Guild Wars 2

mulch.2586:

My point was that with your set-up, you can take at least 3 times as many hits as a true glass cannon (because of large traited toughness and massive starting health pool), not even counting the regen and +200 healing.

Dunno. The 300 from the trait line seems to give 3% damage reduction at best.

And don’t get me started on HP. The impact is a joke. Just about anything that benefits from HP has a 0.01 to 0.1 modifier built in, meaning that there is either a 100:1 or 10:1 ratio between how many points you put in and how many you get out. And many of the skills that are not direct heals, never mind traits that heal, do not benefit from HP at all! It is in essence a joke stat to dump valuable trait points into.

Yep, seen that place as well. Only time i have not seen it like that was during the opening weeks when people were swarming about the area leveling their first characters.

Xavori.3768:

@digiowl

Three bar bunker necro = normal hitpoints + lifeforce bar + downed health bar

Necros have lifesteal as their downed attack and can trait to both boost lifestealing and increased downed damage. My necro is actually higher DPS when down than when up and can outheal 2 trash mobs beating on her while doing damage.

Not quite my experience, but then i have put my necro on hold while leveling alts…

Tou.3078:

Groovy.6749:

I know that wielding the legendary hammer Juggernaut gives your character a metal skin, but it doesn’t seem like he’s wielding a 2 handed weapon at all….maybe another legendary, no idea :/

The metal skin from juggernaut looks like this instead.

I could have sworn the effect picks up the color of the underlying armor. And also that there is some kind of bug where the effect remains as long as it is one of the weapon sets.

Xavori.3768:

mulch.2586:

200 toughness with double regen and + 200 healing with warrior’s base hp isn’t hardly a glass cannon. Add in “extra armor while over 90%” and 2 other defensive traits…

Compared to my necro who actually can stand toe to toe with champs (well, some champs) it is. Plus, my necro has 3 life bars to play with and lots of life stealing.

Not sure where the third comes from.

Anyways, best i can tell adding about 100 armor will reduce incoming damage by about 1%.

ZeroArmada.9426:

Is it even worth it to make your wells ground targeting? I mean if I’m going d/d, I don’t see why ground targeting would be useful

well they do provide a way to mess with those pesky ranged mobs while your dagger is carving up the melee mob.

End result, the game devolves to a third person shooter…

Had it happen to me a few times. Problem is that statistics and RNG may not agree at times. But that i mean that even tho you should be able to do it once in every 5 salvage by statistics, you may well go every 10 or more before it actually hits and then hit 2-3 times to make up for the dry spell.

Because it sorta work in the open world, and people, at least if it is the first time they go in, can’t be bothered to go back and change up their traits, never mind grab a whole new set of gear.

Hickeroar.9734:

I’ve also heard that wielding a shield increases threat, but my GS and I haven’t had any trouble on that topic.

Had this weird episode with a champion devourer while playing an engineer with shield.

I came late to the fight and stuck as far back as i could, but even so the devourer started lobbing rocks my way fairly soon. Had it not dawned on me that i could use one of the shield skills to send those rocks back i would have spent a whole lot of that fight dodging circles.

It also seems that mobs often bypass a ranger pet or mesmer clone even tho they where what initiated the fight, and the ranger or mesmer has their auto attack disabled (meaning no damage done by them on the mob).

Best i can tell, damage done is very far down the ladder of reasons for a mob to target you over someone else. Heavy toughness, proximity, just being a certain profession (guardians mostly) and carrying a a shield seems to all take priority over damage dealt. For instance, i have yet to see a mob get pulled off someone in downed state by doing damage on said mob.

I would not mind as much if only those bone horrors would do like mesmer clones when i blow them up. That is, run to my target before going pop, not on your present location. It almost feels like the did a cut and paste on the various minions/pets/illusions and afterwards different teams did different modifications/fixes.

