TIL, also means i could have saved myself a whole lot of pain on my engineer as i picked the two charr…
I am starting to think that this mission, and a few others, have a serious issue with discoverability of options.
(edited by digiowl.9620)
Eighty levels was a really bad idea if you ask me. It stretches out the levelling process for far too long, and only a minority of content has been balanced for top level.
I wonder if the level range came about after designing the trait system and wondering about how the piecemeal it out. Again and again i feel that the game mechanics were built for SPVP, and was then shoehorned into PVE so they could sell it as a MMO.
I think it’s important to note that playing a class to level 15 really doesn’t give you a good idea of how they will play at level 80. I’ve seen a few people comment about how boring and/or difficult they found Elementalists and Mesmers at low levels (and I can attest to the Ele) that have gone on to main the class at 80. I can also say, with brutal experience, that Necro’s and Rangers are great at low levels… but not so much later on.
Yea a whole lot of alternatives to straight up DPS only becomes available beyond level 60 when the grandmaster traits unlock.
An acceptable design for SPVP, where everyone runs around as level 80 with exotics, but it severely distorts the impression of the game in PVE because of the number of hours i takes to get that tier unlocked.
as my original post says, the summoning mobs seem to summon to many and/or are so close together that they all pull at once, ending in me getting slaughtered. i had one dredge suit that had 7 dredge summoned in that mission (dredge assult, in the norn personal story) i can normaly dodge 1 or 2 of them but the rest just knock me down. and garrentee that i get no hits in before im downed.
Thanks, that’s extremely useful info. The dredge suits can summon up to 5 minions, but you also have a half-dozen Vigil soldiers with you. If you’re running in and aggroing all 5 minions and the suit, you probably need to slow down. I just completed this without getting hit at all during the suit attack by letting the Vigil wade in, then I picked off the suits at a distance. (I tried it with an engineer.) Most of the NPCs did get killed during the fight, but they can rezz each other, so the entire group was back up for the cave exploration step.
This suggests that what beat the mission was superior intel. You knew what was coming going in, so you could tailor your approach to fit your character and your surroundings. Players rarely know what they get into, and may very well overlook elements and options that are in your face obvious for someone that has run the scenario multiple times.
I recall having a odd istuation doing my first character. I was supposed to recruit two sylvari hiding out in the swamp south of Lion’s Arch. And in the process i was to take on a risen witch or something. Ok i have a bunch of NPCs with me and a wave of risen coming, and another, and another, and another. Only on second or third full reset of the mission did i decide that the waves were clearly infinite and i should bypass the whole fight.
In a sense it reminds me of the old issue with point and click adventure games. Unless the game was designed with expert care, sooner or later you would run into a section where you would “pixel hunt” (pass the mouse back and forth across the screen, hoping it would highlight some object that was blending in with the background) or resort to trying each inventory item with every other item to see if there was a combo you overlooked. This because what the designer thought would be deductible or noticeable, was to the player pure randomness thanks to different perspectives.
Point, tho it depends on me having something with interrupt handy and managing to both switch to it and target the mobs in question within the time required.
I find so little use for “controls” during most of the game that i forget what skills produce interrupts. This in large part because if find controls not controlling anything because their primary effect do not last long enough. This in particular when i find myself facing multiple mobs (and that would be most fights, thanks to how the open world aggro system works).
Hilarious, i could have sworn nothing was there (except some risen) last time i did the mission.
Mobs getting more and more damaging abilities is not fun. In my experience people are more likely to grind happily if they destroy large amount of mobs with relative ease. Hell, I’d take “kill 20 mobs every 10 sec” over “fight 1-2 challenging normal crap mobs that can one shot you every 30-60 sec”. Challenging should be reserved for bosses and unique mobs (and not by adding stupid amounts of HP).
Likely because trashing hordes of mobs quickly is boring, it is not as mentally fatiguing as trying to keep up with mobs that can one shot you for the same duration.
OP, if they went by your philosophy we would all play bunker _ and have infinite mobility, cc, dmg, cond dmg, cond duration, and healing (yes I’m pointing a finger at bunker ele) Buffing everyone would just trash spvp to a clone war and nothing would be done. They need to buff the builds that “suck” and adjust the builds that are too common to get them closer to each other. Simply buffing a couple builds to match the “best” build is stupid.
