How does making someone frustrated incentivize them to spend money on the game? If anything it makes them more likely to quit
I suppose most F2P korean grindfest games must be bleeding players through their ears. Except they aren’t.
There’s a reason P2W cash shop designs exist. It’s pretty evident players are willing to spend money to wave away bad luck or immense time gates.
Well, the salt is even greater when you consider their dungeon token system as they had promised, that everyone would get the same rewards with no RNG involved.
They even mocked WoW for it in one of their little pre-release comics.
And then after release they did a total bait and switch as they realized they could milk players out of their money by gating rewards through ridiculous RNG that drives up gold values and as a result costs of items. Which in turn incentivizes people to convert cash>gems>gold to circumvent their frustration.
It sucks not being able to use greatsword in PvP/WvW.
It’s just too slow and cumbersome – now that they have nerfed chill, perhaps they could speed this up to be more in line with the Guardian greatsword.
You can’t even use greatsword in PvE in HoT because unlike a thief’s 7k backstab, a HoT champ will wreck you for 15k+ damage while you’re mid-animation with greatsword.
They made a melee specialization for necro on one of the most melee-unfriendly expansion content.
And the worst part is that there’s no payoff for the risk given that condi necro with scepter auto spam does way more DPS than a power necro at melee.
Loot at anything below 75+ scale seems to be absolute trash. Seems like they moved all the rewards to the 75+ scale.
Isn’t it nice when a thread is derailed by the back and forth of two people?
They just need to trim away the aftercasts on greatsword and buff the power coefficients of our greatsword skills and reaper shroud #1.
Quite honestly, well of suffering should be a 15 sec base cd, the other wells should not exceed 25 sec cd’s.
Alternatively, they can buff minions to be meaningful DPS increase utilities with increased power scaling coefficients.
Shouts will continue to be worthless garbage until they do more than just apply short duration debuffs that any mob with a breakbar is immune to.
Reaper traits need damage modifiers and offensive increases. Shivers of Dread is absolutely worthless, as are the adept and grandmaster tiers for PvE.
His shadowstep has an indicator, not on the teleport itself but on the 1 second windup for his hammer smash shortly after the teleport. So when you see him suddenly appear next to you, you should be immediately dodging.
The only remotely annoying skill of his is his aoe pull and the minions if you have last laugh instability.
Your DPS can also be the result of difference in ping. In a game as spammy as this one, that can be pretty noticeable.
Look at the difference between a Korean player playing Blade and Soul rotations with <15 ms and your average NA player going at 30-70 ms.
For example, with the video reikken linked, I personally can’t attunement swap as fast as he can. Not for lack of mashing the button, his video just does not have the same input delay on attunement swap as I experience.
I mean, Dagger/Warhorn has all the possible tools you could need in fractals.
Personal reflect on earth, projectile destruction from ring of earth and a cripple to keep mobs in check.
You got a line pull/interrupt on air attunement plus a ranged vulnerability stacking orb to pull with.
All dagger autoattacks except for earth attunement have longer range than a mob/boss’s actual melee range, so you can melee perfectly safe and only worry about ranged mobs pelting you with projectiles.
The points of danger in your dagger rotation involve Burning Speed and Fire overload, so use those cautiously. Everything else can be done from max melee range.
With Aftershock and Warhorn #4 on earth, you got 8 seconds of reflection. If you find you need more, you can switch out grandmasters for the warhorn grandmaster that procs warhorn #4 at a health threshold, so now you have 12 seconds of reflection.
And then there’s water attunement on water warhorn, where you 5>3>4>earth 4 for 2 water blast heals, massive heals of your own, and if you need a third blast, use aftershock on that water field as well.
This is not mentioning the strongest heal in the game, Wash the Pain Away. That thing alone will completely refill your health bar and heal up your allies nicely to boot.
All of this happens in zerker gear, you do not need healing power to heal up and survive.
Worst case scenario you drop signet of fire and take 3 shouts and with the grandmaster you’ve just healed for about 4k just using shouts, use water ele elite active ability and you’ve got even more heals.
The only point at which you might be forced to use a staff is in stupid open world events where Chalk mobs and other champions spam aoe all over themselves that will 1-shot you.
MAYBE Molten fractal will also force you into staff if people can’t rotate reflects and don’t jump through waves effectively, or their DPS is crap.
Dagger ele is by far the most fun and interactive melee build to play in this game. Stick with learning it and you won’t regret it.
Staff is so boring ;x
(edited by Zenith.7301)
Ping is gonna affect your attunement swap rotations, unfortunately ;(
Play dagger and max melee range. Aggro is not only based on aggro but proximity, so let your higher HP classes in first.
Take aftershock and either flash freeze or glyph of storms. That plus your heal and blasting water fields should keep you up. Your two auras will mitigate you a lot of damage from both projectiles and hits that do land on you, plus they heal you with the tempest grandmaster.
