Guild Wars 2

Vayne.8563:

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

Time will tell. Note that this is an industry peer recognition, not some rabid Fan vote.

http://www.gdconlineawards.com/archive/halloffame.html

LMAO at peer recognition. One MMO stays around for a long time, due to a combination of lauching at the right time, and having a gazillion dollars to advertise, following some very successful franchises and so the industry has recognized it.

If another game had some out instead of WoW and WoW came out in this environment, it would never have gotten off the ground, particularly with how buggy it was at launch.

Saying a ten year old MMO that made a lot of money got an award from industry peers is all very nice…but time will NOT tell. Because at the time WoW launched there were like 4 MMOs, most of which were piddling and underfunded. WoW was in the right place at the right time.

Now, with a hundred MMOs out, how is any one MMO going to find that same niche?

Ignorance this bad has to be willful.

WoW single handedly grew the MMO market to what it is now. Something that no other game could do. Not even with franchises like Star Wars and LotR to back them (released around the same time). There are 100’s of MMO’s out because of WoW, not in spite of it. WoW drew in millions of players who would, and still don’t, play any other MMO. I know adults who have never played another computer game except WoW. I know (a lot of) kids who wouldn’t touch an MMO with a 10 ft. pole who play WoW. In fact I haven’t met a single person in real life who plays an MMO other than WoW.

And somehow, nearly 10 years later, with these 100’s of other MMO’s you think that WoW still has 5 to 100 times the sub/players only because it was in the right place at the right time? Laughable.

I would think 20 tactics and 30 discipline for sure. Discipline is quite good for axe since you get great synergy with the burst recharge reduction and sharpened axes. Dump the rest wherever depending on what you want (more damage, more support, condition removal, etc.).

TheMaskedParadigm.3629:

Oni Link.4621:

First of all: are we talking about PVP, PVE or WVW?

• PVP: Not worth. If you want to be a bunker-shouthealer go for Guardian
• WVW: I’m a newbie in that field.
• PVE: Absolutely worth. I’m currently running a build inspired by the “famous” Sonic Boon. I can share it if you want but it is 0-25-15-30-0 with 2 shouts (FGJ and SIO) and SoS for more dodges, HS as healing skill. Berserker jewelry and weapons (GS and LB) and Knight armor. You deal a high amount of damage while being a bit tanky with good AOE support (average 130 AOE HPS plus Might and Fury) and good self-sustain (average 660 HPS).

You actually deal very low damage while prolonging boss fights, letting them beat your team up even longer.

Your reasoning is incorrect. Long boss fights don’t kill people.

I like it, but I use all shouts and soldier runes with warhorn so it is a nice little bonus. It’s not worth building around though.

foofad.5162:

PVT isn’t the worst. It’s a power primary stat combo, and the toughness and vitality both contribute to your damage by proxy of consumables and Retributive Armor. Cleric’s, for example, is a lot worse.

Cleric’s sacrifices a very small amount of personal damage for a decent increase to healing for the whole party. Whatever, they are both bad.

Toughness is lackluster as well. And condition damage.

ANet failed miserably and providing any variety in this game. Zerk or go home…why do they even bother with alternate gear sets?

A tanky build is the worst possible setup. Low damage, you don’t really tank, and you don’t provide as much support as a support build. Whatever you do, don’t use soldier’s gear (pow/tough/vit)…worst of all possible worlds!

Faranox.4217:

Longbow is definitely the ranged weapon you’re going to want to use. In WvW, besieging or defending, the fire field is incredibly useful for controlling your enemies position.
Banners traited for regen are also great in these situations.

You mean when it overwrites regen from other players?

TwoWaysyaWowT.3160:

As it has been said before, healing shouts are iffy. You only get the bonus when you use a shout but at the same time, you only heal when you use the shout. So, I’m surely not the only one who sees a problem with this as opposed to a c-o-n-s-t-a-n-t source of healing and a c-o-n-s-t-a-n-t source of bonuses? Much more effective overall because I’m not having to pick between keeping my party buffed or keeping them healed. And with over 1,500 in Healing, the banners are definitely a good thing if you ask me. Especially when you literally see a good quarter of the enemy’s frontline scatter to the winds or Alt-F4 when they notice that they’re no longer able to do enough damage to counter such effects or even remove the other boons that the banners provide since, again, it’s all c-o-n-s-t-a-n-t. Furthermore, I can still pair shouts with healing banners and have those extra bonuses as well. Or, if I happen to be fast enough, I could also switch traits at opportune times during a battle and pretty much allow myself to have both healing banners and healing shouts. Oops, did I say that?

