Guild Wars 2

Rennoko.5731:

Oh my, these are somewhat different. Focused rituals down to adept tier makes for a new build in ZERGvZERG for me. I will continue reading….

Seems Terror and Focuzsed Rituals changed places, lending credence to Spectral Wall handing out fear from now on.

Also, the critical chance DS boost seems to be legit.

ANet could go with 0.01 scaling from HP or something…

Would give 3 extra pr hit on trait line, and 13 extra pr hit if you also gear into it.

Dangerkips.6035:

I just thought it was quite cheeky of them to come out and say stack overlap is an unsolvable problem due to server limitations, only to then add in a new condition altogether (torment).

Compounding the problem ftl. I wouldn’t hold my breath for them to sort it out anytime soon, sad to say.

A intensity stacking condition even, meaning 25 more timers for the servers to handle pr mob.

I see the same argument about attunement swapping for elementalits, and i am not sure i really buy it. Sure, it may have some benefit in the burst department. But if ANet really intended rapid-swapping they would have provided a better way of tracking cooldowns across swaps.

marnick.4305:

digiowl.9620:

Mirta.5029:

Randulf.7614:

Charr – they are evil – they were the bad guys in GW Prophecies…does no one remember they blew up Ascalon!?!

And now they’re not the same people. Hell they’re not even in the same generation. It would be the same as going up to a 15 year old Russian and going “your country had taken over my country once! It’s your fault!”

You would be surprised…

That’s insulting. I work in Germany, not a single one of my colleagues was born before 1950. Not a single one of them carries any blame for what they did to my grandfather. It simply doesn’t matter anymore. Different times, different people.

And yet i recently watched a documentary on the American Civil War where a grand-daughter of one of the southern generals still held Lincoln in low regard.

Never mind that the crap in the middle-east is “blowback” from events decades ago.

The one thing i miss from the Kit Refinement setup is the Elixir Gun Super Elixir field.

Honestly i would love to trait that toolbelt regen on 40 second cooldown for said field.

lakdav.3694:

“The pinnacle of engineering”

Turned into so much scrap seconds later by a neanderthal wielding the oldest weapon known to man…

Gotta love how easily “entitlement” gets bandied about…

Got very silly on Aurora Glade just now. Previously it only seemed to trigger when i was bombing a solid group of mobs while playing engineer. But the last few minutes resulted in skill lag and disconnect every few seconds or so.

Reloading.3260:

Nobodies going to waste their time with those events without 200% mf.

Look how loot starved the playerbase is. 200% mf, lets do some southsun. No mf, back to cof.

I hope Anet is watching and learning from this.

They are not. The balance team is chained to SPVP, and the PVE team is all about producing carnivals.

Astralporing.1957:

You are supposed to swap weapons both strategically and tactically, but you are not supposed to swap spam.

At this point in time, i’m not convinced ANet knows what those words mean.

Ah, reflect. The cure-all of GW2.

Not by a long shot. But ANet has made the combat mechanics so dependent on dodge/evade, that it is the only way they see to threaten certain profession builds.

Meh, i’m in a melancholic mood this weekend and so i will claim that ANet is all about design over mechanics. They have somehow decided that engineers need their pack from a design/style standpoint, and that’s it.

hydeaut.1758:

Most of the other balancing things go in the same direction. Best example Acidic Elixirs – this trait is simply stupid everywhere except maybe spvp.

And that is the basic nature of balance in this game, it is all about SPVP.

Sure, they made some off hand comments on a SOTG video a while back about splitting the skills and such more, but so far there has been little action to back up the claims.

Yep, it has a spawn timer. If you do not see a “queen is hiding” line in the sidebar it will spawn once all 4 camps are held. But Unlike Shatterer (another world boss with pre-event requirements), the camps can’t be soloed.

And the middle camp, Steampipe, ends up blocking the northeren camps from reaching the queen in any practical time frame. This because all the camps go “contested” the second the queen spawns.

Never mind that the events scale simply based on people present in the general area, sending Steampipe into “no way, no how” levels of difficulty very quickly. The place can likely also be camped by parking toons outside the wall, around the upper left corner, as only the odd reef glider wanders up there. And those campers will be taken into account when scaling the Steampipe events.

