Stop saying it’s free damage too. Warriors have more “you now do x% more damage!” traits than any other class by far. Putting 30 points into discipline means they are giving up at least ~10% damage elsewhere that would work against ALL targets. Not to mention Brawn 1% burst skill damage for 10 trait points is like flushing them down the toilet.
You’re going to have to be attacking a target with at least 4-5 boons before you break even with the new trait.
Do you really think you getting fury, might, swiftness, and retal is less than a 12% buff in effectiveness to the engineer? If not, then those 5 points still make you stronger, just not quite as much as they do now, and only against one trait on one class.
“Just don’t do anything stupid” can not be the answer to confusion. Otherwise confusion is no different than a daze. 5+ sec single target daze on a 15 sec cd. 5+ sec aoe daze on a <30 sec cd. “oh sorry, your condition remover cleansed that 3 stack of vuln instead, now eat 3000 confusion damage”
It’s supposed to do some damage. Burning does ~700 dps. Even at 3 stacks the nerfed confusion will do that on someone sloooooowly doing only 1 action per sec.
Now it could very well be that the condition mesmer might be too weak, due to limited access to bleeding and almost no burning. But confusion won’t be (in wvw).
Should we laugh or should we cry?
It’s not just staff. Pets can bug like that using any weapon. I think it has to do with pathing and not the attack used. That’s why the melee pets like flesh golem and shadowfiend have more problems than the ranged minions. When I open with a ranged weapon like staff or scepter (auto attacking, am I doing it right?) they bug out much more often than if I run up and attack with dagger 1, but I think it’s simply because the minion is right next to the mob. When they’re bugged out like that, if I drag the mob over to them they usually start attacking.
And ya, 7 months into the game for necro minions to still be in this state is laughable. It stops me from playing necro. Guardian spirit weapons are pretty much exactly the same as necro minions; you know how many times I have had one of those bug out and not attack? Zero. Not rarely, zero.
So you test in one small, isolated section of the game and conclude its fine? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The infuriating thing is I haven’t had a single problem EVER with any other pet/minion of any other class in this game. Just necros. The very fact that there is a “wrong way” to initiate combat should scream FIX ME IM BROKEN. If I pull with an aoe trap on my ranger, my pet attacks properly 100% of the time. If I pull with an aoe mark on my necro, my pets are completely clueless. My guardian’s spirit weapons never stand around doing nothing even if I attack with a ground targeted aoe like scepter smite.
The only situation, where AOE is overpowered, compared to any other build, is when doing world events in PVE. Proper mob tagging at those Temple events for example, is impossible without lots of AOE skills, those skills also make the events trivial, even if more and more mobs spawn they will be killed at the same rate as when they are fewer.
That’s not a problem with AOE skills but with event design, for a game that promotes cooperation, those events are selfish, there is a “race” between the players to tag as many mobs as possible, often disregarding the leveled Veteran mobs because they aren’t worth the effort (xp/loot wise) and focusing on as many normal mobs as possible. That’s not a problem with AOE or any build, it’s the problem with how these events are designed, and how they give rewards.
What’s the problem with event rewards? They don’t exist, at all. Players don’t do events that use multiple mobs because they are more fun or because they are more rewarding than others AS EVENTS, but because more mobs mean more loot, this is very bad content design, I know the game focuses around the individual, but how about support builds? Anyone that actually buffs his allies or heals, instead of throwing AOEs around is doing it wrong, he won’t get rewarded for actually HELPING and SAVING allies, he might get that Gold Medal for contribution but he won’t get material drops or more item drops that someone who is using AOE to tag more mobs will get.
Easy solution: remove all drops from any mobs that spawn in events. Add a high amount of drops, proportional to the amount of the mobs, in the end reward chest. That way, single target builds, support builds, tanking builds, ALL builds will become viable and the players will start coordinating instead of being mindless AOE spammers. Nerfing AOE skills for the sake of PVE events won’t help much, people will still use AOEs even if their damage is reduced to nothing, because you will still get more contribution, and tag more mobs, therefore more loot.
tl;dr
Regarding AOE in PVE: It’s not that AOE skills are overpowered, the rewards for doing open world events are designed in a way to promote selfish behaviour, as players enter a “race” to tag more mobs, more mobs = more loot.
