Guild Wars 2

Hrrrmn. It’s obscure whether the Infinity Ball player character is claiming that he or she invented the steam creatures, or whether his or her ‘creations’ were an improvement on Scarlet’s original design. The stuff in the Living Story seasons seems to indicate that Scarlet invented them rather than reverse-engineering some she picked up from Lornar’s Pass.

That said, I think it is canon that all of the story arcs happened, suggesting that there are at least fifteen heroes… however, only one of them is the Dragonslayer. The others either died off before they got there or became lesser Pact officers.

Shield I think is okay as is. I wouldn’t complain if it gets a short projectile reflect on SoJ, but I don’t see it as being needed either.

Cleansing Flame I think, at minimum, should be able to hit five targets instead of three, and should have some self-cleansing involved. It’s crazy that a skill that is basically a flamethrower is only able to hit as many targets as swinging a sword, and that breathing out a stream of, well, cleansing flame doesn’t help in cleansing yourself at all. I can understand if they don’t want every pulse to cleanse on the guardian, but it should at least give something to the user. A straight up DPS increase would be gravy, but not my top priority.

With RoJ… well, it’s clearly not the GW1 RoJ. That’s… actually something I’m content to remain the same. I’d probably be more inclined to up the projectile speed and improve its other characteristics rather than reworking it entirely.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

That feels a bit too recent of an event for Balthazar to have learned so much about the secret ongoings of Tyria (Lazarus’ state of being particularly). Possible, though.

But honestly, I’d think the Foefire is more likely tied to Dhuum. Endless ghostly torment and forced to relive their last day alive over and over for eternity sounds more like unjust god of death than the once-semi-just god of war.

Except that Dhuum hated any form of life after death, whether undeath or resurrection, so I don’t think he’d be pro-Foefire. More likely, he’d just want to consume all of those delicious souls. While Balthazar does have a history of converting spirits into warriors fighting in an eternal war.

Considering that the portal opened up into ‘somewhere in the Mists’, it’s possible that it has had an influence – maybe, for instance, the portal opened into the Fissure of Woe, and that ended up benefiting Menzies in some way that tipped the balance. You’re right in that the timeframe is pretty close, but there has been two years between the releases (and thus, by ArenaNet’s current policy, about two years had passed in Tyria as well) – it’s possible that that is enough.

For the majority, it does seem as if it’s a case of Pact Marshal, than Commanders, then the individual ranks of the orders and other organisations that have contributed to the Pact. There’s a good chance that somewhere there’s an ‘equivalency chart’, that shows what rank equals to what.

The Vigil, I’d imagine, is probably a bit more deeply integrated than the other orders. We see General Soulkeeper behaving as if she herself is a member of the Pact, even operating as acting Marshal after Trahearne’s death. This makes a lot of sense when you think about it – unlike the other orders, which have other goals and only prioritised the dragons when it became clear they were a potentially world-ending threat, the Vigil has been a dragon-fighting organisation from the start.

Regarding the Captains and Lieutenants that Aaron linked to: It’s worth noting that they’re all members of an Order, who presumably would have Order ranks. I’m going into the realm of speculation here, but it’s possible that the Pact needs a means to promote people within the Pact even if the organisation that individual belongs to (be it one of the orders, an allied military organisation, or whatever) does not consider them ready to be promoted. Having their own ranks means that the Pact can thus promote people without stepping on the toes of the order or military they came from.

For instance, if we imagine that the Pact considers a particular Agent to be ready for a greater degree of responsibility, but the Order of Whispers isn’t ready to promote them yet. If we consider that Captain is equivalent to Lightbringer, the Pact cannot promote them to Lightbringer (only the OoW can do that), but can promote them to Captain. This would mean that, in Pact operations, the Captain would have the same rank and responsibility as a Warmaster, Lightbringer, and Magister, but only when acting as part of the Pact. When acting with the Order of Whispers, they’re still a mere Agent (which could be, in part, because they might have got a lot of military experience but may not have the covert operations experience that would be expected of a Lightbringer).

That’s all supposition, though. About all we can probably say with certainty is that Captain is lower than Commander, and Lieutenant is probably lower than Captain.

Feanor.2358:

You can explain epic-scale feats with the effort of unknown group or device, but you’ll have hard time motivating that. What story purpose do they serve? Why show us an epic feat in the first place, if it has a pretty mundane explanation?

1) Because, having known the mundane reasons why Jennah could pull off such a feat for years, the writers didn’t consider it to be that epic.

2) Because ArenaNet did not want to have to deal with the complexities they did with Lion’s Arch – again - and needed a reason for the White Mantle to be unable to simply bombard Divinity’s Reach into rubble.

3) Because we were not the people who were intended to draw conclusions – Logan was.

4) Because the writers realised how much they’d overcompensated in making sure that humanity didn’t hog the spotlight in GW2, and coming into what is looking like it might be a more human-oriented storyline, they wanted to remind the players that humans were capable of being more than redshirts and victims.

Like I said, if an asura had done this, we would not be batting an eyelid.

I don’t think talking clones and mesmeric disguises are anything special, actually.

The latter is something we actually see a few times in the open world, granted by someone who doesn’t appear to be anything special other than just a mesmer. For the most recent example, the Fort Evennia heart, but there are other examples as well. Wouldn’t surprise me if, now that they’re introducing profession-specific things into story instances, we will at some stage have our own characters do that.

Regarding the former… we’re able to create clones that can cast spells that, while not particularly damaging directly, can make people bleed and suffer other maladies. Making a clone talk is probably not actually that difficult – it’s just not in the mechanics for our characters because, well, why would it be? A similar observation applies to Jennah’s clone at the Jubilee.

Keep in mind that the skills available to us normally are all combat-focused: what we can do as PCs is emphatically NOT the limit of what certain branches of magic are capable of. In some cases, it is shown that a particular spellcaster has an ability that would probably be overpowered to give to the PC at all – there is one point where Magister Sieran (an elementalist) flies under her own magical power, for instance.

When it comes to Jennah’s shields: NPCs seem to be able to generate more powerful shields than the PCs for reasons of plot. Story mode Citadel of Flames, for instance, has Logan single-handedly generating a shield that’s able to block a steady stream of rolling boulders from a superpowered Flame Legion imperator. While that shield covered a smaller area than the ‘city dome’, it possibly came under more pressure, since the White Mantle seemed to have given up on attacking Divinity’s Reach directly after the city dome went up.

Logan is very clearly a mortal human, yet Jennah’s city dome is not actually that much different except in area covered… and as noted in my previous post, she could easily have had help.

Panda.1967:

There is also the FACT that we were directly told by the devs that elite specializations would not be a direct improvement over the core, merely an alternative way to play the class.

Lets look at what we got out of that.

{cut for conciseness}

So out of every class, thiefs are the only ones who even came close to having an elite spec that isnt a direct improvement… with engineer as a close second due to the sheer uselessness of their function gyro.

