Showing Posts For digiowl.9620:

Necromancers Punished For Having Regen

in Profession Balance

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

It’s also weird because wasn’t the whole point of a Necro to be so insanely tanky?

Yeah. But then they also decided that bunkering in SPVP made for boring play. End result, a fish out of water because they want PVE and WVW to act as training grounds for the SPVP “end game”.

Rethinking trait skills

in Profession Balance

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

Sadly ANet is so stuck in their “bunker bad, m’kay!” mentality that even when they have the perfect opportunity to allow different builds to play noticeably different they fail to do so.

The opportunity in question was the aspect of light in Hidden Arcana. The amount of time one could stay inside the DOT AOE could have been more strongly influenced by defensive stats. But instead ANet opted to make it so that everyone had to dodge the moment the shield dropped, no matter if one ran zerker or not.

End result was that once a gain zerker was the way to go. because with zerker one could do more damage while the shield was up, thus having fewer repetitions, and therefore less chance of a missed dodge leading to a defeat.

The only “saving grace” is that ANet allows these instances to be respawn skitten, and therefore can get away with calling it “casual”.

Who cares if you finished in your underwear after the nth time respawning, you finished and so therefore it is casual. /s

If ANet wants to break the zerker meta it is easy, tie the performance of defensive skills and traits more directly to the defensive stats. Right now the numbers barely move between having no defensive stats and having full defensive stats. But going from zerker to non-zerker produce a massive dip in the DPS.

In essence there is zero tradeoff between offense and defense in PVE.

Their alternative will be to rework every kitten mob in the game to fit more closely to the constraints found within SPVP. But given the kind of cheapness the mordrem are presenting in their designs, i am not holding my breath.

/rant out

I'm out.

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

i think when hes mentioning being thrown against bosses hes referring to the terragrif boss on story with its vine buddy’s its a chain knockdown fest poorly thought out if you ask me i found it relay frustrating when i got knocked around 3 times in a row in the space of like 1-2 secs
for a while now ive thought knockdown should have a cool down timer on to prevent chain knockdown on a target like that it just makes most stun breakers useless coz as soon as you use it you get knocked down again making your stun breakers useless

A problem as old as the game itself. This used to be a constant when traveling across Orr. You hear one mob go “death good” and then get pushed and pulled by 5+ mobs. Why they decided to make stability a boon and not a lingering effect of a stun break is a puzzle. I guess they wanted to be different for sake of being different…

Complaints of Tera bossfight?

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

A little something to wrap your noodles around:

An elementalist in full exotic soldier has an effective health on par with a naked warrior.

Teragriff Boss and Thresher Unfair to Melee

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

While the boss is infuriating to fight without stability, it address a number of issues in the GW2 gameplay. Kudos for that.

+1 to your comment overall, but I wanted to point out the stability in particular.
I did the fight without it. If you stay close to the center during the flying phase, you can position yourself so that the vines don’t pull and still avoid the teragrif damage zones.

Odd, i found that to avoid getting vined i had to be inside the AOE…

Mechanical devourer suit, new engineer elite?

in Engineer

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

Well one gets avoided for its fixed location, and the other is RNG in deciding what form you get…

Mechanical devourer suit, new engineer elite?

in Engineer

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

Mechanical devourer suit, new engineer elite?

in Engineer

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

So, have people given that devourer suit a spin? You can find it in the west end of the new area of the Silverwastes. It seems quite fitting as a new engineer elite skill.

A thought on turrets and mobility

in Engineer

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

I forgot to say that doing such a detonation would set the turret deployment skill to its full cooldown, just as if the turret had been blown up while out.

The primary idea is that you should be able to bring your turrets with you without having to deal with overly long cooldowns (if you take care of them) but without turning the engineer into yet another zoo.

Teragriff Boss and Thresher Unfair to Melee

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

Ok, it seems i need to crank up my graphics settings, as clearly they must be doing tells via some subsystem i have disabled most of the time because i find it distracting.

Anet are these forgotten activities?

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

I think more people would be interested if they could pick when and what to play.

A thought on turrets and mobility

in Engineer

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

A timer that was put in because an enterprising SPVP engineer could bunker a point and then run off with the team and make due on weapon skills only.

Not that it matters much in PVE, because either the turret survives the fight and has to be abandoned/blown up/grabbed, or it gets trashed in seconds.

My thinking in the past is that when we grab a turret we should be given a “boon” that allow us to instantly deploy that turret again (with the health it had when grabbed). While carried like that the option to blow the turret up should remain on the belt, and doing so would produce a explosion centered on the engineer.

