Guild Wars 2

Many.8419:

tragic romance story about two people with opposing goals loving each other

Now, I have not read the novel. So I’ll make only 2 comments, take them as you will.

1) Compare apples to apples. In-game romance to in-game romance. You are comparing a romance that’s described in ~30 lines of text in a living story to a romance that’s described in a novel. Way more space to flesh it out.

2) I have to base my analysis on human race as saying that sylvari are different (in their emotional response) would imply they would not act predictably by humans. As they are fairly predictable in game, I will treat their emotions as human ones. Which goes back to
2.1) People with completely opposite goals do not develop lasting romantic relationships. No common ground means the relationship can be hormonal (physical attraction) which fits the description of how Caithe is acting, but certainly a non lasting love (and by the time of PS, 20 years has passed, Caithe really should get over her middle school crush).
2.2) With regards to Kasjory, at least there is a reason for it – Kas feeling extremely insecure after losing her father and needing someone to rely on. Basic premise is there, even if the romance is not written well. With F+C I just can’t see a basic premise for a relationship other than ‘puppy love’ on Caithe’s part.

Let me get this straight – you thought Faolin and Caithe’s romance was well done?

Even after what you saw in episode 2? ‘You have maniacal tendencies, hang out with crowd that hates our mother tree and want to subjugate our race (which is implied Caithe knew as she did kill Wynne to prevent it), but I still love you! /swoon’. Caithe and Faolin have absolutely nothing in common (I guess they are both firstborn, woo) and Faolin constantly doing things that Caithe disagrees with.

I have no idea how romance where the partners have zero common ground would work, which makes all the references to Faolin and Caithe’s romance from PS make even less sense. While I am not a huge fan of Kas and Jory’s romance, at least it’s believable in terms of Kas needing a strong person to rely on. C+F romance just felt like Caithe was a teenager on her first crush where she is willing to ignore everything and follow her partner in any endeavor regardless of what she thinks about it. Sure, believable for a few months, or maybe year, but how could Caithe not get over it by the PS where she is still saying how much she loves Faolin and willing to fall to the Nightmare for her.

Personally I think that romance arcs are really not ANet’s strong point. I can’t think of one that was done well.

The forum ate my long reply. Unfortunate, but you’ll get a short summary.

You can stop speed-runs in only one way – by making it not worth the time to do. However in doing so, you will reduce the number of dungeon groups by unacceptable margin – new players will simply have no groups to join. A good chunk of people who run regular runs now will stop doing it because for the same amount of time invested the reward will have to be smaller.

Any half-measure like making killing trash mandatory and increasing rewards to compensate for time loss will have people continue doing speed runs and kicking people who don’t kill fast enough/don’t know the dungeon well enough just like it happens now. Except the total time per dungeon will be longer.

By the comparative length of the models, the ‘katana sword’ is actually a wakizashi. Tanto should be 15-30cm, and the blade length of the ‘katana sword’ is no more than double of that, placing it just in the wakizashi range.

And come on, ANet is fully aware that those will sell like candy from gem store. You can still see Belinda’s odachi everywhere.

I don’t see why people are egging on the OP. He brings up a valid concern. Currently GW2 has far too many currencies, and the currencies keep piling up. OP attempts to address the lack of reuse of old currencies. If you disagree with his proposal, by all means explain why and (if possible) provide an alternative solution. Simply saying that his idea sucks is not constructive.

At the moment the system is designed to behave as follows: Each ‘currency’ (be it event reward or actual wallet currency) has a limited number of useful things to buy. After that, the currency becomes useless with exception of a single, somewhat meaningless conversion into some sort of resource. Thus each new currency introduced goes through the same stages – mad hoarding to get the rewards, dumping the rest into the conversion, forgetting that the area ever existed as no more rewards can be gained (converting bandit crests to bags is fairly inefficient, only reason why it’s done is because people have an excess of crests due to how much of a loot pinata SW is).

This will not change meta in the slightest. You will merely be asked to stack full zerk + minimum necessary amount of toughness. People will then min/max to make sure only the bare minimum is used. So meta remains the same, you forced a few pieces of toughness gear down the player’s throats, and now you have to re-balance all encounters in the game. Why?