Berzerker ele is perfectly fine.
Of course, if you got some crap comp with 2 eles 2 mesmers, you are gonna be in a world of pain.
Comp is really important in harder content.
We did want to add more ways to acquire accessories, and in fact added them as a rare drop to some of the daily chests. I’m not sure if we want to go all-in and make them directly purchasable for relics at this point, though.
Can you open up the remaining stat combos in accessories to laurels and fractal relics?
Condi builds have a much more tedious process of gearing up as viper/sinister accessories are much harder/time consuming to acquire than berzerker/assassins stats.
What about shortbow is hybrid? Looks full on condition to me.
The auto has reasonably high power coefficients, and the rest of the skills don’t apply any worthwhile condition pressure.
Poison Spread is a worthless skill outside PvP due to its marginal poison duration, and one skill is a cripple while the other makes pets apply bleeds which are weaker than yours because for some reason they won’t make pets scale off the ranger’s own stats.
Shortbow is eclipsed in condi pressure by mainhand axe and power damage by longbow.
Only reason why I care less about raiding nowadays is the schedule commitments.
Having 2-3 days a week where you might have to tell your friends/family, “Sorry, I’ve got raid at that time” when they want to go out or have dinner is just pretty crappy.
He’s only annoying with the last laugh instability. Last laugh in general is obnoxious on melee loadouts and those stupid spirit devourers just annoy the crap out of you.
Other than that, he seems much easier to me.
Before the change his simple melee attacks at scale 50 would one shot a berzerker ele. Now not even his teleport strike does that.
He’s a lot easier to melee now, not needing an anchor guardian or earth elemental to distract him so you can melee him without getting 1-shot by an autoattack.
He’s just harder to AFK range.
As a dagger/warhorn tempest main I’ve had to scold a lot of staff eles and dumb mesmers and rangers for not having the decency to stay close to melee so he doesn’t port all over the place.
They think because they got ranged weapons that they need to spread out. This boss punishes spreading out.
It’s pretty sad that even after an entire class revamp and specialization focusing on a Power Weapon (Greatsword) that Power Necro is still bad.
I am salty to, be honest, because I main a Power Necro and a Condi Berserker. Guess what? Can’t raid with either.
Because the revamp was PVP revamp. Useless PvP shouts that are garbage in PvE.
Useless PvP chill/fear traits that are useless in PvE.
Useless reaper shroud that already does less DPS than greatsword autochain, which is already mediocre to begin with.
Hideously long aftercasts and cast times to every greatsword skill and no damage compensation to boot.
When Robert Gee designs classes, much like with the chrono, he makes their traits and abilities with PvP in mind and PvE is an afterthought.
They could just buff the kitten damage of ricochet so it’s either a half competent power weapon, or they can add two bleed/3 torment stacks to the autoattack to make it a proper condi weapon.
They could but the damage is actually pretty good for a ranged weapon on our class if you’re fighting two targets and can hit your initial target twice per attack.
How long do you think the weapon would last in pvp when people are getting hit with 4 bleeds or 6 torment per throw simply because they are within 900 units of their ally?
While the skill could be better it’s by no means any kind of real handicap.
Warhorn needs much more help to be relevant than the axe does, in either hand.
I’m not about to have PvE mutilated because of how features work in PvP. Just buff the weapon and make it so the bounce only hits different targets.
And no, the weapon’s autoattack is the weakest in the game besides water staff auto or Flamestrike on fire scepter.
Axe is not a weapon you use from range right now, you need splitblade point blank or you’re useless.
Keep in mind if you choose mesmer for PvE, you will be the lowest DPS class in the game brought only for your party buff, alacrity. Like WoW vanilla’s Shaman and Paladin, buffbot.
Mesmer is bar none the lowest DPS PvE class, so if you wanna do solo PvE and roaming in HoT maps, your kill times will be terrible compared to a Revenant/Warrior/Thief/Reaper/Scrapper/Engineer/Dragonhunter.
Mesmer also has no viable aoe or cleave for easy tagging or constant aoe DPS. Your only aoe comes from 25+ sec cd stationary well utilities which aren’t even that damaging.
Mesmer has no good might stacking in any of its sustained DPS builds as well, so keep in mind mesmer is a GROUP class that’s pretty awful to solo with.
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Power reapers need help in PvE as well, especially raids.
Is the Reaper traitline what’s holding them back, or the base values on weapons, or the damage mods from Necro traitlines?
All of those. The reaper traits are largely pvp traits.
You have augury of death, where shouts are useless in both raids and dungeons, given you’re fighting single bosses and the effects themselves are weakness, chill, or some other worthless crap that doesn’t affect a boss due to the breakbar. Chilling Nova is useless in PvE because chill itself is useless on bosses. 50% reduction to roots/snares is useless in PvE because any of those get immediately cleansed in a group setting with all the eles and revenants.