1500 healing? So you’re arguing effectiveness when running with an inferior gear set?

Also, regen stacks duration. You probably don’t recognize it but half that banner regen is wasted when it overwrites or is overwritten by other regen.

Chrispytoast.3698:

Artemis and Harper don’t understand synergy at all. Why should a defensive trait be more beneficial when used in combination with offensive traits rather than the other clear defensive trait Cleansing Ire?

Why is heightened focus in a trait line which reduces recharge of burst skills!? OMG, IT MAKES NO SENSE!! Every skill must synergize perfectly with every other skill, even though we HAVE TO MAKE CHOICES!

The only reason this is coming up now is because all the “pro” PvPers want their Cleansing Ire and think they should get some kind of magical free healing trait that works perfectly with it, despite the fact that a) it’s a minor trait and b) it’s been around long before the CI kitten DPS bandwagon.

Adrenal Health is a minor trait. I think it’s fine as is.

Sampo.9678:

And i never said i only heal for a couple thousand.
mace every 3rd hit , mace 2 , shield 5 , staff 2 , staff 4 , virtue of resolve , dodge rolls
And then you still have your heal, utlities and elite.

All of those heal for less than a couple thousand except for shield 5, staff 4, and VoR active. Those “big” heals are still quite small relative to hp pools and damage output.

Amins.3710:

Your dodge rolls will be doing over 2k

How do you get over 1900 heal power?

mtpelion.4562:

GW2 is designed to allow you to tweak your class to fit your playstyle.

No, GW2 is designed to have everyone wear berserker gear and mow down mobs that they didn’t bother skipping.

Aeolus Skylla.5037:

Lol this thread… Marnick’s got it right. I run a healing (full 100% healing gear FYI) Guardian as well and I’m not seeing the issue here. I’m assuming most aren’t aware of Energy Sigils? Which would explain some of the wrong things being said here. Try running energy Sigils in both your weapon sets and then see the wonder of 1.5k+ dodge heals

Ah yes, the dodge heals that have a range of ~150. If you dodge backward from melee you won’t even heal the person on the other side of the mob.

If Guardian heals didn’t have such pitifully short range they might be decent. As it is, their value is vastly overstated because even if it looks ok on paper, it’s horrible in implementation.

The real question is why do they have healing gear when they don’t want people healing and it’s so useless?

Delete all non-zerker gear imo.

BurrTheKing.8571:

Yaki.9563:

BurrTheKing.8571:

they made toughness only useful up to a point, you see diminishing returns before long.

When will people stop with this ignorance?

When it stops being true? The math is in and no amount of toughness makes up for Protection.

And why should it? They aren’t mutually exclusive. Toughness is a weak stat but that doesn’t mean it scales as poorly as people think. You’re just spouting off some junk some random stated with ignorant confidence on the forum, and you took it for gospel.

Veritas.6071:

An example of poor scaling would be toughness:
+100 gives +4.5% mitigation or .045% mitigation per point on average
+500 gives +19.04% mitigation or .038% mitigation per point on average
+900 gives +29.74% mitigation or .033% mitigation per point on average

^^^This is an example of poor scaling. Each point of toughness provides less mitigation than the last.

You are making a common mistake in failing to recognize that each percent of damage reduction or increase is not the same. As an extreme example, if you went from 99% damage reduction to 100% damage reduction that would an enormous difference (a boss could hit you for 1000000000000000000000000000000 damage but you would take 0) while going from 0% to 1% damage reduction is negligible.

Each percentage point of damage reduction is worth more than the previous one. And just the opposite, each percentage point of damage increase is worth less than the previous one.

Toughness does have some slight scaling issues, but it’s not because the percent reduction appears to diminish (it should, to retain linear damage reduction) but because it is added to armor meaning it already starts out worth less per point than it should be. Either power should be added to weapon damage or toughness should not be added to armor (and armor would reduce damage separately).

