Guild Wars 2

There’s generally an announcement about a week prior to the cost going above 1 ticket as well. So if you’re concerned about not being able to get the weapons at the 1 ticket price, I would just make sure to keep an eye on news bulletins so that you’ll be informed about when the ticket price will be going up.

I can’t recall exactly how long the 1 ticket period was for the previous weapons, but I think it’s somewhere around a month.

Aeolus.3615:

they are to easy to kite :I i bet less than half would hit target with speed trait or less…

That’s why you take hammer and scepter XD

There’s only so much room to move around on a PvP node before you let the spirit weapon guardian decap it.

Holl.3109:

Nope, i’m experiencing it too for a while. There are 2 situations when it happens:
1. When you drop a trap and swap weapons before you get the stealth, you wont get either of the super speed/stealth.
2. randomly, like you said, you drop it and just keep walking but nothing happens (happens about 1-5% of the time i think)

Anet needs to fix these asap.

I’ll try and see if I can replicate it via weapon swapping when I next run the build. From my recollection, it seemed to be happening even when I didn’t swap weapons though.

I think it may also have something to do with dropping the trap right on top of enemies. Perhaps the trap “triggers” before it is “set”, so because the trap was never “set” you don’t get the stealth or super speed. However, I don’t seem to be able to get this to happen consistently.

At least I know I’m not alone.

I wouldn’t say it’s the best roaming build out there, but it can be quite effective, and is fun to play.

The primary weaknesses are the absence of reliable condition clearing and complete lack of a stun break or stability. In particular, if you get stun locked or perma immobed, you have no real escape options other than hoping you are somehow able to get a trap down to enter stealth, or you get a lucky empathic bond proc that manages to get rid of the immob.

In some situations, I think you may be better off using only two traps and slotting something like lightning reflexes. Healing spring is also a potential possibility, but difficult to utilize properly in roaming.

In any case, I like gimmick builds as much as the next guy, and it’s nice to see that these trap builds are quite functional in a roaming context. Now if only thief trap builds could be as good…

EDIT: I saw in your video you threw down that one trap and got no super speed or stealth. I’ve had that issue as well, but I don’t know what causes it. Glad to see it doesn’t only happen to me.

Tseikk.9032:

I take it you missed the part about cleansing? Swapping foods to fit the situation? That’s the l2p part.

Don’t want to spend the gold for 40%? There is 36% for less.

How is it an exploit when conds get shrugged off like they are nothing from aoe cleanses anyways? o.O

You make it sound like WvW has a cond meta when it’s a power meta and always has been.

Contrary to popular belief, WvW isn’t all about zerging though. There’s just as many people who only run with smaller groups or solo roam as there are people who only play WvW on raid night with their guilds. With the new borderlands in HoT, they are actively trying to incentivize people to not go around in a blob everywhere, and maintain smaller groups to handle secondary objectives. So while the profound effects of some of the food buffs may be minimized in very large scale combat, that’s not at all the case when you’re dealing with smaller groups or roamers.

Other than that, there’s just nonsensical stat choices among the foods. Again, compare fancy truffle burger to rare veggie pizza. If anything, the condition duration magnitudes should be exchanged. That would make much more logical sense. I’m not sure it’s even possible to construct an valid argument as to why fancy truffle burger and rare veggie pizza are currently balanced.

I’m not advocating food be removed, but they all the food items need a balance pass, particularly the outliers like the +/-% condition duration stuff.

I knew a guy that knew a guy that learned the actual answer to this question. He was gonna log on one night to tell the guy I knew, but then he mysteriously disappeared. His account seems to be terminated, email address is invalid, and no one ever heard from him again.

All I’ll say is, some things are perhaps better left unknown.

I like this idea of a “spirit weapon” supply drop. Summons all four of the spirit weapons for you.

And then you could also have your other three spirit weapons out for a total of seven spirit weapons out at a time.

And then you could have a PvP team of 5 guardians for a total of 35 spirit weapons on a point.

Ah, the possibilities…

I’ve heard people complain about the female animation too. They’re just thrusting their chest out in the air for no reason. Though I too prefer it to the male animation.

Honestly, I’d rather have the charr animation. They stand up straight with their staff in front of them while they channel empower. Then it ends with a bit of a flourish.

Or maybe they could give humans/norn/sylvari the asura’s pole dance animation…

Consecrations are unfortunately not that good for roaming most of the time, save perhaps purging flames. They’re definitely tailored more towards sPvP or zerging. Spirit weapons have a similar problem. Much more useful in sPvP than they are in a roaming situation. For either of these, you need to really force your opponent to stay in the area to maximize their usefulness, but roaming (and WvW in general) has such highly mobile combat that it maxes them tough to use effectively. Not to mention you never know when a group is gonna come around the corner and attack you.

I’ve tried making a signet build before… let’s just say I scrapped that quickly. Those things need some serious love.