I believe mesmer currently suffers from 2 problems:
1) Inability to reliably do damage with phantasms (takes too long to get them up and they are destroyed too quickly)
As a consequence of this, mesmer’s DPS is one of the (if not THE) lowest of all classes outside of some niche situations (reflects or places where phantasms stay up)

2) Lack of pure power ranged weapon combination (GS has a melee phantasm)
This issue could have been fixed with MH power based ranged weapon which was what part of the mesmer community was asking for.

While by all means mesmer is a fun class to play, it is currently needs almost as much fixing as necro does, as both classes are built around a flawed premise (at least in PvE) where neither condition/attrition nor AI controlled fragile phantasms are currently viable.

Yeah, can’t wait for people with white wings + halo + … Predator. Good has to be scary, so the evil would be too afraid to sin?

But you already have your account with characters on it! You’ve already invested time into it and therefore you’d be willing to invest more resources into it instead of starting from scratch on the new (DD) account. More $$ for ANet this way :/

A long while ago (a year? more?) we had a developer pop in and say they would like to get it changed so the map completion rewards would be usable by the class of the character completing the map. We are still waiting. Along with engineer’s hobosacks.

Impressive, I think this is the first time I’ve seen gem prices jump enough that people who bought them yesterday could resell them for profit today.

The fun part about getting high MF is that investment per-return is awful for the majority of the cases. Say an item has 1% chance to drop. With 100MF you have 2%, with 300MF you have 4%. But. Between 200MF and 300MF the increase in drop rate is only 33% and the amount of luck necessary becomes astronomical somewhere around 150MF mark. So not only are you getting smaller (relatively to current value) returns, you also need to invest more. I suspect that if someone worked out math in the detail, they’d find that the time it would take to pay off their salvaging vs vending of blues/greens for luck (past MF200 or so) would be in years if not decades.

So, the dead go to the Mists. You can also go to the Mists in WvW. Finally Revenant is one who returned after death or long absence. It all makes sense now. Rytlok went to the Mists to WvW (he does have anger managment issues, so seemed like a good place to vent). He spent so much time in the land of the dead, that he can now be called a revenant. The mad hammer train skills he has learned he will pass to the lowly PvErs and claim its a whole new class!

Just kidding, don’t kill me.

I can not even begin to answer the question due to the following issues:
1) The detailed answer to the original question would take multiple pages
—-You would need to account for different specs and gear sets)
2) How high up in fractals are we talking about?
---At high enough level no amount of passive defense will suffice
3) How experienced is the player playing the class?
—-Very good player will require much different amount of passive defense than a less experienced one
4) How good is the group the player is running with?
—-This asks both how fast things will die, how much support (boons) will you gain from other party members and how much you will need to reply just on yourself

Bottom line: Too many variables to account for.

Argon.1563:

KngGilgamesh.3481:

elementalist and thief. Warriors are still okay for DPS though. The only professions with low damage are Necro and Mesmer.

Necro has very high damage, if you know how to play it. Mesmer is on the lower end of it, but it can still do a reasonable amount of damage.

Unless I am sorely mistaken Necro does not do very high damage in PvE. Zerk D/x does decent damage, but (at the same skill level) is out-damaged by the majority of other classes. Mesmer (with all illusions up) could be counted as among top damage classes. However without illusions (normal state in majority of PvE due to how fragile they are, and the time it takes to generate them), it drops to (literally) the bottom of the pile.

Clarifying on necro: Zerk damage is bound to dagger which does not cleave. While on single target zerk necro does competitive damage, lack of cleave greatly reduces the feasibility of the class. Furthermore, lack of utility makes it less than appealing choice for most groups. Condition damage is largely not viable in PvE.

darkace.8925:

Civilis.2547:

…I don’t think we’ve seen the end of exploration.

Of course we haven’t. But there’s “stop and smell the roses” exploration, and there’s “get across the street as fast as you can before you get hit by traffic” exploration. Lately, Guild Wars 2 has been far too much of the latter and not nearly enough of the former.

