Guild Wars 2

Awesome, thanks all. This is very helpful. I’ll do some tests tonight.

To be honest, this is the kind of thing that really gets my OCD going I’m not really a min/maxer, when it comes to gear, but I love trying to get the timing down to just right. One of the main reasons I was S/D for so many levels, just loved trying to hit that 24th +Might stack…

I should mention too this is entirely PvE and dungeon focused. Haven’t done any PvP yet, but can imagine it’s much harder to set something like this up because players sit still.

DesertRose: thanks for insights onto #4. On #4.1, I didn’t ask it very well. Might be easier with a diagram. So I dug out Powerpoint. Basically I’m wondering how boons apply in cases where the field and the finisher are both ground target AOEs. Diagram “Question4_1-diagram.jpg” I think asks it better.

I include Question4-diagram to seek verification.

Thanks all!

Fay.2735:

Can’t they see the total number of accounts accessed in the past month?

Oh they can. But what value is it to them to release information in a way that gamers understand, when we all have seen how that just compels armchair theorycrafting on forums

The investor reports are designed for, well, investors. Will they buy or sell NC stock on the hopes or fears of GW2? Maybe, or not. But they’re probably not thinking that granularly about a company that has a larger library of MMOs. Net positive cash flow, consistent growth, expectations that align with earlier guidance (or at least analyst prediction). I imagine because it’s a new launch the Q3 report will include some highlights of GW2. But it’s also probably going to include the many successes and writedowns they’ve taken for other titles and acquisitions as well.

One thing I’d love to see on these forums is for players to be able to choose a badge/avatar that designates their preferred playstyle (sPvP, WvWvW, PvE, hybrid). There’s such a stark contrast in feedback on the same points because PvP and PvE are just so different.

This of course is an old problem with the genre, this belief you can effectively balance for both without turning off certain aspects of the game along the way (e.g. removing the levels element from PvP, or nerfing the effectiveness of certain abilities simply because it targets a player rather than a mob).

But if there was a way to sub-divide the comments between various groups, I think it could be helpful. It’s not like any of us here has any real insight into how they’ve set up their matrix of skill interactions anyway

Still a newb at 80

Been playing Staff lately in soloing. Crazy fun and very different from the S/D I’d been running since the 20s. Mostly I like it because I enjoy attunement switching and trying to optimizing fields and finishers. Bunch of questions on the latter:

1. If you drop multiple fields on top of each other, only the first field effect is used by the finisher, right?
2. If you drop multiple fields in a row (e.g., a Geyser on yourself, a Lava Font between you and the mob, and Static Field on the mob) and then throw an Arcane Bolt or Stoning that passes through all three fields, which boons/conditions get applied?
3. Does the boon/condition get applied at the beginning of the cast of a finisher, or at the end?
4. Where do the players and mob need to be in relation to the field when the finisher is cast? I’ve seen at some points: cast Healing Rain over the meleers at the mob, then cast Stoning: fellow ranged folk well outside the Healing Rain get the Regeneration boon. But I’ve also seen sometimes that Lava Font and Stoning only gives Burning to meleers (though I could be missing it).
   1. Similar question but regards to two ground targetted fields/finishers. For example, if I cast Lava Font and then Eruption, do people within the Eruption circle get the +Might while people outside of its range only get the combo effect off of Lava Font (assuming they throw a Blast, Whirl or Projectile)?
5. Seems like all my finishers are in Earth (Earth 1, 2, 5) or Utility (Arcane Blast/Wave). Is that it? Wondering what I’m missing because even with 30 in Arcane I run into inaccessible finishers often.
6. Are Elemental pets or their abilities considered finishers?
7. Do Elementals pets gain boons

Thanks!

Honestly I wish I started swapping sooner. Heck, I wish I understood Might stacking sooner. Swapping and field/finisher combos are so hella fun and very effective.

I love threads like this and can’t wait for the early disillusioned “this wasn’t what I believed it would be” folks to move on. Nobody needs to play this game. Even the professional reviews are already done

As to the OP about the “MMO Community”. Heh. Big echo chamber that. But whatever, if you feel the need to play a game only because it’s the most popular, well, there’s a app game for that.

The game has issues. So do they all.

I like it and would rather retain it. It gives the opportunity for other players to quickly rez you back into the fight. It gives you that extra chance in case you got hit with a sudden crit but that was this close to dying anyway. And if you can survive long enough to Mist (which I generally can if my Ele pets are out), then you can get even further away, making rezzes/rally easier.

