Guild Wars 2

BrunoBRS.5178:

also love how OP “knows” it took them less than a month to do all the work they’re showing now.

I and pretty much anyone who plays this game actively could do the same amount of changes in two weeks even alone. Maybe not implement stuff like adrenaline changes but that’s the highlight of this patch, all the numerical changes that they did and didn’t do take a few minutes to implement and a few hours to create and test

loseridoit.2756:

so you want anet keep messing with the numbers every 2 months……..

So where does q/a testing fit in your idea of anet content distribution

Yes, because the numbers are pretty darn off in many cases
They got QA testers? They might as well give a week or two for the QA guys (if they got those) and they’d still be over 3 months faster than the current pace. And I said 2 months is pushing it, one month would be fine and two weeks would be optimal. Sure the bigger changes take a longer while but minor tweaks and changes every time they update living story isn’t too big of a push. You really don’t need a huge QA testing or massive diagrams of statistics to see why incendiary powder is ridiculously overpowered or why stuff like the new guardian trait communal aegis is awful compared to the other options in that specific tree

If you DO need all sorts of statistics and still can’t see why, you clearly aren’t the right person to do the job.

That big list mtpelion.4562 made for example at the start is just shilltalk, and it’s getting upvoted because that’s what people in official forums generally do and is to be expected. However a professional game dev doesn’t need 6 MONTHS to see what’s wrong with the game and to tweak the numbers. Sure a mechanic change would take somewhere along that long, stuff like reworking condition damage in PvE, reworking conditions as a mechanic to be something less spammy and more interesting, sure. But it’s 2 years from launch and the issues are still there. There’s no need to make excuses for Anet, they are the people who can speak with their actions yet they remain silent. All I want is this game to be good and successful, if you are against that then fine, be against that, but from my point of view healthy gameplay = healthy game and happy players. I really can’t see any harm at all if they tweaked the balance more often or at least tried to keep some sort of interesting, evolving metagame going on in the PvP and in some cases PvE as well

loseridoit.2756:

ummmmm…… you dont find anything odd with the consistent 5 month cycle.

The odd thing is that they call them balance patches even though you can’t keep game balanced by touching the balance every 6 months. Even 2 months would be pushing it

Blaeys.3102:

Uuni.3561:

Since we get balance patches every 6 months or so and they include changes that take less than a month to come up with and create, I can’t help but to wonder what are they doing in the 5 months between the patches? Are they laid off or something?

I’m not trying to be snarky or disrespective . . .

Obviously you are trying to be exactly that.

Don’t see how people start with insults and expect a thread to be the least bit productive or useful.

You may have a good point to make here – but the tone of the thread is derailed completely through hyperbole and insult. Thread should be closed – and probably just deleted at this point.

I honestly am not trying to be insulting to anyone, I just find it impossible to discuss this topic without pointing out the obvious facts ie. nothing happens in 5 months between the balance patches. Trust me I tried my best not to be snarky

Also removing discussion isn’t healthy, I know this place is worse place to discuss about health of the game than chinese internet to discuss about democracy but at least I tried

mtpelion.4562:

And this is why you are not in charge of balancing any type of content for any game.

Step 1 is the single most important step in the chain. Without it you are literally just making dumb guesses. You may as well spin the “wheel-o-nerf” to make all of your decisions.

Doing something is infinitely better than doing nothing. If you are a professional game developer it’s not a ‘wheel-o-nerf’ because you are supposed to have some idea of what the game you are balancing is about. And I didn’t tell them to disregard statistics either, you are just trying to give me flak for stuff I didn’t say

mtpelion.4562:

Balancing consists of the following steps:

1. Collect Data.
2. Review Data to see if Balancing is required.
3. If required, propose solutions.
4. Determine if solutions meet your goals, are realistic, and do not significantly impact other areas of the game.
5. Select a solution.
6. Develop the solution.
7. Test the solution.
8. Revise the solution if anything comes up during testing.
9. Test again if revisions are made.
10. Repeat 8-9 as needed.
11. Release Balancing changes.

Start over at step 1.

