Guild Wars 2

Do that thing even heal you? I was under the impression that it heals anyone but you in the AOE.

Sadly our survivability just means we take longer to die, because in this game taking no damage via player “skill” (more like quick reflexes) while delivering heavy damage via character build is what counts. At least when going PVE.

Honestly, a full stack of healing power barely moves the numbers on any profession, while with a nice stack of critical percentage you virtually triple the output of your attacks. Except that percentages always favors those that have high numbers in the first place (1000 per blow turns into 3000 on crit, while 3000 turns into 9000).

First they broke the trinity by giving everyone the ability to fill any of the classic roles.

Then they reduced the ability to heal, to get away from tank and spank in both solo and group.

And to further solidify the message they made the aggro mechanic opaque and different from mob to mob. Meaning that there is no surefire way to hold or trade aggro.

Now we are left with a game that at least in PVE favors glass cannons, as player “skill” (more accurately, split second reaction times) have a bigger say on defense than gear and character skill. So you pile on power, precision and crit damage with the aim of delivering as many strong crits as possible (with enough crit damage percentage you can almost triple the output of any direct damage attack).

Sometimes when i see thieves in action i feel like renaming the game “devil may cry, the mmo”…

szar.9054:

xtorma.1283:

I have no idea how programming or debugging or whatever works. I am like a computer infant, but if i had to make a guess based on simply common sense, I would guess that in computer code, one thing leads to another, and one thing can have profound effect on other things. If this is the case, then the less people you have debugging, the more efficient it would be.

nope.

Proper coding is done modularly and in essene can be pulled apart and fixed as many discrete part. though in practice you get limited on how many physical humans you can keep in harmony, 2 being laughably bad and 10-20 pretty nice.

What has happened is Anet has simply put a very very low priority on bug fixin and a very high one on content, presumably because balance isnt going to sell gems as fast as new content.

Given the different behavior in seemingly equivalent skills, i sometimes wonder if the GW2 code is less modular and more copy and paste.

Unless the difference is intentional, that is. But then Anet won’t talk to us and list those that are intentional and those that are bugs.

I wonder if we yet again confuse difficult and time consuming.

Because DS, that’s why…

Or at the very least had some kind of command over minions, to tell them to scatter or attack.

My thinking on this is remove the mob drops from events fully.

Instead replace them with a end of event chest that give out the equivalent based on the medal rank.

Also, make the medal rank take into account non DPS actions within the event. Say someone was harmed by a event mob and find themselves healed or revived, or damage a mob while under a boon (or the mob damage had a non-damaging condition on it) them the toon that did the indirectly beneficial action should be counted as taking part in the event and given points towards a higher medal. Especially revives are nasty, as they lock you from dodging or other activity unless you tap a movement key first. Meaning you put yourself in harms way to help others, something that is praiseworthy but detrimental to eventual event gains.

Xom.9264:

Sebyos.4089:

No I really like how you can put up any build and have 4 good skills available at any time.

If you play a power build they are useful skills… not so much if you are conditions necro.

And a melee power build at that.

Honestly, #2 is a gap closer with a bleed and a chill. Only really relevant if you go MH dagger.

DS #1 is a pure power cannon that only really pack a punch above 50% DS.

DS #3 is a one second fear that you need to hammer out button sequences to do interrupts with (i have barely time to slam the dodge when i see something coming, let alone hammering two-three keys in sequence to attempt a interrupt).

And #4 do not really buy you more time in DS, even in the event that you manage to drain 5 targets for the duration without getting smacked. Tho had the heal effect healed me as well as allies i may consider it more, same goes with the heal on DS exit.

(yay for #’s being auto turned into bullet points…)

So in essence a point hold bunker, relying on the marks being the size of the point so everyone stays within them and the spectrals to quickly refill LF. Should have guessed.

So we are back at a core issue with these debates, what works in SPVP does not work in WvW or PVE and so on. And everyone is debating from the vantage point of their preferred game mode.

@Little Smoke

Surprised those thieves stay around to allow you to kill them rather than get out of there and leave the mess to the warriors.

Feel like sharing that build? Clearly you’re using 30 Soul Reaping, but the rest?

Konfuzfanten.6503:

digiowl.9620:

And i just now had a champion mob in a DE drop me out of Death Shroud with a single swing, meaning i would have been downed had it touched my health. No real warning, just a simple weapon swing.

Then you are severely undergeared OR taking on mobs that are intended as group content.

