Guild Wars 2

Vargamonth.2047:

Mixchimmer.7230:

Oh, play style is absolutely affected by non-gear factors — I will not disagree with you there. Like I said earlier, I agree that their content is a large chunk of the problem, Tequatle was literally just a DPS check.

There are a whole lot of different things that change the play style. I don’t particularly think altering gear is going to fix it. I do feel that is it a baby step in the right direction though. All I know is I’m personally sick of DPS dominating all PvE content and I’m ready for the meta to be shook up. Whether changes to gear, changes to content, new content, or deciding that GW2 is no longer the game for me, is what will cure the sickness is yet to be seen.

The problem is … Tequatl absolutely needed to be some kind of DPS check.
It can’t be critted, so Precision/CritDamage become completely useless for anything but defending risen spawn point. Same goes for Condition Damage because of the condition cap. Only Power, major in one of the most bulkiest sets ingame, is useful, so it can hardly be a DPS check on a gearcheck basis.
It’s a DPS check done in a really good way, mostly performance dependant.
If you’re going to have a zerg of bunkerish geared players that, even if they die, will be back in about a minute … how do you fail the event without a DPS check at all?

Remove the timer, make it be about defending the batteries and the cannon from the word go. Most Taco failures fail without ever seeing the first cannon event.

On the topic of range, the engine apparently have some kind of limitation around 2100 units.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

While making enemies target melee first, makes sense. It would still not change anything in regards to stacking. Overall there’s a lot of weirdness with the aggro system in GW2. Like how it seems to put very high priority on high armor targets. I would welcome a change to the ai, but I think a lot more is needed.

That targeting priority seems to have been ANet’s attempt at allowing some semblance of tanking without a overt taunt mechanic.

Except it works crap all because it is highly likely that a caster will dress hardier by their very nature compared to a warrior or guardian. End result is that the more squishy caster becomes the target, no matter how much he tries not to.

Shields across all professions have been a disappointment as a defensive tool.

Their recharges are so long that you are always better of just dodging (you can likely dodge 3-4 times in the space of one shield skill recharge).

Engineers for instance seems to treat it as a offensive weapon, stunning, dazing and providing yet another blast finisher.

I would love to trade dodge for a on demand block with a stamina cost based on incoming damage.

A block that is not a timed channel, but stays up as long as i keep the button pressed.

Thus if i block early i am not penalized by having the skill be useless for 30+ seconds.

I wonder i the 1sec ICD came about before the passive was turned from the siphon to a simple heal. Remember that a siphon do damage that bypass armor. As such, the passive would pretty much be a permanent retaliation that could bypass armor.

Really nasty for attacks like flamethrower #1 or 100B, where you have multiple hits in rapid succession.

I would really love to see the CVS log for the vamp sig code, as i wonder if there was a case of dev A not talking to dev B before making changes going on.

Samhayn.2385:

Make axe 1 a line attack. Just like other ranged line attacks, see mesmer gs1

That apparently was coded into the FX side, and not the specific skill. All skills that had the same “lightning line” FX got this when introduced.

Sorry if this is a tangent, but i get the impression that each trait permutation of a skill have its own entry in the game database.

This includes skills that turrets and other AI use.

We can observe how any weapon or utility skill seems to “flip” into its new form upon applying a trait.

As such, i wonder if hitting overcharge makes the turret swap skills for a while. And upon swapping back the server code for some reason reads the wrong skill entry from the database, resulting in the untraited skill being the one used.

More bounce and small radious AOE effects that are beneficial would help reduce the incentive to stack.

Most of the really effective support utilities are PBAOEs, meaning that to really benefit the whole group, they have to gather around the caster. That is much easier to do when everyone is stacking on (or in) the boss.

If they instead could fire a skill at the boss, and have it affect group members around the boss, or bounce to the group members afterwards, there would be less need to be in the boss’ face constantly.

Could have sworn that the crit increase is applied after the damage calc:

((power*weapon)*skill coefficient)/(defense+toughness)

Meaning that a crit already bypass toughness in a sense, as it ramps the damage back up again.

Hilarious… yada yada yada (15 char)

Lets think beyond cleave then, as the very term seems to limit our thinking.

