Guild Wars 2

Liewec.2896:

Rubik.7192:

Wait 7 days……

for what? an 8% nerf to 1 of their 3 healing sources and a 20% decrease to the damage of one of their skills? yeah that’ll fix them…

Also Pin Down is getting its cast time trebled and the Lyssa set they all rely on for that ridiculous cleanse/boons combi is getting changed away. Possibly other changes that haven’t been mentioned.

A good number of nerfs affect this build, it just sucks that it was completely broken for three months and has been pretty overpowered for another four more (after significant damage reductions on Dec10).

Shaving: it needs to happen when something dominates the meta as hard as hambow and decap Engi have done. Letting the meta settle apparently now just means letting it stagnate.

Cheers for your work, and well done putting up with all the nastiness that forum-goers throw around. Best of luck!

Romek.4201:

easiest and only fix to hotjoin would be to remove the buttons to choose your side

before custom arena patch you could only join random and this is how it should be

I’d like it to go back to this, too – choosing sides can become a custom arena option.

As we are now, every time I look at hotjoin it’s incredibly stacked for one team.

Uhtameit.2413:

cheese.4739:

Liewec.2896:

it would also mean that the rest of us don’t have to switch servers everytime the rotation gets back around to skyhammer.

Yeah a pretty accurate way to check how popular a map is: count the number of hotjoin servers that are empty and sitting on it. They’re all bloody Skyhammer.

That’s because it’s the first map of the rotation…xD

It is? I don’t hotjoin much. It’s not quite so bad then…
Why servers don’t become/stay empty on any other map is still relevant, though!

Liewec.2896:

it would also mean that the rest of us don’t have to switch servers everytime the rotation gets back around to skyhammer.

Yeah a pretty accurate way to check how popular a map is: count the number of hotjoin servers that are empty and sitting on it. They’re all bloody Skyhammer.

oZii.2864:

Isn’t the cooldown still bugged? It’s better if it dies then if the cooldown just expires IIRC.

It’s not bugged, just misrepresented – the cooldown is 120 seconds, but only starts once the summon dies (either naturally or at its time limit). You get it back sooner if it dies… but there’ll be a 2-minute downtime either way.
Ranger Spirits and Necro Minions all function in the same way, with cooldowns beginning when the summon expires so that they can’t be resummoned instantly.

Nary: okay you’re defending playing decap, do that if you want...
But if you’re only going to log into soloq once every couple of weeks to maintain your rank (http://www.gw2score.com/PvP/player/Nary-Why-Irk8150), you’re exploiting the MMR system and really ought to shut up about your ’l33t skillz’. The only character on your soloq or teamq records, since January? "Bombing Technology".

Yeah you totally don’t main decap in PvP. We believe you.

If you can’t keep a frontpage leaderboard position by playing regularly, we all have every right to judge you. Go hotjoin more.

Nope, you’ve just got to wait until a server reset - Gunnar’s Hold didn’t have the Shadow Behemoth for more than a month over christmas, since the monastery/Brenda event bugged soon after one patch and there were no game updates for about six weeks to reset things.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

it would be pointless in most cases, Most of the elementals SUCK. They would all need adjusting. What would happen when they die? I would prefer an Elite that would turn the player into an Elemental. We already have the model for players wit the Charged Potion and such it would just need skills adjusted and such.

Yes, we need another elite that locks us out of our skills ;p

More seriously, I’m in favour of the permanent elemental but that’d probably get complained about for being too like Flesh Golem – would be nice to be able to have that lovely earth tank up indefinitely in PvE though.

I think a more reasonable change that we actually can hope for is manual activation of the summons’ special abilities – it’s generally agreed that in PvP the summons are unimpressive at best, being just a little extra damage output, since their utility is so very unreliable. Allowing players to choose when to stun an opponent with Air-GoE would potentially make Tempest Defence (or even the new air trait) much more useful.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Sir Kaboomski.1508:

Mainly it becomes problematic when multiple Elementalists drop them and they overlap (perhaps especially on top of walls in WvW) because it is realistically impossible to tell where one ends and the next begins.

