Guild Wars 2

Pack Hunter.6103:

No, they’re not fun. But finding ways around them is. That’s why I love shields on my warrior. See an abomination widing up to send me flying? Shield Stance. Or dodge. Or shield bash.

For some reason i keep coming up either too soon or too late on block skills. Sure wish they would allow me to simply hold it down and go on recharge if i actually blocked something.

ShadowPuppet.3746:

VIVorcha.7853:

We’re way too dependent on kit switching. We need more traits like Juggernaut that reward the use of a single kit.

Why would you want to encourage people to stay in a single kit more? I mean there is already incentive in the way builds are made that you will favor certain kits over others but I don’t understand why anyone would want to sit in one kit. I can make assumptions to why, but I would rather not do that.

Perhaps so you don’t feel like you’re gimping yourself by picking a gadget or elixir over a second or third kit?

ShadowPuppet.3746:

digiowl.9620:

Thing about bomb autoattack, i am not sure it takes into account Forceful Explosives. So if you have that trait active, you may be able to hurt someone but not see the autoattack happen. Never mind that they need to be in your arc of attack…

As for autofire on holding a button down with grenades, i strongly agree. I guess we will see how the “hold to aim, release to fire” option that will come in a month will work out.

Confused what you are saying about this. Do you mean that the explosion animation does not match the radius increase? Also it is a full 360 degree attack so they just need to be inside the radius of the attack and can be in any direction from your location.

Every skill has a attack range. if your target is within that range and in front of your character, and the skill is set to auto-attack (gold border), the skill will continue to fire on completed recharge.

The thing is that while the explosion radius of the bomb skills change with forceful explosions, i am not sure the attack range changes. I have more than once found myself tapping bomb kit #1 over and over because a mob took one step back and so ended up outside of attack range. But i was still hurting said mob because i had forceful explosions traited.

The lady is a Lovecraftian style villain. Someone that has comprehended the true nature of reality, and in the process come unhinged from our more limited definition of same.

And even if you survive you are like 3/4 the way towards being downed, meaning that if the mob as much as fart again in your direction…

I think ANet would make a killing by going for something like Rift or LOTRO wardrobe. Buyable tabs with equipment slots are are purely cosmetic. Tho i guess the transmutation system works double duty, as you can transfer over both stats and slotted item (sigils, runes, infusions(?)). Just sucks that at L80 gear of any quality suddenly requires crystals when 1-79 makes do with stones.

Tikky.6231:

digiowl.9620:

ANet’s response to the “moar challenge!!!” crowd seems to be to up the mob spikes, up the mob health pools and decrease the reaction window to spikes. Meaning that all they do are increasing the need to reflexes.

There no real alternatives to dodge. Toughness just make you a more appealing chew toy for the mobs, and control do not control anything because of their short effect durations and long recharges.

Totally agree. What annoys me with dodge, is that you just have 2 charges of it (unless you have a dodge/evade built into an ability) and they take long to recharge – especially with mobs that are on turbo speed (READ: risen). I think 3 charges would help a lot. And CC definitely is a bit short, at least for PvE.

(And once again: risen are dead bodies. Dead bodies have rigor mortis. They’ve no business running that fast. It’s ridiculous. It’s also why zombies everywhere else move slow and stiff.)

On the CC, one thing that came to mind recently is that most other games treat CC differently than GW2 in mechanics as well as concept. While they give them a long effect duration, they also give them a chance to break on damage. Meaning that if you CC something and then attack it, you likely wasted that CC.

ANet could give us something similar for PVE CC. Have the current durations be 100% CC, and then give a longer duration afterwards with a high probability of breakage on damage.

Thing about bomb autoattack, i am not sure it takes into account Forceful Explosives. So if you have that trait active, you may be able to hurt someone but not see the autoattack happen. Never mind that they need to be in your arc of attack…

As for autofire on holding a button down with grenades, i strongly agree. I guess we will see how the “hold to aim, release to fire” option that will come in a month will work out.

FishAnna.9081:

i wonder what is the radius when traited with Forceful Explosives right now

it looks like 240 radius right now, so… is that a buff ?

bomb: 120 (180)
fire bomb: 120 (180)
concussion bomb: 180 (270)
smoke bomb: 180 (270)
glue bomb: 240 (360)
(Forceful Explosives)

Decklan.7540:

The engineer profession is not weak, it’s just incredibly difficult to play. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that it is one of the strongest roamers in WvW while still offering a very competitive zerk dps option (bomb kit) for dungeons. The problem lies in that it is very difficult to accomplish these tasks.