Honestly, from the outset of starting with a axe, and seeing that animation, i expected axe 1 (and perhaps 2) to have a slight AOE around the initial target.

The attack is after all a paw swipe delivered by way of “sympathetic magic” (think voodoo dolls and such). Said swipes could very well be savage enough to hit others nearby. This much like how elementalist Water Blast have a small AOE heal.

Guess ANet worries that cleave + vampiric traits + DS = uber-bunker necro.

This seems to be the ANet necro balancing pattern since BW2 there about, where someone was apparently able to out-bunker the other team by using DS in some way.

Thus prompting the infamous Peters quote about learning to play DS soon after launch.

If it was working fine, we would have a incentive to keep it deployed. But right now the HT meta is D(eploy)O(vercharge)D(etonate)/DOP. Meaning it is more like a healing bomb than a turret.

And i have seen similar attitudes expressed towards the other turrets, using them more like remote controlled bombs than actual turrets.

ANet fears us CC locking bosses. But we are already locking them in other ways by luring them around corners and melee stacking to limit the number of moved the AI can use.

Honestly i find being able to lock a target in place by good skill timing and rotation more impressive than DPS spam, kiting and dodging. The latter to me is a sign of failure and panic more than fun.

The best would be if the game allowed both. But as long as Defiant exists, kite and DPS is king.

As for condition stacking, how about simply making newly applied conditions “pop” if the stack is maxed out? Meaning that the DOT is converted to instant damage at some ratio.

This because anything, at least in PVE, that racks up a max stack of bleed (never mind several minutes of burn or poison) are already so thick skinned that it won’t make a huge difference in the kill time anyways (and likely have a thicket of blades carving it to pieces).

Honestly i can’t figure out why they put in the detonate and overcharge, never mind making the cooldown start only upon removal of the turret from play (could be a limitation with the game engine, as other skills that have a “trigger” skill seems to have a similar cooldown behavior).

Detonate gets in the way of the turret related tool belt skill, meaning the player have to pick between detonate and said skill.

And overcharge seems like micromanagement, especially when it do not trigger instantly (As such ANet could just as well have made every X attack from the turret be a overcharge).

The only rationale that comes to mind is that turret engineers are to bunker (in the most direct sense) up a SPVP capture point. Deploying turrets, maybe mortar, and possibly equipping the tool kit for turret maintenance.

That is all fine and rosy for SPVP, where it makes sense. But that also makes turrets painfully static in PVE and WVW.

I suspect that a large reason for the deploy and destroy behavior with healing turret is that turret cooldowns do not start until after the turret is destroyed. As such, leaving the turret out is much less cost effective in terms of health pr second than using it as any other healing skill (fire and forget).

This is why the other turrets are getting so much flak, because they have long cooldowns, that only start after destruction, and have paper thin armor.

My personal fix would be to remove overcharge and detonate fully, and rebalance the turrets around being disposables. Meaning that once deployed they stay out until destroyed, and utility skill cooldown starts on deployment.

This would make fighting a turret engineer an escalating threat unless the enemy makes sure to keep the turrets culled.

And it would fix the issue with turrets being a siege mentality while the rest of the game is about mobility.

Lovely post, OP.

Carighan.6758:

Speaking about boon removal, I want enemies which actively purge my boons.

digiowl.9620:

This hardly affects mobs, as they attack about once or second. But any character with a fast autoattack chain can go from full health to downed very quickly.

I feel like this could be fixed by instead of PvE having double damage, it should have double duration on confusion.

Or up the attack frequency of mobs in general as that would take some bite out of the zerker meta.

Another gotcha about confusion is that PVE confusion do twice the damage of PVP confusion.

This means that 10 stacks of PVE confusion hit as much as 20 PVP equivalent. And 25 hits as much as 50!

This hardly affects mobs, as they attack about once or second. But any character with a fast autoattack chain can go from full health to downed very quickly.

Keep in mind that at launch, WVW confusion followed PVE numbers. But where quickly reduced to PVP numbers because facing confusion stacking builds were virtually suicide.