Seriously? With all other AoE going on while the walls are under siege with multiple red circles you worry about which circles are from Meteor Shower so you can run out of it?

My point is, even if they are to add the missing indicator ring, you’ll never be able to tell the difference which ring is from which skill in that scenario.

Actually Meteor Shower is the only Staff Ele skill that has a radius of 360 in any situation, so the arc of the circle will let you tell which is which… more of the problem is “I can’t see the circles at all there’s so much stuff going on”.

At any rate, the addition of AoE ring is pretty significant in sPvP, where folks will now be able to tell where the AoEs will be falling – no longer will it be possible to chuck MS partially over a point and watch someone run out of the point into the heart of the effect.

I love running around with another Ele, primarily for all those delicious fields and finishers - but then you’re two squishies, and if a Thief ganks one of you the other needs to either run or hope they’re much more skilled than the aggressor.

I agree with maeggle for the two best to play with - Thief will likely stay king of small roaming for a long time, for their mobility, burst damage, and stealth... and a Guard can always take a beating while sharing out buffs (though if they’re doing the boonsharing you’d better be running something with reliable dps).

A guildie of mine is always Necro in WvW and that’s pretty great - I can see where maeggle is coming from with regards to condi Necro partner, but I’m running something more boonsharey (lots of might, fury, swiftness, pretty good protection, and a bit of regen and stability) and can easily keep myself and a few allies healed up, so most of my combat utility is control effects and ally support.

bhagwad.4281:

I think you care too much about this so-called "farming". It happened sure, but the few people who did it are insignificant. Most stopped at r50 after gettting their bear ranks. And the really high rank players were well past r55 even before skyhammer.

Oh, no, I don’t really give a kitten about the people who farmed it - but the ranks really aren’t any meaningful indication of skill or ability, whether farmed or just gotten through the grind. This is especially true when they’re account-bound - so you’ll get, for example, someone with r50, and they’re really good... then they swap away from the Guard they’ve played all their games on and need to be carried through every game.

The finishers are cool to have, sure - I’m glad I’ve personally managed to get Bear with about 8 months’ play, just in time for the changes - but I’d still like to have other things to aim for, like a good ladder position... targets based on how well you play rather than how much you play, compared to others.

At any rate, there would have to be such longer-term goals for everyone eventually - or do you really expect players to be satisfied when they hit 80, and not expect anything further to aim for that they can show off? Making higher ranks harder to achieve would only be putting off the inevitable, and make it look like the devs were just trying not to have to think up more interesting rewards yet.

For the fun-loving primary Eles.

BlackBeard.2873:

Rezz.8019:

Why does it say rank 20 at the bottom of the screen?

He was spectating a thief who was rank 20.

…this shouldn’t’ve confused me as much as it did when I saw it in the other “post your ratio” thread, thanks for explaining.
I was trying to work out why OP couldn’t just wait until the end of their match to screencap the window.

My ratio is clearly more fun.
#staff

Darksteel.8412:

you don’t deserve rank in 2 month’s of casual play…dedication is what should be rewarded

And it will – but the rank system, as it is now, is not any real indication of skill or dedication to anything apart from Skyhammer farming. It will forever be tainted with “pff skyfarmer more n00b”. Would you mind explaining what an sPvP rank means to you? Why does your rank make you feel warm and happy inside? Do you really feel that superior to someone a few ranks below you?
Maybe a more interesting question is, do you feel inferior to someone a few ranks above you?

