Guild Wars 2

Ohhhhh, you know I was trying to settle on a second weapon set for my Beastmaster Signet build. I just gave it a go, and you’re right, SB does work kinda’ nice.

What pets do you use? I’m loving what Drakes can do with Hilt Bash/Hunt in my dungeon runs.

I appreciate the honesty in the red post.

I am a bit dissapointed that Shouts and Signets got axed this update, but I do love me those Greatsword changes. It’s a significant enough change to Spirits to warrant giving them another look at, and I’ll reserve judgement until I have.

I do agree that most ranger weapons are good.
I just kind of wish Sword would execute the same general pros and cons in a less irritating way. I’m sure it’s a godly thing if you sat down with excel and worked out the numbers, but the feel is remarked on constantly. Even the proponents have a hard time painting it as anything other than an obstacle to be acclimatized to and worked around than something that’s genuinely fun to interact with in it’s own right.

It seems they added a new pet Juvenile Reef Drake. It’s in the pet list in game atm.

Hey, Good catch! Mommy wants. Those things are beautiful.

Hey, hey, hey. Maybe I’ve gone crazy, here.
But I think I just saw my pet take a shortcut instead of following a target’s path step for step. Does somebody whose run one of those Target Dummy tests before and has been paying far closer attention to these things than I have wanna’ feel like giving it another go and see if they notice anything different about the way the pet chases a target?

/counts bullet points up to 14
/blinks

Did they forget to type up a couple?

/edit:
actually, on second thought, that didn’t come across like how I wanted it to, and I’m kinda’ more distracted about the update to really put forth the effort to articulate myself properly. Nevermind this post.

/blink
But, is it really tonight? I’ve seen that in the main forum too, where are people getting that idea?

I totally get where your coming from.
But asking for, much less expecting, patch notes early is very unusual. Even this thread’s OP is more than what most companies would do. Personally I wouldn’t want to see it, because I’d be worried it would set a bad precedent, upping the ‘whine level’ of this forum across the board if any class thought they could grouse their way into a sneak peak.

And we do know the changes will be related to some level of reconstruction because the purpose for the changes is to increase the number of builds people make. People aren’t going to put more shouts on their bar because they like the sound design :p

You’re right to keep your expectations tempered and level-headed, though. That’s admirable, and I don’t mean to undermine that.

Pet HP is your Profession Resource.
Right now, the management of it is a bit too easy in easy content and bit too hard in hard content. So we have some not-good things happening, like farming bots flocking to it and everybody and their brother running bear in dungeons. Because it’s not…quite…operating ideally, most what we can offer is just various coping strategies, and each one is ultimately affected by what we value in pets enough to try and preserve.

If you value the fact a pet is a source of damage over time, Devourers are good. If you value the fact a pet holds additional skills on the F2 key, Moas and Dogs are pretty popular for that, and you’ll focus more on swapping a pet asap to circumvent cooldowns than keeping your pet on the front lines. If you want your pet to do some distraction-tanking you can use a Bear, but you’ll need some build investment to pull it off even a little bit (at the very least signet of the wild, signet of stone and 15 beastmastery). Full Beastmaster Builds do exist, and are the only way I know of to keep a pet up against dungeon punishment, but it doesn’t really come into it’s own until you’ve got the traits and gear for it in late-game.

Brown Bear is one you’ll see alot because it’s kind of the defacto ‘Fire and Forget’ pet. It has less-than-horrible survivability even without build investment and the condition removal is kinda’ handy. It’s hard to recommend it because I don’t recommend firing and forgetting at all. Right now the cards are definitely not stacked in your favor, so you just can’t afford to let your guard down like that. Even if they do get around to making our resource more of a forgiving middle-ground, it’s never going to be so easy you can ignore it entirely in difficult content, so it’s a bad habit to cultivate regardless.

I also used to think ranger was kind of boring.