Going right to death is more punitive than this game needs.

Arsenal.2601:

Disclaimer 2: I find long, autobiographical essays on why someone quit playing a video game – written with all the gravity and self importance of a world leader resigning from office – to be tiresome.

Lol yea. At one point someone created a ragequit generator, but for the life of me (ok, after a few minutes in Google), the closest I could find was Goodbye post generator

But on your point about not leaving, that’s always been the problem with oboards, and why I was really hoping Anet just wouldn’t bother with them. They start all optimistic, decend into annoyed gamers angry with their pet problems, and if the game survives the attrition of the early departed, then they become a place where veteran fans start set the community pace. Hopefully by Christmas…

Ah well. It’s as much a part of the genre as the expected entitlement to have direct feedback with devs.

poiuy.3907:

CCP might have pulled it off by making DUST a kind of FPS MMO like the old pen and paper Travelers game; but some crazy CCP dev got it into their head that they must only tap the console players. They even made DUST a PS3 exclusive! If only CCP made DUST for PC like planet side 2….(I cry every night because of their crazy decision)

I know right?! I imagined at the time Sony may have floated some incentive to CCP to make it that way, while CCP was interested enough to extend the Eve brand off of PC exclusivity to accept the narrower terms. My hope is that with the long term plans they have for Dust, it’ll come home to PC. I love Eve, even if I don’t have the lifestyle to play it the way I want to anymore.

And that is my manifesto on why I love GW2.

• I’m not here to min/max with military-style precision alongside 40+ fellow virtual soldiers.
• I don’t care what other people think of how my character looks.
• I’ll take advice if I agree with it, but happily set my own pace and learn my own way if not.
• I don’t need to value analyse a monthly fee versus time investment.
• I don’t need to calculate time investment to next set of achievements.
• I’ll stick with fellow casual players or dutifully follow orders from an established leader, as long as the latter doesn’t require exclusive commitments in 3 hour blocks. I simply avoid those events.
• I accept that MMOs are a hodge podge of often buggy bugs game mechanics each done better in some other game genre, but generally just one such game mechanic done better. No other genre can combine so many things in one place, because only one has the persistent world public space.
• I quit when I’m bored.
• I come back when I’m interested.
  But of course, that wasn’t always the case. I wonder if everyone whose ever spent time in this genre goes through the same new game/optimistic-for-next-game/wtf-is-this-stuff/acceptance seven steps of grief

There’s enough game here for everyone. And when there’s not, time to leave.

The group creator wants to ensure that everyone in the group wants to do the same option so that they don’t run into a conflict (and potential group members dropping) once they’re already in the dungeon.

Maybe dumb question: but are you sure you’re crafting stuff that isn’t gray? If the name of the crafted item is gray, you won’t get a skill up and therefore won’t get XP.

AlexanderFaust.4518:

IE: It’s a console game, sudo-mmo style.

I agree. I didn’t really follow GW2 development because GW1 didn’t do anything for me. Coming at it blind, when I first played it and saw the contextual UI, I immediately wondered when they’d announce the Xbox 360 version

lollie.5816:

Tabula Rasa actually started the whole dynamic event thing. Wish other games also copied the combat of that game as well. Still waiting.

Ah, memories. Someone here might show up with an even earlier example, but the dawn of procedurally triggered dynamic events was from Garriot’s even earlier game: UO. TR had the concept of moving front lines, but they felt half implemented at the time.

Typically UO events were triggered by a location on a map or an interactive object, like the news post on Empath Abbey. You read a news post, and based on what it said, you knew to go a certain direction a certain distance to perform certain tasks (clear a mob camp, rescue a citizen, etc). Often these triggered second and sometimes third event chains. I think they’d despawn if not completed, but can’t remember.

This then was repeated in SWG with the Mission Terminals.

TR combat was pretty good. It felt like Planetside 1.5, which is kinda why I like PS2 now too. Still surprising that 10 years later, nobody’s made a true MMOFPS (even Huxley was all instances).

I get the rage for attunement swapping, but I don’t get why people who hate it keep playing the class. I can’t see Anet pulling a SWG-NGE on Elementalists. They’re as likely to just balance the way it currently works and make the kind of single-attunement dedicated roles some people want into a new class. Because by the time they have the resources to do that, the Elementalists will have their established fans.