Darksteel.8412:

besides do you need reward for everything? if you can’t do it…or don’t want to invest time/dedication to something…you won’t have it…and yes there is a HUGE difference between rank1-30 players and rank 50+! stop lying to yourself to make yourself feel better….A HUGE DIFFERENCE

But as has been said, rank right now doesn’t mean that a player necessarily invested time/dedication to PvP – they could well have instead invested their time in farming Skyhammer. Unless you did this yourself, and are desperate to make your meaningless farmed ranks sound important, why would you not instead look forward to a better system like ladders and leagues, and let go of rank as anything more than “I was there back in the day”?

re: rank difference meaning skill difference – yes, this is largely true. I’d much rather have 4 r50 players on my soloq team than a spread of r19, r25, r35, r60, because I can probably trust the r50s to know their own professions, other professions, and general tactics better than those far below them. This doesn’t mean that some other system couldn’t represent relative skill levels much more accurately, and give us altogether fairer and more fun matchups.

This is why bringing what you’d probably call the “filthy casuals” into PvP, with the availability of short-to-mid-term rewards, is a good thing:
- more players trying it out (for short-term rewards)
- means more players sticking around (for a combination of fun and medium-long term rewards)
- means a higher population at all skill levels
We can get much more varied (due to not always playing within a tiny pool of players) and balanced (due to not playing in a tiny group of players of varying abilities) games from this. Maybe someday it’ll even be possible to get <5 minute queues outside of EU prime time!

Don’t worry, there will still be long-term goals that you can aim towards and be all elitist about, and someone just doing PvP for their dailies isn’t going to get them in a couple of months’ play – but you seem to be really quite bothered that the old, inferior system is getting phased out.
Are you sure you didn’t just farm your way to whatever rank you are?

Oh cool, I didn’t get a response to my ticket, thanks for posting that!
I can stop considering sending another.

We’ve had at least one redpost dev response saying that we should report them for botting.
Here’s hoping that the feature build includes better reporting options - or better yet, actual incentives to not afk - such as some good permabans for people who so blatantly exploit the system and don’t even get any dishonour stacks.

Boika.5367:

As much as i agree that they had to lower the max rank, they lowered it too much. Instead of cutting the total max rank point by 80 %, i would more like to have it on 50 %. Meaning +-3.5 mil rank points, not 1 mill.

As OP said, rank is meaningless enough (can’t measure skill or even time spent playing matches to any accurate level), and what it’s going to be set to will allow someone to get to 80 after… say about 6 months of only doing soloq for 4/4 dailies? It’s an achievable, medium-term goal, and they’re some of the best ways to bring people in to PvP.

Hopefully we’ll get some great prestige skins to work for, along with shiny titles and of course ladder/league positions that aren’t as easily manipulated as the current system – but the rank change is a pretty decent one for now, and will certainly encourage more players to play at least semi-regularly if they can see themselves gaining a rank with less than two months of gameplay.

coglin.1867:

Swagg.9236:

Renny.6571:

Combo breaker!

Very good. Enjoy your assured +1s. We can’t be creative enough to imagine anything other than the horrific status quo ANet has created for GW2 which is sustained by complacent, spoiled players. Might as well just make silly posts when confronted by scary ideas.

What makes it Horrific? Personally I feel they have done a fantastic job. I thoroughly enjoy the game every time I play. Every financial report from NCsoft of every quarter since the game released shows them surpassing profit projections for this game on a consistent bases. That to me is very solid evidence that it leans more toward flourishing and fun, not "horrific" as you claim.

Why do you assume everyone wants signets completely reworked by the way?

Swagg has essentially rewritten the game by now - there’re threads with huge lists of changes for every profession, and for runes/sigils somewhere too. They’re not so much suggestion/discussion threads as plans for a diffferent product entirely, with a combat system almost unrecognisable alongside gw2 since it’s been artificially slowed down with all these "delay" effects and the massive hatred for anything at all that’s passive.

Swagg: if you want there to be no passive play whatsoever, you’re going to have to remove armour and HP from the game.

It’s definitely a known issue to the playerbase - there’s a new thread posted in the Ele subforum about once a fortnight asking if Persisting Flames actually does work since it’s not listed on the tooltip.
Can’t hurt to post it in here, too!

