Guild Wars 2

Yes, sure, if you use Earthshaker (with Burst Mastery, 10 adrenaline), swap weapon (5 adrenaline) and spam Dual Shot entire duration (12 adrenaline). And hope enemy doesn’t control, block, dodge, move or anything. And hits you a couple of times (3 adrenaline).

Then you are either stuck with hammer (worse adrenaline generation unless you hit 3 targets) or can’t weaponswap (misses 5 adrenaline) so only reliable way is to get hit 8-10 times in 7 seconds.

Unlike normal skills which will be up no matter what happens.

Otaur.9268:

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@Wethospu: Adrenaline can be regained in under 7 seconds.

The famous 6-6-6-6-6 build with 6 utilities?

And burst recharge can be reduced to only 7.75 seconds, not 7 seconds.

sminkiottone.6972:

The dps hasn’t changed, it’s only faster now, nothing wrong with rapid fire or LB ranger.

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Not sure if you understand what DPS means.

Otaur.9268:

Ok then Thief Backstab needs more than 4 second cooldown, Warrior F1 abilities more than 7 seconds CD, Mesmers clones for shatters need to be changed so they cant chain shatter… you get the point?

Sure, and ranger gets adrenaline mechanic to his every skill. Any other great ideas?

So far the page looks like this. No worries, it’s going get some visual improvements next.

Vulnerability gives average 5.5% increase to Rapid Fire damage. Transferring that to the coefficient (3.75) gives 3.96.

Based on wiki, rifle has 9.5% higher weapon strength so Rapid Fire should do about 20% more damage than Volley (with same strength it would be 33% more damage).

It also has about 20% more DPS than Hundred Blades.

Doesn’t look that bad except when you realize 30% of ranger damage should be in their pet.

Which is clearly a bug and it gets fixed soon enough.

I would just reduce amount of needed votes to 1 and then call it esports.

But yeah, ownership thing would work the best. The biggest problem has always been when leader leaves and instance won’t get transferred and now there’s a fix for that.

MikaHR.1978:

Errant Venture.9371:

MikaHR.1978:

Tulki.1458:

Tried a little experiment with the new system.

At level 21, in a level 17 zone. I hit level 22 and got +40 to all base attributes. Whoo, now I’m more powerful! This turned out to be about +35ish due to the downscaling but still. More powerful.

Then I hit level 23 in the same area, and lost 8 power and 7 from my other stats. Then I gained another level… and lost 8 power and 7 from the other stats. Wait a minute. What?

With the old system, downscaling made you weaker, but it was gradual as you levelled. With this one, you get a huge spike in stats that makes the game easier, but between these big stat spikes the game difficulty rises quickly. It doesn’t make any sense at all. Going from level 22 to 23 caused me to lose 80 max HP. It’s very weirdly designed. With all the stuff introduced in this patch about introducing new players, this change in particular makes absolutely no sense. The game difficulty wobbles violently from level to level.

Did you experiment with the old system since you have something to compare it to?

What were your stats as lvl 22-23 in lvl 17 zone before change? No? Sheesh.

Yes, it ALSO went down since your gear was worse for your level.

In the old system, downscaling was on the same curve as stat distribution so you actually increased in strength as your level increased. In the current system, base stats are distributed in big “chunks” every few levels, instead of in a steadily increasing curve every level. This means that, due to the down-scaling system not changing to mirror the new stat distribution, you go from being seriously for several levels in between a “stat chunk” being awarded to very, very strong for a single level. Then the cycle repeats.

No you didnt increase in strenght while downscaling. I have 12 lvl 80ies. If you didnt upgrade your gear regularly you were weakling as you lost stats on each level (while dowscaled)

But please, since you have teh numbers show us how your stats behaved from going from lvl 22 to lvl 24 in lvl 17 zone so we can compare it ot now.

While you are correct, the previous effect wasn’t as severe as people are currently reporting.

From example level 22 in level 17 area would lose 1-104/140 = 26% of his stats.

Level 23 in level 17 area would lose 1 – 104/148 = 30% of his stats.

Losing 8 power would mean that his power from gear was about 8 / 4% = 8 / 0.04 = 200. Which is much higher than what you normally have at that point (no trinkets, etc). Also he lost stats from all attributes which can’t be explained by gear.

Mesmers have 4 different shatters skills and plenty of shatter sources, while clones also have all kind of additional effects. But yes, this one may need a setup to use properly.