You could follow that logic and claim thieves got a direct upgrade – a third dodge and additional effects on their dodge. Although they did gut Acrobatics to do that…

Something you’re forgetting in this analysis is that picking up an elite specialisation does carry an opportunity cost: the third core specialisation you could have had otherwise. While the benefits of the core specialisations may not be as overt as changing up your profession mechanic, they are there, and some of them are quite good to have. An elite specialisation doesn’t need to have an explicit downside to taking the specialisation, like you seem to be asking for: the downside is that you don’t have the traitline that you would have had if you hadn’t taken the elite spec.

You do briefly raise this on the revenants, only to dismiss it on the basis that each traitline is tied to a given legend. However, revenant players can and do run traitlines that are associated with a legend they’re not running. Retribution has been a popular one in PvP for extra durability, for instance, as is running Devastation for additional damage in raids. I’ve also seen builds that run a particular legend while eschewing the traitline for that legend.

Whether the balance is right is another question, but we have seen core builds run in high-end play, and rebalancing since HoT released has been gradually shifting the balance so that the core specs are more desirable in comparison. On the whole, the elite specs probably are still just a little bit better on average than the core traitline that you’re giving up to have them, but the claim that there are no tradeoffs to taking an elite specialisation is patently false.

First, in the interests of full disclosure, from a mechanical perspective I hate ground-targeted autoattacks. Either you’re having to click multiple times for each attack, or you need to set up your interface with one of the quick ground targeting options, which can make it more awkward to place some of the other ground-targeted skills.

That aside, though, my primary consideration is lore-based:

To me, having Spirit Rift being an autoattack just feels like it’s making it seem too easy. Opening rifts should be dangerous. In the lore, opening rifts and portals carries the risk of dangerous creatures coming through, permanently weakening the fabric of reality in that location so that rifts might start opening spontaneously, and other unintended consequences.

For a skilled Ritualist, opening one small rift at a time and giving both themselves and the veil time to recover before doing it again, it makes sense that they’re able to ward off the dangers. Opening them willy-nilly, though, should be asking for trouble. First, because opening them casually like that seems like it would mean that the ritualist is treating it more like a ‘fire and forget’ skill and isn’t concentrating as much on what they’re doing, and thus is more likely to make a mistake. Second, because it’s putting more pressure on the fabric of reality, making it more likely that a permanent weakening of the veil or even a permanent tear occurs. Third, because opening a rift at autoattack rate is likely to result in overlapping rifts, and in most settings where rifts can happen, overlapping rifts is typically bad karma – they’re likely to merge and grow into something unstable.

This, I think, is what distinguishes Spirit Rift from other short-recharge skills from GW1 that were made into autoattacks in GW2, such as Chain Lightning and Fireball. While all magic is dangerous to the uninitiated, elemental magic is something where it makes sense that there’d be a point where you can throw it casually without much risk of it doing something unexpected. Messing around with the barrier between Tyria and the Mists, though, should not be treated as something you do with a click of the fingers (or the shroud equivalent).

I get that you’re looking to bring Renewing Blast back, but an old trait being reintroduced doesn’t necessarily have to work the same way, and any trait introduced for an elite specialisation shroud skill only needs to be compatible with that elite specialisation, which probably opens other possibilities. Broadly speaking, though, if the elite specialisation only gets one shroud, I’d prefer it not to have a ground-targeted autoattack. If some means of having multiple shrouds is implemented, then there is the potential for a healing-oriented shroud to have a ground-targeted heal autoattack… but this does not need to be Spirit Rift when the GW1 ritualist had so many healing skills that could be drawn on for inspiration. In fact, exposing your allies to all of the potential dangers I mentioned above seems like it would be a very poor choice for healing them.

This isn’t the first time this theory has come up.

To summarise my response:

Personally, I can’t help feel that the real reason this theory is coming up is because in Guild Wars 2 we’ve grown so used to humans being the cosmic punching bag that when we do see a human doing something impressive, people start thinking that the only explanation is that she’s not human. Imagine if an asura had done this? We’d assume that said hypothetical asura was just activating some sort of device, right?

How do we know Jennah doesn’t have such a device? Humans have shown in the past that they have access to, and even the ability to create, magical devices that rival those of the asura. Off the top of my head, there’s the teleporter between Nolani and Drasciir, Stormcaller, God’s Vengeance (at Fort Aspenwood) and on a smaller scale, the obelisks. In fact, unlike asura technology, human magical artifacts generally don’t look like they’re obviously magical, so Jennah could have a magical force-field generating device hidden in plain sight. That whole central dome could have been enchanted to be a giant shield generator all along for all we know. There have been threads in the past that have expressed the opinion that Divinity’s Reach is terribly designed for a fortress-city – however, if the physical defences are reinforced by magical defences built into the architecture, that changes the equation. Even without a specific device, the Scepter of Orr is still unaccounted for, but last we knew it was in the possession of an ally of the royal family…

Given that Jennah said that she had ‘made preparations’, this is not something she just pulled up on a whim. Having enchantments put in place by her coterie of mesmers (if Jennah and Anise don’t control, or at least heavily influence, the Mesmer Collective, I would be very surprised) that she could trigger on short notice would explain her being able to do something that one person unaided would not be able to do. In fact, it’s possible that the ‘city bubble’ wasn’t something that was achieved and maintained by mesmer magic alone: while it initially appears purple, when you look at it from Lake Doric, there are patches of mesmer purple and guardian blue. It may be a cooperative effort of all the mesmers and guardians in the Shining Blade, with Jennah starting it off, and her supporters being ready to reinforce it with their own power once she did. (There is precedence for multiple casters cooperating to generate and maintain a shield in Sea of Sorrows.)

Finally, are we really sure that the dome is outside the realm of what an exceptionally powerful mortal can do? Sure, ‘city dome’ isn’t in the list of skills available to player character mesmers, but neither is ‘dispel the Nightmare Tower screen’. The PC is one of the most potent fighters in Tyria in small-group situations, but the PC is not the best at everything. If you go through Tyria’s history, there are plenty of cases of humans performing impressive feats of magic even in periods where magic was much less powerful than it is today: Koro Sagewind, Tahmu, and many of the heroes in Tahnnakai Temple, for instance. One could possibly even include some of the champions we see in dungeons, bounties, and dotted around the map. As a member of the royal line, in fact, it is Jennah’s hereditary has granted her above-average magical potential: there is precedent to royal blood being magically significant (namely, Shiro needing to claim the lifeblood of a member of the Canthan imperial family to regain his physical body).

Therefore, I reject the idea that the only explanation for Jennah’s power is that she is not human. There are three alternative, and I think, more likely explanations: First, that she used a magical device. Second, that the dome was a group effort, and we just didn’t see her support coterie. Third, that some exceptional humans simply are capable of pulling off great feats, and this is just the first time we’ve seen it happening onscreen rather than reading about it in histories. Or it could even be a combination of two or three of the above.

To be fair, the distinction there is probably that the Commander is confident that (s)he could handle anything that Estelle might try to pull… particularly in a public location where any fight that did break out would be quickly responded to and the instigator arrested. Physically attacking Estelle would have ended the investigation there and then.

