Guild Wars 2

Anyone else notice that his wardrobe is backwards between the march banner and the ingame shot?

https://d3b4yo2b5lbfy.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/be46ffeature.jpg

https://d3b4yo2b5lbfy.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/92eabBraham-4.jpg

I suspect the reason is more technical than balance related, at least in any direct sense.

Grenade #1 is the only ground targeted #1 in the game to my knowledge. And i suspect that ground targeted skills have a specific exception in the game code regarding the auto-attack option.

As such i speculate that it is a side effect of making sure you can’t simply put a ground targeted elementalist water spell on auto-attack and have a continual healing AOE during larger fights (never mind that you can get a similar effect by traiting warrior shouts for heal and put one of them on auto). That would in a sense bring back the healer role of trinity fame.

So all in all if ANet wants to fix this they either need to make all ground targeted skills work with auto-attack, or make grenade #1 a on target only skill. A more tricky solution would be to turn ground targeted skills into on-target skills if they are marked as the auto-attack skills.

War Mourner.5168:

You cannot heal in deathshroud. You keep the regen but it’s effectively getting wasted while in DS, same with vampirism traits. It’s one of my issues with DS…

And nothing will happen as long as ANet is fearful of the necomantic highlander.

So lets see:

Leap, applies to you.
Projectile, applies to target or others nearby.
blast, applies to anyone within the blasts area of effect.
whirl, as projectile but with multiple projectiles in random directions.

Never mind that the combo notifications shield will pop up for all projectiles (and is visible for both shooter and whoever put down the field), even tho some may only have a 20% chance of actually producing said effect.

All in all the combo system is a nice idea on paper but the implementation is somewhat lacking.

For one thing the effects are mostly just more of the same boons and conditions as you find elsewhere.

Fields can be overwritten others, can be kitten hard to spot in the middle of a fight, and they do not last long. As such they are hard to use effectively in a group unless you are playing with a fixed team communicating via voip.

I guess it is just another thing with the game that is mostly wasted in PVE/PUG scenarios but vital for elite SPVP matches.

Only thing missing is for them to start porting in destroyers.

hmm, bull-kitten.

Jski.6180:

We are going to get soo trolled on April 1 i can see it now.

Thx for the heads up Riselight.

I for one welcome our 8-bit overlords.

The Molten Alliance, eh?

30 points in death magic, AOE poison on minion death, pop goes the jaggie.

Providing what, 1% extra damage reduction?

Meh, i think ANet should forgo the current auto-attack scheme and simply have a skill trigger if it comes out of recharge and the relevant key is held down. Would make life easier for transform heavy professions, races and grenade tossing engineers.

Khisanth.2948:

Hmm the adds actually help me survive …
I was using Signet of Malice with a Shortbow on my thief. Each bounce will heal.

Not surprising as that signet outperforms a necromancer with 20 trait points in blood magic for the vampiric traits. Only time a necomancer gets ahead is at 30, when multiple wells on the floor and multiple mobs standing on top of them. And that means the necromancer must be standing still inside the well to keep the mobs there, and not use DS to avoid the incoming damage…

Palador.2170:

Like many others, I’m stuck here too.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

It has to go through verification by our QA (testing) team, then it will go in the next content update. I don’t have an ETA at this point, sorry!

Seriously? EVERYTHING gets past them, why are they even considered a step any more? ((I kid… mostly.))

I suspect they deal with technical issues, not game balance issues. Meaning that if it do not crash servers or clients, it gets the thumbs up for release.

Do not forget that the lich form elite can pop 5 of them with a single mark. That i suspect is where the real issue is hiding out.

The game seems like a weird mix of code reuse (traits that trigger skills via different means, like say dodge) and copy and paste (weird kitten AI behavior that seems to plague only the necromancer minions).

Empiren.6401:

Pfft, our survival skills are pretty “meh”.
-minions give good regen, but don’t scale with Healing power and wow is it frustrating to have minions just SIT THERE while you try and get their ai to come back from the twilight zone.(that 2 attack thing works, maybe 50% of the time. i mean wow do they just bug out in pvp. Sometimes I can only get half of them to attack).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yWgn_Pwa2s

1. love the music choice.