Engineers have 4 toolbelt skills. Even if the opponent avoids one of them, rest are still available.

Ranger pets are available at all times, passively. Their entire concept doesn’t rely on hitting on highly telegraphed skill.

You can’t lock elementalist out of an attunement.

Anyways, comparing individual things between professions is really dumb.

And most class mechanics have instant cast time and haven’t been constantly nerfed so the risk/reward is quite different.

Just FYI, over-exaggerating stuff pretty much kills any of your credibility.

You have a great attitude there. And a great sense of balance too.

Only way to get rid of this is to not fall for it. People like completing and achieving things, especially when they are almost done. This is what they are exploiting.

Focus on doing what you enjoy instead of filling mindless completion lists (unless that’s what you really like to do).

Bumping this up for more channels.

Also, could you guys create playlists to filter out videos? Especially if you are featuring multiple professions or have lots of random videos.

For example: https://www.youtube.com/user/Wethospu/playlists

Burst recovery also became a pretty worthless stat.

My HB deals 300k damage.

Player.2475:

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My deaths went up from 18 to 57 before I could finish it.
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I guess this explains it. With only 18 deaths you probably haven’t tried anything slightly challenging which would encourage you to learn to play your profession effectively.

I have tried Slick & Sparki on a warrior. Was able to get Sparki to below 50% couple of times but didn’t have enough tries to learn to dodge his fear.

It’s pretty tough on melee range.

Your health gets affected by the WvW bonus.

Deep Strike trait has been bugged so many times so I wouldn’t be surprised if it is causing your precision to drop. But are you sure you aren’t using signets, etc?

Stooperdale.3560:

The baseline for scaling is the same as it always was. A level 80 character in masterwork gear should have same the difficulty when scaled down as when they were genuinely at that level in the corresponding gear. You don’t don’t want level 80s going off to fight Zaitan in masterwork but needing rares for tough mobs in Queensdale.

How it can be same when it was recently changed?

As quick fixes, I would:

1) Reduce downscaled level by one (now you downscale to level 26 in level 25 areas)

2) Increase multiplier for stat downscaling (so you would end up with less stats, to balance traits and triple stat from gear).

3) Revert trait decision (give us more trait points, etc while leveling up)

Hundred Blades – when one blade is not enough

I’m not particularly looking for anything. About 5-10 channels per profession which have some different but unique stuff for people to browse.

And yes, I know some channels already but it will be much easier for me to remember them if they get listed here. Not to mention easier to add descriptions when I don’t have to think of them by myself.

Would be cool to have a tutorial island with target dummies, combo fields, etc.

Heyh, I’m expanding gw2dungeons build section a bit and it will have links to youtube/twitch channels for different professions.

If you think yours or anyone else’s channel would be nice, please post the link here so I can add it. Also include a brief description.

Channels should be already well established and include something unique or useful (a channel with a few videos about commonly soloed paths isn’t really needed).

For example

Warrior: https://www.youtube.com/user/Wethospu, bit outdated but includes lots of solo videos

Problem is that these “exploits” have been around for a year and when lots of people use them you will be at disadvantage when you don’t.

It’s a different condition than normal poison. Some condition removals remove any conditions and some only specific conditions.

For example Consume Conditions removes only normal conditions.

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Josh Davis.6015:

I think this belongs in the Dungeon forums.

Funny because this originally was in the dungeon forums afaik and got moved into another sub.

Anyway, I’m excited to see how this one turns out.

I think the word you are looking for is “thanks”!

Zagerus.8675:

To be honest I don’t think the nerfs are unwarranted. A 6/5/0/0/3 Zerk GS Warrior is still going to have personal DPS through the roof in PvE right? You’ll just have to play a bit harder to keep it at an untamed level. I think the changes to SoR will have more of an impact.

For PvP though, Arcing Slice is looking like it will have a taste of what Eviscerate is able to do if it nails someone. A nearly 6k crit on foes with less than 50% health with no might – definitely seems like something you’d want to dodge.

If warrior damage in your opinion goes through the roof I would love to hear your definition for the current FGS damage.

dutchiez.7502:

Too bad reports don’t do kitten (at this time).

I think I’m still a leader in his guild.

My uneducated PvP opinion still thinks that CI should work whether you hit anything or not.

All things have right to grow.