They can skip steps 1 and 2 in some cases by playing the game and seeing what creates unhealthy play patterns ie. player can’t react because there is no way to avoid something/they don’t have enough information. This goes for most cases, they are (hopefully) professionals at this. Another thing is listening to feedback and looking graphs if they got them, sure

Step 3 only occurs if there is something detected so it’s fairly obvious
Step 4 is the reason why PvE and PvP should be balanced differently. There is absolutely no need to lift your hands up in the air and say you can’t do something because it would affect another aspect of the game if those aspects are easily separated
I doubt the existence of 6-10 even existing in most cases. A lot of the changes aren’t too well thought out and we don’t have a public beta testing going on where they could even gather the data required for revisioning the changes. Most of the changes are numerical anyway and not new mechanics so the ‘development’ doesn’t actually take time

It sure as hell doesn’t take 6 months to figure out 5% tweaks to skill damages. I do appreciate the big changes WHEN we get them but as for balance updates, they don’t really help the balance much at all. The patches are too infrequent and the balance will be skewed in some other direction in just a few weeks at best, causing the game to be pretty much dead and stagnated when it comes to innovation for more than 90% of the time

Astral Projections.7320:

If I get one and sell it for 3500 gold. I’m buying myself a Legendary so people can be impressed with how hard I farmed (oops, Freudian slip) threw money at the game (let me rephrase) worked to get it (that’s better).

Don’t forget looking unique like every single other person in your party, wearing full abyss and/or celestial t3 cultural armor wielding a truly earned legendary weapon that shows everyone how good they are at the game and that a legendary weapons are something to look up to

Shanks.2907:

The light field on hammer auto attack needs to go.

Maybe a trait that makes third strike on AA for bladed weapons (sword/greatsword) cause cripple. Could put it in zeal to make that trait line useful. Though, adept in radiance would have the best synergy imo.

That could be a nice idea to make a trait that would increase the one handed weapons capability to stick to the targets. I don’t like condi spam autos as a concept though, I feel like the game would be much much better off especially in PvP if the amount of conditions applied by spammable stuff would be reduced by a whole lot, especially stuff like cripple shouldn’t be constantly applied without some planning

I’m also biased against removing the symbol from hammer auto, it’s such a fun skill to use in PvP whe you are traited all for symbol effects and it’s your only way of having 100% symbol uptime, validating all those traits you invested in

Keksmuffin.1450:

Meh… shield 4 should give aegis and protection and you should be able to use use shield 5 while rezzing. It’s pretty funny how resolute healer (honor V) that procs shield of absorbtion on rez is more useful than the actual skill itself. Then it will actually be worth it to think about taking shield over focus.
I don’t really get why you would want something offensive for the most defensive weapon on the most defensive class (class designwise). Don’t really think it would be fitting tbh.

Mace 3 should work like the blocks from warrior mainhand mace and offhand sword. I don’t really see why one range attack is already breaking it while the warrior blocks keep blocking until they block a melee attack or run out.

And meh… I like noscoping staff 2 on bunker guard. :<

I agree on most other stuff.

Yeah that trait is really strong in comparison. The idea behind the chill is that you would have at least some way to do something to your opponent. It wouldn’t be nothing too major but if you are running the most defensive setup of mace+shield you’d have at least some CC you can contribute outside your huge-cooldown shield 5. Also chills are cool and I find the visual of shield4 to be pretty nicely fitting to a chilling wind effect. Aegis would be a cool effect too and of all the weapon skills being able to apply it this would probably be the best

Mace 3 blocking ranged would be an even better fit. I haven’t played around with warrior too much so I didn’t recall only ranged permablock mecahnic. As much as I hate duration-based blocks this would be a really nice fit for it and perfectly fit the defensive guardian theme and give mace some use in all gamemodes

And yes I love noscoping with staff 2 as much as anyone else but the amount of power locked in this skill for staff just makes me sad. It’s such a high nuke if you do the pass-through + detonation on one target – better than hammer 2 – and it so often gets unused just because of how fiddly it is. A complete rework or some sort of tuning would be in order. Heck maybe even give it something special if you hit both parts of the skill on the same target like a knockback or burn or chill or anything. Something to reward skillful use of it rather than ‘i might as well press this button because spamming auto isn’t too effective and everything else is on cd’

I could have commented on all the other skills that could use tuning like ring of warding also revealing stealthed enemies inside it but I felt like it’s better to focus on the most problematic ones. Didn’t want to make it any more of a wall of text than it already is

(part 2/2)

Focus
-4. Ray of Judgement
Increase the visibility of this projectile and add some sort of hitting effect. It’s a great skill but too often it gets lost in the cluster of effects going on.