That just leaves us with meditations and shouts, of which the former is generally more preferable (aside from litany of wrath, which is mostly bad). They’re much easier to utilize given the mobile nature of the combat (all are instant cast), and they provide some of the best stun breakers, stability, and condition clears that the guardian has.

I don’t really see this changing until they make further balance adjustments in the game. The specialization stuff in HoT will of course bring in some new stuff, but that’s still a ways off.

EDIT: For reference, I think my signet build was something like this… http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQNAsdRl0ApQoNCxSI8DRR8QlZK+iWfCvQKUVAgVSA-T1SBAB3p+DXKJqTfDDPAAzUCGxhA4KlZdpUY79H04EAAwRAgUARsMC-w

Like I implied, it’s crap.

Make peace, not war.

/hippie

I thought this thread was gonna be about people popping signet of might for no reason.

Orpheal.8263:

And if Anet insists on keeping Food and potions for WvW, then they should at least introduce WVW SPECIAL FOOD & POTIONS, which should be the only food and potions useable in WvW which everyone should be able to buy in WvW from Badges of Honor for example simply, putting in Starter Zones somewhere a new War Chef NPC which sells then there Buff Food and Potions for the WvW currency that would be the only additional buff stuff in WvW that would be allowed then there.

This is not a bad alternative idea, and would definitely open it up to much better balancing.

However, this change would still completely kill nearly all other applications of non-WvW specific foods in the game, which I don’t feel is a good thing.

As far as zerging goes, while it’s true that that may trivialize the use of the powerful foods (i.e. some dude running with +40% condi duration won’t do much to a zerg on their own). However, in the new borderlands coming with HoT, they’re actively trying to incentivize people to not run around in a single blob. If this works out, food buffs will have a much stronger presence since you average battle in those borderlands will be smaller scale, and the food buffs more significant (particularly the condi ones).

Broom.2561:

Yamsandjams.3267:

Broom.2561:

You REALLY need to look up what those numbers actually mean. I’ve been PVPing (world PVP, wargame PVP) for over a decade, with a ping of over 200, and have always been completely OK. You only start to get issues at pings over 400-500 or so.

A ping of 200 is still not ideal. Assuming the game is running at 60 FPS, that’s a 12 frame delay, which can be quite significant for fast paced combat like in GW2. When you need to react to abilities with a 0.5s or lower cast time, or activate something like a stun breaker at the right time, it’s much harder to pull off. It also exacerbates things like the “desyncing” issues, such as when someone appears to fall off a ledge on your screen, although the game actually doesn’t consider them to have fallen off the ledge, and you see them magically appear again on top of the ledge.

The human eye is only able to see a limited number of frames per second. A higher framerate may mean a smoother visual experience, but you are not missing information needed for a timely reaction. And 200 miliseconds is still a REALLY REALLY short time.

You are missing information for a timely reaction. Yes, 200 milliseconds is a really short time, but so is a skill with a 250-500 millisecond cast time. Think about it. If a thief uses cloak and dagger (500 millisecond cast time) and you have a 200 millisecond delay, you now effectively have 300 milliseconds to react to it. The server isn’t going to delay events in the game to wait for compensate for the latency with your connection. It’s not that it’s impossible to react to, but it’s you need to be that much quicker than the next guy.

Compare it to someone with 100 ms latency. They would effectively have 400 ms to react to a CnD, meaning their reactions can be 25% slower than the guy with 200 ms.

It can also result in things like being hit out of the beginning of your dodges. With a latency around 200 ms, you would have to make sure to dodge preemptively. If you didn’t the game can end up considering that you were hit before you dodged, thus producing the visual dissonance on your end where you are hit out of the beginning of your dodge animation. This makes it much easier for your opponent to bait you into dodging (provided they don’t have equally bad latency), and makes it that much harder to react to the visual combat cues the game is based around.

Granted, GW2 is not as sensitive as something like a fighting game as far as latency is concerned. It can be very possible to get used to a higher latency, so long as it’s consistent. But concluding that a latency of 200 ms is not a real issue in a game that requires actions and timing on the order of 200 ms does not seem reasonable to me.

I think it’s important to keep the food buffs in. WvW is a more laissez faire style of game, where things do not necessarily need to be even and “fair” between the players.

sPvP is a very sterile environment, where people do not need to level characters, and everyone has the same access to gear. They’ve even made it so that you can’t mix-and-match gear stats and rune combinations to reduce the amount of min-maxing that is possible.

While I think that is good for sPvP, it doesn’t fulfill a certain niche that people can want in a competitive environment. People in WvW need to level their characters, and invest in their gear. It means that people will need to build up their characters in order to be good/useful in WvW rather than just being that way right off the bat. This already makes it fundamentally different from sPvP.

