Guild Wars 2

This post isn’t a rant about the new Ascended gear, but a simply sugestion for the whole gear system in general. English isn’t my main language so forgive me if it gets poor sometimes.

When I first learned about gears in Guild Wars 2, I was excited because I knew that I would get to 80 looking for Masterwork pieces, and after reached the level cap, there would be a whole new world of gears to acquire. I could explore through the world and find rare gear, and then survive through a lot of dangers and challenges and someday get an exotic gear.

The problem is, the romance is over. Masterwork pieces (Masterwork!) are just vendored, pretty much like garbage. I would salvage tons of fine weapons – because that weren’t fine at all – and won’t even speak about basic items. Then the problem just got worse: I found that rare items had nothing rare about it, and everyone in Lion’s Arch were using exotic gear they bought for about 2 gold pieces from a merchant who had piles of it. The only truly rare gear, the Legendaries, the ones we could brag about having and that could breath away those who run past us in Lion’s Arch and give us hope about killing the dragon’s most powerful minions – they were just an elitist item, something that money can buy and lucky can bring. They were not related to our achievements and conquered challenges.

And then, after all the mess, a new item type is introducted. Instead of trying to relieve the current gear system, it’s creating a whole new class of items, wich will replace our gear and make it even more trivial. Nobody will touch rare items and exotics will be people’s underwear or pajamas.

So, why? I’m not just worried about the trend of keeping us replacing our gear periodically, wich is everybody’s concern at the moment, but mostly what it will happen to the current items and market. People already don’t give a kitten about items that SHOULD be rare, and what is an exotic? What is the excuse of creating a new, parallel item rarity, instead of boosting the existing ones and make them more appealing through one type and the other?

And then here comes my suggestion. I know it would not be easy to implement but would love to see that you guys at least “get the idea” around it for future content.

1. First of all, rare items should be truly rare and, hence, desirable. They should be attainable like cultural gear, but never trivial (not talking about how you get it, just how much it’s desirable). And above all, gear people would like to use. Even if outleveled, it would not be salvaged because it is rare, after all, and otherwise used to transmute for better stats while keeping those awesome look.

2. Similarly, Exotic items have to be something that catches people’s eyes as you pass by. I’m not talking only about particle effects, but just gear that you can not find easily. Something really exotic. It should be about aesthetics, as an “Exotic warrior” isn’t exactly a better warrior, it’s just.. Something exotic. Hard to get, it would be entirely optional, something wanted only for those who want to stand out in the crowd.

3. About the Legendary. They NEED to be about your story, not about your budget. The precursors need to be something really hard to get, but that can be reliably reached. The beginning of an optional journey. And this journey, in turn, need to be about your character and what he has done to make the world a better place. Speaking about journey, I would love to make the abyss between exotics and legendaries shorter. I am not talking about making legendaries easier to get, but to give the players the feel that they are getting there. For example, instead of collecting tons of mats and boxes of gifts that mean almost nothing for us, make us collecting equippable “legendary fragments”, something that people recognize as “this guy is getting there”.

Going on in this, valuing the system that is already in the game, we can make items that the hardcore crowd would like to have and get them busy. This post is already big enough, but if someone want to I can give my view about how that could be achieved. I would also love to see a feedback from a dev about this. Either way, thanks for your time and hope it meant something!

TLDR: Masterwork items are trivial, rare items aren’t rare, and exotics aren’t exotic because everybody is using those. The game don’t need the creation of a new tier right now, but a rework in the current gear system!

In general, shortbow for anything more than 1 target and pistol/pistol for single target. Worth noting that Unload does not get a damage that higher than auto attack – in fact, if you have some condition damage your dps can be higher spamming 1.

BUT Unload is awesome as a combo finisher. So much condition removal, life stealing and etc is not something to be overlooked in tough fights. Shortbow’s blast finisher is AWESOME too, and if you find yourself using condition damage and keep exploding your bombs in da face you get a decent burst and long-term dps. It requires more trait synergy to work really well, though.

I’m going for the Order of Whispers silenced pistols!

That really depends on the build you are using. Dee Jay is right about Vitality being better against conditions, but remember that you can remove a lot of conditions through a shadow trait everytime you stealth – with dagger/dagger you can do it pretty much always. It synergizes beautifuly with the traits for healing while in stealth, stealths that last one second longer, and regeneration when stealth.

Even if you don’t like stealth you can pretty much play a vampire build with tons of toughness. Traits that heal every time you spend initiative and our “heal on hit” signet works beautifuly with toughness because you have a higher effective HP, while your healing power doesn’t scale with vitality. If you know what you’re doing you can have your health bar full most of the time, and out-heal most of conditions as long as you keep hitting the target (unload shines in here).

That said, I find out that toughness works better with most of our defensive traits and we have enough endurance to avoid bigger hits, so that would be my 2 cents. Consider that, once your traits have been mastered, most people tend to totally invest in Berserker stats and rely in dodges and stealth to lose aggro when needed.

I use the same jewelry always, Beryl + Valkyrie (critical damage and vitality); Then carry around 2 sets – a Knight’s (tons of toughness) and Berserker (squishy, full dps). Unless heavily AOE’d, I can stay alive with the second one and it feels more satisfying. In general, I use Knight’s head, coat and leggings and the rest Berserker. Since I got my new set I didn’t feel the need of having full Knight’s set at all.

For PVE I like my Knight’s set since I use a lot of life steal and regen from traits/signet. I feel like a vampire and with P/P or shortbow my life is up whenever I need without any trouble. I don’t care a lot about burst DPS since most high level mobs, specially in dungeons, are really tough and won’t die in a sec anyway.

