Guild Wars 2

It is simply a technical “problem” that they don’t know how to fix so they rebranded it as a “feature”. It was an oversight in the original development of the game that they don’t know how to fix.

Like the condition limit…
Or the skill lag in WvW…
Or the continually breaking dynamic events…
Or any of a dozen other things that are cited due to “technical difficulties”

DiogoSilva.7089:

A question to necromancers: is your heal skill good in dungeon group content? I mean, when bursting down bosses, it’s pretty much buffing your entire party’s damage, right? I don’t know, because I don’t play with a necro, but that seems like the absolute best situation to use it.

at maximum efficiency it can do 9k dmg to the boss with a 1.25s cast time, spamming auto attack with a power build will yield more damage, but if you also need to heal it can be useful. But 9k dmg isn’t exactly some unholy burst amount.

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Evidently it’s not, because he seems to make good use of it. Maybe that makes him less efficient than all the pros out there, but at least he is having fun.

I’m sure he is having fun. I’ve seen lots of people in full blues with no trait points at level 80 having fun too. That doesn’t really have anything to do with the current balance of skills though. The game should be balanced around equal power. removing the ICD would not in any way reduce the fun he is having, but it would make the skill actually useful.

I want the skill to be useful so I will continue to point out its flaws until Anet fixes it, regardless of how much fun people are having using it.

Think of it the other way. What if it was broken and did 30k dmg and only had a 1s CD… you can bet I would be having a ton of fun with it… But I can also bet that you and many others would be here asking Anet to fix it so it was balanced.

Lorelei.3918:

Well mathematically I could see where they might see the signet as being ok.

Lets say your start a fight against someone. With 300ish healing power the passive heals me for 345. Ok I get hit 10 times and my hp is low enough I think ‘hm I better use my active heal’. With Blood II, the active siphon gives 550 hp and in the 5s the mark is up I can get in at most kittens.

So 345×10+4110+550x5 = 10310 HP gained from the outset of the fight with the signet. Now the signet is on CD, I can’t get the passive anymore for 28 seconds. If it is a pitched, long duel, I may have to settle for a 4110+550x5 = 6860 heal every 28 thereafter.

That’s not terrible but it requires a lot of concentration on your part. You need to maintain the target you marked and hit them constantly for 5 seconds to get the most out of the active part.

I like this signet specifically for the rabid vampire build I’ve been toying with off and on. Mainly because I already had Blood II and signet mastery as part of the build pre SoV.

This would require a very specific set of circumstances… lets look at a more realistic example…

Thief D/D autoattack: according to the wiki there is 1 sequence per 2.07s. a sequence is 4 hits, so your signet only triggers once every other hit. After 10 hits you will have healed for 5 times, not 10. Each hit will do 1.5k-2.5k dmg. so you will have taken ~20k dmg and healed for 345*5*.66 (poison) = 1138. You are almost dead so you decide to hit the active. This heals you for only 4110 but since it is a thief and it doesn’t remove conditions poison isn’t cleansed so your heal is reduced by 33%. this means you only heal for 2741 and all your conditions are still on you. We’ll assume by some miracle the thief doesn’t blind you and you can get the maximum 4 (not 5 since it activates before cast is finished) ticks for the active. This will heal you for another 550*.667 = 367*4 = 1467.

The total healing in a realistic circumstance is then: 1138+2741+1467 = 5346 and you still have every condition on you.

I think i’ll stick to consume conditions….

thefantasticg.3984:

Can’t you sell the ingots that you can make from these things?

nope they are account bound.

They actually have quite a few uses now.

Ascended weapons take 500 of each. Ascended armor takes 200 of each (chest takes 500). Toxic recipes takes 100 bloodstone dust each, and are a good choice for some players as consumables. The new tonic recipes take some as well I believe.

They currently want ascended weapons to not be sellable on the TP so these remain the only component you can’t sell so that you actually need to make the weapon yourself.

A solution that would allow them to keep things account bound would be an exchange vendor. Where you can exchange the mats for other ascended mats, or even maybe T6 items. This would allow people to get rid of their excess and still keep the items account bound.

