Guild Wars 2

Shinzan.2908:

Please… You got an international customer base folks. For us non americans, when the kitten is afternoon “Seattle Time”?

Meh, ANet pretty much stink at giving proper dates and times for when things start or end. I guess they think it helps build hype…

Most people know what their own time zone is in reference to UTC (often mistakenly called GMT, but GMT moves depending on UK summer time). As such ANet should announce things using UTC time (either exclusively or alongside their local time).

And for a heads up, USA starts and ends their summer time on a different date than Europe.

killahmayne.9518:

I faced a necro that with one auto-attack of his scepter put weakness, 3 stacks of bleed, burning and torment.

Sounds like you ran into a very lucky necro with Dhuumfire (burn on crit), Withering precision (weakness on crit, 20s cooldown), and a superior sigil of tormenting (30% chance of torment on crit, 7s cooldown).

That is 60 points into offensive trait lines, and likely back by a high precision armor set. If that necro hadn’t gotten you to spend your cleanse with the lucky crit, he would likely have folded under damage.

Heh, sorry for the hijack.

Or Kiel pulls the “good behavior” card after getting him to help in some way. Maybe getting the karka to fight on our side for a change? I would not mind seeing clockwork vs karka fights (from a safe vantage point, that is).

It is funny how this flip flops between PVE and PVP, thanks to how different the opposition is stated.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Final Rest can only be acquired from a Demonic Chest – which is the Shadow Behemoth Chest. Yes you can buy it on the trading post – but you can do that with every weapon and the person who put it on the TP had to get it from the Shadow Behemoth in the first place.

There is no other creature or boss or chest that drops Final Rest. Check the wiki if you like. Then there’s the fact that originally when the game launched it was not actually in the in-game loot tables which Anet hadn’t realised, meaning that they repeatedly said it dropped from one boss and that somehow nobody had got one yet – then when they did put it in the loot tables people started getting them from SB, and that is the only place they were getting them.

Nobody, including ANet, realized the issue with the loot table, because the Behemoth event chain was bugged for several months. Thus nobody could effectively farm the chest to stress test said table.

They should just rename the weapon class to musket, as clearly the guns fired are smooth bore. Heck, one of the engi traits is even called “rifled barrel”. That is the defining trait of a rifle over a musket or shotgun.

Never mind that you can fire a spin stabilized slug from a shotgun. The spin is provided by the slug design rather than the barrel. In all honesty, shotguns are some of the most flexible firearms out there.

What is more annoying IMO, is that the tooltips make pistols seems to have a higher ROF. But because of a undocumented aftercast, rifles and pistols have about the same ROF. Thus making pistols have a lower DPS than the tooltips suggest.

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

The amount of skills we have per weapon set is fine. They just need to be somewhat equally useful.
And we need to have more weapons available for the proffessions, like giving greathammers to engineers, rifles to elementalists and nerfbats to warriors.

Having 100 skills on the screen is a pain in the eye.
Don’t believe me? This used to be my UI in WoW before I polished it:

Every single spell was keybinded.

Meh, i would not mind having the state of attunement or kit skills visible. I suck at keeping internal time so i know when to switch back to those heavy hitters that just came off cooldown.

Seriously, an elementalist is fielding some 25 skills. Only that about 3/4 of them is hidden from view by the attunement system.

And i also notice in various videos that some are playing with the inventory open so that they can click on various consumables mid-combat. That is no different from having a potion or similar in a toolbar slot, except that you can’t keybind it.

Honestly, the “skill” in GW2 is in managing the skill recharges and such without the help of a proper UI. As such the fight is between player and UI, not player and mob (or player and player).

More and more i wonder if Cryptic is delivering with Neverwinter what ANet claims to be doing with GW2. They introduced a new class, and expanded on existing ones, via a bi-monthly update that also introduced a new “campaign” zone. And they are likely to do the same again in a month or so.

ANet’s idea of “skill” is to have us manage up to 25 skills (elementalist) while only seeing a quarter of them at any one time (weapon swap, attunements, kits, etc). Meaning that the “skill” test is not between player and environment, but player and UI. Heck, they rearranged a guardian weapon skill sequence soon after launch because players could hit 2-3-4 to get a complete combo done. Now they have to hit 2-4-3 to get the same effect.

