Guild Wars 2

I think the end answer, if I’m perfectly frank is “This game just isn’t for really hardcore dungeon types”.

That’s fine, it’s not a judgement on either the players or the game, but that’s also about where we are.

It’s still down to the fact that (unfortunately) content developed for someone like Jerus or Spoj is wasted on 95+% of the players.

I don’t think they’re lying or dissembling about the content, but their definition of the term is just very very different than what the raid-types would mean.

Knighthonor.4061:

Windsagio.1340:

Why do we have chalenges == raids though?

Anet hired Raid developers, and they told us the challenging content isn’t open world content which they will also make challenging but isn’t the challenging group content that was talked about.

Wanna bet whether they’ll do raids?

You might get some kind of new guild content, but that’s the only even remotely possible angle.

Pvp is gonna get nerfed, I’m hoping they give pve a bit of love though, it’s pretty limited in use (especially considering the relative difficulty of obtaining it)

I do have to agree with Timmy, it won’t kill the game. Plenty of games it didn’t kill.

It might not be great for it, but it won’t hurt it all that badly either.

timmyf.1490:

Windsagio.1340:

The guy I’m responding to up there is making a straight conflation, and the point is directed at that guy.

You’ve got to quote stuff, man! You mean this guy?

Avster.1935:

I’m going to repeat the same thing that the dude from the HoT PAX announcement. I want “PvE that doesn’t suck” – in other words, please make me use my brain more.

For those who are more laid back and just want to do things. You can have your open world PvE. I’m happy for you.

For those of us who are more intricate and like complexities, please gives us our challenges

I mean, he never said “raid” in his post, so I hardly feel like he’s saying raid == challenging without alternatives. He just wants PvE that doesn’t suck – as do many of us.

So yes it’s possible that his post is just wildly off topic.

The guy I’m responding to up there is making a straight conflation, and the point is directed at that guy.

timmyf.1490:

Windsagio.1340:

You slipped in the reqiurement for more players again at the end, lol

I’m gonna bet you that far fewer people would object to extremely difficult 5 player instanced content (noting some would of course) than object to multi-group content.

The problem is going from 5 to 10, really? How about 8?

Honestly, I’m fine with 5, but it’d be really nice to get more of my guild in the same instance. More than five isn’t a “requirement lol,” it’s an example.

Its important to split the arguments though, especially in this context. This is what I was kind of getting at to the other guy.

This is a thread asking about raids. The discussion of raids is largely separate from the discussion of more challenging content, there are different issues involved.

For me, specifically, I don’t want the discussion of difficult content (which I most dearly want) to get conflated with the discussion for raids (which I’m reasonably certain won’t happen). To my mind the more we focus on difficult content outside of raids the more useful focus we can get on that. — especially since raids seem to be like ‘zerk’, they turn a thread into madness.

You slipped in the reqiurement for more players again at the end, lol

I’m gonna bet you that far fewer people would object to extremely difficult 5 player instanced content (noting some would of course) than object to multi-group content.

Why do we have chalenges == raids though?

the above had to be snipped some to meet the 5000 char limit, sorry ><

Jerus.4350:

Yeah, people suck (in general) with our emotions and all often getting the better of us and resorting to that “you suck” “no you suck” mentality. But, contributing to it never helps, I find just ignoring it works best and continue on with a reason based discussion, eventually those people will catch on that no one cares about their squabbling.

And personally I hate Open world in general, the only reason I do SW is I find the Amber Troll and Copper Husk, and the VW Troll and VW Thrasher to be mildly entertaining(shout out to Indigo Terragriffs, while I don’t enjoy doing them mainly due to people who either don’t know what they’re doing or intentionally griefing I find their design to be quite nice). I find it annoying that I find it best to just afk my way through the preperations waiting for the fun parts though. In general zerging literally puts me to sleep.