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Corpus Christi.2057:

PeterThomas.7243:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Obviously the OP doesn’t play a necro…

This is the second time I’ve responded to someone who assumes this. My main is a necro.

Then, will all due respect, you have no idea of how to play necro. Nothing to discuss here.

The gw2 forum at its finest. The OP likes the new Necro signet, other people don’t.
To each their own. Leave him alone.

It doesn’t have anything to do with likes and dislikes. It is objectively worse in every possible situation in the game compared to our other heals. End of discussion. You can see the numbers, the situations and all possible (viable) builds in the necro forums for proof.

Got my boots today… one down 5 to go…

I have the money to finish right now but I don’t see the need to waste it on that. It isn’t like it makes any difference at all. Even with all 6 pieces I will do the exact same amount of damage I do now.

Obviously the OP doesn’t play a necro…

LordByron.8369:

Metixo.5086:

Thirdly ascended armor should not matter to you unless you do fractals lvl 50+ because there simply is no need for it and no noticable upgrade. Weapons give you much more of a damage increase then the full armor set will ever give.

This is wrong and we owe the existence to ascended tier to this…

Since release we have people saying “its only a ring….less than 1% in performance” then “Its only a necklace less then 2% performance” etc etc etc.

Reality is:
Armor is 5% more efficient then the corresponding exotic armor
And to that base 5% you can add WWW infusions for another 30 stats.

Ascended is a tier not really different from what is the difference between rare and exotic.

A full ascended player will deal about 5% more damage while suffering 5% less.
For fractals its also +30 AR

The increase in your effectiveness depends heavily on your gear choice. A full ascended zerker gains a 17% damage increase over a full exotic zerker. While a full ascended rabid players gains only 5.1% damage increase over a full exotic rabid player. Additionally a full soldier player only gains ~3% damage reduction.

Anet never bothered to balance scaling because they didn’t intend to add more gear tiers when they designed the game. Getting ascended gear is absolutely required for a zerker player and pretty much worthless if you have a gear set that has more than 1 defensive stat.

The rest of the gear sets are all around a 5% gain and you can decide if that’s worth it to you or not.

I don’t think silk will go down for quite a while. I think for the first time more silk is going out of the economy then coming in. I suspect it will rise for a while before stabilizing.

Leamas.5803:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

The solution is pretty simple really.

1. Remove the condition cap or at the very least raise it and make it personal
2.Remove the cap on condition duration. It is a stat and I should be able to actually increase it.
3. Introduce Condition Damage/Condition Duration/Precision gear
4. Adjust numbers/conditions on skills so a CD/CD/Pr geared condition player outputs the same dps as a zerker.
5. Conditions are fixed and viable in PvE.

This would be extremely over powered…and I am a condition necro.

I agree with you on 1. Raise it or make it personal…the shared 25 is useless when every profession/build can apply conditions.

Point 2, is there a cap on duration, or just limited ways to increase it? There are sigils that increases individual condition durations by 10% and another that increases all condition durations by 6%. There is also food which will increase duration by as much as 40%. The way it’s built, you can’t have unlimited duration and still have stacking…this would be God-like.

Point 3…For the gear, how would this be implemented? What would be the limits? Are you suggesting matching runes as well?

Point 4…conditions should not have the same DPS as a zerker. Raw DPS is not their purpose. However I do agree with the essence of this in that You can have as many zerkers in a group all applying damage (AND conditions to the cap) and the DPS just keeps adding up. 50 warriors = 50x times the damage. Once the condition cap is hit, which can typically be done by 3-4 of necros, 2 fully speced for conditions. I can maintain 16-20 bleeds myself with food. 50 necros = 2 necros condition damage-wise +50x the marginal physical damage necros cause. In any case, 50 condition speced necros might be able to match the damage of what 10-12 warriors maybe? 100 necros, maybe 20 warriors due to the condition cap? The damage doesn’t scale in a balanced fashion.

I don’t agree a necro should be able to take something down as fast a warrior, because they shouldn’t. What I am saying is that 50 necros should be able to take it down 50x faster than 1 necro. Just kitten warriors will currently take it down 50x faster than 1. Currently, this is where there is a horrible imbalance in the professions. Groups do not up scale properly.