Shield
-4. Shield of Judgement
Since guardian has absolutely no skills that let them stick to a target unless they are using 2-handed weapons and this skill is among the most underwhelming ones of them all, I suggest a chill effect on the affected enemies for 2 seconds and reducing the cooldown of this skill from 30 seconds to 20 seconds.
-5. Shield of Absorption
The second activation really needs to detonate the dome. The knockback is really good (or really annoying depending on which side of the bubble you are) but the second activation giving a free heal is just too much. Increase the visual effect to last the whole duration and not randomly vanishing after the first second or two

Torch
-4. Zealot’s Flame (1)
What were they thinking. The skill has barely any visual que, the range is extremely vague, it burns on the start and at the end of the skill and is overall a skill with extremely poor functionality. This skill needs a properly functioning pulsing fire AoE that is clearly visible to the user and the person affected. 3 seconds of burn for a 15s cd isn’t acceptable either, it needs a decent radius along with the pulsing flames — and a duration of 5 seconds instead of 3
-4. Zealot’s Fire (2)
This skill has an insane damage coefficient making it a really effective nuke. The worst part about this skill is that the projectile follows the ground for absolutely no reason, breaking the skill beyond use in most cases. For a 1200 range skill it often fails to land at enemies even from 600 range due to the projectile getting stuck on every single grain of sand on the ground. Airborne projectile is a must have on this skill.
Another thing to make torch a little more interesting is to add a secondary effect to this skill. Remove the burning this inflicts entirely but replace it with a knockdown for 2 seconds if the enemy was already lit on fire. This would give guardians a hard CC offhand skill with good functionality and great synergy with the first part of the skill. The 50% increased cooldown on activation should go in my opinion, the effect isn’t that amazing it needs to be punished for using it.
-5. Cleansing flame
Have this skill cleanse conditions from yourself as well but reduce the duration to 2.5 from 4.5 seconds and amount of pulses to 5 from 9 (no damage reduction though). The skill has amazing utility but is fiddly to use and is currently pretty much useless in PvP orientated gamemodes and only useful in very few PvE scenarios. It’s a channeled skill so it can be interrupted and would give torch a great defensive option against conditions, even though it provides no damage mitigation like the other two.
-Torch trait
Torch trait could make it so the pulses in 4 and 5 cleanse conditions if the innate condition cleansing in 5 is too much to digest

Underwater
-X. All skills & both weapons
These need damage. You are better off picking up a warrior banner and whacking enemies around with that thkittening any of your underwater weapons, I doubt anyone ever checked the numbers on these because they are just abysmal. Thankfully underwater combat is not in a big part in this game because guardians would not do too well.

Any thoughts or is this a ded subforum? If you want to tell me that I’m wrong please add some explanation why that is so and why my improvement ideas. I guess you could put this in suggestion forums but that place is about as dead as it gets and it would gather attention from people who have never played guardian yet think it’s OP because they lost to one in PvP, so that’s why this is here. Also I want to hear your opinions and possibly suggestions too

(part 1/1)

My most played profession is guardian and I got 3 guardians at lvl 80, have tried every single weapon combination multiple times so I feel like I got some idea where I’m coming from with this

And yes, this will be a long post but I’m not going to bore you with all the missing tooltips and stuff like that, if Anet doesn’t wanna read the wiki what’s bugged or just doesn’t have the resources to fix any of it that’s not something I personally can change. These are just my ideas how to tweak the guardian skills to be a little better fit for purpose.