I tried smelling some big pretty flower in SW, and it bit my head off

While I do miss the sense of peaceful exploration (which did sometimes happen in lower level areas), I can see why ANet moved away from it. You have to admit that creating large meaningful non-combat (or minimal combat) areas requires a lot of developer effort for little payoff (most players will end up the action packed, loot filled combat areas instead).

Example: How many people spend time in SW Skritt cave after finishing the jumping puzzle/coins? That place is HUGE, and I am sure took a while to put together. Yet everyone is outside, farming the Breach/VW/Chests.

edgarallanpwn.8739:

Zania.8461:

I like them, but those will be a real pain in anything other than open world environment.

How so?

They will block a fairly large part of your FoV when on another character. In a cramped environment you won’t see your character if a character with wings is nearby. Jumping puzzles will go from hard mode when norn is doing it parallel with you to an elite mode when the said norn has the wings.

I like them, but those will be a real pain in anything other than open world environment.

There are 10 types of people: Those who understand binary and those who don’t.

With that aside, probably explore first, let the Revenant get at least first balancing patch through so I won’t end up either playing horribly underpowered or overpowered character.

Can the argument over nothing stop please? Mesmer portal is a convenience, which can save a fair amount of time. If you believe the convenience is worth tipping for, you will tip. If you don’t, you won’t. Either way you should be polite to your mesmer (being polite in general is a plus!).

Fringe cases where people feel entitled to ports (and being rude about it) is a separate issue, which does occasionally surface. These cases should be dealt with as such.

In summary: Be polite and do not feel entitled to other people’s resources (be it mesmer feeling entitled to tips, or people feeling entitled to portal).

Caedmon.6798:

No..? Do you tip that warrior that is rezzing your kitten at events ? Do you tip that guardian that is providing you with boons ? You want more people to pay mesmers for portals…atleast you expect to be payed,yet you didnt make a mesmer for money…This thread man…

And once again, missing the point. A warrior that’s rezzing me at the event will benefit from my participation and get a polite ‘thank you’ from me (note, if time it takes to get me up is not going to be offset by my damage, I will WP myself). Guardian providing me with boons 1) costs nothing to the guardian and 2) benefits the guardian as increasing uptime of party members increases the party damage and thus decreases time it takes to complete content. A mesmer that ran through a JP does NOT benefit in any way or form from porting other players up.

Marthkus.4615:

Tactu.4867:

yeah!
next time i’ll be doing a content/dungeon/etc I’ll ask for tips to put a fire field , and blast it , to give you might&fury so you can do the content/dungeon/etc faster .

I think this expresses why tipping is silly.
If you want money for something, then charge.

You have to admit that this is not a fair comparison. In the dungeon scenario, when you buff the party you are making the dungeon go faster for everyone, including yourself. Thus doing so benefits the player who buffs. (Caster benefits from their own actions)

However when mesmer ports someone through a JP they are trading their own time (time they put in the JP itself plus the time to actually port someone), for…well a ‘thank you’. (No direct benefit to the caster, in fact usually takes extra time to port people)

There is no tipping etiquette in GW2. If tips are not requested, you should get a polite ‘thank you’, but anything past that is at the discretion of the benefactor of your port. I somewhat expect that people will tip for the hardest-to-reach places, but unless you explicitly ask for money, you should never expect a donation.

With that said, it’s more than a little annoying when a person doesn’t even bother trying to do the JP but sits at the point where you can jump down to (or the WP) and EXPECTS (sometimes loudly, and with worse-than-acceptable language) a port just because you are on your mesmer. Just like I am not entitled to the donation, you are not entitled to getting a port after I dumped 10+ minutes on the JP.

Same issue. Seems to be inconsistent and not related to the amount of in-game action. Frequent boots to character select due to loss of connectivity.

Interestingly enough when I use the resource monitor to look at gw2.exe, the latency is very good. In fact, latency to the server which seems to be sending/receiving majority of the data is in sub 100ms range with no packet loss. So it feels like a connectivity issue, acts like a connectivity issue, but isn’t diagnosed like a connectivity issue.