Anything one class can do with one button press you are going to have to do with three. That’s just the design of the class, and is the reason why it can’t be buffed, or else it will just become a god mode profession for good players. If you don’t get it, and it doesn’t appeal to you, then I highly suggest playing another profession that you do enjoy, because I will warn you, a bad engineer is basically one of the most useless professions in the game, more so than any other player playing their respective profession poorly.

If you are a good player, and can master the engineer, then go for it. You will literally be at the wheel of the strongest profession in the game. If you can’t though, then I highly recommend one of the other seven professions.

I wonder if we could offset the “god mode” by having Kit Refinement or similar produce effects similar to Juggernaut for sitting in a kit for longer than it takes to pop off the spiky skills and move on.

Elementalists have something similar, but ANet may not have taken it far enough. Meaning that the effects gained are not powerful enough to be a worthwhile tradeoff for the constant switching. Also, they have a trait that make the effects linger. Something that counteracts the value of sitting there.

One thing is wish is that having Tool Kit active would count as carrying a shield for a certain trait. we do after all have a shield skill as part of the kit (Gear Shield).

They know what they are doing, but they are fixated on SPVP. And there a PTV tank can outlive a zerker in a straight up attrition fight.

But that kind of balance do not exist in PVE, because the mobs have much higher stats. They produce attacks that spike enough to drop even a PTVer, and can outlast a PTVer multiple times on attrition.

Reduce mob health, make mobs use heals and similar, and increase their attack frequency while dropping their pr hit damage output (effectively keeping the DPS the same while reducing its spikiness). Yes, it will make dodge less valuable. But at the same time it will make interrupts, heals and defensive stats more valuable. All without changing the character side and thus disrupting PVP.

I speculate it is to make circle strafing less effective, by making it take longer time to leave the opponents arc of attack.

Wethospu.6437:

What’s the damage difference between pvt and ppc? What about the tankiness?

I’m just wondering because if we assume that ppc gains more damage than pvt gains tankiness then wouldn’t ppc groups wipe pvt groups?
Basically, if you have players with same gear (except one is ppc and other pvt) auto-attacking each other. Which one would win?

apparently PVT would, as it can soak more damage while canceling out the power part of PPC. This then leaves little for critical damage to increase whenever precision produces a critical hit.

ANet’s response to the “moar challenge!!!” crowd seems to be to up the mob spikes, up the mob health pools and decrease the reaction window to spikes. Meaning that all they do are increasing the need to reflexes.

There no real alternatives to dodge. Toughness just make you a more appealing chew toy for the mobs, and control do not control anything because of their short effect durations and long recharges.

Only issue i have with silvers are that there is no way to tell them apart from the normal bunch. With veterans and champs at least it says so at the start of their name. I wonder how many times i have gone after what looks like a ordinary mob at Taco and found myself wondering why it is not dropping, only to glance at the image and seeing the silver border.

ANet do not want invincible bunkers in SPVP, because it is more fun for the spectators when the capture points are flipped often. And so defensive stats become useless in PVE, because the fights with mobs are all attrition fights.

Tom Gore.4035:

CHIPS.6018:

They should start replacing one hit kills with DOT damage.

And how would that help the “tanks”, as condition damage ignores Toughness?

DOT != condition damage. More like increasing the frequency of mob attacks, but decreasing the damage each of those attacks will do. Now this will make ANet’s “priced” dodge mechanics less valuable, but watch me not care one bit.

One personal example from trying to defend the turrets down in the Fen. I Noticed a new wave of risen coming in, so i intercepted them to try and buy us some time. Within a second or two of coming within range of the first risen my health was 3/4 gone. I have no idea what attack it was that hit me, and i was scrambling to get back out of there while trying to recover.

With lower pr hit damage, but higher frequency, i would see the health globe steadily decrease rather than one moment be full and the next bordering on empty.

ANet, and their hunt for that elusive “skill”…

Turning off post-processing should take care of the glow i suspect, as most likely that is bloom.

Two things contribute to this.

1. zergs make events scale up, and with the current scaling code that means more champions.

2. event mobs drop loot. And with more champions you get more champ specific drops.

I observe that ANet has removed drops on Tequatl event spawns, and i really hope they do this across the game. The incentive should be to end a event as quickly as possible to get the awards, not keep it hanging in a state of eternal in-completion so that more high value mobs will spawn.