You have the second tier, which is only decimate defenses. The minors consist of chill on fear, but you are neither fearing or chilling bosses anyways so those two are worthless most of the time, and their contribution to breaking a break bar is marginal.
The final minor is longer chill duration, with chill again being worthless on bosses and even some champions due to breakbar.
Our grandmasters are all garbage. First because two of them have to deal with reaper shroud, and reaper shroud is a DPS loss to even autoattacking on greatsword, let alone Gravedigger spam. Then you have Deathly Chill, which only scaled off condition damage so it was worthless on power reapers, and NOW it is even more worthless as it has been turned to a single even crappier bleed stack.
So, power reapers:
- Garbage shouts for instanced, non-idiot (zerg) instanced content.
- No damage % mod increases.
- No meaningful group utility, since bosses are resistant to blinds, chills, and weakness, the few utility we had.
- Hideous aftercasts on Gravedigger and other GS abilities, greatly hampering DPS. Autoattack chain has long wind-up’s, which means we often have to interrupt an autoattack mid-animation to dodge something.
This results in mediocre PvE DPS, a reaper shroud that’s worthless in PvE because it is a DPS loss over camping greatsword or dagger, and reaper shroud will never be buffed because the PvP mob will cry a river of tears about it.
There’s nothing particularly good about a reaper. You might have cared about boon strip, but then again both the chrono and revenant already do that, as will a thief.
They should have made Deathly Chill something like “your conditions deal 15% increased damage to chilled foes.”
No more Chill damage, is now group-play friendly, and still highly relevant.
Why just conditions?
Power reapers need help in PvE as well, especially raids.
An inferior, less mobile version of the engineer as the bulk of the DPS did not come from the axe, but rather Bonfire from the torch. Bleed DPS is garbage in terms of DPS contribution relative to burning. Which is why the strongest condi classes in PvE also have the strongest burning uptime.
The difference is the ranger relies on a boss being stationary on bonfire to do damage, and he can’t cleave his axe or torch conditions onto other spread targets like engineer or necro can.
Ya, I’m well aware of what fuels the DPS in double bonfire.
I’m also well aware, as you are, that it was a build that utilized axe in the main hand. While it might be feasible to use sword now without the glue when in raids or high fractals, you probably aren’t going to make up for the bleeds which literally leaves only one option.
Just because the auto is turds doesn’t mean the weapon isn’t the optimal choice.
The auto on staff and GS are both pretty kitten in a lot of cases and yet they are both very solid weapons for other reasons.
Which is what I’m arguing, that their balancing of autoattacks is horrendous.
Adding might stacks to ricochet is like adding retaliation to mesmer scepter auto. It’s a useless way to fix a garbage autoattack.
They could just buff the kitten damage of ricochet so it’s either a half competent power weapon, or they can add two bleed/3 torment stacks to the autoattack to make it a proper condi weapon.
He means that on the strongest weapon eles have, Fireball is the strongest auto-attack. Not that it is the strongest auto-attack we have.
I see
Well, the only place staff might be the best is wvw ZvZ
Not really. In PvE raids staff is neck to neck with D/WH, with this buff it’ll pull ahead.
You don’t compare fire staff or lightning whip, because fire staff has lava font and meteor shower that increase DPS in that same attunement next to fireball autoattack DPS, while air dagger has nothing but autoattacks.
We disregard overloads because both cases use their overloads.
They buffed the autoattack that needed the least buffing. I mean, staff air autoattack was already worse than fireball, so air attunement wasn’t even used on a single target, and they buffed FIREBALL?
Anet pls.
As a PvE ranger that used mainhand axe the majority of the time I disagree with you. Sure it sucks if the axe is your main damage output, but as a utility weapon set it has great functionality. Stacking might through the AA (before the buff to it’s might generation) I could get anywhere from 8-15 stacks of might from the AA alone depending on how many enemies there were and with my chosen secondary of warhorn could get 15-25 fairly comfortably (might I ad my setup gave me swiftness, fury, and regen as well). It left me enough might to deal good burst damage with the warhorn #4 and longbow #2 & #5 skills before switching back. Granted I used it more for power than condi, but the chill is decent and the axe 2 skill was good for tagging enemies as is the axe AA. I haven’t tried it, but the shortbow or sword mainhand with torch may be a good complimentary second set. The benefit hybrid weapons have over power or condi weapons is that you can destroy destructables while still dealing decent overall damage. I prefer hybrid weapons in PvE.
You don’t need the might stacking because the revenant and warrior already cap it for you in a group setting. But I get the impression you’re not the guy doing instanced content at high fractal levels or raids.