I think it was in Brisban Wildlands recently that i had a hyena spawn right in front of me maybe 5-10 seconds after i had killed one in that exact spot. While it may be that someone else killed a hyena close by recently and it decided to spawn on my location, it still left me with 2 enemies in quick succession inside a very narrow gully…

Scourge.4317:

digiowl.9620:

UnderdogSMO.9428:

Go play another game if you don’t like this on, me and many other’s (game one plenty of awards this year so its doing something right… or at lest better than the other game’s this year))

Consider it a place between outright hate and drooling unconditional love.

we like the basic ideas, and some of the implementations, but feel the overall end result comes short of the claimed goals.

So we hang around trying to point out potential flaws and improvements to ANet.

What you see as a potential flaw may not be for some one else. A lot of you are spouting your opinion as fact and its getting a bit ridiculous.

That blade swings both ways.

DaMunky.6302:

Nightarch.2943:

Control: Pointless.

sPvP 1v1.
Your best character vs. my thief.

My “lol mad immobilizes yo” build will show you just how ‘pointless’ control is. (When you can’t ever move because you’re always immobilized, I mean.)

That is one thing to keep in mind, the game is balanced with a focus on sPVP rather than PVE/WVW. End result is that things that looks pointless in PVE can be very effective in sPVP.

This in part because sPVP is focused on short intense battles, while PVE usually end up with lengthy grinding battles (in large part thanks to bigger mobs having scaling health pools and innate resistance to controls). As such, heals are weak, damage is abundant, and controls are short duration with long cooldown.

Karl McLain.5604:

We’re always reading the forums, even if we don’t have the time to respond.
Chap (Jonathan Sharp) and I play every profession in PvP. We have multiple of each profession type and play each of them regularly. My necromancers do have several hundred games since launch.

May want to take some spins around PVE as well (not just WvW), as what works in sPVP may not work at all in PVE…

Karl McLain.5604:

You just need to tag the mob from what I’ve experienced, Lettucemode.
Zoke, we’d like to be able to include things like internal cooldowns within tooltips at some point in the future.

Hopefully this will include things like exact numbers on the vampiric traits.

alanis.6094:

digiowl.9620:

1000 at 400 HP? Meh…

Then again, it is a 5 point minor trait…

Well its also ~970 at under 100 HP, so HP isn’t really doing much and its still probably over 950 for 0 HP.

And that may be my biggest issue with the game right now. While i can somewhat understand it for sPVP, in PVE the all or nothing nature of healing power means you can’t splash a bit of HP into your build for better survivability.

MithranArkanere.8957:

Like the Karka and the Orrians, they are a collection of all the things that make combat against any enemy slow and boring.

Homing projectiles that hit you even if you dodge, Vulcan machine gun CCs, too high health pools, too much armor, effects and projectiles that bypass protections of all sorts, condition and boon spam, condition removal spam.

It’s like:
“Kids, here are the tools you can use to play the game.
And here are the monsters, against which these tools will not work.
Have fun!”

Seriously…

I found myself wondering after the dolls were unveiled if ANet was using the event to demonstrate the power of boons and conditions to various parts of the community.

Battlemaster.2154:

Stephen King fulfilled his medical marijuana prescription and went to work for the GW2 development team. The Princess Dolls are the stuff of pot-induced nightmares.

Someone on the design team is laughing their kitten off at these threads and the frustrations of gamers. All this hell for an ugly sweater. Right.

There was some talk after the video preview was released about how it had a Burton-ish feel to it…

Being even one level above the mob seems to have a serious beneficial effect on survivability. And adding a second or third toon to the fight even more so. 1 on 1 with a same level mob is a slog tho.

1000 at 400 HP? Meh…

Then again, it is a 5 point minor trait…

Edenwolf.6328:

Give necros battleaxe, make auto attack cleave, win.

With next halloween producting a vanity skin that looks like a very different kind of “axe”?