CMstorm.8679:

When attuned to Fire and if you have the trait Persisting Flames(XI) it doesn’t effect the duration of the fire field it leaves. Dunno if this is intended or not. Seems like it would be, hence the skill itself is pretty strong as we all know.

Also, will Fiery Rush get a duration tooltip of how long the fire field lasts from it?

Fiery Rush doesn’t actually leave a fire field – none of the FGS skills do. It leaves ticking AoEs, but you can’t use finishers in/through the trail.

I have noted in the past, though, that the Conjured Flame Axe’s fire fields don’t get extended by Persisting Flames – it has Burning Retreat and Ring of Fire, and they are both fields.
Even if Persisting Flames is only meant to funtion on weapon skills… these skills are weapon skills when cast. At the very least the trait description should get clarified (hopefully in the same pass as the Blasting Staff + Persisting Flames tooltip confusion).
I submitted an in-game bug report ages ago but of course won’t be hearing back about it – I’m just hoping that it’s among the ‘many bugfixes’ we keep getting told about in feature build.

Vash Past.4385:

Echo + (x)…
… Meteor Shower – 2 at same time, but only once because of long CD of MS.
…Lava Font – Spam lava fonts while in Elite mode, way fun
…Conjure weapon – Team Weapon Conjures
…Lightning bolt Spam
etc…
The idea for Echo always was:
at max it’s only giving you an extra skill identical to one you already have anyway that isn’t Elite, so who can cry OP.
Opens up builds where you can’t quite proc the effect/skill you want often enough
When used on powerful skills, they have long CDs anyway, so you only get one or two extra in before Echo timer runs out

Who else has used this in GW1 successfully? Think it could port?

It could be really interesting – we lost a bunch of things to other classes (wards! Guards now have the ward effects on their consecrations and the skill names on their staff/hammer #5s!) so an argument could be made for pinching it from gw1’s Mesmers.

I toyed with Echo builds for a while, but of course it was always best used for Shiro runs. So many numbers!

kirito.4138:

Hype.8032:

Decap is still too strong, nerfing AR won’t fix it. That is all.

I’m new to gw2. what is a decap engi?

An Engineer with huge access to knockbacks, launches and immobilise – they can build to be pretty reasonable bunkers and then cap points while bunkering due to their incredible amounts of CC.
Automated Response (AR) is a grandmaster-level trait that currently stops new conditions from being applied to the Engi while they’re under 25% health – this means that condition users can’t take advantage of the Engi’s lack of condi-cleansing options.

Hopefully with AR changes we’ll at least see some people moving away from this terribly broken build type, since most players running condition-heavy builds (especially Necromancers) will be able to take them out easily.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Elemental Surge is rather poor. I have used it and went back to EA because EA is much better. Wow, 5 condition procs every 45 seconds...yeah that is REALLY worth a 30point Grandmaster trait...

Sorry but Elemental Surge is A LONG way of being good enough for it to oust EA.

Burning - I have Perma Burning as it is. No need for it.
Chilled - Good
Air - Blind decent
Earth - Immobilize. Terrible.

Okay right, here we go. I’m not much of a fan of ESurge, since I tend to build for EA if I’m going into deep arcana anyway (the only time I’ve really taken this trait has been to troll on Skyhammer with insta-immobilise, and that’s just making the best of a sucky map mechanic), but your argument includes a whole bunch of fallacies:

"5 condition procs every 45 seconds" - so you’re only running Arcane Power, without:
- Arcane Brilliance
- Arcane Wave
- Arcane Blast
- Arcane Shield
- Final Shielding (traited Arcane Shield proc)
- Arcane Retribution (traited Arcane Power proc)
- Arcane Mastery (srsly wtf)
You’ve tried running a powerful, build-defining, Grandmaster-level trait without actually building for it. Of course it went badly.