Been saying something very similar for some time now Heneil. Glad to see others have the same idea.

Could have sworn that at launch, support was not capped at 5 and it turned WVW into a glorious mess…

Anyways, i could have sworn that ANet patched the support AOEs to have some sort of priority where minions and non-party friendlies were near the bottom.

Bombsaway.7198:

Initially, I think all engineers go thru the phase of “how in the heck to I avoid dying”. But, you will get it.

I suspect that the way the UI works, in that 3/4 of the skill set is hidden at any one time, increase the confusion. This because when we don’t see we often forget we have.

Honestly, half the fight in GW2 at any serious level is keeping a reasonably up to date map of where various skills can be found and their state. And that is while avoiding attacks and AOE fields.

As such, i can understand why ANet claims very few change skills around to adapt to the situation. It is simply because doing so breaks muscle memory. And when you break muscle memory, you lengthen the reaction time massively. This is why in say martial arts they practice what is sometimes called kata. when doing so, a incoming threat can be met with an appropriate counter faster than can be consciously processed.

And this is why you can’t simply “action up” a MMORPG. The impact of the heightened action has to be considered throughout the design.

Jon Peters stated on Reddit a while back that they didn’t put in permanent camera look because in their mind it made the game too much action-y. except they already did make it a action game when they put in active defenses, and the addition camera controls don’t change that, it just ups the workload of the player for no real gain.

Much the same deal with weapon swaps, kits and attunements. It ups the workload of the player because it is hiding the state of part of the skills set available. end result is that most will play in ways that reduce the workload, by staying for long durations with a specific set, kit or attunement.

Sorry for the rant.

fun is in the eye of the beholder, different people find different things fun.

As for the video, i see stack and boon spam, not cleric, carrying the day. No diff between that and the zerker meta, except the zerker meta finishes much faster thanks to the amount of DPS the synergy between the 3 stats produce.

Call me when the cleric build is face tanking during a mixed pug, and then we can talk about it being op or not.

Jski.6180:

It would be a cool idea to have more bosses have block able shots as in a tank like person can get in the way of an attk and take the hit for them. So in a way we can have a 3 class system but not in how they build but in how they set them self up on a battle filed like a real life system. Where you have you melee or armor unites to be in the front lines have your dmg sit off to the side and have a long ranges support set way back. The way this game runs now i think they could make a lot of boss fights like this. I think that would be the 3 class system that ppl are craving but with out the need for build one way or another or to have a needed class.

That would require the ability to body block the mobs, as that was pretty much the job of spear and shield formations until the advent of the rifle.

Or they could simply give us CC that actually is worthy of the name, and not these interrupts in CC drag we have right now. They may be fun for SPVP, but they are worthless for any kind of PVE fight.

TChalla.7146:

digiowl.9620:

And this is what happens, absent taunts, when DPS is the main determination for aggro. Tanking is not just about putting on armor and getting in the mobs face, it is about aggro manipulation to keep the mob on you.

Absent this, we need reliable CC (pull, knockback, immobilize, stun, etc). And right now we have neither.

I never really thought that taunts and such were very realistic. Saying “Nanny nanny boo boo” to a boss mob to keep him attacking you isn’t any more plausible than standing there in front of the boss in heavy armor while it’s being pelted by various other things that could be taken out with one swipe.

The bosses need to have the intelligence to know where the most damage is coming from and take out the source of the damage first. I know that’s how I’d do it if I was a boss mob.

In order for them to create more realistic combat, they really need to rely more on elite groups than they do elite solo mobs. Or at the very least, have the boss mob surrounded by trash, with the ability to bring in more trash every so often. Meanwhile, the highest DPS would be the focus of the boss, the trash monsters would spread out some, double and triple team some, and focus on the weakest members of the hero group.

Area of effect abilities should not have a red circle telling the player where to avoid. Realistically, how would the player know where the area of effect was going to be?

If these combats were more realistic, I wonder just how many players would come here and complain, or simply quit the game because it was too hard.