Condi build is Axe/Torch and Raids will have you playing with staff in a lot of cases so we have plenty of variety.
If you really want more variety, then ask for them to make dagger more interesting or make warhorn better.
An inferior, less mobile version of the engineer as the bulk of the DPS did not come from the axe, but rather Bonfire from the torch. Bleed DPS is garbage in terms of DPS contribution relative to burning. Which is why the strongest condi classes in PvE also have the strongest burning uptime.
The difference is the ranger relies on a boss being stationary on bonfire to do damage, and he can’t cleave his axe or torch conditions onto other spread targets like engineer or necro can.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
Meta mesmer before chrono did more than just portal, and the discovery and smart usage of portals on top of reflects, iWarden chaining, mob pulling and blink tricks makes far more mechanical creativity than just spamming alacrity generation skills.
It’s been a very long time since most of those were wanted from mesmers. Guardians did reflects and mob pulling far better than us while also providing far higher dps. Realistically the only thing that made us objectively useful was portal; as exhibited by speedrun mesmers literally just holding an fgs by the door ready to run for a portal while everyone else did the dpsing.
We went from smart use of Power Block on bosses to it being useless garbage, reflects were marginalized, pulls were marginalized.
You mean the all of 8 hours that power block worked through defiance? Past that it wasn’t really ever used, since trying to block some skills for 15 seconds was a waste of time and effort. Reflects and pulls were certainly nerfed, but guardians did both of those better anyway…
You use shatters that you wouldn’t use otherwise and at significant DPS cost just to keep that stupid boon running so everybody else can actually do something.
I don’t think you know how to play PvE chrono very well if you think this is true.
You can spin the whole vanilla WoW totem bot however you want, but the chrono is there for one thing and that’s alacrity generation.
Not to pick at nits here, but you seem to be forgetting that at least half of our purpose is quickness generation.
And let’s not sit here and pretend like ele and revenant aren’t providing utility while still being top tier DPS.
The role of an ele in a raid is to press 1, 2, and 5 repeatedly. If they need to switch to water or something else for utility, somebody else in the raid has screwed up. Same for a revenant outside of being a boon duration totem for the chrono. On top of that, revenant hasn’t been top-tier dps for months now, not sure what you’re talking about.
Mesmer and ranger players who bought into the vanilla game under the premise of being a DPS class as they advertised got screwed with this bait and switch of elite professions.
Wait what? Since when did Anet ever advertise specific classes as dps classes? You’re just expecting things that were never promised.
Yes, I understand that it’s reasonable to feel disappointed that Mesmer isn’t able to be the top dps class if that’s what you want to do, but it’s unreasonable to expect that Anet has an obligation to make every class able to do everything. The balance team’s first and only priority is to make every class viable in every mode of play. Nothing more, nothing less.
Check the posting history from Robert Hrouda (dungeon dev long fired after AC revamp), he basically said rangers were low on burst because they were supposed to be THE sustained dps class.
Jon Peters in the early days of vanilla, in a pre-release AMA session, said rather specifically that mesmer would be a highly offensive class doing even more damage than the necromancer, whom they also trumpeted as a high dps class.
And just because Revenant isn’t an elementalist does not make them NOT top tier DPS. The nerf to their auto was more than offset by the change to sword #3, giving them a net DPS gain. In terms of DPS, shiro/glint revenant are in the upper tier of damage dealers.
By comparison, chronomancer is abysmally low, more so than even a druid and that’s pretty bad to begin with.
I’m not disappointed at Anet missing the mark on one class. I’ve mained ranger, necromancer, and mesmer since this game’s release, and they’ve missed the mark on all those three.
I don’t even need mesmer/ranger/necro to be top dps or equal dps to an ele; I just want the gap to not be as horrendously bad as it is.
Look at WoW or FFXIV, they have gaps, but not to the degree where classes are turned away from specific roles. FFXIV has about a 5% max DPS discrepancy between classes, and WoW at most 10-15%. GW2 DPS discrepancies are immense by comparison.
YOU JUST TOOK THE VERY LAST BIT OF PROGRESS OUT OF THE GAME THAT WAS LEFT…. and i dont know if you realize that anet. You are promoting your game as a “big living world full of dynamic events” and you are basically taking it away from the new players…
Its okay giving it to the players who alredy have an lvl 80 character, but giving it to the new players ???So because you bought the expansion you get to automatically skip everything and become max level instead of having to work for it and put the time into doing it yourself…What is this WoW now ?? What a better way to throw the entire world you created in the garbage. Why would I leave LA now except for guild missions??
It removes the entirety of what GW2 is.. exploration and discovery.I just feel that i have nothing in this game, untill now i was like “okay i have level 80 i accomplished something in this game”… cant say that after this patch anymore…
I cared about this game but im not going to anymore… im sick of watching stupid decisions pass in anet like that… im a little sad about this cause gw2 was my fav game. R.I.P.