How will we fight Mordremoth?

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

DEEPS!

kitten kitten kitten kitten

Pistol AoE bleed

in Engineer

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

Frankly if you need the bleeds, grab the elixir gun.

I so want to love the pistol, but just about the only attack worth it is the off hand flamethrower for the point blank burn.

Teragriff Boss and Thresher Unfair to Melee

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

I think people don’t play eles and don’t even realize that you can’t change weapons as an ele. Only way to switch to a ranged weapon is to redo the instance.

Or don’t engage with the wrong weapon equipped..

Because everyone knows the correct weapon to have equipped before engaging. /facepalm

Best i can tell, Arenanet’s definition of “casual” is that you can respawn scum your way through the story…

That is all well and good, if the game didn’t do armor damage on respawns.

10 second patch summary.

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

yep, also almost fell asleep while doing the laberynth. so sad. thank god mmo’s aren’t known for their story but their lore and gameplay. 2 weeks for this…

I think i spent more time trying to find the entrance to the center of the maze than anything else (was bypassing tendrils and whatsnot once i discovered that the “legendary” wolf would just respawn on kill), because the red marker had nothing to do with where the entrance was at all.

That is, once i discovered that i had the mini map set to just the right zoom to hide the maze itself…

Enemies hit way too hard

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

Yeah the scaling gets weird. I can understand scaling in numbers, or scaling in levels, as either makes it so that people need to cooperate. But scaling both? That just leads to a curb stomp if someone get more than one mob on them.

At this point in time i think there are 3 independent scaling mechanisms in action, and they interact to make the difficulty spike exponentially.

We have scale by numbers. In that a wave contains more mobs if there are more characters present.

We also have level scaling on the mobs so that more people are needed to take down the individual mob.

And on top of that we get rank scaling, where waves replace grunts with veterans, elites and champions at some ratio.

And in the end these end up overlapping so that if you hit the perfect storm you get multiple champs that can take on a zerg and hit like nuclear weapons.

What's wrong with Traits?

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

One issue is that an adapt trait, one you could use at level 30, could have the unlock be in a level 50 area. Another, and the one I hate the most, is that the way you unlock the traits has absolutely nothing to do with the traits. They were all picked seemingly at random.

When i looked over the traits back when the patch hit, it kinda felt like they had assigned unlocks based on the trait value for meta builds. Problem was that they assigned it for the same trait label across all professions.

So you ended up with build defining trait from one profession and borderline useless trait for another profession sharing the same difficult/tedious unlock requirement.

I think however the biggest mess was the use of skill points. Because while gold is shared, skill points are not. And they are a pain to get. I seem to recall that i was running in circles for a week after getting my first toon to 80 before i had unlocked the final elite skill. This because i had run out of skill challenges and basically had to earn skill points by leveling.

(edited by digiowl.9620)

[Suggestion] Currencies & The Wallet

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

I think this is one of those “Why do you even have to ask?” moments. If it’s used as money, it goes in the wallet.

If it’s used for crafting, it goes into materials.

If it’s used for both, it should go into materials, but be spendable from the bank.

I have to completely agree with this one.
Some linearity would be nice…. With the new LS it feels like that they did everything to take up you brank space on purpose, so you would buy more bank tabs. Instead of just following their own example in the past e.g. see quoted post above this text.

I fear it is not intentional, but a limit of the game engine.

Seems to me that non-item currencies can only be added to the game by modifying the game engine directly.

But adding tokens can be done by adding a object to the drop tables and item database. Thus it can be done by some intern with access to the game editor.

[Suggestion] Currencies & The Wallet

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

I see two options.

Either introduce a token inventory separate from the inventory and wallet.

Or introduce a token section/tab of the bank and extend vendors to take payment from the bank directly.

A new tab is likely the better option, so that they can fit 1000s pr token type without requiring a gem store expenditure. This because right now we need nearly 1000 tokens of certain types, and that means 4 slots of 250 stacks!

A thought on turrets and mobility

in Engineer

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

Another thing was that you could use the skill again to summon a new spirit even if the old one was still in play. This would result in the old being unsummoned. Not the most effective way at moving them, but still a option. This because the cooldown of the summon skill started on use, not on spirit death.

End result was that you didn’t need to blow up or pick up. You just abandoned and summoned again at the next fight.

Then again, turrets are just a symptom the “designed for SPVP” illness that is plaguing GW2. the cooldowns are not tuned for the run and gun nature of PVE or WVW, but rather for SPVP capture point sieges.