Furthermore, WvW already has the concept of extra buffs built into it. Guilds can activate certain buffs to give players bonuses when in the vicinity of certain capture points, and your overall point score earns you world bonuses that can give you a boost as well.

As such, given that WvW already has these aspects built into it, I think it’s a very fitting place to allow food buffs to be used in a competitive setting.

If they cut the food out of WvW, it would largely cut it out of the game as a whole. It’s generally unnecessary for PvE as the cost-benefit ration for obtaining and using food is generally not favourable for things like dungeon farming. The only real use of it in PvE is to level up faster, or for special niche scenarios.

IMO, the main thing that needs tweaking with the food is that certain foods need to be toned down. In particular, the foods that boost or lower condition durations are so blatantly more powerful than any other food in the game. This makes it so that other people are more-or-less forced to run the counterpart food if they want to keep their opponent from having too high a competitive advantage over them, which I don’t think is a good thing. The foods should provide a notable boost in power, but not to level of what the +/- condition duration foods are doing.

Furthermore, the sheer power of those foods make it so that all other foods are essentially trash. Why get +100 toughness when you can be virtually immune to any form of movement impairing effects? Or why get +100 condition damage when you can significantly improve the duration on every condition you have?

Not only that, but compare the following two foods: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Fancy_Truffle_Burger vs. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rare_Veggie_Pizza. Why would I ever use the fancy truffle burger? +15% poison duration is obviously completely and drastically inferior to +40% condition duration. I guess the +3% crit chance from the 70 precision vs. 70 condition damage somehow is supposed to make up for it……? No, not at all. The rare veggie pizza is simply a waaaaaaaaay better food, so fancy truffle burger is essentially garbage.

If you look at the way they do condition duration on the runes, the foods should follow that. For instance, compare the following runes: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Superior_Rune_of_the_Nightmare vs. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Superior_Rune_of_the_Krait. The former gives +15% duration to all conditions, while the latter gives +45% duration to bleeding only. If the runes of nightmare gave +45% to all conditions, it would be a vastly superior rune to the krait runes (at least as far as condition duration goes). So the reason this is not the case is to help balance out the runes.

Similarly, a food like the fancy truffle burger should have +40% poison duration instead of +15%, and the rare veggie pizza should have +15% condition duration instead of +40% (I would opt for +10%, personally).

Then there’s really bizarre foods, such as http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bowl_of_Fire_Veggie_Chili. This food is so grossly underpowered, it might as well be deleted from the game. Why would I ever want to use this? It needs to be made more powerful to at least be a legitimate choice between other foods. But instead of rebalancing it, they made another level 80 food, http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Plate_of_Roasted_Cactus, which is completely superior for no good reason.

There’s perhaps some other potentially powerful foods as well, such as the seaweed salad (10% damage while moving) and the orrian truffle and meat stew (40% passive endurance regeneration), but the pizzas and poultry soups have been outliers as far as power goes for a long time now.

So rather than see food completely removed from WvW (and consequently the game at large), they just need to give a well-needed balance adjustment so that the consumables aren’t so powerful. I do think they should still provide a significant bonus, but the outliers are doing way beyond that at the moment.

In the worst case, you can just run out the south exit (or north exit even) of Lion’s Arch and take about 2 minutes to get to some ore, trees, or harvestable plants.

Although 10 is a little bit of a weird number seeing as the standard gathering amount is 3 per node. 15 would definitely make more sense to me.

Broom.2561:

You REALLY need to look up what those numbers actually mean. I’ve been PVPing (world PVP, wargame PVP) for over a decade, with a ping of over 200, and have always been completely OK. You only start to get issues at pings over 400-500 or so.

A ping of 200 is still not ideal. Assuming the game is running at 60 FPS, that’s a 12 frame delay, which can be quite significant for fast paced combat like in GW2. When you need to react to abilities with a 0.5s or lower cast time, or activate something like a stun breaker at the right time, it’s much harder to pull off. It also exacerbates things like the “desyncing” issues, such as when someone appears to fall off a ledge on your screen, although the game actually doesn’t consider them to have fallen off the ledge, and you see them magically appear again on top of the ledge.

As stated though, OP, they can’t just “fix” the ping as it’s not something they have direct control over. You could see if it’s possible to upgrade the quality of your Internet connection, but other than that the only real way to make it better is to relocate to a region that can maintain the connection with lower latency. Either that, or they would have to open a new set of servers that would serve your region specifically, though I don’t think that’s in the cards.

Well I didn’t want to post a thread in the bug forum since I have no reproduction conditions, so I’d just thought I’d make an inquiry with other people.

Does anyone else have issues with the trapper runes not activating the stealth and super speed on trap use? I have it happen a number of times where I’ll throw down a trap, it goes on cooldown and everything, but it just doesn’t grant me any stealth or super speed.

