Balthazar doesn’t seem to have been a god at the time, and he was never portrayed as the most intellectual of the lot to begin with.
I suspect Abaddon would have known how to make such a machine, but he would also know the consequences. In Kormir’s case… depends on how much of Abaddon’s knowledge she’s successfully assimilated.
Well, unless they’re willing to remove the tool belt with elite specializations (which they shouldn’t, because it’s part of core) then we’ll never get new mechanic skills, and if we get them, we’ll be losing options in exchange.
There is precedent, however. Dragonhunter and necromancer both had their profession mechanic replaced by something that was similar but equivalent. Doing so with the engineer does have the additional wrinkle that replacing the toolbelt will influence skill balance (making skills with poor toolbelt skills more attractive while making skills with good toolbelt skills less attractive) – however, ArenaNet might consider this a good thing.
Personally, I’d prefer that the the alternative you propose. A lot of the toolbelt skills have interesting mechanics and simply wouldn’t work as the flipovers you suggest – to me, having an elite spec which replaces them would be better than removing them entirely.
Those are an upgrade, or a variation. You can’t really do that with all the skills of the tool belt. The only thing you get is new tool belt skills with the new slot skills.
If they ever want to use the mechanic bar for anything, they would need to nuke the tool belt, which would lead to many problems, since you would be losing so many vital tool belt skills.
Which toolbelt skills do you consider ‘vital’?
F1 usually supplements your healing. This can be substituted for by having the elite specialisation’s F1 provide a similar healing/survival effect. Medkit would be substantially disadvantaged, but it wouldn’t be hard to have a skill in there that’s roughly equivalent to the healing turret and Elixir H toolbelt skills.
The other toolbelt skills… none of them are vital. Really. Useful, sure, but a specific, fixed toolbelt for an elite specialisation could bring capabilities that compensate for the loss of the current toolbelt.
2) You are punished for not playing PvE
Like i said the whole time, example after example. not only did Anet hide mastery points behind PvE but they also hid the new elite specs for PvE. Yes they have addressed those issues but the fact that Anet would screw over 2 groups with in there community says alot.
For WvW players, yes, but the elite specialisations are unlocked for sPvP as soon as you have HoT activated on your account – you don’t need to unlock them through hero points.
I wouldn’t say the selfhealing is that bad, since Bandage Self is a decent selfheal. It’s not as good as the healing turret, but it’s not too far behind.
Problem is that the rest of the kit is fiddly to use and just doesn’t offer any reward for the effort it takes to use, let alone the time spent in the kit which could be spent doing something that’s actually useful.
Yeah, I think removing the dazes without thinking about that trait was one of their bigger mistakes. Core engineer has very few dazes and stuns, most of its CC coming in other forms, so the main source for the scrapper is the hammer and the drones. While I can understand that the result probably was too much CC (and to be honest, it probably was) it does leave the scrapper with a minor grandmaster trait that maybe gives you an additional 3/4s total of daze and stun when you use the Thunderclap + Rocket Charge combo?
They really should have reworked the trait.
The major master traits also have problems in that there is no ‘generic’ trait in that tier. The traits in that tier will only have their full effect if you have swiftness/superspeed, dazes/stuns, or stability in your build (or will be receiving the appropriate boons from your allies). You can make builds that don’t use hammer or gyros that will benefit from the scrapper line, but you can’t just take any core build, add scrapper to it, and expect all the traits to work.
This is in contrast to a lot of the other elite specialisations, which do allow for selecting a full set of traits that will benefit you regardless of what other skills and traits you have equipped.
Well, unless they’re willing to remove the tool belt with elite specializations (which they shouldn’t, because it’s part of core) then we’ll never get new mechanic skills, and if we get them, we’ll be losing options in exchange.
There is precedent, however. Dragonhunter and necromancer both had their profession mechanic replaced by something that was similar but equivalent. Doing so with the engineer does have the additional wrinkle that replacing the toolbelt will influence skill balance (making skills with poor toolbelt skills more attractive while making skills with good toolbelt skills less attractive) – however, ArenaNet might consider this a good thing.
Personally, I’d prefer that the the alternative you propose. A lot of the toolbelt skills have interesting mechanics and simply wouldn’t work as the flipovers you suggest – to me, having an elite spec which replaces them would be better than removing them entirely.
(edited by draxynnic.3719)
Still it’s sad to see, Axe is a very satisfying weapon and well, looks like it is definitely underpowered compared to the rest of the Power kitten nal.
Eh, not really. We’re comparing it against dagger and greatsword, which are both melee weapons, while axe can do most of its damage at a 900 range. It’s typical across all professions that melee weapons will either have better damage, better defences, or both compared to ranged weapons.
If you’re expecting to be in melee 100% of the time, then yes, you probably just want to stick to a melee weapon (and dagger gets the added bonus that Life Siphon does have some range, so you don’t even have to be in melee 100% of the time with it). If you are expecting to be out of melee for long enough periods that it’s worth swapping, however, then going axe/focus and dagger/warhorn is a worthwhile option. Having a melee set and a ranged set is a common strategy.
