Guild Wars 2

Gaile Gray.6029:

It’s an interesting idea. I wonder if it would be one of those things where one person would want things organized a certain way, where someone else would prefer a different sorting. I know how much I appreciate the “compact” option, so sorting is an intriguing idea.

It could then use some user control. Items can be sorted by various keys, so the player would select which keys are relevant for him, and “all that remains” would work with the “compact” option.

Like, there could be keys for weapons, trinkets, boosts, skins, armor, boxes, collectible items, materials, keys, currencies etc.
And I’d select : sort “weapons, armors, trinkets, boxes” which would be sorted in the beginning of the bank, and all the other stuff in my bank would be compacted after these.

Hello,

I think they’re indeed a good addition, but maybe too limited. The most meaningful thing, to me, is the ability to do north/south travels at west or east keep. Central keep feel less useful.
Yet, as you said, when the keep is T3 and you have the WP, it loses a bit of interest. Even when the WP is contested, it lacks utility, because the point is to get in the keep as fast as possible, and not run outside of it.

A better solution that had been put forward lately is to connect towers with such devices (tornadoes, skritt tunnels or such things). Each tower would only have 2 links so that the 4 ones would make a rectangular pathway.

It’d provide more incentive for taking and upgrading towers, as well as more tactical value because of the longer travel range it’d provide.

SlippyCheeze.5483:

ThomasC.1056:

As OriOri said, mere CD fixes or adding 2% here and there don’t seem to justify a 3-4 months delay. This is more tweak than balance, to me.

You are assuming that a few percent difference isn’t enough to change balance; it practice, that can actually make a significant difference to performance over a fight.

I’m not saying those tweaks are irrelevant. I’m more into the opinion that waiting 3 months for 5 seconds seems to give too much importance on “small things” compared to some “big things” that players are expecting and waiting for.

SlippyCheeze.5483:

ThomasC.1056:

There’re lots of underused skills, traits and runes that’d need a rework, ie change the effects, big changes in numbers etc. so that they’d shine like the most used ones. This kind of patch justifies a once or twice a year frequency. Not number tweaks.

Part of the issue there is also that you suppose that getting skill balance right is easy, so a redesigned skill, trait, or rune would slot right in to be equally strong with everything else already in balance.

I’m pretty sure the gap there is obvious, but: if it were really that easy, we wouldn’t need balance patches, we would already have balance. They would simply have designed those traits, skills, and runes, in that balance in the first place.

The need for balance changes is, itself, proof that you can’t “simply” redesign things and achieve balance.

I’m not saying it’s easy ! That’s why I’m telling once or twice a year seems reasonable for such big changes. Likewise, the notion of equally strong is tedious. I’m more into equally useful, or even equally meaningful.
I’m totally positive designing a skill that’d be meaningful, effective, and that players may want to use next to another one isn’t an easy task. There may be things devs are thinking and forseeing, and that eventually happen to work totally otherwise, or that players use another way, so that they need to be worked on more. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it needs to be thought of.

If I just think of one of the most gimmickly underused skill set : guardian spirit weapons. They got one major change since release : they’re no longer destroyed when you activate their special effect. And since then ? Nothing. They were a bad design idea, and happen not to be useful, so the devs need to think more about how they should work in a given guardian/DH playstyle. I’m not against the idea of putting a new idea in game, and see 6 months later how players used it, and if it needs to be tweaked, or changed again.

Yet, after months of waiting, we only got 5 seconds cooldown tweaks… Which means devs have not been able to implement changes that’d alter things like build diversity, varied playstyles etc. Or maybe the hammering of some skills (ele air overload and meteor shower, just to name these ones) was an attempt to corner elementalists into changing their playstyle ?

As OriOri said, mere CD fixes or adding 2% here and there don’t seem to justify a 3-4 months delay. This is more tweak than balance, to me.

There’re lots of underused skills, traits and runes that’d need a rework, ie change the effects, big changes in numbers etc. so that they’d shine like the most used ones. This kind of patch justifies a once or twice a year frequency. Not number tweaks.

OriOri.8724:

The overarching response that devs gave in the balance AMA was that they didn’t have enough time to do something. That was their response maybe 75% of the time they responded to someone unfortunately. This leads me to believe that GW2 has no dedicated balance team, and its more of a few devs are pulled from their other work to implement balance changes and test them when we do get a balance patch. This would explain why we don’t get them more often, and also unfortunately means that we aren’t likely to see an increase in frequency.

Our only hope is those devs are busy building something really big like new weapons, or crazy things for next X-Pac. Or there’s only like 3 people that are asked a overwhelming amount of things, and they therefore only shuffle numbers to pretend they’re actually trying to fix some issues. Which would be really sad.

I understand why you’re asking for a frequency increase of balance patches. And I strongly agree on the fact that “figures patches” coming more often would help lead to an equilibrium state, while deep changes may be allowed to come in a 2-3 months delay.

Yet, if you check the answers in the Q&A session that happened last ime, it figures that the balance team doesn’t have enough time and resources to do really deep changes in useless skills, and traits, and runes etc. In a matter of months, they’re “only” able to think about, implant and test numbers tweaks.

So, I’m really pessimitic about that.

It’s easy to check whether those figures are true or false

And they’re not remotely close to those I found today february the 26th 14:40 GMT+1. So I don’t know the point of such a thread. Maybe you’ve been mistaken by a bug ? After all, the very site clearly states :

Due to several bugs with the Guild Wars 2 API (See this post in the official forum), this week score and victory points will be almost wrong. Only current skirmish and income should be correct. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I’m overall pleased by the mesmer update, mostly because it enforces my way of playing :-p
That part about alacrity reminds me about how confusion was supposed to be mesmer only condition… Let’s just consider us mesmers as generous people !