And there is the crux of the problem. Half the skills on the professions are worthless outside of SPVP because the mobs come in waves, are dumb as bricks and can take damage that would wipe out a bunker build 3 times over.
Thanks Jeffrey. I suspect the fight will be much easier to deal with without the summoned mobs.
Targeting priorities should be simple:
1. anything actively hostile to me me, nearest to furthest, within cone of sight.
2. anything red that is not actively hostile to me, again nearest to furthest in cone of sight.
3. optionally target yellows, again nearest to furthest in cone of sight.
Never mind the issue that if you stop and turn the camera using right mouse, hitting any attack will not make the character turn to face the direction of camera before attacking. This is games console level of instanity! If they want this to be a action game, the controls need to behave as such!
I guess lighter armor could bright a benefit in terms of endurance recharge, meaning that you could use different armor to trade between active and passive defenses.
And then run around in circles for 30+ seconds as bursting that one mob aggroed 2-3 others nearby and your big burst is on recharge.
Well Dragon’s Tooth recharges in 6 seconds, Shatterstone in 2 and Phoenix/Arcane Blast in 20 (if nothing is traited). Also, with my build, the attunements recharge in 11 sec and this is only fire and water attunement. There’s still earth and air as well as other utility skills.
You’re trying to exaggerate, aren’t you?
After a fashion. Btw, Dragon Tooth is notorious for being difficult to use against a moving target, and shatterstone suffers from much the same issue (second or two windup). And this is why they are allowed to have such short recharges.
I fear that asura in general are very focused on practical/physical applications.
That said, statics seems to have the most thoughtful approach to things.
And then run around in circles for 30+ seconds as bursting that one mob aggroed 2-3 others nearby and your big burst is on recharge.
If it is a action game is has a very awkward interface.
Ah yes, the ever helpful “l2p”. Except you advice include running around as “control”.
Take your condescending attitude and shove it!
Ok, tried again and to expand on my wondering.
It seems the boosted kraits love to drop long duration poison AOE and 5 stack AOE bleeds. Best i can tell they are instant effects, so by the time the circle is on the ground you have already been affected.
The veteran at the end summons a mix of 5 kraits, meaning that you are facing down 6 of these beasts in a a single go. Get defeated, and the fight resets. retreat too far and the leash triggers, and fight yet again resets.
The area of the fight is covered in bushes and on a slight height, so situational awareness without pulling the mobs some distance is difficult.
It is in a corner of the instance area so you do not have much space in those directions.
All in all the fight is a clusterkitten for my engineer.
Skills like frost aura, flame aura…they have little to no purpose outside of PvP and even then, they’re lessened because they take up a slot and offer very little without a class to consistently mitigate and heal damage.
There is your basic problem. Tho i would say what is needed is not a specific profession that can do healing, but meaningful healing skills and traits.
Dodge seems to be what is supposed to supplant healing as a active defensive measure. But because it doubles up as both a invulnerability period and a movement animation, you often can’t dodge because it will send you flying off some cliff edge.
What i have proposed for months are the option for shield carrying characters to be able to raise their shield in a sustained fashion, spending endurance for the duration. It would not allow you to do damage, but it would produce a breather while skills are recharging and also allow you to “tank” a larger mob until someone else do something to take its attention away from you.
This because i find the current shield blocks a mess. They have 2-3 second windows where they are effective, and 10x-20x that in recharge no matter if you manage to block a attack or not. end result are that experimenting with blocking is defensively expensive.
I just wish. The only way for an elementalist player to keep up with the DPS rat race is to constantly swap atunements.
And that’s a problem because….you have to try a bit harder? I think most can agree elementalist is a harder class to play than others (such as warrior and guardian)
So what you have to switch attunements on the fly to have decent DPS, I honestly feel that was the whole idea behind elementalists and being unable to switch weapons in combat but rather 4 elemental attunements.
Thing is that you more or less need to dump 20-30 points into arcane to keep up with the joneses, limiting the amount of build flexibility available. End result is that most elementalists are played like thieves in light armor, dual daggers and evasive arcana.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_elementalist_skills
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_warrior_skillsElementalists have far more weapon skills than warriors. Giving Elementalists more weapons multiplies these weapons skills by 4.