Gombie.3860:

If your a dedicated healer and you are just switching all over the place when you are trying to heal, your doing it wrong.

Even with water alacrity, how does one stay just in Water to be a healer? Damage would seem to come to fast to stay ahead of it. I ask seriously too, I don’t have a lot of experience with healing so far.

I use attunement swapping in Staff mostly for combo field effects. My usual rotation goes through all four attunements of fields and typically involves blast and projectile finishers. I’m no mesmer of boons/conditions of course But I can’t fathom how someone wouldn’t take advantage of this.

Oh, and yes, PvE only. So, “noob” for the “real gamers” who only PvP I guess?

Red Falcon.8257:

Perhaps gamers are not ready for this, the leap between traditional MMO and GW2 is too long for a generation that was used to much more simple formats?

Nah. GW2 isn’t fundamentally more complicated than earlier MMOs. I just think for some there’s a dissonance between how it plays and how it’s wrapped. You see hot keys, minimap, spells and fantasy, you think WoW with tweaks. And why wouldn’t you? The last 8 years have largely been that except for a few outliers.

But we can’t blame marketing either. You can’t say “MMO” and not think of the 900lb gorilla. And you can’t risk saying “is nothing at all like what you expect” because so many people make purchase decisions on precedent and reference. You can only hope people who say they want something different actually want something different and not just “my favorite WoW class but not-kittened”

Another group might be disappointed that GW2 is very different from GW1. MMOs don’t typically get sequels. But where they have so far, the sequel was nothing like the original in game play. EQ2 and AC2 shared only lore with their predecessors. PS2 is closer to PS1, but that’s not really in the same field. And so comparatively few people have played the first two (nor will play the third) that these aren’t well known examples anyway.

No group mentioned above is wrong.

This isn’t a critique of close minded thinking or any of that. We’re supposed to be allowed to like or dislike something, and continue or quit as a result

Having said all that, we’re at a stage in a new MMO launch where the official boards will feature a lot of ragequits, complete with manifestos about what’s wrong/broken/stupid about the game. This will lead to an echo chamber for a bit until the last of the disillusioned move on. Once the remaining dedicated fan base is established, they’ll be the veterans to usher in new players and explain how things really work here.

My hope is that this happens in time for Anet to reap the benefits of the Holiday shopping season. New players brought in after the disillusioned move on is really when the game starts to grow again.

Not sure I’d write off Guardian or Warrior so quickly. The names are evocative of archetype, but all the classes I’ve played in GW2 all play very different than whatever other MMO one might reference.

At the same time, I love my Ele, Engy and Mesmer. They all play very differently from each other, and are interesting twists on traditional convention.

Agent Mulder.4531:

Can anyone tell me what a back slot is?

Often we’ll encounter one early on, like Hearty Back Brace.

Back slot items are pretty uncommon, as noted in the OP. Generally people just buy them from the Guild Armorer once the guild has upgraded to it. And even the level 80 ones don’t seem (to my eye anyway) to have the kind of stat you see in other level 80 trinket slot items.

The whole thing feels very unfinished.

“He saved Russia from dirty czarism, took Russia out of WWI, protected Russia from foreign imperialism during the 1918-20 Civil War, planned Russian development…”

It’s statements like this which is probably why they don’t want any real world people’s names. It’s a slippery slope no matter how you look at it. One person’s hero is another’s villain, and you can’t ever really tell which it will be until it’s put out there.

So what benefit is there to Anet for them to let you put it out there?

Galdethriel.7524:

My first MMO was a much older game (I think it came out 1 year either before or after WoW did). It was slow, grindy, poorly balanced, glitchy, ugly to look at, had an unresponsive dev team (and when they did make a presence in the forums, they were usually jerks) and a hit-or-miss small playerbase and community.

Sounds like Shadowbane I did enjoy that, but man, yea…

Fiddlestyx.9714:

So an MMO is just a single player game where I can see other people playing too?

Back in my day (and get off my lawn!), it was the inverse. You couldn’t do anything meaningful unless you were grouped. And even then, you were lucky achieve forward momentum because dying meant XP loss, de-leveling and therefore skill loss (and potentially item loss). Ironically, UO was very soloable after they launched Trammel, but EQ was the larger business success, and “what is an MMO” built on that game style instead.