Veritas.6071:

Fenrir.5493:

Healing signet scales terrible with healing power, tha only thing that scales a bit better is adrenal health, regen is another one that scales a bit better, but healing signet nope.

To find how a heal scales, you divide its coefficient by how often you receive healing from that source.
Stage 3 Healing Surge: 1.5/30 =.05
Healing Signet: .05
Adrenal Health: .15/3 =.05
They all scale the same.

Scaling refers to how much the heal improves relative to its base value. Something that heals for 9000 with a coefficient of 1 scales far worse than something that heals for 200 with a coefficient of 1. Healing surge and healing signet are big heals, so those coefficients give them poor scaling relative to adrenal health which is a small heal.

This is different than power, which scales properly across the board.

SpecterMAT.7306:

All banners have really really cool buffs.

Only one banner has really cool buffs. Another is decent and the other two are bad.

DargorV.8571:

Banner healing still better.

No, banner healing is distinctly worse because regen doesn’t stack intensity. I guess if you’re solo and you never get hit by a snare/root/chill.

In fact, banner traited for regen can actually hurt overall healing if you aren’t wearing healing power gear and there are people with healing power and regen. In a zerg this possibility increases a lot.

killahmayne.9518:

It provides approximately 400 hp/s which is pretty amazing as a standalone heal. However, this synergizes really well with our other sources of healing, namely shout heals.

I don’t think you know what synergize means. Healing signet has 0 synergy with shout heals. None.

Sampo.9678:

Almost perma regeneration on all allies that heal for 350-400 a tick.
And the instant heals heal for a huge load too.
And lots of boons from shouts and virtues

It would take 2160 heal power to get 400/tick regen.

I would hardly call a couple thousand (10% of a warrior’s hp) a “huge load”, not to mention those heals are on longish cooldowns. Our best heal (on dodge) has a pitifully small range, like 2-300.

The boons are nice, but you can get those with more offensive specs as well and only one of them (might) increases damage output.

GW2 game design is built around dodging for defense. Thus defensive stats are basically useless. Heal power scales horribly (it scales great…on skills that heal for nothing to begin with…yay 500% of crakitten till crap).

This game would be better off if they only offered berserker gear and scrapped all the rest of it. Imagine all the grief and elitism it would eliminate.

Zerker is the only viable gear set. Great game design, huh?

Go zerk or go home is how GW2 plays. They honestly would probably make a lot of people happier if there was only one type of gear (zerkers) rather than a 15 different useless gear sets that just lead noobs into thinking they can play a role that they actually can’t.

TheMaskedParadigm.3629:

bunnyandbear.5734:

Yes this happened to us the other night in AC. We killed the last boss, guy ran over and got chest and then left so it kicked everyone out and then the kittenbag logged out so when I went to talk to him about it he was offline. Fix this kitten now!

The only chest near the end of AC is the one you get for completing the event before Ghost Eater. You can get that chest before even interacting with the last boss. If you did path 2 and didn’t get that chest earlier, it’s not really the party leader’s responsibility to make sure everyone has it before he leaves the group. People have other things to do.

He shouldn’t be “leader” then.

This is what happens when you make the defensive stats inferior in scaling/effect relative to offensive stats and make attacks that do so much damage that you die regardless of your stats unless you dodge. You don’t need defensive stats to dodge.

1000 power = 100% increase in damage
1000 toughness = ~33% less damage taken, and only from non-condition sources
1000 heal power = ~10% increase in healing, varies widely based on skills

BurrTheKing.8571:

they made toughness only useful up to a point, you see diminishing returns before long.

When will people stop with this ignorance?

Olba.5376:

1. Ok, that’s nuts. When are you people going to get it through your skulls that Warriors should not have Protection?

Because you say so? Ok…

Akkuma.2501:

Defektive.7283:

JonPeters.5630:

The heal sig is a typo. The numbers are correct but it should say per second. Yes, that is correct, 392 health per second.

Oh.
Snap.

392/sec is pretty gd strong!