100% agree regarding AOE in pve. You can’t give nothing but situations where AOE should be the best option 95% of the time, then complain that people are only using aoe because it’s the best option.
1. Stop scaling events by simply adding hordes of normal mobs that instantly melt to combined player AOE. How about instead of sending ~20 weak mobs almost every event, half of them scale by instead sending 2 champions?
2. The tagging metagame is lame and you guys should really remove it. It’s not just about aoe damage vs single target damage. It’s aoe damage vs supporting and resing. It’s aoe damage vs controlling and “tanking” dangerous single foes. Right now everything but max aoe tagging setups is discouraged. Make the majority of rewards come with the medal at the end.
Now I do think there are certain “aoe” abilities that are over the top. Some are too much damage for too low cooldown. For instance, thief cluster bomb. It’s WAY to spammable for the damage it does when compared to thief single target options, p/d or p/p.
I think warrior melee cleave is worth looking at too. HB does good single target damage already, yet it obliterates clumps of targets as well. I wonder if all melee cleave type attacks should do 25-50% reduced damage to the non primary target.
IMO, I think you’re really opening a can of worms by getting the mindset of “aoe is OP”. The vast majority of attacks in this game hit more than one target. After months of people getting used to playing the game one way, you’re threatening to change the whole feel of the game? It’s really dangerous ground.
No way should 1 offensive stat (condition) be anywhere remotely comparable to 3 offensive stats (power, precision, crit damage). You want to do more dps? Equip more offensive stats.
The bleed cap is stupid though. I can’t see any point in having it.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Effect_stacking
That page has some useful, but conflicting information.
First it says “If there are two unique sources of Burning, the effect with the greater condition damage value will be used until that source ends, at which point, the intensity from the second source is used for the remaining duration.”
Then later notes “When a boon or condition stacks in duration from multiple sources, its strength is applied in the order of application, using the relevant stats for each source. For example, a stronger stack of poison applied over a weaker one must first wait for the weaker stack’s original duration to expire before the increased damage takes effect.”
For bleeding I fairly sure it works like this.
Ex: Person A applies 10 stacks of bleeding at 50 damage per stack for 10 seconds. Person B applies 10 stacks of bleeding at 100 damage per stack for 10 seconds. Both players see “20” on the stack count for 10 seconds, but they only see the damage text fly up from their own stacks, at a rate identical to if theirs alone were the only stacks. The total damage done is unchanged from if both players had applied their bleeds sequentially rather than simultaneously.
Ex: Person A applies 10 stacks of bleeding at 50 damage per stack for 20 seconds. Person B applies 20 stacks of bleeding at 100 damage per stack for 10 seconds. For the first 10 seconds, B will see 20 stacks worth of his bleeding, but A will only see 5 stacks worth of his, as stack count is capped at 25 total. After B’s stacks run out however, I’m not sure if A will revert to the full 10 stacks for another 10 seconds, or if the game “throws away” the excess stacks and would only be at 5.
Would you use the flesh golem if he wasn’t completely brain dead half the time? I find dagger necro + flesh golem probably the best single target sustained dps in the game, when he decides to actually attack. He also cripples for you.
Should stick to NPCs.
Riel Darkwater
I think the problem is the NUMBER of minions. I think it has more to do with having over 3 pets at a time than it does with pathing. When I attack, some minions respond right away and some sit next to me and do nothing.
Can’t be that, nope. I only use the flesh golem and he’s a complete idiot at least 75% of the time. I can have both melee spirit weapons out on my guardian and they work fine.