A whole other issue is that the lack of friendly targeted skills, and the low limit on most hostile AOE massively favors a dense pile of characters rather than spreading out to avoid being hit.

By clumping together (stacking?) You increase the effectiveness of both caster centered and ground targeted beneficial skills, and decrease the time it takes to get someone back on their feet when downed.

you can tell that ANet never really considered this as just about every mob will spray their AOE wide by default, in the belief that we will be spread out. But by instead bunching together, few gets hit because of the pr AOE target limit. And those that get hit have a high number of people helping them back up making recovery time minimal.

Lots of bombs and stubbornness…

TriggerSad.2597:

Vince Ste Marie.2081:

TriggerSad.2597:

Vince Ste Marie.2081:

Allow me to clear this up.

1. The meta will be available for 2 weeks.
2. The Tequat’l fight is permanent content; Rox and the dragon clue hunts will go away after 2 weeks.
3. “Boss Week” is a Shark Week joke.

Too bad you guys didn’t release this on Shark Week. It would have been glorious! xD

Sharks and World Bosses don’t get along. :P

But what if there were a World Boss that was a shark?!?! :P

It is a safe bet that we get that with the deep sea dragon…

Good point. Whenever i find myself in a EU overflow, i find half the chat being in german, french or some other language i have no clue about. Why have language specific servers in the first place, if the game dumps us all into the same overflows?

In other words, yet another event where it is better to stack and DPS than spread out.

And once more the solution is “stack and DPS”.

For some reason ANet opted for a over complicated system for tracking boons and conditions, in particularly the kind that stacks…

unleashed.8679:

I would also love to see more support and control instead of pure DMG. But both types have huge disadvantegs in PVE right now.
Control:
- Ever Champ/Boss can’t be controlled, because you have to get rid of those 10 or more defiant stacks. If you remove them completely i think people will stunlock bosses with mace autoattacks witch is also a bad idea.
- CC is less efective beacuse of Unshakable on every Champ/boss making CC more useless.

Support:
- Every Class or weapon gives tones of Boons for the group why do we need one guy specialized for Support. DD Warrior i.e. have Banners, 150Power Trait, grand fury, … . The only classes that supports right now are the messmers with time warp and probably Guards with aegis and WoR.

Ding ding ding, exactly this. Control do not go anywhere because individual CC skills are tuned for SPVP duels more than PVE 1vX mob waves. In most other games, non-tanks compensate for their squishy nature by putting multiple mobs on hold for long periods.

One reason i suspect for GW2 not having this is that CC lasts the same no matter what i do. In just about any other game, if i CC a mob but do not attack it it will stay that way longer. But once i attack it there is a high chance (sometimes a guarantee) that the CC will drop.

CC in GW2 is set up with a fixed short duration because it is meant either as a set up for a spike or as a escape mechanism in a 1v1 SPVP fight.

I guess what ANet could do was make CC have a dual tier. Leave the current durations as the CC’s unbreakable duration, and once that is over it will continue but with a high to guaranteed chance of breaking on damage. This means i can use CC to keep mobs off my back, but still do not enhance its effectiveness for SPVP spiking. They could even leave the breakable portion out of the CC in SPVP completely, tho i suspect they won’t as they are hell bent on keeping the skills as similar as possible in all game modes.

As for boons and nondamaging conditions there are one stat each that count, duration. Meaning that the only difference between protection, or weakness, from a dedicated build vs a non-dedicated build is how long it lasts. And unless it is from a long duration source from the outset that will mean bupkis, so why bother?

Riojin.2649:

I never understood why they designed racials to be weaker overall,why have them in the game in the first place if they are less appealing that regular moves???

Because e-sport…

I ran around with the Sylvari mastiff for a while, as he “fire and forget”.

Also, the idea of a walking weed with a flamethrower had some appeal. But these days it is more fire bombs, as the flamethrower is less reliable imo.

Btw, ANet have made racials less effective by design. This to discourage favoring certain races, and to avoid us relying on them in builds before going SPVP (never mind that PVE and SPVP plays like night and day because of the more responsive opponents in SPVP, making builds largely nontransferable).

I may replace one of the kits with El. S or B, and also consider traiting 10 points elsewhere as i may not feel the need for Forceful Explosives as much.