I’ll move in the gw2 wiki order, starting off with:
Greatsword
-1. The autoattack chain
This one is fairly good auto chain with might on the last hit. The tooltip doesn’t state that it gives a stack of might for EACH enemy hit, maximum of 3 because it can only cleave 3 targets. A slight fitting change with the tooltip would be that the last hit gets a tiny bit more range (ie. from 130->160), just to increase the functionality of the cleave but this is a very minor thing.
-5. Binding Blade & Pull
First part has a damage over time effect that scales off of condition damage. Absurd effect that is not clearly explained in-game in any way. The condition damage part needs to be clarified or scrapped, honestly I’d change it to reveal stealthed targets for the duration as stealth currently has no counterplay and a skill like this would be a great tool for it.

Hammer
-4. Banish
This skill is simply amazing. The launch effect is incredible and fun, it has a clear tell unlike pretty much all the other hard CC effects in this game. Damage is nothing to write home about but it’s a great fun to knock someone off a cliff with this. Only change I can think of is to change every OTHER skill with launch or knockdown or something to have a clear tell like banish. Seriously this game has way too many strong control spells with barely any tell or way to react to them.

Staff
-2. Orb of Light
Your hardest hitting spell on the staff with incredibly low cooldown if not detonated. This skill should be able to be targeted on allies. What it needs is a change of the damage-heal distribution. Put all the healing to the pass through and all the damage to the detonation, greatly increasing the impact of both of these actions and making this skill feel like less waste of a time. The biggest downside of this would be that you couldn’t heal yourself with it anymore, so getting the pass-through heal if you hit an enemy with the second part would be an excellent compensation (reward for being good = good for PvP). With this kinda change the no-activation cooldown would obviously need to be larger but the explosion increase could be shorter. 8 and 12 seconds for example.

Mace
-1. The autoattack chain
The third hit of this chain only hits one enemy, which is a HUGE disadvantage for an autoattack, rendering it practically useless even though the damage isn’t that bad. Give it proper cleaving and up the healing power coefficient to something reasonable, healing power will forever be a terrible stat and bunkering in PvP will forever be cheesy if if you can be a bunker with practically no healing power investment. Up the coefficient on every single heal skill and lower the base heals, this skill included. It should be the main healers tool along with staff yet it isn’t.
-3. Protector’s Strike
This skill blocks only one attack, which renders it pretty crappy. For a defensive skill it does worse than the focus 5 skill. I’d say up the blocking amount to something more useful ie. 5 total in the AoE and it’s good. It blocks for allies too so it’s a decently powerful skill yet it only takes one hit, which happens almost instantly making the skill pretty useless. Maybe add a blast finisher if the shield is popped? Would grant you some nice area retaliation if you combo this with your healing symbol.

Sword
-1. The autoattack chain
The third hit is incredibly buggy, not working at all against enemies that are reflecting projectiles and completely fails to connect against graveling burrows for example. This really needs to be fixed, especially because your autoattack chain won’t start over if the projectiles miss, oh no, it will re-fire the projectiles and it will miss over and over and over until the chain resets on it’s own. Fix pls.

Astral Projections.7320:

Uuni.3561:

The hair is pretty hilarious I feel bad for anyone who wanted to have a lore-friendly experience in this game

It’s similar to at least one Guild Wars 1 Charr hair style.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Champion_Drakin_Cinderspire

I was more referring to having a pink gel hairdo charr running around in general. Joke characters have been around since release with the dye system and peoples creativity to create abominations but this one seems to be the most popular one of them all. Lore-wise it’s impossible to have any self-respecting warband member to pose such an epidermis, so I feel bad for those who try to have a serious roleplay around black citadel at least for a while

The PvE encounters in this game aren’t particularly well thought out for the most part. Hopefully over time we get to see better boss mechanics and AI so things like turn times aren’t necessary, although I’d love to see some sort of turn times on lupi, that guy is just too big to turn on a dime

ThiBash.5634:

Then again, given that Anet had the guts to add a lesbian couple to the game, I’m still waiting for them to have the guts to openly sexualize a male character by giving them skimpy outfits.