It’s fortunate they say they wanted to improve underused skills, because I didn’t figure that out at first read… Especially the whole GS buff, which may be necessery and is of course welcome, yet… :

• Spirit weapons are still never to be seen anywhere
• Signet guardian may live next to the Loch Ness
• Consecrations are still underwhelming ; it’d have been nice to reduce their CD
• Hammer ? Mostly useless trait, and underperforming weapon.

I’m really disappointed by this part of the update.

Hello folks ! Here’s a little tale.

Once upon a time, there was this Norn druid whose name was forgotten. She was nice yet ferocious, and she wandered the world to gather riches, winterberries and fame, and build her legend and complete maps.

Her travels led her once in Bitterfrost Frontier. This was a harsh and bitter place, and cold. And the name fit well. There dwelled lots of icebrood foes, ferocious and cold. Many once friendly allies had been turned into monsters.

Now, the fair and lightly dressed (though wearing a medium armor) druid faced a veteran icebrood kodan. The fight was tough and our Norn-girl almost messed her hairdo in the process. Then the infamous kodan raised his sword in an attempt to summon a terrific veteran corrupted storm !

Whatever her name was, she couldn’t let this happen, as it’d finish ruin her hair, so she decided to take action. Here’s how the fight went :
" Me want to summon storm !
- Norn-girl uses Glyph of equality ; Kodan is interrupted
- Me summon storm !
- Norn-girl uses Point blank shot ; Kodan is interrupted
- Me summon storm !
- Norn-girl uses Hilt bash ; Kodan is interrupted
- Me want to summon storm !
- Norn-girl uses Lunar impact ; Kodan is interrupted
- Puny nornette can interrupt Kodan no more. Me summon storm !"

And so the storm went. Abandoning herself to anger and frustration, the Norn-girl killed the obnoxious and monomanic icebrood kodan along with the terrific and cold storm, then realized how everything she did in life was pointless. Why did she have to fight ? Why bother interrupt enemies when they just want to live and summon veteran corrupted storms ? How can a storm actually be veteran ? Maybe there’s a juvenile storm somewhere waiting to be tamed ?

Realizing that all her quest was in vain, because mobs didn’t have CD on their skills, instead of hers, she eventually decided to go back to Zelechor hot springs and open a kebab.

Winterberries flavoured.

(Edit : removed awkward polysemous substantive)

All that you’re asking for is also asked by many players here, but more as a “skill overhaul” patch than an X-Pac.
There’s been rants about HoT being a half-baked expansion, that’s why an X-Pac without elite specs would get an even worse reception, should it only include the overhaul you’re asking for.

Anyway, I agree about the issue you’re raising : new elite specs will have to be really potent so that people see the expansion as useful from the skills point of view. I also think the next elite specs may become the new standard, which would fail bringing diversity as the elite specs claimed.

The only solution I can see in that is have a much much higher frequency of elite specs releases, and also skills overhauls as you’re asking for (those ones free of charge of course). But that’s not what ANet’s gonna do, unfortunately

Hello !

I didn’t understand all that you said, but I’m a bit tired. I therefore apologize for my questions :

• You want to remove gear stats, but you’re also talking about points set in an attribute. How ? Like GW1 old system or GW2 old traits system ? (without the trait thing attached to it of course !)
• Do you think your system would work in a similar fashion with other attributes ?
• I am afraid this could lead to professions being more stereotypical : with a stats profile more set to profession than it currently is, I fear that we’ll tend to one single build fit for a profession. What do you think about that ?

I agree on the fact that the base health system feels now a bit awkward. Even if I understand the concept, the normalization of any other attribute (excepted armor, for close reasons) leads to the health pool feels off.
Anyway, from a PvE point of view, I’m not sure it’ll be such a big change considering the huge gap between PC and mobs, but that’s another topic !

My optimistic reading leads me to expect a similar vendor to be set in WvW. Mostly that part about consistency and flexibility.

My pessimistic reading confirms WvW is not considered a game mode in itself. Maybe more of a side-mode for PvE.

Amongst other benefits, I’d add that Embrace the Darkness can be tremendously effective against melee thieves (supposing you survive the first spike).
Another weird benefit : players are so accustomed to power rev that they expect any rev to play power. They usually feel how wrong they are when they try to disengage and run away, and die miserably farther because of the 21 stacks of torment they got from you ;-)

I agree on cons :

• No range weapon
• No truly satisfying switch (both weapon and legend) that allows you not to play mixed damage.
• Really really vulnerable to CC.

Condi revenant is indeed not optimal, yet it works not so bad overall, especially in WvW when you meet enemies with high mobility and lots of boon to strip.

Still I agree with most of what you said.

On the White Mantle topic, it’d be a very interesting plot. There currently are 2 White Mantle :

1. Historic Unseen White Mantle : whose purpose was to bring Lazarus back to life
2. Caudecus White Mantle : the geezer used the Historic’s faith to serve his own prupose, aka take over Kryta for megalomaniac reasons.

That last part are indeed labeled “bad guys” while the first one may be more or less neutral. But now that the Mursaat is back and taking into account his current behaviour, we can expect the White Mantle to be split into 3 currents :

1. Caudecus White Mantle : which should anytime soon be extinct
2. Good Lazarus White Mantle : their purpose would be to defeat the Elder Dragons, as this is what the Mursaat claims he wants
3. Possibly evil Lazarus White Mantle : with some mischevious eveil scheme in mind.

That’d be really interesting plot-wise, because while the PC could join #2 as any other Order, #3 may still be active and it’d lead to more schemes and plots to be discovered while being part of the Mantle. I’d enjoy this a lot !

Now, for the Factions fighting each other, why not ? After all, we had factions in GW1.

Then, for open PvP, I’m strongly against. WvW is for this. There has been talks about enforcing an “order fighting each other” system in WvW but it was just player talks.

As much as I like Orpheal’s idea, it’s a bit off topic so I won’t comment it.