I don’t go on raving about how it’s killing the game though, I think it’s great, I just want options is all. It’s only logical that zergs limit challenge and that’s why instances were created some 14 years ago by multiple MMOs. If ANet comes up with a way to change this situation, I bow to them as I would think most MMO developers would as they’d have conquered a 15 year old problem that no game I know of has been able to do. They’ve made strides with the split stuff, but even then it’s just smaller zergs and doesn’t really solve the issue as a whole. And, my main problem with that is the challenge often becomes not the encounter itself but in herding the cats to actually accomplish the goal. There’s a reason I stopped leading large scale raids in other games, and well, quit those games, I find trying to get everyone on the same page cumbersome and drains the fun out of things rather than is fun in itself. “God we would have won if soandso knew what to do” as an example, and I see it all the time in SW map chat and why I feel that if any place is “toxic” (i really hate the term) it’s the mapchat in these types of encounters.

I’ll agree that mapchat in a place like SW can get ultra awful (ESPECIALLY WITH THE MISINFORMATION), and i get not enjoying that style of content.

Honestly though, I think that’s a style thing, and I strongly suspect it’s based in some pretty solid business decisions.

an aside as an example

At work, we had a discussion about UI’s for Gacha chests (ie Black lion chests). We were putting them in a building that looked pretty generic. An expert on the subject came in and in essence said “You’d be best served by making that building look like a treasure chest. If even 10% don’t understand it, that’s 10% who won’t go in there, and that’s a large source of monetization”. If you shave off 10% here and 10% there, your numbers can get pretty small.

Their style is to not shave players off with their content, presumably for exactly the same reason. Raid content shaves off a TON of users (ignoring the obviously fake ’I’M GONIG TO QUIT PLAYING!!!!’ people), and is a dead end. It likely does a pretty poor job at driving monetization.

As for pros/cons, I acknowledge them, I just see it pointless to discuss them in depth as in the end it’s ANets decision that will be based on whatever information they have available. At this point I simply speak my mind on things. I’m not so quick to argue against logical cons to my point of view as I respect them. THe numbers argument for instance is a logical one. While I personally feel that diversity of content is important the numbers issue is certainly valid. Why create content for content for a smaller group? Well, I’d simply ask why ANet seems so adamant about the existence of challenging content when we all know full well that they’d be utilized by the minority? I don’t feel I need to elaborate on that even though I’ve done so in other threads. ANet will make the decision they see fit. I feel that going on and making another thread that derails to that discussion to be quite pointless as it’s been had and in the end it’s out of our hands anyways.

So at the end of the day my point in this thread is “here’s the stuff I’d like, here’s the issues I’d think it’d address if done correctly, and I hope it’s considered”.

I’d agree with this, although I’m certainly guilty of getting sucked into the arguments and sometimes getting heated. My whole thing is I really really hate the “WELL THE OTHER SIDE IS JUST MORONS!” argument. It’s kind of un-thought and gets people all riled up to the point that we can’t even have discussions on some subjects at all (ie it’s impossible to talk about dungeon balance without going OMG ZERK ANTI ZERK – it’s the Godwin’s law of GW2).

Maybe it’s not my place to tell people to modify their attitude, but I’d enjoy having real discussions (if occasionally snarky) on the subject, and every escalation just kills it.

spoj.9672:

Windsagio.1340:

And people double down (Not Jerus, in fairness).

It is the same. We’re just not wired to see it that way.

One side is saying “This content existing would enhance my game experience” the other is saying “This content existing would hurt my game experience”.

They’re 2 sides of the same coin. Until we get that through our heads there can be no legitimate discussion between the sides.

Nope. If they were really 2 sides of the same coin then the other side would be saying “This content doesnt enhance my game experience”.

Besides the idea that it can hurt their game experience is completely false. Unless they are forcing themselves to play content they dont like. But in that case its their own fault.

I’m trying to find a safe way to phrase this, just to make you understand how people feell

Essentially, adding raids can irrevocably change the tone and culture of a game, and plenty of people want nothing to do with that.

Here’s the dicey part:

I understand that you guys don’t get that because you like the raids and are comfortable with the associated culture. try to see it as others who don’t agree with you see it. What I see is people (on either side) only seeing their own side and being vociferous about it.

I don’t expect to convince you guys to change your minds, taste is taste. What I’m trying to convince people is that each side of the discussion has a legitimate place they’re coming from.

It’s up to Arenanet to weigh these competing needs (& their own design philosophies) and come to a decision as to whether to implement the feature…. and they surely already have made that decision, whatever it is.