Culling is a mess in the game. In large part because simply having a mob, character or NPC slip behind a obstruction results in the client completely forgetting how they look until the server gets around to sending that data (separate from the message telling the client about the location no less).

I tested this during the fireworks event by simply running around the projector.

A single pass around was enough for the plaza to look deserted, then the green names came popping up, followed by a incremental filling of appearances.

This even tho the very same characters had been on screen less than a second ago, and clearly all the armors were loaded into ram (no noticeable HDD activity as they popped into view).

As the mobs are clearly even more fixed in appearances than player characters, why oh why is the client waiting for the server to ok the drawing of their appearances?!

Shatterer is hard enough to get help on, most just camp out and wait for someone else to do the pre-events. But at least there they can all be done by one person.

With the karka queen, 4 camps have to be cleared out at the same time. And because triggered the queen cause the camps to instantly become swamped by karka, nobody is willing to hold the northern camps as they are unlikely to get past Steampipe in time to tag the queen.

Quite a few of those may well be ground for a psychology study into latent psychopathy.

tigirius.9014:

Immersturm.6097:

google.3709:

sounds legit, I’m kinda disappointed tho, we got decent updates but necros…. I’m glad they got an update but every buff screams out, “skrew you engi”. A 9s+ wall of fear, our burning (4s on a 10s cd) and they got fear…

it will be impossible for engi’s to 1v1 necros now or anyone without stability or instant full condi removal.

Yep, pretty much this in my opinion.

Buffs are nice, but there’s no really dramatic changes going on here. No new weapons being made available, no hobosack appearance fix, just more buffs that make a bunker build stronger and stronger…and I don’t like/play bunker builds.

If anyone needed Torment it’s us. That’s for sure. And they need to change the tossed elixirs so we can have a direct stability boon without the RNG hassle.

It almost seems as if the initial design of the elixirs were one of much shorter effects and cooldowns, so we could chug down those elixirs like a drunk during happy hour.

that is at least the only way i can really think off that would defend any use of RNG in a skill mechanic.

Maskaganda.2043:

Lyssas.1586:

“New grandmaster trait – Modified Ammunition: Damage is increased by 2% per condition on the target, when wielding a pistol or rifle.”

Should this be interpreted as for each unique condition? (seems kind of right) or each condition stack (would get op really fast)?

unique, its always per unique condition/boon.

A P/P build could bring that up to 10% on pistols alone (bleed, poison, confusion, burn, cripple) temporarily. For rifle it may be a bit more difficult.

google.3709:

sounds legit, I’m kinda disappointed tho, we got decent updates but necros…. I’m glad they got an update but every buff screams out, “skrew you engi”. A 9s+ wall of fear, our burning (4s on a 10s cd) and they got fear…

it will be impossible for engi’s to 1v1 necros now or anyone without stability or instant full condi removal.

The necro wall do not stop bullets, and we have plenty of those.

1. A misguided attempt at combating theorycrafting.

2. A equally misguided attempt at promoting “skill” via seat of the pants playing.

I find it ironic that a hylek is more accurate with a blowgun than we are with a pistol…

Terrahero.9358:

Kits are not our profession mechanic. You said it yourself “we can opt not to use it”. Toolbelt is our profession mechanic. Its unique to the Engineer, you will always have it, and it is the thing that gets enhanced through the bottom Trait-line (like every other profession).
Kits on the otherhand, are not unique to the Engineer. Anyone with 60c can get a Flamethrower for example.

You even get a limited variant for free in Southsun. Irony being that the flame jet there do more damage than our kits flame jet.

nakoda.4213:

digiowl.9620:

nakoda.4213:

I just want to add to the debate by reminding everyone that the question of “how well put together” many of our skills are (ie: broken traits, mundane toolbelt skills) is a different concern from the functioning mechanicisms of the class, which is, like it or not, kit swapping and toolbelt skills. these are the mechanistic characteristics that define the engineers play and differentiate us from other professions.

That is one aspect. Another is that many uses of skills and traits that are very valid in SPVP are worthless in PVE because mob are protected in various ways.

such as what?