Beyond the issue of sigils and runes is the issue of gear drop and its utility for players who can afford to craft and/or buy in TP when they need new gear, or restat their full ascended set. So : ascended drops are useful for new toons or alternative sets. Exotics too, for some extent, or salvage a superior rune/sigil, or ectos/black matter. Rares are somehow useful for ectos. Greens and blues are no use except for raw materials, so their sigils and runes get even more useless, and are no worth in the TP.

Some solutions :

• Standard or copper fed salvage kit should not get rune/sigil. Ever. Period.
• Add a “mark as junk” option for easier inventory management (has been asked for a long time
• Auto-upgrade runes. Like : if you double click a stack of 100 minor, you gain a major etc. That could be an interesting sink ?

I agree Caudecus was expecting the ritual to fail. And as he’s a megalomaniac mad man, he couldn’t figure anything else, so that may be the reason why he’s claiming Lazarus is a fake.

I think the ritual partially succeeded, ie Lazarus got back, but he’s still missing some of his aspects. Maybe he just managed to compensate by draining the bloodstone. That may also explain why he’s behaving better, even if, as a Mursaat, he knows quite well the threat that Elder Dragons are, and the fact than the living being who managed to kill 2 of them should not be taken lightly.

Anyway, I more inclined to think he’s looking for ways to become full again, so maybe his missing aspect : that’d explain why he let Caudecus live, and why he wants to collaborate. He may also want to collaborate so that he could draw more power from more powerful sources : aka Elder Dragons.

Their talkings are here in the wiki

Should be : “eat my dust” ? You can find the talkings for other boons on their specific wiki page

I’ve been surprised by this association, but more in a good surprise way !

To me, the association of conditions + healing + concentration aims at builds dedicated to somehow long fight, yet in a different way than tanks (dire or trailblazer). As I figure it, I imagine a backliner that’d be able to heal and buff other (druid ? Ventari ? Staff ele ? Glint ?) and impair foes (hence the conditions).
Precision goes nice with conditions, because it provides the ability to add conditions through critical strikes and appropriate sigils.

Now, I truly don’t think why it goes with Seraphs or Thackeray, apart from Thackeray being a guardian, so burn + heal ?

Anyway, I would have been even more extatic if Heal + Condi were the major stats, and concentration + precision the minor ones. And I’m looking forward for more of those in the upcoming releases. Maybe “Pale tree” stats ? “Rytlock” ?

Hello,

I’m done with the story and most achievements, so I guess I can give my feedback on that release :

Story :

I really enjoyed the story for two reasons. The first one is it winks a lot to other parts of story (human personal story, order of whispers arc etc.). The second is it felt like things were evolving more than all of Braham’s drama.
Moreover, story opens on new questions, and we eventually get to guess who’s E.

Lake Doric :

The map is nice, and it’s a good thing we’re back to Kryta. It may have that “overcrowded” feeling as in Bitterfrost frontier, but it seems less annoying for some reason. Maybe because White Mantle don’t freeze.
The greatest drawback I can see is renown hearts take ages if you’re unlucky enough not to have events to help you do them. Besides, the need for some events to fail in order to get achievements is also a big flaw.

Miscelleanous :

• Seraph stats are interesting. I’m already thinking of ways to put them in use !
• New skins are nice.
• There’re far too many CC’s all around.
• The power creep needs to stop. Queen Jenah is more powerful than the commander of the Pact. Valette Wi is a more potent mesmer than the commander of the pact. Any White Mantle mesmer is more potent than the commander of the pact. Any White Mantle elementalist has more powerful spells than the commander of the pact’s. The commander of the pact is a below average character running suboptimal rusty skills. Only issue is : the commander of the pact is you.
• Some camera issues in cluttered areas, especially in the last instance : the camera moves to odd places, clips in walls, the fighting scene gets impossible to see, and it’s hard to aim AoE on the floor because they end up on the ceiling.

Justine.6351:

Hitman.5829:

Justine.6351:

To balance their power. If an enemy group of 30+ camps under them then they are now under ac fire.

Defense in layers.

Well, now reverse this argument, what about the 30+ that go around killing siege when 2 or 3 defend a tower. The siege is killed and there is no way to defend against 30+.

so you couldn’t 3v30. does math exist anymore?

Those maths would be relevant in an open field battle, yet the thread deals with objective defense battles. So it’s more (3+siege+walls)vs30. And that’s the point of walls and siege : help a few amount of scouts/defenders hold an objective against more people. And it miserabily fails because :

• Walls obstruct line sight, so it gets impossible to shoot below, while attackers have a nice time melting you.
• Siege are death traps when they’re too close from the edge, and some sieges don’t really have a use, because they can’t shoot in all direction : they’ll hit some walls, or columns, or hanging ceiling, or whatever in the line of sight. Meanwhilst, the walls/doors are melting.

I’m totally for a small amount of people in a keep/tower being able to melt a small zerg with siege, because, from a tactical point of view, it’s common sense to use a “build” advantage in order not to loose to much of your side’s attacking force. What makes no sense is calls like : “Random keep is under attack, please send the k-train to defend”, and objective defense being reduced to “zerg fight near an objective”.

Hello folks,

I’ve been thinking about a personal training area in home instance for some times, so let’s jump now to details :

Context :

• Theocrafting of builds is a thing some people do and enjoy, and it helps provide new builds ;
• There’s no real cheap way of testing a build in PvE/WvW ;
• There’s a way to test builds in PvP with dummies and iconic foes (Svanir etc.) but it’s not fit to PvE/WvW because of amulet system (which has its qualities, but is just different) ;
• With new episode came new stats that are fairly expensive to farm, and we can hope for new more with upcoming episodes too.