More than any other class, I kind of got the feeling I could coast on auto-attack. Then I noticed some pets were using or prioritizing the use of their family skills once certain conditions were met. So I sat down and really took some time to figure out ranger’s profession mechanic. Personally, trying to figure out every pet family’s AI idiosyncrasies is and continues to be (because some families still allude me) one of the more entertaining things I do in open world PvE. For dungeons I find alot of enjoyment out of applying my knowledge by trying to purposefully manipulate the circumstances of a battle in order to coax my pet to meet the conditions and use their skills. Looking back on it now, I find it cast alot of the #2 – #5 skills I’d previously written off as too situational in an entirely new light and now I use them alot more often than I used to. Because now I’m not only considering what’s situational for me but what’s situational for my pet as well.

But, I’m a beastmaster kind of person, so I was bound to enjoy the kitten out of this sort of thing. AI Abuse and all the micromanagement that entails is definitely not for everybody.

I don’t know about honest speculation.
But I could tell you the sort of thing I’d secretly love to see.

- Fixed bug where pets would not attack certain world objects
- The 5 person limit on AOE effects will now prioritize hitting players over ranger pets
- Signet of Stone and Signet of the Wild cooldowns reduced
- Signet of the Wild no longer impedes F key functions
- Signet of the beastmaster now correctly allows you to gain the damage increase of Signet of the Hunt
- new Frost Spirit
- new Storm Spirit
- new Sun Spirit
- new Stone Spirit
- Drakes now correctly use Family Skills on land.
- Moment of Clarity provides an Attack of Opportunity to you and your pet when you or your pet successfully interrupt the enemy.
- Attacks of Opportunity now Stack in intensity.
- The effect of Attacks of Opportunity now persist throughout the duration of a channeled effect (such as Rapid Fire and Barrage).
- Guard no longer grants Invisibility. True Travel time increased from 1 second to 3 seconds. Protection buff and True Travel reflected in the tooltip.
- Search and Rescue’s healing effect now scales better with level. If Pet is under the effect of Guard, Search and Rescue’s AOE point of origin is now the designated guard location.
- Sic’ Em causes your pet to leap forward and upon successfully hitting latches onto the target and pulls them towards the player. If they miss or are out of range, the pet ends up simply leaping. If under the effect of Guard a pet will pull target towards the designated Guard location.

I know everybody does it,
but taking weapons out of the context of their profession is always going to be pretty apples to oranges. Capitalizing on opportunities afforded by control skills is just a different experience for somebody who has the initiative system versus a pet system. We just don’t face the same challenges, so it’s really hard to compare. For the record, I feel this way when I hear people take up that Warrior Longbow argument too, so I’m not just singling you out, I’ve just been too lazy to type that up.

I’m actually pro-AOE damage reduction, so, no argument about that point.

It’s easy to see how Initiative altered the way Thief skills were put together, and how Toolbelt altered the way Engi skills were put together, but Ranger’s kind of a tricky wicket largely because it’s actively trying to give you the impression the Ranger and the Pet are two separate critters. Really, pet classes are more like playing a two-headed beast than two truly independent self-contained entities, but they sure do try their hardest to give you an impression otherwise. I can’t tell you how many (bad) MMORPG pet classes are just glorified DoTs with fur, but you’d never know it from the way people talked. Maybe GW2 has nailed the illusion of separation a bit too well if people aren’t really feeling any synergy with their pet.

For what it’s worth I find Drakes and Birds work well with our Attacks of Opportunity.

Ah, I see the hangup.
I didn’t mean balanced like “damage”, I mean balanced more like overall structure.

I guess the better way of putting it is to say Rangers were built from the ground up with the expectation the profession mechanic would be there, so all the skills and traits you enjoy are things that were added onto that foundation. Even if they don’t expressly mention the pet, they were created with the understanding that the pet mechanic exists. And messing with the foundation of a thing can have repercussions for the rest of it.

…This is probably a bad example, because while the weapon concept is sound the way they went about achieving it ended up needing some work in the feel department (hopefully it’s one of the weapons being looked at). But it is one of the less confusing examples I can think of. So put aside somewhat less than stellar bug-like execution for a moment and think more conceptually.