Can’t knock mobs off edges, while they can do so to us and we can do it to each other in PVP. This reduces the utility of knockback/launch in PVE in my view.

Also the larger health pools on late game mobs makes control+burst pointless (outside of blind spam, the condition equivalent of aegis spam really) as you can’t really drop one or more that way.

Never mind the abomination that is Defiant.

nakoda.4213:

I just want to add to the debate by reminding everyone that the question of “how well put together” many of our skills are (ie: broken traits, mundane toolbelt skills) is a different concern from the functioning mechanicisms of the class, which is, like it or not, kit swapping and toolbelt skills. these are the mechanistic characteristics that define the engineers play and differentiate us from other professions.

That is one aspect. Another is that many uses of skills and traits that are very valid in SPVP are worthless in PVE because mob are protected in various ways.

Velron.3729:

This video should help you love shield.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBOxCqyXPG0

Only applies for PVP tho, as mobs can’t be knocked off edges…

Anything that breaks the channel instantly lights the effigy.

This because ANet seems to have intended for us to use the effigies as temporary health boosts (2% pr unit in the stack, with a max stack size of 5, or 10% extra health. Not sure if it matters in the grand scheme of things tho) for the rest of the month rather than grind them for the achievement within hours.

Ashen.2907:

Vayne.8563:

The OP said, and I quote:

“Looks like they forgot about the “Multiplayer” aspect of MMO.”

In order for Anet to have forgotten about it, they have to not done it more than once. Surely this is an overstatement of how often they forget about the multiplayer aspect, since they’ve had the muliplayer aspect in both of the living stories before this.

1) he then went on to explain what that statement meant. Taking him out of context doesn’t make your argument less of a strawman. You are either purposefully putting words into his mouth, or are unintentionally reading more into what was said than is actually there.

2) You don’t have to neglect to do something more than once in order for it to have been forgotten. The very first time you failed to remember to send in the rent check, even if you never made that mistake again, it was an example of having forgotten something.

It is Vayne, so your efforts are sadly wasted. Him and a few others makes me wonder what happened to the ignore “functionality” in this forum (it was present in a non-functional state at launch but later vanished).

Not just short draw distances, but no concept of an appearance or location cache.

I ran a quick experiment during the weekend fireworks.

Simply lapping the holo-projector was enough for the game to the group that had gathered and request updates from the server.

By this i mean that even the name tags would be gone once i came round the projector, and they would them slowly pop back in (without any noticable HDD activity, so clearly the armor, weapon and coloring was already in RAM) as the server responded.

At least in PVE you would think that simply keeping a cache of seen people, to quickly load from while waiting for server updates, would not be game breaking.

I hear about them showing up in WVW and SPVP again and again, and sometimes the random sighting in LA. Can’t recall ever hearing about them showing up at open world events or taking part in dungeon groups tho.

kokiman.2364:

RoterFuchs.9216:

Vayne.8563:

Ten minutes and not particularly repeatable? People will complain about anything. Who even cares?

Everyone who loves playing together.

Lol, thousands of posts here say otherwise.

There is a very defined difference between the ability to play alongside one or more friends, and having to fill out a 5 man party with random strangers.

The latter is what people complain about in relation Arah story and the F&F finale, especially as ANet have shown the capability, throughout both the Personal Story and the F&F story instances, to make scaling instances that can handle anything from solo to a full party.

Didn’t notice knockdown much, maybe because i ran bomb engineer and so put him in a blind field. But his health pool seemed absurd for a veteran.

Going high defense is not just about being the tank, it is also about surviving those “oh crap!” moments.

Soon.5240:

The OP may not realize that there is a trait that will reduce the cool down of shields by 20% plus grant 90 toughness. It’s in the Inventions line.

Either of those mean fart all. 20% on the shield cooldowns still leave us with long cooldowns, and 90 Toughness results in no practical damage reduction. Never mind that the shield has to actually be out to get it, so no kits. Heck, i think you get more if you plop a toughness weapon into off-hand. And it remains in effect even with kits active.

Mirta.5029:

Randulf.7614:

Charr – they are evil – they were the bad guys in GW Prophecies…does no one remember they blew up Ascalon!?!