Agony.3542:

digiowl.9620:

ODB.6891:

Black Box.9312:

This. This, this, this. There’s nothing wrong with zerker gear being high risk, high reward. The problem is that that risk ratio should be even with the percentage of damage gear substituted for defensive gear. Right now such a ratio only extends to a certain point, beyond which it actually becomes LESS risky for your party to spec more into damage and less into defense. This is incredibly counter-intuitive, and should be more than enough proof that zerker gear is (comparatively) too powerful.

Yes, this is incredibly counter intuitive. The reason being that tank gear exists in pve in the first place and this game is not meant or designed to have tanks. The same can be said for healing gear and healers. These gear types are very useful in pvp environments…that is where they should have been restricted to from day one. Now you have all of these players mad that their tanking gear and healing gear is not accepted in pve content.

It comes back to how differently PVP and PVE plays out mathematically.

A warrior in soldier can actually outlast a win in a direct PVP slugging match with a warrior in berzerker.

But this is never possible in PVE because most mobs above fodder can match or exceed a soldier warrior. This while the majority of their damage output is found in the spike they do every 3-4 seconds (i think i calculated one of those silver rimmed toxics to doing about 3-4x the damage of their normal hit in their spike, and this seems to be the pattern across the PVE board).

And dodge is also the least expensive defensive move in terms of recharge time pr use. 10 seconds after a dodge it is ready to be used again. Most other defensive moves in the game have 3x or longer recharge time between uses.

End result is that it is the go to defensive move unless there is some kind of gimmick involved (projectiles that can be reflected back or similar).

We see the same problem with elite skills. Sure they are massive, but their recharge is so long that people hesitate to use them at all in case they misjudge and so waste it.

But dodge is so readily available it can be virtually spammed.

You can clear dungeons without having to use the dodge key at all. You don’t even need to utilize those “op reflections” for it nor really anticipate a move and react accordingly. Hell even defensive cooldowns can become obsolete once you stack up enough defensive stats and boons. This is a TRULY brainless playstyle.

We ran arah p2 without dodging at all (dodge key unbound) or using strong defensive abilities (shieldstance, renewed focus etc). Just walking through it. NO reflections used at alphard or lupicus. We wiped like 2 times. Once @Alphard because of 4 (or 5) consecutive explosions after a single pull (seriously?!) and once while skipping to the last boss because of … reasons.

video or it didn’t happen?

Egorum.9506:

LelouchViBritannia.3607:

Egorum.9506:

Have it remove conditions when it triggers: Engineers have very, very poor condition removal, and no access to the full condition clear that almost every other class has access to.

Elixir C?

2k hours on my engineer and i forgot we had a full condi cleanse. fail

honestly, i don’t think i’ve ever even put it on my bar though. how does a clear every 40s compete with any kit? XD

If the fight is so heavy with conditions that i need to dedicate a utility slot to a full cleanse, it is likely that the stacks will be right back where they were within seconds of me hitting the button.

May as well trait for 406 and put elixir H in #6, or slot med kit.

ipan.4356:

Lifesteal traits based on Healing Power – Vampirism.

Already exist in the necromancer profession, and ANet has nerfed it to pointlessness because they fear the uber-bunker combo of vampirism and Death Shroud.

mahariel.4981:

ANet explicitly stated that this game won’t have dedicated tanks and healers. Argue “play how you like” all you want, but these people are trying to stick a triangle in to a circle by trying to tank or heal.

Dedicated can be read multiple ways.

Very few games (Rift being one exception) have the freedom to define your own role as GW2 does. This means that dedicated is by design, not by choice. If you pick a priest in most games you are a strong healer but lacking in offense or tank. Pick a warrior and you are likely to be a strong tank. Pick wizard and you get heavy offense but tip over in a strong breeze.

In GW2 any profession could on paper go from tank to offense to healer by moving the numbers around. But in practice, not by a long shot. Everything, at least in PVE, is DPS with a dash of something. And that dash is likely to be overly taxing on the DPS to be worth it.

Mizstik.1736:

One of the major issues I have with this heal is that, while other heals are designed to keep up sustained or near full in order to prepare for the major spikes common in PvE, with AED we will spend the majority of the time with depleted health. Either we try to go for the big heal (and intentionally remain in low health), or we use the small heal which is very sub-par AND also deprive us of any chance of big heal for the next 40 seconds.

