I see now.
Yeah, I’m not sure what they’ll being doing. We’ll be in a bit of a weird transition period where there won’t be mastery points to obtain, so levelling up past 80 could potentially be pointless.
However, that’s not necessarily bad, per se. I mean, it’s not like anything is being lost. It’s not as though you’ll be missing out on mastery points. If you use a level up tome, you’ll still get a spirit shard. From what I understand, level up tomes will just give you a shard and not count towards mastery points at all, even post-HoT, but I could be wrong.
So while it is true that it is “wasted”, nothing actually goes to waste, per se. It’s not like experience is difficult to attain in this game anyways. I could understand if it took and entire week to grind out a level, but you can easily get a level every 10-20 minutes if you want to.
So my guess is that they’ll just leave it in the weird interim state and then implement the mastery stuff when HoT rolls around.
Didn’t the Reaper reveal specifically call out that it was picking up chill effects so you could fear a target while easily keeping in melee with it?
changed the topic to ‘should the change to dash affect fear’
So are you now asking if the change affects fear, or if the change should or shouldn’t have any effect on fear?
In any case, my response in both situations will be “no”.
It won’t have any effect on fear.
This applies to “leap” or “dash” skills. That is, skills that have an animation which involve moving the character. Fearing someone just causes them to run normally, it doesn’t invoke a leap.
For more info on the things it applies to: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Leap
The venom sharing works quite well with arrow carts.
This is basically the same as when warriors used to be able to proc their leg specialist trait off of arrow carts, but they got rid of that. I guess they never bothered to do anything about venoms because of how crappy they’ve been overall and the unpopularity of venom share builds. I don’t really know what triggered this sudden fad (made those 5v30 videos that people keep trying and failing to replicate), but it is definitely something that should be fixed. It’s really just a matter of when it’ll get fixed.
Correct me if I’m wrong but (after patch):
- I’m an Engineer and someone’s applied chilled AND crippled to me. All I need to do is activate super speed + rocket boots LIKE CHILLED AND CRIPPLED NEVER EXISTED ON ME?
It’s not that I don’t understand what you’re saying, but this is a very bad example. Super speed already ignores the effects of cripple and chill, so there’s no change in that regard. Additionally, rocket boots removes cripple, chill, and immobilize, so the only actual change here is that the engineer won’t have the leap reduced if they get crippled or chilled immediately after using rocket boots (that is, during the actual leap), which is a rather uncommon occurrence. In other words, they can already do as you described.
As such, the changes to movement impairing effects do not really matter as far as super speed and rocket boots are concerned.
The super speed → rocket boot combo is being nerfed because the engineer will not be able to propel themselves nearly as far. This means it will actually be harder for an engineer to escape a given situation using super speed and rocket boots than it currently is.
It’s a bit funny also that rocket boots cures movement impairing conditions but is no longer affected by movement impairing conditions.
I suppose it handles the uncommon situation where you get chilled or whatnot just after using the rocket boots, but that’s about the only benefit it gained from this.
Hornet’s sting->monarch’s leap is used more for mobility than actually fighting most of the time, but it can be nice to combo with fire or water fields.
One thing I’ve been screwing around with on my double melee build is using the fact that ML scoots you slight further forward than HS moves you back, as long as the target isn’t selected. You can drop target, HS, ML (hitting the target both times even though it’s not selected) and then weapon swap, hot key select the target, and press 5 which will automatically orient you and land a stun instead of daze with hilt bash. There aren’t a ton of scenarios where you can actually get a stun instead of daze in a 1v1.
I’ve been using it untargeted as well, if for no other reason than to combo fields properly. But you can kind of get a sense for the spacing to be able to still hit your enemy on the leap in. I’ve hit enough random moas running around WvW with it to just have a bit of an intuitive sense for it.
Interesting idea with the GS combo though. I might have to try that out.
I think so, but I’d have to actually test it. Not sure if someone has done that before or not, but they seem about equal from my casual observations.
5 sec evade?
Ok, I’m down for these changes if for no other reason than to see the absolute hilarity that would occur as a result of that.
Think of the salt mountains… glorious.
