(edited by digiowl.9620)
Healing in DS will not come to Necros as a base ability of DS.
I do believe, however, that it should be added in some form as a 30 point Blood Magic trait.
Vampiric Shroud? Allowing vampiric traits to work while in Death Shroud? While also opening up for healing from Transfusion and external sources (like Well of Blood or elementalist AOEs)?
Sounds like a interesting idea to me.
When they abolished energy, they abolished tradeoffs.
Because the main tradeoff in GW1 was a lower energy cost for a health cost.
This wasn’t the only thing it was for. Self sacrifice was the trade-off for a few things: reduced energy cost, increased effect, lowered CD.
Well two of those would translate to increased energy cost without the sacrifice anyways.
there are no trinity roles here. and game was advertised as such
and there is no reason to buff healing, as it would have negative effect on pvp and wvw
imo – in pve healing is just for learning purposes – learning not to get damaged
and don’t bother ‘saving’ someone, you are doing bad favor for them. if you constantly save them, they will never improve
P.S. and you should specify that you mean ‘healing support’, because support in general is awesome in this game – 25might stacks, fury, swiftness, vigor.. etc, and it makes huge difference
I laugh at all berserkers like you, because I buff myself and heal myself while I watch you people basically throw yourselves at the enemy and blow yourself up into a thousand tiny pieces.
P.S: Keep going berserker in PvP, I love the free one-hit kills.
One more example of how the 3 modes, one balance concept is messing up the game. zerker is massively OP in PVE, but a liability in PVP.
The sad part is that the core of this issue is not with profession skill design, but with the lazy nature of mob design.
Late game mobs, even trash ones, are so health fat that anything but zerkers get stuck fighting endless respawning waves of mobs.
And control is not a option, as their duration to recharge ratio makes them a futile gesture even before considering defiant.
So people skip and/or zerker zerg rush their way to their true goals.
And then none of this matters one twit in PVE because of the hard cap on condition stacking…
You have to understand that support doesn’t mean better healing all the time, the best form of support in GW2 is to outright prevent damage, rather than mitigating it, blind, block, reflect, control, etc is what makes support a very real and effective strategy in guild wars 2, the only problem that reduces the need for support is the amount of exploits (boat skip, thankfully fixed is one of the many exploit), overpowered “mechanics” like corner stacking, and faulty AI like the spider queen only using her AOE at range.
Reinforcing the notion that this is a action game (more like a shooter or fighting game) than a RPG, as most of those are not affected much beyond a few traits (and often outright negated by mob design).
Regen actually scales really well with healing power… I do think it should scale better for other healing abilities but as far as regen goes I’ve never had issue with how it performs. Just don’t expect to tank damage on regen alone.
Don’t expect to tank anything at all. ANet broke tanking twofold. first off they removed any semblance of aggro control. Second they added spiky damage that you need to use some kind of in game mechanic to avoid rather than passive stats, as they will overwhelm even the highest of stat combos.
All in all, GW2 is more action game than RPG.
By tanking damage, I meant to imply not tanking aggro control, just all the tools a traditional tank use to survive damage. Apologies if that was unclear.
Sorry if it seemed like it corrected. I was more elaborating/venting.
Yep, it is as old as the game itself.
Same with that event near the north crossover between Bloodtide Coast and Lornar’s Pass. Pirates will be seen spawning and running around, looking for one last merchant to kidnap.
With all these seemingly random bugs on each patch, i wonder if ANet knows what a CVS is…
“New on gem store, common armor with extra dye slots! Get them while they last!”
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Toxic-ShoulderPad
The bugs may be related to body size/build. Could it be that at one point they toyed with a norn size body for sylvari and never reset the meshes? Perhaps nobody at ANet plays non-slim/petite sylvari?
Welcome to the wardrobe hell that is male sylvari.
This effect applies to pretty much anything the sylvari male wears.
And there is another where any “skirt” (trenchcoat tails included) will bellow out as if the sylvari male was wearing a classic ball gown.