If the silverwaste forts were more like capture points and less “keep this airhead NPC alive!” things may have been more interesting. But as it stands it is just another NPC escort event (where he will happily run right into a ball of griffs just to rez another NPC).

Why there's only 1 useful gear stat..

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

Because while professions are designed for SPVP, mobs are not.

Mobs, and PVE in general, violate every tenet SPVP is designed around.

In SPVP you have to trade defense for offense, and there are de-facto upper limits to both. Mobs get both in super-sized servings.

in SPVP a central mechanic are the capture points, and AOEs basically force you to choose between staying on point and die, or run and survive. No such mechanic in PVE.

Oh, and GW2 do not have CC. It has combo interrupts that mask as CC by having a short stun or similar for flavoring.

Mordrem Wolves-not so scary anymore.

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

In all honesty i suspect that ANet only test their mobs in 1v1 scenarios.

Because once you face multiple of them, they quickly go off the rails. In particular when dealing with scaled open world events.

Female norn and the new carapace armor.

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

Floating armor is not unique to norns. Try building a “large” sylvari and you get much the same. Shoulder armor float, and both them and gloves becomes insanely large. End result is that if such a sylvari decks out in some of the bigger armor pieces he can pass for a compact norn.

Supposedly the issue stems from trying to avoid clipping during /dance. For me that seems silly, as dance seems like such a frivolous thing to worry about when it makes whole armor sets look silly for the rest of the game.

Final fights were overtuned and unenjoyable

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

U guys who complain its too hard should do the following :
LEARN THE MECHANICS OF THE BOSS
end of story
took me 10 minutes to figure out the mechanics and from there its easy

Why do people feel the need to post answers like this?

The CAPS were a nice touch, though.

kitten swinging…

Why is SW suddenly dead ? O _ O

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

3) Breach is predictable. It occurs when Pact Assault is maximized, which is done through successful defend events (seems to be the only thing that progresses it). Number of forts held/defended doesn’t matter, which is why people only stuck around and defended Amber for the chest farm. This is something that I hope would change, making forts held and defended mandatory for the Breach (increasing rewards in the process).

The Noxious gas is only present after the Breach if it fails. 5/5 = no gas.

Funny, i could have sworn i have seen forts go straight from defense to breach with noxious gas more than once.

As for the rest, thanks.

Why is SW suddenly dead ? O _ O

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

Yeah, the mechanics of the place is clear as mud.

I have protected many a dolyak but i can’t say if it has any effect on the state of the fort. Nor does protecting the repair guy after a successful defense seem to matter much.

And then the breaches happen at near random, sometimes with and sometimes without the toxic smog.

Only place i felt i could really do something besides zerg the mordrem waves was up at blue fort, where i can grab a hammer and build some additional barriers along one of the walls.

Actually, the mechanics are very simple. I liked having to figure out out and not have it spoon fed to me.

Funny how different the in game and forum communities can be…

[Spoiler] (I guess?) Mal 20%

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

Thanks for this thread, it pretty much confirms to me that the issue with it is that while you can mentally combine the lessons from light and the lessons from shadow, nothing tells you that the sequence is vital.

The AOEs the boss spams makes seem as if you should get the shield (as done with light) and then go for fragile (in particular if fragile happens to be sitting in a big puddle of AOEs). But if you do that you can’t get back to the vortex.

Final fights were overtuned and unenjoyable

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

With slower reaction time, what should not be twitch becomes twitch. And once that becomes twitch, one has less time available to do things like take in the scenery or read gray text on a multicolor background.

Final fights were overtuned and unenjoyable

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

I would love to give everyone debating difficulty in this game some kind of standardized reaction time test.

Why is SW suddenly dead ? O _ O

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

Yeah, the mechanics of the place is clear as mud.

I have protected many a dolyak but i can’t say if it has any effect on the state of the fort. Nor does protecting the repair guy after a successful defense seem to matter much.

And then the breaches happen at near random, sometimes with and sometimes without the toxic smog.

Only place i felt i could really do something besides zerg the mordrem waves was up at blue fort, where i can grab a hammer and build some additional barriers along one of the walls.

[Spoilers][Speculations] The voice ...

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

I am feeling like I missed out on so much now. All my hologram scenes were complete silence, even the last one. :/

It is ONLY the final one that is voiced. The rest are silent. The dialogue is quite quiet, so it’s possible you just didn’t hear it. You can always play back through and have a listen at the end!

Meh, every other line from a NPC was not voiced during my playthroughs. So it is quite likely that it never played at all.

Silver and Gold

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

for me the place is disorienting thanks to the age old issue of how the camera interacts with the terrain.