Time to re-awaken the shout/banner bunker warrior, 1600hp every 3s (w/Adrenal Health), and more from either shouts or banners. You could probably convert the cc warrior build into a very similar build, but more of a bunker.

Except you can go full zerker and still get 1200hp every 3s.

Leo G.4501:

Also possible people have wised up and geared for +condition duration since it directly counters -condition duration. Metas will be metas…

Since when was 5000% +condition duration available? That’s what you’d need to counter 98% -duration. Should be obvious how broken additive stacking is…l2gamemechanics ArenaNet kitten .

The cooler and better any new warrior skills might be, the cooler and better the skills other classes are going to get. Prepare for continued complaining.

Safer is irrelevant. This has been proven by the abundant use of berserker gear. So essentially you’re limiting ranged players to doing less damage with no real advantage.

Range doing less damage might be a valid argument if, for example, melee died frequently and were forced to use soldier gear while ranged could sport berserker.

Bismuth.3165:

Whatever the new dungeon is, it’s going to be a level 70+ dungeon, because 60 tokens of that dungeon = 2 rares, thus globs of ectoplasms

I’m surprised no one else has brought this up. Seems to be a major factor to me.

Bash.7291:

Yaki.9563:

Christos de Soufre.3802:

At 60% boon duration, staff #3 alone can give you permaswiftness.

True story.

Incorrect.

12.8 swiftness duration, 12 second recharge time with two hand mastery… granted he missed the point about needing THM… but yeah, corrrect.

You forgot about the up to 1s of swiftness you don’t have while waiting for the pulse. Not to mention it’s completely artificial because you need to time it so you not only run over the symbol right when your swiftness runs out but you don’t accidentally run completely through it without getting a pulse.

So no, staff doesn’t give you permanent swiftness even if you have 50000000000% boon duration.

Bash.7291:

Yaki.9563:

It’s impossible to hit those two skills at the exact moment they come off cooldown even the tiniest delay means you will lose swiftness uptime. That’s why I said 70%. Even then, you are constantly having to monitor those 2 skills which is a seriously crappy quality of life issue.

Oh no! .25 seconds of not having swiftness!!! The world will end because you failed to keep it exactly 100% up all the time! seriously, if you can keep it up pretty much 99.9999999% of the time, its perma.

.25 seconds every 48s is only 99.5% of the time. So I guess it’s not perma.

And don’t forget, you need to spam the heck out of that stuff because if you aren’t paying attention to the exact cooldown you’re going to get far more than 0.25s of no swiftness. In addition, entering a fight with two of your skills on cooldown to maintain this “permanent” swiftness seems a good way to suck.

Brutaly.6257:

Yaki.9563:

It irritates me when people say that Guardian has permanent swiftness. The only way this is possible is if you go 70%+ boon duration and use Save Yourselves and Retreat, spamming them as soon as they come off cooldown. That’s very limiting.

with 60% boon duration i have 48s duration, and 48s cd on SY and retereat. If you go with staff you have about 6-7 minutes of 100% uptime on swiftness for the entire team. After that you need to take a break for like 10s.

It’s impossible to hit those two skills at the exact moment they come off cooldown even the tiniest delay means you will lose swiftness uptime. That’s why I said 70%. Even then, you are constantly having to monitor those 2 skills which is a seriously crappy quality of life issue.

Staff doesn’t provide permanent swiftness even with 300% boon duration because it doesn’t even overwrite itself. Say you run over the symbol with 1s duration remaining, now you have 2s after you leave symbol. That doesn’t work well. Or you could wait till your duration runs out before running over it, then that’s not 100% uptime either. And good luck coordinating that with a group trying to run over it, especially with the known issue of missing pulses.

You need 10 points in virtues and 10 points in honor to achieve it, the rest is runes and food.

That’s a lot to give up. No soldier’s runes, no melandru runes, etc. Same with food, there are better choices for unless you’re specifically going for some kind of boon duration/support build.

A warrior has to sacrifice more then that tbh. 30 points in boonduration and an additional 20 points, if memory serves me right, to get decreased cd on signets. And its not teamwide.