And for the conditions applied - remembering on top of these points that you can choose which attunement to activate the skills in and that you don’t have to, say, apply unnecessary chills on a downed enemy.
"Burning - I have Perma Burning as it is. No need for it." - the burning provided by this trait can allow you to free up utility or trait slots for other effects, or you can just not aim to cast arcanes in fire to proc ESurge effects.
"Chilled - Good
Air - Blind decent" - yes, they’re both pretty great effects in the right situations - the high chill duration from stacking ESurge procs on a foe will shut down many builds, and repeated blinds can also give powerful shutdown against enemies that don’t attack too frequently.

"Earth - Immobilize. Terrible." - ...really? This gets its own paragraph. Seriously, you think immobilise is terrible?
Have you not been following the arguments since immobilise stacking was introduced? It’s an incredibly powerful condition, especially as it can’t be cleared by stunbreaks but still prevents dodges unless the defender wants to waste a skill cooldown.
Immobilise lets you get a bit more time to decap (or maybe fullcap, depending on the situation) a point, or save a downed ally (woo insta-cast arcanes) or get away from someone chasing you. It lets your allies get off their burst since it prevents dodging.
It can keep someone in an AoE.
Immobilise is bloody brilliant, even at short durations.

Later in your post you go on to mention torment as an alternative to immobilise - I can maybe see this being useful (it’d be great for many condition builds) but the control it provides is limited to high condi damage builds... while immobilise is effective for control even with a 0-condi-damage setup.
To make condi Ele more useful, I’d rather see some trait or skill options to lengthen the durations of our other conditions (the soft CC ones like chill and cripple) so we can cover our damaging ones a bit better, and maybe also let folks running condi builds stack bleeds better. Such changes could be done without allowing our inherent versatility to outshine the heavy condi pressure accessible by Necromancers, or even that available to Mesmers and Engineers.

___

Oh, and one other thing - if you’re going to respond to any point in my post, please respond to all of it. Even if that means accepting that I’ve made (any) valid points -though I may not have done so and you’re of course welcome to note what you disagree with in every part of my post.
I ask this because every time you reply to someone (that you don’t agree with entirely) you seem to cherry-pick quotes to refute (with lots of ALLCAPS emphasis)... but you don’t actually address the core argument they’re making.
It doesn’t lead to interesting or useful discussion, it derails threads - and it just kittenes off the people who actually want to discuss the current state of the game, its classes, its balance, or the directions in which these things could be taken.

Edit: fixed a minor typo.

Much more important: pay attention to your enemies’ close (your far), and count the foes at other points. Decap it whenever it’s left vulnerable, and learn how to judge when to fullcap it rather than just decap -> run.

Pressure is usually more powerful than defence - that’s why no team runs 5 full bunkers.

Also getting a mouse with multiple buttons *really* helps - even just a cheap one with back/forward buttons on one side (for web browsing) is great since you can chuck your dodge and one or two utility skills on there (if you want to click your wheel) and save your WASD hand a lot of work.

Grimreaper.5370:

But boy wouldn’t it be awesome to, for example, attune to earth, magnetic grasp, attune to fire, burning speed and then be able to go right back into earth?

With the way our traits are going right now, this would be even less of a good idea – the new Earth GM is “you can’t be critically hit while attuned to Earth”, so being able to switch back instantly would be completely overpowered.

This thread is where I took that from, in case you want to look at the other points people made.

It would require complete redesign of the entire class.

Okay, here’s a repost of something I’ve replied to this with before:

Anyway, the ’our skills have long recharges’ argument is daft. Yes, stronger skills have long cooldowns, how surprising.

Consider just the #2 skills on Staff:
Fire: Lava Font.
Water: Ice Spike.
Air: Lightning Surge.
Earth: Eruption.

Think of the chain here: you can set up your lava fonts with ~60% uptime, with might-giving blasts going off every 7 seconds or so, and maintain 10 vulnerability on targets in that AoE.
Untraited.
And you have a bunch of CC and other utility in your remaining weapon skills, as well as the right half of your skill bar.