Chipster.6713:

Zeldain.5710:

http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/12/19/where-guild-wars-2-goes-wrong/

I think this is an excellent basis for the foundational problems with the game. Try and read it objectively and see if you agree.

I can’t understand his issue on the “roles” part. It’s pretty simple: There are no roles.
I play D&D board game and have done that for the past 15 years. There are no roles there either, just the classes and what they bring to the table.

Except that you can clearly see roles in how only certain classes get heals, others get massive HP and an arsenal of weapons, and yet others get lethal abilities but can’t take on a stiff breeze without falling over.

There are two things people talk about when they say “trinity”. The first is that you need a certain mix of roles filled to have anything close to a smooth instance run.

another is the pigeonhole-ing of classes into tank, healer, DPS. Or if you will, warrior, white mage, black mage. This is similar to how D&D classes have been structured since almost forever.

The tank/warrior classes will have the ability to take massive damage (tho not infinite) and grab the attention of enemies no matter what the rest of the group do.

The healer/white mage will have all the serious single and group heals, but can’t take damage beyond whatever the heals can counteract or do much damage.

DPS/black mage is all about damage. Alone their best bet is to outdamage the opposition by dropping a massive amount of hurt on them before their minimal health runs out as their heals are nonexistent.

Thing is that with ANet’s “no trinity” effort they not only removed the pigeonholed classes, but basically neutered tank and healer. End result is that everyone runs around with DPS that are sometimes sprinkled with weaker elements from tank and/or healer.

Funnily ANet, or some element within the game community, has come up with what is effectively an alternate trinity. One replacing tank with control and healer with support.

Control would mean using various effects like immobilize, push, pull and others to control the behavior of the enemy.

support broadens the healer into also providing various defensive and offensive benefits like aegis, protection, might and fury.

While a nice attempt, i am of the opinion that they are lacking compared to the tank and healer. For one, the control effects are balanced for PVP over PVE. This means that they are short duration, long cooldown (to abvoid CC locking, tho you can see plenty of mobs doing that in places like Orr or any dredge infested area). So if you push or pull a mob away from a downed group member, you at best only buy them some seconds. This compared to a proper tank that would be able to grab the mobs attention and so get him away permanently. It is not unheard of that a mob that got pulled across the room with a CC effect will promptly turn around and run back to continue hunting its selected prey.

And the same with support. While boons like aegis and conditions like blind can stop the mob from hurting someone, they are rarely readily available like the heals of a trinity healer. And the out and out heals in the game are weak from the outset and hardly, if at all, benefit from trait and gear expenditure. This compared to say DPS where you can have 99% crit chance with ease, and via that have two trait lines that boost damage (power and crit damage bonus percentage).

And that is before we consider that dynamic events favors those that can wipe out masses of mobs rather than help their fellow players.

UnderdogSMO.9428:

Go play another game if you don’t like this on, me and many other’s (game one plenty of awards this year so its doing something right… or at lest better than the other game’s this year))

Consider it a place between outright hate and drooling unconditional love.

we like the basic ideas, and some of the implementations, but feel the overall end result comes short of the claimed goals.

So we hang around trying to point out potential flaws and improvements to ANet.

sinisterpink.7912:

• Character roles: The editor wants to be told what his role is supposed to be in parties and group encounters. The game offers multiple ways to build your class that can be hot swapped (with traits), enabling players to discover and augment their own unique playstyle as they gain more experience.

Hot swap? Not by a long shot!

If we had true hot swap, ANet would allow us to store whole templates, potentially complete with gear, that we could swap to anywhere by hitting a single load icon, and perhaps paying the equivalent of a trait reset, no matter where we were in the field.

Right now the best i can do is carry extra gear in the bag and swap around the major traits and utility skills. but to really be effective you need to swap whole trait lines when you swap gear.

Zoke.2147:

not only are they not aoe but you can’t use any of them vs an invisible character because they require a target, have fun spamming your long cooldown AoE’s blindly in hopes of hitting a thief only to not have them when he becomes visible again, kitten if you do, kitten if you don’t….