I didn’t know this was supposed to be ARMA, medieval style…

Avigrus.2871:

digiowl.9620:

siphon/leech is always iffy, as it makes the attacker stronger at the expense of the defender. This means that the defender has to not only go through the attackers original health, but also his own depending on how much he gets hit.

Usually this is balanced by the attacker having little else to go on for healing. But that is not the case for GW2.

Never mind that the necromancer also have Death Shroud to fall back on. I think there is a thread on the necro forum demonstrating that DS can be quite effective if played more like a block/dodge ability (pop DS to absorb a incoming hit, and instantly drop it again). but that was done while DS would still absorb the full damage of a hit that would take it below 0%.

That idea goes to custard when you have multiple people on you though – DS vanishes under focus fire – that’s why many consider it sub-standard to invulnerabilities and blocks… plus you also get locked out of your heal and all utility skills for 2 seconds after exiting deathshroud (only happens some of the time though, not sure what triggers it).

Testing seems to indicate that the skill lock happens when DS is reduced below zero from damage, rather than the player existing early.

And my understanding is that DS got a late beta nerf because someone managed to bunker a point against a determined onslaught by the other team. This likely done via a build similar to the Mindx attrition build (the same one i mentioned in passing further up).

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Attrition-PvP-Spectral-Build-Video/

This all feeds into my suspicion that the balance team is preoccupied with nerfing corner cases rather than taking a big picture look at what is going on.

TChalla.7146:

Rauderi.8706:

What I’d like to see is better actual “tanking” for GW2, which means having better aggro rules.

Set priorities toward:
High armor
Melee attackers
High HP

Set priorities away from:
Range
Low HP/Armor
and the coup de grace, DOWNED STATUS.

Because it’s kittening annoying to be downed with four other people beating on the boss, but still being the sole focus of its overpowered attacks. [/rant]

Of course, when I say priority, that’s not to say a boss shouldn’t go for thieves and elementalists, but it should be a surprise. Also, if a smart melee character backs off to heal, someone else should be picking up the aggro.

I love that GW2 washed the holy trinity, because it means that everyone can just LFG a party and go, not wait on a 30-40 minute queue for one dungeon. But the aggro equations REALLY need tweaking.

Tanking doesn’t make tactical sense. If I’m being attacked by a heavy armored person and a light armored person, logically I’m going to take out the light armored person first, since they’re easier to hit and kill, halving the amount of attacks I’m having to try and dodge.

When you go after a veteran monster in game, and there are normal monsters there as well who join in on trying to kill you, do you continue to attack the veteran or do you take out the trash first?

Same principle.

And this is what happens, absent taunts, when DPS is the main determination for aggro. Tanking is not just about putting on armor and getting in the mobs face, it is about aggro manipulation to keep the mob on you.

Absent this, we need reliable CC (pull, knockback, immobilize, stun, etc). And right now we have neither.

Death Prosecutor.8713:

ANET’s prerelease hype, “we’re going to get away from grind” (GW/grind). Now we have ascended armor / FOTM GRIND. What a prerelease con. A bit hypocritical It would seem.

Anything from ANet these days seems to be high on hype/marketing. And that is what brings out the negative snark in me, to try to mentally counterbalance it all.

MakubeC.3026:

Immensus.9732:

1. Personal story is not engaging at all. Is so boring that in fact I haven’t finished it
2. Is very annoying that I was promised a living world that my choices have impact and instead I got events that reset every hour and they no more different than traditional quests

If you have played this game long enough, then you’ll now this happened once.
The name was “The Lost Shore” and it was a once and once only event. Karkas attacked L.A and brought chaos into it, to extend of even destroying the light house which can still be seen that way.

The problem with this approach is the problem we have with every approach in this game: Way, way too much QQing.

The moment some people were busy and couldn’t play out the event, madness went rampant. Just because they missed it. Even when it was announced weeks before. (Aside from some several technical problems which I deduce Anet have resolved ever since.)

So yeah. You want real events? Then don’t come crying here when you get homework and can’t play them.