So, our Sword.
It keeps a target locked down at the expense of your own mobility with the option to dodge away periodically. When you think about it all by itself that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. What’s the point of keeping something crowd controlled so consistently if the rest of your skills are mobility and not about following up that opportunity with a burst? But imagining how it works in tandem with the pet mechanic, especially a damage F2 skill every 15 seconds, suddenly it makes alot more sense. The weapon’s about holding something down so your pets can follow up and capitalize on the opportunity. Remove pets from the equation, even if you’re just putting it on your own skillbar, and the chain cripple concept is suddenly complete nonsense.

That’s what I’m getting at. A profession mechanic is something you’re supposed to be managing regardless of build, so developers took it’s existence for granted when they built the rest of the class. It’s not just Ranger, all professions are like that. There really isn’t a “Ranger without the Pet”, once you pluck that load-bearing jenga block from the bottom the resulting pile of sticks is not the Ranger we know.

/blink.
I can’t see any connection between what you quoted from me and what you wrote under it, Division. It’s alright you don’t agree that profession mechanics and skills go hand-in-hand, but it’s kind of confusing if you don’t say as much.

@Shilian
There’s no point getting upset with being told go try out warrior. If you want to talk to Arenanet directly, that’s what the suggestion forum is for. A post here is asking for our input as well. Suggesting alternative classes because the class you’re playing isn’t meeting your expectations is the only thing your fellow consumers can do for you.

Skills aren’t randomly constructed without any regard to the profession mechanic. It’s not some happy accident Mesmer gets shatter and also gets all of these things to use shatter on.

You have access to such a wide spread of boons and conditions because you’re working with a partner whose toes you don’t want to step on, you have such easy access to movement manipulation because being outmaneuvered is one of your weaknesses and being in two places at once is your strength. If you change Ranger into a Guardian who gets to customize their Virtues, not only do you no longer need these things, it’s probably not balanced to allow you to keep them.

Depth is when you come across these moments while you’re playing where you have to choose between two or more equally appealing options, it’s not just being presented with any two options at all that have associated pros and cons which rationally dictates their situational usefulness. It’s in the act of making Choices, it’s not just granted by virtue of Options existing.

And that still doesn’t address that a stow-buff is a Non-mechanic. You’re not managing a resource, you don’t have overarching circumstances that frame the combat experience specific to your class, your not constantly actively thinking of something in particular in the middle of a fight. There’s no actual gameplay in this mode, it’s just a blank numbers increase.

Those traits may alter how many times you physically click the F key buttons, but the profession mechanic is far from abandoned because it’s resources are still being monitored and timing it’s use is still a part of the decision making processes Upstairs. The reasons those traits exist is because your desire for the effect is supposed to come into conflict with your desire to use the profession mechanic making the choice of when to press those F buttons more deep, interesting, and meaningful. Not to circumvent the profession mechanic entirely because there’s a few quality of life concerns and/or you just plain don’t like it.

It’s not that I don’t get the desire to have pets work more fluidly without the need for excessive micromanagement and heavy investment into beastmastery and pet related skills. What I don’t get is people taking this somewhat reasonable desire off onto a tangent and desiring pets or effects that work without the need for management – period.

This sentiment isn’t asking for something that adds more to our profession mechanic, it’s asking for the option to not have a profession mechanic at all.

/edit: blah. rewrote to be less confrontational.

Profession Mechanics aren’t created in a vacuum.
Mesmer gets Shatter because it’s skills summon a ton of functional cannonfodder meatshields. Necromancer gets more HP because it’s skills are attrition-based. If you wanted to remove the pet from Ranger, the skills you’re so fond of would have to become different in order to compensate for the new mechanic.

Just a quick suggestion to improve the quality of life on this trait.

Track Master’s Bond independently on all four pets in the swap rotation, and cause swapping a pet to halve the number of stacks. If a pet is taken out of the swap rotation, zones, or dies, it loses all stacks.

