Guild Wars 2

Donari.5237:

I run them all the time, Windsagio. I can’t speak for anyone else, I may be the single player who loves them enough to keep them permanently equipped, but I somehow doubt I’m that unique.

Now am I still in a tiny minority that needn’t be heeded in this? Possibly. I’ve certainly seen a number of threads and posters stating they find the fall damage traits super useful and agreeing with my feeling that the current iteration of the new format does not adequately address the need for them.

I know there will be teething pains with any massive system overhaul. Most of us will adapt to however it shakes out. Still, as we are in the feedback stage, I think us free-fallers are pointing out enough reasonable concerns that ANet can take a look at the metrics to see how much the traits are used overall and decide if they want to let a chunk of their player base lose a treasured part of terrain navigation.

Oh no, if people do it, that’s fine. Just struck me as weird :p

In the original posts question, did anyone ever run the fall damage traits all the time?

The old answer is still true, just switch in as appropriate, then switch back.

And seriously, the discussion should be about the specifics (now that we have the basics of them) not “OH GOD THIS SYSTEM SUCKS! I HAVEN’T USED IT YET BUT I NO LONGER HAVE THE POWER TO MAKE ALL MY MAJOR TRAIT SELECTIONS ADD UP TO PRIME NUMERS!”

Let’s talk about what trees need to be rearranged, or what skills need to be buffed or nerfed, not complaining about a change that is done and done (especially since at least half the people seem to like the change)

That’s such an arbitrary definition of ‘customization’.

The goal is to make an expandable and balanceable sytem, and they succeeded in that.

The current setup is neither, and so skill and trait extension is at a dead end.

The upcoming system is more of a framework at this point. The trait balance is off, we’re missing a line, and we don’t have any extra lines…

The thing is, and I want to repeat, this is why they did it, is now they can add extra specialization lines without breaking everything or having an insoluable balance consideration.

It was a longterm decision for the ongoing growth of the game, and it has tradeoffs. But they’re tradeoffs that will be mitigated if and as they expand the content.

~~~

There’s an interesting side-discussion on this, when designing a game, the question comes up of ‘how far are we willing to go to let the player screw themselves over?’

I totally agree that the system needs a lot of revision and tuning, there’s things I think could be reworked too (As Jerus mentions there are some specialization tiers with 1 REALLY CLEAR CHOICE and that needs to be fixed).

The thing is, most people are just making problems, both from that just being how MMO fans work and from the fact that stuff is being taken away.

Any change whatsoever gets a negative reaction about this strong (to go with the positive reaction), and this one is a bit worse because we’re (on paper) losing about half the traits.

The thing is, to me, we need to get past the kneejerkers before we can really discuss what’s missing and what’s not, what’s broken and what’s not

edit: Go back and read the OP, you’ll see what I’m talking about in spades.

Coming from someone who doesn’t care about the ‘meta’ except to occasionally get mad about people using the term ‘meta’ wrongly, this is what I see.

People sense things going away and they don’t like it. They don’t like the loss conceptually.

~~~

This kind of change is definitely a thing that can go too far, but this is what I’ve realized in the process:

The number of possible builds has gone down, but the number of distinctive builds has gone up

I don’t give a fig about how the meta-mongers limit it down, the number of builds within a class that are substantially different from each other instead of just kind of mushing along between one variation and the other has gone up substantially.

phys.7689:

Windsagio.1340:

So they’re intentionally mutually exclusive. It’s an interesting point, but hardly a side effect.

it actually is a side effect.
problem is the mantra trait is strong, but not strong enough to stand on its own. And there is a limited number of places for it. Essentially it needs back up to work. But with the new system anywhere you place it, it clashes with some other build.

the build existed before, and it has never been OP.

DE should exist in opposition to phantasm build, but mantra should be able to work with either one.
see mantra you spend a lot of time casting, so you either need to be able to spike your resource to do anything, or set up a lot of things while you are casting.

as it is right now, they are basically weakening mantra build greatly.

ias for the get everything
it existed, it was not an OP top end build.
mantra has a high cost in cast times. you need something else to make it work.