I disagree with your premise. Why should Warriors be able to do more damage than a condition necro? If I spec full condition damage then I should be just as viable as a direct damage person.

Also there is currently a cap on duration of 100%. There are a few traits that ignore this cap (all of them necro traits) but this is why you don’t see anyone using condition duration on their gear. With 30% from traits and 40% from food you are at 70% already. Duration above that is currently mostly wasted since you can get to the bleed cap with only that 70%. non-necros benefit more from more duration since they don’t hit the cap quite as easily. 100% is possible with runes and sigils, not to mention weapons. (No armor exists with condition duration as far as i’m aware)

Also why would it be overpowered? why should my DPS suddenly be reduced because I hit some invisible wall. If I invest gear points into longer conditions then I am losing those points somewhere else. There is still a cap based on gear quality. Crit damage doesn’t have a cap but you still can’t get it higher than ~%120. The same should be true of condition duration. A full condition duration set should be able to get me up to ~150% (numbers can be tweaked) which would give me the maximum possible dps and allow me to reach higher stacks than someone who opts for more defense.

Some skills will need to be tweaked for this to work, but the concept itself doesn’t automatically mean we are OP.

I believe condition specs should be just as viable and diverse as power based specs are. There is no power equivalent to the duration cap, no power equivalent to the condition cap, and no condition equivalent to zerker gear, which is why condition specs are crap compared to power specs.

The solution is pretty simple really.

1. Remove the condition cap or at the very least raise it and make it personal
2.Remove the cap on condition duration. It is a stat and I should be able to actually increase it.
3. Introduce Condition Damage/Condition Duration/Precision gear
4. Adjust numbers/conditions on skills so a CD/CD/Pr geared condition player outputs the same dps as a zerker.
5. Conditions are fixed and viable in PvE.

RubiBayer.8134:

We save the livestream chat logs in case we ever need them for reference, so we went back and double-checked, since “most” is kind of a strong word. The actual quote is:

[12:13:27] <guildwars2> Yegor, this is the first Wintersday for a lot of people. ~Rubi

This is true–new people join Guild Wars 2 every single week.

Well that clears that up.

I know i’ve played since launch but was traveling last year and didn’t get to participate. So this is my first wintersday.

Clark Skinner.4902:

^cool pic

It wasn’t a matter of people discovering they didn’t need that much gossamer. If you look at the spidy graph, and zoom it in to max detail, it shows it 22,700 buy orders were filled at the starting price of 8s94 and dropping it down to 5s93. This started at 12:15pm (right when the patch hit), and the near-vertical line crash ended at 1:00pm.

People sold massive amounts off ASAP. And it didn’t have a natural curve, the way it would if it was the whole community moving. I suspect it was a group of people, or a few groups who planned to sell as soon as the patch hit, and were just waiting to press the button.

Personally, I think there should be limits in place to prevent people from doing this kind of damage. Clicking Buy 100 times in November, and then clicking sell 100 times in December should not warrant a 750g reward.

can we apply the same limits to other areas of the game? hitting 1 over and over should not reward 5g/hr then either right? and using GW2stuff to find world bosses which takes no effort or planning at all shouldn’t reward any gold either I take it?

I doubt prices will recover. Most of the people who wanted to level have already done so. Gossamer is now 100% useless. Exotic armor can be bought for far cheaper then it is to craft it and it takes almost no gossamer to level to 500. If anything I think the prices will probably fall back closer to their pre-ascended craze. 30c for gossamer scraps and 60c for bolts.

1. No monthly fee: This is probably the biggest hindrance in this game for getting actual content and not gem store spam filler. This is my #1 thing that I don’t like in this game.

2. No Fetch Quests: There are still plenty of fetch quests, every day I have to fetch dozens and dozens of seige supplies and bring them back to an NPC to get the shatterer to spawn. This has not changed at all from other MMO’s.

3. Instant travel: Instant unless you actually want to go there cause something is happening. Then the nearest 5 WP’s are contested and you need to run twice as far as in other MMO’s and with no mount to get to where you are going. Good for traveling to places where nothing is happening, bad for everything else.

4. Dynamic events: Some of these are great, others are repetitive and boring. I’d consider this a step forward over other MMO’s though.