I’m trying to get people to view the discussion the way Arenanet has to.

And people double down (Not Jerus, in fairness).

It is the same. We’re just not wired to see it that way.

One side is saying “This content existing would enhance my game experience” the other is saying “This content existing would hurt my game experience”.

They’re 2 sides of the same coin. Until we get that through our heads there can be no legitimate discussion between the sides.

~~~

@J I’m about to leave work, and your post looks to deserve some long response, I"ll hit it from home.

Jerus.4350:

I’m honestly not sure if you’re trolling right now Windsagio, simply because usually your arguments are founded in more logic than this and less than pure feeling and opinion.

The idea that raids are bad because you had a bad experience once is silly. The idea that we shouldn’t even discuss the topic because there are people who hate them is even worse.

Using resource costs and all that as an argument is also pretty silly considering we’re making pure guesses based on past actions and nothing more, really sound enough to say “nope can’t happen, don’t even discuss it” I mean, wow people seem quite sure of their guessing ability.

As far as raids needing more time… well in my last game we cleared most raids in 15-20 mins, some being as low as ~5mins. Compared to running a VW that might last me an hour depending on total map participation on proceeding to the boss phase… well, yeah. Now the idea “well you’re not locked in” guess what, I’m not locked into raiding either. If something comes up with I say “sorry guys, gotta take care of something” and they find a replacement. It’s really not that big of a deal. Hell I’ve passed out drunk on raids in my old game (to be fair we were playing a drinking game, and as the tank, I had to drink a lot ) and they continued on after giving me 5-10 mins to respond and laughed at me the next day. There’s nothing forcing you to stay.

As for the “forced to play with other people” Well that statement can be read two ways. “I can’t solo this” and “god I wish I could play with only the people I want to” But yeah, solo, not likely, though you can solo dungeons right now, i’d hope if they did raids it’d have better design. The other side is where I sit on that phrase, I assume an MMO is going to have some fun content built for teams, I mean that’s why I play MMOs vs a single player RPG while I have my phone on my lap to chat with friends. But, I don’t enjoy playing with people who have completely different objective than me. Getting into a VW map and having it turn into a chest farm… ugh. Watching people AFK and scale up a tower while I attempt to solo/duo it. Failing to get a reward because not everyone can do what was specifically made quite easy to allow the greatest amount of people to complete it as long as they actually try. Couple that with griefing and leaching and yeah, I’d like to be able to play with friends/acquantences or at least people who have read the LFG and said “yeah this is the party for me” (note my LFG notes do not have zerker 80 exp in them when I post )

As for why I say raids, I think the increased amount of characters can broaden up the game and expand upon what is possible. I can think of various ways to promote the idea of defensive build use for different reasons. I see the viability of more professions instead of the 4-5 profession meta we have currently (makes sense 5 slots).

I think it’d be a good move on ANet’s part, shouldn’t take much more work than new dungeons/fractals and could be so much better combating many of the aspects of current dungeon/fractal content that have many people going “meh” That is granted that they actually want to make challenging group content and aren’t blowing smoke where the sun don’t shine.

I’m not trolling, I’m reacting.

I’m reacting to a whole bunch of “NO YOU”RE DUMB" “NO YOU’RE BAD!” yelling across the barrier.

I’m happy to discard the resources argument, it’s complex.

The fact that people can legitimately hate it is a different thing, and I don’t like seeing that rejected out of hand — especially since it feeds the cycle of yelling.

I understand why people like them, I understand why people don’t like them.

I also understand that people on both sides see their position as the only natural way and opposition as stupid.

~~~

Anet’s decision is long made, and there’s not remotely a player consensus to even begin to push them to change it (whatever that decision is, I dont’ know any more than anyone else).