ICD on traits wouldn’t help with this. The only options to make zero-second attunement cooldown even remotely balanced are:
- making our short-cooldown skills very ineffectual
- increasing the recharges on every skill we have
Neither of these would be even slightly okay.

While I sometimes would like attunement recharge set at a constant, with arcana investment giving some other class-related bonus, there is no way to get zero-second attunement cooldown to function fairly.

How would you balance, say, those #2 Staff skills without a CD? Nukers casting Font every time it’s off cooldown while applying heavy vuln/damage/blast finishers? They’d all have to be nerfed to hell either with damage or their own longer cooldowns (which is the purpose served by our attunement cooldowns).

EDIT: my quote messed up some formatting, fixed that.

runeblade.7514:

cheese.4739:

Because it doesn’t belong in competitive PvP, and it’s all about which specific, map-abusing builds are being run.

Just like GW1 with Running builds in HA!

Yeah this is a valid point – most of my argument is against its inclusion in soloq rather than teamq, since at least in teamq folks can maybe be expected to compose groups suited to the maps and it’s not the “who has the best broken builds for this one?” lottery of soloq.

The same reason Skyhammer isn’t in teamq.

Because it doesn’t belong in competitive PvP, and it’s all about which specific, map-abusing builds are being run.

One team takes, for example, "a double endure pain berserkers stance gs/ sword warhorn warrior" while the other doesn’t? Oh look they’re orbrunning forever and suddenly things are heavily stacked against the other team.

Bugs
- Often the orb carrier icon disappears or never appears on the map.

Yeah this is one of several problems with the addition of enemy markers on the map - with the current setup it can’t display both orb carrier’s position and their profession at-a-glance. This is on top of the clutter (who’s where? I don’t know, there are just a million Mesmer icons) and issues with muiltiple copies of one profession on a team (where’s their bunker Guard? Oh, there, cool, let’s backcap. Oh no that was their dps and I’ve just wasted time running at their bunker). Only the last one of these can ever be sorted by the player (by mousing over the map) and still doesn’t work when there’s anyone else nearby anyway.

Sarrs.4831:

Y’know what would be super cool? A GM guardian trait that would allow you to grant minor healing to your allies when you blast a Light field.

Only if we get some kind of field priority system so everyone else doesn’t have to deal with light field spam.
They’re frustratingly common enough even when not being intentionally cast for the field effect – if Guards start putting them down so they can finish in/through the things, I don’t expect anyone will get off a might, heal or other combo off in less-organised group combat ever again.
Something like this would otherwise likely push zergs even farther towards hammertrains everywhere forever.

Yep, me too, I also sent in a ticket and a­m not spending the glory. I recommend submitting a ticket yourself, Torres.

EDIT: kitten (haha) this wordfilter. Can it not recognise [A-Za-z]<curse string possibly including spaces>[A-Za-z]? There are far too many false positives, many of which remove the meaning from posts.

Hyena.2037:

I always thought if there was an arcane attunement it would function as an elite skill, shifting you out of the standard attunements for access to a single more powerful one, independent of equipped weaponry, to tap into the primal, an possible unstable, arcane energy for a short duration.

This actually sounds half reasonable – maybe a skill that replaces weapon skills with a different selection, but it has a cooldown (like our other attunements and I guess Death Shroud) that stops you from going into it too frequently (and long enough cooldowns on its own skills that you can’t just sit in it forever). I guess something like a 20-40s cooldown depending on the skills it offers?

Arcane Precision I’d quite like to see scrapped, so Bountiful Power could be moved into our boon duration line (where other else’s boon -> damage traits are) and so we didn’t have a (very heavily) crit reliant trait in a non-precision traitline. What would replace it in the Water Magic line... iunno.

GoEP: probably wouldn’t be too strong if it lost the proc % altogether - as Kyon says, it has a pretty long ICD, so you can’t maintain burning or chill anyway.