And you get other things, not just evasion. Our whole discussion started on a weird point because you said ‘duelist’ and ‘3 mantras’ are mutually exclusive, when you meant 3 mantras and deceptive evasion are.

So they’re intentionally mutually exclusive. It’s an interesting point, but hardly a side effect.

Edit: And this kind of ties into the ‘optimized sludge’ theme. A good build doesn’t mean you get everything

TheFantasticGman.9451:

mrstealth, we are moving that way. Eventually we will have even less choice later, and not neccessarily with better choices.

Don’t forget Anet is a for-profit company. Not a non-profit organization. They have to/will cut cost in operations just like any other corporation that wants to stay in the profits for investors, and you know, stay solvent.

Your parallel is kind of weird: There’s no real ongoing support cost to not changing specs.

~~~
More importantly, there’s a proper middle ground, choice without too much choice.

People are so absolutist about their game modes ><

phys.7689:

Windsagio.1340:

Was deciding which off the many threads to put this in, this wone will do.

DIfferent builds aren’t diverse builds

Adding Bolt to the Heart and Vital striking and stone splinters didn’t change the way you played, they just increased damage (the limitations weren’t meaningful),

Taking all 3 symbol traits in the guardian Honor line, was meaningfully playstyle defining, and it required you downgrade your GM trait to master… So they made it so the ‘play defining trait’ is the grandmaster in the tree. Similarly in the same tree if you wanted to do shouts.

Almost all the ‘diversity’ people are complaining about is minor damage optimizations and nothing that speaks to the real play style.

In fact, that’s my challenge.

Present a play style that’s lost with this change NOT a specific build, but a way of playing.

I honestly can’t think of any.

mesmer cant really play dueling mantras any more because they are now mutually exclusive.
Deceptive evasion is a playstyle defining trait that gives you a quick resource and adaptability for shattering, and turning around the situation. Mantras are a side mechanic the reward preparation and reactionary play.
These are now mutually exclusive.

trickster mesmer with on death clone effects have been removed completely. This type of mesmer often relied on tricking people into attacking the wrong clone. Picking and killing the wrong mesmer resulted in various negative effects.

yeah, some real playstyle builds died.

then there is a number of optimized builds that gave you the things you may have wanted out of different lines. That really matched your playstyle. Like i had an power/crit/tools engineer, that had vigor/swiftness on weapon swap.

the build relied on being highly evasive for defense. Used the tool cool downs, with low recharge tools and static discharge. Bombs and a bit of critical.

there are builds that dont exist. Most of them are hybrids, or and some of them are from build defining traits that are now mutually exclusive.

This is where my question becomes a trick: They want us to bring up lost builds as feedback to modify the system and trees

About mantras and duellist, I don’t know mesmer builds super well, but I kind of doubt they’re truly mutually exclusive, it becomes a question of ‘how important are they to add?’

If you have to make a hard decision between 2 potential options, if both are viable and both are at the same level of significance, then that’s a good choice.

The thing is, more polarized builds might be more interesting as compared to the ‘optimzied sludge’ we have right now.

That’s the ele 62222 point, it’s optimized sludge with very little character.

You do have a legit point that in the guardian case you’re loosing a bit of flexibility (although I’ve been taking the adept symbols trait over aria anyways lately, that’s a taste and group setup thing),

I’m kind of getting to the point in seriously discussing and thinking about where I realize how messed up the current system is. With a few exceptions (forceful greatswords and PS for instance) we take the 1 thing that defines our build and then it’s all just filled in with the optimization sludge.

(Sorry in advance, I"m really in love with that term having thought of it, so everyone who’s in these discussions is gonna hear it some for a while :p)

@Jerus, the interesting question is:

“Are Zealous Scepter and Wrathful spirit Inherently wrong, or do they just need balance?”

(Wrathful spirit actually might be, that always seemed dumb to me)

Was deciding which off the many threads to put this in, this wone will do.

DIfferent builds aren’t diverse builds

Adding Bolt to the Heart and Vital striking and stone splinters didn’t change the way you played, they just increased damage (the limitations weren’t meaningful),

Taking all 3 symbol traits in the guardian Honor line, was meaningfully playstyle defining, and it required you downgrade your GM trait to master… So they made it so the ‘play defining trait’ is the grandmaster in the tree. Similarly in the same tree if you wanted to do shouts.