Chris Cleary.8017:

“Safe Spot” – Standing in a location to hold aggro or attack a monster/boss while it is unable to damage you (basic attack) and does not leash back to it’s original starting position.

This is an abuse of a geometry and/or pathing bug, and is considered an exploit.

What about enemies who don’t move at all? They can’t leash back.

Is idling at high range without no one even attacking the boss safespotting?

For example running away from Belka to get out of combat regeneration or just staying out of her range until healing skill comes off cooldown. She doesn’t reset her health.

If you think you are a decent player or don’t care about getting carried, I suggest avoiding levels 1-3. Lots of inexperienced guys (to fractals and to the game) are in same situation as you so things may go really bad.

Quality of life: Add universal slaying potion.

Lol competitive PvE, only skip and stack. EZ

No tank, no skill.

Desperate bump.

Necro should get the old FGS.

I take back my words. I always thought Lupicus healed based on damage taken but apparently it’s a flat amount so he heals through Defiant Stance.

For Life Drink it’s 1432 * 4 = 5728. While not much it’s a downside so I would say that Healing Signet is better for wall solos and Defiant Stance is better for off-wall solos.

Purple Miku.7032:

I was told a few months ago that defiant stance on phase 3 doesn’t prevent him from healing off of you despite it healing you during his leeching attacks. I found this odd but nobody I asked at the time really knew so I just avoided it. Since his HP bar doesn’t really move at all I wasn’t really able to accurately test it.

I’m assuming that this is false based off of some of your responses… as it wouldn’t make sense for you guys to advocate its use here if what I was told was actually true :P

So it is probably the best overall heal to use when doing off-wall casual solos. If ever going for a speed kill, I’d never use it because it’s not instant cast and interrupts attacks. This is simply disruptive, though it’s pretty obvious that it heals more over time than signet does. Ideally you shouldn’t be taking damage at all though, so… doesn’t really matter.

In either case, I don’t really see the point in bothering. The only times I ever have problems on Lupi is when he either bugs on terrain and bubbles me when I’m 100bing him from directly beneath him (so… freaking… annoying…) or just straight up terrible RNG on phase 2>3 transition (you would be shocked to see how common it is for 4-5 aoes to simultaneously pile up on top of me and 1-shot me from full hp on the transition). Defiant stance is not useful if you can’t predict when you’re about to take damage, so meh.

Use Defiant Stance at transition then And it’s not like Healing Signet would have saved you either.

I would give structures very high armor (75%-90% damage reduction vs. current situation) but make them crittable and vulnerable to condition damage while lowering their health a bit. This would give pretty nice niche role for condition users without needing encounter reworks.

In my opinion improving existing content is much better idea than adding completely new content. Most importantly a new dungeon (or even a path) requires lots of resources because they have to design terrain, dialogue and encounters from scratch (including models for everything).

If same effort was applied to existing dungeons, we could have fixes and improvements for several paths / dungeons. From a living story perspective, corruption of Mordremoth could spread to existing dungeons and give enemies additional attacks / mechanics. If you want to keep dungeons accessible for casuals, add “casual mode” with -50% health, -50% damage and party size scaling.

Either way, a real effort has to be applied. Spending on average 1 hour per week on dungeons doesn’t really cut it. I’m pretty sure dungeon forum can give some very good pointers what to do but we (or some of us) really need to know that something is going to happen.

Perhaps if you go for a record or have trouble pushing buttons. Otherwise, why use a lot weaker healing skill for a very minimal damage increase (Deep Strikes vs Rending Strikes)?

Defiant Stance has better HPS, better burst heal and allows you to even tank hits.

At least gw2dungeons will stay relevant for a long time!

But yeah, I think it’s a bad decision to completely forget dungeons. I never really expected new paths/dungeons but improving and reworking current encounters wouldn’t take much work. Honestly I think it would take me max 1 month to improve/rework all dungeon encounters.

Breakpoint for rare/exotic is about level 60 iirc. So at sub level 60 it doesn’t matter much whether you use rares, exotics or ascended.

Stats scale similarly regardless of source (gear, food, signets, traits) so every bit counts.