One of the harsher things about Master’s Bond, is that while it keeps you from using Swap aggressively to take advantage of the player buffs/circumventing pet cooldowns in exchange for giving your pet a powerful buff…it also keep you from using Swap defensively to avoid pet death which is something you’ll need to do in harder content just to maintain a constant pet presence on the field.

By giving pet swapping a more forgiving penalty that removes a percentage of your benefit, I’d hope to maintain the basic drive of the trait while creating a more forgiving middleground. That is to say, people who excel in keeping the pet alive would still be rewarded the most, and people attempting to swap often would still find little benefit, but people who can manage to keep their pet alive enough to swap infrequently due to average player skills or demanding content would often find themselves fluctuating in the middle with a moderate number of stacks.

Yes, that’s how it works.
Even discourages Swimming, technically.

I know that it seems kind of laughable at face value to give up the loveliness that is Quickness for the seemingly lost cause that is pet survivability. But, to be fair, there’s quite a few things hovering around that support that playstyle. Signet of the Wild, Signet of Stone, Natural Healing, etc. There’s a Beastmaster build floating around in all these puzzle pieces somewhere, it just has a hard time coming to light because some of ranger’s quality of life hiccups keep Master’s Bond a niche novelty instead of the build cornerstone it should be.

Not to rain on anybody’s parade, but,
of all the things mentioned to be on the table for revision – the profession mechanic wasn’t one of them. There’s no harm in playing armchair developer, but, try not to let harmless passtime escalate into genuine expectation for the coming patch.

I think Oakheart Salve is in the Toughness line because DoTs are your Achilles’s heel while investing in Toughness. That one’s pretty sensible, actually, and I’ve used it from time to time for exactly that reason. Two Handed Training and Martial Mastery getting combined is a great idea, though.

I’ll grant you, seeing your pet whiff more often than not can be depressing to witness.

But, the nature of ranged attacks and hit/misses in this game are just so different from other MMOs, it’s only rational that the mechanics that involve them have to be different as well. Direct-hit ranged attacks are par-for-the-course in other games, but here it’s a fairly rare commodity.

/blink

If you think armor’s the culprit, why don’t you just mix in a few non-knight’s pieces?

I’m arguing the damage isn’t meant to be consistent to begin with.
It’s not as though the developers were blind-sided by the notion that people in a movement based game would actually be moving. Somebody had to sit down one day and make the conscious decision to make pet run speed lesser than player run speed, that’s as much a part of the intended balance as the numbers your pet produces is.

Feel is feel, though, and I’m not about to try and change your mind about something subjective like that. If it feels awkward to you, it feels awkward, and you’ve got every right to voice your opinion. Lord knows, there’s things I’d like to smooth over, and I generally agree with Anet’s approach here.

Pets are basically a projectile with 100% uptime.
Like any projectile they can be dodged with simple movement and the name of the game when landing them is altering the movement speed of a foe. I’m not saying things aren’t just a bit to the left of comfortable, but the basic idea seems intentional and rational.

Yeah, that means a pet will hit less often in PvP than does it PvE, but that’s true of all Projectiles.

Things are kind of wait and see at the moment.

There’s a lack of build diversity overall…which just ends up meaning the community at large doesn’t have much build advice to hand you, because we tend to think only a small selection of options are useful right now (if that). Whether or not that’s true in an objective sense is neither here nor there, truthfully almost anything is at the very least functional. It’s just communally we’re not doing much in the way of picking favorites because we’re either waiting with baited breath for the next balance update to change our opinions on these things, or collectively alternating between posts of wishful thinking and posts of disgruntled fanboy cynacism to keep from vibrating in place.