1. Computer can’t handle engagements of more than 10-15 people without dipping to single digit fps
2. The current state of thieves often makes small scale objectives extremely lame.
Two things IMO:
1. Revealed debuff lengthened. Not to some ridiculous 30+seconds, but 4 or 5 seconds instead of just 3.
2. Hitting a stealthed thief with an attack (has to be a new attack, not just condition damage ticking) will cause them to have the revealed debuff when their current stealth ends. Not pop out immediately, but no more just using C&D 1/2 sec after you come out (and likely before you are even rendered again) over and over and over with impunity, no matter how many aoes the multiple people searching get lucky with.
Stealth atm is a bit too good of a defensive ability considering its effective cooldown, while also being a good offensive ability.
Copy/paste some Ranger or Guardian code or something. My guardian has no issues with spirit weapons. They quickly and reliably assist whatever I’m targeting. Same with Ranger pets. I don’t even have to order them to attack. They instantly assist me entering combat and if I switch targets they do too within 1-2 seconds.
Flesh golem? More like kitten golem.
As someone who played WoW for 6.5 years (and other trinity MMOs before that), and a “hardcore” raider for the majority of that time, I very much disagree that the trinity itself is the reason WoW pve (specifically large scale raiding, WoW 5mans have been a joke for years) was “better”. Instead, Blizzard is simply better at, or more likely puts a lot more effort into, coming up with deep, complicated, precisely tuned raid bosses that are intended to occupy people for months.
The simple fact that a healer role exists means nothing more to my gameplay as a non-healer in WoW than it does here. Clump up to help them do their role? No different than standing in a ranger’s healing spring and using a blast finisher. Otherwise I’m still just avoiding the avoidable damage I’m designed to and passively taking the unavoidable damage the healer is intended to heal. IMO no designer so far has ever gotten the tank and healer roles exciting enough to get an adequate amount of the common mmo player “OMG BIG NUMBERS!!” dpsers to want to play those roles instead, thus creating major obstacles to simply forming a group in the first place. Hence WoWs need for queues where random people line up to have the privilege.
I totally agree that stuff like the Karka event was crap, and the 3 dragons are “meh,” (in a gameplay sense, they are pretty good in an aesthetic sense) but throwing the trinity back in won’t do a kitten thing.
(edited by Undertow.2389)
Try looking at it from another angle: The 2 sec quickness on swap isn’t there necessarily to be used every 16 seconds. Rather, you could think of it as a “I can swap my pets (a 100% heal and CD reset for them) without losing any dps (as my personal dps will be doubled) while the new one has to reposition.” feature.
Of course, certainly get a boost if you’re at ranged and swap to a ranged pet or in melee and swap to a melee pet.
Ranger is the best. Great dps (that is damage per second, not biggest single number fools) with far better survivability than warrior, and passive 25% speed signet for getting around. Just put at least 15 pts into BM traits and take Master’s Bond, it makes your pet A LOT tougher. For normal soloing 3 or less mobs, just use a cat and kill them super fast. For tough stuff you can swap to bears or devourers as needed.
The guy in that vid is using a shortbow, 3-4 feet in length. Longbows were around 6 feet tall and had draw weights of 100+ pounds. Longbow is fine in fire speed.
A better shortbow vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zGnxeSbb3g
I think being able to dodge to break the animation of it is a very reasonable request.
I don’t agree with “just remove it all and turn it into a super plain vanilla 130 range auto attack spam” Yes the leaping can get you in trouble some times, but the current range on the attacks along with the cripple makes a sword ranger extremely hard to kite. Greatsword is far less capable of this other than swoop and a hit or two every 12 sec.
That’s not true. Other classes can just choose to wear less defensive gear and have full control over their class effectiveness. Rangers have a large component of their DPS (that has a confusing % of effectiveness reserved for the pet) that is beyond stat choice and limited to a selection of pets which have other factors (such as range, utility and survivability – more of an issue when you can’t just dodge to make up for running full zerkers). Pets are not useless, which was never a myth, the popular belief is that they are often a hindrance and don’t function as well as they should resulting in the class as a whole paying the price. I don’t believe you’ve busted that belief.