Also have in mind that this is a MMO, so you can only make so many decisitions to affect the world.

On a different note, what I hate is not room-based minigames.

If the end chest didn’t spew precursors for some, and didn’t open at all for others, there would have been much less QQ.

haviz.1340:

But then ranged players can pew pew from the distance while melee ones do the entire job.

Odd, i thought the constant argument for lower ranged damage was that ranged was less risky. With the current aggro system i don’t see how that’s the case.

Even more so with bosses that are happy to spam out heavy ranged attacks that go bye bye the moment everyone is in the mobs face.

Never mind that the way support is either point blank on the caster or ground targeted, making non-melee support a much higher workload.

Right now the game seems to be a mishmash of traditional rules of thump (range safer, etc) and attempts at introducing something new. End result is a fish on land, gulping for air.

Yeah the aggro is a likely part in all this. Seeing a mob go for the staff ele, because he apparently has more toughness than the warrior in the mobs face with a melee weapon, is just loopy. People will instinctively put on more defensive gear while leveling in this game, but if they then take that into a group scenario they suddenly become a mob magnet.

siphon/leech is always iffy, as it makes the attacker stronger at the expense of the defender. This means that the defender has to not only go through the attackers original health, but also his own depending on how much he gets hit.

Usually this is balanced by the attacker having little else to go on for healing. But that is not the case for GW2.

Never mind that the necromancer also have Death Shroud to fall back on. I think there is a thread on the necro forum demonstrating that DS can be quite effective if played more like a block/dodge ability (pop DS to absorb a incoming hit, and instantly drop it again). but that was done while DS would still absorb the full damage of a hit that would take it below 0%.

Nokaru.7831:

yayuuu.9420:

What’s the difference? It sucks anyway that it is possible to solo 111111 this boss while afk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNMltxyvAvo

Wow, you can solo a boss while afk? And they’re seriously nerfing Berserker gear and not Cleric’s????

Sarcasm? I am not sure if this would be possible with any other profession and boss combo. The SQ’s gimmick is poison and immobilize, no? And the build specifically cleanse conditions when a certain number of them is reached. Also, it is using just about every last passive heal available.

The 1223 HP here do not ad many percentages to the overall healing output.

Retaliation, like confusion, changes massively from PVE to PVP thanks to how rapidly characters attack compared to mobs.

Engineers, like elementalists, are pretty much balanced around their large toy chest of skills. End result is that each individual skill is not as potent as those found in other professions. Meaning that to reach the same performance as other professions, the engineer has to be played more like a piano and less like a washboard.

1. I get the distinct impression that the GW2 balance team is preoccupied with chasing SPVP corner cases. Meaning that they are looking for individual skills, and combinations of such, that can be “OP” in the hands of someone with a high APM and stone cold concentration.

2. I would love to see the CVS log for the code dealing with this signet, as the changes to the massive reeks of two devs doing changes without talking to each other. One removing the siphon effects, another putting in the ICD. Even the guys doing the video demo seemed surprised at the low numbers they were seeing, making me wonder if there is a breakdown of communications within Arenanet.

Faster paced in PVP perhaps, PVE mobs seems designed to drag the fight out unless you go wall to wall DPS.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Something I noticed with stun breakers is that they don’t work. The reason why they don’t work is largely due to the amount of consecutive stun in the game. Classes run a lot of CC, and in group environments it isn’t uncommon to have multiple stuns layered on a player over and over again.

But… I would make it so stun breaks give at least short duration stability, regardless of whether or not they are used under an actual stun. This gives players the ability to actively counter CC, instead of just reacting to being hit by it.

This! So much this! Stun breaking is broken due to all the chain-stuns. This really needs to be fixed for pvp, wvw and pve. There’s currently no limit to the amount of CC that can be layered on top of a single target. This literally turns then player into a helpless ping-pong ball, unable to do anything, until they die.

With the massive irony that ANet knows this, and gave big mobs Defiant…

The problem with grenades are that they change the performance by adding projectiles. No other skill in the game have a trait that works this way (that i can think of right now). This means that the performance of the individual projectile is hampered.