I’ve only noticed it in WvW (haven’t played the build in PvE, no trapper runes in PvP), and only while in combat. And no, it’s not that I’m being revealed by a lingering damage tick as I’m neither stealthed nor revealed, and it should still give me the super speed regardless of whether or not I become revealed right away. It’s happen both when dropping the trap on top of enemies or when throwing it up on a wall or space nearby.

In any case, it doesn’t happen too frequently, but I have no idea why it’s not working like it should be.

So yeah, is this a known issue that I’ve just failed to find information on? I’ve never heard anyone talking about it before.

Apparently you are not supposed to report them frequently either, or else you are at vault for abusing the reporting system.

I have always wondered why there was no “hacking/exploiting” report option, since that is distinguishable from “botting”.

Someone listed one of the GMs that you’re apparently supposed to mail about hackers (I have no idea where this is officially stated) in this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Speed-hack-becoming-a-problem/first#post4854372. So you could perhaps try mailing that person with every instance of hacking you see.

If you want to attack clumps like that, you’re generally much better off using grenades or something like the flamethrower. Or bombs if you want to be right in melee. Coated bullets has it’s place, but it doesn’t fit well in the current PvE environment.

The best use I’ve had out of it is in WvW. However, you’re generally going with a condi or hybrid based spec in that case. I usually run something along the lines of http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdEQJAqalcTp6qlcx+KseNCbBByNECRfko8kPGxAA-TFyCABA8gAsU9HsUidxJEIP9EJqEMLlH6t/AhAWsGA-w.

Of course, it might be better to drop coated bullets in favour of speedy kits in some instances as swiftness is the only real mobility such a build has.

Lahrun.3704:

Hey Yam,

A dev recently posted a little way to “update” all of your “old” boosters and whatnot. Withdraw everything from your bank or wherever it is and either change maps or logout. This should fix the problem. I’d recommend doing this for all of your boosters, BLC items, etc. that are account bound, just in case, to update them all. Hope this helps!

Tried map swapping with the boosters in my inventory, and it allowed me to stack them all properly. So that’s that sorted out.

However, I’ve tried both map swapping and logging out, but the issue with the experience scrolls was only partially fixed. In my bank, I had a 3 stacks of experience scrolls, one with 5, one with 8, and the single one I got from my first year birthday gift, none of which will stack with each other. After performing the map swap, the single one stacked with the stack of 5, making a stack of 6. However, the new stack of 6 will not stack with the previous stack of 8. So now I still have two stacks that won’t stack despite any logging out or map swapping I’m doing.

In any case, although this workaround will apparently solve, or at least partially solve, the issue, it’s still a bug that needs to be looked at. The items should simply stack with each other, whether or not they are “old” or “new” boosters or experience scrolls.

EDIT: A side note – The experience scroll stacks used to be of two different varieties. One stack used to be “Account Bound” while the other was “Account Bound on Acquire”. However, they are both now “Account Bound” (not sure when that changed), but they still won’t stack with each other.

Also, if I link them in the chat window, both stacks are listed as “Account Bound on Acquire” in the chat link instead of “Account Bound” that the tooltip normally shows in the inventory when mousing over them.

Kain Francois.4328:

Skill #3 (Immobilize) is pretty great. But Skill #2 (weak channeled heal) is pretty dang useless in my opinion. Where is it useful? I haven’t found its any usefulness in PvE.

That particular skill isn’t that useful in PvE since PvE is all about killing things ASAP.

However, it is useful in situations in PvP and WvW. The main situation I use it in is when I want to attack the opponent but not be in melee range, or I need to back away for a bit. The way the ability works, you can turn around and run away from an opponent during the channel time, so it’s useful for kiting and dealing damage while healing at the same time.

I just received a first year birthday present for one of my characters. It contained an experience scroll and a birthday booster.

The issue is that none of these will stack with previous experience scrolls and birthday boosters that I’ve received.

According to the wiki, there are 3 variants of the experience scrolls, which will not stack with each other. Each has their own item code (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Experience_Scroll). Why they are set up this way is beyond me, but it would be nice if they could be stacked.

What’s even more odd is that the birthday booster I got with this gift will not stack with other birthday boosters that I currently possess. I could not find any references of this on the wiki or otherwise, and I have never had a problem with birthday boosters stacking before, regardless of whether they were from the first or second birthday gift. It seems to me like they should simply stack.

EDIT: Coincidentally, I also just received a second year birthday present on another one of my characters. The birthday booster contained in this present stacked with the existing birthday boosters I already had. However, the single birthday booster from the first year birthday gift still refuses to stack with the rest of them.

I, too, am confused as to why it didn’t get the 3 stack treatment, similar to something like plague form. Lich form I can understand because that thing can pop out insane damage, but tornado is often an “I give up” ability that doesn’t help you do too much.

Yeah, if there’s a particular type of dyes you want from those gem store sets, you’re better off converting the cost in gems to gold and buying the dye right off the TP instead of buying the dye packs and trying your luck.