The thing is that until we get past this “Well you’re just a fool, you’re just an elitist kitten” we can’t even discuss it.

~~~

EDIT: It’s not cut-and-dried either way, and we need to get over that. It’s a complex decision and people have a tendency to see all the advantages and none of the disadvantages of the things they personally want.

They think they have something to lose, that’s my point.

Leaving aside the development expenditure argument (which has some validity, but is a little pat), people think the game will change the game in a way they don’t like.

Saying it’s just bloodymindedness is a dry socket. They may be wrong but they think that the anet investing in and adding raids will adversely effect the game and their gameplay experience.

And… yes you’re right, the divisiveness isn’t at this point particularly one sided, it’s a subject that for some reason generates strong emotions. Still, lashing out only makes it worse, even if it feels justified (Of course I’m being a bit of a scold so I hope you’ll forgive that :p)

My main point in this discussion is that it’s DIVISIVE and EXPENSIVE so I don’t think they’ll do it.

If I have another point, I want to help people understand why folks like/dislike it. It’s not a moral judgement on either side (or isn’t meant to be), but if we acknowledge and try to understand each other it facilitates communication and keeps the outrage highs to a minimum.

I’m trying as much as I can to keep my own personal feelings out of it, because it’s not constructive (as we see in the thread). I only posted them at all because the dude was freaking out at me by projecting the opposite position onto me.

spoj.9672:

Windsagio.1340:

And again, to me at least, it says something that people are vehemently, even violently against the raid game mode existing.

That in and of itself says worlds about how it effects the culture.

Says more about those people actually.

That people can get irrational about something they’ve had a bad experience with?

Totally. It also says they had bad experiences however. If you think they only had bad experiences because they weren’t good enough (I don’t think you’ve said that yourself, but Dinks above sure is) you’re fooling yourself.

Dinks.2478:

Yes there is so many times you can repeat your same tired nonsensical reason for being a selfish player. I agree. So stop it because it is childish and getting annoying. We’re here trying to get some content in this game for more than 5 people at a time and you’re just sitting here trying to make sure people who don’t want to carry 100 random pugs running nomads gear through barely mediocre world bosses don’t get to have fun in the game.

Maybe it is because you’re one of the people being carried and you’re afraid you’ll need to step it up when we’re in raids or maybe it is because you’re unfairly linking the word raid to a bad experience in a completely different game. Either way it is childish, selfish, and your entire argument is meaningless. Adding more stuff to a game isn’t removing resources from the game its the opposite.

Example of what I’m talking about. It’s all dehumanize and denigrate the ‘evil other’ who dares disagree.

~~~

Can you agree that it’s a divisive issue?

CorrynnStarr.7942:

nope, not gonna fly here… you dont assume some one is violent just because they have a strong opinion against something you like or want. We have already explained the reason for the dislike. it wasnt intended for the game to begin with and it would sap resources that are already devoted to current content starved developement.

It’s a play on words, take a chill pill.

And here’s the important part: I AGREE WITH YOU IN DISLIKING IT

I think it’s terrible for the game in all number of ways.

The thing is people that dislike it have no more right to be myopic about it than spoj saying “the only toxic people are the haters”.

CorrynnStarr.7942:

considering this isnt and never was meant to be a raiding game…and what violence are you saying exists?

I picture people yelling ><

It’s okay to be mad if something makes you mad.

My point is that if raiding was so unpleasant for people that they have such a strong sense of revulsion to it, it perforce says that at the very least there are divisive effects to including raid content. It’s a where there’s smoke there’s fire kind of deal.

And again, to me at least, it says something that people are vehemently, even violently against the raid game mode existing.

That in and of itself says worlds about how it effects the culture.

spoj.9672:

Windsagio.1340:

There seem to be plenty of people who just hate the idea of stuff they can never accomplish/get. They’re SOMEWHAT accepting if it’s just too hard, but the requirements on raids are different:

1) significant time investment
2) forced interaction with people you don’t particularly want to interact with

Funnily enough these are the exact two issues that make me hate open world. Ironic isnt it?

No, because neither is forced — although part of that is my fault for allowing ambiguity.

- Open world (say silverwastes) takes a large amount of total time investment, but no set-block time investment as raids tend to.

- No open world content requires interacting with other players in a meaningful manner.

timmyf.1490:

CorrynnStarr.7942:

timmyf.1490:

I can’t believe people are literally suggesting they’ll quit if ArenaNet builds content they aren’t personally interested in playing. This blows my mind.