Lazarus was a different situation – the Commander says to Marjory in Episode 2 that putting Lazarus down wouldn’t be easy (not the precise words, but that’s the gist), so the Commander is probably looking to get every advantage they can, including surprise. There’s also no third party around to intervene on behalf of whoever is struck first, so nothing is lost by striking first except the opportunity to talk. And, as previously noted, the Commander seemed to feel that Lazarus had already taken hostile actions by hijacking the gate.

Could talking have lead to a better outcome? Possibly. It might also have lead to a worse outcome. Either way, I don’t think it’s a case of the Commander having changed so much as using a different tactic for a different situation.

Sarrs.4831:

I think they should make one direct change to the pips rewards:
1st place: 5 pips
2nd place: 4 pips
3rd place: 3 pips

The only real issue with the system imo is that it is so intimidating to lower-ranked players that they don’t want to bother trying. This will allow them to make actually noticable gains without relying on Outmanned.

I don’t think anything else needs changes.

Outmanned is an issue, but it’s not because it gives 5 pips. Outmanned needs to be redesigned to only reward players who have been on the map for at least one tick. It is a key system that is implemented at such a high weight to reward playing on low-pop servers.

The problem is that part of the idea is to attract players to outmanned maps.

One solution there could be to require that the last time the player earned participation be on the map. So the ‘switch at the last moment’ brigade don’t get anything, but, say, someone who switches at the 4 minute mark and flips a camp at the 2 minute mark gets rewarded.

This could be combined with the idea of Najten and TheWolf, so that you don’t lose the outmanned bonus because someone came in at the last moment, as long as you earned participation while the bonus was active.

The system will require a reworking so that Outmanned is practically required for a new player to get any tickets at all, though.

Sarrs.4831:

2. Most of the price is behind Memories of Battle whose price has been inflated by speculation. Give it a bit of time to settle.

I suspect this is a big part of it. Furthermore, from what I’ve seen browsing the prices, it’s likely that in the long term, claim tickets and not Memories of Battle are going to prove to be the limiting factor in acquiring the new items, and when people realise that we’re going to see memories going back to being a means of earning money off PvE players looking to craft precursors.

Daddicus.6128:

There is, however, some higher levels of toxicity as the map population goes up. I think this is because the elite players tend to think that if you’re on a fully-populated map, then you had better darned well be doing the meta. And, they can get very toxic if you continue to ask for help (on a fuller map) while they’re busy doing “their” meta. I understand the sentiment, but it’s NOT “their” map, and they treat it like it is.

I’ve had a bit of experience with this in the first place. People doing the meta get really uppity about people trying to do a hero point run or the like when meta time approaches, and insist that they stop what they’re doing and go to another map, sometimes complaining about the ‘awful timing’. The problems with this are:

1) Organising a meta map often starts about half an hour before even the pre-event portions of the meta start. This means that ‘meta time’ can be half of the total cycle. This can leave precious little time for a hero train to complete the map, particularly since some hero points are hard to get to without completing certain events first.

2) Because of the way the megaserver system works, the HP train may well be the reason that the map in question was still open rather than having been closed, and hence why it was there to get populated by people looking to do the meta. The trainers didn’t choose to train on a meta map – instead, the meta group is gathering in their map because they were there keeping the map open in the first place. This is particularly obvious when you have a map where the various camp/pylon events were not progressed (unless needed to by the train) but suddenly you have a mass of meta players demanding the trainers leave.

3) Many trains are only a handful of people. Half a dozen people should not decide whether the meta succeeds or fails.

4) With the consideration that the next expansion may be as little as five months away, for some players stocking up on hero points may well be more important to them than another run at the loot.

Personally, though, I blame ArenaNet for putting hero points that are balanced for groups on maps that have a meta that requires most of the population to participate in to succeed. Tangled Depths seems particularly toxic in this regard – which is probably a function of the meta providing very little reward for a failed attempt while being one of the hardest metas in HoT. If the hero points had been on maps that were more like the Living Season maps that do not have such demanding metas, there wouldn’t be a problem. If the hero points were soloable (or at least, soloable after the meta had progressed far enough) then there also wouldn’t be a problem: Dragon’s Stand is a good example of this. Maps with an ‘all hands on deck’ style meta probably should just have soloable hero points on them, while group hero points should probably be kept on maps which do not have such demanding meta-events, where a bunch of people running around hitting all the hero points in turn will not interfere with the meta.

Go ask the Elementalist forum what they think about delayed effect skills. Wear something fire-resistant. :P

A skill with recharge <10s or so in GW1 is a suitable candidate to be an autoattack in GW2, as shown in, for instance, Fireball. My thinking, though, is less based on what Spirit Rift was and more about what it should be. The theme is that you’re tearing kitten in the barrier between Tyria and the Mists, causing an explosion of destructive energy to spew out. To me, this feels more like a high-impact skill that you throw occasionally that really hurts if the enemy doesn’t do anything to avoid it, rather than an autoattack that you throw every second to wear the enemy down. (In that vein, I see a pulsing area attack as being fitting – it’s not the same mechanics, granted, but it represents a spirit rift which remains open for a period of time, rather than releasing a burst of energy and collapsing immediately.)

A bolt of Mists energy in the form of teal lightning, as seen in skills like Channeled Strike, Essence Strike, Spirit Boon Strike, or Spirit Burn, is, I think, more appropriate as a generic autoattack.

Regarding the pattern of shroud skills… as a friend of mine who works in statistics says, it’s the third time that sets the trend. We really don’t have a particularly large sample size to determine whether the characteristics of the current shroud skills will be maintained.

Skill 2, for instance, has been a movement skill up to now, but we don’t know if that’s because ArenaNet has decided that skill 2 will always be a movement skill, or whether it’s just because that suited both shrouds: Reaper Shroud, being melee, obviously wants a gap-closer, and Death Shroud, having been originally designed as a compromise that tried to be suitable both in melee and at range, also gets a gap-closer. A future shroud that’s ranged-focused might not have a mobility skill on slot 2. It just needs a skill that’s compatible with the effect of the Path of Corruption trait. This could be, for instance, a skill that strikes in a line.

Skill 3 has involved fear up to now, but there’s no guarantee it will in the future. We’ve started with the generic ‘death’ shroud, which involves fear, and reaper mechanics were apparently inspired by horror movie antagonists, so fear makes sense there. Future shrouds might not be so fear-oriented, or may not have it on skill 3 even if they are.

Skill 4… really does have to be a channel skill to fit with Transfusion. That probably can’t be avoided.

Skill 5 – to me, the similarities between Tainted Shackles and Executioner’s Scythe are so great that taking the one thing they have in common – that each applies an effect that prevents movement at the climax of the skill – seems like it might be purely coincidence rather than a deliberate thematic link on ArenaNet’s part. One is a channeling effect that applies a condition over time, the other is an attack with a long activation time that deals significant damage in an area and leaves behind a combo field. It just happens that one applies an immobilise, the other applies a stun, and both have the effect of preventing movement. To be honest, I’d be more surprised if two skills with so many components didn’t have at least one that they shared. If the next shroud also has a skill 5 that prevents movement, we might have established a trend, but at present, it could just be coincidence.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Tanner Blackfeather.6509:

Exactly what are you suggesting to change in their functionality? Because I can’t see any effective change, just a rename to potion

Currently, writs of experience can’t be used on lv80 characters.