Before the boost let alone HoT existed, I managed to get all eight lv80 professions just by crafting.
GW2’s traditional leveling is horrendous; map completion has got to be one of the dulles experiences ever, especially those hearts and dynamic events.
So are druids, but that doesn’t make the playstyle any less kitten for those uninterested in the buffbot/healbot role. I wasn’t a support class in GW1, I don’t want to be one in GW2.
Especially creating a role that revolves purely around alacrity when the PvP mobs are out to nerf it to the ground. Pretty terrible to have the class underpinned around one effect.
I want my old Well of Precognition back. If they’re gonna leave in this crap one, the least they could do is add some protection ticks to it and the end explosion could blind foes.
Druids are replaceable. Tempests can heal enough, mesmers can heal enough, guardians and engineers can even heal enough. Chrono is completely irreplaceable. No other class can do anything remotely similar.
Ultimately, you’re just complaining for the sake of complaining. “Oh woe is me, my class is only the best in the game at doing a particular role, I want it to be best in the game at doing the particular role that I like better”.
This patch literally had nothing but buffs for Mesmer, and you’re sitting here complaining that they didn’t buff it enough. Do you understand how absurd that is?
Druid’s 15% damage increase via grace of the land and spotter+frost spirit is about as replaceable as alacrity chrono is.
Which is to say, not in any remotely optimized group.
Sorry you can’t empathize with anything that doesn’t bother you personally.
Before chrono mesmer was meta anyways in group content, be it as portal bot or quickness/reflect bot for speed records, yet that didn’t stop you from complaining yourself about it until chrono arrived. I’m not sure why you feel entitled to be the determining voice for what should and should not matter to people.
Your trivialization of the role that chrono plays is absurd. “Oh it’s just an alacrity bot, it’s meaningless.” If you want to make that argument, you must be willing to apply it to every single class. “Oh ele is just a dps bot”. “Oh revenant is just a boon bot.” “Oh Druid is just a heal bot.” In fact, one can easily make the argument that ele is playing a far less interesting role in PvE because 99% of their play is pressing 1, 2, and 5.
As I said before, you’re just complaining because chrono doesn’t fit the exact definition of what you want it to do. It had a powerful, necessary, and thoroughly engaging role that it plays in PvE right now, one that requires you to pay attention and use your entire build for a purpose.
The difference between current PvE builds and portal bot is massive. Back then we were taken for a single utility, with time warp as a bit of an extra. The current situation requires your entire build, all of your utilities, multiple weapon skills, traits, and gear all focused on performing precise rotations to maximize your support to a group.
Ultimately, in a perfect world every class could be useful in every role. But guess what, this world isn’t perfect and neither is the balance team. If every class in the game is a viable pick in a PvE party, they’ll count the balance situation as a success, and so that needs to be the benchmark that we use as well.
Oh, please, don’t wear out the word “absurd”, will you.
Meta mesmer before chrono did more than just portal, and the discovery and smart usage of portals on top of reflects, iWarden chaining, mob pulling and blink tricks makes far more mechanical creativity than just spamming alacrity generation skills.
We went from smart use of Power Block on bosses to it being useless garbage, reflects were marginalized, pulls were marginalized. You use shatters that you wouldn’t use otherwise and at significant DPS cost just to keep that stupid boon running so everybody else can actually do something.
You can spin the whole vanilla WoW totem bot however you want, but the chrono is there for one thing and that’s alacrity generation. If scepter for all its misery farted alacrity despite being a dogkitten weapon, we would use it just for the alacrity. The mesmer’s contributions other than the single buff are that irrelevant.
And let’s not sit here and pretend like ele and revenant aren’t providing utility while still being top tier DPS.
Mesmer and ranger players who bought into the vanilla game under the premise of being a DPS class as they advertised got screwed with this bait and switch of elite professions.
What’s worse, this whole alacrity fiasco is only gonna make it worse down the line when they introduce the next elite spec or try to support non-chrono mesmers as whatever they have to offer has to beat out alacrity, which is highly unlikely to happen.
It looks so kitten y. Why couldn’t they just keep the kick but not make it a leap?
So are druids, but that doesn’t make the playstyle any less kitten for those uninterested in the buffbot/healbot role. I wasn’t a support class in GW1, I don’t want to be one in GW2.
Especially creating a role that revolves purely around alacrity when the PvP mobs are out to nerf it to the ground. Pretty terrible to have the class underpinned around one effect.
I want my old Well of Precognition back. If they’re gonna leave in this crap one, the least they could do is add some protection ticks to it and the end explosion could blind foes.
