One thing to keep in mind about kits are that in game they are treated as bundles, that is the same way as banners or those environmental weapons that you can pick up (planks, rocks, that stuff).
As for grenade targeting, sure wish that targeting the portrait would target the ground under the mob. Right now it either sends the skill into the mists (out of range) even when standing on top of him, or right underneath my characters feet.
Could be they are busy working on ways to use the API to have gear stats show up without manual updates…
Forgive me for not reading the entire thread, but isnt culling a feature concerning player models? Do npcs get culled (i.e. not displayed intentionally), or is that just a result of the server/pc/internet failing to deal with the high data bursts?
It is a combination of factors. All models gets culled, with an attempt to cull things far away and that are not threats primarily.
But it seems the engine can get bogged down when there is a whole lot of new stuff loading, if it is network related or client related i am not sure. One example is when i travel to LA via the gates. It takes the game several seconds to load up the engineer kit pack models, even tho the effects themselves kick in instantly. Also, all sounds are silent for this period.
Meaning that all this talk about culling may hide a inefficiency regarding graphics and sound handling in the game client, that turns culling from a virtual non-issue into a killer.
2 right now reflection outclasses destruction by a massive amount, as it uses the damage of the projectile source rather than the reflection source as the basis for damage done. This exemplified by how the opening burst of Lupicus stage 2 reflected via mesmer Feedback do enough damage to send him right into stage 3. Or how you can basically take out 2/3 of a young karka’s health if you reflect the initial burst of projectiles. This while the more riskier retaliation use the casters own power rather than the incoming attack, even tho the caster has to take damage for retaliation to do anything.
They already hardcapped Feedback at 20 reflects, so it’s harder to bring down Lupi from phase 2 to 3, especially if he uses his AoE in the beginning of Phase 2. And to be honest, if they nerfed reflects, the people that can bring Lupi down the fastest, will still be able to bring lupi down the fastest. Dodging is AoE is extremely easy when you’re in Melee range. Dodge backwards once, dodge forwards after that, and you’re safe. You’re actually more vulnerable for lupi’s AoE at range. Although, the only difficulty in melee is that you don’t have much time to react.
And the damage from reflects is already based on the caster. The base damage is based on the foes, but the multipliers from Power and Critical chance are all due to the caster of the reflect.
1. i was only using lupi as a example of the issue i see with reflect.
2. as long as power is from the attacker, reflect has issues. Notice that nothing else that punishes actions (retaliation, confusion) use attacker power against himself. Only refect does that, and that in essence makes it unbalanced vs alternatives. Especially as ANet’s idea of a PVE challenge is dodge-or-die attack spam.
dps=dps/tank=control/healer=support…
A duck by a different name…
Try reading this owl: http://gw2101.gtm.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/combat/healing-death/
I read through that entire thing and to me it seems they intended for every class to fulfill each roll in that trinity. The control was more focused on cripples and chills, which is definitely going on now. Support was more focused on projectile destroy/reflections along with boons and conditions, which is definitely going on now. And everybody knows about damage.
Even in CoF p1 farm, it perfectly demonstrates this. The mesmer pulls the adds to the right, pushes the boss against the wall, and always uses signet of inspiration to double might and fury stacks for the team, while dealing damage. Warriors use banners, fgj, omm, and tank the boss while dealing damage. Thief annihilates the turrets, pulls the boss towards the wall, passively stacks multiple helpful conditions, stealths, and gives the highest quick single target dps in the game. That’s the gw2 trinity in action right there.
Makes me think that toning down Defiant 1 and reflection 2 should bring things more in line.
1 rather than have it a blanket block on controls for every x fight participants, a rising chance of resistance on hard blocks may be a option. Meaning that as more and more knockdown, push, pull and such gets used, the higher the chance becomes that the next one will be resisted. If left alone for a while, the chance would fade.