Functionnality :

• Personal training arena is the hologram training arena Taimi sends us to in that episode that leads to Ember Bay ;
• It’s accessible from home instance ;
• While in the arena, players are equipped with full ascended gear with selectable prefix + rune + sigil + infusion in each slot
• Using a console, player can :
  • summon various kind of mobs (icebrood, undead, mordrem, karkas…) from basic to elite level, and select the number of each ;
  • OR summon profession NPC’s like in PvP ;
  • OR summon iconic champions like ABL and DBL lords, fractal bosses…
  • OR summon golem dummies ;
  • AND add environmental effect like agony, raids effects…
• Then a fight starts. If the player is defeated, the enemies are dismissed and the player is restored.
• Grouped players can fight together

Expected effects :

• Players won’t need to craft/buy if they have an idea they want to try out ;
• Making builds testing easier will bring an incentive to try new things, and may therefore provide more diversity in the game ;
• Knowing a build works and fits one’s playstyle may provide an incentive to farm content to buy the reciepes ;

TL;DR
Make a training arena in home instance where you can set your build just as you wish, and summon enemies on which you can try your skills. It should help players design new builds and therefore, could bring more diversity to builds players are running.

Thanks for reading ! Feel free to comment.

Eleazar.9478:

Hmmm biggest complaint in this thread, the SUSTAIN CONDI META, right? what does that sound like hmmmmmm let me think…… oh yea PVP season 1 thats right, how did they fix that? oh yea they took out certain stats to encourage snowballing fights and bursty builds. hell this pvp season was funner thankitten

Actually, not at all. That thread is mostly about some behaviours than build topic (even if it’s been quoted here and there).
Maybe you should seek for advice about your obsession ? ;-)

That thread needs to be renamed : “behaviours we’re getting fed up with”, that’d be more accurate ;-)

Some personal thoughts from my experience and from what I’ve read : players don’t want to play, nor do they want to fight. They just want to win. And win means here kill, crush and tear you. That’s the low risk high reward behaviour, and you can find it in roughly every aspect : gankers, group gankers, cheesy builds, zergs, outnumbered fights etc. Everything is good as long as you can feed your sadistic and bored temper by steamrolling a foe without the need to think too much about it. The “fair” fights scene has vanished because the outcome is too uncertain.

The whole WvW point is roughly dead : even blobs or guild raids are just there to flip objectives and some also like to fight in the process. Yet, it’s really harder to find commanders who also defend, help with camps etc. So, it feels like some people just wanted to spend some time, they logged in, got their lootstick guardin, pushed “A” while spamming “1” and joking on TS, and logged off 2 hours later, with the sense of accomplished duty.

Also, about walls and siege etc. I’m the one who stays on top of walls, mostly because I enjoy playing scout. So I roughly don’t care about the jumping guy there essentially yelling “Hey ! Come down ! I want a sparring partner !”. So I pew pew, and I siege. I don’t come down, because I generally assume a solo player runs a cheesy condi bunker, tank or whatever meta build, and I don’t want to waste my time with that. Am I wrong to think so ? I personnaly think it’s a pity. Posts above show that I’m not so wrong to end up to these conclusion.

To conclude, as Svarty said, even if players are responsible for their expectations of a game mode, ANet is also responsible of what the game mode favors, through mechanics or rewards for example. They unfortunately lost the “fair fights” player base, out of boredom or exhaustion, and now, this is what remains. In my opinion, no new “fair fights” community can come back as long as toxicity is not cured. That means tighten all the screws everywhere to get rid of them.

I really like this idea a lot. As I like any idea that goes towards more tactical gameplay, and sheds more light on the objectives.

I only have two concerns about it :

1. As MichaelofOrange said, it’ll be hard to tweak, but that’s no reason not to try.
2. From my personal experience, I’m afraid it won’t give that much incentive. As I said in some other topic, I once was scouting in an enemy BL, 2-3 guild raids came and took roughly the whole map, then stood at spawn while trolling the /t and even laughed “What do we do now ?”. The playerbase that has interest in objectives matter may not be sufficient.

Flawlessness.2061:

As it has been stated by several people, they don’t seem to see a problem with condi damage being a bit over bearing, lets refer to a burn guard as a example this spec can tic for 4+k damage. I’m all for the damage staying the same but if you are able to melt a player in 2-4 seconds that is the issue I am speaking about.

Aww… I know a lot of power builds based on the sequence stunlock + spike that melt players in 2-4 seconds. So where exactly is condi OP compared to power ? Is it because you can’t melt them before they melt you ? So you’re basically asking to be able to melt a condi user in less than 2 seconds…

There actually are ways to mitigate conditions : foods that reduce condi duration and/or damage. Vitality stat helps a lot, equip cleanse passive/sigils/skills, use healing skill and regeneration. But using them requires players to sacrifice their beloved trinity power+precision+ferocity.

Even if there may be things to tweak with conditions, keeping on posting such nonsense won’t help in any way, because you ruin your own credibility.

Haematic.4913:

• How would you describe the current condition of WvW?

Not really good. It’s mostly a place to have casual trips with a zerg. It’s just as every casual trip : it helps spend time in a not too bad way, but when you come to think about what’s really happening, you end up wondering what you’re actually doing there.

Haematic.4913:

• What do you believe ANET needs to do in order to make positive changes to WvW?

1. Clearly state whether WvW is an open world PvP with objectives excuses for fights, or if WvW is a strategic game mode revolving around those objectives, and having PvP as a consequence.
2. Rebuild part of the system and mechanics according to previous point.

Haematic.4913:

• Is there anything wrong with the current system? If so, what? What do you think needs to be changed the most?

• The current system doesn’t provide any “accomplished work” reward. Like, if you take the whole map, it doesn’t change anything.
• The current system favors zergs too much.
• The current system favors toxic behaviours like the other evening, after the enemy map had been flipped : “What do we do now ? – Now, we camp at spawn and troll the /t”. Defend objectives ? Dollies ? Nah… The map switched colour in 10 minutes, keeps included.

Haematic.4913:

• What are some of the good things, if any, currently being implemented in WvW?

Currently, I don’t know, but I’m thankful for reward tracks and the overall idea of guild claim and associated bonuses.

Haematic.4913:

• What is the biggest concern you have relating to skill balance and what are your thoughts about fixing it?