Warhorn gives 10s swiftness with 20s cooldown. You don’t need any boon duration at all to combine this with elite signet for permanent swiftness. With the warhorn trait reducing cooldown to 16s, the same trait line giving 30% boon duration means you only need to find another ~40% boon duration to give your entire group actual (not fake like staff) permanent swiftness (and this isn’t even counting your own personal swiftness from the signet…you end up with swiftness duration in minutes+). Though for warriors, boon duration runes and food are not really ideal for any build. But still, this stacks fully with other swiftness boons (unlike staff) so it’s vastly more useful in practice.

Christos de Soufre.3802:

At 60% boon duration, staff #3 alone can give you permaswiftness.

True story.

Incorrect.

It irritates me when people say that Guardian has permanent swiftness. The only way this is possible is if you go 70%+ boon duration and use Save Yourselves and Retreat, spamming them as soon as they come off cooldown. That’s very limiting.

Olba.5376:

Yaki.9563:

I wonder what kind of drivel was going through their heads when they decided to stack duration reduction additively. Some people just can’t reason logically and unfortunately the devs are among them.

I would imagine that it mostly has to do with the fact that making it multiplicative would favor -duration% over +duration% massively.

You don’t understand what multiplicative stacking means.

40% food, 25% runes duration reduction:

Additive: 1 – (0.4 + 0.25) = 0.35 so a 65% reduction
Multiplicative: (1 – 0.4)(1 – 0.25) = 0.45 equals 55% reduction

Lets take it to extremes (unfortunately available in the game):
40% food, 25% runes, 33% trait duration reduction:

Additive: 1 – (0.4 + 0.25 + 0.33) = 0.02 so a 98% reduction
Multiplicative: (1 – 0.4)(1 – 0.25)(1 – 0.33) = 0.30 so a 70% reduction

Clearly additive is far, far, far more powerful as the sum approaches 100%. A 98% reduction is the counter to a 4900% increase, while a 70% reduction is the counter to a 233% increase.

Multiplicative scaling means that they can balance duration increase and decrease relative to each other without any worry about the interaction between multiple sources. This cannot be done with additive scaling, which is why it is a total rookie/idiot/ignoramus programming decision.

Broadicea.8294:

lunyboy.8672:

colesy.8490:

….
And this discrimination is easily remedied if you just roll a warrior or mesmer.
….

Totally putting this in my signature, and quoting you.

Unless you are serious? Wait… this is a troll, right?

If you want to play basketball at the gym and it says “ATHLETIC SHOES REQUIRED” then you put on the your kittening sneakers and go play, you don’t post a million posts in the forums whining about how they won’t let you on the court in sandals

So if you’re designing a recreational facility for your clients and 75% of them only wear sandals, you create a gym that requires sneakers? Or wait, did I miss something and it says at character creation for any non-warrior, non-mesmer class: “NOT ALLOWED IN DUNGEONS”.

rogerwilko.6895:

Drakkon.4782:

Why is there an external site and not a game-integrated tool?

Because the “game-integrated tool” is proving a major challenge for AN.
Similar to a smart TP search algorithm/sorting mechanic and similar to a smart forum search option.

IMO.

The website has a smart TP search algorithm and sorting mechanic? Looks like a simple list to me…

Since when did LFG tool become synonymous with WoW’s LFD tool?

Syn Sity.5826:

Tries once and fails > impossible.

It sounds like he tried about 20 times, given that he was in there for hours.

Dungeons in this game have a horrible risk : reward ratio. Sure, once you know them they aren’t that difficult but even then the reward is so lackluster that you wonder why you even bother. Hence why so many people cluster at just 1 or 2 paths of the 30 or so dungeons paths available.

Good news is you don’t need to bother with dungeons at all. Well I guess that’s good news if you like just sitting around twiddling your thumbs because you “won” the game (given that there’s no progression).

If anything needs to be nerfed it’s protection.

I wonder what kind of drivel was going through their heads when they decided to stack duration reduction additively. Some people just can’t reason logically and unfortunately the devs are among them.

What else is there besides Berserker gear?

I can’t believe duration reduction stacking hasn’t been changed yet. I’d have thought even a 10 year old would be smart enough not to program it that way. Guess not.

Probably the most entertaining GW2 video I’ve seen. It just makes me sad how awesome GS is relative to our other weapons.