Which was probably done so people couldn’t insta-level their core masteries when HoT launched, but it’s probably redundant now. Any established account is going to either have their core masteries maxed out by now or be limited by mastery points rather than by experience, and any new account isn’t going to have that stockpile. Just make it grant a set amount of experience and have done with it, I think.

Mind you, that isn’t the current topic, but it probably is tangentially relevant.

Well, being compatible with Dhuumfire is simply a question of “does it strike the enemy? Yes? Then it’s compatible.” Whether this is actually a good move depends on other factors. I just like the symmetry of a bolt of Mists lightning (most Channeling offensive skills) turning into Spirit Burn if combined with Dhuumfire. It’s a nice tie-in to the past.

Regarding Spirit Rift: To me, punching kitten in reality over somebody’s head that allows the unbridled energy of the untamed Mists to explode in their face doesn’t feel like something that should be spammed every second for autoattack levels of damage. To me, that feels more like a high-impact move that the Ritualist should only be able to do every so often, but if the enemy doesn’t get out of the way it’s going to hurt. Guild Wars 1’s five-second recharge is, I think, probably the minimum interval it should have between uses.

In Guild Wars 1, its characteristics were such that it achieved high damage with a short cooldown, but this was balanced against the enemy being able to avoid the damage by getting out of the way. However, I don’t think this is a great mechanic for Guild Wars 2, since it would be hard to balance both for PvP (where targets are usually more mobile than they were in Guild Wars 1) and PvE raids (there are bosses which are essentially sessile for long periods of time if the raid team is doing their job, which would allow something like the classic Spirit Rift to pour on the damage). We see this with staff elementalist – top DPS in raids, almost unseen in sPvP because people just get out of the way of the high-damage attacks.

So to get the proper feel of a spirit rift, I think we’d be looking at a pulsing AoE, like Chaos Storm or a tempest overload. This could possible build up to a final blast (as Well of Calamity does) but it does put it in the territory of really needing at least a 10s recharge – and the longer the recharge is, the more dangerous it can be made. Putting it in skill slot 5 makes it the equivalent of Executioner’s Scythe – if you take that to the face, you will NOT be a happy camper.

Incidentally, with respect to the possibility of putting it into slot 4 – using a mechanic similar to tempest overloads could work there. While you’re channeling, you retain enough control over the opening rift that if you have the trait, you can summon waves of healing energy through the rift. Once you’ve finished channeling, the rift remains in place until it closes again – but since you’re no longer directly controlling it, you can no longer cause it to emanate healing energy for your allies. (Now, I’m not saying that this is necessarily the best way to implement Spirit Rift into GW2, but it is a workable possibility.)

I agree with everything Zaxares said. It’s also nice to see an answer to afk farmers that works by giving incentive to play actively. Personally, I’d probably prefer to see things rejigged so you earned rewards from what you did directly rather than simply building up participation and then spending the time, but as long as that’s the system (and maybe it needs to be, for scouts getting participation sharing) then I think people should be able to sit in Obsidian Sanctum as their participation ticks down after they’re done.

One observation I’d also make is that I feel that placing all the tickets at the end of a tier was a mistake. They seem to have just copied over the ranked sPvP system, where such a system makes sense – you’ve got eight weeks before your pips reset, and having the majority of the rewards at the end of a tier gives you incentive to strive to reach that point, and once you do then, depending on how you’re feeling, you can either bow out for that season or start pushing for the next tier.

In the World versus World context, however, the pips get reset every week. Getting any tickets at all, then, requires making enough of an investment, per week, to hit the wooden chest. If, for whatever reason, you’re getting low pips, this can be a significant barrier for entry for people to basically get anywhere at all, and an even more significant barrier to keeping going once you’ve got an end-tier chest. (if you’ve just gone through 100 pips at 1-3 pips per tick, you’re probably not going to be enthusiastic about committing to another 150…)

My proposal would be to make it so that some of the pips in the end chest get redistributed to the earlier chests in a tier, in a 20%-20%-20%-40% arrangement. This means that the final chest is still something worth going for, but it’s not an all-or-nothing proposal: if, for whatever reason, you’re in the middle of a tier when reset happens, you’ve still earned something from that tier.

Ghotistyx.6942:

Spirit Weapons don’t need a ton of changes to have a niche.

• Spirit Weapons should stay alive until killed like most Necro minions (i.e. not dying on a timer).
• Swap the knockdown and knockback effects on Hammer so that the knockback is the active.
• Swap the active and passive actions on Shield so that the bubble is the active and the bouncing projectile is the auto attack.
• Have the Bow target enemies and deal at least a small amount of damage+a defensive condition. Let the arrows either bounce or pierce targets while retaining the current functionality when the arrows pass through an ally. The Shield could instead get the piercing projectile if the Bow bounces.

Really that’s it, and Spirit Weapons will not only have a niche, but multiple builds that could revolve around the skill type. Power, Condi, AH, Support and any permutation of those would be potential routes. Such a SW Guardian could function just like an MM necro currently does, which isn’t to say that MM necro is necessarily optimal, but they at least have a purpose unlike Spirit Weapons.

I’m not sure about swapping the active and passive on the Shield, since the main drawcard for it historically has been projectile hate for as long as the shield lasts. Although I guess that ‘for as long as the shield lasts’ is the problem – if it doesn’t run out of time, it’ll just keep generating that bubble until the enemy manages to kill it.

Possibly the bubble could have a roughly 50% uptime if activated on recharge? This would give it roughly the same uptime as traited Wall of Reflection, but in shorter bursts. You also get a regular knockback, but this is balanced against the shield being destroyable.

Personally, I’d imagine Spirit Rift as being one of the big nuking skills, probably skill 4 or skill 5 (noting that skill 4 needs to be channeled in order for Transfusion to work). I’m viewing it as tearing a rift in the air through which a storm of Mists energy emerges (probably in the form of teal lightning, if we keep to the historical ritualist aesthetic).

For the autoattack, I’d probably go with Essence Strike, hitting the target with a bolt of Mists energy, possibly being a no-projectile line attack similar to Spatial Surge in behaviour. This would also have the advantage of turning into Spirit Burn if you have Dhuumfire traited. :P

As well as skill 4 needing to be channeled as noted above, skill 2 also needs to be something that strikes an enemy so it can work with Path of Corruption.

One balancing factor for having multiple shrouds is for them to all share the same pool of life force, and to have a ‘default’ one for Foot in the Grave. Even with this, though, you’d probably have to balance them so that each is individually weaker than regular Death Shroud, requiring an elementalist-like juggling act to get the most out of them. Personally, I think it would be better to just have one really unique shroud. That said,when we do actually see the new tome mechanics we may have a better idea of what ArenaNet thinks about these things.