Interesting that you have tracked it down to a specific body type tho.
EG3 is pretty much us paying 6 skill points for what a guardian get for grabbing a torch (#5).
EG was interesting while we had the old kit refinement. But since its nerf, i find the gun to be meh except for the recent stun breaker on toolbelt (and perhaps for the weakness on #1 while fighting bosses that do not chain-spawn adds).
Regen actually scales really well with healing power… I do think it should scale better for other healing abilities but as far as regen goes I’ve never had issue with how it performs. Just don’t expect to tank damage on regen alone.
Don’t expect to tank anything at all. ANet broke tanking twofold. first off they removed any semblance of aggro control. Second they added spiky damage that you need to use some kind of in game mechanic to avoid rather than passive stats, as they will overwhelm even the highest of stat combos.
All in all, GW2 is more action game than RPG.
Didn’t ANet introduce a trait reset gem store consumable recently?
When they abolished energy, they abolished tradeoffs.
Because the main tradeoff in GW1 was a lower energy cost for a health cost.
The base problem is that when ANet really had necro as sustain during beta, it was pretty much an uber-bunker. So they may still be talking about sustain, but they also want points to be flipping back and forth for that esport spectator excitement. And those two notions are pretty much mutually exclusive.
The axe range is so short it may well be considered melee anyways.
And i am wary about using axe 3, as the range is great enough (even after the reduction since launch) that it may aggro some nearby yellows when i least need it.
For PVP it may be interesting, but for PVE i’ll rather use dagger thank you very much…
Honestly, I feel the first step is to make it a shoulder fired weapon, removing the immobility of this. That is the first step needed in my eyes.
This. If they worry about us running with it out all the time, they could give it a limited number of charges, like the elementalists conjured weapons.
Never mind that if we switched to a kit or our main weapon we would pretty much lose the launcher and have the skill go on recharge.
Just about the only time i found the mortar useful was for cracking those sonic turrets during the molten alliance. This in large part to its stability.
Not going to happen, as that would in essence give engineers for free what others got by getting hold of the time limited greatsword skin.
A middle ground would be for skills to repeated as long as they are held down.
This may lead to someone dropping a weight on some AOE heal skill or other and call it a day, but then there is no skill i can think of that will keep a character standing through a determined mob onslaught (let alone any PVP scenario). The cooldown on most support skills are simply too longer for that to happen.
A continuing issue with this game is that leveling is dependent on dynamic events, and said events are not easily discoverable unless you pretty much walk into them.
ANet pretty much designed GW2 leveling around GW1 community behavior, where after having done all the story lines and such your only real thing to do in PVE was to explore the instances. It appears that ANet designers thought this drive to explore would be the norm in GW2, and designed the game around it.
But this didn’t take into account how the community was self selecting. Those that didn’t enjoy exploring would have left the game once they were done with the stories, or were busy chain farming end game instances.
Exploring on your first toon is ok. But once you hit your second or third L80, you want to get it over and done with. And not being able to locate and complete events quickly makes the whole process tediously boring.
Ah yes, grenades. Just about the only thing to like about them is the grenade barrage (and that #2 seems to hit silly hard for such a low cooldown skill).
My go to setup for PVE seems to always end up being rifle, elixir gun, tool kit, bomb kit.
Bombs for when i really want to get up close and personal, rifle for running around (#5 can be surprisingly effective in a melee fight), elixir gun i don’t have to explain, and tool kit for throw wrench.
Throw wrench packs a nice hit (at least as long as it gets to boomerang, pesky walls), is targeted, pierces, is a 100% projectile finisher, and is ready 10 seconds sooner than barrage. All kinds of crazy things happen when i throw that during a event boss fight.
Any time a single hit eats 50% or more of someone health, they may be for all practical purposes “one hit”. This because if they happen at any time outside of perfect health, they have a high chance of taking the character out.
And this scenario increases sharply when fighting more than one mob.