5. No Kill Stealing: or in other words… the rise of the zerg. You still need a group and you still lose out on kills because of the damage threshold and the prevalence of zergs. If anything this has made it worse then in other MMO’s since everything is a zerg for maximum efficiency.

6. Downed State: I enjoy this in PvE, I still find it annoying in PvP.

7. Armor Dyes: Probably the greatest thing GW2 has done to MMO’s. I love this feature.

8. Bot Hunting: There are 5-10 bots selling gold in LA all day on my server… I also get 10-12 PM’s and multiple mails every day for buying gold. It is just as bad if not worse as other MMO’s.

9. Gold to Gems: This has pluses and minuses. I like the idea, but it has caused items to be put at ridiculous price points in order to compensate. $200 weapon skins? $30 for bank space? I can buy entire games for cheaper then some items in the gem store. Good concept, bad execution.

10. Transmutation: This is fairly common in MMO’s these days, and is mostly just a cash grab. Games with monthly fees have this feature for in-game currency. So this is overall neutral.

11. World Wide TP: I love this feature, it makes a much more robust economy. This was a win.

12. Skills while moving: Another great feature. Not unique to GW2, but still great.

13. Exploration: Another win for Anet. The world is beautiful, and captivating. Unfortunately they have left this concept behind and now just give us predictable LW updates.

14. Dungeon Paths: This was a flop. 50% of the dungeon is the same across all paths in most cases, and the paths are just more of the same and never have any change. Especially considering there are only 8(?) dungeons as opposed to other MMO’s which have many more which are more significantly varied. Concept was good, execution was poor.

15. Non-humans: This is good, but hardly revolutionary… I’m pretty sure every MMO ever made (except SWTOR) offered non-human type characters.

16. LA hub: I like the hub, but it isn’t revolutionary either. Lots of games have a main trading hub with instant travel between other hubs. I’ll agree that GW2 makes it very easy to go between ALL cities instead of just the major ones.

17.Living Story: yeah… I’m just gunna let this one speak for itself…

18. AP rewards: I love this system. I hope other games use it in the future.

19. Account Wallet: This was a last ditch solution (though a nice one) for a problem Anet made themselves. The fact that there are about 20 currencies more than there should be in this game. I have never seen a game with such a convoluted currency system.

20. Multiple Guilds: Good concept but i’ve never seen or heard of a guild that doesn’t have a 100% rep requirement so in the end it is a useless feature for most.

About 14 of your 20 points are actually things that are wrong with this game or haven’t changed at all from other MMO’s….

I know you guys at Anet worship the warrior and guardian classes, but could you try to make it a little less obvious?

I mean did you really need to make light ascended armor take 11 days longer to craft then the heavy armor?

It’s like you aren’t even trying to hide the bias anymore…

I don’t think anyone can legitimately argue that there is no inflation after the queens jubilee patch. Since then it is hard to say, but there was even a blog post that said we know this patch caused massive inflation so we are adding in more gold sinks.

Considering we have an achievement that is to sink 3.3g out of the economy this month, I’d say we are still fighting the inflation from that event.

Don’t worry they will buff warrior to compensate!

I’m sure next update there will be some super cool thing that will take 250 charged quartz.

mtpelion.4562:

Here’s my idea:

Signet Passive: x% of Life Force Generation is also added as healing.

Signet Active: Sacrifice 10% of your current health. The targeted foe instantly loses 10% of his health. You are healed for 200% of the health lost by the foe over 5 seconds. Nearby allies are healed for 100% of the health lost by the foe over 5 seconds. The instant health loss would need to be adjusted for champions/bosses, of course.

This would be hilarious… even at 1% you could get 10 necros to kill Teq… 200000k AOE heals FTW!

I tried it in 3 different situations and then gave up.

1. Solo. was attacking 3 toxic NPC’s. They were all hitting me but I only got the passive heal once per volley making it kind of crappy. The passive also didn’t seem to damage the enemies. When I was almost dead I popped the active… I only managed to get 1 hit in and almost no healing due to interrupts, dodging and the ICD. They then proceeded to kill me.