Elementalist have more than enough flexibility with what they got, I don’t get the point of this thread…
I just wish. The only way for an elementalist player to keep up with the DPS rat race is to constantly swap atunements. This because the control (air) and support (water) do not really work well in PVE for sustained use and so he needs to go deep into the arcane trait line to get quick attunement recharge so he can dip in and out of them to get those single skills that work for him.
Never mind trying to keep track of those 20+ cooldowns when you can only see a quarter of them at any one time, while the warrior can sit in GS unless the fight demands a ranged approach.
I wonder if they could have built the elementalist weapon system so that you had two sets of 5, with each of the 5 having 4 elemental sub-options that could be swapped around outside of combat.
Then again, it is virtually impossible to balance a game so that sitting in a single set and swapping between sets of skills are of equal value.
I don’t know if it’s the circle of people i hang out with in game, and our guild has 500 players but i’ve never met a person that plays sPvP ever in game…
Yep, and this is just one more reason why it is frustrating. They focus all their balance around a gamemode that most people never even participate in.
Best guess some high up at ANet still think they can turn SPVP into a esport.
Best guess i have is that Ascended gear has the equivalent of a locked in slotted gem, so that there is only one slot for the UI to bother with when the user wants to apply a infusion. Meaning that is a hack around a game engine limitation of some kind, as early plans were that two-handed weapons were to have two sigil slots but at present only have one.
i had the same problem with my mesmer, bought 2 heavy armor pieces.
later i found out that you can transmute them with another item, that will make them salvageable, just transfer all the stats and runes with the trasmutation stone, and choose the appearance of the non temple armor piece.
That is one hell of a way to waste a fine transmutation stone tho.
While I am all for being careful with what you do at vendors, I think ideally since the UI already can note when a weapon or armor piece is not usable by your character it should also prohibit purchase of the appropriate items.
At least in the case of it being soulbound, as then it is character locked. If it is instead accountbound it should still allow a sale as it could be the player is buying for an alt.
What ANet could do to fix this was for the specific vendor having the ability to trade one armor piece for the equivalent in a different grade. That, and/or make vendors only show the relevant armor grade to the customer.
Seems to be largely echoing what i have been saying since launch. Hell, i swear there was a ANet statement around launch time that confirmed that the balance focus was SPVP with WVW as a distant third.
And this is why healing and such is so kittenty, as making them workable for PVE (in that you can use a healing focused build to sustain against a group of mobs) would make for impenetrable point holding bunkers in SPVP.
There was an example of that during BWE1, where someone built a necromancer to be borderline unkillable unless the whole opposing team focused everything they had on that one individual. end result is that PVE necromancer is a mess.
Is the summoning ability of the head slaver something new?
One way to rework bleed would be to have the stack drop by one each damage tick rather than run a separate timer for each unit of the stack. They could also reduce the workload further by calculating the damage on application rather than pr tick.
If they still wanted mid combat stat changes to have an effect they could have it change if the new damage was higher than the old. Then it could even become valuable to maintain a stack once a high value was achieved so that it didn’t reset.
They could even run a single track for the whole zerg, with the highest damage character dictating the overall damage, but all the rest helping in maintaining a large stack. Meaning that one 80 and a bunch of newbies could cooperate on maintaining a high damage stack. And the stack size itself would in essence act as a damage multiplier.
It would be quite easy to calculate gain and drain in percentages, but leave the rest as numbers. As it currently is seems to require them to convert damage into percentage of health before applying (and likely rounding up so that anything less than 1% do 1% of LF damage).
I really do wonder why ANet bothered with defining LF in terms of percentage rather than straight up health. It seems to cause no end of grief.
Those two together on crit almost heal as much as a thiefs Signet of Malice ^^. Also it procs off AoE Marks an Wells too. So if you hit 5 people with your mark of blood, and crit on all 5, you get 435 hp back^^.
Again reinforcing the issue that trait balance is all about level 80s in exotics (aka SPVP).
This because only at the end game can you set up that kind of a hit, and it requires you to have 5+ opponents standing on wells while you crit slap them. That takes quite a bit of recharge to set up (we can get 4 wells down, tho not all of them can crit on pulse). And it also require a build centered around critical hits.