If we have the option of taking a small cooldown smaller sustain heal with AED (and can have our chance of big heal back in 10-15 seconds) then it will become a lot more viable in more situations.

This is a constant problem in the PVE side of the game. It massively favors using short recharge skills over the long recharge ones, simply because they will be ready to use again sooner. This because any time a fight involves more than fodder, the fight can’t be ended with a spike. This then turn every fight into an attrition fight, and so you want to be able to use skills as often as possible.

ODB.6891:

Black Box.9312:

This. This, this, this. There’s nothing wrong with zerker gear being high risk, high reward. The problem is that that risk ratio should be even with the percentage of damage gear substituted for defensive gear. Right now such a ratio only extends to a certain point, beyond which it actually becomes LESS risky for your party to spec more into damage and less into defense. This is incredibly counter-intuitive, and should be more than enough proof that zerker gear is (comparatively) too powerful.

Yes, this is incredibly counter intuitive. The reason being that tank gear exists in pve in the first place and this game is not meant or designed to have tanks. The same can be said for healing gear and healers. These gear types are very useful in pvp environments…that is where they should have been restricted to from day one. Now you have all of these players mad that their tanking gear and healing gear is not accepted in pve content.

It comes back to how differently PVP and PVE plays out mathematically.

A warrior in soldier can actually outlast a win in a direct PVP slugging match with a warrior in berzerker.

But this is never possible in PVE because most mobs above fodder can match or exceed a soldier warrior. This while the majority of their damage output is found in the spike they do every 3-4 seconds (i think i calculated one of those silver rimmed toxics to doing about 3-4x the damage of their normal hit in their spike, and this seems to be the pattern across the PVE board).

And dodge is also the least expensive defensive move in terms of recharge time pr use. 10 seconds after a dodge it is ready to be used again. Most other defensive moves in the game have 3x or longer recharge time between uses.

End result is that it is the go to defensive move unless there is some kind of gimmick involved (projectiles that can be reflected back or similar).

We see the same problem with elite skills. Sure they are massive, but their recharge is so long that people hesitate to use them at all in case they misjudge and so waste it.

But dodge is so readily available it can be virtually spammed.

haviz.1340:

They should but what we currently see are countless whines of vocal minority that most likely bought the wrong game (“Why can’t I tank?”) and now are trying to force their elitsits views on the silent majority.

“play as you like”…

It is already rewarded.

What i suspect is the real issue is the cost to benefit of dodging vs say block or similar.

Thing about dodge is that if it is misused, it is quickly available again. Depending on timing you can dodge 3 times in a 15-20 second period.

In comparions you may be able to block twice in a 30-40 second period. And the blocks may come with extra expenses like cast time (dodge is virtually instant) and rooting (dodge is a rapid movement ability).

The overall problem of this game is that it massively favors spamming short recharge/cooldown skills/effects. End result is that dodge is the go to defensive ability rather than the “oh crap, i am out of options!” defense because it can be ready for use again in 5-10 seconds depending on vigor being up or not.

Neko.9021:

LelouchViBritannia.3607:

I still don’t understand how the class with the most armor and health can have a passive heal that heals for over 400 every single second, while the class with the least health and armor can at best (fully traited with everything) get 260 health WHEN USING AN ABILITY which of course isn’t every single second.

Eles can use abilities more than once per second. >.>

That is player action tho. The signet passive is, well, passive. The player can virtually forget that it is there and gain pretty much the same benefit as others hitting an actual heal skill in terms of health pr second gained.

Honestly, while AED has its issues, i think the real bugbear in terms of engineer healing is the healing turret. It simply outclass any other heal available. This by virtue of being a on call water field, for a profession that can virtually spam blast finishers.

In all honesty, ANet could have saved themselves a whole lot of headache by removing the option to detonate or pick up turrets. Because who in their right mind leaves the healing turret out, like it is clearly designed to be used?

It is much better to heal, overcharge, detonate, and have it ready to be repated in 20 seconds. If left out to be destroyed, then the cooldown goes up with the time it is left in the field.

I find myself wanting to rebadge “skill” as “player agency”.