It shouldnt, cuz people play games to have fun and feel a sense of accomplishment… if they arent getting it, or fearful they wont get it due to lack of developement, then they will consider leaving for another game that does. Just as you are fighting for your emphasis on a certain kind of content, so they too are fighting for theirs.

There’s tons of players who don’t do dungeons and Fractals and WvW and PvP. They haven’t quit yet. Why would raids make them quit now?

Again, because raid culture is poisonous in many ways.

Beyond the crazy hostility raiding (especially difficult raiding) can engender, there’s the haves/have nots issue and the way that impacts player behavior.

There seem to be plenty of people who just hate the idea of stuff they can never accomplish/get. They’re SOMEWHAT accepting if it’s just too hard, but the requirements on raids are different:

1) significant time investment
2) forced interaction with people you don’t particularly want to interact with

Admittedly irrationally, this leaves people feeling they’re forced to put up with the time investment (usually set raid times) and the personal interaction issues (both basic to large groups and also because raids will take really awful people that are good players if they want to be competitive), and they don’t want that feeling from GW2.

timmyf.1490:

I can’t believe people are literally suggesting they’ll quit if ArenaNet builds content they aren’t personally interested in playing. This blows my mind.

A bad raid guild experience tends to be like, super traumatic :p

When people say they would quit over raids, they most likely mean they wouldn’t want to play with the emergence of raid culture.

This subject comes up a lot, and there’s always an easy answer in 2 parts:

1) Of the minority of players that care about raids either way, plenty of players rabidly hate the idea.
2) They’re expensive to develop as content.

Combined together its an expensive feature that by all the data we have across all games most players don’t care about and won’t engage at all, and additionally will actively kitten off a meaningful group of the people who do care.

What you’ll see are more sustained attacks like hte mordrem tetragryphs and trolls that make ‘perfect’ use of active defense effectively impossible.

And that, if they do it, will be more than enough.

spoj.9672:

If you look at the UI they are simply unselected by default (no linked effect).

I guess I"ll be shocked then. Seems like an easy win to me :p

deSade.9437:

Prepare to get shocked out of your panties, then!

Well where do you think the majors will go, all back to center?

I’d be shocked to not see ‘light’ build templates in HoT, at least to the point where when you reslot a spec it remembers it’s former status — since it can never be empty and has to be somewhere.

because a forced ability is still a forced ability, whatever level it’s at.

This is a bad change for people that think ‘coordination and strategy’ is dualboxing so you can waste supply for another server.

Casmurro.9046:

Nice how bugs that affect pvp or living story get fixed in the next day of the patch.

Nice how you can turn a bug being reported and a promise of it being looked at into a bad/divisive thing :p

just an agony infusion would be fine, the power on the infusion is so meaningless ><

I’m not sure that’s what’s driving their design guys.

Good boogyman though.

spoj.9672:

Well necros didnt get banned from instances. But we did get a stealth change to axe auto attack. It was to fix auto attack cancel abuse which resulted in double the attack speed. The new animation is buggy and has resulted in a slight increase repeat time. So the worst weapon in the game was nerfed slightly. x)

Not that anyone uses axe anyway. :>

Reminds me of when they ‘fixed’ ranger SB autoattack ><

Also, although this would be rad, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There’s always a reason not to do something.

Everything takes time and money.

Make it an infusion like the + 5 AR/ +5 stat infusions. Win/Win

Ease of play has to be part of the calculation, because if that changes so do the preferred styles.

The “meta” presumes perfect play due to the ease of the encounters, and if the encounters were harder, it wouldn’t presume perfect play.

If the encounters get harder, or the style of encounter changes so that its impossible to entirely avoid all damage, then the situation is going to be different.

We’re kind of wandering (although it’s a very fun wander) :p

I think we both agree that skale venom isn’t required for performance, and also isn’t so strong that ANET should remove it.

I’m making a conceptual case for it — in the circumstance that the encounters (or the group makeup) are such to set it up (again pointing out that the more substardard your group makeup the stronger it becomes — “meta” assumes so much to work).

Edit: And that’s an important point, I get the impression that a lot of the people in here run optimized or nearly optimized groups. The calculation is extremely different if you’re not.