1. I’m not the OP.
2. It’s simple math, if class X derives 100% of their offense from gear and the ranger derives 60% with 40% staying static from a pet, then if at a given offense/defense gear stat distribution class X is equal to a ranger, removing offensive stats from that point will have less of an overall effect on ranger dps than on class X, and vice versa.
3. There are indeed lots of people on this forum saying pets are worthless and asking for a petless option for the ranger. Basically they go “being a pet class has x, y, z disadvantages therefor rangers are crap until you remove pets and make us exactly the same as every other class” while completely discarding or ignoring the ways in which a pet is an advantage. To me, that was the goal of this thread; to remember the upsides. But then again, this is an MMO forum, where people demand a boring homogenized game and hyperbole to extremes (every class, not just rangers) in the name of the almighty “balance,” citing any disadvantage is an obvious “design flaw” and how the devs have an mindboggling “disconnect.”
One other thing I think you can add to the “Why pets are good for you” section is they are significant potential damage that is independent of your gear selection. Some people look at this and say “aww pets suck, it’s not worth it for me to wear full glass cannon berserker gear because I wont improve my total dps as much as non pet classes.” You can also see the opposite as an advantage: “I can wear more defensive oriented gear for myself without sacrificing as much damage capability as other classes.”
No movement speed percentage increases stack. You’re crying over nothing.
In regards to class imbalance: http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/perfect-imbalance
Do a power/precision build (not glass cannon) using the less popular pvp weapons like longbow + greatsword. Something like 20/20/30/0/0 or 20/20/15/0/15.
Why are bow attacks seemingly using completely different code than other ranged attacks? The elementalist wasn’t getting obstructeds using his 1200 range lightning non instant projectile attack.
Oh and longbow kills all 3 dummies in less than 10 seconds due to barrage. Not a realistic damage expectation for non stupid targets but it’s a factor that shouldn’t be ignored.
It’s an unfortunate truth that the vast majority of mmo players have “big number syndrome.” That is, larger single numbers are always perceived as better overall damage over time. How many times have you heard stuff along the line of “wow class x is so much more powerful, I get hits of 10k while on class y I’m lucky to see 4k!” It goes for any mmo. Why do you think Anet changed the way rapid attack skills are displayed so that they sum up the damage of the many small hits? People like seeing big numbers.
Dungeon Finder is never a solution to create a social game. If you want a social game, get rid of the instances altogether. Instances do nothing but isolate people from the game world.
Also, if you want a social game, you want an ecology within the classes/professions. Things a class can do, that others cannot. Everquest had this in spades, which made it a very social game. A Druid and Wizard could teleport, an Enchanter could give you mana regeneration, a Necromancer could summon your corpse, a Cleric could rez you, etc. I am not sure why MMOs try to get further and further away from this.
The social aspect of your game is based around the granularity of your game design, not surface level stuff like whether it has guild options or not. If you present your world as a world that people can get lost in, instead of an amusement park with every little thing pointed out on your map, you will have a more social game. If you have a reason to interact with others because other individuals offer things you want that you can’t get yourself, you will have a more social game.
Completely agree. I started playing mmos with UO in 1997. Did time in EQ, DAOC, FFXI, WoW, and LOTRO. The genre has gotten less social over time simply because there is less need to be social in game. Why? To make more money. There are simply way more people/gamers who want an ultra convenient, solo friendly, playfor30minutesorless, theme park of attractions than who want the forced grouping to do anything, reliant on others, social network sandbox.
The last new friend I made in an mmo was years ago in WoW before random dungeon finder.
“key phrase being “on golems”…
Perhaps in this vid the ele is purely glass cannon specced with 30/30/0/0/10 or something similar and that’s why he gets these damage numbers. Of course, if you run that spec today (and not during the Beta when this vid was made) you’ll be wiped before the air skill #1 channel can finish by any competent player."
I didn’t say anything about scepter in offensive gear being good against competent players. I said the damage still sucks. You really think anyone in the beta weekends was playing high toughness bunker builds with protection up constantly? This video just ISN’T an example of “pre nerf” ele damage.