Also, I’m still convinced thieves will be getting either mace or axe. If they gave them rifle then they might as well delete their p/p set from the game.
its actually .5 evade not 5
Well now I’m not behind these changes at all.
For future reference, you might consider writing it as “0.5”.
As long as I can make a full conjure weapon WvW roaming build that is at least semi-effective, I don’t give a crap about what happens.
Ranger axe has a similar problem. It’s very sluggish when trying to use something like splitblade in some situations since there’s some kind of recovery delay that occurs from the auto-attack. Even things like path of scars can be difficult to combo it with.
I think it’s just something linked to that specific animation. Annoys me all the time on ranger.
5 sec evade?
Ok, I’m down for these changes if for no other reason than to see the absolute hilarity that would occur as a result of that.
Think of the salt mountains… glorious.
Also, I’m still convinced thieves will be getting either mace or axe. If they gave them rifle then they might as well delete their p/p set from the game.
I don’t mean to bad-mouth anyone in saying this, but those revive traits are much less useful for casual players. From what I can tell, those traits only really shine in higher level competitive matches where reviving your ally 0.5 seconds faster can be the difference between a successful and failed team fight. This particularly applies to things like the standard 5v5 PvP format.
In more casually oriented play, people will either simply not die or rally too easily (i.e. PvE), or people simply won’t bother to revive their allies and all and just elect to flail their auto-attack around at the air while their friends are being stomped. In these scenarios, these players would benefit much more from something that doesn’t improve their abilities to revive someone.
I could see them swapping something like the Empowered trait into the minor slot or condensing the two revive-related minor traits into one trait and making a new minor trait. Those traits aren’t inherently useless, but I do agree that they are useless in many situations that players can encounter.
Although personally I’d prefer something other than might on revive, seems a little odd… something like reviving them with more health or letting their death penalty expire faster would be more useful IMO.
You can still benefit from pin down’s immob just as much, and the #3 skill will hit as hard as ever.
Not to mention most people take it for the CI proc anyways, I highly doubt LB will suddenly disappear from builds due to this sole change.
Well, the only reason they function the way they do underwater is that ground targeting generally doesn’t work at all underwater. If it could work underwater somehow, then they probably would’ve made it work like that.
Implementing some form of auto-attack would not upset any balance. I think they may be slightly resistant to do such a thing simply because the grenade toss skill is not meant to be used without ground targeting, so it could easily throw newer players or people who don’t know any better a bit off. Not only that, but the majority of players would not even want to use an auto-attack for grenades since it would be next to useless in any sort of PvP encounter, and it would be harder to hit moving targets in general.
If you get tired of spamming 111111 during such a PvE encounter though, you can always just swap back to your gun and use that. Or maybe elect to use bomb kit if it’s a close range encounter. It’s not like there’s often any shortage of DPS in those fights anyways. Maybe that’s a bit crappy of me to suggest, but I don’t think they want to invest time into doing that for such a small QoL change.
The Mortar kit, F5-toolbelt, and medkit changes should be coming with the specialization implementation changes. If not, then ANet has been sippin’ some crazy Kool-Aid lately.
Hobosacks might be coming with these changes, but I don’t think they’ve said one way or the other yet. That might not make it into the game until HoT.
As if condition grenades wasn’t a thing already…?
In any case, if you want to maximize the effectiveness of that sort of synergy, you’d likely need to invest in explosives and firearms, leaving only one other specialization line open to you (probably tools).
So it’s not like it won’t have to sacrifice some things, but it will definitely give a boost to overall damage output. If nothing else, it’ll make the carrion-based grenade elixir build I use in fractals that much more potent.
My kitless gadget build is crying: http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQFAUnUISfX25FeZBrXGJvgG9RqymD5/6HIDwCA-TVCBABGt/QkKBrRHRXKjwSpjEXQAAOBA4o+TAPIASBExyI-w
In any case, I wonder if this will mean you can actually cause yourself to move slower if you use rocket boots during super speed now. That would be quite hilarious and sad at the same time.
Hobosack goind away in like week sou your OCD can celebrate:-)
A week? o.o Is there a course for that time claim?
