Strength of Scholar for classic builds
Aristocracy could be interesting for condi or hybrid builds (condition damage AND might stacking!)
Ice or Grenth for chill builds
Trooper can now be useful for splashing some tankiness and more condi clearing.
Overall I agree with waiting until expansion hits so runes can be tailored for specific role.
Biggest problem is that siphoning is not necessary for good groups (although it can help maintain scholar’s bonus due to stray damage). Boon and condition management is too rare to warrant bringing necro for (although in some spots it IS handy). Projectile destruction can be done by almost every class, and reflection will be preferred.
So necro support/utility, while useful, is simply not as useful as warrior banners and guardian reflects and aegis. At the same time the damage is not on par with elementalist or engineer. With current meta of 2 support 3 dps, necro simply is not bringing enough to the table to be invited.
On the up side, a well played necro is a solid addition for PuGs where extra lifestealing is often put to good use as well as reasonable damage from easy rotation that will easily outdo FT camping engies and cele d/d eles.
Sadly too many PuGs insist on ‘meta’ groups even when they don’t utilize the meta composition.
So if what you are saying is true…. and difficulty gating is impossible…. then essentially the prestige associated with the rewards amounts to absolutely nothing.
(except, you got a lucky dice roll)
There are already other rewards in the game like this.
Fractal Weapons for example.
There is no prestige… but also no way for players to trade skins…. so you are left with a system where everyone loses.
What I mean is this: you CAN tune a raid to be only doable by 1% of the population. Initially only 0.01% will succeed but then after strategies are spoiled another 0.99% will be able to do it.
What you cannot really do is prevent that 1% from being able to farm it. If they could do it once, they can do it again. The only way to prevent massive influx of rewards from these players is time gating. Time gating can take a very large number of forms. Respawn timers (EQ before instanced content, WoW world bosses), lockout timers (can’t enter instances, instanced respawn timers bound to raid leader/character/whatever) or finally the ‘you can do it as many times as you want but only get reward once per week’ lockout of GW2.
I am sure that top tier guilds can still profit from raids. I suspect it won’t be long before raids can be 9 manned. That last spot will then be sold for obscene amounts of money. Due to enrage timers one’s ability to sell more than 1 or 2 spots will likely not happen for a very long time, so prices will stay up. You won’t be selling specific item but a random roll for one. That, and/or completion achievement, similar to how some people get their dungeon master without actually doing Arah.
However I currently think that raids will not be tuned to 1% of the population – not if they want all classes to be viable. I’d make a guess of 5-10% being able to (eventually) participate.
Think to TT – it is almost impossible to completely PuG, but very possible to do if you have an organized core with random PuGs in vent. I suspect that instanced raids will run in the same vein – difficult to PuG but reasonable if you have some organization present.
Few thoughts.
Weekly raid lockout timers are not new. This is an artificial way to extend the lifetime of the content. Simply put if you can farm-run raids 20 times per day, you’ll get all the shinies from them and never step your foot in it again, whining about lack of content all along.
RNG in rewards plays the similar role. If you only get things you want, you’ll stop playing faster as you won’t be forced to acquire (via RNG) all the stuff you don’t really care for in the process. This is slightly mitigated by having raid currency for people who have reeeealy bad luck and still would like to feel some sort of progress towards the desired goal.
All of these mechanics are present in practically every game with raids. Even GW2 has precursor for this mechanic in one-per-day-per-path dungeon rewards and daily fractal rewards. In raids loot is in higher demand (and with higher chance of dropping), so the lockouts are longer.
EDIT: Difficulty gating is almost impossible in GW2. Most mechanics heavy encounters will be learned, spoiled and put on the farm status relatively quickly. A guild that can reliably kill a boss can certainly farm it.
With regards to account bound rewards – GW2 is moving away from non-account bound rewards for ‘prestige’ items (legendaries), so I wouldn’t expect them to add unbound items into raids. It’s unlikely that they intend raid rewards to be a source of additional income for raiding guilds.
(edited by Zania.8461)
I think people misunderstand the question. OP is stating that the WvW armor soulbound to (I assume now deleted) sylvari necro cannot be salvaged by any character (now or in the future) because it cannot be moved from the bank to inventory as it is soulbound to a character that has since been deleted.
As far as the answer is concerned, I am not sure as to why that restriction (on moving/salvaging soulbound items by other characters) is in place.
Should call her Trahearnia. Warning: the name might have side effects of being dead more often than not, using most annoying skills possible during encounters and occasionally being bossy and annoying.