L80 rares are undergeared? And even with group events someone has to go in there and take the hits at some point. Remember that necromancers are the high health profession alongside warriors. And this champion delivered a blow strong enough that it would likely drop anything but those two professions. No big scary windup or anything, just a simple swipe with the limb and i watched the DS go poof. Never mind that i was downscaled, so i should actually have an advantage thanks to how downscaling deals with gear.

Thing is that burst go hand in hand with the active defense design of this game. Meaning that you can’t really sit and do damage over time on something, but instead have to get in, burst and get out until the burst resets, and then repeat as needed.

Most of the necro abilities are built around attrition, having the foe sit there and take damage over time. But in PVP any capable player is not going to stay within your DOT AOEs. And in PVE foes are likely to be pulled off a well or out of AOE unless you maintain aggro for the duration, meaning you put yourself in harms way.

Veteran kara one-shotted whole groups, because they could not see the roll coming thanks to server prioritizing nearby players over distant mobs.

And i just now had a champion mob in a DE drop me out of Death Shroud with a single swing, meaning i would have been downed had it touched my health. No real warning, just a simple weapon swing.

Konfuzfanten.6503:

If you dont move and dodge you die = skill
Standing more or less still and pressing the optimal combat sequence = fail.

Except for when the game itself makes those skills worthless (see culled veteran karka roll of wipe).

And i am unsure if it is skill or simply wired to the max reflexes to hit a “make me invulnerable” when the big shiny lights up. To learn, something has to hurt but not instantly kill on first encounter.

It is one of the paradoxes of humanity that we love to complain, but we rarely raise our voice to praise. Makes it really hard to tell what the “popular” opinion really is.

I agree in particular on the active defense/dodge. As was seen in the last event, server culling of distant objects makes a mockery of the system. Several servers reported whole groups being wiped because of the sudden appearance of high strength poison fields or rolling veteran/champion karka. You can’t dodge what you can’t see.

Given that she goes on about donations to rebuild LA, it seems a bit short to have her only there for the weekend.

ericf.2837:

Hawkmoon.5849:

http://www.gw2armor.com/

1. select human or norn, female, light/medium/heavy
2. go nuts.

Hope this helps.

edit: lv 80 exotics only pictured.

It does. Thank you!

I think the only armors that page lacks right now are the lower tier crafted sets. But then Dulfy seems to have that covered at a different page from her skimpy focused one.

That pet is a juvie, they do not sport the confuse that their adult kind does.

Never mind that they wander around the start area, while the nuisance known as shelks hide out elsewhere…

I found it to be mostly a “oh crap!” tool for the recent event.

Poison on floor that i missed he warning circles for, finding myself on the back after a knockdown, and a number of other situations all had me hit DS and run for the back of the battle lines.

the rest i spent with staff #1 going continually and summoning minions whenever. The mobs were moving about too much for marks or wells to be worth the attempt.

shaktiboi.5194:

If you get confused, stop hitting and kite until the confusion wears off.

The games universal solution, equip ranged weapon and circle strafe…

Here you go: http://dulfy.net/2012/08/11/skimpy-armors-in-gw2a-list/

They do have a camp at the south shore, where the POI is. Could have dumped a waypoint there for the duration. Maybe have some asura NPC going on about it being a prototype mobile emergency point or something.

The wurm used to move during the betas, somehow they must have fund that overpowered. Anyways, it moves to some degree if you for get to unsummon it before you head somewhere. But where it ends up may not be the most practical of locations.

As for having two people working on class balance in the general sense i could understand. But if they are also the ones fixing the actual bugs in the code it seems a bit much. Much better to have two people that can triage the incoming data, and pass the actual bugs on to whoever is in charge of that part of the game code.

There was some floating things shooting chain lighting as well.

Funny enough i found the minions surprisingly responsive during the karka event. They would at best spend a second or two before running towards my target after summoning.

Meh, the problem as i see it is that the game is too focused on active defense. One bad moment, thanks to a distraction or problem at either end of the network connection and you find yourself on your back.

More than once during the spiral sections did i see poison barrages coming from veteran karkas that the server had culled because of the mass of people near me.

There need to be some leeway for errors in play or tech, at least on PVE and other mass events. In dungeons and other instanced events there is less chance of culling and similar, so there the hard cores can run riot for all i care.

Then again, with the new drop code perhaps i should just hang around 60-ish zones.

Drakes that put down instant AOE confusion is not something i would call usual…

The worst part is that the cooldown happens on death, not on spawn.

Still, i found myself going staff and minion during the karka event because going in there with all the lag and culling issues were suicide.