Not at all. Some people felt that the announcement of specialization changes coming in the “next update” meant “next week”. However, it seems highly doubtful that that will be the case, and we don’t even know if the hobosack changes are being bundled with those.
I’m still in favour of Swirling Winds being able to destroy siege projectiles again. But, only a 30% chance. Bring alternative (i.e. not just staff) builds for ele back into the WvW meta.
First, no.
Second, the meta would not shift. If you would recall, all that would happen is that eles would swap to their foci to protect siege when needed (i.e. counter the counter trebs/catas), but then they would swap back to their staves when they’re done with that.
As far as the OP is concerned, I’m not too sure that having that sort of play is really necessary. Marks and traps can already be countered by dodging through them or blocking untraited marks. I don’t really think they need another way to be countered.
The field clearing idea is kind of interesting though, although I’d question as to whether or not it would even really be that useful in the first place. And what exactly would the extent of it’s effects be? Since shadow refuge is a dark field, would you just be able to dismiss a shadow refuge? Could you cancel a ranger’s healing spring or a necromancer’s well of blood, both of which are fields?
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The only caveat to the old nerf still apply is that it was immune to movement impairing conditions.
Now that applies to all movement skills across the board.
It is only just that RTL have it’s split-cooldown nerf removed. Either that, or similar movement skills (i.e. rush) must have the same nerf applied.
I’m curious as to whether or not you can run into a situation where using a movement skill will make you slower.
For instance, if an engineer uses super speed and then rocket boots, will the normalized speed of rocket boots make them slower overall? That would be quite weird.
Well, speaking about WvW specifically, it doesn’t really matter too much for warriors since the majority of them will be running 93-98% reduction in movement impairing condition duration already. If anything, this will make it harder for them to escape because their movement skills will no longer be affected by their passive move speed or swiftness.
I am concerned about situations where using a movement skill can make you move slower though. For instance, the super speed->rocket boots combination won’t work anymore. However, since super speed gives you the maximum amount of move speed regardless of conditions or combat status, I’m wondering if it might create a situation where using rocket boots with super speed will temporarily slow you down since the rocket boots speed is normalized. This would apply to other movement skills as well, of course, I just use that as an example since engineer has some of the most accessible super speed.
They also didn’t mention whether or not the movement skills have the speed normalized to a state where the in-combat and out-of-combat are the same. The post states “movement-speed increases or decreases do not impact the distance travelled by your character”, so one would assume that combat status no longer affects it. But then is it normalized to out-of-combat speed or in-combat speed?
I see some good aspects to these sorts of changes, but some rather large negatives as well. For now, I’ll just be a fence sitter.
EDIT: Come to think of it, I think the movement skills actually do move at the same rate in and out of combat, so perhaps that last point I was making is completely irrelevant. The only thing that should affect them are conditions and boons or other miscellaneous movement speed decreases and increases.
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No. HoT isnt coming out next patch..
For now leveling up past 80 will grant skill points and youll be able to use them.This is in direct conflict with what the post said, “Leveling up after level 80 no longer grants skill points, but level 80 characters will be able to loot spirit shards off of monsters.”
This is why i’m asking for clarification because it’s either going to be wasted XP or business as usual between the time the spirit shards are implemented and when HoT is released.
IIRC, your current amount of skill points you have will be converted to a certain amount of those shards. So if you level up and gain a skill point, that will earn you something when the updates occur. As to how much one skill point will be worth of the new currency, I can’t say. We don’t have those exact details yet. There will no longer be skill points once the specialization changes occur.
Note that masteries is an entirely separate concept that will not come until HoT, but the specialization implementation will be happening before that. Masteries have nothing to do with skill points going away.
If you want, you can earn your skill points now and just spend them on stuff, but if you just stock them up then they should not go to waste, in theory.
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A nice change indeed, although engineers still can’t have them locked fully to rows since they have more than 4 in each category. But oh well.
When I read it on the news, it sounded like it was coming in the next update.
However, it’s possible they may have simply phrased it in a bad way.
I’d actually be very surprised if it came out in the next update. We’ve only seen one work-in-progress view of it. In particular, the engineer specializations were only half-complete, at best. I find it highly doubtful they’d release such a massive change like that without the desire to get a lot of preliminary feedback.