Jerus.4350:

Actually you’re looking at more RNG with weakness. Weakness may or may not help you when you slip up. You slipping up is not RNG.

As for up time for some reason I had it in my head that you wanted 4 people with it for it, but looking at the math you should just need 3-4 hits per second to keep it up on a boss. So yeah 2 people maybe 3 can cover it. The vuln is pretty lacking though and really shouldn’t even be considered as anything more than maybe a little extra.

I think that’s the wrong way to think of it (all the below assumes that party members are going to be hit sometimes)

I don’t remember the specific probability math (15 years out of College), but weakness decreases your chance of getting crit by about 50%. (might be higher, to my memory the roll order matters, but I can’t remember how)

Even presuming protection, on a very high power boss, a crit assumes a splattered character. The chance of a random splatter is MUCH lower (again, half) with weakness.

Imo, we can’t think of it in terms of multiple rolls interacting, but rather as comparing the % of catastrophic result.

To me this factor is more important than the loss in outgoing DPS (although mods are as always cumulative).

~~~

Given perfect play, yeah the weakness is not a factor and the vulnerability isn’t great (although that greatly depends on party makeup. If you don’t have, say, an ele or an engi it’s really hard to cap vuln, at which point even minor stacking is a significant mod).

The thing is, I’m not a big believer in perfect play, and I think the ‘meta’ development reflects that philosophy… and this is with (at this point) easy, largely solved content.

@Jerus

I dunno man, I’ve used it a fair amount, and I’d swear a hammer guard and a PS warrior + pugs gets 100% or near-100% uptime (and my mind tells me 7-8 passive stacks of vuln, but less sure of that). If I get a chance to play tonight I’ll give it a check.

The other important effect of weakness, more than the damage reduction is the evening effect from lost crits. With all the passive effects flying around these days, spikes are potentially bad at all times, and weakness largely mitigates the issue.

The OP hit on it, I think it’s going to end up (although it isn’t right now) similar to the rise of the PS warrior. Consistent and reliable rule the day over high precision/high coordination technique.

Weakness has the potential to take a lot of RNG out of the fights, on an easy non-class-specific high uptime application.

You guys are all more experts on this than I am, but if the content gets some actual difficulty, that control of randomness will only gain value, especially if you can get full uptime from 2 party members.

Thorwyn.8469:

Windsagio.1340:

Thorwyn.8469:

NikeEU.7690:

If/when higher level fractals ever get opened up ghost pepper poppers and skale venom will be much more in demand. As would Necromancer if Wither Precision ever got un-nerfed.

So where is the difference?

As a low HP class in a lvl 50 Fractal you kinda get one hitted by everything already. Even with weakness the dmg numbers are high.
In higher Fractals, stuff might kill you even with weakness on them, so where is the point of it?

And yeah, it often feels like NA is way behind the EU meta. Skale Venom was nice back then, when you could use it beside a dungeon potion or sharpening stone/oil. Now you only use it, if there is nothing else to use.

with weakness + protection that’s a lot less true “LOL EVERYTHING 1 HITS ANYWAYS” is one of those myths that needs to die.

We were talking about Skale Venom, didnt we?

With the upcoming trait-changes for example, the hammer guard might come back and with perma protection plus this passive heal and regen, you should be able to facetank kinda everything. But that’s not the point of the Skale Venom discussion.

As Abe said, you are not supposed to facetank stuff right now, at least not in the way of getting damage. And then still, you cant rely on weakness, cause of the 50% chance.

Weakness and protection synergize well, it’s not like one negates the other. Weakness in combination with protection is extremely powerful damage mitigation

And if we want to refer to the OP, why are we limiting the question to the Current “Meta” anyways? It’s not remotely the only way dungeons are played (or even the majority of runs).

In mixed comps and with sub-perfect play both the weakness and the vulnerability are very useful… and they’ll likely be useful for even more “meta”-ish groups depending on how the ‘hard content’ comes through.

Which isn’t to say they should be banned, the effect is hardly gamebreaking (my other reference the Teleport gun, and the original black lion spy kit were gamebreaking), and it frees up people to play more interesting ways.