Central US. Vyve broadband. Tracing to the connection server (as per resource monitor) ends up with one of the intermediate hops constantly having 100% PL. So yes, seems like there is a router down somewhere. Alas it has been down for several days. While this is not a problem on ANets side, it would be very helpful if one of their employees would investigate.

While I agree (in general) that ANet doesn’t want people in undies, the comment was more in line of ‘how little do your clothes should cover before it stops mattering’?

Back on topic though, I am all for some pants. Medium armor has plenty of pants, but trench-coat tops. Light armor has plenty of tops, but skirts only. Heavy armor gets plate skirts as well. Silliness.

Keneth.6490:

I don’t think having people run around in their underwear is the vision Arenanet has for their game.

Judging by the starting light armor on norn/human females, I find this statement hard to believe.

I suspect this was one of the “50 suggestions per week” that John Smith shot down.

I am actually perfectly fine with spending gems for bank space. I am however completely baffled by the per-character bag slots. If they made them per-account, I’d probably max them out. The way things are now, they are too expensive on the gems-per-space basis as I have to buy them for every character. I don’t see why they can’t make an alternative of, say 1000-1200 gems per bag slot unlock for entire account. That way people with single character can keep using the current model, and people with 3+ characters would buy account unlocks.

And yes, useless inventory clutter has to go. Way too many items which are obtained too often to not have a slowly incrementing stack of in your inventory (no point in using these one at a time as you just get them back and have to rearrange inventory…again).

Ranged power based MH weapon please. We have:
ranged condition MH (Scepter)
ranged condition 2H (staff)
melee power MH (sword)
ranged power 2H (GS)

This really only leaves room for melee condition weapons (please don’t), and MH ranged power weapon. I know mesmers have strange weapon choices (ranged GS), but cripes, if the shield is going to be the ranged power MH weapon…I dunno, I think it’ll be too strange even for mesmer.

AA from EQ1? This can get out of hand pretty fast and become an awful gate for new players.

I fully support this.

Some pretty interesting ideas here. I was actually spit-balling some ideas on how to address this today. This has always been something that has bothered me, too.

For example:

Have kits respect the existing back item flag. If you have a back item and you want to show it, hide the kit. If you don’t have a back item or choose to hide it, always show the kit. Obviously this makes it a little harder than usual to tell what kit you are using, so:
A nameplate icon similar to Elemental Attunements would be a good addition (I may add this regardless if we can get the art )
Move the kit somewhere else on your body. I know, crazy right? For example, who doesn’t like a sweet fanny-pack?

Hopefully this finally gets resolved soon, and I’ll do what I can to see that happen. Keep in mind, as Colin mentioned before, that there are some pretty beefy projects going on that are consuming our engineering time. But that doesn’t exactly mean we can’t sneak stuff in here and there .

-Bill

Over a year ago in Engi forum. It really shouldn’t be that hard to fix. For a game that’s stressing the horizontal progression and ‘looks’ of characters, the inability to hide the awful hobosacks is bad.

I hope we will gain the ability to deal competitive damage without relying on phantasms. At the moment sustaining 3 fragile illusions against many boss encounters is simply not feasible. Since they cannot be buffed due to PvP, I am hoping that chronomancer will allow us to deal respectable damage (if below pure phantasm mesmer with 3 phantasms out) without relying on the said mechanic.

Also, hoping that shield is just a spell effect and we’ll get a MH pistol. But not holding my breath. The strange mix of ranged power weapon that produces melee phantasms, and power melee weapon (no power ranged 1 hander) coupled with only ranged phantasm never made sense to me.

Here is an idea which should only use reasonable amount of new calculations server-side (IMO) while solving the bleed stacking.

Once the creature has 25 stacks of bleed on it, the bleeds are wiped and the new condition is added (call it whatever you want, say ‘deep wound’). The condition is set to do same amount of damage as the 25 stacks of bleed would (calculation will be required here), over the average amount of time bleeds would last (another calculation, might do a slightly more complicated one and weight the remaining times so that average DPS is preserved better).

After that you can stack another 25 stacks of bleed. If you cap again, just add another stack of new conditions. Even if new conditions are capped to 10, this is still effectively 250 bleed stacks on boss. Immediately solves all the group problems (and even marginally allows multiple condition builds), and somewhat reduces the boss problems.