Heck, i am already toying with the build. Looking into replacing my reliance on Med Kit with El. H traited for condition removal and shorter recharge (seems to come out slightly ahead on the heal as well).

Rozbuska.5263:

Atamaz.4195:

I’d like a script than when I press 1 it start to throw grenade to my cursor position until I press 1 again, I don’t it to be a targeted skill, just throw the grenade so I don’t have to spam 112411111241111111

You can do that with Razer mouses for example but imo its much better do it manualy because engineer is about reactions not rotations.

In theory the whole game is about reaction rather than rotation. But most professions can set their #1 on auto and just keep dodging.

Grenade kit #1 can nearly match the rifle before traits. And outmatch it once traited for the extra grenade. Never mind that it is AOE and out-range just about anything once traited.

But this come at the additional workload of having to hammer the key and adjust the target location while others can sit back and let the autoattack plink away and hit the dodge key now and then.

Well ANet claimed that the Orr spawn points were bugged back then, producing at least twice the spawns they were supposed to.

Morrigan.2809:

Solid Gold.9310:

Funny because I keep them, but haven’t had a key drop for months, lots of chests NO keys at all.
Then I bought a few gems with cash, and hey presto a key dropped within 15 minutes.

What a co-incidence…………………….

I buy gems all the time but see no relation to drop rates.
If anything my lower level alts are more prone to drops while my 3 mains get them for map completion or dailies.
my low level alts get stuff like hair makeovers for dailies.
Haven’t seen a Black Lion kit in ages though
RnG is RnG

Heh, all i see out of dailies beyond the common stuff are repair canisters and boosters…

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Vapor_Blade is the closest i can come up with.

Could have sworn dodges always trigger confusion.

And this is why i find it annoying when ANet devs thinks it all fine and dandy to have mobs drop half a pile of confusion on characters.

Especially as PVE confusion has twice the damage of PVP confusion to account for lower mob action frequency.

Killthehealersffs.8940:

I would love to see something like that :

By equipping the Rifle+Rockets turrets at the Ui bar , a <<switch weapon mechnic>> shows up , with a weapon that has :
1) Main spam attack
2) 3 Bleedsfor 5 sec , with 15 sec
3) Rocket with 15 sec cd
4) 3 sec Burn with 15 sec cd
5) Aoe knockback with 30 sec cd

And if u <<summon >> any of those 2 turrets , u automatically loose this weapon

Lately i have been toying with the idea that when you pick up a turret it do not simply reduce the cooldown of the deployment skill, but actually make the turret show up as a “charge” along boons and such. This then allowing certain things.

One option could be that depending on the carried turrets, certain things happen when you use weapon skills. Maybe a rocket or bullet flies off, maybe the attack apply a short burn, maybe it knocks the opponent over or immobilize them?

On that elixir stealth thing, how does it interact with acidic elixirs?

If we toss it on ourselves, will we break stealth if the explosion hurt anything?

Looking forward to try the improved GT mode. Just wish it was not nearly a month away…

mercury ranique.2170:

But what I do is, when the aetherbar is done and gone, I start farming minions myself. I ask in mapchat to ping minionchamps and off course
I do that myself as well. This very often tempts the farming zerg to start paying attention to the minions instead of the left over aetherblades.

Social engineering the zerg? nice. Wish it worked on their namesake in a certain other game

Store them in my personal guild vault, as they are not account bound. Then i may dump them on the TP when i rack up a stack or so. I may unlock one whenever i come across a key and have a chest on hand.

If builds could influence the effectiveness of boons beyond how long they lasted, support would be a more interesting topic to dive into.

And control really needs to be rebalanced so that a single combatant can use it to even his odds against a group, without it also being used by the group to decimate the lone combatant. Defiant is a ugly hack, and stability is not always available.

One option i guess would be to make it less single target focused (a side effect of them also being about interrupting opponents in PVP duels, much like combo breakers in a fighting game), and more AOE. But at the same time put in a duration based immunity rather than the current stack based defiant.

Btw, it just dawned on me that in GW2 you can damage someone CCed with impunity. In most other games out there you have either a no damage policy, or a traited threshold, meaning that anything held by CC can’t be damaged or the CC is wasted.

This again reinforces my thinking of GW2 control in fighting game terms. With control being something akin to a air juggled opponent. You get him up there and he is virtually helpless as long as you can maintain the juggle.