City of Heroes kinda started the emphasis on soloing (though in some ways so did SWG), in response to Everquest’s significant lack therefore (unless you were a Necro or Bard, maybe Druid). This continued through many games into WoW, which was soloable to the level cap (60) at launch and every level cap since. You could choose to dungeon, but you weren’t forced to.

Eight years and a few dozen new MMOs later, it’s as core to the genre as minimaps and generalized waypoints

I like the Asura testing the Skritt IQs as well. I was most surprised by the underwater Quoggan organ in Caledon, and more so when it actually worked. I also like the Priory quest in Maelstrom where you’re helping them discover dig sites in the ruins. It was nice to see new game ideas come up for the first time in the 60s levels. Usually by then the game has already shown you all the “new” it has to order. Sinking the Ash Horizon event in Sparkly is also fun, as you’re trying to balance keeping the NPCs alive so they can repair the weapons you use to fire on the boat while fighting off the land invasion. Lots of events like that with multiple variables, which is what I like to see.

The absolute coolest thing so far though (bearing in mind I haven’t PvP’d nor dungeon’d yet) was just last night: the quest chain in Maelstrom that starts with the spider invasion on the Asuran camp and ends with Megadestroyer at the bottom of the volcano. Lots of steps, different game ideas, different levels of coordination, and while it all started with me and one other guy constantly getting killed in camp, it ended with 40 some people.

Best thing I like about the game is how easy it is for people to randomly show up and help out.

Tom Gore.4035

You don’t get it. The events themselves are short and thus offer very limited loot. The real loot comes from the counter-events that happen when the Pact is not advancing and the risen try to capture the facilities back.

Good point Tom. You’re right, I didn’t get that.

Masaki.2153:

Since The last patch was 5 days ago for the patch and they broke within 24hours and it’s not like they don’t know they are broken yet keep allowing them to stay broken for so long, knowing how it’s affecting the player base, progression and what not.

I personally consider it one of prioritization. I recall starting to see this in mid/high level zones three weeks ago. Makes me wonder if most of us are only being affected by launch-day bugs, or it if was something from a mid-Sept patch.

Kso.6458:

Man, if this was daoc when daoc came out I can absolutely say I wouldve never tried an mmo again. From a time invested point of view, I guess I got my 60$ worth but I definitely didnt get 60$ worth of fun.

Heh, DAoC was much much worse. Back then, the biggest achievement was that it was playable on day one. That was not the case with Anarchy Online before it. And even at that point, EQ1, UO and AC1 were all such bug riddled messes that the sense of accomplishment came largely from figuring out how to dodge the issues and achieve a goal anyway

But, back then, MMORPGs were beautiful snowflakes. There wasn’t anything quite like them, so they got a lot of forgiveness just for not crashing. Nowadays every game from Black Ops 2 through Farmville 2 has a diku-inspired leveling achievement mechanic so baked in they turned it into the entire microtransactions business model. And the “what is an MMO” has largely been answered first by “like EQ1 but…” and then “like WoW but…”. I consider outliers like Eve Online to be separate genres altogether (and true to the original 90s vision of “massively multiplayer”, but that’s another thread ).

MMOs are still unique in the 24/7 random social encounter aspect. But as cross-genre/cross-medium gamers, it’s up to each of us individually whether that makes the bugs and MMO-specific issues acceptable.

I’m old school enough to remember broken world geometry on corpse runs where you risked not only the XP loss you incurred but also item loss if the server crashed and reset along the way. In that vein, GW2 is “perfect!”

But I also accept that any new game gets compared to the current state of all other games that are live, no matter how long those games have been around nor how well they launched months or years ago.

With all that said, GW2 is very awesome. It’s been more than worth my time and money, it does everything I want it to do better than other MMOs i could be playing, and I don’t really do polish comparisons between genres because MMOs have always lagged behind FPS, RTS and general RPGs (though nobody get me started on Skyrim issues… ).

KevlarZero.6849:

There were 1-2 professions that didn’t seem to be complaining but for the most part everyone is complaining.

Nerf them!

Good post though. Understandably, most people don’t come to their game’s forums to post accolades of cours, but it’s nice to see one of these per day. I’ve certainly gotten my money’s worth out of this game. And I’d go as far to say that they chances they took were all good choices, with the biggest issues being your bog-standard MMO stuff of bugs and other changes that are a part of all of them.