5 I can tackle, though, as it’s not entirely a build question.
You shouldn’t be less reliant on your pet. It’s your profession mechanic and nothing can be gained from ignoring it. What you should be less reliant on is your pet tanking mobs for you as it does in open world PvE; handling multiple mobs easily without much investment in traits and utilities. If you don’t feel like making that investment (and it sounds like you’re not interested in a beastmaster build), you just should be focusing more on constantly swapping pets and using their cooldowns. This is harder on pets like bear, admittedly, because his family skills are all about tanking and you don’t feel like you’ve accomplished much by using swap to reset those. But there are other pets that have more generically useful family skills, and alot of pets can even use family skills back to back so you don’t have to force yourself to keep them in a dangerous situation just to ensure you’ve squeezed all the utility you can out of them.

I unabashedly adore the idea of ‘Return to Me’ causing the pet to follow directly behind you. Solves the pet accidental aggro problem, gives rangers in melee range an option to get a pet out of AOE without necessarily having to back off a mile, and gives you an option to block projectiles for your pet all without adding anymore buttons. Neat!

I think Pets as Kits is interesting, but sort of think it might be stepping on Engineer’s toes.

As far as dodge goes; I don’t think us micromanagement / invested-in-the-pet types are the ones that really need help when it comes to pet survivability. I kind of think if there’s any additions in the area of pet survivability, it should be the sort of thing that helps the non-micromanagers and non-pet-invested folks get more consistent performance out of the profession mechanic. Like passive buffs. Which is not nearly as entertaining, admittedly, but something I think would be more useful to more people.

I think the post at the start of the thread outlines the intentions pretty clearly. For the coming patch I think it’s reasonable to expect bug fixes and bringing some lackluster utilities up to par to improve build diversity. You might be setting yourself up for disappointment if you’re hoping for too much more than that.

We seem to be having contradictory experiences.

I wonder if there aren’t other options that factor into it? For one, I’m playing without autotarget on. I wonder if that’s making a difference?

Seemingly, it can.

I’m more in the business of using my pet as a distraction tactic in dungeons, so be forewarned I can’t actually speak from experience, only experimentation. But as far as I can figure, if you first clear your target and then use an F2 skill while the pet is set to ‘Avoid Combat’ it will simply use the skill whereever it’s standing and in whatever direction it’s facing. However, if you are struck by something while it’s in the process of casting, suddenly all bets are off and your pet will go tearing after the first non-ally thing it personally sees. (including, say, rabbit NPCs serenely nibbling away at a blade of grass 50 feet away, if the pathing just so happens to have it pointed away from your battle).

It’s easiest to see when you don’t have aggro, while making an effort to kite or dodge during the F2 casting, or right after the swap if you have quickening zephyr to minimize the casting time-slash-window of irrational revenge seeking.

For future purposes, please consider posting this stuff a bit sooner. Just knowing you guys are looking at our feedback and are planning to do something with it, literally means everything. It’s a difference of night and day.

Aw c’mon. It’s literally hours from the patch.
Dude probably collapsed into an exhausted heap after crunching to get the Halloween patch out, came back the next morning to some CM muttering ‘Jon, the ranger forums are freakin’ out’ and came to placate you with a coffee in one hand. I know we fans can be kind of anxious, but I like to think we’re still letting people sleep :p

Thank you for the red post, kind sir.

I think pets survivability has a good direction overall.
Wait, wait, hear me out.

I agree there is this need to make sure pets have enough survivability that people who don’t invest in pets feel like their profession mechanic isn’t useless. On the other hand, there does need to be recognizable rewards for investing into pets. And, largely I think these two seemingly conflicted desires are handled pretty elegantly with the gameplay split.

There seems to be two major ways to play the profession mechanic, the sustained ally gameplay people are familiar with from other MMORPGs, and a swap-style gameplay. The main difference between these two is how much survivability and control you have over your pet, which to me, makes alot of sense. With high pet investment your pet is around long enough to do the micromanaging gameplay you were obviously seeking with that investment. With low pet investment your pet doesn’t survive too well in harder content, but it’s basically incidental because your main drive is swapping a pet to circumvent it’s cooldowns and you only need it around long enough to use those. All told, I think this is pretty clever.