Um, when was the last time any of you actually equipped a scepter?
Go to the mists, equip a zerker amulet, spec at least 20 into air and pick up the 10% air damage, and you’ll get 2k channels easy on the golems. Sometimes nearing 3k on the light one. Even knights amulet gets around 2k.
All the damage in that video is what you get right now, wearing you know, offensive gear. No you won’t get it wearing clerics. The 6k air 1 channel is just a bug it was summing the damage from multiple successive channels. The only thing that is obviously nerfed now is shatterstone (water 2). It now crits for a pitiful ~1k wearing zerker amulet, and the cooldown doesn’t start until after the previous one explodes (in the vid the cooldown starts the instant he puts one down).
It doesn’t matter though, because 2.5k air 1 full channels with 1-1.5k air 2s every 5 sec is still crap dps. And scepter’s fire burst isn’t really any better than dagger’s but is much harder to land.
1. Tweak longbow so it is more desirable to use in more situations. Make rapid fire an actual dps increase and make the close range damage penalty on 1 less harsh.
2. Fix all the “obstructed” crap and other bugs associated with ranged weapons. I’ve been shooting mobs, had them move TOWARDS me, and gotten “out of range” on the next shot. The random “obstructed” in the middle of the open field is the big one though.
3. Improve the many sub par utility skills: shouts, signets, and spirits.
My definition of Ranger doesn’t matter one bit. The GW2 Ranger is what it is in game. If I find that combination of skill set/ability/toolkit fun, I’ll keep playing it. There are just too many demands for complete class redesigns to transform it into the paradigm that some individual wants it to be. Rangers aren’t unique in this. Nor is GW2 as an mmo.
Rangers definitely have problem areas. Longbow desirability vs shortbow, spirits, nature magic trait line, shouts, general bugs etc. Thing is, nearly every class has these types of issues. Ask mesmers how much they like the scepter, torch, or mantras. Ask elementalists how much they like glyphs, focus offhand, fire trait line, or weapon conjures.
I think you need to differentiate the valid balance complaints from the ones that simply hate the way the ranger is designed. That is, there are a ton of complaints on this forum from players who read “Archer” as the class name not “Ranger”. They feel they should use the longbow 99% of the time, never switch weapons, and pets should just disappear. You see a similar situation on the elementalist forum where a lot of players want to be that long range, 100% offensive, single target uber nuker of doom, instead of the balanced offense/defense/heal class that Anet designed.
Longbow needs more situations that make you think “hey I should switch to longbow right now” and less situations like “wow this longbow sucks here”. Right now the only time longbow is desired is in a keep fight. Any other time it is inferior.
It’s pretty obvious Anet envisions longbow as the long range required, bursty power/precision cooldown weapon, while the shortbow is the steady, consistent damage weapon. The problem is rapid fire sucks as a burst tool and longbow auto is far too penalized based on range.
1. Longbow 1: Currently, you get 100% damage at 1000+ range, but a huge dropoff to ~70% from 500-1000, and ~50% <500. This essentially makes eagle eye pretty much mandatory to even think about equipping a longbow, as otherwise you have about a nornswidth worth of window (from 1000-1200) to do remotely decent damage, which is nearly impossible to find. I find it nearly unusable in solo pve untraited. Either the location is too small to get 1000+, or you have room but can’t get the perfect 1000-1200 window. Should be changed to 100% damage at 900+ range, ~85% from 450-900, ~70% <450. Or ~85% 600-900, ~70% 300-600, ~55% <300.
2. Rapid fire …. isn’t rapid. It’s not a burst ability at all. It doesn’t increase your dps for crap, all it does is show a medium sized single number to fool the ignorant into thinking they are bursting. Personally I think the damage total is fine, it just needs to fire much quicker. Same damage in ~3 seconds instead of 5+.