2. the last part where the golem drags another karka back to a already damaged character is one illustration on why i am wary of mobility as a defensive mechanism. Especially in areas where mobs are not perfectly static.

Tulki.1458:

It seems like they’re testing mob stats against level 80 characters or something, regardless of the zone’s actual level. It happened with AC (introductory dungeon my kitten ) and it happened again with these krait explosions.

Would not surprise me, as the rest of the combat mechanics are built around SPVP where everyone is lvl80 in exotics (or even a bit above, if my math is accurate).

Could be that ANet have a bit too much faith in their downscaling system.

If this ever came to pass, i would have to roll a female asura engineer named Vita.

Aridia.3042:

LOL got 1 shotted for 15k last night by a Krait on Sparkfly. What exactly is the AOE suppose to look like btw? I didn’t see it.

A red circle on the ground. Sadly the shallow water pools around the swampy areas obscure them. Never mind that the circle and the attack seems to come at the same time, meaning they are virtually impossible to dodge. This especially when the attacker is covered in particle effects or perhaps “signaling” the attack with a tail twitch.

There is a serious flaw with “watch the game, not the UI” when each enemy has so different an anatomy and attack animations. By this i mean that the only way to learn how to react is to fight the same enemy ad nauseam until you can dodge their attacks on rote.

With the varied fauna of this game, that means focusing you efforts on a single area, or even subsection of said area unless you happen to be one of the lucky few with photographic memory…

No Walking.6349:

Kryen Lavitt.6051:

No Walking.6349:

Concerning F1-F4 abilities…

• Engineer – instant cast toolbelt skills

These are all the classes F1-F4 abilities, and they’re ALL INSTANT CAST as they should be, very balanced overall don’t you all think?

Wait, what’s that? I forgot a class? OHHHHH that’s right. The Ranger…here

• Ranger – pet paths to target, pet roots, pet begins 2 second cast.

There. I think I covered it all now. Still think it’s balanced? 7 months without a fix to this obvious imbalance rangers have…how nice it is to be ignored.

Please teach me MASTA how to instant cast my Bandage Self!

/fail

Bandage self is one of the MANY different tool belt abilities you get, most of which are instant cast…EVERY one of our pet abilities has a huge pet pathing/cast time besides jaguire which is useless anyways

When did instant become 1 second?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bandage_Self

Do not forget that the necromancer ability come with the price of being locked into 4 skills (that do not change depending on weapon or utilities equipped) for the duration, and that said health bar bleeds about 4 percent pr second on top of whatever damage he takes.

This while sharing the requirement of having to build it up just like warrior adrenaline or mesmer clones.

Elementalists are locked out of the old element for a period on switch (Starting at 15 seconds, dropping with points spent in a trait line. This is why most elementalist builds have 30 points in arcana).

Guardian abilities behave like sigils. periodic effects with a linked trigger effect that locks out both triggered and periodic effect until recharged.

Likely necros are gathering at the swamp to try their luck with the behemoth.

What is the point of attrition in a game where a PVP fight can be over in seconds thanks to rampaging spikers? The only ones that can possibly the taken down by attrition are bunkers, and ANet are nerfing them left and right.

CriSPeH.8512:

But Mesmers are getting some new definatly OP skills.
Dev Fanboys.

Anyone up for a tesla coil?

Best guess, ANet don’t want the cone daze to be overpowering in SPVP.

Simple, the character abilities are balanced for SPVP rather than PVE. As such, they are all tuned for fast and furious fights over who is to hold a point for the next x seconds.

As for the later counter-comment about watching the fight rather than the UI. All well and good on paper, but when half the screen is continually filled by what looks like a explosion in a paint factory it becomes a pointless exercise in style over substance.

Honestly the game feels more and more like it was create by a bunch of graphics designers and yes-men, while the engineers where bound and gagged in the broom closet.

Eivene.9127:

I made a charr mesmer for that reason, love it. Charr elementalists could currently be frowned upon, lore-wise, considering the Flame Legion history.

Another odd combo I quite like is a sylvari engineer. Nothing beats a plant wielding a flamethrower!

I got both a charr elementalist (complete with a flame legion link in the back story) and a sylvari engineer (gotta love that “British” voice and the Steampunk equipment).