Almost all the ‘diversity’ people are complaining about is minor damage optimizations and nothing that speaks to the real play style.

In fact, that’s my challenge.

Present a play style that’s lost with this change NOT a specific build, but a way of playing.

I honestly can’t think of any.

the 1 and 2 point takes were always super-boring but quite powerful anyways.

They weren’t things that defined a build, they were things that enhanced the power of any build.

They were boosts, but not meaningful.

I honestly think adept-adept-adept had to do. It made balance a nightmare, and as others have mentioned it really did encourage sameness… as did ele “Eeh I don’t really care so I guess bolt to the heart and stone splinters” decisions.

phys.7689:

Vague Memory.2817:

They said they did this to add build diversity (I think this was achieved by removing stats from the trait lines), but they also said this would help to balance things (despite giving thieves access to x2 consume plasma – what!!).

its not really about build diversity
its more about simplification of the trait system and unification of builds.

im guessing in the long run, diversity will have to come mostly from elite specs, hope they can pump them out faster than 1 per expansion.

I honestly think the “Diversity over all!” attitude is wrong anyways, that’s not the important value as compared to balance and expandibility.

If they’d 100% streamlined the spec lines, I"d agree, but there’s still enough choice to support all the playstyles I know of (ie the actual deiversity)

Knighthonor.4061:

Windsagio.1340:

Knighthonor.4061:

Nike.2631:

Knighthonor.4061:

Can somebody clearly explain how they work?

I am confused right now and trying to find some good answers and info.

I’m not sure how far back towards the basics we need to go, but basically they’ve renamed the existing trait lines “specializations”.

Now when you’re 80th level instead of having 14 points to distribute among the 5 lines you will choose 3 of the five and they all are automatically maxed out (as if you had spent 6 points in that line under the current system).

Instead of having 6 adept traits, 6 master traits, and 3 grand master traits there will be 3 at each tier. You also will no longer be able to put lower tier traits in a higher tier slot — you will always have 1 adept, 1 master, and 1 grandmaster trait for your specialization.

A lot of the missing traits have been folded into other traits to make stronger/more desirable options. Some effects have been moved to other lines. Some have been moved down in tier. The goal being to preserve styles while reducing the number of bad/ineffective combinations.

What we’ve being thinking of as sub-classes/specializations up to this point is now called “Elite Specializations”. Each class will have 1 at launch and its another specialization that can only be put in the third slot, unlocks a new weapon, a new heal, a new elite, and 4 new utility skills. The Revenant elite specialization unlocks only 3 utilities because of the way legends are structured.

Hope this helps.

Sounds like we get less options now..

also does Revenant get a new legend with their elite specialization?

Also what about all that talk about mechanics of classes changing with the specialization? Was that scrapped?

We have technically fewer options, but there’s still a metric crapton of builds, and some of the new traits are really really crazy

You have example of these new crazy traits?

Also what about mechanics? How do they change if at all?

We don’t have full knowledge of mechanics, but several traits have had their abilities mainlined into the game (eg blasting staff).

some example very powerful traits:
“You, as a guardian, do 20% more damage to enemies in your symbols”
“As a mesmer, every time you summon a phantasm get the activation effect of ’signet of inspiration”

phys.7689:

Coldtart.4785:

How did you watch as most of the currently useless traitlines got massively buffed into possible overpoweredness and conclude that build diversity has been reduced?

If your build got nerfed then your build was probably bad.

power is not build diversity. Those are two separate things.

I feel like overall many classes got buffed.

However its also true that there looks like there will very little diversity. for most of the jobs i play regularly there will be like 1 or 2 builds everyone will be using, because the other ones are mostly illogical.

power up, diversity down.

i think the mileage varies from class to class though

Only thing is that what you say is mostly already true anyways. There aren’t many accepted builds for most game styles as it is.

Knighthonor.4061:

Nike.2631:

Knighthonor.4061:

Can somebody clearly explain how they work?

I am confused right now and trying to find some good answers and info.

I’m not sure how far back towards the basics we need to go, but basically they’ve renamed the existing trait lines “specializations”.