It also makes a mockery of their supposed active defense and grand claims of us playing the game, not the ui. How can you dodge something you can’t see is there until after the whole group has wiped?!

Never mind that during the beginning and end, a dodge may well send you to a forceful impact with rocks?

The design claims and day to day play experience are not lining up.

And yet again the game proves itself a third person action masking as a RPG…

Remind me, do the thief attacks hit multiple foes?

And for the those already 80? L2P?

Why is it that our elites seems to function better than our profession mechanic?

Consider Reaper of Grenth, the human elite, for instance. It provides an AOE chill and poison around you while still allowing you to attack in all your normal ways, and it looks very much like the person entered Death Shroud.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Reflect

Well the warrior has to trait for it and the thief’s is an elite, but only the necromancer is really out of luck. Sure, there is Death Shroud but that really needs to be charged up first.

So as usual, the ones saying it is acceptable or even easy have the reaction time of the Flash, while the rest of us can just pack up and go home. Honestly while it is nice of Anet to try and make the fights a bit more active, it seems things are overly tuned towards mobility as a defensive mechanism right now.

The more i play, the more i feel the game is overly focused on mobility as THE defensive mechanism…

There is also leeching venoms, that Anet recently patched to scale of power…

Err, somehow you have Death Magic V two times…

Thing is that they have already made such a DS nerf.

Sounds very similar to a build i have already seen.

Honestly tho. What seems to carry are the gear and food, not the traits.

Meh, i am starting to think that whoever claims so and so build works (be it vampirics, axe, or some other such claim) are better than average at kiting their opposition.

It appears that i left out a word.

Yes, most of us will say that vampirics are under-performing. But there are a few contrarian voices out there.

RhysSebastian.7651:

Necromancers are extremely powerful, but only if you understand the flow of the battle you are in. In PVE if you know how to utilize staff, epidemic, and blood is power you can kite (and kill) 12 – 15 mobs at Orr.

Meh, with a good kite a level 1 can kill a level 80. It will just take forever to do so.

Oozo.7856:

It’s really kind of amazing how different people can have completely different experiences playing the same class. :P

Because its plays differently on PVE, WvW or sPVP.

It can do quite well in PVE, at least if going dagger or scepter with staff backup.

In WvW, it seems to be hit or miss depending on the player and profession mix they bump into.

SPVP, forget it. at best you can go bunker as the wells fit the points, or perhaps try countering bunker guardians. But the major problem in sPVP is that LF takes a while to charge, and during that time you do not really have any good way to deal with bursts.

Also, this game is heavily rigged towards player skill, especially in sPVP where the gear is equalized. By this i mean that your best defense is to constantly move about to avoid being hit at all (melee attacks have limited range, most ranged attacks have actual projectiles that can be avoided). Meaning that it plays more like a third person shooter than a RPG.

This is then compounded by the Anet insistence that you should play the world, not the interface. By this they mean that you need to look for animation cues as to when high damage attacks are coming up, rather than watch for some indicator in and around the target UI.

Oh yes we do. Some have reported success by going “all in” on vampirics.

This meaning siphon on crit, siphon on hit, siphon on wells, and as many vampiric sigils and runes as they can lay their hands on.

It is almost as if Anet is not aware of the kind of numbers direct damage can output.

Ascii.9726:

digiowl.9620:

SupahSpankeh.8452:

4) Lifeblast pierces first, second and third targets irrespective of which one is targetted – someone above claimed otherwise, and having tested it 3s ago with a few risen it’s not the case at all. It pierces normally.

You sure you were not targeting furthest away mob?

I swear i have seen LB stop the moment it hit the mob in front of me if that was my focused target, but go thru anything between me and said target.

edit: ok, tested on mist golems and there it worked. Not sure what i observed, terrain effect or whatever, but i swear i have seen the LB projectile stop after it hits the focused target even when it was traited for penetration.

Life Blast doesn’t naturally pierce but if you use Soul Reapings ‘Unyielding Blase’ it will pierce for the full range, i think he meant that.

I know that. What i am saying is that i had that trait set, but still the projectile stopped after the first enemy. But only if that enemy was my focused target. If said focused target was off in the distance, allowing a second or third enemy to stand between us, it would pierce just fine.

Best guess after testing on the golems is that i ran into a terrain issue, similar to what people have been reporting for Dark Path and Spectral Grasp. Thing is that i could have sworn the place was perfectly flat and the projectile stopped the moment it hit the focused target.