Manuhell.2759:

The effect of those other interrupts is denied – that’s the whole point of defiance. You do 6 interrupts, only the last one works. Until that, you’ve done absolutely nothing.
And there no way to increase the effectiveness against defiance of a control skill. No gear permits that. You can do more damage, but you can’t do more defiance stacks.
It isn’t the same thing of having “more health”, and i’ve already explained before what the correct comparison would be (that is, something really awful to play). Putting more health is a matter of balancing. Putting a different mechanic to deal with interrupts is a matter of design. And those skills were neither designed or balanced taking defiance in account.
Saying that “you can get more control skills” doesn’t make sense. 5 out of 6 of those will still do nothing at all. You are just increasing the number of your skills that won’t do nothing at all to a boss. Especially as you can’t kill something just with control – you will need damage, and CC skills often don’t even deal damage at all.
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Actually it’s the first one which works because bosses never have initial defiance stacks.

Defiance is a mechanic for bosses just like bloated health bars. There is no gear to increase your effectiveness particularly against huge health bars. For example no stuff like “you do 10% more damage against targets with over 1m health”. But sure, PvE gear like that can be added but what’s the point? Interrupts would still be bad even if you could remove 2-3 defiance stacks with one interrupt because whole interrupt mechanic is weak and not needed.

Design and balance are not separate things. They have to balance their design and design their balance. Similarly damage skills are not designed or balanced against 1m targets because enemies have only about 20k. Give one player 1m health in PvP and it gets totally broken.

I honestly don’t understand why this is so hard to grasp. In PvP balanced situation is 1v1, you need 1 control skill for one interrupt. In PvE balanced situation is Xv1, you need X+1 (which should be X) control skills for one interrupt.

Anyway, some of the fixes you propose are indeed fine. Other would be if they wouldn’t potentially increase cpu load, that is also the same reason why we can’t have proper AIs for enemies, and thus workarounds are instead used. It should be seen how much they can effectively do in that regard, else we can’t see such improvements.

None of them increase cpu load because bosses can just keep spamming their skills like they do now.

Fergus.4208:

Wethospu.6437:

Greatsword and Axe are already fairly balanced in PvE and Warrior definitely isn’t top damage in PvE. So I don’t think big PvE nerfs to HB are justified.

Warrior is definitely in the top with respect to damage (PvE), and that’s coming from the class with highest base health and armor.

The Ele FGS exploit will get fixed.

100b and whirlwind attack combined deals a ridiculous amount of damage. On top of that, those two skills are spammable, and warrior can weapon swap to unleash his other bursty skills while those recharge.

Elementalists and Thieves do more damage than Warriors. Guardians too when you can abuse projectiles. And other classes are not far behind Warrior.

If GS gets a big nerf then people just camp Axe unlike the current GS/Axe/X swap. If Axe gets nerfed too then Warrior drops to thrash tier DPS and becomes a true support class.

Sellers are truly evil. I was kicked once because I asked is the boss really at 1% like advertised and not at 2%.

Manuhell.2759:

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There are much more damage skills than control ones, though, as i said before. And their effect isn’t completely denied – just reduced in percentage. Defiance denies any CC effect until the stacks are depleted. 5 interrupts are 5 wasted skills. 6 interrupts are an interrupt. But 50000 damage is still 50000 damage, whether it is 5, 10 or 20% of the boss’ hp.
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Also effect of interrupts isn’t completely denied because they do something. Control skill is also a control skill, whether it interrupts or removes a defiance stack.

Just like bosses have ~5 times as much health in dungeons you need 6 times as much interrupts against them.

Also, there is no way to influence how many stacks of defiance you deal, whereas damage depends from gear. There is no “speccing for control”. And having many control skills makes one barely useful, as attacking and making the fight last less would have better results than using a lot of skills to maybe interrupt the enemy 3 or 4 times over a fight.

If you want to spec for control you can take more control skills.

And that’s because control effect is weak and not required, not because control skills are weak.

Still, damage skills are balanced for a mode where players can reduce or nullify damage in various means and heal themselves; but the defenses for interrupts are rather scarce in comparison. Sure, both can be dodged, but that’s a moot point…since enemies don’t dodge at all.
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Control skills can also be dodged or blocked just like damage skills. Additionally stun breaks and stability work too. I wouldn’t call that “scarce”.

It’s really hard to understand what you are trying to say when you mix players, enemies, PvE and PvP together.

Ehr, damage is all but underperforming as now, i would say.

It’s your definition, not mine.