Maybe that is why control is so borked in PVE, there is no crowd element considered. It is all about two opponents facing each other on top of a capture point, locked in a dance of death where one good control landed leads to a swift ending. Bringing this into one against multiple fight and you either get nowhere or you get locked, and so we have the quick hackish fix of defiant.

Seems we are getting some love in the middle of October. A option to have ground targeted AOEs fire on key release alongside the current ones (quick cast and double tap).

Meh, strip event mobs of loot and instead increase the loot for successful event completion to match. Do this across the game, and the event farming issue would fix itself over night.

Every issue with events in this game for over a year has been tied to event mobs dropping loot. People were farming various Lost Shore events specifically for this since day one, because it was more profitable (outside of karma) than chase down random mobs around the maps or even look for other events to run. You simply had to camp these locations with fingers on your most effective AOEs.

Raine.1394:

This situation has been highlighted for me of late. I’m currently leveling a shadow and guardian in swtor. I played that game for 3 months at launch, quit, and thought I’d check out the expansion. One of the key differences I notice is that the skill/abilities are more varied, there are more of them, and they feel more significant. I have CC’s that actually CC for up to 60 seconds. I have a variety of hard-hitting abilities that feel like hard-hitting abilities. The net effect is not to trivialize combat but rather to open more possibilities and make it more interesting. You simply feel like you have a proper kit at your disposal and it makes combat more interesting.

Yep, i have had a blast playing Sith sorcerer as i could trait up the whirlwind so that it affected multiple targets and last long enough to be chained. Meant that even tho the sorcerer is a glass cannon, i had some measure of control as long as i picked the time and place to fight. I would then open by putting the biggest of the group on hold while taking out his companion.

Similar with LOTRO and the Lore-master, where various abilities can again be used to hold one or more mobs out of the fight.

In both cases it allows a “frail” class to handle a fight by the use of brain rather than brawn and reflexes.

Right now this is completely lacking from GW2, possibly because it makes for static and frustrating SPVP.

And we can’t have that if we are to have a audience worthy e-sport, now can we? /s

Beldin.5498:

And the worst are skill with overlong cooldown and a so short duration that you mostly can’t even time them right. Ahh .. that guy will knock me down with his hammer .. now stability .. oh he holds back 1-2 seconds … to late stabilty gone .. knocked down. Next try in 90 seconds or whatever.

Exactly why i run pistol/pistol on my engineer even tho i would love to run pistol/shield.

About the only time i really got a flow with the shield was fighting the branded devourer outside Ebonhawke. This because each time i tossed a rock on me i could see the circle come up on the ground and had just the right window for hitting either one of the two skills or dodge.

Rest of the time i have constantly found myself raising the shield a second too soon and have it drop just as the swing comes.

And that cooldowns on defensive skills are consistently 10-20 second longer than offensive ones just fuel the DPS mantra outside of SPVP.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

We initially launched the game with two types of scaling:

• monsters get stronger
• monsters get more numerous

Since then we have have adjust various events to utilize a scaling system that mixes the two. You’ve seen this in action when you start seeing champions and veterans popping up as more players show up. While I certainly feel that this approach is effective, I appreciate you sharing all of your comments and especially the examples. I agree that facing down an army one-shotting health bags doesn’t make one feel very powerful.

The intent of scaling isn’t necessarily to make content harder, it’s to keep it relatively the same difficulty no matter how many players appear.

Works fine for the most part, except that now we have zergs trying to supersize events so that they get champs that they can farm for bags/chests.

also, while events scale up, they do not seem to scale back down. This resulting in champs roaming the field because the zerg evaporated the moment the medal pinged.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

---

All player controlled minions. excluding Mesmer phantasm and clones because they were already increased in a previous patch, now have 71.43% more hit points in a PvE map.
——-
Turrets need a health and defense buff in WvW they die within seconds most of the time :/

WVW equals PVE when it comes go game balance.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

But i have to agree, they need to make the clkitten reliant on kits – the same goes for ele and attunement dancing

Npt sure if that is possible, unless they rework the trait system to be both positive and negative (so that you make one attunement/kit worse while boosting another).

Without it, attunement/kit dancers will always beat the rest.

Carighan.6758:

Hrm, the Elixir S and B changes are kitten awesome changes, if these notes aren’t fake.

Reliable stealth and reliable stability sounds like it is worth a utility slot or two indeed.

As for fake, hard to say. But the last time there was such a leak, most of it carried through with some minor changes.

Note btw that this is not for the September 17. update, but the October 1. update.