This is a change to the Teq fight, and simply requires an increase in dps during the burn phase. Gunnar’s Hold’s assaults on Teq failed a couple of times after this change, but we’ve recovered well enough and can again beat it with more than a minute to spare.
Sorry that your server is struggling, all anyone can really do is wish you luck and hope that players can adjust to the now-more-difficult fight.

Uhtameit.2413:

oZii.2864:

Malcastus.6240:

30 water will be the thing with condition cleanses and 30 arcane will likely still be the thing in TPvP. So 0/0/10/30/30 staff bunker ele will be good. That or 0/0/20/30/20 with stability to be able to stay on point. 2x Armor of Earth with lowered CD.

Hmm I don’t see it maybe glass staff with 10-20 arcana maybe 10 arcana with 30 water, but why bring a bunker staff ele?

Because it is a wonderful support class that will destroy conditions?

As I posted earlier – I can see 30 earth 30 water full clerics, with Stone Heart and Cleansing Water, doing a powerful anti-condi bunker who can also last well against zerkers if need be. Another idea would be Diamond Skin/Aquatic Benevolence, but that’d be very unreliable against a combination of condi and power foes so unsuitable for a primary bunker.

Fenrina.2954:

chris.6583:

i just want no one else can use my conjured weapons cause they waste them or bug trying to loot

I know the feeling. I’m kinda torn on it. I like being able to help by providing others with access to skills, but I wish they couldn’t hurt my setup in the process. The latter tends to happen more often.

Oh aye, in PvE I’d really like to be able to choose whether I was sharing – far too often do I place down a Flame Axe somewhere useful for me, only to see it picked up by someone, get AA’d a couple of times, then dropped. No real might stacking, they gained no utility, they just picked up the conjure because it was there (and hey, that’s what they’re for, right?). It’s only ever okay for some random to pick up and waste it if they use skill 3 and accidentally Burning Retreat off a cliff.
I wouldn’t object if they used it to contribute to the group, but far too few people know how to use them (particularly the Flame Axe and Earth Shield, which aren’t so great for dps dps dps) but will still pick the things up.

Rym.1469:

They gave Necromancers undead minions because… They’re necromancers ? What did you expect, butterflies?

And now more seriously – In GW1 Necromancer could bring about 16-17 minions at once to combat and make new ones from corpses during larger fights pretty endlessly. Currently, typical Necro will run 5-6 minions.

All of the gw1 necro’s minions were uncontrollable and constantly lost health, however – larger minion groups were primarily used for body blocking rather than as a reliable damage source, and they worked with a completely different set of control abilities/effects to what we have now.

Since there’s no body-blocking in gw2 and we can all run through each other, minions have to be given some other role in PvP… and that role is to be huge monstrosities adding lots of clutter to the battlefield and dishing out not insignificant amounts of damage. If anything, playing MM is much easier in gw2 than it was in gw1 because you’re given two already effective sets of weapon skills along with death shroud, rather than being left with only a couple of skill slots after 1-2 for minions and some energy management.

Great, thanks for finding that info!

ExTribble.7108:

Frozen Ground and Lava Font have cast times under 0.25 seconds, but they aren’t truly instant. Cast times under 0.25 seconds aren’t shown, which is why they appear to be instant cast skills, but truly aren’t. The cast time for Lava Font is 0.2 seconds, and I assume Frozen Ground is about the same.

It’s a bit confusing and could use clarification (i.e. tooltips showing ALL non-instant cast times), but once you learn how they work it’s not too much of a problem.

Oh, when did Lava Font’s tooltip drop its cast time? I must’ve missed the patch where that was changed and only caught the Frozen Ground one - not realising that it didn’t become instant, just very very fast.
Thanks for bringing that up! ^__^

To elaborate on "Cast times under 0.25 seconds aren’t shown": all cast times are rounded for display, as are condition/boon durations - but the exact values are always used by the game. I’m not certain how the rounding is done, but from what ExTribble says it sounds like things are always rounded down to the nearest 1/4 second.