2 right now reflection outclasses destruction by a massive amount, as it uses the damage of the projectile source rather than the reflection source as the basis for damage done. This exemplified by how the opening burst of Lupicus stage 2 reflected via mesmer Feedback do enough damage to send him right into stage 3. Or how you can basically take out 2/3 of a young karka’s health if you reflect the initial burst of projectiles. This while the more riskier retaliation use the casters own power rather than the incoming attack, even tho the caster has to take damage for retaliation to do anything.
And yes, my initial impression from the linked blog entry was that every profession should have some way to perform either role. Either as a jack of all trades or a specialist.
both tanking and control reduce or eliminate incoming damage on most or all of the team, and allow for positioning of the mob.
So by that logic, support is tanking too because it has abilities that reduce damage to the group (protection, aegis, regen, etc.)?
Well no good tank can stand for long without a solid healer on the back row.
both tanking and control reduce or eliminate incoming damage on most or all of the team, and allow for positioning of the mob.
dps=dps/tank=control/healer=support…
A duck by a different name…
And to put one more thing on top, I actually like the idea of having PvP as a base for PvE balancing. The more distance between the two, the less my interest in trying/playing the second when I am usually doing the first. The difference in gear is allready quite a big obstacle imho, I would not need any more.
Problem is that because of the PVP balancing, the PVE mobs are simply overgrown punching bags. You can drop a PVP opponent with a well timed control and a follow up burst, but 2-3 such will be required to take down a single “trash” mob of equal level.
This is also why warriors are so overpowered in PVE, because the basic counter to their attack is a dodge. This while the warrior is either rooted in place or go spinning of in a fixed direction. But PVE mobs simply don’t dodge.
Hmm, that would drop the DPS of that turret by about 30%?
That’s just a joke about engineer icon being a bomb and having a fuse. And necro having his revenge from doing nothing and having necro burning kill engi.=P
Aaa I always thought it was an Elixir ! :P
Now make sens!
Could be a flask of that charr whiskey the guy is peddling up in Snowden. When he says he sells booze and bombs, i think he means a single product that can be used as either. Especially given norn’s reaction upon getting a taste at the haven.
Settler’s armor became available with the karka queen meta event.
Consortium economists sell them, in all rarity grades beyond common, once all 4 camps are secure.
I fear that at present, teams would die even with it.
Especially as the beast follows up with a pull that seems to have enough range to get you even if you dodge backwards out of the field.
I have found myself opening with blinds on those drakes.
Heh, adaptation is a double edged sword.
On my engineer i had elixir gun as the #9 utility for oh so long, but recently moved it to the #7 to save on finger movement when i wanted to use its toolbelt skill alongside the med kit one.
This however broke my muscle memory such that when i wanted to switch to elixir gun i often used whatever i had in #9, or ended up with the elixir gun when i was going for #7.
A martial artists would call it kata. Basically actions repeated until you can do them with barely a thought. Having the same layout over time helps reduce reaction time as you do not have to think about what you are doing so much.
Heh, i find myself once more considering “fanny packs”.
Was looking closely at the flamethrower, and once you remove the generic backpack you can have one flask at the hip, and another across the lower back.
Same goes with bomb kit, where the distinct element is a big keg (hello St. Bernard).
Grenades, tool and med kit could have distinctive elements at the hips.
And elixir gun could adopt something similar to flamethrower.
As long as ANet avoid (or minimize) back items with long draping elements (and given their reluctance on capes, that is almost a certainty) adding a lower back attachment point, and reusing the one handed stowed weapon points, should allow back items and engineer kits to coexist.
I guess they could even tie it into the back item checkbox. Box checked, give us the hip slung variant. Unchecked and we get the “hobo” version.
When it comes to combat though, I fail to see the rationale for slowing us down. It just makes combat feel sluggish and dull. One counter-argument I read in a previous post was this was done to resolve FPS issues that would otherwise result from too fast of movement while in combat.