It’s possible in the next few days we’ll be getting more information on the finalized specializations. Perhaps on the Ready Up stream on Friday they will go over it.
Also, “next update” does not necessarily mean “next week”, although it was kind of phrased like that was the case. For all we know, it could be next month. If they push out the engineer changes without at least getting proper feedback on them, I’d be a bit shocked.
The only two things I don’t like are the non-cancellable nature of the auto-attack and the fact that serpent’s strike is clunky during the attack portion (doesn’t hit as consistently as something like stalker’s strike).
Other than that I’m pretty much fine with it. Hornet’s sting→monarch’s leap is used more for mobility than actually fighting most of the time, but it can be nice to combo with fire or water fields.
I just want to be able to move my shield like that. Forget the crappy stunbreaker thing that doesn’t provide any usefulness half the time, I’d rather be able to tell my shield to actually shield me instead of running off the node and playing around behind some wall somewhere.
It’s trash. Intentionally not gimping myself with a subpar heal doesn’t make me a sheep. It means I have an IQ greater than 70.
Normally I’d agree with you, but I’ve had to switch to litany because the game was no longer fun unless I kitten myself.
I guess having crappy skills in a game does serve some purpose, let’s you play with new stuff when you’re bored and see how well you can get them to work.
Once I get bored with that, I guess I’ll try using antitoxin spray as my main heal… in WvW at any rate.
Nerf Merciful Intervention Kappa
lol I’m surprised they still haven’t fixed this.
Luckily they can’t do any real damage if they get in there. The only reason to do something like that is if you’re bored out of your mind.
It does let you walk up on that ledged area, but they can’t do more than camp dolyaks from there, which they could do whenever they want to.
Makes me wonder how many broken spots like this will be in the new borderlands.
I use the following (keyboard: Naga):
1-9: 1-9
0: 10
-: 11 (I bind the – key to weapon swap)
=: 12 (I bind = to dodge)
F1-F4: Shift+respective number key
Then some of the other stuff is standard like z and x for look behind and reverse direction.
This assumes that mantra spamming is a wholly good idea though. In PvE, perhaps it will be since the AI is limited in what it can do. However, if you’re fighting other people and decide to spam all your mantra charges, you might not have them readied up when you actually need them if you’re burst doesn’t kill the opponent right away.
It’s a similar argument to gaining might stacks on healing. Sure, it encourages spamming your heal skill in the sense that it will maximize your might gains. But then you put your heal skill on cooldown and might not have it for when you actually need it a little later.
So, whether or not the math concludes that it’s more or less damage, you’ll still need to use your mantras effectively instead of just spamming them out and not accomplishing much when your enemy dodges around and such.
You’ll be screwed either way. If you hold on to them, they’ll eternally waste your bank space. If you sell them, ANet will make them a requirement for something special, like the new legendaries.
So pick whichever brand of disappointment suits you best.
This does highlight a slightly different issue, in that if you swap from a weapon set with two weapons (i.e. dagger/dagger) to a weapon set with one weapon (i.e. staff), you end up eating up an extra inventory space.
I always thought it would be nice if a weapon set in it’s entirety would occupy the same amount of effective inventory space. Of course, the game isn’t really built to handle that.
I was thinking it could also be cool to have a reserved “equipment” area of the inventory that would be exclusively for holding weapons and maybe armour. Kind of like the equipment bags in GW1. For instance, they could have a 40 slot bag that can only hold those kinds of items, so you can’t just use it for normal inventory stuff. That way, a person who had multiple gear sets would be able to manage them much more easily without them being cluttered with the rest of the inventory, but they also wouldn’t be gaining any extra effective inventory space (in fact, they’d probably be losing some).
All my 16 characters have at least 2 different complete gear sets at the moment for different builds, so it gets a bit annoying sometimes when I need to swap weapons and I have to rearrange a lot of the inventory so that it doesn’t put the offhand I just swapped out in some random place in one of my bags.
While we’re on this topic, I still hate how the minimap works against me when I try to turn my camera. I’ll be trying to rotate my camera, but because I have the sheer audacity to slightly place my mouse over the edge of the minimap, I instead start panning that thing to god-knows-where instead of actually turn my camera.