Final fights were overtuned and unenjoyable

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

And even if, the boss does not go out of combat, so you don’t lose any progress…

Just don’t fall out of the map grumble

Silverwastes Waypoint

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

an alternative, at least for me, was for the quartermasters of each fort to offer to buy my junk and sell me salvage kits etc.

My Own Thoughts on the Latest LS Chapter

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

Facet of Strength: more mob control spam.

Facet of Light: why do this game have defensive stats again? The permanent AOE do so much damage pr tick that the difference between zerker and anything else just comes down to how many iterations of grab shield and DPS you have to go through (non-zerker equals more iterations, equals longer fight).

Facet of Darkness: actually quite interesting, in that what you pick up do not block your normal skill set.

Malevolent Memory: A iffy mix of the 3 thanks to the fragile mechanic from Darkness making the AOE issue of Light even worse. And adding its own by having to grab the shield and the fragile in exactly the right sequence while under fire.

Last boss - Exposed Weakness: Redux

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

I guess the biggest hairball is that you can’t pick up fragility after getting the shield and run back into the vortex. End result is that you have to be very careful about your sequence once the color pillars appear. Never mind that the vortex don’t pick up fragility instantly sometimes. I have found myself standing on top of the vortex for what seemed like seconds before anything happened. All while expecting the big bad to drop a massive hurt on me.

nerf grenade range

in Engineer

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

Only problem i have with the grenade kit (except for having to hammer that 1 key) is that its range and mobility makes the mortar elite pointless.

Heck, you would think the Silverwastes would be a perfect place to use the mortar etc. Nope. Either the mobs are so close to the wall you can’t hit them, or they are so far off you can’t reach them…

Nevermind

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

There is supposed to be challenge motes nearby that reset the challenge without having to redo the whole instance.

Fix mesmer in dragon's lair

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

THAT isnt any way to play, if I cant use the classes basic reasoning for the class then why even have different classes?

And that is the basic dichotomy of GW2 PVE.

Engineer and sieges...

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

I have over the past few days tried to use the engineer mortar elite and turrets during defense events in the Silverwastes, and found it a futile effort.

Either the turrets are trashed by mobs in seconds, or they end up hitting outcroppings and edges rather than mobs below the walls.

The husk slingers, a perfect target for the mortar elite skill, spawn outside of the mortars range, even though they can fling rocks with large AOEs inside the forts.

[Spoilers][Speculations] The voice ...

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

Sadly i played that part twice, and both times the crystal segments were silent…

Vortex Crystal in Glint's Lair

in Living World

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digiowl.9620

Did Majory not rez you guys when you went down? I died maybe twice during the fight and Marjory immediately ran over to get me back up.

I think she tried, but the boss was laying down those AOEs on top leading to a futile effort.

Vortex Crystal in Glint's Lair

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

(Plus on a zerker warrior I was getting him 90% down after just one set of attacks)

And here we have a core issue with the PVE side of the game.

My tanky engineer had to do 3-4 passes on that boss. And whenever the shield dropped i could not hesitate to dodge or i would be down within the second because of the massive damage the AOE did. It would not surprise me of the AOE was set to do percentage damage rather than some fixed value.

New content doesn't seem Solo friendly.

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

In a game that barely offer either without some investment in third party tools…

Last boss - Exposed Weakness: Redux

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

The hard part is eliminating every source of boons. The engineer for instance have at least two trait lines where minor traits will produce a boon of some sort under the right condition.

Facet of Light vs mesmer

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

That persistent AOE is nasty. It can eat through just about anything in short order.

Never mind that the circle is just large enough that a single dodge can still land your hitbox inside the AOE.

New content doesn't seem Solo friendly.

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

The mordrem are acceptable 1v1. But once it becomes 1v2 or higher it quickly turns into the same mess that early days of Orr was.

There is just so much going on at once, that trying to figure out of that blob of pixels over there is going to rush at you or away from you is bordering on impossible.

Never mind the vines etc that sit there spamming carpets of poison AOEs etc.

Only One Waypoint?

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

Ran into a situation where i was defeated near a base, and something was hitting me with enough damage even in that state that it was impossible for others to revive me…

domain of light

in Living World

Posted by: digiowl.9620

digiowl.9620

Killing one of the small crystal creatures give you a colored aura. Bring that aura to a similarly colored pillar of light to gain a temporary shield to bypass the high damage areas.

The real “fun” begins when you have to fight a miniboss that is protected from projectile attacks unless you use the same mechanic to step inside its barrier. The damage once your shield drops is massive, btw…