If retaliation scaled off the incoming damage, then we could always use axe 3 to make thieves think two times about trying a out of stealth burst.

Meh, i suspect the real reason for the lackluster “roles” are not the “no trinity” bruhaha but rather ANet’s vendetta against bunkers.

Observe that if you go all in with damage you can output numbers in the 20000s, but doing so with healing will barely grant you a extra 100, if HP has an effect at all.

I have had the same experience across all professions so far, sooner or later i will find myself kiting a mass of mobs around with AOE auto-attacks simply because it is my only defense. I can’t stun them for long so i can focus down on one of them, or in essence control the battle, because the duration of my CCs come in the single digits but have cooldown sometimes measured in minutes (this while if you venture into Orr pulling one mob may quickly find yourself facing a CC lock train).

And when the kiting comes into effect i fight the game controls as much as the mobs, because the camera reacts to just about every low hanging branch in the area, i have to hold down a button continually to even control said camera, and my toon can’t be aimed using the camera controls.

And i have also encountered the issue of while doing what i was apparently supposed to be doing to stay alive the mob will simply loose all interest and head back to its spawn point while regenerating health at an alarming rate. This while i am stuck in combat, no health regen and likely will find said mob return to chew on my face with full health within seconds.

Never mind that often the terrain makes it impossible to move about as a defensive measure, unless you like bumping into walls or fall off cliffs.

End result is that vigor becomes more important than protection or regen for survival, with only out and out attack stoppers like blind or aegis topping it (swiftness and its condition counterparts may apply if you have the actual room to circle strafe).

I suspect ANet’s problem is that WvW, a very unbalanced place, has become a much bigger deal than their vaunted sPVP. So people grind fractals to get those extra few numbers to bring into WvW, tho they will make less than a percentage difference in the grand scheme of things.

Tho i suspect there are some that grind fractals simply for the chance to boast about hitting some high number without the maw melting their face for appetizer.

This while the difference between 0 power and 1000 power can be explosive (depending on who you hit). Especially once the outcome gets compounded by the crit values.

tigirius.9014:

digiowl.9620:

Honestly i feel that Anet could buff heals across the board in PvE, but leave it as is in PvP. Anet seems to have a vendetta against bunkers in sPvP that ends up making anything but perma-swiftness glass cannons pointless in PvE.

They could most people here are ignoring the fact that almost none of our heals scale with +healing. seriously.

Ah yes, that. seeing that over at the necro forum as well. And the ones that do scale do so at ratios like .01 or something similarly silly. Meaning that you get +1 on your heals for each 100 dumped into HP.

Dunno, having a event boss or similar coming after you while your clones are basically worthless gets annoying fast. Mesmers do not have the hitpoints of the necromancer, nor the direct firepower of the elementalist, meaning that illusions are how we are supposed to stay alive by having the opponent confuse them for us. Seems to work much better in PVP than PVE at the moment tho.

That may apply once you get some levels in and can trait for it, but during the early levels the clones are at best a poor distraction (in that mobs regularly ignore them completely).

So until then your main source of condition damage will be staff skills, and they are decidedly random.

Also, most mobs that confuse may put out 1 or 2 stacks pr move. And their cooldown between moves seems long enough for the initial stacks to time out. The drakes and dolls on the other hand…

And that is what i tried to illustrate earlier.

1-3 stacks of confusion can be barely noticeable, or so weak that you have plenty of time to react. But dumping 5+ in a single blast can be devastating. Especially if it hits someone using a half second auto attack chain, as then you have 3 hits of confusion in 1.5 seconds. That is almost 2000 damage without any additional condition increase at level 80 if the stack is 5 high. And it can go 5 times that (25 stacks), or 10000 damage in 1.5 seconds (half second pr attack in a auto-attack chain).