Ah thanks Mil. That does make sense.

I’m seeing more and more people make the claim that the class doesn’t match some WoW-style archetype or that it doesn’t match the “back of the box” description. I get it. People want to play a glass cannon. But you can’t blame the class design itself for the class not fitting your mental image of it. That’s more a blame you apply to marketing

I’ve been playing mage-types since Ultima III. Every one is different to a degree. Sometimes the names are similar enough to cause confusion (EQ1 Magician vs WoW Mage). But most times you realize the differences right away.

“Elementalist” is not “Wizard” is not “Mage”.

There are definitely ways for this class to improve. I personally just want to see all abilities work as advertised first, and then be nerfed or powered-up as needed. But what I don’t want is for this class to become a WoW Mage. I’d rather they just make a new class for that, and change the marketing copy on this one

Ah, this all makes sense. I’m sure I messed it up and that I meant armor not weapons, thanks! And the note about having those runes on four different items to get the 4/4 bonus is I think the piece I was missing the most.

Thanks!

I went ahead and bought four Rune of Strength at one point. However, for the life of me I can’t figure out how to slot all four at once.

1. If I drag a stack of four to my weapon, nothing happens.
2. If I double-click the stack and then click my weapon, only one Rune gets applied.
3. If I then double-click the stack again and then click my weapon, the one Rune already there gets replaced by the new single Rune.

What am I doing wrong? As an Ele, I likes me my +Might and Might Duration

AH! Ok, I’ll be grabbing some then. I generally go through the standard Air>Fire>Earth rotation during combat. Sounds like I should start in Earth so going to Air would get me the first 3.

I’ve been seeing this sometimes as well. As an extension of Josh’s hypothesis, I’ve seen them go invuln mostly when I’m close to the surface of the water near a shoreline. Anything that shifts my position (water2, air4) potentially puts me over the threshold where the game thinks I’m on land.

Newb question: Sigil of Battle says it applies Might when swapping to that weapon in combat. While Elementalists can’t swap weapons during combat, lots of people here have recommended using this Sigil for +Might.

So how does it work? Does it give you +3 Might when you use a skill associated to that weapon? Or does it give you +3 Might when you switch to that weapon outside of combat?

And is how it currently works a bug we can expect to get fixed?

In this post I wrote “quickittenhe worlds” but the actual statement that is posted is “quickittenhe”, so it basically replace “ly t” with “kitten”. See attached before and after.

Am I old school enough to not know of some nefarious connotation for “ly t”, or is it a profanity filter bug?

I’m going with something with the code issues (maybe world geometry maybe broken unseen triggers, whatever). The DEs and Skill Challenges are a core part of what draws players through the maps. Them not working not only reduces the fun for soloer/PvE-only players, it also prevents map completion. They’re also core to the business promise of the game, the “dynamic” nature of GW2 in both PvE/PvP.

I think it’s becoming more pronounced as the playerbase is “aging” in levels too because higher level zones seem to have more of a problem than lower ones.

This is why I suggested nightly server resets in the suggestions board. They don’t have unlimited development resources, so I get that six weeks into launch they haven’t been able to plug all the holes. But they’ve also shown just how quickittenhe worlds can be restarted. Not that it’s a good thing to highlight bugs you can’t get to. But as a stop gap for a few more weeks, it could dull the noise in their Bugs forum and /bug DB from ingame reporting

Tom Gore.4035:

I’m pretty certain botters shut down certain events on purpose to farm them.

Can’t farm them if they’re shut down

When I see a thread that doesn’t have reply, I do two things:

1. I check the URL: If there’s anything after the title of the thread in the URL, I remove that part and reload the page,.
2. If there’s nothing wrong with the URL, I force refresh the page.

The reply button (and the other four buttons to the right of each post) all then show up for me.

Pretty much the same way. The only thing I add is that every time I’m sent to a new zone for my story, I 100% the zone first. Just for kicks. And maybe someday I’ll 100% the world

A bit over 110 hours in game with a 70 Ele, 10 Mesmer and 10 Engy. I play like an addict but am not really all that fast at leveling. Haven’t hit PvP nor a dungeon yet.