I don’t feel this argument has merit given that we can just speed ourselves back up again to nearly base movement speed using the swiftness boon. Therefore, I believe it was implemented for reasons other than FPS but which escape me as to why. I just don’t see the need for it. Combat feels like it’s going in slow motion and does not achieve the visceral, action-packed, fast-paced experience it was marketed as during development.
Best guess i have was to try and bridge action-packed and tactical. With slower combat speed, you have a bit more time to respond to your opponents moves beyond “oh kitten! oh kitten! oh kitten!” skill spamming after a defensive dodge. This while the higher speed out of combat means you more quickly get to the next fight.
In all honesty, thinking about it makes me suspect it is yet another SPVP design element that makes a mess out of WVW and PVE. SPVP do not seem to have the widely spaced maps of the other two modes, and so the time between fights are shorter. The slower speed also makes point covering DOT fields more effective (notice how necromancer wells neatly cover the usual point size).
Again and again i feel they were working specifically on SPVP until someone higher up called for a new MMORPG, and they hammered what was in essence a MOBA into something resembling a RPG.
ANet has apparently designed the game so that speed is a defensive element. Consider that swiftness is one of 3 boons you can gain from the engineer healing elixir. Meaning that ANet is thinking that said boon is not for overland travel, but a quick burst to get you away from your opponents range at the right moment.
It may not even be your fault, thanks to this being a open world event.
Bouncing and piercing projectiles, never mind the veteran young karka stampede (ouch!), can really ruin your day from out of nowhere.
And here may be the key. As you get to the higher zones, the game virtually expect you to have laser focus on a single mob. This so you can avoid or interrupt that split second action. But at the same time the game is throwing multiple mobs with devastating actions at you, with no internal synchronization between them.
This then makes people resort to kiting as a cure-all, and that to me cheapens the game.
ANet seemed to boil a whole lot of trial and error into this game, possibly thinking it would award “skillful” play…
When i first started playing i distinctly recall that the skill tooltips didn’t include casting time for instance.
May want to tone down the music next time. Was hard to follow the arguments at points because it was almost drowned out, by what i guess was Mega Man boss anthems.
i like the model but not the textures
“casual” does not mean “amateur”. Nothing in this game needs to be made easier, things need to be made harder. If you are finding things in this game too hard or challenging, you need more practice and need to improve more.
But most of the “amateurs” (not saying n word) are hiding behind casual label, i can bet most of them are playing way more then me.
I guess there are two kinds of casual. The first kind is the one that have only so many hours they can spend on the game. The second is the kind that may spend hours at a time logged in but often use the game as a glorified chatroom, idling in LA and elsewhere.
Agree with Vayne, it’s times when I am mobbed by enemies that I feel challenged as a character and have a feeling of accomplishment when coming out of the battle alive. It can really test your abilities as a player sometimes.
I agree, like I said 12 Skelk at the same time going D/D Thief – it was an intense fight – I’m totally bragging.
Shelk are ok, as they can’t stun lock you once all your stun breaks are on cooldown. So there at least you have a fighting chance, or potentially a escape if you find you are in over your head. But drakes, risen, or anything else that spams stuns, pulls, knockdowns or similar are just lazy game design. Especially when aggro-ing one also aggro anything similar within earshot.
That manifesto was clearly written on toilet paper.
Honestly i sometimes wonder of the PVE team got the message about the game mechanics, as they love to get up waves of mobs that belong more in a game offer mass amount of AOE control with long effect durations. But the game do not offer that, and the rest of the defensive skills are on long cooldowns are rarely effective against more than one mob. Resulting in the paradox that multiple “trash” mobs are more threatening than a single big mob, because the latter we can handle via dodges and interrupts.
Seems they may have toned down Steampipe in the recent patch. Or less people are camping the place waiting for QK to spawn. In any case, i didn’t see any waves spawning masses of upscale karka directly inside the place this time round. Maybe i was just lucky tho.