Druids are replaceable. Tempests can heal enough, mesmers can heal enough, guardians and engineers can even heal enough. Chrono is completely irreplaceable. No other class can do anything remotely similar.
Ultimately, you’re just complaining for the sake of complaining. “Oh woe is me, my class is only the best in the game at doing a particular role, I want it to be best in the game at doing the particular role that I like better”.
This patch literally had nothing but buffs for Mesmer, and you’re sitting here complaining that they didn’t buff it enough. Do you understand how absurd that is?
Druid’s 15% damage increase via grace of the land and spotter+frost spirit is about as replaceable as alacrity chrono is.
Which is to say, not in any remotely optimized group.
Sorry you can’t empathize with anything that doesn’t bother you personally.
Before chrono mesmer was meta anyways in group content, be it as portal bot or quickness/reflect bot for speed records, yet that didn’t stop you from complaining yourself about it until chrono arrived. I’m not sure why you feel entitled to be the determining voice for what should and should not matter to people.
So are druids, but that doesn’t make the playstyle any less kitten for those uninterested in the buffbot/healbot role. I wasn’t a support class in GW1, I don’t want to be one in GW2.
Especially creating a role that revolves purely around alacrity when the PvP mobs are out to nerf it to the ground. Pretty terrible to have the class underpinned around one effect.
I want my old Well of Precognition back. If they’re gonna leave in this crap one, the least they could do is add some protection ticks to it and the end explosion could blind foes.
You don’t seem to understand that hybrid builds in PvE SUCK because players stack one stat or the other.
Why do you think they don’t intend these changes for PvP and WvW, which is where those weapons have traditionally been used?
Because PvE deserves more weapon variety than just mainhand sword and longbow.
The entire game’s balance is slave to PvP; it’d be nice for a change if they actually gave a kitten about PvE rangers.
You have an axe mainhand that has some horrible case of mistaken identity just as with the shortbow.
You have a crappy hybrid weapon with a power based, low coefficient autoattack on a weapon whose other skills are condition based.
You could give Ricochet 10 might per hit and it would still suck, because the weapon has no sustained DPS whatsoever due to its miserable autoattack damage, and short of shotgun melee range splitblade you are not doing anything with that weapon in a group setting.
Same goes for shortbow, bunch of hybrid physical and condition skills.
You don’t seem to understand that hybrid builds in PvE SUCK because players stack one stat or the other.
Power builds want to stack ferocity and precision. Condi build will take condi damage, power, and precision.
Because both ricochet and the shortbow skills all have miserly power coefficients, they’re essentially wasted skills on a weapon with 3-4 other skills that deal with conditions.
PvP balance, guys. They don’t give a rat’s kitten about PvE in this game.
Reaper shouts and traits are still garbage in PvE, but hey PvP whine so nerf some more.
PvP balance as usual.
Mesmer damage is still garbage, so we’ll still be alacrity bots in PvE.
Condi specs will still suck at cleave, so condi mesmer is significantly inferior to other condi specs.
One day, maybe they’ll actually get around to balancing autoattack damage across classes.
Are you serious? You want to encourage people to take dagger/scepter over staff and yet proceed to buff the strongest autoattack of the strongest weapon by 17%?
While only giving scepter a miserly 33% increase to the water attunement auto and marginally reducing fire auto cast time?
And leaving dagger water and earth attunements the same?
A 7% buff to Churning Earth? Are you joking?
Churning Earth needs to function like Dragon Tooth. Drop and forget.
They don’t understand that the water autoattack was not the only one that needed help.
Flame Strike is still hilariously bad and the earth auto is still mediocre.
Dragon’s Tooth and Shatterstone are both easily dodged just by walking out.
Yet another instance in which PvP takes a crap all over PvE usage.
And for what, there’s no balancing PvP. PvE, you tweak numbers. PvP, people will always cry about imbalance based on duels.
Forget about your crappy esports and start balancing the godkitten skills for PvE or at least split the skill balancing.
Best solo build. Alongside ranger, MM necro is the other best solo class out there in HoT.
As far as optimal for instanced PvE, not really. But PvE in this game is a joke anyways so have fun with whatever you enjoy.
Things don’t just have value because you’re greedy about it. You don’t stop caring about something just because you don’t have an overbearing obsession with acquiring more of it.
There’s some grey in between that black and white, people.
You don’t even need to remove legendaries from people who want to grind gold. You can just make it so people who do difficult content acquire the legendary far faster than people who play auction house barons and dynamic event farmers.
Everyone would still acquire a legendary their own way, but instanced group content wouldn’t feel so kitten in acquisition rate, on top of raiders/dungeoneers not feeling pressed to use the auction house to acquire legendaries in a reasonable amount of time.
No.
Prestige items should be tied to in-game achievements and challenging combat gameplay, not about who farms best or plays the auction house baron.