In the general trends : lack of diversity, and “the faster the better” trend, favouring strong damage output builds (equally for direct and condis).
In specific trends : CC and stunlock.

Haematic.4913:

• What do you believe is most important to (insert server here) as a server? (i.e. population, coverage, community, coordination).

• Do you think (insert server here) currently has enough coverage? If not, which time zones need help? Which time zones do you think are doing ok, if any?

• Lastly, what would you say is the best thing about (insert server here’s) community?

Not so many opinions about servers.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I’ve always been against the idea of fixed “prefixes” — we should be able to craft any combination of primary/secondary+secondary (3-stat prefixes) in core and any combination of prime+prime/second+second (4-stat prefixes) in HoT, by combining the appropriate ingredients. Then we’d only have to memorize the stat|ingredient combination rather than an arbitrary set of names linked to an arbitrary set of stat combinations, with an arbitrary set of sources.

That would be absolutely perfect, yet it’s really another crafting system, so we probably won’t see it until GW3. Maybe you should try to get hired as game designer ?

There’s indeed a huge contrast of quality and creativity between some male armors vs. their female counterparts. Just check :

• Embroidered light armor : female = nice piece ; male = pajamas
• Inquest light armor : female = nice revealing vest ; male = another pajamas
• Whispers light armor : female = revealing ; male = pajamas
• Winged armor : female = bra ; male = pajamas with rope
• etc.

There’re far too many light armors that are mere pajamas tops for men while females have more diversity, more style… On the creativity topic, I’ve got far more possibilities with my female toons than male toons because of the “meh, just another pajama with a different pattern on it” look of most tops.

And I’m just talking about light armors ! (even if that icy outfit is just the same… Another pajama under the armor, while the female counterpart shows more skin)

So please ANet, just like other said, there’s no shame in a guy’s skin.

Baldrick.8967:

Engis don’t need any more help- just try facing a good one 1v1 and you’ll see why.

Basing condi reduction on healing power could be interesting, but will need a rework of lots of traits and balances in order to not make ‘power, toughness, healing power’ on a warrior type completely OP and impossible to kill.

Those are cleric prefix, with power being a secondary attribute. Surely that’d prevent the power creep, but a warrior would indeed take a long time to kill !

anduriell.6280:

So players keep saying toughness to reduce condition damage, i say that is an overkill for one stat. Toughness should work better to mitigate the power damage but conditions should be treated differently, so nobody should go for all bunker and still do crazy damage.

My opinion is to use the mostly useless stat that is healing power to reduce condition damage. 1% for each 100 points.

I also think Might should only increase power, no condition damage. I would give an special buff like GoTL mainly to the engies and in a lesser grade to necros to increase the condi damage so they can have more roles (specially the engi) in wvw.

So the condi damage doesn’t go out of the window with so many buffs everywhere.

Discuss.

It’s nice you put that topic forward. I had the very same idea half an hour before you ! !

So, I agree : healing power should reduce condi damage. Still, I won’t endorse negative condi damage.

Hello,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. From the end on, I’m not convinced about the vitality part, mostly because your HP pool already determines part of your sustainability equally for direct and condi damage.

Concerning the toughness part, I’m more mitigated. Even if I think toughness reducing condition duration is a fair idea, that stat is linked to armor, which feels irrelevant for conditions overall.
My option on this would be a use of the healing stat, as a condi damage mitigation way.

It may eventually end up to the same effect, yet the healing stat is rarer, so it may cause more diversity in gears than the widely used toughness stat.

Behellagh.1468:

Odin the exiled.5764:

I wouldnt even call these skill updates, they’re just minor tweaks for most part, changing aftercast/recharge/casting time. Rarely do we get to see a GW1 skill update, where they actually change a useless skill into something else. Sometimes for the better sometimes not. ie glimmering mark or double dragon Players started to actually use them once they got changed and brought in with a skill update. The same thing can be done in gw2 with many of their unused utility skills and even the racial ones too. I know myself i love playing a norn, chose them to invoke and change into a bear or wolf but those elites are really bad and too long of recharge for pve fun mode. So to me changing a skill or a functionality like shadowstep/teleport is a skill update, but changing aftercast/cast/recharge by .3 seconds is not and that’s what most of their skill updates are changing things that don’t matter to 80% or more of the gaming population

Because the devs learned from GW that balancing was a shear nightmare. As a player you may have found it fun to find the next broken combination of traits and skills which forced a complete re-balance but the devs didn’t. That’s why GW2 has a much simpler skill and trait system to make balancing easier. And easier means tweaking not overhauling.

Simpler than GW1 ? Are you kidding ?

• GW1 was fare easier because armor had less influence on stas than it has in GW2 ;
• GW1 was far easier because there were less stats ;
• GW1 was far easier because stats effects were easier too ;
• GW2 has stats all around, traits all around, runes and sigils, with passive effects, on condition effects, more or less random effects. That’s very complex to forsee things in such a mess. GW1 didn’t have all this.

Yet, GW1 had an enchantement and hexes system that was far richer than GW2’s. And also had better lisibility, because whatever effect was on you came from a skill, and not a skill OR a rune effect OR a trait OR a sigil thing. Icons were bigger and recognizable, and not those lasting-for-a-few seconds little squares you see once in 10 minutes and can’t remember.
Of course, the amount of hexes and enchantement made things difficult to balance, organize etc. But as someone stated above, when new skills were out, or when they were balanced, it added or removed in game effects. It was not a marginal figures change, or aftercast or CD or little tweaks that made skills more or less usable in a given amount of time.

Behellagh.1468:

ThomasC.1056:

• Elite specs : a good idea, but frequency is ridiculous. Moreover, people complain about them that they caused the power creep, and the lack of diversity because they’re supposed to be mandatory in most builds. A rationale explanation is ANet wants people to buy HoT and so made vanillia average. I’m not discussing whether this is true or false, but I’m just underlining it’s not a compliment.