It kinda depends somewhat on whether the dragons have literally always been here – meaning that the Elder Dragons either predate Tyria or were created along with Tyria – or whether there was a period during which Tyria was Elder Dragon free. If the latter, then either the system can’t be completely closed, or there was something else that existed before the Elder Dragons that sealed magic away.
My gut feeling, though, is that the answer is the Mists. We’re told that Tyria was formed from the Mists, so all of the magic Tyria started with ultimately came from the Mists. We also know that it’s possible for Tyrians to draw power from the Mists, or for entities in the Mists to send power to Tyria. So it’s possible that there has also been a trickle of magic entering Tyria from the Mists.
This comes with the twist that every time a revenant uses a skill, they might actually be making the magic overload problem just a little bit worse…
I was just having the same problem. Did some WvW, and I was able to get into a match after that.
They didn’t actually set out to destroy the trinity, but to change it. Instead of damage/heal/tank, it became damage/support/control. Instead of most builds only having token self-healing if any at all, everybody had their own healing so support characters were less focused on being the sole thing replenishing health bars, and were more about helping relieve the pressure so that selfheals could do the rest of the job – whether that was through healing damage or reducing the damage that was coming in (through damage reduction boons like Protection, removing damaging conditions, or outright preventing attacks from landing).
They didn’t set out to remove healers entirely, but to reduce their importance and fold them into the general category of ‘support’. In previous MMOs, you NEEDED a dedicated healer. In Guild Wars 2, the intent was that you COULD have a healing-focused character, or you could have a more protection-focused character that took the pressure off in other ways. Either could do the job, because unlike traditional MMOs where you needed dedicated healers to keep up with the damage, in GW2 it’s more a matter of taking enough pressure off so that the self-heals can cope.
You could make healers in vanilla GW2. Water elementalists and certain guardian builds come to mind. There were, however, two problems:
The first, possibly as a result of overcompensation to make sure they don’t accidentally make healers essential, is that they initially gave terrible scaling for healing power. So even healing-oriented builds might as well use DPS gear, since the additional benefit you got from healing power wasn’t worth much.
The second, more important problem was that in attempting to create a game where nothing was essential except for the damage to eventually kill the enemy, they succeeded in creating a game where, if you were good enough, you really didn’t need anything except damage. Some of the mechanics even encouraged this – the original form of Defiance made control effectively worthless, for instance, and there was little point in attempting to heal if the boss’s attacks insta-downed any character they hit.
Regardless, what we got at release is not what was intended.
Having dedicated healer builds is not against the manifesto (particularly since even the druid brings other things to the table) – it’s just one of the options that fits in the ‘support’ role.
Requiring a dedicated healer, however, becomes more iffy. Requiring that the dedicated healer – or any essential role, for that matter – comes from a specific profession clearly breaks it.
That said, I have to say that I still don’t consider it the worst violation. Making an explicit ‘tank’ role required for certain encounters goes against the prerelease announcements far more. Heck, I would say that the very existence of the ascended tier shatters the “you should play to have fun, not to prepare to have fun” mantra that was the core of the prerelease publicity.
I find the traits/skills order very interesting (it already was mentioned by someone else in this thread). We get our minor traits very quickly, with 3 major traits. I have no idea tho, if those major traits are 3 adepts, or maybe one of each – adept, master, grandmaster (this order wouldn’t make a lot of sense tho).
I wrote an article about a year ago to the effect that this was exactly what they should do.
To summarise, the reason is that it’s not really viable to take up an elite specialisation until you have at least one trait from each category. You don’t need the utility skills (since you can use core utilities), but if you don’t have at least one of each category of major traits, you’re going into battle with holes in your build. With the HoT unlock order, this effectively meant that it wasn’t practical to start using the elite specialisation until you were most of the way through.
Going adept, master, grandmaster would allow players to use the elite spec with a complete build fairly early in the unlock process, with further unlocks expanding their options and encouraging players to try new skills and traits as they’re unlocked. If you place the grandmasters on the last quadrant of the wheel, though, a lot of players will defer using the elite spec at all until they get there.
Okay, so your actual issue has nothing at all to do with Firebrand, but boils down to you thinking that core guardian is crap?
I disagree – there’s some good stuff in there. There’s also some stuff in there that’s definitely underperforming and can use a boost. Mind you, core guardian has been receiving boosts over the past few balance patches (symbols on sword and scepter, core virtues being buffed), so it does seem to be something they’re working on… albeit not as fast as people might like. Meanwhile, every profession has its underperforming areas.
There are also issues in that some of the mechanics in high-end PvE devalue some mechanics and promote others.
However, given that it appears that the thing you’re actually arguing over has nothing to do with the topic itself, I don’t think this is an appropriate thread for continuing it.
I didn’t say that people shouldn’t be investing time if they want something. What I wrote was that the game is literally limiting their basic content access by locking Masteries to story content (you can’t proceed with HoT if you don’t have certain Masteries) and cutting their XP gain (for Spirit Shards) if they don’t grind all Masteries (including Raid Masteries).