Would be nice if I could use a key combination to pan it instead of a simple click. For instance, shift+click and dragging will pan the minimap, whereas simply clicking on it won’t do anything and still allow me to rotate my camera.
I’m already required to have very quick reactions to be anywhere close to competitive, I don’t need my minimap sitting there flipping the bird at me while I play.
I think there’s an argument to be made on improving the cast times of the tossed elixirs (i.e. shorter aftercast delay), but not one that you need to link to cleaning formula 409.
The only real improvement I’d make to cleaning formula 409 is that the utility skill elixirs (the ones you “drink”) remove two conditions per use instead of one.
As far as requiring two trait lines to get both HGH and cleaning formula 409, the real fix for that is to move cleaning formula 409 back into the alchemy line at the master position. There’s no reason I can conceive of as to why it was moved into tools at the grandmaster position other than they just needed to stick it somewhere for the time being. Having to take both alchemy and tools just to keep elixirs the same strength as they currently are would be an absolutely travesty to elixir builds everywhere.
The last point you indicated is the main reason they only provide 1 might. That is, it affects allies as well as yourself, potentially providing 5 might stacks spread around 5 people instead of 2 on yourself.
I suppose one would have to do some number crunching to determine its theoretical worth, but I suppose it’s not unfair to say that the amount of might granted by both the utility and tool belt elixirs skills should be increased slightly. They are relatively small amounts of might that only end up being really powerful when using a might stacking build, particularly since taking elixirs means not taking kits.
Although it’s not related to HGH specifically, I would actually like to see cleaning formula 409 remove two conditions per utility elixir, which the tosses still removing one. Then there might actually be a strong alternative to condition cleansing that doesn’t involve healing turret.
Shortbow often fills more of a utility purpose, whereas your other weapon set is generally what you will use to actually fight things.
In particular, infiltrator’s arrow is an excellent mobility skill, allowing you to move about the map quickly, blink up on certain ledges, and escaping situations if things go badly.
Other than that, you’re able to apply poison in an area, which is useful for counteracting healing, you have a convenient high damage AoE attack that is a blast finisher for combos, and an evasive leap back that hopefully doesn’t bug out too much.
If nothing else, it allows you to keep pressure on the enemy without being in melee range. For instance, if you’re fighting a necro and they dump a bunch of wells on a node and sit in them, you can swap to shortbow and shoot them until the wells run out, at which point you can go back in melee. It also does have the advantage that it hits multiple targets, but that tends to be more of a side benefit in PvP.
At least, that’s always been my take on it. I’m not a thief expert by any means.
Speedy kits can’t be made baseline. Perma-swiftness by default? No, that’s too strong.
Guardians have that, not to mention Necros, Thieves, Ranger, and Ele’s get +25% at the cost of a signet, Warriors and engies can get it through a trait.
Honestly, does anyone but mesmers not run with at least 25% runspeed perma?
The point is exactly that though, you need to make a decision to get that. Simply giving it baseline doesn’t make any sense, especially since kits provide all sorts of other utility. For rangers, eles, thieves, and necros, the entire point of taking the signet is to get the move speed. It’s not like you take a kit and all it does is give you move speed.
I think there’s improvements that can be made to speedy kits (i.e. not having to constantly swap), but making it baseline is not one of them.
I’m not gonna take the bullet, someone else do it and tell me how it goes.
Magi hammer kitless full gadget engineer will clearly be the new meta, duh.
Speedy kits can’t be made baseline. Perma-swiftness by default? No, that’s too strong.
Mind you, it still requires you take a kit for that, but that’s a whole separate issue.
In reality, engineer does have a decent number of alternatives to speedy kits. For instance, infused precision is an often underrated trait, though that’s partly because people don’t like investing in firearms. There’s also power shoes for passive move speed, essentially giving you runes of the traveller. You can even take certain utilities like elixir B and rocket boots to help you out in the mobility department.