That is the presumption of players, especially those in PvP and WvW who had no concept how to counter the new sub professions. Plus it takes a while to balance something new Vs something that’s been around for 3 years. Pretty sure it was never ANet’s intention to supplant the core professions from PvP and WvW as it smacks of P2W.

• Desert Borderland : the whole ruckus last summer about removing it plainly from WvW speaks for itself.

The original version of the DB map were horrible in terms of travel and the periodic capture the flag mega cannon event which one shot all loser keep gates simply wasn’t enjoyable. ANet introduced the current DB map just before they were swapped out, for a while, which significantly improved the ease of travel across the map. I think the current 1 DB, 2AB maps is helping to ease WvW players into the newer DB map since the original is often pointed at as a primary cause of the drop off of WvW game play.

I should have stated better : those aren’t necessarily my opinion (and I enjoy DBL as it is, just like you’re saying), nor is it some kind of truth.
It’s mostly rants that I’ve read here and there, and that I gathered to show how negative feedback has been since HoT was released.

On the concern topic, and related to HoT, I’m not sure whether these are facts but when they’re put one next to another, they seem to make sense.

HoT was advertised and hyped because :

• Revenant : that profession feels unfinished. It was said it’d be tweaked, but it’s not. Mallyx stance has been severly altered just before release making lots of traits irrelevant, and that’s never been adressed.
• Elite specs : a good idea, but frequency is ridiculous. Moreover, people complain about them that they caused the power creep, and the lack of diversity because they’re supposed to be mandatory in most builds. A rationale explanation is ANet wants people to buy HoT and so made vanillia average. I’m not discussing whether this is true or false, but I’m just underlining it’s not a compliment.
• Verticality : not so bad on this one, but TD is a mess.
• Stronghold mode : it has been removed from ranked PvP so I think that’s a sign of defiance
• Challenging content : some discussions I saw are now asking for a nerf to HP because HP trains are now killing meta events
• Desert Borderland : the whole ruckus last summer about removing it plainly from WvW speaks for itself.

So, maybe players posting on the forums are just demanding kids ranting and ranting, or ANet critically failed on that one. As far as I’m concerned, I fondly enjoyed HoT. But from a dev’s point of view, having such a part of my work being tossed to the sewers is not the most encouraging thing.

So I can suppose (now it’s pure speculation) that ANet’s become really cautious about what they release.

ShinjoNaomi.1896:

Because I don’t like PvP.
I’ve tried both sPvP and WvW, and both have left me feeling nothing but frustration and anger.
Frustration at myself for not doing better, frustration at the other player who seems to be better at absolutely everything no matter how I work and change my playstyle or profession or build…
And anger at the jerkwads who wave their tiny kittens in my face, yell at me about how much I suck and how I’m only good for dying or how great they are for being able to press buttons on a keyboard. Behavior that they can only get away with because they can hide on the internet.

In short, my experiences in Player vs Player games and game modes have been terrible.
I don’t like how I’m treated, I don’t like how other people act, and I don’t like how I get.
Thus, I no longer have any interest in it.

Same here. I’ve tried PvP with friends and family, and I enjoy things like scouting in WvW.

But I don’t like competitive gameplay. First, some players want to win, and not to play. And by win, they mean crush, obliterate and humiliate you. Whenever a competitive game mode runs online, it provides that kind of toxic behaviour. I’ve had nice fights in PvP and WvW, I sometimes lost to nice people, and it made me want to try again. Those were the exception.

Also, the fact that most of the fights are more or less boring because of lack of build diversity, and the trend being : “let the fight end as fast as possible”.

Ack, my bad. Irony doesn’t really show in forums. I’ll therefore be plain and will avoid my “read between the lines” biais.

As sad as I think it is, I agree with most of your post. And I also agree that if the game has severe flaws, then light has to be shed on it.

Now, on a lighter tone : I may be as pessimistic as you are, after all ;-)

Mikali.9651:

Why should I be labeled as pessimistic if I share my thoughts? My man, my man, my optimistic friend <3

Nothing wrong with sharing thoughts of course ! I also like to share my thoughts on things like the frequency of updates or some designs decision that I find discutable here and there…

The thing is I think the staff is getting thinner and thinner, and they’re overwhelmed by the amount of things left to do in every aspects this game has.

But that’s not pessimism of course !

Long live the imperator !

You’re the pessimistic one, aren’t you ?

Mikali.9651:

I really don’t have strong and supported arguments, so this is pretty much my bias and intuition. Still, I feel there is enough “bias evidence” to have this concern.

I can’t but not notice how many people which were the ones who created GW2 (and even Guild Wars) have left it for other company and other game. That is a big alarm for me. For me it says those people lost the passion for Guild Wars 2, they lost vision for it, or maybe they don’t even enjoy the way GW2 changed and is changing. We must be aware that the directions game is developed aren’t always shared with every staff member, so that can be strong enough reason for them to leave it cuz they just can’t accept it.
People which are left can be completely “new staff”, people which aren’t the original creators and they have completely different vision and passion. And personally, I am VERY afraid of those new people! They can completely change the game, the way it feels, the way story is told, the way Lore is continued, the way Story should be can be changed!

This, or the fact that spending so many years on the same game or universe can make you feel like : “I did all that I could”, and want to move on to something new. But what you say can be true as well.
Anyway, it’s really true that, considering GW2 is actually more of a GW1.5, it’s hard to keep up with big changes in the staff.

Mikali.9651:

Another problem I have is lack of the skill updates, there is no reason for it, except low amount of passion for fixing disbalance.

You’re wrong about this ! Just check how many new skills were given to mobs since HoT. How many new mobs with new skills. Just think how Gabrielle in DBL Academy has a nice set of skills for staff Ele. They are very creative and create lots of new skills ! Those just aren’t for players. (That’s sarcasm, of course)

Mikali.9651:

There is also a fact many features are already abandoned, we can’t forget dungeons and we can’t ignore the fact most features which are promised still aren’t done (legendary weapons, armors, etc.).