I suspect that once you hit on said build tho, you become the attrition “god” that ANet envisions us to be. It takes a kittenload of effort tho, and can’t be sustained at all (you more or less have to be on the front lines of the battle).
But individually the various vampirics are just lackluster…
All in all, playing PVE seems a bit like the old D&D wizard mantra; dweeb at 1, god at 10, dead at 2.
(edited by digiowl.9620)
Fear is one of those effects that radically change between PVE and PVP, without having any actual mechanical change.
1. For some reason, having your character run in a specific direction for a second or two is more annoying than having them launched thru the air or knocked over.
2. Mobs can’t fall off ledges, toons can.
Heh, science is all about repeated failures. That is, if you learn what went wrong and correct for it the next time. Tho when you have groups like the Inquest that dabble in chaos magic, any amount of iteration may not solve the inherent issue of it being chaotic…
Asura magitech is like steam power but without the possibility of ever getting it to behave 99% reliable. And with chaos magic you are replacing steam power with nuclear power…
Meh, either make the skills start recharging on summon, or have them regen out of combat. Having them not regen and the recharge start on death just adds insult to injury. Oh and please please please copy the bit of code from mesmer that makes the illusion run at the target before going poof and attach it to the bone minions. Maybe also grab that bit of code that allow the engineer to pack up turrets with the F key for shorter cooldown and apply it to the bone wurm.
It has the lowest damage of every weapon we have, has regen on a 6 second CD, along with a way to transfer all your allies conditions to enemies, a chill/poison with a field, and a fear. It is in every way a support weapon. Yes you can stack up power or condition damage to force it to be a damage weapon, but scepter outdoes it for condition damage in every way, and even axe outdamages it for power builds. Dagger vs Staff damage isn’t even comparable.
Death magic gives toughness and boon duration. Toughness is never a bad thing, and boon duration makes plenty of sense for the weapon with a boon on a 6 second CD. Again, staff is a defensive/support weapon, so is in the defensive/support tree, with defensive/support stats.
Once again you have to look at the objective and battleplan. Yours is single target. Mine is multi-target. Big difference.
For single target damage yes staff is slightly weaker, but not by much. Staff 2 applies 3 stacks of bleeding for 8 seconds every 4.5 seconds, which is pretty strong. Against multiple foes staff 2 is the best AoE skill the necro has. It doesn’t hurt as much as wells but its fast recharge allows it to be reused rapidly. And in wvw zerg vs zerg situations that’s the perfect weapon a necro need.
Toughness and boon duration does not benefit the staff directly. This is true 100% fact. No one can deny this. It doesn’t matter if it is categorized as a support weapon or not. This means you got to trait into something else to make staff work. That’s all I am saying.
Dunno, that regen from #2 is a boon.
Lack of coherency of design is calling a profession “the attrition profession” and giving the only unique condition to the mesmer. Terror trait is a step in the right direction, but with only 2 sources of fear, it’s hardly worth comparing.
Never mind that you really have to push the build to get more than one tick of damage out of terror.
The only time our downed abilities are useful is against another downed player…and that’s only because our 1 spam is a lifesteal. Only once have I managed to fear someone off a cliff so I could rally off them.
Honestly, fear is borked as a mechanic. Fear a mob and it will turn right round and continue attacking, fear a character and you get the same result unless they happen to fall off a ledge. Never mind that our down state fear is single target, meaning it will not buy you one second of breathing space if there happens to be more than one mob gnawing on you.
Best i can tell, anything with a light blue flavor text attached can’t be salvaged what so ever.
Solution: 1. Allow cosmetic upgrades to hobo sacks available in the gem store (Maybe I can turn my cute quaggan backpack into a grenade bag?).
Take it one step further by changing grenade animations to throwing quaggans and someone will get my lifetime vote for President of Earth.
Heh, now i find myself reminiscing about a old Quake 2 mod called Chaos Quake.
In there they had modified the humble grenade launcher into a weapon that shot smilys. Yep, yellow balls with a smiling face on them. To top it off they didn’t simply explode on landing, but instead jumped around for a while. They even homed in on nearby enemies. All this while making various cheerful sounds, including the classic Tarzan cry.
You could even hit a button and make them sit idle until the button was pressed again, with the example given of stacking a number of them behind a door, wait for someone to walk thru it, and hit the button. End result was a gaggle of “battle cries” and one of sheer terror.