Baclavaman.9054:

- Weapon skill swap, this one might be a little more subtle but will have a huge role to play as you keep on reading. Warrior greasword skill number 2 " hundred blades", simply having the ability swap it to slot 3, 4 and 5. On its own its not a huge thing but it is more customization in a way if you choose to use it.

Not going to happen. I suspect ANet took player agility and reflexes into account when they designed the skill layouts for the weapons. Heck they moved some of the guardian GS or hammer skills around soon after launch, because people could just hit keys in sequence and get of a complete combo.

I guess it is their idea of “promoting skill”.

What may be a more probable option would be for each weapon skill to have variants. Meaning that you could bring up a menu for each skill, and select between variants of the skill with various parameters changed (knockback turned into knockdown and so on).

Not sure if the fields last long enough for this to matter, but it would not harm if it was a client side option.

Less skills may have made things easier to balance, but then they made many of the skills multi-use.

Take engineer shield for instance. Each of the two skills have multiple uses. #4 is a projectile reflect, a knock back, and a blast finisher. #5 is a block, a piercing boomerang projectile stun, and a 100% projectile finisher.

End result is that to balance these skills they have to take each of the uses into account, never mind how they may interact with other skills.

RedStar.4218:

Didn’t PvE confusion got caught into that too ? Sorry, didn’t pay too much attention on this since my characters don’t really cause confusion and I don’t attack too much when I have it.

If so the wiki is out of date, as it still lists PVE confusion as being twice as a strong as PVP confusion.

RedStar.4218:

Some skills already have slight differences in PvE and sPvP. As for WvW, that won’t happen.

Dunno. WVW confusion follows SPVP rather than PVE. At launch it followed PVE, but it was quickly changed to SPVP after complaints about how much damage it did.

Teniz.5249:

Yeh a pvp skin locker would be cool but wheres the gem profit with bank / bag slots then?
It would decrease so i think this will never be implemented… unfortunately

There is still the transmutation consumables.

There was talk that hinted towards the ability to bring skins from one game mode (SPVP/PVE) into the other. The recent changes towards phasing out glory from SPVP was a first step towards this supposedly.

VOLKON.1290:

digiowl.9620:

VOLKON.1290:

digiowl.9620:

VOLKON.1290:

Tolmos.8395:

Don’t forget that shift+tab goes backwards. I usually just tab spam until I get who I want, and if I miss him then a quick shift+tab puts me back where I need. Adds no more than 1-1.5 seconds before I’m ready to start shooting again.

It also seems to involve where your camera is facing, so I almost always point my camera right at who I want to target. Of course, I could be mistaken there and just pointlessly moving my camera… but meh, makes me feel better lol

You can also just simply click on your target as well.

Yeah right. For some reason we can click friendlies even tho we have no friendly targeted skills to use. So once you have more than 2-3 entities milling about, selecting that one target you want, while keeping yourself out of harms way, ends up being a pixel hunt that will drive a adventure game fanatic to rampage.

Well, I do ok at it in WvW, probably just a matter of getting used to not relying solely on the auto-target features.

Zerg blob or roamers? The latter seems to spread out more than your typical zerg or mob group.

Large number open field combat. On my mesmer I try to stay out of the heart of the combat and choose targets within it to place Feedbacks, phantasms, etc.

Ah yes, i was wondering if ti should include a third option “staying on the edge of the fight and snipe”.

What i do if i end up at a zerg vs boss PVE event. But that is not because i want to, but because i find it lessens my frustration with the targeting system.

In a sense, every one of us is a mercenary roaming around Tyria.

It will always be impossible to balance PVE and PVP as one unless we can come up with an AI that plays like a human without melting the server cluster.

So it seems that those that find the game “easy” are those that able to maintain a kite without the UI getting in the way somehow (higher inherent APM perhaps?).

Wondrouswall.7169:

Wouldn’t mind seeing Tool Kit’s auto attack reworked to be like Warrior’s Axe auto. At the moment the auto is too slow to be worth anything. Triple bashing with a wrench for fun, yeah, one can dream.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Fixer_Upper

That is pretty much the weapon in hand when the tool kit is equipped.