And now they’re not the same people. Hell they’re not even in the same generation. It would be the same as going up to a 15 year old Russian and going “your country had taken over my country once! It’s your fault!”

You would be surprised…

Honestly, with the world bosses being all about ranged spam i would love to see a targeted ranged kit that could match traited grenades in DPS. Throwing those spicy pineapples gets boring after a while.

As for the melee happy rest of PVE i have bombs (AOE spam baby!) and pistols (blowtorch and dart volley are both best used in melee).

1. theme over playability (you see it again and again in the game)

2. balanced for SPVP.

2 is what is causing all the PVE grief, as mechanics that work both for balance and theme in SPVP just result in increased pressure when used in PVE. This in essence making them worthless for PVE use.

This is why the working PVE builds are the most straight forward SPVP builds, the ones built around hitting something until it stops twitching. Try anything fancy and you’re just gimping yourself.

That extra toughness results in extra aggro makes adding toughness for survivability a futile effort. This because the extra mob attention is likely to cancel out any survivability gained from the additional toughness.

Been seeing this quite a bit lately, can’t pin down the exact cause.

what i usually experience is that during a fight the game will freeze, and either come back with a burst of damage (as if the network packages are being buffered) or the game will eventually drop me back to the character select screen with the mentioned error.

The problem of the protect Steampipe event is that once a certain number of toons are present, karka start to spawn inside the camp (supposedly they tunnel in, if you’re lucky you will see a dust plume before they spawn).

But As with the Grenth temple event, the object/NPC you are supposed to protect do not gain additional health as the event escalates. And so any young karka going unchecked long enough to get off a tail barrage is likely to one shot the object. Thus sending the event into failure with a instant start of the “retake camp” event.

This then spawns additional, likely upscaled, mobs, while the mobs of the previous event is still around.

The term clusterkitten comes to mind…

There are a couple of issues with the meta-event.

1. it is virtually impossible to uncontest the various camps without permanent stations on each of them.

2. when the queen spawns, all the camps get overrun.

3. because of 2, anyone holding the northeastern camps need to go through the swarms of karka spawning in the middle (Steampipe) camp before they reach the queen.

4. because the queen is likely to be camped by people not interested in running the unlocking events, Steampipe will be stuffed by upleveled karka. This result in a high likelihood of being one shotted by a mass of tail spike barrages.

End result is that nobody wants to hold the northeastern camps because they do not get a shot at the daily chest, nor the queen chest.

A simple fix is to at least let Steampipe stay uncontested until after the queen is dead. Or redesign Steampipe so that it can be bypassed without having to parkour over the wall in some way.

Non-DPS builds should, in theory, be able to compensate for the lower damage by increased survivability. This either by the mobs hitting them less, or by being able to recover from the hits more.

but right now the best way to avoid being hit is the same no matter if you build into it or not, and that is dodge (this to the point that it has become something of a flavor of the month in SPVP).

As for recovering from being hit, don’t even get me started!

Best i can tell, 10s of artists, maybe 5 programmers.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

I’m confused, how is having two reticules a good targeting system? I can’t even make sense of how that would work.

I think he means the “call target” system, likely to allow commanders to assign different targets to different groups.

On the topic of meta.

While PVE meta is all about DPS, apparently the SPVP meta is all about evasion. Usually via vigor fueled dodge.

Meaning that ANet really have to hard break the two game modes apart, or they will never get anything close to balance.

I find myself wondering today, if ANet wanted movement to be a big part of defense (observe the amount of cripple fields an engineer can place for instance) why did they make strafe and backwards reduce movement speed?

Even if pistol sucks in the DPS department, i find myself returning to it as i find rifle downright boring.

With P/P at least i feel that i use most of the skills on hand, while with rifle i basically sit there watching #1 go plink plink plink.

Then again, if ANet had provided us with a ranged direct damage kit that didn’t involve ground targeting i would likely never touch either weapon option again.

Only speculating here, but the bugged videos give me the impression that the berserker is only hitting in its front arc rather than all around it.

Meaning thakittens arc of attack has been reduced from 360 to 90 degrees or there about.