Another little niggle, the warrior healing signet has a passive heal pr second that match the heal pr second of most other professions heal skills. And the warrior still have the option of activating that signet for a spike heal equal to other heal skills (with a recharge not much longer than said heal skills). So most of the time a warrior can out heal most damage if he avoided the mobs spike attacks.
Yeah, i kinda want to see the chambers mechanic turned into some kind of solo/partner-friendly fractals.
It is the travelling between that is exhausting. In part because of the open world mob respawn system (they seem to use any available spawn point within a certain radius, even ones cleared seconds ago), in part because of the path blocking group events.
Those events may not have been so bad though, if you could see them from anywhere inside the tower and plan accordingly. Right now you pretty much have to stumble into them.
Never mind that there are no staging areas or safe spots between each of the levels.
Yep, this is the exact behavior of the current system.
It isn’t. Right now highlights the auto-selected target, whichever one it decides that’d be, rather than the one that’s in your crosshairs. You don’t get the same results when you use the mouse cursor.
Define crosshair. Currently the game prioritize the mob nearest the center of screen unless you use mouse to click a different one, be it using Next, Nearest, or attacking with a skill (as long as within range, if not then the skill will fire in whatever direction the character is facing). To me that is crosshair based selection even tho there is no graphic on the screen to represent said crosshair.
I tested this months ago, and the behavior was consistent. The only thing that could muck it up was that the crosshair code behaved pretty much like a fired projectile, and so anything that would produce a “obscured” message (tree, wall, you name it) would make it go for a target further from the center.
Way better. Warrior get higher natural health, and guardians get all kinds of boons that are unaffected by gear choices (and can heal on dodge, much like an elementalist).
Because if there’s an enemy in front of you, but you want to target a smaller enemy 20ft behind them, that target system wont be able to do it.
But if you can see the enemy, you’d be able to target them by hovering over them. That’s the whole point.
That’s actually the exact type of problem that would go away if you use manual targeting instead of automatic.
You can do that now, why would your idea be any better. You’re just adding another layer of unreliability to the system.
Yep, this is the exact behavior of the current system. It is just very subtle about it if you have names set to always show. The only way to tell then is by watching for a health bar popping up (and perhaps a faint glow if you have the FX settings high enough, but i leave it off because of that excessive bloom).
The problem, imo, is that the game mixes action targeting (crosshair/center of screen) with locked targeting (next/nearest/mouse). The controls seems to be in some half way state between a over the shoulder action mmo (with permanent mouse look, like you find in a first person shooter) and a classic mmo. End result is that we get the worst of both.
i got the mask and never went back because the tower is just the same old boring uninteresting zerg content with 5 minute side instances with the same old aetherblade/twisted crap trash mobs.
Outside of the clockwork horrors (nasty cross between icebrood wolf and reef drake, way to many fast knockdowns and a confusion that makes it virtually impossible to melee) i found the instances interesting. Just wish those NPCs would leave the plants and mortars in the final chamber alone, as they respawn virtually instantly.
The interaction between Marjory and Rox was particularly funny, in that Marjory seemed to confuse Rox for a hallucination.
It was the main tower that got to me. I felt i got nowhere by fighting, and running felt dirty.
And i even ended up with a trikey on my last chamber run. But i can’t really muster the interest to run L3 once more to use it…
If you were at the top of the tower to begin with when you entered the instance, you shouldn’t have to run L3 again. You can just walk down to the chest.
Nope, i was at the bottom. As i was using the entrance to flip between overflows in the hopes of getting easily accessible chamber instances (first on L1 and the one in L3 starting area preferred).
The one troublesome thing about targeting is that it uses center of screen as a priority in both Next (tab) and Nearest. And that priority is locked at 1200 range, no matter what your furthest range skill is.
Also this priority target uses line of sight, so if a projectile would be obscured, the target is ignored and another is selected instead.
I am not sure, but once no target is within a certain radius of screen center, the targeting priority of Next becomes from right to left across screen.