That’s not to say, I don’t think there’s some hiccups in the execution or potential improvements.

Anyone with MMORPG experience comes into this with the expectation that the gameplay of a pet class should be the former as a default. So the fact swapping gameplay is sort of the standard for dungeons is something of a stigma right out of the gate. Also, it’s kind of hard to figure out how to achieve the classic sustained pet gameplay in “harder” content. Unlike Swapping gameplay, which has solid early level gains and clear benefits spelled out in minor traits, the benefits of a sustained ally and how to abuse them is less explicitly written and difficult to manage in ‘harder’ content until endgame (because it doesn’t feel like it’s paying off comparatively until you’ve got the traits and stats to back it up). It’s not something you’ll just stumble upon, it’s the sort of thing you need to be purposefully trying to discover. Another thing that makes it tricky is the transition from open-world to dungeon content, because Swapping gameplay and Sustaining gameplay kind of trade places as the standard. There isn’t anything that helps indicate the switch and imply that the sustainable pet gameplay still exists in some form if you build for it, all you really know is that you were previously doing in open-world just suddenly doesn’t work anymore, so it’s just as easy to believe it’s off the table entirely.

There’s also the trouble of pet selection, as the sustained gameplay in harder content has a naturally more limited selection compared to swap gameplay. I kind of wish some traits and utilities gave their benefits in ways that were statistics neutral or worked towards homogenizing statistics (signet of stone made your pet reach a fixed toughness, instead of adding the same toughness for all pets).

/edit: Wasn’t clear what part of the game I was talking about. Too general, sorry about that.

I wouldn’t play the comparison game.
At least, not on that popular microscopic level of comparing skills to eachother. The only differences worth paying attention to are the macrolevel tactical ones. Because there’s a world of difference between ‘Ranger doesn’t have any teleport skills’, and kiting Destroyer of Worlds and all his little friends for 2 solid minutes while my wiped allies take the time to hoof it back. The minutia is pretty incidental because while the content is difficult, it’s not terribly picky about how you decide to go about conquering it.

I think one of the more valuable things I’ve found about playing Ranger in dungeons is the fact you can be in two places at once…and one of those places can just up and die. I mean this in the sense of pet tanking, which you already know about. But also between the high mobility, ranged penchant, and ability to disengage while still technically engaging, I find it amazingly easy to Rez other players just because it’s so easy to get to them.

As far as tips go;

For Pet Tanking, I’ve always found it easier to use the pet as a distraction tactic when I take it upon myself to Call Target and send my pet after a different Target. The reason for that being is that you can try all day to get the enemy to target your pet versus other players, but you don’t have to try at all to get the enemy to target your pet versus nothing. You might have to let people know what you’re trying for sometimes, but by and large, I find folks seem to go along with the red target without so much as a word.

For Rezing, I think ZS+Rez isn’t the endallbeall. I’ve found the more effort I put into doing constructive things with my pet on the battlefield, the more I had to weigh the pros and cons of taking him out of it to get a faster rez. If you’re going to ZS+Rez, it’s worth taking a moment to see what your pet is up to. Even if you aren’t making a concerted effort, you may find your pet is unexpectedly tanking for a bit. Making a quick pet-check during the first few ticks of the Rez doesn’t lose you out on the opportunity to use ZS to speed it up, because pet-centric abilities can be used while you’re otherwise engaged and it won’t interrupt you. All of the the Fskills can do this, but less obviously, Shouts and Signets can too. In a beastmaster build, being caught in the rez channel is a perfect opportunity to temporarily shift all your focus on what the pet is doing and issue some commands.

I tend to think it depends on what your build is and what it’s for.

I agree with nldixon, it seems more geared for keeping up your Pet as opposed to keeping up yourself.

Not only is the base heal better for your Pet, your +healing scales the benefit for your pet alot more too. Just for a solid point of reference; at 640 Healing I get 96 a tick and my pet gets 276.

It seems like a sound theory.
But I’ve got an odd experience to add to it.