Now when you’re 80th level instead of having 14 points to distribute among the 5 lines you will choose 3 of the five and they all are automatically maxed out (as if you had spent 6 points in that line under the current system).

Instead of having 6 adept traits, 6 master traits, and 3 grand master traits there will be 3 at each tier. You also will no longer be able to put lower tier traits in a higher tier slot — you will always have 1 adept, 1 master, and 1 grandmaster trait for your specialization.

A lot of the missing traits have been folded into other traits to make stronger/more desirable options. Some effects have been moved to other lines. Some have been moved down in tier. The goal being to preserve styles while reducing the number of bad/ineffective combinations.

What we’ve being thinking of as sub-classes/specializations up to this point is now called “Elite Specializations”. Each class will have 1 at launch and its another specialization that can only be put in the third slot, unlocks a new weapon, a new heal, a new elite, and 4 new utility skills. The Revenant elite specialization unlocks only 3 utilities because of the way legends are structured.

Hope this helps.

Sounds like we get less options now..

also does Revenant get a new legend with their elite specialization?

Also what about all that talk about mechanics of classes changing with the specialization? Was that scrapped?

We have technically fewer options, but there’s still a metric crapton of builds, and some of the new traits are really really crazy

waiting on the trees to be posted somewhere, missed hte stream ><

You have to understand that the natural response of every class forum is to downplay and complain. Wouldn’t expect too much from it ><

Title pretty much covers it, feels like that or a similar build will be so useful as to be almost required if/when they extend fractals.

I do regret a small loss of granularity (for my guardian I can no longer have both healing marks and pure of voice, which is helpful sometimes), but in every tree I’ve looked at for my characters, I haven’t seen a single ‘kitten none of these are good for me!’ moment.

hammer has better uptime if you’re actually fighting something, imo, and the mace trait is kitten .

can someone explain to me why they feel honor forces mace? It seems to favor hammer more.

Jerus.4350:

Exactly, and being mainly an Engi/guard, not gonna lie, reading the stuff left me feeling a little tingly. I feel like someone at ANet loves me or something.

On that, do you feel better about the valor tree now, especially since stats have been desynced?

my sadness is that I’m unable to watch. Results so far seem really really interesting and got my theorycraft runnin’

You see what you want to see.

Fewer choices don’t automatically mean more meaningful choices.

Rather, fewer, more meaningful choices (as a package) is more useful than a larger number of meaningless or false choices.

They explicitly said they’re going to do their best to support currently existing builds under the new system.

That being said, “SO”? We’ll likely lose some builds, we’ll likely gain some builds.

Even more likely there will be old builds that still exist that are overwhelmed by new builds and made obsolete

We can’t treat any build like it’s sancrosanct or special, as long as the general style continues to exist and be viable

Ragnarox.9601:

They wil lscrew up my medi guard, 0/1/6/6/1. I have 6000 more hp because I am vitality heavy and now they will remove that plus remove virtues so what the hell guardian will be? I am not going to play wvw with 12k hp. (now 25k)

and 300 toughness is not meaningless lost… :S

Change your armor?

if they can change ‘6 adept traits but only 1 ever ever ever gets used’ with ‘I have to make a meaningful choice between these three because I only get one’, that’s only an excellent thing.

It ties into the rebalancing of the traits, which from the look they’re substantially reworking, to the point of sometimes making the trait just part of the base skill.

They’re also explicitly making an effort to preserve existing builds that might be impossible in this setup — although I’d wager a lot of these little things (eg 1/6/1/6) aren’t as necessary for the build as people think.

Their challenge is to make each tier in each chosen line a meaningful, dramatic choice. Right now, there tends to be a whole bunch of choice that means very little… so many dead traits.

ronpierce.2760:

People will realize that this isn’t that bad once it’s out and how it will pave the way for better balance and expansion later. I think people are in shock and a bit scared of losing current builds, which is understandable.

Gamers always hate change, it’s like the law

That’s kind of my position, I’m excited by it in some ways, and it’ll be a general power boost, but it looks a lot like the WoW talent cleanup, which I was not a fan of.

Flip side, the old system had a ton of choices, but they were either false choices or simply not meaningful.

Murders build experimentation though.

Yeah not downgrading your majors is teh first thing I noticed. They specifically mentioned preserving existing builds, though.