Love the brutal honesty of steps 12-15…

It’s good to see some of the ‘staples’ going in. One of the things that’s been holding me back from even really getting started on scribing is ending up with a pile of things that I really don’t want to just get rid of, but where it might be a long time before I actually use them. Leveling up cooking left me with enough of those to begin with. Making some of the cooking staples easier to store is going to make things quite a bit easier on its own, and the scribing staples being in will mean I can actually get started without my inventory getting stuffed. Looking forward to it!

Regarding the ritualist and engineer:

ArenaNet have said a few times that the ritualist was basically the engineer playstyle in the Guild Wars context. The original articles from 2006 are hard to find nowadays, but here’s one a little more recent. (You’ll need to search for ‘ritualist’ – it’s a long interview.)

Regarding urns – urns were basically bundle items you could summon. Kits, conjured weapons, and the things rangers get from Forage are, basically, bundle items you can summon. Thief stolen skills work a bit differently, but think about it: a steal skill where, instead of stealing an item and then using it once, you get to control which skill you have and how often you can use it is limited by recharge… is basically describing a toolbelt skill.

Granted, the more bomb-like urns are probably most closely modeled as individual skills… like, say, the bombs from a bomb kit. Those you hang onto while using other skills, however, are more like a bundle you hold onto and attack with while benefiting from the effect of the bundle. Elementalist conjures are the closest to those in GW2 mechanics, but kits come a close second.

When it comes to weapon spells: Weapon spells are basically repackaged enchantments, and enchantments as a group were killed from GW2. So I don’t think anything could be read from them not having an equivalent in the engineer. Granted, before the engineer was formally announced, I was expecting them to get skills which allowed them to pass grenades and bombs to their allies, which didn’t happen in the end, which could be seen as an equivalent. At present, though, the only thing even vaguely close in mechanic is, again, elementalist weapon conjures.

When it comes to the necromancer and it’s supposed selfishness: I don’t think that’s the case. Or, possibly more accurately, I don’t think it was intended to be. One of out first introductions to the GW2 necromancer, if not the first introduction, was Killeen in Ghosts of Ascalon, where at one point she uses necromantic magic to heal an ally. That interview I linked also has a section where they talk about how orphaned monk players might find a new home in the necromancer, as an alternative to the more obvious choices of guardian and elementalist (search for ‘necromancer’, it’s the first hit in the interview).

And the evidence is there if you look for it. Staff is a supportive weapon (as support options stand in the pre-Druid days). A couple of wells are supportive. Blood Magic is essentially a support traitline, including a fast revive trait and the GW2 equivalent of Order of the Vampire. In practice, these tend to be underpowered or not taken, but that’s because of balancing, not indicative of the overall theme of the profession – particularly not that ArenaNet has deliberately changed the theme.

Furthermore, even if it was part of the necromancer theme to be selfish, one of the functions of elite specialisations is that they can take a profession out of its usual theme. After all, even if the ritualist had never existed, support spirits on necromancer would probably surprise people less than traps on guardian did.

When it comes to shroud and dervish… I made that connection as soon as reaper was announced. It’s pretty obvious.

However, the same nitpicks that you’re making on the engineer/ritualist comparison can be made there. Avatars do not influence your skills directly, they simply provide buffs, either passive buffs or buffs that trigger off using other skills. Shroud replaces your skillbar with the shroud skillbar. Shroud requires building up a special resource which is only used for shroud, avatars do not. Shroud gives you a second health bar, avatars do not (although Melandru gives you additional health). Shroud is something you swap into and out of regularly as long as you have the life force – avatars are something you’d have active permanently if you could (which you could in the final iteration if you don’t get interrupted while renewing the form – in earlier iterations, it had some downtime).

Personally, I think shroud is a better way of implementing the idea, but either way, the mechanics are very different.

That said, though, I wouldn’t be inclined to associate a shroud of a hypothetical ritualist elite spec to necromancer with urns. Instead, I’d see a ‘mists shroud’ as the ritualist drawing in the power of the Mists, becoming a living conduit that allows them to perform more powerful channeling magic than they can in their usual form. This would be where you’d see powerful nukes like Spirit Rift and Ancestor’s Rage, and/or, possibly, potent Mists-fuelled heals if it goes fully supportive in design.

If you like, you could consider this the GW2 equivalent of Avatar of Dwayna. :P

Each story step gives you a mastery point, so when the story tells you you need a mastery, it’s usually just given you the mastery point you need to unlock it. The only problem I could see there is the step that requires updraft mastery, as that requires two points. In that case, if you’ve been brashly spending all your points in other trees, you might have an issue… but it should also only take finding one more point to resolve it.

If this were a formal debate, there are two points of information I would raise:

First, when comparing weapons between professions, you need to consider the characteristics of the professions. Elementalists are inherently more vulnerable because they’re the profession with the lowest base health and armour, while warriors have the most. Taking this into account, the elementalist staff has still compromised survivability compared to warrior greatsword.

Second, condi necromancer uses ranged weapons because they don’t have a condi melee weapon. Mesmers are in a similar boat. Presently, these are top DPS purely because the balance between power and condi in raid situations is out of whack since the nerf to seaweed salad, creating a meta where the top DPS for any profession with a viable condi build is a condi build. If you don’t include consumables, the melee builds (for both) still do the most damage. This is probably why ArenaNet is planning to give guardian a condi weapon – so that in the future, they don’t get completely excluded in a condi-based meta.

My final arguments stand.

A better solution might be to dispense with linking rewards to time at all. Grant reward track progress, and pips, directly from the activities that earn participation in the first place. Participation remains, but it acts as a multiplier on the track progress you get for those activities, rather than something that gives you progress over time.

Because I can guarantee you, the people afking while their participation ticks out would probably be quite happy if that was no longer part of the WvW experience.

Jayne.9251:

No, I believe the intent is to finally reward folks who have been playing this mode WITHOUT rewards (for the first three years, and greens/blues afterwards) since launch.

I think it’s a bit of both, which is why WvW rank influences pips. The veterans can earn pips, and therefore the new shinies, much faster than people just coming in.

However, I think they also want to give people who wouldn’t normally WvW more of an incentive to do so. That incentive is going to dry up quickly if it becomes a case of ‘expect to to spend several hours per week to make any progress at all’, however.

Dadnir.5038:

Also, you can put it however you like, urns in guild wars 1 were not even close to kit in gw2. The dev at the moment where they said that probably meant that they intended to create a profession that gave the vibe of a ritualist. They probably never said themself : “Urns are kits!” or “Kit alike skills are meant to be urns in gw1!” .

I think, when comparing features of professions, you need to consider the different mechanics between the two games.

Guild Wars 1 had no concept of changing your skills according to your weapon – in fact, there were very few things that could change your skillbar once you left an outpost (mounts, norn elites, Kuunavang, and Dhuum are the only things I can come up with off the top of my head, and only one of those existed in Factions). Some skills on martial professions required that you use a particular weapon, but that was as far as it went – changing weapons wouldn’t change your skills, it just meant you couldn’t use the skills that required a different weapon. For spellcasting professions like the ritualist, the weapons you had in your hands pretty much only gave you an autoattack, bonus energy, and a few other minor buffs depending on the weapon.