I use Clerics items, so Toughness is a secondary stat in my build, and my pet still tanks. I can wipe my traits entirely, take off my signets, eat some toughness food, and take a low toughness pet – and even when I can get more toughness than my pet (20-50 point difference) it still tanks the majority of the time.

The quality of it is noticeably affected; they lose aggro sometimes and sometimes I gain intial aggro. But by and large I can’t purposefully get a mob to choose me over my pet for the life of me.

How many people saying “pets won’t tank” actually have a decent amount of trait points invested in Beast Mastery?

I’d like to know the answer to that question too.

Aggro is still a pretty nebulous topic. Especially for us Rangers who have the additional mystery of how it affects the Pet. When we’re talking about it, it’s worth going into the details of our builds a bit, so the forum gets a nice sample to start finding patterns with.

I’m one of the ones who doesn’t have too many problems with Pet Tanking. I’m 30 deep in Beastmastery, and I use Signets.

Whatever the benefits of specializing in vitality/toughness may or may not be, it’s just going to feel kind of trivial, at least until we figure out what it means to build to like that. That is to say, we all have the holy trinity gameplay in the back of our minds setting up our expectations of what ‘a good defensive character’ should be able to accomplish and how they should accomplish that. But that’s apples to oranges in a game where the role we traditionally associate with these stats doesn’t exist, and the alpha and omega of defense is mobility instead of statistics soaking.

For instance, when I tried a defensive build for dungeons, I found one of the more unexpected benefits of specc’ing defensively was something I normally wouldn’t associate with a traditional trinity ‘tank’ at all. It was the capacity to Rez just about kitten near anybody from just about kitten near anything.

Guy halfway across the room bleeding out on the floor among a horde of advancing little nasties as my allies skiddishly backpedal? Whatever. Excuse me, polygons, EMT comin’ through.

It’s almost comical.
When somebody first hollered ‘run!’ and the group started tearing kittenbooty forward through all manner of nasties like the devil himself was on their heels, I actually looked behind me to try and identify the danger. That’s how dissonant this practice is with all my expectations of what a dungeon run should be like. It literally took me a solid minute to figure out we were running through the danger, not from it.

Don’t get me wrong.
I can merrily skip past that small enclave of baby spiders in AC EXP on my way to the traps boss and barely even register that as decision (much less an odd decision). But somehow running past hordes of worms, packs of spiders and a half dozen NPC mobs in TA EXP immediately brought to my lips the first note of verbal confusion I’ve utter thus far since starting.

I’m thinking it’s some culture thing from Guildwars 1 that veterans of that game are just so used to they don’t even think twice about it anymore. But just as a general public service announcement; this actually kind of bears some explanation to the rest of us. Because, while you can skip small select clusters of trash mobs in other games, it’s not normally feasible to skip basically the entire dungeon by just simply running past it. This is odd enough to warrant typing out a sentence or two going over the battleplan, at least in earlier dungeons.

On a personal note, aside from the initial confusion;
…I’m not just super sure I’m enjoying this?
But I’m torn about suggesting incentives otherwise (like trash mobs can drop dungeon armor currency) to make my experiences more likely to be enjoyable. Because, while I’m quite the old lady who can remember the days of camping spawn windows for hours on end, I’ve never before been the type of old lady to shake my cane and grouse some grade-A young whippersnapper babble at the latest newfangled thing. Is anybody else struggling to enjoy this and would appreciate suggestions to incentivize fighting the trash mobs, or should I just go find myself a porch and rocking chair?

I don’t end up caring what it does, because I just can’t get over the fact I’m CCing myself.

I like how each Forage is split up into a group of 3 items that share similar functions. That makes the result randomized but still somewhat predictable.

I think the flow of picking an item off the ground is a bit awkward generally speaking and working with pets in specific. In general, because you can’t just buzz by something and pluck something off the ground in one smooth single motion, you have to pause for a moment to bend down and pick it up. In specific, because mid battle porcine item usage ultimately requires a choice between bringing the pet to me and pausing it from it’s DPS/Psuedo-tanking, or endangering myself to go get it. It’s pretty incidental in open world PvE, but in Dungeon scenarios I rarely ever want to do either of those things.