I believe that either
1) Raid bosses will not be killed during BWE3 or
2) Raids will be heavily tuned between BWE3 and release.
If second happens that means that obviously raids aren’t hard enough if people can figure them out and beat them in less than a weekend and thus they’ll be tuned heavily before release. If first happens you don’t have to worry about spoilers.
Why is it not “Dungeons, Fractals & Raids”
WHY
Either a forum mod or a developer must like Franklin D. Roosevelt a lot.
Anyone asking me for a GW2effiiency link will be reported, NO ONE should be able to keep another player from certain content because they refuse to use 3 party programs.
You always have an option of finding a raid with someone who does not have such requirement. Your report will not be taken seriously as the raid leader does not have obligation to accept everyone in his or her raid.
I think this is purely due to the way preview lighting is setup. Only a few places in the gameworld have lighting similar to it, so most of the time items do look different.
But grats on getting the hoard!
When they find that time invested in development of new raids does not involve enough players*hours running the raid treadmill.
If the raids generate enough new/returning players and can keep them involved over long enough stretch of time, we’ll see more. If not, we won’t.
I have severe doubt that they can tune it that finely. The damage difference between Ascended trinkets+weapon+exotic armor and full ascended is what, 2%? If they tune it that finely, that will mean that they will be forcing a single, idealized group composition for the entire raid with everyone performing perfectly. If either execution is not absolutely perfect (talking both damage rotation, add control, boon managements) or you have sub-optimal party (even in full ascended) the event becomes undoable as variation between classes is way more than 2%. If they tune it so the WORST composition can complete it if all characters have full ascended, then idealized composition will do it in masterwork.
I expect that raids on release will be horribly overtuned and undoable, similar to the way Ragnaros was in vanilla WoW. Raid balance is extremely hard even for less dynamic combat system with much less class variation. Balancing raids for GW2 is going to be a nightmare. Aiming for a balance within 2% efficiency is something that is still quite far away IMO. The problem is made worse by the fact that players do not have tools to objectivly measure their performance (damage, boon removed, bar break, outgoing healing, whatever else).
A compromise? Moa still destroys all minions but resets the summoning cooldowns. That way if necro survives being moa’ed they can at least re-summon and re-engage without waiting up to a minute.
These are special chicken. Bio-engineered for the war with charr. The wide scale deployment has been postponed due to the peace treaty and unpredictability of this weapon once released in the wild. But as last resort it can still be deployed. Beware, Elder Dragons – if things get sufficiently bad, the menace WILL be unleashed and the world will bow before the new chicken overlords.
Unless I am missing something, this was the case already (at least in BW2). My sylvari got readable text and voiceover whereas my human did not.
Hey, they warned us well in advance to have an expansion-ready sylvari before HoT launches.
My reasons to kick a player:
1) Not obeying LFG.
2) Actively trying to be annoying/destructive.
The LFG comment is there for a reason. If you are not willing to read it, or choose to ignore it, you are not being considerate (to say the least) and I don’t want to be in the same group as you. Just because you do not agree with LFG description (for whatever reason) does not mean you can ignore it.
However if the player does not violate the LFG description (and not being overly destructive), it’s up to the rest of the party to make it work.
Gemstore.
Only plain pants on heavy armor (Aetherblade Heavy)
Only non racial skirt leggings for medium armor (Viper’s)
Few non-racial non trenchcoat tops for medium armor (Strider and Krytan). I think glorious and sneakthief are only other non racial you can get.
Light armor however really has no clean pants choices even in gemstore unless you count Profane, with annoying sticking straps instead of buttflap.
So I don’t think the availability of these items (or the lack of thereof) is necessarily an accident. I am sure we can expect a gemstore armor set with plain light armor pants sometime in the future…
Purpose of guardian hammer is group utility/control, not damage or even self buff. Traited (why run it untraited anyway?) it gives large size permanent protection field and provides team healing. Even if you are using it purely for damage the permanent protection that benefits entire team is still there.
At the moment I think the usability has once again been sacrificed for the ‘coolness’ factor.
EDIT: Isn’t bulwark gyro a direct upgrade to the Phantasmal Defender? Instant cast, can operate at range has on-demand missile reflection. Of course will depend on the gyro hp, but still could be handy. 50% max uptime, but any time Defender is used it’ll likely not survive long anyway, so max uptime might be completely meaningless.
(edited by Zania.8461)
Rata Sum is far more vulnerable in regards of story telling. Relatively small city populated with individuals each one with an ego the size of an elder dragon and technical know-how to blow things up. Based on what’s seen in the Uncategorized Fractal ending up with blown up RS is quite likely.