In that context, using an urn was basically a process of trading the benefit you’d usually get from your weaponset with the benefit of the urn. In some cases, this was simply a matter of being able to ‘precast’ a spell that you could then use in combat by dropping the urn. Others would provide various buffs, such as boosting Health, boosting Energy, increasing the potency of your spells, steal health from foes striking you while holding the urn, and so on. At the most basic level, you’re trading the features of your weaponset with the features of the urn. (Some skills also had effects that were conditional on holding a bundle, although it didn’t really matter WHICH bundle. These could even be viewed as the urn equivalent to skills that require a specific weapon… sure, you COULD use these skills without holding a bundle, but they’re not really worthwhile.)

Now, in Guild Wars 2, the effect of what you have in your hands is more significant. Most significantly of all, it decides what the first five skills in your skillbar are – these are determined by the weaponset you’re holding, unless you’re holding a bundle of some form, in which case they are determined by the bundle. There are other effects of your weaponset, of course, but the primary benefit of your weaponset is the skills you provide.

In that context, what is the effect of equipping a kit? It’s trading a benefit you receive from your weapons with a benefit from the kit. Namely, trading the weapon skills with the kit skills. When Guild Wars 2 was released, the kits also had their own stats, which would replace the stats of your equipped weapon when you equipped the kits, but I’m pretty sure that’s no longer the case (although elementalist weapon conjures do provide the wielder with bonus stats on top of their weapon).

So, while it might not look like they’re very similar, when you look at what they actually do, they are pretty much as close to being equivalents as they can be given the very different mechanics of the two games. (Okay, that isn’t technically true: weapon conjures are a little closer). In fact, the urns that did damage when dropped were pretty much considered to be GW1 bombs.

(Keep in mind that ArenaNet have stated that the idea behind the ritualist was to bring an engineer playstyle into a fantasy setting that didn’t have enough technology for the traditional engineer. The ritualist mechanics are pretty much how they did engineer within the constraints of GW1. Engineer is how they do the same thing in GW2.)

A similar line of thinking, really, is needed to make the connection between reaper and dervish. Reaper is pretty obviously a transfer of Grenth dervish into GW2, but the mechanics of reaper shroud are very different to the mechanics of Avatar of Grenth, let alone the rest of the build!

Personally, if I designed a ritualist as an elite spec for necromancer (or any other profession, for that matter – necro is probably the best fit, but I could see arguments for attaching it to others), I’d probably be inclined to leave out the urns entirely – they’re not really iconic enough to try to squeeze into the limited design space of an elite spec. If I did include them, it’d be purely aesthetic (for instance, maybe placing spirits would be a matter of placing urns, with the spirit rising from the urn).

One thought I had in another thread is spread out the tournament ticket rewards, rather than having them only granted for the final chest for each tier. For instance, the wood track, instead of having 10 tickets all in the final chest, could have 2 tickets each per sub-chest and 4 for the final chest.

This is mostly directed at point #3, since it means that a player can still get something even if they’re not able to get to the final chest of a tier. However, it might also help with #1 somewhat, since at the moment to get anywhere as a newer player you really need to play the hunt-the-outnumbered-map game, which hinders seriously committing to any given map.

On that matter, the bonus for outnumbered really needs to be a lower proportion of the total potential pips for players with lower rank. In the worst case scenario – losing server, WvW rank below bronze level – finding an outnumbered server can be 83% of your pips. What I’d possibly do is make it so that you also get pips based on your current participation (so a player with participation level 5 will get a minimum of 6 pips), while the outnumbered bonus instead doubles the reward you get from your WvW rank. This means that:

a) Players are rewarded for high levels of participation, rather than maintaining the minimum while playing hunt-the-outnumbered-buff;
b) New players are encouraged to stick with a commander while learning the ropes;
c) It’s the vets who get the biggest benefit from switching maps to prop up an outnumbered server (which also helps #2)

Zalavaaris.5329:

The reason people haven’t been excited to play since day one is the weak reward system! Now that there are cool rewards people are saying that they should only be available to people who have been playing for YEARS. Ok…. so if there are no cool new rewards then the people who felt it wasn’t a rewarding use of their time to WvW will feel the same way and the game mode will stay dead. But at least you get some shiny particle effects on your non-legendary armor while the mode is dying. Makes sense to me.

This. If the intent of the new rewards is to entice more people to play the game mode, they have to be actually enticed, rather then looking at what it’s going to take to get anywhere and going “blow that for a game of soldiers”.

That said, I think the high ticket requirements are fine. There’s nothing wrong with having a long-term goal!

I think the bigger problem, however, is that for newer WvWers, there’s a significant barrier to climb just to make progress. It takes 100 pips per week just to get any tickets at all that week. When you could be making as few as twelve pips an hour (and that’s once you’ve got your rank 3 participation, which can take a bit of time itself), that’s a big investment to ask of somebody who’s just dipping their proverbial toes in.

What could make for a good compromise is if, instead of tying all the tickets for a tier to the big box at the end, it was spread out more. So the wooden tier could have two tickets per sub-box and then four in the final box, and the bronze tier could have three per sub-box and six in the final, and so on. That way, somebody who, for whatever reason, only has a limited time to spend in a given week can at least make some progress, even if it is going to take a long time to get anywhere at 2-6 tickets a week.

The WvW rank requirements for the higher tiers… those I’m fine with, actually. Again, long-term goal, and there doesn’t seem to be that much difference in appearance between Triumphant Hero and Mistforged Triumphant Hero. Different enough to show off, for sure, but it’s basically just some extra light and particle effects – if you just like the skin, Triumphant Hero’s is sufficient.

It’s possible that whatever the splitting process sought to achieve required the aspects to be reasonably widely separated in order to work. Lazarus might then have left instructions as to where the aspects should be placed, and that they should not be disturbed until the time was right. If this is the case, then Xera might have known exactly where each piece was supposed to be, but it might still require some significant effort to bring them all back together. particularly if the process required the aspects to be so widely spread that the White Mantle simply couldn’t garrison them all.

Kenshi Maru.5489:

This is mostly due to the auto on main hand being horrible.

You’ve identified the real problem here. We could add to that that Poison Volley and Static Shot could probably also use buffs.

Despite your claim that they’re a closed package, mainhand and offhand pistol actually do have different themes:

Mainhand pistol is a standoff weapon. Since the grouping of Poison Dart Volley was tightened, every skill can be used to full effect at the pistol’s maximum range of 900 units.

Blowtorch makes offhand pistol a close-in weapon.

For completeness, shield is a defensive weapon which is designed to be useful regardless of whether you’re fighting at a distance or in close. If you’re at a distance, you can get a reflect from shield 4 and throw shield 5. If you’re fighting in close, you can use shield 4 as CC and shield 5 as a block with additional CC. (Come to think on it, shield 5 also acts as a block when ranged – the skill doesn’t end when you block a non-melee hit.)