By this point I’d even prefer they release legendaries tied to gold medals in adventures or upon successful completion of hard jumping puzzles.
But have these legendaries means something that is not FARM GOLD. kitten that.
Weapons and armors should be earned by doing meaningful content WELL in the game.
The economy should be restricted to convenience items like food, pots, minis, and other frivolous crap not tied to character progression.
Get this virtual market filth out of my gaming.
Are you sure that you are picked a right game then? GW2 was made as game without carrot on stick, and that why it became so popular and lasted so long. And yet we constantly getting people who want to take some valuable stuff from everyone else and call it a “meaningful reward”. Seriously people, why you left WoW and came here, asking for same game reward model?
lol seriously? Carrot on a stick? Like the gold gate and RNG droprates already in place aren’t a carrot on a stick?
What the hell are you even trying to say? The basis of many videogames is that you are rewarded for accomplishments with gameplay feats, not by just mashing your autoattack on an HP bag in a dynamic event or downloading some auction house trading app.
There are 3 ways to make something “Legendary”.
1) Put it behind horrible RNG/grind
2) Make is super expensive
3) Put it behind hard contentWe’ve tried 1 and 2 multiple times, now it’s time for 3
I agree that #3 is the best option. But that’s not GW2. There is nothing wrong with #2 and it fit a lot more with GW2. From the beginning it’s a casual game with little bit a hard content. I’ll still have my legendary armor, but it just don’t fit with the game.
No.
Prestige items should be tied to in-game achievements and challenging combat gameplay, not about who farms best or plays the auction house baron.
By this point I’d even prefer they release legendaries tied to gold medals in adventures or upon successful completion of hard jumping puzzles.
But have these legendaries means something that is not FARM GOLD. kitten that.
Weapons and armors should be earned by doing meaningful content WELL in the game.
The economy should be restricted to convenience items like food, pots, minis, and other frivolous crap not tied to character progression.
Get this virtual market filth out of my gaming.
The raids were fun to me for all of about a week, now it is just content that I do not bother with. It’s not “bad”, but boring.
Unlike dungeons, it’s content you don’t really repeat on a daily basis, and the rewards by comparison for time and effort spent compared to what dungeons were pre-nerf are pretty bad.
But then, in-game rewards in this game are bad by default in order to drive their gem to gold real money conversions.
If I’m being honest, I liked dungeons better. Not because they didn’t have significant design flaws that were exploited for mindless play. I mean, dungeons only suffered because of the massive power creep that berzerker gear alongside the ease of generating and maintaining might stacks and fury created alongside aegis spam and so much of many encounters being nullified with easy to use reflects.
But it amounted to a lot more than just a boss in a box. The original explorable dungeons had ambiance, storytelling, and there’s nothing better than a 5 man so you can just get your core group of reliable friends without having to deal with the logistics of managing 10 people’s schedules and varying time commitments.
They released in vanilla Guild Wars 2 with 33 branches of a dungeon (counting 3 explorables plus the 1 story branch except for Arah which had 4).
33 dungeons, now compare that to maybe 14 fractals. Of the 14 fractals, 3 are just bosses; 2 are recycled from living season instances, 2 of the 3 boss fractals are from living story recycled instances as well. That leaves us with about 10 original fractal introductions, however most of them are even shorter than a dungeon path and don’t even contain much narrative progression to begin with.
People SHOULD be annoyed at the marginal amount of content we’ve received after the vanilla release. The expansion is an atrocity: same price as the base game, but only 3 maps full of zerg dynamic events, no new dungeons, no new fractals, and a tiny tiny fraction of the amount of weapon and armorsets the vanilla game offered FROM the game with guaranteed token rewards, not RNG grindfests and massive goldsinks.
It’s an utter ripoff how all you get from this xpac is virtually raid wings with almost a 6 month wait in between if “dynamic” braindead events are not your cup of tea.
It also doesn’t help they still refuse to split PvE/PvP balance so classes are still hideously lopsided in balance and performance. They won’t even standardized the godkitten autoattacks across the classes.
Obviously I go into this knowing that some players will be very upset. That’s why it’s such a tough decision.
Ankdarkwolf, Darkmikau, Ballads, Spira, Caerbannog, Cysgod, you each posted a variant of an accusation I’ve seen many times over the past few months on the forums, something along the lines of, “AN shipped half an expansion with HoT.” I take issue with that. We shipped a new region full of content, a new mastery system, gliding, guild halls, a new profession, nine new elite specializations for existing professions, and more. Then we shipped precursor journeys for existing legendaries, and said, “We’ve been working hard on new legendary weapons, the first handful of which will be introduced in Heart of Thorns, with more to come in subsequent updates.” While I fully get that you’re disappointed today, this is not about us shipping half an expansion pack.