More seriously, neither is likely to happen – it will require redesign and/or creation of new starter areas that have some sort of linear progression to higher level ones. This would require way too much effort just for the sake of blowing up a starter city. This is also likely to be the main reason why LA was chosen for Scarlet’s invasion – it’s destruction did not require anything other than moving MF to another place – all other services area already present in other cities.
It was never a gem store item. It was obtainable via PvP only. No PvE equivalent has ever existed. Current ones are the carry overs that happened when the wardrobe system was implemented and armor sets became usable in all game modes.
I suspect that Necro with Reaper spec is not the highest damage class. Nor does it have the most group support. It’s likely not even the most survivable. However it scores pretty high in both AE damage and survivability. And most importantly the darn spec is amazingly fun. Even if it does not make it in the meta (although it might if AE damage with reasonable survivability will be needed), I can see myself playing it a lot.
Since, my friend, you have revealed your
Deepest fear,
I sentence you to be exposed before
Your peers.
Tear down the wall!
That aside, walls buy you a bit of time to get response team in place, and the breach provides a narrow point to lay down your AEs. I will agree that from defensive standpoint that’s probably not how the walls should act.
The hilarious part is that most players think that since gold → gem ratio is so high, ANet should fix it by…adding ways to get more gold.
The ratio is really an indicator of two things – how much gold is there in the system, and the usefulness of gold for purchasing out-of-store items. If there is too much gold in the system, people will convert more gold to gems and drive up the ratio. If there is no in-game items to spend the gold on, they’ll convert the gold into gems since there isn’t much else to do with it, once again driving the ratio up.
This is of course over the long run. Short term large spikes are possible when desired item with limited availability is up in the store (sale events like current one). I expect it will level off back to 70-80g/400 gems in a few weeks after the sale is over. Of course what happens to the ratio after HoT launches is anyone’s guess.
Sorry, that’s the point. They want to siphon gold and/or stashed gems out of the system. The only way to get around it is buying the desired dye directly off the TP. IMO the prices you get are usually slightly cheaper than statistical average of the cost you’d incur trying to get one yourself (especially if you only one specific dye from the pack). Of course if you are lucky, you can always play the kit lottery.
Most of the out of WvW achievements, even hardest ones take less than a year of grinding. Open world – Slayer is annoying on giants only (1 long achievement which, if necessary you can grind out in a month). Bioluminescence is a week or two. Weapon Master is not overly long, just mind numbingly boring if you decide to grind it out. Dungeons – dungeon master is a matter of a week. The new one that requires every piece of gear from every dungeon is the only one that takes time. Yes there are a few categories which are annoying altogether (rare collections), but most achievement categories have one or two long ones, and the rest are doable in a few days.
Let’s be honest, any reasonable achievement system will award the achievements to the people way before they spend 2-3 years playing that game mode.
So far I am underwhelmed. Reveals have shown very little in raids that will be unique to GW2.
Weekly lockouts are an old mechanic to artificially extend the lifetime of the raids. Coupling it with RNG is the surest way to keep people doing the raids over and over.
Enrage timers is another old and not-so-creative mechanic. I would hope that over 10 years from WoW’s launch, designers would find better method for DPS control. Make monsters get progressively more difficult without a cutoff timer.
Reward system seems…strange based on what GW2 used to stand for. Originally you were supposed to be able to obtain items in different ways. I know it was always shaky – there are no ways to obtain legendaries in WvW, no way to craft (most) ascended accessories and varieties of other gaps. I guess ANet finally decided to scrap that model altogether with expansion.
The integration of GW2s dynamic combat is…silly. Yeah, sure, no trinity. Instead you get field bots and blast bots. STACK! WATER FIELDS ON RAMS! BLAST! FIRE FIELDS! BLAST! Considering the buff limit, enrage timers and touted difficulty, this will likely relegate raids to extremely specific class combinations, at least for the vast majority of the population (top tier raid guilds will likely do them with 8 necros in underwear eventually).
Btw: (The fractal relic bags have an automatic sorting effect that is really annoying if you don’t specifically want it).
The 150 slot ones take “masterwork before everything else”, but if you only get those bags then it wouldn’t really affect your inventory.
No, even if you do this, they are still annoying, because you can’t use the option to compress your bags, so after you use deposit all materials, you have random stuff in all of your bags and you have to manually sort them.
They are a terror if you try to keep your bags organized.