But like i said, most mobs in the game barely stack 1-3 at a time. meaning that you will see something like 400 to 1200 pr chain under the same conditions.

Makes me wonder if givers are ANets attempt at shutting us up. the variant is unlikely to show up in sPVP after all…

I wonder if it could be a game engine limitation. Necromancer minions have the same issue, and one thing they have in common with engineer turrets are that they have a secondary ability once summoned/placed. Thief traps on the other hand are fire and forget. this then leads me to suspect that as long as the secondary function sits visible on the skillbar, the cooldown for the primary one has yet to trigger.

Sporadicus.1028:

I agree that they aren’t regens in the official term of the boon, digi. But they work more like the regen boon than a normal heal in the amount of each heal.

Just me being a bit pedantic, as calling them regens can make people wonder about the power stacking claim (i certainly did at first). This because regen boons stack in duration, not power (unlike say might).

If you stack multiple regen boons of varying power the strongest will tick down first and so on, rather than all at once.

But by being pulse heals, they can go off as the same time as a regen boon tick, potentially giving a triple heal.

Heh, since i made the above i have swapped to doing warden and berserker side by side, followed by shattering to apply either direct damage or confusion depending on what is off cooldown. seems to make a serious mess of the enemy, and the first profession where i have really felt the need to be active about weapon swapping.

Thing to keep in mind is that the backpack and super elixir are not regens in the traditional sense, they pulse a heal ever so often. If they were regens they would provide a regen boon.

Pendragon.8735:

Could comment on a lot more, but just want to say I think wells are too much balanced around sPVP (like the whole game really) where there they can be good, because you are expected to fight on a small circle not much bigger than a well. In PVE they can also be good because mobs are dumb and come right at you.

The problem with them in PVE is that you are not supposed to stand your ground, but rather dance around the mobs because defensive measures are poor at keeping you alive. End result is that you are likely to pull the mob off the well.

One thing i would love to see is allowing builds to swap dodge for a sustained block under certain conditions.

Then you could do things like the roman shield formations where the front row would act as a mobile wall while the back row lobbed javelins at the opposing force.

The closest we have right now is a rotation of people popping their short duration/long cooldown shield skills, or trying to time them to counter a specific attack.

While i applaud the attempt, i fear it will fall on deaf ears at ANet. This because their focus seems to be on making it more about player “skill” at the controls than clever combination of traits and character skills. This so they can angle the game towards esport…

Best i can tell the main issue is that the obvious big gun of mesmers, the shatter mechanic, can be neutralized by mobs simply by taking out your clones.

And conditions are very much RNG.

I find myself chaining mantra of pain at present…

For most of the leveling i ran D/D with wells and a scepter on second (no offhand, meaning i reused the off hand dagger). This because i worried that staff 1 as a ranged pull would risk pulling more than i needed thanks to its pierce. Worked acceptably, imo. At least until Orr…

This is the Death Nova in question:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Death_Nova

Never mind that in open world PVE if you attack one mob you often end up with 2+. And with short effect, long cooldown CC you can’t really lock the rest while focusing on one. End result is that you go heavy on AOE and perhaps kite (depending on your AOE source being melee or ranged, tho even melee can always benefit from circle strafing the mob group). Attempting CC or support just makes you intimately familiar with the down state.

Heavy armor gives about 300 more than light. That results in about 3% damage reduction, or about one extra blow worth for survivability.

Simply running in circles will be a better option, especially if you have available a ranged weapon that bounce. i survived an encounter with stuffed griffins this way today, as trying to face them head on was suicide.

Or simply thought they would never require boon strippers for PVE open world mobs.

I know i will be considering packing focus and well of corruption if i ever decide to pop some more oversized presents from here on with my necro.

But honestly, i never felt that the boons made this much difference on any of my toons.

So the confusion is point blank aoe, but they will not run into melee to apply it.

Still, i find myself wondering if this is ANet’s way of trying to tell us something about the power of boons…