Undoubtely more complex designs and proper AIs would help a lot in making fights more fun and bosses not just simple hp sponges. Having bosses behave like players, following the same rules, would deepen a lot the fights.
I doubt we’ll ever see them, though. Probably they would end up too costly in terms of cpu to be deemed usable.
That’s why i’m suggesting some sort of bandaid – defiance itself is a bandaid over the normal game mechanics, after all.

None of those changes require complex design or proper AI.

Bloated health bars are also a bandaid over the normal game mechanics.

cesmode.4257:

I think Defiance on bosses is moronic. Who thought of this one?

Yes, lets stop the players from using utility on bosses…lets just funnel the players into DPS to burn through encounters.

This coupled with the eternal encouragement of zergs should tell you that arenanet has no clue how to develop engaging combat.

Instead I suggest taking a page from Wildstar with interrupt armor. Boss has 3 interrupt armor. When he is casting, you interrupt him 3 times to break the armor, on fourth interrupt, he is put into MoO…moment of opportunity where he takes double damage.

This requires coordination and utility skills on your bars. Sometimes a boss will have 5 interrupts so everyone needs to have at least one interrupt, or one person carry two.

You think defiance is moronic and then you pretty much suggest exactly same mechanic?

FrostSpectre.4198:

Wethospu.6437:

PvP is 5v5, not 5v1 like PvE.

But sure, defiance can be reworked so that every interrupt instead gives a stack of miss. One stack of miss nullifies one hit from an attack. So single target attacks could be nullified with 1 interrupt, cleaves with 3 interrupts and area attacks with 5 interrupts.

But I’m pretty sure this would make even more people confused and complain how control doesn’t work. Not to mention that it wouldn’t really make any sense.

I’m guessing they’d be kittened off at players who CC the boss, causing their attacks to miss.

If I understood your suggestion correctly…

If boss uses a single target skill only one player has to dodge. To balance, only interrupt should be enough. But when boss uses area attack everyone has to dodge so 5 interrupts would be balanced.

So interrupts would cause a hit from the boss to miss. If boss uses area attack and is interrupted 3 times then 2 players would get hit.

But anyways, the point was that while it’s possible to fine tune the anti-control mechanic, it usually becomes so complex that you need a manual to understand it.

Manuhell.2759:

Wethospu.6437:

A boss can easily have 1 million health while in PvP players have like 20k. Should damage skills also get additional effects (like control) because they are less efficient at killing the target?

(direct) damage skills still have the same effect, even if they do relatively less damage due to the high hp pools; Still, bosses usually just tank damage, since they don’t dodge at all (and neither properly use defensive or healing skills). That high hp is their only defense, since they lack a proper AI.
Damaging conditions may have some other issues.
Interrupts have their effect completely denied 5/6 of the time.
And they aren’t even in equal numbers, anyway – there are much more skills dealing damage than CC skills..

If my HB deals 20k damage I need one HB to kill a 20k target. If boss has 1m health I have to use it 50 times.

Compare that to interrupts. I need to use 6 interrupts for an interrupt. 50 >> 6

Yes, high health is their only defense against damage. But so is defiance against control.

If there are more underperforming damage skills, perhaps they should be fixed before fewer control skills?

A correct comparison should be about having bosses with a reduced health pool compared to now (let’s say, 100k hp) but they are damaged only by a single hit out of 10.
Sounds fun?
No, it would just be annoying. Extremely annoying

It wouldn’t really matter much because time to kill would stay same. But it would be pointless so of course current system is better. But your comparison doesn’t work for defiance. While damage can be split to smaller pieces, an interrupt can’t be.

What I’m trying to say is that they should fix what is broken. Bosses have bloated health bars because they are against 5 players so it’s completely fair that you need 5 interrupts to interrupt them (that’s why I’m suggesting reduction of one stack).

Additional effect for control skills won’t fix the control. It only reinforces dps meta because you get more damage while control is still pointless.

Simple fixes to make control meaningful:

1) Make interrupts cause full cooldowns for PvE enemies

2) Reduce one stack (5 players -> 4 stacks)

3) Encounter design
* Add special attacks to some bosses which temporarily remove defiance.
* Add devastating special attacks to bosses which are hard to deal with blocks and dodges.
* Add strong defensive skills to bosses which have to be interrupted if you want to kill the boss fast.
* No defiance but fight against 3 – 5 (weaker) bosses at the same time
* No defiance but use stability instead
* No defiance but give boss frequent stun breaks

It’s fine.