This is actually exactly the opposite of my experience. I want my bags organized. My bag 5 is my backup gear set. 4 is consumables. First 3 is for loot. Last thing I want is to accidently hit ‘comress’ and end up with my backup set in bag 1 and have to sort it all over again. So yes, ~40 fractal bags on this account :>
On one hand, this isn’t a big deal at all since there is very little one can do with a copy of an outfit one already has.
On another this just highlights the issues ANet has been having with all their reward batch jobs. Multiple rewards for some people is a recurring trend.
If ANet is moving into the direction that length =/= difficulty (with which I agree), I hope they are planning to do the same for their upcoming raids. Or is being able to sit in a raid instance for 3 hours somehow adds to difficulty whereas in group content it does not?
They can’t mail but they can join guilds. Farm laurels, convert to materials, deposit materials in the shared guild bank…done. Can transfer all the wealth necessary,
EDIT: I stand corrected, no guild banks either. Interesting. We’ll see how it goes.
EDIT 2: Well only way to go around this (that I found so far) would be to buy some items in gem store as gifts for main account.
(edited by Zania.8461)
By far the biggest problem with rangers is that it is a VERY easy class to play in open world PvE. You take a tanky pet (bear), you equip a longbow (high ranged damage) and you just pew pew things to death. This gives rise to ‘bearbows’ – rangers who have no idea they have pets other than bears and weapons other than longbows. Whats worse is that these people are so used to soloing in open world, they have no idea how their playstyle can cause problems in organized parties (ie careless use of longbow 4).
Well played ranger provides some unique party support and deals competitive damage. Problem is that due to the large fraction of rangers being poorly played, they have a fairly bad stigma associated with them. Most groups are not willing to take a ranger not because its a bad class but because the number of players who know how to play it well is relatively small.
Icons look like mobile turrets to me, with corresponding toolbelt skills (healing blue ‘drone’ and corresponding blue ‘force field’ that’s likely the toolbelt heal).
The issue I have with this is that no matter how responsive the AI is, it will never be viable in the current PvE unless the minions are invulnerable, or have practically 0 cooldown, which would make them overpowered in PvP and thus unlikely.
Problems with suggestion
1) At this stage this might no longer be possible as both FA and SoS seems to be deserted in WvW most of the time. Like really deserted. People get out of the safe area, get stomped by a huge zerg and leave.
2) What will this accomplish? It will take a huge amount of effort to coordinate and maintain, and at best it’ll result in stalemate where neither YB will move up, nor FA/SoS will move down.
3) It really doesn’t matter whether it’s YB or a T1 server at this point. Most of the time its YBvD karma train anyway.
4) From the point of view of FA/SoS its better to drop down to T3/4 and rebuild. At this point I don’t think either server is even going to be able to hold their own in T3, the maps look that empty.
5) Lack of participation in WvW should make server populations drop making them more competitive in the future.
So yeah, upper tiers of NA WvW are in for a long bumpy ride unless either YB or a T1 server implodes.
That sucks…Fallout 4 comes out 2 weeks after HoT.
As much as I am looking forward to Fallout 4, I made a decision long ago never to buy any Bethesda games until a few months after release. The number of bugs at release is just crippling.
Besides, Bethesda will likely not release GECK until a few months later anyway. And it might get cheaper by then!
Practically, current hardest PvE content is higher level fractals. Rewards are unique skins and better-than-average access to top tier equipment (ascended chest + rings).
Also evident from TT and Tequatl both of which have some unique skins attached to them (although I am not sure higher access to ascended enters there).
I would expect the upcoming raids to follow the same formula. Some unique skins will be available, but doubt anything past that.
Hypothetically, what would you consider ‘good rewards’? Let’s examine two cases:
Case 1, gold is abundant. Each monster now drops 10g on death. In 2 days you now have tens of thousands of gold. You feel RICH! Except now skins on TP cost hundreds of thousands of gold, gold to gem ratio is now 100 to 1 and…nothing actually changed. You’ve added several 0’es to your bank account, and similarly increased the prices across the board. The system has leveled itself off and you are no richer than before.
Case 2 – EVERYTHING is abundant. Exotics drop like rain, legendaries are rewarded for doing dynamic events, ghastly grinning shields, BL keys and dyes are sold on vendors for coppers. Everyone has everything. Great! Except this game has very little long term content. Once everyone has all the shinies, they simply quit because there is only so many times you can run a dungeon, fractal or SW when there is no longer any reward in doing so. Game is deserted other than occasional roleplayer or a new player who has not gone through the limited content available.