There is also WvW which feels very abandoned. It feels like Anet doesn’t have enough passion for working on it, like they have lost vision for it, what it should be, how it should be played for us to really enjoy it.

Talking about abandoned features next to WvW made me think about the WvW overhaul.

Mikali.9651:

Story is also a big alarm, it feels so lost, so rushed in some parts, so slow in some others, like they are buying time to create something for us, so they leave us with some useless drama to keep us “entertained”.

I sincerly hope you’re right on this one, because it’d mean they’re actually creating something big ;-)

Mikali.9651:

Also I feel like Guild Wars lost the touch of it’s original universe! Since the EotN it was suddenly only about dragons! Dragons, dragons, and dragons. And more dragons. And only dragons. That is not what Guild Wars universe should be about. Guild Wars has rich Lore, which isn’t even touched in Guild Wars 2. I ask myself, why?

42 ?

Mikali.9651:

I want new nemesis like Shiro was, or Abaddon, or White Mantle and Titans!

I can understand. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t want new nemesis. I want trash mobs that’d be like me, i.e. running the same skills with roughly the same stats.

I think it’s a little bit of both.

If you’re asking for a build template that automatically equips you with gear, traits and skills, then you’re gonna have lots of friends that’ll agree with you.
If you’re adding that all those changes should be free : i.e. unlink armor with stat like in PvP and just put new prefixes in your gear for free, then… Why not ?

If you’re asking players to be able to change build only in specific places, then you may not become that popular ;-)

Xenesis.6389:

You bunch of ingrates.
They wanted to give you mobile cannons and you didn’t want it.
They wanted to give you repair hammers and you didn’t want it.
They gave you scoring changes all you do is argue over numbers 3 2 1 2 1 1 5 4 3 100 99 98.
They proposed more worlds to dying wvw and you said no.
Then people wanted mercenary worlds which is the same but you can’t agree on it because identity crisis.
Anet proposes 1 dbl 2 alp, you say no, vote says yes, anet checks on scrapping dbl, you say no, anet checks for 1 dbl 2 alp again, you say yes.
Then cry about veterans not playing for 2 years didn’t get a fair vote, you need bunch of ranks and a bunch of wvw hours to vote, you cry the vote was rigged cause pve players care about a wvw map.
Then you cry about the empty red borderland when the other two borderlands are also empty, while ebg is over queued every night.
You cry for population balance, they lower the threshold to keep bigger worlds from getting bigger, you cry about it to players from 20+ dead servers, we’re gonna die if we don’t open up!
They gave you golem week and you cried about a minor golem buff exploit.
They gave you some new commander tag colors and you cry about every other color not available.
They gave you reward tracks and you complain about not getting a legendary backpack.
They put gift of battle in the track and you complain about not getting a years notice before so you can buy it with free badges.
They took away crafting stations and you cry about not being able to skip a loading screen.
They gave you you a “big giant sized” guild hall with a “small dinky” arena to do your gvg’s and you cry about it.
They reorganized the wvw upgrades into your guild halls and you complain about the minor cost of spending months in pve.
They gave you fun to use banners and you complain about it being op.
They gave you extra upgrades to scout for you and all you do is complain about small groups.
Big fancy airships to make the big castle in the middle of ebg feel more epic you cry about it killing you every 15 mins.
They put a big fat cannon in the middle of dbl to promote fights every 3 hours, you cry about lag so they take it away, and then you cry about it being empty and no bloodlust.
They gave you new elite specs to freshen up classes after 3 years of getting old and boring, and you cry about imbalance pfft like that didn’t exist before.
They gave you boons to counter the increased damage but you complained no one was dying, so they fixed it after months and months and months of hard testing, and then you complain about dying to conditions.
They made conditions good so you don’t feel limp in zerg fights and now you complain about spreading it.

Pfft.

Where do I vote you for president ?

I’ll also add :

• They gave you objectives that’re worth more PPT when they upgrade but you don’t defend them.

Hello,

I’ve got another small suggestion for shared inventory slots.
I use it for my unlimited mining tool. When I go to the hero panel, I see I can equip the tool from inventory, as other gear I have.

But I can’t put back the mining tool back in the shared slot from the hero panel, so unequipping it requires to open both the inventory and hero panel.

My suggestion is : put the empty shared inventory slots in the hero panel so that any item you unequip can be send to it.

Spiral.3724:

Please organize the buff bar. When you have food and tools and birthday boosts and boons all over the place, it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s what.
You could put a blank square for food buff and tool buff (the apple and wrench icons) that light up when they’re active. (and mouse over for effect, as usual.)
That way, I’m not scanning through my 12 buffs to see if I need to eat again.

I agree. All the buffs and condis should be visible at all time, but grey when they’re not active, just like they do in the build editor They’ll light up with their CD and amount of stacks when needed.
It’d make things easier, because you can thus identify a boon or condi applied on you by its position on the bar, instead of having to read the icon.

DeceiverX.8361:

Yes, it’s a bad move, and I’m probably not going to buy it after the blunder that HoT still is until that itself gets fixed, but NCSoft demanded they profit more because HoT under-sold, and demanded it be done with more, and more frequent, boxed expansions.

Oh boy…
We’re not even sure next XPac will release in 2018 (even if I hope so) and you’re talking about more frequent boxed expansions ? You’re the optimistic one :o)

DeceiverX.8361:

And no, Thomas, condi builds currently burst almost as quickly as power ones; I can achieve a 6-10k tick in < 2s on guardian and my reaper’s soul spiral frequently ticks for almost 3k within a two second window on a berserker build running no condition damage at all. My thief can get to 20k bleed ticks and 8k poison ticks in less than ten seconds – or 5k+ ticks immediately on engage, with most of the bleeding being unblockable. There are also a huge number of damage reduction effects in the game at the moment which only effect power damage; it’s not uncommon to find people taking > 70% damage reduction on permanent or near-permanent uptime. An all-in 20k power burst gets quickly turned into 6k and is left with substantially higher cooldowns than the 8s-and-under cooldowns you find on skills like Illusory Counter which deal > 10k condition damage.