2. Solo against condition. Similar situation as above but one of the NPC’s was using conditions against me. I managed to come out alive at the end but I had no target to mark so when I activated the signet it kept the conditions on me, had no one to gain health from and then slowly watched my health tick down until I died since I had no way to remove conditions and no way to gain health without an enemy.

3. Against a boss in a group. This went better, I was able to use the active to full effect, but that effect is minimal, and the healing is weaker then CC’s. Ended the fight with low health due to insufficient healing. Also healing once a second on the passive for 300 when the enemy is hitting you for 11k is kind of sad…

I will never touch the skill again unless it is changed.

If they just removed the ICD I would consider it. As it is now though it is utterly worthless.

I got 50 flawless snowflakes from a box, but no 50 of the ascended mats… I wonder if you can get 50 emp frags… if so I might open 10k boxes.

Vayne.8563:

Most MMOs teach you how to be selfish. This game rewards you for rezzing other players.

That’s an overly optimistic view… People very rarely rez others. Doing so usually results in the loss of 10s-30s due to the zerg faceroll. In the Teq fight you will be insulted and reported if you attempt to rez a dead player. Since events complete so fast due to the zerg faceroll, people will almost always run over your dead body so they don’t miss the event.

We did get rid of tagging which was very nice, but it lead to just another problem that is just as selfish as before, AOE spam to get as much loot as possible, event tagging where you only tag the event and then leave, and worst of all, zergs that mean many players can’t get credit at all unless they group up (just like in WoW). So in the end while it was a good theory and works in small roaming groups it introduced many more problems then it solved.

It’s already been confirmed that there is no more ascended items being released. This was the end of it.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/living-world-2013-the-year-in-review/

“The addition of the final pieces of Ascended gear: Ascended armor.”

Yes all ascended armor has an upgrade slot as well as a defensive infusion slot.

I don’t think anyone has put GW2 on a pedestal since last November. It is just like wow except without the trinity that made combat deep. Now we have shallow combat with a gear treadmill but no raids and no quests.

It does have dodging which is nice.

As long as people are willing to spend absurd amount of money for Anet to literally change one line of code then they will keep doing it.

I just can’t believe anyone would spend that much money. You can feed an entire village in Africa for a month on that. I mean just 5 years ago $30 got you:

10 new zones
1 new class
2 new races
12 new dungeons
3 new raids
5 new features
1000 new quests
30 new mounts

Now it gets you:

extra bank space.

Well except for the fact that condition damage is significantly weaker than all other damage specs and needs to be heavily buffed…

We’ll see in about 4 hours if the supply can keep up with the demand. I suspect they are bottomed out now and will slowly rise over the next day or so. Not sure what the end price will be. Probably around what it was yesterday if I had to guess.

Apparently much more than anyone though. Of course prime time is when most of the casual players come on and that isn’t for another 4 hours. It may recover by then.

$30 to activate a feature that should be standard… yeah… no.

Except for the fact that now you DO earn SP’s in PvP….

This is great news. They are finally listening and slowing down the living story to give it a chance to polish and debug it.

Also only 2 more months until the end of Scarlet (yay!).

It sounds like they want to go out with a bang, so hopefully this will be the start of something fresh and new.

I think Wildstar and ESO will both be competition and both take a chunk of players from GW2, but I don’t think the games will fair well long term.

ESO turned me and many other people I know off by announcing that it will launch on consoles. The fact is that the game will ultimately be dumbed way down in order to accommodate that. That alone made it fail imo.

Wildstar will do better since it has the eve sub model which was fairly popular in eve, has all the features of WoW, and has a robust housing system. However the weird humor and art direction is off putting for me so I don’t know if i’ll play. I do like the GW2 style combat combined with the trinity though so I might give it a try once there is a free trial.

GW2 really just needs to launch an expansion. If it doesn’t then I don’t see it lasting past 2014. The game has just gone the wrong direction and gotten stale. Scarlet needs to end asap, a new dragon needs to show up and an expansion worth of features, dungeons and maps needs to appear.