MH and OH pistol interact together as a set that is mostly standoff, but which rewards getting in, letting off a blowtorch, and getting out again. (Or you could use a melee kit and switch back to pistols every so often.) If you want to stay at range indefinitely, shield is your better choice, but being a defensive weapon comes at a stiff cost in damage.

You can claim that MH and OH pistol is a package because engineer currently only has the pistol as a mainhand weapon, but that will change as soon as an elite specialisation for engineer comes out with a new mainhand option. When a mainhand melee weapon comes out, I expect everybody will be glad to be able to pair it with Blowtorch which is most effective at melee range, rather than pairing a melee weapon with Static Shot.

Now, it’s harder to imagine what an offhand ranged DPS weapon for engineer might be… but if one does come out, it would be better paired with a pistol that has the 900-range Static Shot over the 600-but-you-really-want-to-be-200 Blowtorch.

I can understand thinking that MH pistol is underpowered (shield, I’m not so sure about – the skills offer good defences and CC, but aren’t much help in the current meta), but I think ArenaNet is thinking towards the future with the current setup. Putting blowtorch on the MH would make it unavailable to future melee MHs, and would lock every future offhand to needing to work with a pistol that is expected to get in close every dozen seconds to let off a blowtorch. The weakness of MH pistol is better solved by buffing them to be competitive again, not switching them around and making the choice of OH one of deciding which of the options is less bad.

Balthazzarr.1349:

If you got more pips by doing nothing then I suspect you didn’t get much? I was active this morning running all over the place with my group and popped 10 pips solid for a couple hours…

Basically, yeah. I have a low WvW rank and my server was coming last, so the rate I was getting pips without the outnumbered bonus was basically in “not worth the time” territory.

I see hero point trains on a regular basis, and some of those do mastery points as well.

I think it’s less common, though, because a) mastery points are only needed once per account, while hero points are needed once per character, and b) most mastery points are soloable (and those that aren’t are usually part of map events that people do anyway, so you generally don’t need a specific team).

I actually missed McKenna’s second post, which makes it 8+ hours. That’s a pretty big commitment in just one game mode, and it’s not considering the time it takes to get to participation 3 in the first place.

Yes, the odds that a losing server doesn’t have at least one outnumbered map is pretty low – however, getting players to compete with each other to get onto an outnumbered map for a tick isn’t exactly healthy gameplay. I was trying out the system yesterday, and I got more pips from ten minutes idling in an outnumbered map then I received from about an hour of actively playing.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

We need to update the loyalty pip description.

You need to earn at least 75 pips for 3 weeks in a row to earn the loyalty bonus. We wanted players to have to participate in skirmishes to be considered loyal.

75 pips…

So if you’re a new WvWer, your world is placing last, and you don’t manage to get any of the other bonuses, you’d need to play for over 6 hours a week for three weeks in a row to start getting the loyalty bonus.

Ouch.

My gut feeling is that the only thing they have in common is that they’re both scrolls containing powerful magic. It’s a pretty common fantasy trope.

Well, in both of the cases of ascension we know the circumstances of, a party of eight was involved. Grenth had his seven supporters which became the Reapers, and Kormir… well. Let’s just say that it wasn’t through her magic or martial capability that Abaddon was brought down.

There are certainly ways and means for a being to have power levels that allow them to threaten one of the Six, but it does seem that there are only six domains among them. It may be possible for two entities to cooperate and thus ‘share’ a domain, as with Lyss and Ilya combining to form the goddess Lyssa, although that could just as easily be that Lyssa simply likes the symbolism of splitting herself in two. However, it doesn’t seem to be possible for one entity to hold two of the domains. There does seem to be something special about those domains that distinguishes those who hold one from simply being a powerful being.

I’m largely in agreement with IndigoSundown.

The elite specs weren’t supposed to completely overshadow the core specs, and pretty much since release, ArenaNet has been slowly toning down the elite specs and buffing the core specs to match. We probably won’t get there before the next expansion hits, but the issue is the balancing, not the elite specialisation concept itself.

Part of the problem, I think, is that a couple of the elite specs (dragonhunter and tempest) had some pretty strong backlashes from people who just didn’t like the concept. ArenaNet’s response was effectively to try to bribe those people by increasing the damage… when the problem was that those people weren’t complaining about the numbers, but simply that the elite specialisation was going in a direction they didn’t like. If anything, it made it worse for those people, since it made it harder to just ignore the elites and continue playing core builds.

On the future balancing side of things: Guild Wars 1 balancing did allow for ArenaNet to play whack-a-mole with overpowered combinations, but it was obvious that as the number of skills increased, they were never going to keep up. It would usually take them weeks or months to deal with a particular overpowered combination, and then the next one would appear, often within days. The elite specialisation system means that there are some combinations they just don’t need to worry about.

The flipside of this, though, is… how long is this realistically going to keep up? The more optimistic estimates for the next expansion to release still put it at two years after the first one. It’s possible that the third one will have a shorter wait as they settle into a steadier cadence of expansions and Living Story releases, but we’d probably still be looking at eighteen months or so. Which raises the question… how long is GW2’s lifespan going to be? It’s already been actively developed post-release for about twice as long as GW1 was – will it last long enough to have more than a handful of elite specialisations, and would it really be a big deal if the weapons and skills of a small number of elite specialisations can be shared?

However, I think ArenaNet is planning for the long term, and if they do get to the point where the number of elite specialisations per profession gets over half a dozen or so, they probably would start running into the ‘whack-a-mole with broken combinations’ problem. And if they stick to only running balance patches between seasons to avoid shifting the balance during a season, they’re not going to be able to keep on top of that.

Kenshi Maru.5489:

I feel like changing pistol skills 3 and 4 is one of the changes we need the most.

I think they’re probably thinking about future weapons there. Sure, you might think that swapping them would be an indirect buff to shield now, but you might be glad to still have access to Blowtorch when a mainhand melee weapon gets introduced. Conversely, you might be glad to have Static Shot on the pistol when a new offhand is introduced that is more oriented to midrange damage rather than the relatively close-in nature of offhand pistol.

Granted, mainhand pistol could probably do with some buffs so it’s less of a case of being carried by Blowtorch, but I don’t think that simply swapping over Blowtorch and Static Shot would prove to be the right decision in the long run.

Kenshi Maru.5489:

Either way the change to turret basically means they are indeed switching the toolbelts somehow. The explanation they gave for the change was hard to believe. Most people don’t use turrets and those that do most likely value Overcharging them over the toolbelt. I mean, if you can’t overcharge now then there isn’t much point to keeping them anyway in most cases.

Not true. Surprise Shot was popular on power DPS builds because it basically converted a free utility slot into otherwise free DPS (Surprise Shot has no activation time, you just press it on recharge and damage happens… particularly if you have the Static Discharge trait). People would take the rifle turret purely for Surprise Shot and never drop the turret itself because even if they dropped the turret, overcharged it, and detonated it before Surprise Shot recharged, it was still a DPS drop over what their character would be otherwise doing.

Now, you can drop the turret, and then forget about it until it gets destroyed or it’s time to relocate.