ThiBash.5634:

kiwiburner.2186:

Yeah, I’m saving for it. Who needs ascended gear? I just want to be able to make a dignified exit from keeps in WvW when they’re about to fall (the reindeer transformations already work surprisingly well for running past enemy zergs, but that might just be the culling effect

Lol. Then with the cat tonic, they should reduce falling damage to near 0 because you’ll always land on your feet!

Next up buttered toast backpack. if the proverbs are correct, you should find yourself hovering in mid air. continually spinning.

Geikamir.6329:

Also, the lack of trinity is the only thing that they have stood firm on and it’s the best thing about the entire game. Well, no trinity and active combat.

More like “hyperactive” combat…

I am surprised they didn’t put in falling dryers to squash anyone that stands still for more than 5 seconds.

It is a system to avoid trait cherry picking in SPVP that bites PVE-ers because the “play as you like, any profession can fill any role” type traits are found mostly on the third tier.

Lyrio.9431:

That trinity reason really makes me laugh. Is not that you’re bound to play a specific role because of choosing a class.

In GW2 you can tune your most of the classes to play a specific part of that trinity. Guardians, elementalists, etc… can either DPS or support, heal, even tank.

Except you really can’t. Any deviation from straight up DPS will just kitten your build for no good reason.

Engineer shield #4 do, it makes me sit under a energy dome for its duration.

As for side effect on failure to block, only ones i can think of are one or more guardian ones that give out a boon or something at the end if it didn’t block x attacks during the period. Engineer shield blocks do nothing, unless i remember to hit them again to trigger their secondary skills, nor do the mesmer parries that i can think off at the moment.

Honestly i suspect the black/parry mechanics are yet another case of tuned for SPVP, virtually pointless unless overwhelmed in PVE. This because their window of effect seems to work best when you are facing one or more opponent with rapid attacks, something most mobs (outside of the poison barrage of hyleks, and stinger barrage of karkas) do not have.

There is a fine line between hard and dropping tactical nukes at the slightest provocation.

Also, at least the lab event seems to have been a unforeseen consequence of seemingly unrelated changes.

Change 1, general buffing of krait.

This change also most various late game story missions virtually impossible to complete for non-bust builds and professions. This because they had a krait boss with a summon ability.

Change 2, changes to event scaling to include more difficult mobs rather than just pile on more and more trash mobs.

This resulted in veterans and eventually champions spawning. Thing is that we do not know exactly how the event scaling works so we can’t say how it decides that someone is taking part in the event or not. And the lab area is a dragon fight staging ground and so leads to masses of people gathering.

These two changes, on the surface seemingly unrelated, come together in this single event to create a situation, where you quickly find yourself facing down multiple buffed krait in champion form.

I have been voicing something similar from day one.

As for the various block or parry skills out there right now, in my opinion they are pointless. They have a 3 second window with a 30+ second cooldown most often, and they enter said cooldown even when they fail to block anything.

About the only block i have found interesting is shield #4 for engineer, because it is a projectile reflect. This allows me to turn the tossed boulders back at the boss that tossed it. but even then i have to often dodge one or two boulders between each i can reflect back.

Now if the block skills were sustained skills, meaning that the block stayed up for as long as i kept the button pressed or a attack got blocked, i would not mind having them there still. You are after all incapable of attacking while holding the block, and often you are also rooted to the spot. And upon hit, it could enter the cooldown assigned to it.

Pizz.3698:

Condition cleansing is not really a problem as most of them only clear one condition and the classes that do apply a lot of weakness (thief and necro comes to mind) apply it so fast and so often that cleasing it wont even matter.

Actually i think a elixir gun engineer may apply weakness faster than a necromancer as it is part of the guns #1 attack.

Best i can tell, this “boon hate” is supposed to deal with multiple issues.

1. DD elem

2. provide an alternative way for thieves to hurt bunkers that do not make them walking tactical nukes (the interview basically stated that the current thief damage was put in to counter bunkers, but like foxes imported to deal with imported rabbits they instead turned on anything other than their “native” prey).

3. give warriors a meaning in SPVP.