So I still think speedy kits should be a trait that you need to take, they just need to be sure that there’s decent alternatives to speedy kits so not everyone is forced into tools. Oddly enough, I think packaging it with kit refinement will actually make people disinclined to take it since they just don’t want to fuss with kit refinement at all.
Of course, there’s still a lot of fleshing out that needs to be done for the engineer traits, so I think it might be a bit early to make sweeping judgments as of yet.
Corruptions interested me when I first started playing necro in the game’s younger days, but I found making a corruption specialized build to be quite underwhelming. They mostly just focus on applying conditions to your enemies. There’s no stun breaks, no mobility, no life force generation… basically they’re lacking things that are key to a lot of necro stuff. I used to try and do a build with plague signet transfers, but I found other builds were just better overall (particularly in PvP/WvW).
Corrupt boon and epidemic are really the only two that see any sort of common usage currently. I think BiP is not terrible, but it’s tough to fit on a utility bar, whereas I feel CPC is just not powerful enough yet to warrant a slot.
However, I’m looking to make a new corruption specialized build with the specialization changes. Specifically, it would be a terrormancer with dhuumfire that would use corruptions. I think it might end up being a bit more effective given how the trait distributions are changing, attributes being unlinked from traits, and things like poison and burning stacking.
Also, I think that consume conditions is a very likely candidate to be labelled as a corruption, so spec’ing into them can mean more healing and condition clearing, which is never a bad thing.
But who will stroke my kitten if I don’t?
EDIT: deng it censors that. Oh well.
Yeah it might as well just be a full 25 stability stacks. It only lasts a second, so even with extreme boon duration you’re not going to be getting much more than that. The point of that stability is to make it so you can’t be interrupted on your use of stomp, but having just the one stack can prevent that sometimes.
But maybe they want it that way for a sense of counterplay? I dunno, seems like a weak excuse to me, especially since stomp is an uncommon utility to bring at the best of times. You can cancel the stomp animation and move around for a bit with the stability, which is useful for getting out of rings of warding, but that’s a fault of the skill design itself. It should either have a uncancellable animation or just work some other way.
also if animation is canceled it goes on full cooldown.
Yep, makes it real annoying if you hit a bit of lag because it’s really easy to cancel it and suffer the full cooldown without getting the stomp. Why this thing has ever been cancellable is beyond me.
Yeah it might as well just be a full 25 stability stacks. It only lasts a second, so even with extreme boon duration you’re not going to be getting much more than that. The point of that stability is to make it so you can’t be interrupted on your use of stomp, but having just the one stack can prevent that sometimes.
But maybe they want it that way for a sense of counterplay? I dunno, seems like a weak excuse to me, especially since stomp is an uncommon utility to bring at the best of times. You can cancel the stomp animation and move around for a bit with the stability, which is useful for getting out of rings of warding, but that’s a fault of the skill design itself. It should either have a uncancellable animation or just work some other way.
Did anyone already find a viable warrior build without fast hands?
I dont get this posts that say that fast hands should not be made baseline. Every warrior already takes fast hands in their builds if he wants to be viable, so the only thing that would change is the build warrior takes, and that is really good.
People should not compare classes….Nope!
I guess u can go something 6 0 6 0 2 with warr runes. Bad tho but I guess it’s ‘viable’
I actually do use a build of this description, although it’s some physical skill focused build I made that uses mending, so it’s extra bad.
The warrior runes are chosen to make up for the loss of fast hands, though the build would undoubtedly be more effective with fast hands present.
The funny thing is that the specialization changes will allow me to go 60606, so I’m going to be getting fast hands in that build anyways (don’t need arms or tactics in it).
I tried the build for a long time without the warrior runes, but I felt it was just way too much of a problem. As such, I swapped to warrior runes to try and compensate for it a bit.
I’m still not 100% sold on the idea of fast hands as a baseline characteristic of warriors, but I do agree that not having fast hands can severely reduce the effectiveness of many builds, particularly those that rely on certain weapon combos (i.e. skullcrack builds).
It’s the same reason you can get hit by stuff when you dodge, or why you may appear to not fall off a cliff but suddenly die instantaneously from fall damage. There’s always going to be some bit of latency that may cause a dissonance between the visual information on your screen and what the server considers actually took place in the game itself.