Yes, warrior is very OP in pve… at low levels (especially with signets and the precision trait)
In the 50+ range though it really comes back down though. It’s still… “simple”… but it’s not so overpowering. In that you can’t just auto attack 4-5 mobs dead in 4 or 5 swings with little to zero chance of dying. You still kill easy stuff faster than others, but you feel weaker against harder encounters. My 80 ele or 55 mesmer both feel like they can take on and win (or at least survive) far harder situations than my 70 warrior, but even a couple risen thrall feel like more work for them.
I don’t think it’s a problem. Some days you feel like playing something really involved. Other days you just want to smash stuff. The variety is good for the game.
The only thing that should really be changed is the precision trait that gives you an absolute amount of precision per signet regardless of level. At 80 it’s a small amount of crit. At level 20 it’s like 100%. Just change it to something like 3% crit per unused signet instead of 40 precision.
(edited by Undertow.2389)
All posting early does is make people whine and complain about stuff they cannot directly experience the actually effects of in game, as well as things that might not even make it live. That’s all the ptr of that other game does.
Just wait.
A lot of what has been said already.
Pistol Whip feels like just a 5 init cost 1 sec stun now. There’s no point in using it for the damage.
Flanking Strike feels worthless for anything other than a 1 on 1 pve tank n spank fight.
Pistol/Pistol is just lacking something.
Body Shot really needs a boost. Seems to me that the vast majority of “applies vulnerability” effects are grossly overvalued. As if they were tuned with the scenario of 25 people attacking this single huge hp target in mind, when that situation accounts for maybe 2% of the game.
I’ve tried them all to at least see and use all the weapon skills and several slot skills, along with complete inspections in the mists, and I’d personally (keyword) rank them in this order, from greatest to least:
Guardian
Elementalist
Engineer (as long as you don’t just spam grenade #1)
Mentalist
Thief
Ranger
Warrior
Necromancer
This is just for pve. For example, I think warriors are much more interesting in pvp because half of warriors “thing” is getting in melee range and preventing targets from getting away. A lot of these moves are fairly pointless in pve because 90% of mobs want nothing more than to be in melee with you, and the other 10% don’t even try harder than stepping 2 feet to “get away”. So your gap closers and cripples are boring, and you have basically 1 combo field that you can use to self combo while soloing. Couple this with most weapons having high auto attack damage and abilities like “does a small amount of damage and applies 4% vulnerability”, or “does a small amount of damage and buffs you to do more damage for a very small amount of time”, along with many, many slot skills and traits that are “use this and do more damage for X time”. It just ends up to be a /yawn with no depth in solo pve. I rank necro lower because they are similar to warriors in that they have a lot of abilities that cripple or vulnerability on use, yet don’t have the crazy damage that warriors do. Axe, dagger, and scepter main hand are basically auto attack and use #2 to deal more damage and/or cripple. Staff is cast some marks then put it back in your bag for 2 hours.
The top half is basically there due to the added depth/interactivity of self combo fields and/or weapon switching.
The difference is in hp, not armor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=-udk3CEtc7E#t=153s
Look at that awesome warrior durability!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=-udk3CEtc7E#t=228s
Warrior, Guardian… that heavy armor sure is making a huge difference…
(edited by Undertow.2389)
I dislike it as an elementalist and as a mesmer.
On top of that the respawn problem + hard to avoid aggroing extra mobs.
Armor “class” actually means very little in this game.
Level 80 light armor: 920 defense total
Level 80 heavy armor: 1211 defense total
Sounds soso difference right? Except that the “armor” stat is the sum of your defense from armor, your base toughness, your toughness from traits, and toughness from gear.
Both elementalists and warriors have the same base toughness, 916 at level 80. Add in on top of that another 500-1000 based on gear and traits and the new total armor looks more like:
Elementalist: 2600 armor
Warrior: 2891 armor
Very little difference at all. The vast majority of difference in toughness comes from how you trait and how much you put on your gear.
Now the real difference between classes is base hp pool. Elemenalists (along with thieves and guardians) have ~10.8k. Warriors (and necros) have over 18k.