The main reason they do them this way is so that the supply and prices can’t be manipulated as easily. If you could straight up buy a single shadow dye for a sum of gems, it would dictate the price on the TP (until it goes unavailable). Having this random thing makes it so that the supply is more variable, and consequently the price is as well.

Of course it really sucks if you just want to have the dye to use and not play “Guild Wars 2 – Trading Post Edition”. Like I said, just convert the gems you otherwise would’ve spent on the dye packs into gold to buy the actual dye(s) from the TP.

It will be a bit odd. We haven’t seen a hammer on a non-heavy armour profession. Given that the heavy armours are mostly metallic, the metallic sheen added by Juggernaut sort of fits with those. But I’m not really sure how it will turn out with medium armour. It might just make it look all metallic.

In any case, I at least hope they add some legendary weapon effects to the skills. Poor shield still has zero love, even though they did a bunch of updates for the other ones.

OP, did you try the suggestions found here?: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/PC-FPS-and-Performance-based-issues/first#post338300

I have a i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz and a GTX 770, and I used to get some problems with framerates in general play unless certain settings were toned down.

However, after I followed the suggestions in the thread I linked, I noticed immediate FPS improvements in all areas of the game while running on maximum settings (the suggestions say to use no reflections and native sampling, but I set both those to max and still have good framerates). I do still notice dips into the mid 40s in large scale events (i.e. Teq raid), and massive WvW zerging is usually not feasible on maximum settings. But I’ve been able to maintain a very consistent 60 FPS in areas like dry top and the silverwastes.

However, I do still like to turn the settings down in large scale stuff, just so I can keep nice framerates. The only place it will consistently drop is in WvW during large zerg stuff.

Well, the mes shield could perhaps have more offensively oriented abilities, so it’d be easier to work on your shield master achievement.

Yeah this dolyak defence buff will be really great. Escorting dolyaks is generally a thankless and boring job, but this buff will give a small sense of purpose for the people doing it.

Should also heavily quell or fully eliminate yak divers. I can’t count how many times a warrior comes up, pops everything to go fully immune, and just kills the yak in 5 seconds before using the greatsword to run away. Thieves can just CnD chain off one until it’s dead as well. Any spike build can usually get it down in a few seconds too. But this defensive buff will perhaps fill a bit of a niche for tankier builds, who can stay with the yak, avoid getting bursted down, and in turn keep the yak up while the guards help hurt the attacker.

Victory or Death, the final story instance where you have to do Arah.

Another flaw in the personal story design, you can do everything yourself but then need a party of players to do the very last part.

Although it should be possible to do VoD with just 3 people, though it’d be more of a slog.

I always felt it was a bad idea to let people do explorable mode of dungeons without first completing the story mode, but I believe I’m in the minority with that opinion.

I’m not sure why it wasn’t at least 8 stacks. It just seems a bit odd that they’d give it the same amount of stacks as SYG, when the latter is an AoE ability on a lower cooldown.

I’d still let it have less than dolyak signet since dolyak signet has a longer cooldown and doesn’t give swiftness… so keep dolyak signet at 10 stacks and boost balanced stance to 8.

Ohhh, no no no no. If you want this thing instant cast, it’s not going to jump the queue ahead of litany of wrath. I swear, if they made defiant stance instant cast and left litany of wrath as is… well, I’d probably jab a fork in my eye.

So my advice is to advocate for litany of wrath to be instant cast, and if that works out then work on advocating defiant stance to be instant cast.

Of course the one issue with having defiant stance instant cast is that you could use it while CC’d, unless they specifically set it so that you couldn’t. Litany of wrath doesn’t really have that issue since you need to be hitting stuff to benefit from the heal, which won’t happen if you’re CC’d.

Saiyan.1704:

Yea SYG is about as good as “Retreat” in terms of utility now… a single dose of Stability simply sucks against any type of hard CC team. Necro’s and Engi’s are even more powerful

Although if they blow all their CCs knocking down your stacks, they won’t have them for when the stacks are gone. In small scale fights (i.e. sPvP), it still seems to be much better to either strip the stability or wait for it to go away. Even an engineer has limited CC, it doesn’t make sense to dump 5 of them to strip off SYG, especially since the time required to do that would likely take as long or longer than the duration of the stability in the first place.

Aside from the skills that got pulsing stability, it seems to me the stability stacks really only affect WvW. I guess the things that got stuck at a single stack might be worse off in sPvP, but those are generally short duration stabilities anyways.

I feel it should keep the same duration, but be boosted up to at least 5 stacks. Or maybe 4? I think 3 stacks is sufficient for general usage, but given that you need to burn one for overcharged shot and the fact that they’ll disappear fast in WvW group fights, it could use a bit of a boost.

I suppose they want to ensure it’s not as powerful as something like SYG, although it inherently isn’t due to it having a much smaller AoE radius and a cast time.