Mo
Those precursor journeys were 3 years in the making after you floated the idea 6 months into the release of the VANILLA game.
The precursor journeys should have been in the BASE game to begin with, but you profited from the broken RNG of their initial design to drive up massive gold gates so people would buy gold with real life cash as you proceeded to nerf about every method of earning gold in-game that wasn’t auction house trading.
Most notably dungeons, which you gutted in rewards saying fractals and raids would cover that gap and yet they never did. While you continued to introduce more goldsinks everywhere.
Abandoned branching personal storyline. Abandoned dungeon branches for basically a once a year or two fractal update, when a single fractal is basically a single dungeon path.
The issue people took with your expansion is that they wanted more entertaining instanced content akin to the wonderful missions and dungeons in Guild Wars 1, and instead with Heart of Thorns you gave them Zerg Wars 2: Blob of Thorns with yet more brain dead “dynamic” events that everybody hates.
Nobody likes these zerg events where people mash their autoattack and brute force with taxing into a map.
They want smaller instanced content with actual challenge and gameplay.
Any comments on rewards? Something that doesn’t spoil the fight.
He’s not gone… His LinkdIn accnt is public information, you can see that his current employment is still with AreanNet.
Also, a curious snippet of his profile..
“Monitor and balance the game’s 1000+ skills, 10 professions, and countless monsters across the PvP and PvE areas of the game”
Either the bolded section is a typo, or he is working with the ‘expansion team’ on the next profession. I’m going to guess the ladder. He proved to be one of the most adept devs at delivering unique and engaging mechanics with HoT, it would be a waste of his talents to have him anywhere else.
You mean gimmicks. Because both reaper and chronomancer traitlines have been terrible PvE wise, and the only reason wells were used was to stack alacrity, not because their effects were actually that good.
Reaper is even worse. Greatsword turned out to be garbage in both formats due to the ridiculous aftercasts, the reaper traitline is terrible with a sole PvP focus and little of PvE value, and Reaper shouts are among the most worthless PvE utility in game.
He buffed mesmer sword autoattack by a miserable 10%. It was 30% behind thief auto and yet they buffed thief sword auto by around 25% even though it was already 30% stronger than mesmer autoattack DPS.
And it’s not because they’re busy, otherwise we’d see class balance changes more often than every 6+ months and on a scale larger than mostly tooltip polish and some measly numerical tweak to some awful trait that won’t still be used.
We do not really have enough information to assume that. I would like to think that a significant amount of time is spent working on the next living story and/or expansion. This is work that will not be visible until it’s beta or RTM. Even then, a significant amount of coding work will still be invisible.
This is not unlike the inner components of your cell phone – no one pays attention to what goes into the cell radio or GPS receiver so long as calls and Google Maps work.
3 years to develop an expansion pack which consists of 3 maps with just dynamic events. No new dungeons, no new fractals, a tiny fraction of the armor/weaponsets we received from vanilla and most of it gated behind huge RNG or gold grinds.
1 short raid wing that was wholly cleared in less than a week of its release.
Living Story updates that amount to a 2-3 hour affair every 4-5+ months?
How can you even justify the glacial pace of everything they do? When they release new armor/costumes pretty much every month on the cash store.
This game has devolved into a Farmville experience.
Dev communication only really happens when they have a new box to hype up and sell. You see them appear for beta event weekends sporadically, and once those changes go through and boxes are sold, they go back into the nether, rarely to be heard of again.
And it’s not because they’re busy, otherwise we’d see class balance changes more often than every 6+ months and on a scale larger than mostly tooltip polish and some measly numerical tweak to some awful trait that won’t still be used.
It’s been 3+ years and they still haven’t even balanced autoattack DPS across classes for PvE or made many of the useless weapons viable.
Clearly class balance or content that is not conducive to massive gold/RNG grinds to drive up gem to gold exchange is not high on their priority list.
Gorseval: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVbXoR9GStg
Sabetha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yB-mMUDslsABoth are done in pugs, sabetha was a last cannon run.
I seem to get druids each week who focus too much on trying to camp staff and get out heals rather than balancing skill usage around the mechanics, as well as not using buffs when possible.
Cleric staff guardian syndrome. People are deadset on a role and don’t want to be flexible. It’s most notable in top 50 raiding guilds in WoW in terms of healers, you have healers DPS’ing in between slow heal periods and they often do the DPS of a mediocre dedicated DPS.
Crappy healers just heal and don’t help push phases/adds.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
To be honest I never understood why there is such a thing as Shoulder box and such. All ascended box should allow you to take whatever piece you want.
Because that would reduce the RNG fest that they purposely instill in the game to keep you logging on.
The game is like a casino, it withholds meaningful rewards most of the time so you are so starved for meaningful rewards that the one time you do get lucky you get that high that keeps you searching for a lucky streak.