This in that a high “agency” game would allow player actions and decisions have a higher impact on the game than the gear equipped.

A low “agency” game on the other hand the outcome will be the same no matter who plays, as long as the character played have set X equipped and rotation Y is continually pressed.

The thing is to not confuse agency with APM or reaction time. Meaning that a defensive build would still allow for high agency, in that the player could hunker down and gain time to observe and plan.

darkace.8925:

The problem with Crowd Control builds is most trash mobs die too quick for it to matter and most bosses are immune to it anyway. Short of severely nerfing Defiance while upping the damage output of bosses I don’t see a way around this, either.

Meh, GW2 CC is CC in name only. They are fighting game combo breakers with a little dash of CC on top to make them look like classic MMORPG CC. They are single target, long cooldown, short duration effects. Their main use is to mess with a opponents spike combo, not control a bunch of adds.

If you want to see real CC go check out the amount of AOE daze, stun and similar that a control wizard in Neverwinter packs.

Face it, the whole game is rigged for SPVP. And PVE mobs are hacked together in the worst possible way. They ignore (CC) or make useless (boon steal, conversion, removal) all to many game effects.

Sometimes i wonder if ANet have deliberately designed the UX to be awkward, either to up the “difficulty” or to give people a greater sense of “achievement”. Hell they even moved some weapon skills around on the Guardian after launch, because people could hit 234 to get a field+finisher off. Given that i am surprised that they allow us to rebind at all.

Anyways:

1=1
2=2
3=3
q=4
e=5
r=6
z=7
x=8
c=9
alt+e=0
alt+1=f1
alt+2=f2
alt+3=f3
alt+4=f4

is my current idiosyncratic setup.

Works fine as long as i remember to let go of alt before hitting tab

Best i can tell their setup is this:

login server(s?) -> any number of instance servers -> character status database server(s?).

Once you’re past the login server, your traffic seems to go directly to your instance server. And each time you cross between zones, you get moved to a new server (either one of the permanent ones for your world’s zones, or one spun up for load balancing instances). All this thanks to the character database being separate and shared.

Mork vom Ork.2598:

digiowl.9620:

With detonate gone we will always be able to access the toolbelt skills.

With detonate gone we will lose access to blast combos and controlled knockback from Accelerant-Packed Turrets.

Last time i checked, the label on the tin says TURRET. Not remote controlled claymore.

It is really telling that ANet got it wrong when drop and boom is the preferred use of what is supposedly a deployed weapon platform…

Combat, skill based? Maybe in SPVP, but in PVE it is DPS and stack.

Dalanor pretty much sums it up.

Never mind that say necromancers rarely get to show off their boon conversion skills, because mobs are made tanky by stats rather than boons. And that tanky aspect feeds into the whole “DPS or GTFO” PVE meta. Because you can’t out-tank a mob, no way, no how.

Warjin.8942:

I say give our turrets legs, make them little robots like the Eng class in Wildstar, make it a trait that mobile’s them.

I would much rather see turrets be fire and forget rather than the siege equipment they are today. They are quite clearly designed for one thing and one thing only, SPVP capture point defense.

IMO detonate should go, overcharge should go, and instead we should be able to spawn turrets as often as cooldown allows.

With detonate gone we will always be able to access the toolbelt skills.

With overcharge gone, the deployment skill can go on cooldown the instant it is used.

End result, turrets that work more like mesmer illusions.

Then again, if a warrior needs to pop the active on that signet he is way over his head. The passive match the HPS of most healing skills.

As for Backpack Regenerator, Dunno. i would say it is junk in PVE, but i can see it make a difference in small scale PVP.

Saturn.6591:

What I find a bit annoying is, that the autoattack doesn’t trigger until you stand inside the closer radius, even if traited. So this trait is semi-useless, unless you spam your number 1 key (or whatever your keybind is).

I was afraid they would pull something like that…

Or just drop the whole idea of siphons doing damage independent of skill damage, and just have it heal us as a percentage of damage (pretty much like the new guardian skill, but permanent).

The more i think about weapon swaps, kits and attunements, the more i feel that GW2 is much more of a traditional MMO than GW1 was.