Rhyse.8176:

10/all, 30 Arcana, Evasive Arcana, Staff. Arcane Wave, Arcane Shield, x <situational>

With all the combo fields Staff gives you, and 6 blast finishers, you can rotate through a series of combos that stacks might, burning, chill/cripple, and heals you for 50-75%+ every 20 seconds or so. In addition, with Sigil of Battle and the various combos, I’m usually maintaining 5-10, with up to 20 at times, might stacks on myself while soloing. The key is to have REALLY good reflexes, attunement swap like mad, and dodge roll into your fields for a massive number of combo effects.

I’ve just started dabbling with Staff solo. At 70. I’m tardy to the party What does your typical skill use rotation look like?

Huh, that’s pretty cool. I don’t remember that from TERA though. Maybe it was a toggle? I didn’t play that one for very long.

1. Do a search in a forum. For example “staff solo” in the Elementalist forum.
2. Note that the first page of results includes posts in thread: “Forum no longer exists”.

Speculation (probably not useful to ya ): the search cache is not getting updated at the same pace as posts are moderated.

Not to play pretend moderator, but there’s already a good debate on this idea in a thread created by Conncept and moved over to Suggestions:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Elementalist-weapon-swap-1/first#post389458

TSW was fun. A shame about the business side of things for them.

Reticle combat could be interesting here; however, I personally probably wouldn’t use it any more than I would in TSW.

In both TSW and GW2, your ability to hit a target isn’t really based on the same type of “leading the target” shooting from an FPS game (or a quasi-FPS action shooter like Planetside 1/2). It feels like it sometimes, but to me it’s more in the ability to quickly evade a shot at the last minute than in predicting where your opponent will evade to and hitting them there instead of where they were.

Then there’s the positioning. I play pretty zoomed out to max because I’m constantly moving and changing direction.

So for me it wouldn’t work. But I’m really curious what others think.

Unfortunately no. The only ones you can move around are the Utilities on the right. The ones on the left are set by Anet.

I have found nothing but friendly and helpful people in my time in game. I credit the non-punishing game mechanics for that. However, I also haven’t done much PvP, nor have I done any dungeons. I can imagine the frustrations that come out in both though.

A lot of the pessimism I’ve seen has been on these forums, but that’s not anyone’s fault. All MMOs with official boards generally have that, because it’s not like most people spend their days posting to laud a games good points

The focus on the system is about providing the fun. This is a fundamental piece of multiplayer game design that is often missed. Everything we do has a potential impact on everything anyone else is doing. So of course you balance to the whole system. You can’t give just the loudest complainers some new ability or tweak and ignore everyone else, because then you’re just kicking the problem down the road to the new group of complainers you just created

Fievre.4510:

W\I don’t have to spend 10 minutes looking through items if I happen to have multiple daggers/scepters/whatevers.

Yea, this is where I am at too. For now my favorite thing in my inventory is Equipment Box

Conncept.7638:

‘they should have called it a mage then’ is a childish statement, it doesn’t matter what they call it, it matters what it does.

You missed my point. Your argument for this is based on expectations: “what most of the playerbase expected of the elementalist when it was previewed, it does not fulfill fantasy archetypes desired by players, or expectations of diversity of style”. I actually think your statement is accurate. None of the previews showed anything about attunement switching as a part of every combat encounter.

But that’s an error in marketing, not in design. They actively decided NOT to conform to typical Mages or Wizards.

You want weapon switching so that a full set of a single attunement is viable in scenarios where the range can change enough during combat that you feel kittened being stuck with either just close or just long range abilities.

That’s a fine request. But I think you’re running into problems by combining a desire to have weapon switching for range changes (which we’d all like) with the ability to stay in a single attunement (which some of us feel is contrary to the design intent of the class). I get that you are trying to think through balance implications.

But there’s a big difference between enhancing a class with UI tweaks/balances and altering the design of it to match a mental picture of what “should be”.

Only because I’ve ran into what I thought was something like this:

Are you sure it wasn’t just a DE whose condition wasn’t being met, either because players didn’t do it or of a bug?

Most recent example I ran into is Save Parnna from the guardian golems in Metrica. You kill 6 oozes and then kill the boss that spawns, in a room of NPC Asura scientists whose task is to fill container. If they’re dead, they can’t fill containers. So if you kill oozes and then the boss and then oozes again, you’re not achieving it and it feels like an endless loop. Good for XP maybe But it’s really just because the actual objective is not being met.