Every class has different ways of avoiding or mitigating damage. The last thing I want to see is a super homogenization similar to the direction Blizzard took with WoW as people kept complaining “waaah we aren’t equal in every possible way, it’s not baaaaaalanced!”
Can’t do it with just 1 IMO.
1. Drop spells all need to drop faster. Mouthbreathers shouldn’t be able to backpeddle out of them by accident. Relying on 1 or 2 45 second cooldown abilities just to make your 4-6 sec cooldown sloooooow drop spells land is just dumb.
2. Dagger mainhand needs a damage buff. The difference between a D/D thief and a D/D ele is laughable.
3. Downstate #2 needs to be quicker and start off with a small knockback then the current immobilize + damage.
The gold sellers offer much better rates atm because they obtain their gold by CHEATING. They hack peoples accounts and/or run bots 24/7. That’s how they get their gold. Their competition, real players playing the game, are averaged due to the global trading post so the gold you get from them is an amount corresponding to a level 20ish playing for an hour or two a night. Of course that “average player” isn’t going to offer as much.
But it is going up. Two weeks ago gems were ~20 silver per 100, now they’re around 40 silver. As real players level up and accumulate more gold, they will have more to spend. It’s not really fair to compare a 1 month old game to one that has been established for years like EVE.
ANET really really needs to crack down on the kitten botters. I’ve reported the same 2-3 bots running the same loop in the same area 3-4 times this past week, and they are still there grinding away.
I would very much like an option that prevents targeting of other players/friendly npcs when fighting in combat. It is incredibly frustrating trying to click a specific mob in the middle of a group of other players, only to repeatedly get allies and have your offensive attacks do nothing. Since there is no real reason to ever target allies in combat, this creates a very strong “other players around are a bad thing” type feeling, something the game has tried hard to eliminate.
I would REALLY love a “don’t allow targeting of allies in combat” option/feature. Since there are no beneficial spells you have to target and cast on allies, it’s incredibly frustrating trying click to target a specific mob in the middle of a bunch of warriors/thieves and keep getting them and having my offensive abilities do nothing. It’s an “other players are a bad thing” type feeling, something that this game has tried very hard to get rid of.
I don’t think they should ever have a cost imposed. Anet originally said they didn’t see a reason to charge for them, so it was disappointing to hear free transfers were only temporary at release. Though if they are purchasable with gems it won’t be so bad as you can indirectly use in game currency.
However, they should have a very lengthy reuse timer. Not 1 day. More like 6 months.
I think it’s because from arenanet’s perspective, there is no “auto” attack. You originally couldn’t set any ability to automatically repeat over and over, you had to press for every swing. They added the option because of complaints of fatigue.
So if you don’t think of your 1 key as “auto attack” (ala WoW and other mmos) but rather the primary attack with your main hand weapon (since 1-3 come from your main hand), the current system makes sense.
Also, from a technical stand point adding new animations for every dual wield combination would probably significantly increase the memory requirements of player models, something very key to be kept at a strict budget as you never know exactly how many will be in one location at a time.
Other than wvwvw keep/zerg battles and very high player count DEs, I think the performance of GW2 on my 2.4 ghz Core 2 duo and HD 6670 is surprisingly decent. 20-30 fps in cities, 25-40 in outdoor areas, 30-50 in spvp. Yes I have to turn shadows to low, and reflections off, but shaders and post processing are high, native rendering, and FXAA is on. Compared to the last 3 MMOs I’ve played: LOTRO, SWTOR, and AION, GW2 feels the most smooth, despite the lower framerate. What I mean is those other 3 have terrible jerks and hitches for hard drive access. Like WoW, GW2 seems to reserve some cpu time for HD access and let it take it’s time, rather than doing a “OMG STOP ALL RENDERING RIGHT NOW AND FREEZE FOR .5-1 SEC WHILE I LOAD THIS ARMOR TEXTURE!” For a 6 year old cpu it does ok for a 2012 MMO, especially one that looks as good as GW2 does. It’s not like it’s poor performance for meh visuals.