ANet kinda mucked up all this with their recent prioritized targeting, putting hostile characters and champions on top of the list if no target is selected.
Nothing wrong with rezzing, stomping/finishing someone while in stealth. If they are applying burning while they are in stealth and not being revield, that is probably a bug since it is an attack from stealth hitting someone and that should apply a revieled. If they are not hitting anthing when blasting, they should not be removed from stealth.
I’m speaking about that they should be revealed by burning, cmo’n they are on flames…
You just lit their whole smoke powder stash.
So far I have not encountered any 1-shot kill mechanics in this game that are not clearly telegraphed with a prolonged, Saturday morning cartoon villain-esque pose :P
End result is that it comes down to individual comprehension/reaction time. What feels like a long time for some, feels like a split second for others. It also depends on how often one fight a single opponent over and over in 1v1. I’m slowly picking up on the dramoss (and the very similar hypnoss) but for the rest, no dice. I simply do not have the mental capacity to memorize every tell for every variation of every race.
While it comes back to playing the ui rather than playing the game, i kinda prefer the Champions Online solution. A small set of icons, all showing up right next to the mobs targeting data (and also over his head, superimposed over any and all animations and FX) that tells you something big is coming.
Then again that game also have a universal block mechanic, that can be maintained for as long as you feel needed, rather than fire and forget mechanics that last for just a few seconds.
Meaning that there is no chance of reacting too soon, something i have done on occasions (hind brain confusion one animation for another or something). Just hunker down behind the block upon noticing a threat and wait it out. Much better than the interrupt concept that GW2, SWTOR, and likely others, are laden with.
Just sad that the game has gone lockbox heavy in recent years…
The one on my home server seems to have barely moved over the week.
If the rate do not drop, the tower will be around for the better part of a year.
The Tower of Nightmares is an open-world map designed to challenge even the hardiest of groups. Fighting side by side, players will need to rely on each other to survive.
It clearly says “GROUPS”. Not “SOLO-PLAYERS”.
And then they go on to talk about solo instances, with the end result being mixed signaling.
a speed boost
Seems to be the big one, so that you can outrange those mobs.
Other than that, i have been running with a mix of soldier and magi for the whole week, and found it anything but fun.
Found myself parking one toon there, and one toon at the top, then using the crafting stations in WVW as a bank each day to pass a key between them to get the chest achievement (when you log out while in WVW you log back in where you were in PVE)…
And i even ended up with a trikey on my last chamber run. But i can’t really muster the interest to run L3 once more to use it…
The one i missed was the third on level 1. When you are about to take a left into the last stretch before the level 2 starting area, instead take a right up the ramp, and double back across the walkways to the chamber.
The problem with the tengu was that the beak made them unworkable with the talking heads cutscenes. having them talk without lips to move apparently was not a good thing.
Would do crap, as the problem is that bunching up magnify the benefit of support, because most support (in particular from guardian and warrior) is character centered AOE.
And at the launch of the game that kind of support was unintentionally uncapped, and the zerging was even worse then once discovered. This because then just a single shouter could cover the whole zerg, rather than requiring multiple to make sure you get everyone.
Digiowl raises a good point with the difference in combat between PvE and PvP. Attrition isn’t really the word I’d use for PvE fights though. (I might have misinterpreted your post here)
In an attrition fight I assume one side manages its resources better than the other in order to win over time. The losing side did not have the resource management to come out victorious.
In solo PvE the player has limited resources (skill cooldowns and endurance mostly) that can be managed, but the monster has no such thing. Most monsters have no resource management at all. No healing, no damage prevention (while being able to deal damage), no condition removal, nothing.
In team PvE the player side sort of has limitless resources as well. They can blast all their cooldowns, but even then, they can just keep ressurecting one another. Very few of my PvE party wipes seem to be caused by losing an attrition fight, most seem to be lost by poor positioning and missing our dodges on damage spikes. (Not so much the lack of endurance, much more the lack of timing.)
(This does not go for all fights! But for most.)