Are you kidding me? Anet is openly ridiculing same sex couples with the harmful, stereotypical gay couple that have absolutely no personality outside being gay and force their sexual orientation in your face as much as they can in their dialogue. I guess people are so desperate for seeing a homosexual couple in video game that they let it pass but applauding them for it is really pushing it. I am all for having all sorts of couples and relationships but enforcing stereotypes is not something that should be applauded or looked up to

As for the skimpy male armor, sure, why not – as long as we get both skimpy and non-skimpy versions for both asura & charr genders

The hair is pretty hilarious I feel bad for anyone who wanted to have a lore-friendly experience in this game

No answer on this? Hope nobody minds me bumping it

There appears to be a gap between the waist and chest of my character
Race: Asura
Gender: Female
Armor class: Heavy
Armor in question: Arah leggins and twilight arbor chest (although this seems to happen with MANY MANY different armor pieces)

It only occurs when the character is leaning forward aka. pretty much all animations except the idle one. I know you don’t tend to fix character art issues but if you ever get around to it you might wanna iron this one out, thanks ^^

Barabbas.8715:

(snip)

To be honest you are using one of the slimmest greatsword skins that clip the most with the thickest armor piece. And weapons held on your back are bound to clip or hover. Pretty much every single one for every single race, not just this one

I don’t know if you read this thread anymore but here goes:
Race – Asura
Sex – Female
Description:
Strange lump on her neck, mainly on her right side

Ps. Majority of the female asura faces have neck lump issues of some sort in combat stance, not just this one but this one has them in idle more than the others I’ve tried

I really can’t see the point in completely ditching the town clothes. They were a niche, sure, but the niche loved their town clothes a lot. It doesn’t hurt you to keep town clothes in the game at all, yet you are going through all this trouble to ruin it for the niche of players. I personally just have one costume set but I would never wear it as a full costume with all the parts and especially not without being able to dye the parts. I’m really really sad to see it go and I hope I can get at least refund for it

Leaves me at sour mood to read about this kinda “hey here is a change that nobody asked and it’s going to ruin the fun of some players but overall the update is good so majority will still cheer for us and we can’t hear the cries of the few”. At least that’s how I see it (inb4 banned)

Being limited to one region is really annoying for the people who have friends overseas. I understand the limitations with the cross-region transfers and why it might not be feasible to allow guesting in the same scale cross-region as it is allowed within a region, that’s why I think something like a cross-region guest pass service might be an opportunity. It’d be an account-based unlock, similar to deluxe edition upgrade, and it would create a copy of your account to the other regions servers for even a somewhat steep gem fee. (with all the obvious wvw limitations and whatnot) Having a fee involved in it would likely limit the use of this feature to those who really want to play with their friends on the other side of the pond, rather than just people doing open world events like the current guesting is mostly used within the regions

Maybe this would be a more feasible way than just free for all guesting and it would definitely be a useful service for those of us who have friends on both regions and can’t really make the decision between the two sides

Zacchary.6183:

I actually have made my own rifle suggestion in the thief forums. Some thieves like it.

I feel like your suggestion has way too many new mechanics attached to it. Considering how every weapon in the game so far follow a set of somewhat simple mechanics I don’t feel that kinda level of complexity is justifiable. Your sniper seem also far too versatile, leaving very few weaknesses or options to counterplay

I was thinking of how thief with rifle might work and here’s what I came up with. Tell me how it sounds ’mmkay?

1. 1200 range basic attack
-Cripples from behind, slow fire rate but relatively high damage
-Maybe up to 50% projectile finisher chance
2. AoE blast finisher
-Scatters caltrops in the affected area
3. Cheap 3 shot burst
-Less damage per shot than basic attack but overall more DPS
-20% projectile finisher chance
4. Evade backwards and shoot
-Stealth if the shot connects, 600 range tops
-Negligible damage
-100% projectile finisher chance
5. 1500 range execution shot
-More damage to low hp enemies, you can’t move when channeling
-100% projectile finisher chance
-Maybe even make the skill so that it gets interrupted if you get hit during the channel but is also unblockable?