Use your defensive abilities! A well placed wall of reflection, feedback, daggerstorm, whirling defence or magnetic aura will destroy a whole group of Karkas on its own. Endure Pain, Shield stance, smoke screen, swirling winds, obsidian flesh or what ever lets you survive the initial burst and cc abilities will prevent the karka overrun!
I can also second this… Feedback does amazing things against any ranged mob. Cycle your immunities and really lay on the hurt and it’s not too hard.
Ah yes, lets fight nukes with nukes. Face it, reflection is as messed up as these events. It uses the damage output of the mob against him after all.
And it becomes down right gratuitous when compared to its nearest relative, retaliation.
You sure it was not the Universal Multitool?
The Steamside protection event is bunk. The first wave is at the gates, but subsequent waves spawns directly inside the settlement. And no, it was not culling, they spawn, then it takes a second or two before they start attacking everything in sight.
Given that your mission is to protect some building in the center, the event insta-fails and you then have to attempt to retake it by destroying a nest while a mass of karka is spamming you with heavy hitting projectiles.
All in all it seems to be reusing the event from earlier that happened in between instigators. I just wonder who it was that had the brilliant idea of putting spawn points inside the settlement. What is that supposed to simulate? Some kind of tunneling karka?
Or could it be that the instant the defend mission fails, the retake mission winds up, and the mass spawns for that? It just seemed that i got the “event failed” message after the mass spawn, and the defense was barely beginning its second wave.
Never mind that mobs love to target downed people and those helping them, even more than they love high toughness builds.
There is virtually no way to get a mob off you once you go down, meaning that unless said mob happens to be on his last leg (so you can rally via a kill) you may as well just wait for the defeat.
Can your team release a single patch without unplayable content? What was supposed to be the highlight of the event turned into another bugged mess.
4 different settlements, all with interlocking events, not to excuse the quality here but i am surprised it works at all…
There is no need for it to be accountbound. Cause it’s only interesting for level 80 characters that needs the stats. So you can easily go there with the character that needs it, help to free the settlements and then buy the armour or weapon you want to have.
Or simply sit right inside the gate, wait for the settlements to be freed, and shop at the nearby merchant. That is, if you have the required shells ready.
Ok, i was perhaps a bit harsh. Still, the impact of healing power on relevant skills and traits will have to be reworked so that trading power and/or crit damage (precision is too overloaded with trait and rune procs to be considered) for healing power makes a impact on the overall survivability.
Solstice came up with a great soltuion to that on the Guru forums:
Do not get me wrong, I am not saying critical chance should be hammered into the ground, a precision-focused build could still attain, say, a 30% critical chance with fury halved to around 10% for a total of ~40%. I also recognise the impact on traits and other ‘on critical’ effects, but many of these have their own in-built probability which could be increased or removed. Hell, Arenanet has already had to adjust for high critical chances by placing an internal cooldown on certain effects (e.g. life-steal consumable if I remember correctly)
Hmm, may work. Drop max attainable crit chance so you can’t run with virtually guaranteed crit damage, and up the proc effect numbers to compensate.
And yeah, those consumables. They allowed a zerker warrior to be a better vampire than a vampire build necromancer before internal cooldowns were put in place…
The amount of kitten wagging in here is staggering…
Yep, seen it from time to time. Think i even have a thread about it on this forum somewhere. Best i can tell it has something to do with traveling between zones under certain conditions.
Ok, i was perhaps a bit harsh. Still, the impact of healing power on relevant skills and traits will have to be reworked so that trading power and/or crit damage (precision is too overloaded with trait and rune procs to be considered) for healing power makes a impact on the overall survivability.