So building for an attrition fight by picking up more resource management (in the way of healing power and toughness) seems to be a poor option in PvE.
This would probably be different if there was no downed state, and if PvE mobs could use more pressure to kill, instead of spikes.
If PvP had a meta in which players could 1 or 2 shot players regardless of their defense, we wouldn’t see attrition fights there either.
I call it attrition in that the only way to win against a mob is to remove its massive health while trading blows. This because control skills are tuned for SPVP, where a single application, or countering of same, can make or break a fight. In PVE however, it is more often than not wasted effort. I have seen mobs last through 2-3 recharges of such skills, meaning that the fight lasted multiple minutes.
And when one side has to manage resources (healing cooldowns and similar) while another does not (just a single massive health pool), the side with the management better not ever slip up or or it will be a slow inevitable march to the death.
DPS short circuit this by significantly reducing the duration of the fight vs defensive.
If you have level 3 travel golem unlocked, and want that chamber survival done, start overflow skitten. By this i mean entering and existing the tower over and over until you either get the L3 chamber, or the first L1 chamber (next to minefield). Repeat until done.
The clockwork instance of the chambers pretty much exemplifies this. Until then i had fun with the chambers (the Marjory and Rox combo is hilarious after clearing the first chamber). This squarely because of the clockwork horrors, a insane mix of icebrood wolf and reef drake. Try to run from it and it pounce on you, knocking you over for multiple seconds. Get in its face and it produce a sonic scream that is wider and longer than the animation would suggest. Never mind that it can also knock you over with a paw swipe. End result you are etiher stun locked or facing down a big pile of confusion.
I sprint because of the spawn system. If i didn’t i would never get anywhere, because mobs spawn on top of mobs on top of mobs. Like trying to stop the tide with a bucket.
The tower is not even meant to be solo’ed. So why exactly are you trying to do that?
It’s like leaping of a building because you want to fly. <= not working.
With the lovely irony that the instances auto-balance between solo and 5 man bands. But to get there you pretty much need to hop on the zerg train…
as a mesmer i agree with u. the knockdowns are very very frustrating.thats the one thing that gets me already mad in wvw and in pve its even worse as the mobs just spamm knockdowns. there should be something that grants u invulnerability to cc after being knocked down.
Demonstrating that the skills are balanced for SPVP once more. There a single well placed stun break or similar can ruin an attackers day. And they have cooldowns to match this game changing effect (as do most interrupts).
But in WVW and PVE you all to often run into what may well be called CC conga lines, where one attacker after the other apply some form of CC. ANet clearly recognized this issue on the mob side, given that they gave bigger mobs a mechanic to specifically counteract this.
Time to consider character side defiant for PVE?
Inconsistent tells (starter zone mobs universally use a bright flare to indicate a heavy attack, later mobs not so much), FX smog, 1vsX, and camera issues, all leads to heavy attacks that are harder to notice than they should be for a twitch focused game.
Also, end game is universally about attrition fights. With anything above trash mobs having health pools that make a bunker warrior envious. And long fights makes concentrations wander, leading to a increased chance that heavy attack is missed and so lead to what can be seen as a one shot (tho mathematically it rarely is), because it sends the character health so low that even a random trash mob, never mind the basic attack of something bigger, can send you into down state.
Not going to happen, as the balance team as SPVP myopia. And there the defensive builds win, simply because they can outlast the enemy in a straight up fight. This as an artifact of how both sides start on equal grounds in SPVP, but not in PVE.
One example of this is a simple one right now. Attack a toxic dramoss out in kessex using only autoattacks, and count how many autoattacks you need to do to take it down. Then do the same inside inside the tower. The difference is staggering. The mob scaling in this game is bunk, making all at level fights attrition fights.
And this is compounded by how you rarely fight a mob 1v1 unless you take special precautions. More likely you are alone vs 3+ mobs. This makes their spike attacks (the ones put in there to make us use those interrupts and make the fight more “active”) difficult to notice and favors base AOE spam to clear out the area as fast as possible.