From stealth:
Fire two regular bullets at the same time
-Gain quickness for a few seconds if you hit enemy in the back
-100% projectile finisher chance

Hard to say without seeing the new thief how much exactly would the skills cost but idea being that 2 and 3 skills would be quite cheap, 4 and 5 would be expensive.

Idea behind this kit is to try and keep enemy away with the caltrops, try to dish out as much pain as possible with 3 while still managing your initiative and kite around with the 4 skill, then finish enemy off with quickness + execution shot from stealth. You’d be somewhat weak against other enemies at range if they can have any deflections or just higher damage at 900+ range. It would be hard to finish off enemies that are in melee and not fleeing away as you can’t safely execute them. You might think that the evade + stealth is a bit OP but do note that the stealth won’t activate if your shot misses, gets blocked, gets evaded, is out of range or whatever, leaving you with a big initiative deficit and open for punishment.

Traits could let you upgrade the rifle shots to penetrate target, say master tier in critical strikes

If this were instanced i’d love it. Now I can’t get past the collapsing part at the very beginning thanks to me being asura and norn & charr blocking my view 100%

Vixena.3821:

I’m sorry… but this thread is just sad. I’ve completed it now over 45 times. You just need the skill to do the jumping puzzle. I absolutely love it. It’s an amazing challenge that I’m glad is not catered to everyone and really tests your ability at jumping puzzles.

Aside from the necessary level of skill and patience what you need is:
Good ping, decent gaming rig, charr or a norn, low population server, lots of time

I for one can’t even try to practice parts after the part at start where you wait for things to collapse with my asura. By the time I can see my character from the norns and charr the time is up and I die to the acid at the next jump. If only I had an empty server I could clear the jumping part in no time, it’s just that I cant do any jumps when I can’t see my character and when I can’t do it even once I can’t have any practice

And yeah, I did try to run it for 4 hours and never got past that part. Next time I’m near a door I go and take a screencap of my screen filled with charr and norn

So the walkthru is:
-Move to live near the server for decent ping
-Get a decent gaming rig
-Transfer to a low population server
-Create a huge charr or norn

Mmkay. Grats anyways

Wildclaw.6073:

Be faster? I always get in the front of the pack and once you make it through the first few jumps 70% of those fatty’s are gone.

Either that, or wait a second and run behind the back. Both versions work fine.

You mean wait a second and die in acid or whatever that green stuff is?

Arrogoth.7085:

Be faster? I always get in the front of the pack and once you make it through the first few jumps 70% of those fatty’s are gone.

It’s quite impossible to practice the start in a way that gets you ahead of the group. Being asura I always die at the start to the acid rising rather than missing jumps because I have to wait for the big guys to move ahead so I can see where I’m going. By the time they have passed on I will die soon after because the time window is just 1-2 seconds at the start

4 hours and I haven’t got past the first vertical gear that you need to jump on…

Time to call it quits? I’m playing an asura and the overflows I end up on are mostly norns/charr

bluewanders.5297:

I had a blast with it. Looking forward to more. I do not believe that all content should be nerfed to be completable by everyone… I suck at PVP, and I think it would be an awful idea if they started applying handicaps to other players just so I could “win”… I also haven’t built the proper reflexes yet for the dungeons, that’s on me to learn and get better, not on the company to make it easier so I don’t have to. Leeroy dies, in case you never watched the vid.

PvP is completely different from jumping puzzles. This is just poorly designed jumping puzzle as people in crowded servers cant complete it with smaller character models

The time window for jumps is way too small. 1-2 seconds in the start is just too little when you have to wait for other people to move out of the way so you can see your tiny asura from behind the gigantic charr and norn models

Maybe I should roll charr for this event to get it done?

Another thing is the waiting times. What’s the reasoning behind that? Why not just let everyone try as many times as they want rather than force them to wait for about three times the time it took them to fail

oh, and i’ve been trying this for the past 4 hours, now im just dissapointed and angry for such a trivial reason..

It’s just impossible to get past the first quarter as an asura when there are huge norns and charr blocking your view. The time limit is too narrow (1-2 seconds to land a jump) so this is where my halloween title hunt ends, just not worth the effort. I already put 4 frustrating hours into this