The answer is that lore-wise the Asura gates shouldn’t even exist: they were merely put in for player/gameplay convenience. If this wasn’t a video game you can bet they wouldn’t exist, so it is probably just best if you consider them as non-existent for lore purposes.
lore wise WP teleportation does not exist Asura gates are a important part of the GW2 lore. from wiki :-
In the original Guild Wars series, the asura gate network was assumed to be powered centrally from the now-destroyed Central Transfer Chamber by Primordus, who was then thought to be merely a statue of a dragon that radiated magical energy. Since then, Primordus has awakened and left, but the asura gate network is still functional.
Is it just me, or were all the dragons sleeping on various high powered magic nodes?
bosses already love AOE spam…
And so we are right back at altruistic DPS guardian, shout DPS warrior, and the odd control DPS mesmer for good measure.
I’m not following Owl, That would still work (if some control/support was mixed in via skills) but It would no longer be the meta. If everyone just bunched up and spammed dps as they do now they’d be werecked by the “weak” regualr cleave atatcks that need to be mitigated through control and support.
Both of those builds either heal self as part of group buff cycles (never mind that guardians buff as they attack), or heal group as part of self buff cycles. Meaning that they can mix heal, buff and DPS in a single package. Then you put in the odd control mesmer (never mind utilities for getting around puzzles and DPS boosting) for taking care of those interrupt-able spikes.
The others that come close are perhaps engineer and elementalist, by swapping kits or attunements at a furious pace.
The reef riders basic attack also seems to have a insane bounce range.
Never mind that in event situations it is not uncommon to be attacked from behind while you are busy avoiding another opponent at the front, simply because some other player pulled one or more mobs close.
A lot of ranger bunker builds have stats like these (apothecary) Good to see that they are selling them for such low prices .
2 gold and 70 karka shells per piece is a low price?
Since the unveiling of the new gear the shell price has crashed to 1-2 silver a piece.
Meaning you can land yourself a set at 3 gold a pop or there about.
And so we are right back at altruistic DPS guardian, shout DPS warrior, and the odd control DPS mesmer for good measure.
Heh, “people” did want events with a potential to fail…
- some roles are not fun when leveling – but there is an easy fix for this . give all classes the ability to play all the roles so that everyone can chose the role they like ! and also the ability to switch between the roles when doing dungeons or when doing the usual pve !
When i first heard about ANet’s “no trinity” claim, this is what i expected. Move some traits around and my character would shift from DPS or control to heal/support.
Don’t work tho, because ANet is deathly afraid of SPVP bunkers slowing down the spectator esport excitement.
These suggested improvements were to alter the way bosses deal with these skills rather then alter the skills themselves. That way SPvP would be uneffected.
This may work for control (defiant is a mob mechanic after all) but it will do jack all for heal/support.
I think three things need to be done: 1) Lengthen the cooldown on mob power moves. 2) Improve the telegraph animation or perhaps add an audio cue to warn the player when the 1-shot kill is coming. 3) Add an graphics option to turn off spell particle effects. I think these things would greatly improve the player experience.
1) could be built into the scaling mechanism i guess. Meaning that as the events scale up, the cooldown on mob attacks lengthen.
2) in mass events that will just add to the cacophony of battle
3) already coming i think, at least i swear there was some dev statement to that effect recently.
The current transmute system is a mess.
Simply because one of the items you want to transmute together you all of a sudden need crystals rather than stones.
How about instead there is a third tab in the hero panel, one that has a set of slots for armor pieces, back piece and weapons.
If i then put a item inside one of those slots, i can use a check box to say if the skin of said item should show on top of the items my character is wearing and holding.
To put something into those slots, current stones and crystals can be used.
Not just berserkers. It punishes all builds because the scaled karkas can drop you in one or two attacks, even with thoughness, vitality and healing power maxed out.
that is human T3…except the hat..
And just for reference, the one the lady is wearing is T2 medium human.
Honestly wish ANet would turn the current transmutation system into one where i used them to slot armor pieces into cosmetic slots, so that i could change the underlying armor stats easily and reversibly. ANet could “simply” implement a third page on the hero screen, next to the armor and town clothes.
(edited by digiowl.9620)