Past 2014 there is EQN which seems to hold the most promise of all the games so far. The combat is a little iffy to me, but the next iteration of living world is what GW2 should have been. The 40+ classes to mix and match will make PvE interesting. The established EQ lore is a plus, and the companion game landmark which will allow players to design content for the game world is also a potential HUGE plus. But we will have to see how it plays out. Right now balance and combat are the two things that could fall flat on its face in that game.

Since they deleted every question and comment that even remotely mentioned ascended armor during the livestream i’m going to go ahead and say they know we will be really mad when we see it so they are trying to down play it as much as possible.

How is learn to dodge an excuse for a skill being so blatantly OP?

What if kill shot did 50000000000k dmg and a 6 second stun and applied every condition in the game every 10 seconds? I mean you can do one dodge every 7 seconds or so… so does that mean it still wouldn’t be op since you can dodge it?

That is quite possibly the worst excuse for claiming “balance” I have ever heard… dodging has no bearing at all on if a skill is op or not. You can dodge every attack in the game.

Guest over to JQ. there are guilds that run guild missions almost every night that take anyone who wants to come along.

Rann.7198:

Ya, no one was able to get a weapon in a single day. The ectoplasm refinements are on a 8 hour timer and you need more than 3 of any one of them to make a weapon…and they are account bound, so no getting them off the TP

You might want to learn about ascended crafting before trying to call people out…

It’s just a list. Do it one part at a time, it really isn’t that complicated.

Personally I enjoy building it up one part at a time and seeing my progress as I get closer to the next piece.

Great presentation and nice data. I’d be interested to see if there is any corralation between the number of possible named exotics and the frequency of precursors. Theoretically you have an equal chance of getting any named exotic, which means some weapons like foci would be significantly harder to get precursors than something like maces.

Also it would be interesting to see if the chance to get a GS precursor is really 2x that of other weapons.

The cast time on the active is so long that you can easily revive 2 people before it even goes off. Not sure why anyone would use the active on this either.

Because you can get 50g/day easily but you can only get 1 laurel a day no matter what?

And I save them by not spending them.

We need an expansion:

10-12 new zones
8-10 new dungeons
1 new class
1 new race
100+ new skills
New trait lines
New armor sets
Raids

Anything short of this is not enough.

LordByron.8369:

notice how any ascended update they introduced a new method for acquiring it, resetting any potential work people could have done to get it asap…..

If ascended armor doesn t have any form of timegate will be the first time:

RIngs/backpacks => fractal
Necklace => laurels
Accessories => guild missions
Weapons => craft + T7 + time gating
i doubt any player will be able to get an ascended armor before at least 1 week.

unlikely… people had ascended weapons within 24 hours of the patch. I guess it might take a week to get a full set of armor, but I doubt that. I suspect they will only add in the time gated cloth. The other 2 mats are a possibility, but seem more fitted for jeweler than tailor.

They will probably hold off for a bit. The first one was good and they met all the things in the blog. The second one fell short by 3-4 months. We don’t have new legendary weapons, no legendary trinkets, no new PvP game modes, no PvP reward revamp, no new traits and barely any new skills.

They probably want to catch up and finish all of that before they move onto the next high level overview. I would suspect a new blog in April or so if we want one with new things in it.

AkiSakura.1657:

You actually just helped answer a thought in my mind. I’m working on another legendary and need more t6.. You’ve just shown me that I don’t have nearly enough laurels to get what I need from the bags, so I guess it’s back to running dungeons and metas.

yeah it’s pretty easy to figure out how many you need. Each bag gives 3, you need 2000 total so 667 bags/laurels is what you’d need (roughly).

what level? only above 40 (I think? maybe 30) drops the new boxes where you get to pick a skin. The lower levels still use the old method as far as i’m aware.

Dyno.9467:

The thing about it, you get a group of people saying they “hate scarlet” then you get the bandwagon people who follow so they can have a good whinge on the internet, next thing you know everybody hates Scarlet.

Theres nothing wrong with the Scarlet story, and anyone with at least half brain knows it.

and those of us with a full brain know why she is such an awful and poorly written character.

At least we get a break from her for a while.

It would be fun to have to earn new skills but I don’t see it happening. My main has 500 SP’s and I don’t even do champ farming.

People are always talking about how expensive precursors are… except for the fact that more than half of them are pretty much worthless…