DeceiverX.8361:

I think it’s because they want to secretly make all classes deal low-medium damage hits and have medium-high armor and health pools to draw out long fights.

Seeing as the past changes and the upcoming ones appear to be emphasizing the nerf of burst and buffing long, passive gameplay.

That would be a complete 180 on their stated goal at launch, where they wanted fights to be quick and decisive (in SPVP at least, crap if i know with the PVE mob health pools) so to make a more exciting spectator experience…

Supposedly they want to avoid GW1 style splits, because it made going from PVE to PVP confusing for newbies.

Perhaps they should make the champ bags rotate between zones on a weekly basis? Or introduce something else for the L80s to lust for that can only be found in x zones on a temporary basis?

VOLKON.1290:

digiowl.9620:

VOLKON.1290:

Tolmos.8395:

Don’t forget that shift+tab goes backwards. I usually just tab spam until I get who I want, and if I miss him then a quick shift+tab puts me back where I need. Adds no more than 1-1.5 seconds before I’m ready to start shooting again.

It also seems to involve where your camera is facing, so I almost always point my camera right at who I want to target. Of course, I could be mistaken there and just pointlessly moving my camera… but meh, makes me feel better lol

You can also just simply click on your target as well.

Yeah right. For some reason we can click friendlies even tho we have no friendly targeted skills to use. So once you have more than 2-3 entities milling about, selecting that one target you want, while keeping yourself out of harms way, ends up being a pixel hunt that will drive a adventure game fanatic to rampage.

Well, I do ok at it in WvW, probably just a matter of getting used to not relying solely on the auto-target features.

Zerg blob or roamers? The latter seems to spread out more than your typical zerg or mob group.

Naevius.3185:

So really, all they can do is to buff the defensive stats to make them more attractive. Maybe vitality should reduce condition duration, for example.

And that won’t happen unless they make SPVP and WVW their own games fully.

Sakri.7234:

Instead of nerfing zerker, they should have boosted cond dmg and cc. With the current mechanics, they are next to useless in PVE. And generally people hate nerfs. They should instead boost weaker options. People like to see heroes growing stronger over time, not the other way around. Basic psychology, anet.

ANet, in its infinite “wisdom”, made CC do double duty. First it interrupts, second it CCs. As such it is tuned for interruption over CC, as if it was a fighting game combo breaker.

And this goes for a whole lot of skills in this game. They are designed to have multiple uses, and balanced as such. End result more often than not is that their up front usage is held back by some alternative and situational usage, that the balance devs seems to deem potentially OP.

And the “genius” behind this seems to be Izzy…

Inimicus.7162:

Tolmos.8395:

A second targeting mode that gave you cross hairs and allowed you to attack whatever direction you were facing would pretty much make this game AMAZING for me. =D

This does exist but it’s hidden, clunky and generally not worth trying… if you auto fire a ranged weapon without a target, the game lines up the shot with your camera position and your character’s chest to make an old fashioned “iron sights” line up. Problem is that the camera has mobility issues with walls and ground and your view for such shots is limited further by any bushes and other such things the camera can move through but not look through

Nope. It will fire in the direction of the character, unless you happen to have any kind of valid target within 1200 range, with valid LOS, and somewhat close to center of screen. At that point the shot will go done the screen center (or close to it). Outside of those conditions, the character will go pew pew in whatever direction he or she is facing.

VOLKON.1290:

Tolmos.8395:

Don’t forget that shift+tab goes backwards. I usually just tab spam until I get who I want, and if I miss him then a quick shift+tab puts me back where I need. Adds no more than 1-1.5 seconds before I’m ready to start shooting again.

It also seems to involve where your camera is facing, so I almost always point my camera right at who I want to target. Of course, I could be mistaken there and just pointlessly moving my camera… but meh, makes me feel better lol

You can also just simply click on your target as well.

Yeah right. For some reason we can click friendlies even tho we have no friendly targeted skills to use. So once you have more than 2-3 entities milling about, selecting that one target you want, while keeping yourself out of harms way, ends up being a pixel hunt that will drive a adventure game fanatic to rampage.