~~~

To try to center myself, how will this actually effect the OP’s build diversity question?

It might just be totally too early to tell tho’

Jerus.4350:

Aye Hammer guard for instance will lose teh 200 vit bonus, but it will gain the base stat increase and the ability to pick up force of Will for an additional 3k hp if they want it.

It’ll be fun to see when they have everything fully fleshed out for viewing, curious what traits will be where.

It’s fun to think about what will be rolled into base like that.

spoj.9672:

Well in some instances where glassy people would have defensive stats from traits they might be glassier. But for others where they didnt have any from traits they should be tankier. Thanks to the baseline stat increases.

I see you’re right, I missed the part where they’re split between gear and stats, thought it was all gear.

Galeskyring.9617:

stop talking, you clearly don’t know what I’m saying.

Honor, Kindness, Patience, are Virtues; Virtues are practiced~ Loyalty & respect are earned

Regard others as you would normally, the internet is not justification for mistreating others

spoj.9672:

Shifts gear into even more of a difficulty slider.

The change is good overall.

Yeah I’m pretty pleased with it. Pretty curious to see how the stats balance out, sounds like glassy people are gonna be glassier.

NoTrigger.8396:

nobody who is serious about gaming cares about gw2 or gw2 dungeons anymore.

and to judge from anets actions, they hired a raid content designer. and tbh they dont need a raid content designer to create more boring open world zombie gameplay.

No they hired a designer with raid encounter experience. You’re seeing what you want to see.

And that’s what it comes down to. I’d love to see more dungeon content in this game (as long as it’s interesting), but I’m not about to tell myself fairy stories about what’s going to happen, or about how all the playerbase is either just like me (and thus awesome) or sucky losers that are really bad at the game and also stupid.

Instead I’m going to look at my understanding of design and try to read Arenanets actions or trends in the industry —not for what I want to see, but to see what’s probably going on.

NoTrigger.8396:

Windsagio.1340:

Kichwas.7152:

NoTrigger.8396:

i got my dungeon master title 3 weeks after my first char hit 80 and the only experience i had was leveling from 1-40, because i crafted the other 40 levels.
how can gw2 dungeons be hard?
in wildstar we wiped to a single dungeon boss for hours, HOURS.

first of all we dont cheese through dungeons and secondly without berserker gear the dungeons are even easier because there is more room for error.

for HoT instanced content, i want content that utterly destroys me for weeks and months, just like in wildstar. i want to do pulls for weeks on a single boss to figure out the fight and get a perfect execution done.

Oh man I remember that about Wildstar. I also remember those in my guild that cheered when we wiped so much.

A lot of us felt that sort of feeling of “FINALLY… An MMO says it will be tough, and is.”

Yeah I also hope the expac to GW2 can do that… I may even wait to get it, see what all of you people say first… after running it for a little bit…

The essential problem is that most people don’t want that, and it ends up being wasted content.

the essential problem is most people who dont want difficult content dont play dungeons/raids anyway and yet they are here crying.

why?
because they dont wanna live with the fact that they could be too bad at the game.

and if you check how many people raid in wow its about 20-25%. i dont think that is wasted content.

Let’s try to judge from Arenenet’s actions. It at least looks like they don’t feel further dungeon development is a good investment.

phys.7689:

Windsagio.1340:

Kichwas.7152:

NoTrigger.8396:

i got my dungeon master title 3 weeks after my first char hit 80 and the only experience i had was leveling from 1-40, because i crafted the other 40 levels.
how can gw2 dungeons be hard?
in wildstar we wiped to a single dungeon boss for hours, HOURS.

first of all we dont cheese through dungeons and secondly without berserker gear the dungeons are even easier because there is more room for error.

for HoT instanced content, i want content that utterly destroys me for weeks and months, just like in wildstar. i want to do pulls for weeks on a single boss to figure out the fight and get a perfect execution done.

Oh man I remember that about Wildstar. I also remember those in my guild that cheered when we wiped so much.