Given that the revenant hammer is a ranged weapon, I’m quite sure the guardian longbow will be a melee weapon.

Ragnarox.9601:

where did you saw guardian wear the longbow? you mean looking at that guyy with longbow and aegis effect that he got from retreat buff? srry no longbow confirmed yet.

There’s a charr that rolls away from the golem, and an effect that looks very much like selfless daring procs on him following the dodge roll.

As far as I can tell, no character uses the retreat shout as no one seems to gain aegis during that time.

Maybe the shield will have something similar since, you know, it’s a shield… but we’ll see.

In any case, I don’t think it was nice to get rid of echo. There’s some cool things they could do with that, but they just never did. Not that they’d be that easy to implement, mind you, but there’s way more interesting ways they could’ve changed mimic.

As much as I didn’t like the old mimic (though I used it occasionally), the new mimic is even worse.

Dasenthal.6520:

You can choose not to do dungeons if you go through Spvp… But yea, this change effectively removes WvW from making a legendary.

They still need a gift of battle, which for people who detest WvW is apparently a real chore.

sPvP gets screwed more than anything. Even if you’re a pure sPvP player, you have to do the other two formats for sure. At least if you’re a pure PvE or WvW player, you only have to do one of the other ones.

They always kept the WvW map completion in there to encourage people to play all formats (though sPvP was never made a requirement), but the fact that they’re finally shying away from this will hopefully open the doors to legendary requirements being achievable from any one of the game formats. This would help people play the game how they want without barring them from being able to achieve a legendary weapon.

The primary issue in doing that is making sure that each format takes approximately equal effort. As such, a WvW player should need to put in about as much time, money, and effort to get a legendary exclusively in WvW as someone in PvE would. At least, that would be the case if they wanted to be fair.

I think it would also add to the system if playing all the formats would make it easier to get a legendary than someone playing only one format, though it would still be possible in either case.

I think it’s a good direction to go in, but there’s a ton of details that would have to be figured out. It’s surely not a change that can just be slapped in.

It still baffles me why this hasn’t been changed.

The funny thing is that this was less of an issue before the transmutation changes came in. Back then, you could swap the rune over to a new item via the transmutation process.

But with the “better” changes, I’ve had to simply toss away numerous exotic-grade items with runes intact because I had the audacity to purchase them from the WvW vendor (which never tells you they aren’t salvageable).

Well, hopefully it’ll come around later than never.

johnno.7543:

So am I reading this right this map is completely replacing the old BL maps? So no option for ppl who end up not liking the new map to play on the BLs we use now? Sooooo if this map flops and people dont like it the only map people who enjoy open field fights and dont want siege interference or pve stuff going on will be EB?

I was for this map as a cool thing to try out but replacing the current BLs completely is a huge risk.

Apparently that was stated during the stream, although I missed that part. I would have to watch the VODs to see what exactly was said.

From what I had understood, they were going to put them on some kind of rotation rather than just a straight up replacement.

In any case, I think that the very competitively-minded people won’t like the new maps that much. These sorts of “bells and whistles” get in the way of “real” competitive gameplay.

It’s kind of like Smash. The “proper” way to play Smash is final destination with no item. If you play on the standard stages with items, they just consider you some kind of casual scrub. Having items and stage elements active introduce mechanics into the game that would inevitably introduce inconsistencies (i.e. player X won that match because they got a good item).

So I think the same sort of mindset will apply to the new borderland maps. The stark asymmetry and numerous mechanics will end up turning them off.

Though personally, I think that stuff looks pretty cool and I’ll probably have fun playing it. Also, I do prefer playing Smash on standard stages with items, it’s much funner that way.

I would suggest sPvP as an alternative to the competitively-minded WvW people, but apparently they don’t like that either. At least they will still have the community run GvGs to participate in, and they can suck up queue space on the new maps when they do it too.

Zarathustra.1458:

Lol, wrong attitude Cae, we need to rise up my mesmer brothers and sisters, rise up and overthrow our warrior-kitten oppressors, all in the name of our survival! WAR is needed, War for the changes that our class is in need of.

I think a better question is why you stopped paying the bills for the Anphillia forums.

The stab changes also fix dagger storm where a thief can’t just pop it for a second and then enjoy the stability while the other transformations always lose their stability when coming out of it.

I have mixed feelings on the potential teleport changes. It will probably sort out thief sword porting across open space, though in a more indirect manner. But it’s just gonna be that much harder to catch people/escape on thieves and medi guardian. I guess maybe from a PvP standpoint it makes better sense, I generally look at it from a WvW perspective since I play that the most.

I don’t feel the stat change is enough without being able to swap sigils too. For certain builds I need certain stats, which a legendary lets me switch. However, I also need certain sigils. If I can’t swap the sigils, than it can be quite suboptimal, much more so than simply getting an exotic weapon with the stats and putting the proper sigils in it.