In fact, if this calculation is not overly intensive, you can lower the bleed stacks to 10, add 10 stacks of new condition, and then 10 more stacks of 3rd tier condition. Call them bleed → deep wound → gashing wound. 1000 worth of bleed stacks. And at the same time the server only needs to keep track of only 30 stacks of dots.

The leveling system in GW2 is merely a glorified tutorial. Yes, it doesn’t do a perfect job (most fresh level 80 bearbows are scary), but it’s simply meant to teach you how to play and introduce to the setting. To add to that, it is (IMO) a very enjoyable tutorial, which can be (largely) skipped by veteran players.

The fact that GW2 is stepping away from gear treadmill (as per announcement), makes me even more excited about the game finally answering ’what do you do once your players reach level cap? ’ question correctly. The previous answer (make the player run in the hamster wheel) that is so prevalent in MMO genre since EQ1 really has to go.

Whether GW2 will be able to maintain the interest using horizontal + skill progression coupled with Living Story over long term remains to be seen, but for now I remain optimistic.

Biggest issue with Bonneti’s and similar weapons is that most sword animations in game are slashing. Rapiers, are mainly meant for piercing attacks. I think the most reasonable sword would be something like Sclerite, but with a more appealing cross-guard. Alternatively, fractal sword IS one of the better looking swords (IMO), but alas, locked behind pure RNG gate.

Finally, we can hope that Delaqua family has a few 1 handed swords stashed somewhere to match Belinada’s Odachi.

Cyrrin.1230:

With these new collections, we were curious if the precursors would still be obtainable through other means such as drops and the Mystic Forge where they are currently acquired. The original precursors will definitely remain available through those means, but the new precursors will be different and revealed when they are ready to roll out the new legendary weapons. The collections are just a very clear path that outlines every step to getting a precursor, which Colin says is important to them as well as a bulk of players that will see these collections as an epic journey to crafting their precursor. For the handful of players that like to roll the dice and play the Mystic Forge, those options will still be available for the original precursors for those who enjoy that and find it an exciting experience.

Will new precursors not be available at all via MF? Also, old precursor not available thru collections?

I read it as old precursors will be available through both MF and the collections, new ones only through collections.

I have no evidence to support this other than a couple of relatively hectic runs where I was the person kiting the Husk (the other times went as expected – swarm of ‘1’ pressers at the entry, usually resulting in a huge number of heals). It felt that most bubbles would pick a spot where the husk is at the moment the bubble is spawned, then move to it and explode at that spot. The only time it felt that they behaved differently is when you dragged husk in the 200 range of them, which would make them prematurely explode.

This is based on the fact that I successfully kited Husk in a circle around the room with no bubbles healing it until I lost aggro.

I am pretty sure confusion is useless against golems as well – fairly certain their spin is a channeled skill (could be wrong though), as it can be interrupted at any point. Thus you’ll get a single ‘tick’ of confusion at the very beginning.

So no, there is still no valid use for confusion in PvE. The biggest issue is not even the low amount of damage per skill used (this can be tweaked as it was done in the patch), but the fact that attack speeds differ greatly across different creature types. This results in complete inability to normalize confusion without making it either useless for a large chunk of the game, or completely overpowered for another chunk. Since we can’t have an overpowered condition in PvE, it will remain useless, or marginally useful in a select few encounters. Certainly not something I’d spec for or carry a set of condition armor for.

While poorly worded, the original concern is a valid one. A new player would have played through PS (introduces you to Pact, and Trahearne), then you suddenly dropped into S2 which talks about the fallout of Scarlet’s invasion. The game also assumes you know your team at least to some extend (and talks about the consequences of their actions during S1).

Having played through S1 myself, I can easily see how a newer player would get horribly lost. Just sitting in Silverwastes listening to people ask ‘what is the Marionette people keep talking about’ can really drive the point home.

I hope they will add some sort of ‘into’ cinematic for the players starting S2 who never played S1. It need not be a large one, but a few slides that recap the story of how you met your team and defeated Scarlet would be very useful.