FanaticDamen.3749:

If they add more classes to GW2 in the future… What classes would you hope for? I would hope for a puppetmaster class… Or dervish… OH GOD PLEASE BRING BACK DERVISH

No idea on expansions, but there’s actually a growing thread here with speculation about new classes.

Anyone who played a Bard in EQ, DAoC, SB, and LoTRO can tell you just how much variability there is to “class expectation”. As to this not fitting with fantasy archetype, perhaps that’s why they didn’t call it Wizard or Mage?

I wouldn’t mind fast weapon switch out of combat, but only as an improved UI, not to change the class. In combat I think it would unbalance things. We’re forced to switch out of combat as we assess what kind of combat we’re headed into at the moment. Other classes have different types of compromises (e.g. Mesmer can only switch between two sets though have access to eight, each of which only have five abilities, though of course there’s a good deal more complexity to it…).

Lack of in-combat weapon switching is ours.

And of course, the bugs and balance stuff, but that’ll come…

I’m by no means l33t. I play like an addict but don’t have the kind of time I used to for serious achievements.

Having said that, I love this game in both how it plays and especially how it’s styled.

Facebook is really more about outreach to potential new players. There’s a bunch of social metrics built into FB that shows correlation between the number of Likes and Mentions which potentially translate into actual marketing for them. Emphasis of course on “potential”

GW2.com is focused on the game and game forums, mostly relevant to people who either already know the brand or are already playing the game.

It would be nice to have a front page that had the kind of tagged messaging you’re talking about. But I imagine it’s not a priority for them.

We’re all playing the heck out of this game But one of the stumbling blocks seems to be the recurrence of invisible Skill Challenge NPCs and broken events. These all get cleared up at server restart and then break at some variable (and under variable circumstances) thereafter.

While you continue to explore a permanent fix, would you consider nightly server restarts? Maybe an hour or two before local server prime time, and with enough notice that people don’t get themselves caught in the middle of a dungeon.

Not sure what you’re asking. Are you asking if Eles are glass cannons because that’s what you want to play (i.e. WoW Fire/Arc mage)? Or are you asking what Eles are all about?

Funny I was thinking about this earlier too. GW2 is kind of a level-less game, using levels really just as an indicator of time investment.

However, as others here have stated, it does delineate mob abilities in a way that is instructive. Level 6 mobs won’t do what level 66 mobs do. So at 66, the skill rotation you use that works well will probably utterly melt faces when downleveled to level 6.

The other way this helps is by ability unlocking. By 66 you have a lot more options becuase you need them. But those options also let you feel OP downleveled (though not completely OP so all content in lowbie zones is boring).

So it works for me. It’s just not as arbitrary as it was in earlier MMOs.

Antrasith.2187:

Korath.7402:

S/D: Fire 4, fire 2, fire 3, arcane blast, earth 4, earth 5 = 15 stacks of might for your entire party.

I tried using this before, but the timing is just too short, 8/10, so I don’t find it reliable. It’s very good when it works though, even when soloing..

Based on another thread here, I’ve been using a variant of this for a few days.

• Scepter/Dagger
• Slot Trait: Elemental Attunement for boons while switching attunements
• Slot Utility: Arcane Blast
• Other Traits and Utilities: YMMV
  • Some folks slot Spell Singer and some Cantrips for +Might. Situational here.
  • I prefer to slot pets in case things go unpredictable

Sequence:

Be in Air

• Air 4- RTL
• Air 2- Dmg (while in Air4)
• Air 5- Updraft (knockdown)

Switch to Fire (get +Might)

• Fire4- RoF
• Fire3- Phoenix- Blast finisher for +Might
• Arcane Blast while Phoenix flies- Crit Dmg plus projectile finisher for Burning
• Fire2- Dragon’s Tooth- Blast Finisher for +Might
• Fire5- Fire Grasp- for whatever’s left, in a cone, or just go right into:
  Switch to Earth (get +Protection)
• Earth4- Knock em down
• Earth5- AOE

One thing I’m still trying to figure out is how to get Earth5 to fire with Fire4 still active. I can’t get the timing down. But even without the Blast Finisher component of Earth5, it’s still cast when I’ve got 12-15 Might (it’s hard for me to see the number during combat ).

This is also highly situational, ideally against a clump of melee mobs, or melee mobs who’ll run to protect the ranged units (so you target the ranged units for Air4). One rotation of this effectively puts everything in cooldown though, which is why I like having the pets.