Those levels are indeed no reasonnable, as you’re saying. Yet, I stick with the fact they should lower the damage, rather than lowering the sustain possibilities.
Also, on the direct damage mitigation topic, I agree there’s too much of it, but it’s more a matter of boons and traits than pure prefixes (even if toughness is a very common stat in lots of prefixes).

beatthedown.2651:

ThomasC.1056:

And that’s accurately the reason why this whole thread misses the spot. There’s no use ranting against dire, or zergs or stunlocks or whatever.

The wet dream is being able to melt any opponent in a matter of seconds while having 25k+ life and 3k+ armor. Oh, sure, no prefix allow you to run such stats alongside 3000+ power and 80% crit + 250% ferocity. That’s so bad…

Because dire and TB are such a big issue : they make fights last. That’s so troublesome. That’s so tiresome. That’s so tedious to have to fight for, maybe more than 100 seconds in a game mode that implies players fighting players, dodging, blocking, using invulns (to prevent condis from being applied).

Oh a condi boy…
I think you missed my point. Maybe you misread since my English is a bit “meh”.

If you read the previous posts you might figure that dire/TB gear is a nobrainer for condi classes and has no real downsides.

Don’t worry, your english is fine and I can read. The fact that I partially disagree with you doesn’t mean that either you or I are dumb. And by the way, I play mostly direct damage (only 2 of my toons are condi setup, and no dire in them).

Now, maybe you misread my post. I’m just saying that your complain is a symptom of a bigger behaviour : dire has a downside : it’s the relatively long amount of time needed for condis to drain an health pool. Maybe some are too powerful, I may agree on that point.
From the direct damage point of view, my point is : if you need to land your special combo 4 times to kill a dire condi user, you need to make sure you’ll survive long enough, therefore have some skill, and a build with high vitality, sustain utilities and traits (cleanses and stun breakers). If you read that paragraph with the WvW idea in mind, you’ll see how laughable it is, because it goes against the trend of quick fights settled in seconds.

And so, that is my point : if fights were to last longer, it’d bring more balance, and build diversity. But then again, it’s not only a matter of ANet’s way to balance things. It’s also a matter of players wanting it quick and easy, and dire stats are a dark cloud in that wet dream.

beatthedown.2651:

this would be a wet dream running around with 3k armor and 25k life while doing loads of damage.

And that’s accurately the reason why this whole thread misses the spot. There’s no use ranting against dire, or zergs or stunlocks or whatever.

The wet dream is being able to melt any opponent in a matter of seconds while having 25k+ life and 3k+ armor. Oh, sure, no prefix allow you to run such stats alongside 3000+ power and 80% crit + 250% ferocity. That’s so bad…

Because dire and TB are such a big issue : they make fights last. That’s so troublesome. That’s so tiresome. That’s so tedious to have to fight for, maybe more than 100 seconds in a game mode that implies players fighting players, dodging, blocking, using invulns (to prevent condis from being applied).

The only solution for your issue is to make players acknowledge that entering the game may involve to spend some time fighting, and that the odds of winning are related to personal skill, and not only to build. Which means if you want to deal direct damage “from time to time”, opposite to the relative continous damage conditions apply, then you’ll have to sustain long enough between each blow.

So, maybe condi application has become a bit too easy, and I’m clearly for a cleaning of the system and restrict condis acessibility of classes. The only other thing I’d tweak is to bring more diversity of prefixes with the vitality stat, because that one is really helpful against condis.

To conclude, as long as players will play to win, and not play to fight, there won’t be any good solution to that. Players running direct damage are mostly lazy demanding kids that want to win as soon as the fight is engaged, and as soon as first spike has been played. Or zerglings, which is mostly the same.

Hello,

Thanks for your big well argued post. I understand the points and acknowledge the underline issues, yet I don’t feel convinced for two reasons :

1. I often go to PvP to test build ideas and feel frustrated by the lack of possibilities. Like “If I could just change my weapon, I’d be more this, and it’d work better”. Anyway, I also acknowledge that the possibility of not begin fully optimized is a source of diversity.
2. I think that a lot of behaviours we see come from deeper mechanics than an apparent lack of choice in stats. The game mode in itself encourages zergs, discourages tactics around objectives, discourages roaming and small scale, encourages power creep and damage-oriented builds (condi or direct) at the expense of utilities…
   Even if there’s choice, and your idea would provide some, players won’t use it if they don’t feel both useful and effective.

On a side note, I think of many things when I read Guild Wars, but I’m perfectly sure GW2 has absolutely nothing to do with guilds beyond a mere gathering tool.

Svarty.8019:

Zohane.7208:

The UI being non-customizable was a decision Anet made since they wanted people to “play the game not the UI”, so I guess that was one way they tried to make GW2 different. (I don’t have a source link but I’m sure it can still be found here on the forum for those inclined to find it.)

Personally I don’t mind the UI, but then again I’m not much for tweaking UI’s, I’ll learn to use it instead.

Here you go:

Allowing players to play the game rather than the UI is the third rule. This rule is responsible for the lovely and minimalistic UI, which is meant to convey as much information as necessary while staying more or less out of the way. Important combat information isn’t necessarily going to be relayed through the UI so much as through the game world.

Source

Ironic, considering the ubiquity of conditions and the necessity to constantly stare at the condi-bar.

That source is a joke ! Minimalistic UI ? Just have a look at ESO vanillia UI, and you’ll know what “minimalistic” means. That doesn’t prevent ESO to have mods that allow you to have more information and bars should you need them.

And you’re terribly true about conditions that need a constant check, and the tiny icons that makes me say : “what’s that new effect on me ?”…