The best thing I found about axe 5 is that it keeps channeling through dodges (at least used to before I took a break good 6 months ago). Considering the skill is fairly obviously tailored to fighting 5+ mob swarms, this gives you ability to do damage while taking none in return. That with whirl finisher make it a viable, if not a great option. Generally I’d go for utility of warhorn, but axe can be useful in some niche cases.

Just came back (a week ago) after a 6 month break. I found the new chapter to be quite challenging, but soloable entire way through with minimal deaths (I had a death or two… or three in some of the boss instances). Once you learn the encounters they become MUCH easier (that, or read spoilers, which I didn’t do other than for a couple of achievements).

Note: I played a (zerker) mesmer. The class has a combination of reasonable damage (with a lot of fire and forget capability) and (generally) high survivability. Once you beat each instance once, coming back is much easier. By now, I have managed to solo all achievements with exception of the timed Priory run, with reasonable amount of fails (although I did have severe issues with soloing the centaur boss in challenge mode).

And there for a bit I thought that Trahearne was corrupt before he wasted entirety of Pact + combined race forces by lowering the fleet for bombardment (they could have used bombs instead of guns! Napalm bombs! Or Agent Orange!). But I guess incompetence works as an explanation as well.

As far as DE is concerned, we have seen Logan survive worse in the last part of PS.

For PvE, zerk prespective

Poor sustained damage on multiple foes
-Lifeblast is the only meaningful ‘cleave’ necros have. Other than that, staff marks (ha?) and wells, all of which are hindered by cooldowns

Decent sustained damage against single foe
-Don’t get me wrong, dagger damage is nice. Except it’s just comparable to most other classes damage, and is lower than either ele’s or thieves

Decent condition control
-Yes, necros can get rid of conditions, except as mentioned guards can do it better. Heck, traited WH warrior can probably do it better.

Decent (but meaningless) enemy boon control
-As mentioned earlier, rate of boon application on most NPCs far outpaces necro’s ability to strip them. And still, if boon stripping is a must (which it really isn’t anywhere in the current PvE) you can always bring a mesmer

Poor sustain
-Yes, the class that is supposed to be the high in sustain, is actually severely lacking in PvE due to lack of access to vigor / endurance regeneration. The way PvE is designed makes dodging extremly more potent than passive defenses such as high health pool (and extra hp bar of lifeforce)

Bottom line is that if you want damage, you won’t bring necro. If you want support, you won’t bring necro. If you want control, you won’t bring necro. Even if you want a mix of the above, you won’t bring necro. You bring necro if you enjoy the class and willing to put up with it’s shortcomings, of if necro player is simply better than alternatives from other classes.

As I mentioned earlier, there are a few very easy to impliment suggestions that wuold address the majority of issues.
-Give ability for players to trigger world bosses at any time provided the required number of people is present in the area
—-This will remove any need for scheduling (if wanted, keep that as well)
—- It will allow small guilds and group of unguilded people to have access to events without need to wait on timer or large guilds
—-It will not lead to the increase in loot if you make all the loot from events once per day per account
-Reduce the cost of waypoints inside the same area to 0. This will fix the double waypoint cost issue introduced by the forced ‘contested’ waypoints.

Make every event triggerable ala Siegerazer in WvW. Gather N people around spawn point, click an item, spawn the boss. This way it’s not biased toward guild size, allows for random people to interact and trigger bosses as desired. Make all loot obtainable from world bosses to be once per account per day.

Figure out a way to deal with temples. The main issue is not knowing if temple is up. Ever. You would need to explicitly go visit every zone, hope to land in the same overflow to check. Only suggestion I can come up with is making the temples revert to contested status faster, thus allowing for higher probability of being able to participate in the event.

Figure out a way to deal with waypoints. The moneysink added will make temples events even less accessable, and fewer people will want to go to an already deserted Orr. I propose 0 cost for waypoints if teleporting inside the same map.

This heal is disappointing. But I guess we get a great utility signet that goes in healing slot.

EDIT: If it doesn’t recharge damage phantasms, its not even great utility.