Goloith.6349:

Guardian: Don’t get me wrong this is a profession that an Engineer can take on in a 1vs1 and win because he can kite them in WvW

And this in the end is a serious issue i have with the game, it is very much built around “kite to win”…

maddoctor.2738:

I have ~3k armor on my Guardian and I’m a mob magnet. My guildies and friends I’ve done dungeon with always want to group with me as every mob comes after me, always. The funniest place where I tested my magnetizing skills was in the Underwater fractal, I always, ALWAYS, have every single little jelly following me, they never go for anyone else, ever, I create huge tails of fish and it’s so funny…

digiowl.9620:

That very much depends on the power stat of whoever you are fighting tho. Power and Armor pretty much balance each other out 1 for 1.

Not really. Power and Toughness(???) do not balance each other out, Power scales far far far better than Toughness in this game.

The formula for damage is:

Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Defense+Toughness)

To double your damage you need double Power, because if you have 2xPower in the formula above you get double damage, so assuming the base 916 Power, you need another 916 from items/traits etc to deal DOUBLE damage.

On the other hand, to double your Armor you need a LOT more Toughness. Let’s have an example with heavy armor:

Exotic Heavy armor offers 1211 Defense combined with the base 916 Toughness results in 2127 Armor. To double your resistance to damage (and take half damage) you need to… double that.

Medium armor offers 1064 Defense for a total of 1980 Armor (base)

Light armor offers 920 Defense for a total of 1836 Armor (base)

In other words, to take half damage you need 2127 (Heavy), 1980 (Medium), 1836 (Light) Toughness but in order to deal double damage you only need 916 Power… That’s how badly Toughness scale compared to Power.

I see that i worded myself poorly. What i am getting at is that in that formula, power is a multiplier while armor (the total of defense and toughness) is a divisor. End result is that if both have the same value, resulting output will be weapon modified by whatever skill is used.

You are correct tho that armor is worse off in the grand scheme of things as it is fighting both power and weapon damage. Meaning that it needs to be higher than power to impact weapon damage, and so produce a effective reduction in incoming damage.

But that was not my claim, only that armor and power cancel each other out one for one.

rizzo.1079:

Going to speculate a bit here: I wouldn’t be surprised if they put toughness on the aggro table like that to encourage dodging over just loading up on ac and face tanking everything. The devs certainly seem to love the dodge mechanic, and I can’t blame them because it is fun. Face tanking everything seems very counter to their philosophy.

I find it fun to dodge the occasional big, properly flagged, spike. But as it is right now, i feel i need to have vigor up 24/7 and be constantly rolling around in the mud. First of all because armor seems to do jack all except paint a big bullseye on my back, second because i have seen time and time against single hits from vets on up that strip me of half my health or more.

All in all, i can really understand why evasive arcana is so loved. It basically turn what is a defensive measure, dodge, into a AOE offensive measure with a 10 second (5 with vigor) recharge.

Mujen.2089:

Around 3k armor ( as a heavy armor wearer you gain roughly 1200 armor from base defense) you have around 40% damage reduction. Toughness pushes your armor further as armor = gear defense stat + toughness.

That very much depends on the power stat of whoever you are fighting tho. Power and Armor pretty much balance each other out 1 for 1.

The more i think about it the more find that the current aggro system is very pug-hostile. While roaming the open world you are very likely to stack up on every last bit of survivability you can find, unless you happen to pack enough burst to level a group event solo. But bring that setup into a dungeon and all of a sudden every last mob will want a piece of you. This even tho you may be standing near the doorway waving a twig while the burly norn in plate armor is up front swinging a big piece of metal.

Funny thing is that the list on the wiki is not sourced, and so can’t really be said to be anything more than speculation. At least unless a group of people are willing to go into a dungeon or similar repeatedly with various builds, and record the aggro behavior of a select mob.

And even then that may only give us pointers for that specific mob.

Mist.3208:

The smallest change such as slightly reducing life blasts base damage, but adding a small bleed tick would be a step in the right direction to making DS viable for more than just one build.

Or give it a damage increase depending on the amount of conditions on the target.

And as always, the steal that carry the build is not the traits but the food…

Honestly ANet…

Yid.3024:

I wish turrets followed you around as a little toy chopper. Like a mini pet. And periodically shoot at your target. If you activate the skill, it will mount itself onto the ground, and it will automatically overcharge.
So… like a signet+minion with an engineer twist, which i think might work well in terms of turret viability.