It’s just odd that they let you customize the base stats but not the sigil. The former seems to imply that it will allow you to use it with multiple builds, but the latter goes against that by limiting the potential usefulness of different builds.

Fortunately the game doesn’t require ascended/legendary level gear to have a competitive build, and it’s usually not too cumbersome/expensive to re-outfit with some exotics.

Tien.3865:

Was there an update I missed that helped boost its popularity?

The original set of nerfs completely killed the build (it was something that needed nerfing though). This was because the entire combo the build relies upon was just not possible anymore.

However, there was a later sigil and rune update that boosted the sigil of paralyzation’s duration up to +30% instead of +15%. With this, it once again became possible to set up the proper skull crack→100b combo. As such, some people started to use skull crack builds again.

They are still not nearly as powerful as their original incarnations, but I think they’re much more balanced in the overall scheme of things. For me, this actually makes them much more fun to play, and they’re also more fun to play against (although I don’t think it’s ever really that fun to eat a full 100b while stunned, but hey).

So in short, they came back to life awhile back, but they’re still fairly uncommon since they aren’t as well rounded and heavily rely on one specific combo to win. It’s a very fun build to play, although it gets much more difficult to pull it off if you choose not to use the holy stance trinity.

I usually use a forceful greatsword variant (more similar to the classic build), but the missile reflection can be really delicious against the right opponent.

You won’t fight off a turret build just by slotting coated bullets. You’re much better off using the grenade or bomb kit to do so. If it comes to needing higher AoE pressure, those two will always win out over coated bullets. This is especially true if you’re running a power based build since the scaling for bombs and greandes will be much better than pistol.

However, coated bullets can be useful depending on the situation. In particular, I find it tends to be more useful in highly mobile situations. This is because it’s tougher to keep the enemies inside your bomb radii, and grenades can be easily avoided without dodging if they’re used from long range.

The most natural area for these situations is WvW. In fact, my goto WvW build utilizes coated bullets with a carrion/rabid mix to hybridize the damage. However, my WvW build also does not utilize bombs or grenades. Thus, coated bullets gives me a way to sort of fill in the gaps.

The other good aspect to coated bullets is that it allows me to keep pressure on a target despite other people in the way. Thus, in a zerg fight, I can constantly target the enemy’s ele even if there’s several people obfuscating them. Similarly, in smaller scale battles, mesmer clones, ranger pets, and necromancer minions won’t get in the way of your shots.

Of course, the rifle can do this by default, so if you only care about the piercing aspect, then you’re probably better off using that.

Turrets, on the other hand, don’t obstruct ranged projectiles, so you don’t need piercing to be able to keep pressure on the engineer. They’ll also tend to keep their turrets spread out around the node (particularly the rifle and rocket turrets), so you’ll not likely be able to attack them all simultaneously via piercing. You’ll need raw AoE, a la bombs and grenades.

So while coated bullets can be quite useful in some circumstances, I don’t forsee it being very useful for fighting turret builds, or really being particularly useful in sPvP in general.

Note that he’s not talking about using the med kit, he’s talking about swapping to it, distributing the dispensibles, and then swapping back to your good healing skill.

I think it tends to be unnecessary in PvE, but when you think about it there’s little reason not to do so. I mean, it’s free stuff, you’re not blowing any cooldowns or anything. You just have to be careful that you don’t accidentally get engaged or something because then you’re stuck with the med kit.

I’ll often do this when the party has stacked up somewhere and we’re waiting on a guy to pull, or there’s some scripted event that has to play out before the boss becomes aggroable. That sort of stuff. If you have enough time, you can actually have 9 bandages and 2 antidotes on the ground, which is actually potent healing if you pick it all up at once.

Even if it’s not needed, it’s just free stuff, so there’s really no reason no to other than not having enough time to properly swap back to your main healing skill.

I do the same thing with flamethrower and toss mine. With flamethrower you can activate the incendiary ammo and then swap back to whatever you were using. This gives you free burning without having to sacrifice anything, so it’s just extra DPS (assuming that the enemy is going to get perma burned already). With toss mine, you can use the mine field tool belt skill in an area. So if you’re stacked up and waiting on a pull, put those mines down and then swap back, then the mobs will hit the mines on their way in. It’s not a butt tonne of extra damage, but it’s free. There’s no point in not using it.

I also do this for blast finishing. I’ll swap to something like elixir gun and flamethrower to get the blasts off, then go back to whatever I was using (assuiming it wasn’t those). Thumper turret is also good for this since the tool belt causes a blast (the rumble skill, not the detonate).

You can even make use of them in WvW. The flamethrower gives you extra burning for an encounter without having to actually have the flamethrower equipped (great for roaming), and swapping to the med kit is a good way to give yourself some swiftness if you’re not running speedy kits for whatever reason. With my full glass s/d build, I like to drop the med kit bandages and stuff off to the side of a supply camp when I go to solo cap it, because I can just go pick them up once I get damaged by the NPCs.