While OP is generally correct, I think they are trying to sell thieves short. Using auto attacks to deter the thief – it just doesn’t work. You will either need to spin in circles (which means exposing your back to a stationary thief) or hope the thief doesnt know how to dodge roll/walk around you to backstab. Nor does damaging stealthed thief break the stealth, and even a GC can eat a swing of auto attack without flopping.

Thieves really arent limited to roles of harasser with little damage and pure glass cannon either. Thief can take guaranteed crit on stealth, stack p/v/crit dam and p/t/crit dam gear and have spike damage near equivalent to burst build and survivability of a harasser.

Generally the guide will be sufficient against a newbie thief who rolled the class because they got owned once too many times by thief in WvW, but against a good player, it won’t do much.

Regarding PU mesmers. Yes they are annoying as hell. But on the other hand, telling apart mesmer from their clones should be trivial. Clones do crap for damage and can be ignored completely (in fact should be, as most PU mesmers will trait into annoying conditions on clone death). To get maximum stealth uptime mesmer has to sacrafice 2 utility slots, an elite, and have a torch out. Which means that they have one selectable utility and one healing skill that they can play with. But yes, just as a good thief, good PU mesmers are really annoying.

Warrior’s HS is 400/s and is completely passive. Illusions do take effort to keep up, and mesmers do have lower hp/armor so I would expect something more than 400/s for 3 illusions out. On the other hand, 800/s does seem a bit much. Mainly thinking how horribly overpowered a WvW illusion spam/stealth condition build would be. On the other hand, warriors get 3s stance with 3k/hit block/heal, which would make them completely unstoppable in WvW zergs, so I have doubts that whoever designed these considered WvW at all.

Elidath.5679:

FateOmega.9601:

How about mesmers?

What about mesmers ? Their illusions ? They have stats derived from the mesmer’s, they already take advantage of the ascended equipment.

Just like engineer damage takes advantage from engineer’s stats. But neither take advantage of increased weapon damage. So phantasm mesmer gets quite a bit less use out of an ascended weapon than pure melee class.

MM necros, rangers, phantasm mesmers, kit engineers and all condition builds do not scale with increased base damage ascended weapons.

There are several problems with LS and Scarlet in particular.

One is character evolution. Generally, in well written books the characters evolve as they overcome presented challenges. In the semi-static MMO world (especially with the current LS vs PS issue), our characters really can NOT evolve. This greatly reduces the available avenues for the storytelling.

Compounding this, is the issue of pacing. Take a good book. Summarize it into 4 page essay (content loss). Then read one paragraph of the summary to a person every 2 weeks. At this point, by the end of the second week the person already forgot what the previous paragraph was about, much less what the paragraph 2 months ago was. This creates a very disjoined presentation. Even if the original was interesting (even after being summarized), after such presentation it is disjoined and loses appeal.

Furthermore, currently LS needs to cater to people who did not do the previous parts (either due to joining late, taking a break, whatever). I think this is the issue of constant repetition of how great and evil Scarlet is. It allows the people who haven’t done the previous parts to see that she is great and evil. However for the person who has done each step it feels repeatetive, predictable and therefore boring.

Let’s be honest. After the first LS updates the rest was extremly repeatative. The main villian is the same, she always escapes and no actual plot development is visible. I am sure that dev team has a great story which will tie in most of loose ends at the end (or at least I am trying to be optimistic), but the current presentation of the story is lacking.

My personal preference would be one of the following. If the 2 week schedule is negotiable, reduce the rate of releases to 1 or maybe 1.5 months. This will allow to tell the story without constant repetition.

For the current story it would be:

Molten alliance for the entirety of the first release (sets the stage, some greater power behind alliance is hinted on)
Multiple attacks by Scarlet: Toxic Alliance, Aethereblades, Jubelee, whatever) as we fight her on all fronts. This is likely 2 releases, first of which would confirm existance of the ‘overmind’, second would actually reveal Scarlet.
Conclusion of the story arc (which we are yet to see)

Oh, and while at that, please do not have her present at the end of each story, make it understood that she was behind it, but dont have her be physically present and escape. It is really not needed, and ruins the storytelling.

A lot more can be written about it, but I am fairly certain most of this has already been disucssed at length.