ANet only hides the fact by having half the skills bars behind buttons, rather than allowing all the bars on screen at the same time.

And with our inability to rearrange the bars as we like, they add meta-difficulty by making the interface deliberately unergonomic. In a sense feeding into an APM mindset.

P Fun Daddy.1208:

They’re still freaking annoying when someone supply drops on a point, so I wouldn’t say they’re useless, but they can’t chase, so they have some important, though limited, utility.

And this i think is why they are not mobile. A turret engineer is expected to set up shop on a SPVP point, and stay there. Using turrets, mortar and toolkit to keep his “fortress” up against attackers.

May work as a concept in SPVP, but in PVE (and to some degree in WVW) it ends up being pointless, as the rest of the game is built for mobility.

As such, i think the problem with turrets is not their mobility but their “opportunity cost”.

Notice that we have, somewhat like the warrior with banners, the ability to pick turrets back up. This reduce recharge, but it also means that we have to actually run over and grab them after a fight (if they still stand).

But because of this, the recharge time on destruction (or detonate) are set high. This to avoid and engineer simply running circles and refreshing turrets by picking them up and setting them back down again (and also to not turn them into remove controlled bombs).

IMO, the pick up option should go and the recharge reduced accordingly. Thus the engineer can treat them as disposables. And honestly, remove the detonate as well. instead allowing us to always have the tool belt available.

This would also fix the balancing nightmare that is the healing turret, where it is more effective right now to use it as a quick heal (deploy+overcharge+detonate) than it is to deploy and keep out.

And maybe have the overcharge go as well. It is after all the source of maybe half the bugs at present. Instead have it happen automatically every X attacks or so (maybe have a trait that make the turrets open with a overcharge rather than a normal one).

Meaning that once deployed a turret stays out as long as it can survive, and the engineer may during a long fight deploy multiples of the same turret (not unlike how a mesmer can have multiple phantasms of the same type in play).

The med kit is an odd one in any case. It is just about the only skill i can think of that drop an actual in game object that triggers by being run into.

Then again, engineer seems to have much more of a bunker/siege thread going through it than the other professions. The turrets also feed into the whole “set up camp” mentality that dropping a pile of bandages hints at.

Sadly the only game mode where this is even remotely a valid way of playing the profession is SPVP. The rest are just too mobile for that kind of approach.

Maskaganda.2043:

-main hand pistol skills are still somewhat weak: short bleed on p1, ramdomness on poison dart volley

Ever since i ran a hostile frog with a blowgun, the cone spread of the dart volley has irked me greatly.

It is really not needed, as any block/evade on first hit result in the rest of the stream going wasted anyways.

Infamous Darkness.3284:

a little off topic but still on the topic of retaliation, blind blocks a whole grenade skill unless they hit at different times, so it usually blocks 3+ hits with one blind, but each hit still counts for retaliation, on the plus side at least each hit doesn’t count for confusion.

Or reflection, where the damage roll is used, but the crit chance is rolled anew…

Best i can tell, the balance team considers DS a much stronger defensive tool than the community does. As such, they are wary of boosting our non-DS defensive abilities because it may turn necro into some kind of uber-bunker.

Oh dear, those two from Jon Peters…

What is interesting to note is how much of this is from the SPVP forum…

Overkillengine.6084:

I’m more in favor of indexing the lifesteal to be a % of the power damage dealt to the target per attack; that way you get something controllable (and helps power/hybrid Necro builds) while not allowing a bunker build to breach the immortality threshold in the way a static base leech does, especially with AE’s.

So pretty much the guardian meditation. Didn’t we see what that could do under ideal conditions?

Iirc, juggernaut has a history. The initial design was not about giving might, but stability.

Meaning that a jugger-neer would wade into combat with his flamethrower and be immune to CC.

Nice idea, but ANet messed up the implementation. Rather than having repeated applications of a short duration stability, they made it a long duration. Meaning that people would flip into flamethrower ever so often to refresh their stability, and then go back to whatever they were using before. Never mind that it made jugger-neers a focused target for boon stealers.

Pretty much the same insanity as we have seen going on with speedy kits being used as much for perma-vigor as the actual swiftness.