The explanation does make sense. However, the fact that they’re did it now, in what might be the second-last balance patch before the expansion, is… suggestive. It might be that it’s part of the reason but not the whole reason.

Randulf.7614:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Aren’t most of the choices still there? The only thing missing is the little icon on the Hero Panel. I imagine one could keep track of one’s choices and determine which icon would be showing, were said icons still there.

Good luck.

Not only are the choices still there, they use the choice system in new content. In episode 5, you use the choices to convince Phlunt to leave the lab. The conversation is surprisingly different each choice.

My experience has been that he respects you if you stick to the Dignity route, and very quickly sticks his nose up if you use a Charm or Ferocity option.

One thing that was supposed to be in the original system was that the more you took a particular path, the better you were at it. So it might open up more options, and there might be options that have a different chance of succeeding depending on your character (so a character with high Charm might be able to charm Phlunt, for instance). I think nowadays it’s pretty much just a marker to let you know which tone each response has, in case it’s not obvious (not as silly as you might think – there have been times I’ve seen responses in RPGs which I thought it was going one way, and then I selected it and the character took an entirely different tone to what I’d thought). If it is still being tracked and there are in-game effects, even minor ones… then they really should show where the character stands, so you know where your character stands.

True, but the Saltsprays, and even the Rockhides and similar creatures such as kirin, lack anything crystalline in their appearance. However, they do have features reminiscent of aquatic creatures (specifically, the catfish-like barbels). For the record, I think it’s far more likely that they’re an independent group rather than being directly connected to either, however.

From what we know, there has only been six full gods at any one time:

• We don’t know Balthazar’s precise history before their arrival on Tyria, but Menzies has never been described as a god, so we have no reason to believe there have been two Gods of War simultaneously.

• Grenth was only a ‘demigod’ until he cast down Dhuum

• The whole thing with Abaddon, his predecessor, and successor shows a clear passing (or, rather, seizing) of the baton – there has never been two Gods of Knowledge simultaneously within the pantheon.

From what we know, there are only six full Gods in the pantheon at any one time – Life, Nature, War, Death, Knowledge, and whatever Lyssa stands for. Lyss and Ilya have possibly cheated the system somewhat in that they’re sharing the role, but they are referred to as the two who are one – for the purpose of divinity, there is one Lyssa, even if that one Lyssa seems to have two parts. How exactly this works, we don’t know…

…but I digress. The children of the gods seem to be only ‘demigods’ until they claim one of the six domains. Grenth was not a full god until he claimed the portfolio of Death from Dhuum. Menzies was never a full god – or, at least, was not until after Guild Wars 1. We have no reason to believe that Balthazar and his father were the God of War simultaneously – heck, for all we know, Balthazar’s father held a different domain (Abaddon’s predecessor, perhaps?) or wasn’t a god at all. (Note that I consider it most likely that the common parent of Balthazar and Menzies was the god of war… but that might not be the father. There have been female war gods in real-world mythology, after all…)

The Greek gods are probably a good analogy. They don’t have the bunch of omni-adjectives that monotheistic gods have. However, if you want to get into a fight with Poseidon, you’d better make sure your home isn’t on a fault line or within striking distance of a tsunami.

My thinking on having a mace as a weapon draws from the use of ceremonial maces, in some contexts, as a symbol of authority. So a ritualist-esque character may well carry one, not for bludgeoning their enemies, but as a symbol of their authority over the spirit world. The expectation in this case would be that the mace is not acting as a melee weapon, but as a spellcasting tool (there is precedent in Guild Wars 1 – some of the scepter skins there were actually maces or morning stars of various types, the Deldrimor Scepter coming immediately to mind).

While on the topic of symbolic weapons, a sword might also work, as a means of slashing open the veil between Tyria and the Mists.

Having just experienced it myself, I think there is a problem. I got more pips from ten minutes afking in an outnumbered map than I did from the time I spent building up participation in the first place.

A large part of it, I think, is that while for the more experienced players it’s just a nice bonus, if you haven’t done much WvW it could be up to a 500% increase to your pip gain (if your world is losing the current skirmish and you’re not getting any of the other bonuses). This means that the less experienced players, the ones that you probably do want sticking to blobs as the learn the ropes, have a strong incentive to try to find an outnumbered map as it ticks over, while the experienced players have less relative incentive to reinforce an outnumbered map. Which likely is pretty much the reverse of what you want, since it’d be the experienced players that have the best chance to hold out against superior numbers.

What I’d probably suggest is:

1) Make the outnumbered bonus scale in some fashion with the pips you’d get otherwise, rather than being a flat +5 bonus which is huge to some and nice but not a big deal to others.
2) Require you to have been on the map for a certain length of time to qualify for the outnumbered bonus – possibly tie it to the last time you earned participation?
3) Increase the baseline number of pips for people who are less established in WvW. This could possibly be a matter of granting pips per level of participation. This might require increasing the pips needed for rewards to compensate, but it would mean that low-ranking players aren’t put in situations where they practically have to be on an outnumbered map for the pips they receive to be worth their time.

Elemental Blast will also dish out Torment if you have Abyssal Chill. Not as strong as Unyielding Anguish, obviously, but it’s there.

Can we PLEASE have a forum bug fix?

Crapgame.6519:

Shield, well, overlooked by developers when focus in most cases one could argue is better, same with mace, and then finally others utilities that block and/or reflect. I don’t know, gee devs, a wall of steel or wood and it can’t block – rollseyes. Seems an oversight.

Shield has probably had the most post-release development of any of the guardian offhands, actually. Shield of Wrath got Aegis added to its effect, Shield of Absorption got the ability to move while it’s active (not to mention fixing the bug so that the shield actually lasted the time it’s supposed to) and both got cooldown reductions.

I’d also contest your claim that guardian shield “can’t block”. Shield of Wrath generates an Aegis on the user, which is a block. Shield of Absorption blocks projectiles and knocks back enemies within the area – if you don’t stop at least one attack with SoA, either you’re using it wrong or you’re using it to break a defiance bar or a stability stack. Guardian shield might not have a “block everything for the next X seconds” skill like warrior and chronomancer, but it certainly can and does block attacks. It is, however, a little less ‘selfish’ than other shields, so it makes sense that its self-defence capabilities are a little less.

That’s a possibility – however, I’m inclined to think that the Canthan dragon population are unrelated to the Elder Dragons (or at least, are not minions or former minions, they may have a common ancestor), similar to non-corrupted wyverns and drakes. If they ARE, though, the DSD is probably the safest bet.

There’s a certain degree to which charr history is propaganda. Claiming that they killed their gods rather than admitting it was humans is part of it. Another part is their vilification of significant human characters of the time when their own leaders are raised as heroes, when from an objective perspective, the things the charr leaders did at the time are worse than anything Rurik, Gwen, or arguably even Adelbern did.

That said, charr society has matured a lot since then, and there may be a time in the future that they admit the truth. In the meantime, the charr view of history is simply the charr view of history – the official history of the Guild Wars 1 period is what we saw in-game.