But more than anything, it would look so cool. It will sell the fantasy of being an engineer(better than backpacks at least). People will see our little toy choppers transforming into a turret and go “I’m totally rolling an engineer, right now”

Yea, GW2 and STO engineers seems to suffer from the same issue. That turrets are inherently static while the rest of the game is built around mobility.

I guess they could change the F feature into this. So rather than picking up a turret to reduce cooldown (i would frankly have it eliminate cooldown, given the cardboard nature of the turrets) you would it F to have it sprout a rotor or in some other fashion come with the engineer.

After doing so the engineer would in effect be the turret(s), having all the normal periodic effects coming from the engineer. The option of overcharge and detonation would still be in effect, with the latter originating from the location of the engineer.

Would be interesting if one could have a turret-sprouting hobobag for this, btw.

Nay of the Ether.8913:

Red Falcon.8257:

Chronoslol.7514:

Wow so entitled, anet doesnt have to give you any functionality they dont want to, check your priviledge

This, and… DS is designed to be a transformation.
When transformed (and most times, when carrying an item) you cannot do basic actions because you’re busy with what you’re doing.
Infact the dev also said DS is designed to be a transformation to use when on low health to continue fighting or to prevent spikes when fighting – not a tool to “bypass” some fundamental mechanics such as being vulnerable while ressing or buying yourself seconds of cooldown with in-transformation swapping.
DS was never meant to be a normal state you use for every purpose.

So that only applies to necros right? because every other class transform can do all those things you say we shouldn’t be allowed to do, and that was intended. They also said DS is the core mechanic of our class and once we learn how to use it we unlock our class potential, yet they continue to limit it and you say it’s supposed to only be an OS button….something isn’t adding up here…

If ANet had fixed the forum ignore function rather than disabling it, i would say you should have just put RF on ignore and move on as he is of the clear opinion that anything ANet does it holy and right.

Bhawb.7408:

Because we all know how amazing 100b is in PvP, thats why every good team runs a warrior… oh wait.

And that is the core of the problem, the balance focus is stuck on SPVP and the rest of the game is suffering for it.

Btw, i am getting the impression that minionmaster is much more viable in SPVP than it is in PVE thanks to the mess that is the games targeting UI. This is however not something unique to necromancers as it also apply to mesmers with clones out.

All in all, SPVP and PVE plays very differently and so far the necromancer brokenness is most visible in PVE.

Pennry.9215:

FLFW.3105:

Its a myth. On my alt is shout warrior with full soldiers gear and soldier runes and i really have to put a lot of effort to make mobs attack me cause they just go for squishies while ignoring me.

You do know that “Soldier” gear has less Toughness than “Knight’s”, right?

Indeed. Soldier is power primary and secondary toughness, knight is toughness primary and power secondary. On a full exotic set that is almost a 100 point difference.

The benefit of soldier is that it has both toughness and vitality as secondaries, the only gear set outside of wayfarer (magic find primary) to boost both of those.

I think the opaque nature of the aggro mechanic invariably devolve a group fight from a organized battle to a barroom brawl. And i suspect this lack of control is why there are quite a few calls for trinity/roles.

I hoped the game could accommodate both organized battles and brawls, depending on the players wishes, via different character builds. But so far it seems it can only do brawls. In part because of the focus on movement as a defensive mechanism, and in part because CC do a poor job at controlling.

Morena.9604:

*If you like playing a certain role in trinity… this game isn’t for you

Tho more so because we are all padlocked to DPS with variable output than anything else. And this largely to avoid SPVP bunker builds becoming overpowering.

TheDaiBish.9735:

digiowl.9620:

Do ANet expects us to play the game with a detectives eye to every last scenery item we pass by while battling a champion, with entourage, solo?

You’re constantly battling Champions? With no respite?

Consider it a hyperbolic euphemism.

Anyways, i find myself wishing i could hit a icon in NPC conversations and have the text show up in some kind of collection (perhaps even in the event sidebar) for easy reference while out in the field.

Then again i sometimes wonder if ANet designed this game for the boys with elaborate setups of third party tools and massive stacks of ready to use notepads.

TheDaiBish.9735:

No story fully makes sense until you get to the end. That’s where the vagueness comes from.

This has kitten all to do with the overall story tho, this is about how the NPCs relay information about where said macguffin is likely found so we can progress our fedex achievement.