Also: thread lock in 3, 2, 1...? This discussion isn’t at all productive and the OP probably isn’t going to show their face again - though hopefully they’ve learned that the vast majority of macro accusations are just well-learned skill combos, and while a small number of folks will cheat with macroes, they’re definitely not the biggest problem PvP has right now.

Oh, you edited your post. In reply to your edit:

You can use a macro software to “read” the chat log and react to a skill with another skill.

No. That’s not a macro, that’s a screenreader. Some other issues with this argument:
- it will react slower to the majority of telegraphed attacks than a player who is paying attention, since it won’t be able to see the casting animations
- it doesn’t address the super-fast-casting of skills that all your previous posts insist on
- srsly it has nothing to do with the discussion why did you even bring it up? It reeks of grasping at straws and logical fallacies.

urdriel.8496:

cheese.4739:

urdriel.8496:

he cast ALL of them on us in 1 sec.

Well of Corruption+Well of Suffering+Mark of Blood+Chilblains+Reaper’s Mark+Putrid Mark

In that case, either you can’t count to 1, there were multiple necroes, you were lagging, or they had somehow gotten a hack working that told the server they were casting skills faster than they should have been.
EDIT: oh, or you weren’t paying attention and they’d precast the three marks, in which case the two wells and Chilblains could all be cast in less than 2s and you could be excused for some hyperbole.

They were most definitely not using a macro, which would be regularly affected by all cast/aftercast times because it’s just a sequence of instructions, nothing more. A cheaty way to execute a set of commands with flawless timing every time, yes, but still not at all capable of doing what you describe.

Reality check, this game have hacks.

I’ve hilighted a couple of important bits for you.

I believe this image macro (haha) pretty well sums up how I feel about your use of the word ‘macro’:

urdriel.8496:

he cast ALL of them on us in 1 sec.

Well of Corruption+Well of Suffering+Mark of Blood+Chilblains+Reaper’s Mark+Putrid Mark

In that case, either you can’t count to 1, there were multiple necroes, you were lagging, or they had somehow gotten a hack working that told the server they were casting skills faster than they should have been.
EDIT: oh, or you weren’t paying attention and they’d precast the three marks, in which case the two wells and Chilblains could all be cast in less than 2s and you could be excused for some hyperbole.

They were most definitely not using a macro, which would be regularly affected by all cast/aftercast times because it’s just a sequence of instructions, nothing more. A cheaty way to execute a set of commands with flawless timing every time, yes, but still not at all capable of doing what you describe.

::excited::

Sooo which part of HotM is going to become the new Bank Steps of LA? Most worlds’ lobbies aren’t really busy enough to have such a thing yet, though folks on Gunnar’s Hold tend to congregate around the rubble between forge and training gate, or on the ledge above that next to the amulet vendor. What’re other worlds like?

Yes, doing anything apart from instant-cast skills during MS will cancel the channel, setting it on full recharge if any meteors have already fallen.

The only skill I can think of off the top of my head, with 0 cast time, that will cancel the MS channel: Frozen Ground, Staff Water #4. This skill previously had a cast time, so it’s quite possible that it shouldn’t interrupt the channel... but it does! :P
The Magnetic Aura (Staff Earth #3) has 0 cast time and can be cast freely while channeling, as can Arcane utilities, Cantrips, Glyph of Elemental Power and Signet of Air.

This has been an issue since forever - pretty sure other ’increased radius’ traits also have this issue with ground-targeted skills.

Go to the Heart of the Mists (PvP lobby) to check it out though - for some reason AoE circles are correctly sized there.
(you may need to change your traits once in the lobby, pretty sure Blasting Staff won’t be a default one)

You... what? Instant-cast skills allow, for example, the crazy burst from Ele S/D - attunement switching, arcane skills, lightning bolt. And if there’s a global cooldown, the macro will still have to abide by it - so someone casting that fast is cheating in some other way, that isn’t a pre-recorded list of commands.

EDIT: oh, that’s pretty much exactly what Mouby just said. Cool. I was replying to urdriel.