Thorwyn.8469:

NikeEU.7690:

If/when higher level fractals ever get opened up ghost pepper poppers and skale venom will be much more in demand. As would Necromancer if Wither Precision ever got un-nerfed.

So where is the difference?

As a low HP class in a lvl 50 Fractal you kinda get one hitted by everything already. Even with weakness the dmg numbers are high.
In higher Fractals, stuff might kill you even with weakness on them, so where is the point of it?

And yeah, it often feels like NA is way behind the EU meta. Skale Venom was nice back then, when you could use it beside a dungeon potion or sharpening stone/oil. Now you only use it, if there is nothing else to use.

with weakness + protection that’s a lot less true “LOL EVERYTHING 1 HITS ANYWAYS” is one of those myths that needs to die.

As to who uses them: They’re nice in semi-pug fractals, or if you like mixing up group comp (at which point the additional vuln helps a lot).

Otherwise, I wish they’d go the other way and bring the bundles back instead. Maybe not the TP gun, because you can break the instance, but the others are honestly just fine.

And really it’s the same deal, nice normalizing for sub-optimal groups.

spoj.9672:

Yeah. Its mostly guesswork. I dont predict dagger to beat gravedigger spam. But i do expect it to be a better pure damage auto above 50% health. But we might end up auto attacking in Reapers Shroud instead. And never need dagger again except for the immob and maybe lifeforce.

Curious, what would your weapons swap be with Greatsword? My impression is it used to be staff for max lifeblast (not sure on theory so don’t kill me if I’m mad wrong), seems like GS covers that, what would you intend to use as your alt weapons?

Guild halls, some of the ??? masteries, those are the best chances I Think.

I kind of agree with you, I’d rather they be more in scale – like if continuum shift replaced distortion, that would be a bit more interesting.

Making it an additional skill, I think, is a mistake.

@Vayne, it does serve a purpose, it paints the setup in a negative moral light.

Ralanost.8913:

Windsagio.1340:

Ralanost.8913:

You guys honestly sound exactly like the guy claiming HoT is p2w. Numbers are far from final and you are claiming that the new stuff will give them increased power. Amazingly shortsighted and missing the fact that number balance will happen. Some numbers might go up, some numbers will go down. We have no idea what the final numbers will be like so claiming there is a power creep is completely baseless assumptions. You are complaining to complain.

I’m cool with characters getting stronger, but I’m also totally happy to admit that it’s happening. The trait change is in almost every case a big power boost. The Elite specs seem to, in most cases, be stronger than their base classes. Yes the numbers are in flux, but it’s a totally reasonable discussion.

It really isn’t. The traits aren’t final. Numbers aren’t final. Just combining some traits doesn’t equal more power. It’s nothing but assumptions based on alpha numbers and footage.

Having more traits essentially = more power, as a general rule, although you can make a hypothetical case that you’re losing some combinations, I’ve yet to see a really legit case where you can show a net loss.

More importantly, several of the changes are binary:

1) Chronomancer gains a new powerful shatter while keeping their old shatter.
2) Numbers aside, the way the DH virtues work is pretty much just stronger than the Guardian variations (with a possible exception of F3). It’s things like gaining a leap, or ticking burns instead of applying a single burn.
3) (although I mentioned it above) everyone’s gaining 4 trait points, including access to more GM traits. — and again, these 33332 fake builds are just like the 14/14/14/14/14 fake builds we had before – fake.

My only other though is that if the nerf to celestial goes through I hope they hold it just to the PvP amulet. If anything the set needs help in PvE (and afaik world)

Ralanost.8913:

You guys honestly sound exactly like the guy claiming HoT is p2w. Numbers are far from final and you are claiming that the new stuff will give them increased power. Amazingly shortsighted and missing the fact that number balance will happen. Some numbers might go up, some numbers will go down. We have no idea what the final numbers will be like so claiming there is a power creep is completely baseless assumptions. You are complaining to complain.

I’m cool with characters getting stronger, but I’m also totally happy to admit that it’s happening. The trait change is in almost every case a big power boost. The Elite specs seem to, in most cases, be stronger than their base classes. Yes the numbers are in flux, but it’s a totally reasonable discussion.