I kind of wish during the cooldown of Forage, you could press F2 again and have your pet throw you any environmental weapon near it. That way you not only get to have your forage’d item conveniently delivered to you, you’ve also got a free mobile environmental weapon snatcher.

Well, there’s sort of a unwritten social element to this.

If you were really suffering from trust issues, you wouldn’t be pugging at all. You’d be recruiting from your Guild. This isn’t a WoW dungeon where you need to fill eleventy bajillion slots of very specific classes, it’s just 4 other people you know and trust.

I just don’t think a month is enough time to set up an impressive enough social network to recruit from people you know yet.

Yup.
I get some good use out of that thing.

But oddly, it’s mostly through creative uses of the Stealth, Protection, and travel that aren’t mentioned in the tooltip. About the only thing I don’t use it for is the actual act of making my pet stay somewhere while I walk away.

If only I could find this kind of depth in Sic ’Em.

Yep. Happened to me zoning as well.

Adorable filter, is adorable.

That’s a warrior trait.
Ranger attack of opportunity is a buff that lets your next attack deal 150% of it’s damage. If you use Signet of the Hunt or thunk something on the head with greatsword #5 and check your pet’s status icons, you can see it crop up.

But, yeah, I also can’t seem to get moment of clarity to work either.

I don’t know about controllable, but, it’s not assignable to a button at any rate.

As far as I can tell, Moas are panicky critters.
It seems to me as soon they lose any health within a certain distance of their foe, they’ll finish up whatever they were doing and heal up immediately after. That makes them an interesting choice in AOE and splash damage situations, because they’ll invariably get clipped by something and incidentally patch everybody else up in the process of tending to their own hypochondria.

Oh yes. I think it goes without saying how freakin’ gorgeous this game is. But we probably should say. Loudly and often.

You know what my inner supporty ranger kinda’ wants?
In the sylvari capital the local minor flora literally grows out of the ground as your character gets closer to it. I want that on a skill somewhere. I don’t even know what skill that would be, but kitten, I wanna’ make plants grow in my wake okami-style.

Server costs are kind of small potatoes to a company like NCSoft.

If I had to pick a financial conspiracy theory, it’d be more like;
Given that they mentioned wanting these rooms to be 10v10 before I imagine it’s more of a stop-gap measure until Rented Servers, the stepping stone between hotjoin and tourney play, gets implemented. If they give us free 5v5 rooms they devalue the future monetization potential of Rented Servers, but if they’d only left us with 10v10 they’d of run the risk of losing people like us and risk creating a barrier between hotjoin and tourney play because the games would play too differently with nothing between to ease the transition. So, compromise number; 8v8.

Not that I’m casting imaginary stones, here, I find that all fair and sensible. It’s just that mass wild speculation is kind of fun. I only hope whatever’s going on behind the curtain, they get those servers up and ready kinda’ soon. I also am not a zerg fan.

It doesn’t proc for me either. Did it with steady weapons to ensure it wasn’t a UI thing. Not on my interrupt, not on my being interrupted, not even on pet’s interrupt. (Though I guess I didn’t check pet being interrupted, I just can’t believe that’d be a grandmaster trait)

Pity! I wanna know if that trait rocks or not. Creating attacks of opportunity by interrupting other things sounds like an awesome kind of thing I’d make a build around. Creating attacks of opportunity by being interrupted…kinda’ not so much.

…that…doesn’t seem right.
Your sure that’s not a bug?

Not sure if bug, or quirk of the Drake family in general.

It’s hard to tell without pet actions showing up in the combat log or access to any underwater combo fields, but I think the Drake family skills Chomp and Tail Swipe are only activating while underwater. Just judging from the animations, I think Tail Swipe replaces Bite as the autoattack and I’ve seen Chomp happen occasionally while under there.