Lets face it, certain amount of treadmill is necessary for every MMO. GW2 does a fairly good job at making it a light treadmill where most things are reasonably achievable (with a few exceptions). Risk vs reward is a very tough thing balance and I think GW2 does a reasonable job at.
One dye per 3 year old character. Most people will likely pick either celestial, shadow abyss or one of the most expensive dyes. If people have ~5 characters it will affect a tiny portion of the exclusive dyes. So really nowhere as dramatic of an effect as people make it out to be.
The funny part will be people getting dyes because they are expensive, not because they like the color. Even funnier will be those same people whining loudly when Taimi set will be re-introduced later because they ‘wasted’ their birthday dye on the color they didn’t like which will go down in price.
Well, now we know why they put the core game on 75% sale recently. Because with this sales strategy purchasing core game alone is…less than optimal.
After a certain point, adding extra dps has almost no return on how fast things die, but adding extra support can greatly reduces time between bosses.
However for the majority of PuG groups that’s too fine a point as skipping is done only in places where its very obvious (or too painful otherwise), and usually done in less than efficient manner.
Drones at extremely high altitude with precision striking missiles and/or napalm bombs (or Agent Orange) Ballistic/cruise missiles, even without nuclear warheads. Satellite recon (although of limited use due to high density jungle and underground system).
You are really describing Vietnam War as would be fought today, with a correction that you aren’t interested in keeping territory, but in complete annihilation.
While I always have problems picturing a greatsword wielding banshee, WH40k did have something similar.
If possible, code it so unless phantasm is directly targeted by the enemy it is not affected by attacks. This will make phatasms invulnerable against all AEs and cleaves. Furthermore if possible only apply this change to PvE (as I have no idea how this will affect PvP).
Another suggestion would be to have phantasms have a limited lifetime and turning them completely invulnerable to damage, effectively making them into DOT abilities that still benefit from direct damage stats.
Advantages of S/P is the blind (which is very handy on mean trash pulls), PW which is a great defensive tool and headshot which gives ability to quickly strip defiance. All 3 of which can be very useful. S/D gives flanking strike, which for most PvE content loses to PW, dancing dagger which isn’t very useful and CnD which doesn’t have a good synergy with MH sword in dungeons.
Dropping ferocity (instead of precision) altogether could actually have some benefits, if the massive overall drop in damage would be somehow addressed. That is, drop ferocity, but add a flat multiplier to all damage to account for the loss.
New highest damage stat combo would be rampager or sinister, but the extra damage from conditions would likely be relatively small (compared to ferocity), so using defensive stat instead of condition damage would not be a large dps drop.
Could get a few interesting hybrid builds popping up, and people who aren’t comfortable without running a defensive stat would be relatively more useful.
(edited by Zania.8461)
If you go from 0 to 100% MF, you double your chance of getting a rare
If you go from 100 to 200, you increase your chance to get a rare by 50%
Going from 200 to 300 increases it by another 33%.
Considering that each % is harder to get than previous (until 218 MF when it levels off), you get increasing costs for diminishing returns.
If you factor in MF food/bonefire, the returns are lowered farther.
Can we just call it a guardian with ranger as secondary class?
Guardians can already do reasonable support from mid-line using staff. The issue is that at the moment max damage melee is the name of the game, so unless we’ll see encounters that are absolutely undoable in melee and this spec’s longbow does amazing ranged damage, I just don’t see it being very useful
Of course final judgment will have to wait until full trait line and LB skill list, but so far, I am not very keen on what I see.
Wait..
So..OP is mad that people that had a discountinued version of the game had to be compensated because anet switched the type of accounts they had?You realize how petty this sounds?
It was a bug, anet fixed it, end of story.Life isn’t fair, nor will it ever be.
Secondly, not every beta tester got a heroic chest, only people that had old, discontinued versions of the game.
Grow the kitten up
1) It was not a bug, original Heroic Editions did not come with these items, they were added to newer version of HE.
2) No one (I hope) would complain if ANet did a batch job and gave the same Heroic Chest to ALL people with ‘old’ HE accounts.
What happened here is that only a portion of HE accounts got updated, based on whether they participated in beta or not. THAT is why some people are upset – because beta invites are random and thus a random set of accounts got upgraded, not a full set.
Note, I do not have an old HE account, so I stand absolutely nothing to gain. I am personally just annoyed at a) Poor communication, as we were notified of this quite a bit after a set of people posted about getting the said items and b) randomness in which accounts got upgraded.
The fan is designed nicely but it just clips so horribly when wielded (looking at the video on Dulfy’s). I am surprised they didn’t check it or didn’t consider such major clipping important.