The mine field is also useful to place down for zergs since those things strip boons. That is, if you expect a zerg to move in on your position (especially through a choke), put the mine field down and let it take away some of their boons. It’s AoE boon removal on 5 different mines, so that’s potentially 25 boons stripped since zergs won’t dodge stuff unless someone shouts at them to do so.

Again, just need to be careful that you aren’t put in combat before you swap back.

As long as you aren’t blowing cooldowns on stuff, you can get these sort of extra freebies. It’s not necessary in most situations, but there’s little reason not to.

You don’t gain any increased lateral displacement with a jump dodge. That is, a normal dodge will move you the same distance forward/backwards/sideways as a jump dodge will. So if they only use it to avoid your attack, it doesn’t do anything special.

The only situation it’s really valuable in is if you need to increase the distance you jump, or you need to avoid an attack while also getting over an obstacle.

For instance, if I’m trying to run away from someone in WvW and a log is in my way, I may choose to dodge jump over the log so that I both clear the log and dodge an incoming attack. If I only dodged, I’d run into the log and the enemy would get closer. If I only jumped, I’d clear the log but probably get hit with an attack they just used, which could be a problem.

As for increasing your jump distance, that’s really only useful for clearing certain gaps. Thus it’s only combat application is to gain a particular position under very certain and uncommon circumstances.

For the most part, people only do it because they think it looks cool, and they can “show off” to newer players who maybe don’t know how to do that.

Furthermore, I also suspect people who do it often are using a macro to do so, so if you want you can report them and maybe they’ll get banned. Not that I really think it’s at all a problem, just pointing out that that avenue is available if you want to try and ruin someone’s day.

So in summary, it’s doesn’t provide any particular combat advantage outside of situational circumstances, and it’s generally not worth attempting it because flubbing up the keystrokes can cause you to simply jump instead of dodge.

This could easily be added to quickening thirst to buff it. So not only do you get faster movement speed, you also get faster attack speed.

It could possibly also have mobility options, which is a niche that isn’t really explored much on necro. That is, maybe it has a leaping skill, or some kind of blink. Or perhaps it can administer power-based AoE damage, which the dagger and axe aren’t very capable of doing (i.e. some kind of spinning attack, wide range auto-attack).

So even though it could have lower single-target DPS than the dagger, it might make up for that in an increased ability to hit multiple targets or to make you more mobile.

We’re just gonna have to wait and see though.

Michael Henninger.7451:

psizone.8437:

Jayden Ennok.3687:

Send in game mail to GM Madi Walker.7520

I did that this time though last time I did so I received no reply and people kept seeing the hacker around.

I check them all, but most cheaters don’t cheat 24/7. That said I knock at least one out every day.

So, am I just supposed to not use the built in report feature and mail you instead? Because I will mail you literally 100 times a day to get rid of hackers I see if that’s what it will take.

To my recollection, this isn’t noted anywhere in game, so I don’t know how people are just supposed to know to send you a mail regarding these issues.

That animation should be featured on the warrior’s kill shot ability (with the kneeling down and such).

I think possibly elixir F and super elixir have that animation also, but I’m not 100% sure. Usually moving around whenever I fire that thing. If you stand still, I think it’ll be the same, although obviously with a shorter cast time.

robertul.3679:

Yes the lack of cleave on 3rd hit of the toolkit auto is the exact reason people don’t use the toolkit auto.

I use toolkit auto

I don’t use it commonly, mind you, but depending on the particular build I run, it may be the highest source of sustained direct damage. It also effectively applies perma cripple to an enemy, so it can be great if you need to slow down someone trying to run away if no other means are available. It’s something you can’t do with the bomb kit.

Then there’s the situations where a guardian sits in a wall of reflection, or an ele pops swirling winds. Against an engineer, most will consider this effective invulnerability since the engineer is generally highly reliant on projectiles. But I’ve had eles just go into a small fit of panic when I unexpectedly wade right into their swirling winds and just slap them around with the toolkit. I’ve even had people spend dodges on it.

Even if it had cleave, I don’t think it would change that much. It’s not going to be superior DPS in PvE, where such cleaving would be most useful against stacked mobs. The melee chain is used so uncommonly in PvP and WvW despite the common use of the toolkit, so the cleave would rarely even come into play. Even if someone was using the melee chain, they aren’t going to be doing it in the middle of a zerg, and the battles in PvP are too small scale to really gain the benefit from it.

Technically speaking, we’re supposed to be using it to repair our turrets, but well… you know how that goes. And by that, I mean no one ever does that.

The only real value I’d see it getting from cleave is that it could be used more effectively against builds like minionmancers and rangers. It’s the same reason why they gave a thief’s dagger the two target cleave.