Given the randomness of elixirs, i wonder if not the recharge times could be halved. Right now the recharges are on par with skills that can reliably give comparable effects, meaning that the opportunity cost of the engineer version is higher.
By the title i mean elementalits, kit using engineers, and necromancers.
What seems to be the trend with all of them is that for them to competitive, never mind shine, they have to be constantly jumping between “modes”.
This then drives the workload for the players thru the roof compared to professions with no such mechanic.
Why is it that it seems impossible to remain in one mode and maintain competitiveness? I can understand having constant switching as a alternative, but right now it seems to be a requirement. Is that because of the potential inherent in mode switching ANet fear bringing any one mode up to stand-alone competitiveness, less mode switching becomes overpowered?
If so i wonder if ANet needs to reconsider the trait system so that it becomes more of a tradeoff. That taking certain traits and such Not just greatly improves a single mode, but also greatly increase the cost of switching.
Could have sworn i completed at least the ruin one back when i was leveling my main character, but it has been a couple of months at least since i last set foot this far south east.
What worried me was how fast the events went from quite manageable to complete failure once the veteran(s) showed up.
I seems that the issue with conditions are more server workload than network bandwidth. It is starting look like each unit of bleed is tracked internally as if they were individual conditions, complete with their own timer and pr tick damage calculations.
A related issue is that ANet seems to love using launches as the mob CC of choice. Except this blows up in our faces because while we can’t launch a mob off a platform, they can very much do so to us. On recent example, tho in the patch queue, is a personal story mission in Timberline Falls.
At the top of a towering platform waits a krait priestess, who summons 4-5 other krait. Krait that happens to love spamming a highly potent launch at every opportunity.
The platform is also barely big enough to contain a dodge, if you happen to stand at one edge and dodge towards the other.
End result is that no matter what you do you sooner or later end up being launched off that platform and plummet to your death on the wreckage below.
Similar issues can be found with dredge regarding a underground vista, and harpies in a fractal, iirc.
In essence, ANet has made dodge a very big focus of defense (with vigor you can dodge once every 5 seconds, 6 times more often than most of the CC and blocks can be employed) but at the same time keep putting us in situations where dodge is either ineffective (AOE spamming mobs in narrow spaces) or downright dangerous (platforms and bridges with no railings).
Never mind that defeats are expensive (broken armor) and leads to battles resetting everything but dead mobs. And that last bit leads to a focus on DPS because it is the one thing that can lead to a measurable advance if you manage to take out a mob between resets.
The button mashing is very annoying.
I personally wouldn’t want a normal auto-attack for #1.
I would rather the skill be a channeled skill that just throws out nades while you hold it down.
ANet should implement this on all the skills with zero recharge, rather than the current ctrl+right-click auto-attack thing. Would make jumping into necromancer lich transform and such so less painful, and avoid quite a bit of pointless skill linking in chat (i keep getting left and right click confused when i find myself required to set the auto-attack on a skill in the middle of a fight).
Heck, with that and a camera movement lock (please ANet!) i could alternate bind #1 to left mouse and play ranged builds like a third person shooter.
Honestly i find myself thinking again and again that the action part of the game mechanics were a late in development introduction, after some lead dev or other had a weekend session with TERA.
(edited by digiowl.9620)
Solution? You can only get chests from your own server.
More like the one a day applies to the character, not the server.
Well said, OP, but I don’t think the game needs more mechanics.
In my opinion, fun and challenge is being able to use the tools at your disposal to solve problems presented by the game (i.e. monsters) in interesting ways. Where GW2 fails is that the problems posed by monsters present checks rather than choice. For instance, you need condition removal or you’ll spend most of your encounters or you’ll spend most of your fight against certain enemies crippled, chilled, poisoned etc. You need stability or else gravelings will play ping pong with you all day long. It certainly doesn’t help that whoever designed the monsters made them spam attacks faster than the player can react and that the attacks themselves are so poorly advertised.
And that recharge their skills at less than half the time our shortest such counters do (never mind said counters having very narrow windows of effectiveness). Leading to the thinking that there is no point at being fancy, just spike the mob down asap.
Best guess, ANet is overly committed to dodge as a primary defensive mechanic.
I’m just not a PVP guy.