Vitality is kinda important to counter condition damage, and it’s worth to have some through upgrades/jewelry. But as long as I keep hitting the mob I can counter most DOTs thrown on me.

It’s not a male charr tail, it’s from a charrmander. Working as intended.

Seriously now, I think if your tail caught fire it would end without any fur. So maybe we won’t ever see a female version for these tails.

Some professions can do similar combos, like the scepter elementalist and most “panic” utilities. It’s valid to note that there are another combos you can do using this function, like pre-casting caltrops instead of cloak and dagger or using shadowstep instead of steal. This last one is useful for ranged builds, since you can caltrop + shadowstep in the middle of your target and then shadow return to safety while your enemy is crippled and bleeding. If you use it in conjunction with weapon swap, there’s a lot of interesting stuff you can do.

You guys have pretty solid defense skills, though. As a thief one of the classes I take longer to kill in SPVP is a good bunker elementalist.

I think the problem with elementalists is that they still have a lot of bugs and skills not working as intended. Still, a well played elementalist is one of – if not THE – most powerful class in the game because he can do and counter pretty much everything. You guys have all the classes in your hand.

I’ve noticed that the first “meteor” fall in the middle of the casting time and if I cancel it the meteos keep falling without any problems. Is it working as intended? The tooltip doesn’t say anything about it getting more powerful or anything like that..

I know many equipments suffer from clipping, but I would still like to report it. This is the tier 2 medium cultural human armor, and while I love it the shoulders really bother me while I’m using a shortbow. Hope you guys ever fix some of these clipping, it bugs me so much

Tip: If you read what skills are meant to do you will find them way more interesting. If you’re indeed playing a warrior, there’s a trait to truly rally when you kill someone while in Vengeance.

This is not a bug. They want you to keep the item as a symbol of the unique choices you made in the very beggining of your adventure.

There are “workarounds” like the transmutation one, but I’m pretty sure they are not intended to work. These should be unique items that reflect your character’s story.

Yesterday some guildies and me ran our first time ever Nightmare Tree path in Twilight Arbor’s EM.

Everything went somewhat fine (ouch for these knockdown combos), but after killing the last boss we just didn’t receive any rewards at all. The quest updated to “Congratulations! The arbor is safe” but the chest pop-up didn’t appear for any of us, neither the button to leave the dungeon above the mini-map.

I’ve already sent a ticket to support (they haven’t answered me yet), but in the meanwhile I would like to ask if anybody suffered something similar, especially after the update. Also, is there something else we can do about that?

Thanks!

Thanks for the fast reply! I will be a much happier dungeon crawler once these are fixed. Keep up the good work and send my regards to the team!

Rising Dusk.2408:

Just as a note, though, I’d argue that the Volatile Blossom hit boxes in TA are far more significant an issue than the Graveling Burrows in AC.

Well, I can imagine myself missing some shots, these flowers are really thin while the burrows are bigger than myself! Jokes apart, I do it fine with my shortbow with these and haven’t seen people complaining. But I can say in general that a lot of static targets need some hitbox tuning..

Are their hitboxes already working as intended? I still keep missing/obstructed in the smaller ones even if I circle it around spamming AOEs.

After a small conversation with some guildies I realized that the problem is worse with ranged weapons. The bigger ones get all the hits even if I stand still, so there may be a problem just with the smaller ones (the ones that spawn while you protect the scholar and the two crystals). It makes the battle infinitely more annoying for me as a Thief, since it’s almost impossible to hit the burrows with pistols across all these mobs and the shortbow single-target damage is not that great in a dps race.

We are able to get to the end fairly easily, but it’s still something odd and frustrating. Can a dev give it a check?

I was wandering in Snowden Drifts when a group event popped up near me. I saw some fellow players around and went to ask for help. The first guy just not answered for my call but also teleported to the nearest Son of Svanir and started attacking it. It let me curious so I decided to wait a bit.

In total 5 Charr Rangers, with identical specs, wearing + Magical Find gear (including signets in its weapons) and using Signet of Stone and Carrion Devourer pets. Not just killing everything at sight but clearly TELEPORTING at will.

The names were Freda Hilda, Jocelyn Gail, Geraldine Cora, Aamy Doris and Charles Karl. I’ve reported each one of them in-game, but as they seem pretty much organized I decided to report them all together. There is a better place to do it besides singular in-game report? It seemed to me more important and urgent than a single fella botting the game. They are getting better at this..

:(

I’ve decided to go after the Dungeon Master title since the dungeons were supposed to be fixed now.

Started with Ascalon Catacombs – 15 tokens in MY FIRST RUN EVER in the Howler King path. Very dissapointing. Read something about it being a bug, that’s ok. It happens.

Going for the second path in the other day – at least 20 hours after the first run – and got 15 tokens again. I’ve just gave up. Then some guild mates suggested that it was especific of AC.

Then we went to Caudecus Manor – again, for the very first time – I got SIX tokens. First time ever in the path, first Caudecus of the day. I’m just done with dungeons for now.

Your graphic settings don’t have anything to do with lag – If you have low fps it’s not lag, and if your character moves but you can’t use skill it’s connection lag and not a graphic problem.

If you have both, that’s 2 different problems..

My game was perfectly fine until 3-4 days ago. Since then I get a little delay in all my actions (don’t know exactly how much since there is no way to check my ping ingame) and sometimes a huge 5-10 seconds lagspike. Did you guys made some change in the servers? I hope it isn’t permanent!