A lot of us felt that sort of feeling of “FINALLY… An MMO says it will be tough, and is.”

Yeah I also hope the expac to GW2 can do that… I may even wait to get it, see what all of you people say first… after running it for a little bit…

The essential problem is that most people don’t want that, and it ends up being wasted content.

i dont think wildstar died due to hard dungeons, it died due to other tthings.

In that post I didn’t refer to wildstar, that also appears to be the pattern in GW2, and in general.

Edit: Since you mentioned Wildstar though, I"ll say what I said before: Dungeons didn’t kill Wildstar, they simply weren’t a selling point to make it succeed.

Kichwas.7152:

NoTrigger.8396:

i got my dungeon master title 3 weeks after my first char hit 80 and the only experience i had was leveling from 1-40, because i crafted the other 40 levels.
how can gw2 dungeons be hard?
in wildstar we wiped to a single dungeon boss for hours, HOURS.

first of all we dont cheese through dungeons and secondly without berserker gear the dungeons are even easier because there is more room for error.

for HoT instanced content, i want content that utterly destroys me for weeks and months, just like in wildstar. i want to do pulls for weeks on a single boss to figure out the fight and get a perfect execution done.

Oh man I remember that about Wildstar. I also remember those in my guild that cheered when we wiped so much.

A lot of us felt that sort of feeling of “FINALLY… An MMO says it will be tough, and is.”

Yeah I also hope the expac to GW2 can do that… I may even wait to get it, see what all of you people say first… after running it for a little bit…

The essential problem is that most people don’t want that, and it ends up being wasted content.

Random loot has very strong motivating features — if the payoff is big enough.

It’s one of the core concepts of how FTP mobile games make money ><

Jerus.4350:

If you look at that whole post I even note that they coudl do a harder version with all bosses at once

There are some things I really enjoy. Locking it behind me winning the roll of the dice… well kitten that. And, that’s why I still hope when they add new challenging content it comes int he form of a dungeon rather than a fractal. It’s purely because of the RNG nature of fractals, words can’t describe my hatred for RNG based “fun”. “roll a 1 and you get to do what you wanted to have fun with, roll a 2,3,4,5,or 6 and you don’t, muahahahah”.

My dream, which they won’t do because it’s too much work (specially more ui) is single fractal challenges, where you choose out of a list:

“Do the Snowblind Fractal with the following instability effects: the fire buff lasts half as much time and take a hit of X damage each time a stack of frostbite is applied”

Give a list each day, make the fast ones ugly as hell, and you get a reward for completing (1) of them, then we have some actions.

Most people in here are cynical about the designers, I’m cynical about the players :p

Except for the ‘grand tour’ idea, which I like (except it makes for a a looooooong run), I’m sticking with the idea that even if you balance things out, the players will come to some conclusion for the accepted orthodoxy and stick with it.

Whole boss replacements would be interesting actually, if probably trying.

The simple optimum for this:

The best encounters are where you know what can happen more than what will happen

Jerus.4350:

NoTrigger.8396:

good “randomness” in pve is the wildstar elemental pairs in DS for example.
you have to fight 3 elemental pairs to get to avatus, 1 pair -> 2 bosses. and each week after ID reset the combination of each pair changes.

like this:
pyrobane is in each fight, the second boss is a different one. the whole fight is completely different.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLa_D-zqKIs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT0tsCgIJbU

Personally I see that as annoying RNG, in that I hate that fractals don’t let me choose stuff because some fights I love, some I hate. Having my enjoyment be determined by the RNG is lame as far as I’m concerned.

The fractal thing is kind of tricky, because, as we see from swamp rolling, people would decide the set of four that is the quickest and never do any others, and it would become an orthodoxy.

As it is I can’t think of the last time I did underwater.

I’ve gotta be with the few aboce here;

The fixed timed phases and the fixed health phases models lead to easily repeatable and easily farmable fights… and boring fights

reactive fights, where the enemy chooses randomly (say with a weighted random) from their skills is much more interesting, because you have to be awake and the fight changes.

They’re harder to farm and difficulty is uneven, but it’s better than playing to a timer.