Personally, I think the latter is the bigger issue.
You can get the masteries required for story progression pretty quickly. It can be annoying, but on the other hand, it does force you to explore the maps at least a little before running off to the next green star, which gives you a better picture of the overall story.
However, having XP become worthless because you’ve maxed out your XP bars but you don’t have the mastery points to unlock the next mastery is something that’s extremely annoying. Rather than make spirit shards be something that only activates once you’ve maxed out your masteries, they really should have made it a repeatable track that can be selected from the masteries tab at any time.
In the meantime, I’ve got hundreds of LS3 reward chests waiting to be opened… I open them when the autoconsumed scrap of maguuma mastery will actually do something for me (usually when I first enter a new map, since it means I can instantly unlock the mastery associated with that map).
The alacrity monopoly has already been broken with Ventari, nothing changed. And notice how alacrity was given to a base spec, Revenants didn’t have to dedicate their whole elite spec into stealing mesmer’s toys.
First, I don’t see the relevance of it being through a base spec rather than an elite spec. Base specs are supposed to give you nice things too.
Second, and more importantly, I don’t think Ventari revenant really succeeds at granting permanent alacrity. The energy requirement is pretty high – you could possibly do it with boon length gear, but you won’t be doing much else apart from autoattacks and the heals. Combine it with something else that might appear in the future, however, and maybe it would.
Chrono does 4 vital things:
1. tanking
2. perma quickness
3. perma alacrity
4. AoE distort
Bonus: PortalYou will never replace them by doing just 1 of those things. If Firebrand is a full condi dps (like Ranger/Thief levels, not Condi PS), while also providing perma quickness, it will simply get nerfed.
I expect that there will be tradeoffs, but it doesn’t take much to offer more DPS than a chrono.
But let’s say it does just that, then you have 1 dps slot that provides perma quickness, and Ventari provides alacrity. So far, you have 2 classes doing the same thing a single one can, but Firebrand has high dps, so we let it fly. You still need someone to tank that doesn’t lose dps or utility by doing so.
Anybody can tank, it’s just that chronos can do it while still doing their other things (nobody cares about the chrono’s personal DPS, and therefore the fact that the chrono will lose DPS by wearing tanking gear). We’ll see what happens in the new meta. Maybe we’ll see firebrands taking the tank slot. Maybe we’ll see something else. Maybe it will still be chronomancers, but other things will take the place of the second chronomancer. And that’s without considering that a lot of raid bosses don’t need a tank at all.
And all that is moot, because nobody else can provide AoE distort.
And how do we know that the new elite specialisations won’t have something with equivalent functionality? Possibly even on firebrand?
All 3 classes you mentioned have top tier condi builds. And 2 of them are base. It’s unbelievable in how bad a state the class is when there are 3 classes with 2 builds each that do more damage than the only real dps build guardian has. And we got a power dps elite spec, DH offers absolutely nothing else.
And if Firebrand brings a condition build, guardians will have a condition build.
At the moment, we’re comparing specs at a time when condition largely outperforms power. Assuming that this is something that ArenaNet intends to fix, there’s not much point comparing power builds to condition builds, since we can have good reason to think they’ll get rebalanced. In the meantime, dragonhunter outperforms 5/9 professions in the benchmarks on small targets, and the gap between dragonhunter and the best power build is less than the gap between dragonhunter and the next build down.
Against large hitboxes, dragonhunter is second only to tempest for power damage.
I’d say they’re doing okay, by power standards. They’re low at the moment because they’re competing with condition builds and condition builds are just plain better than power for every profession that has them at the moment – problem being, of course, that guardian doesn’t have a proper DPS setup. Yet.
Also, on the professions doing what they do without using their elite spec… So? First, elite specs weren’t supposed to render core builds completely obsolete – taking an elite spec is still trading off the core traitline you could otherwise have, and if there are builds where going full core is better for you than taking an elite spec, that’s the system working as intended.
At the moment, it feels like you’re looking for reasons to be pessimistic. At the moment, what we’ve been told is that there are two things that will be significant upgrades for guardians… and there is likely more that we haven’t heard. I’m inclined to think that what we’ve heard so far, with the assumption that there will be more, is at least enough to wait until the official announcement before we start the prophecies of doom and gloom. (Hopefully it will be announced early enough to give the opportunity for proper public feedback.)
Isn’t breaking the mesmer monopoly pretty much exactly what was being called for earlier in this thread? Sure, it covers the same ground, but assuming that the mesmer will be automatically better is a bit of a stretch. In fact, if the Firebrand is able to dish out better DPS than a chronomancer while also granting permanent quickness to allies, they’d probably be quite valued, especially if the alacrity monopoly is also broken.
If if if if
You don’t break Mesmers’ monopoly by giving exactly 1 aspect of the BASE class to an ELITE spec. Perma Quickness is the ceiling, you can’t get better than that, so guardians can only hope to match them.
Core mesmers can’t get perma quickness either – you need to have chronomancer for that. It’s also well known that chronomancer DPS is basically garbage tier in raid scenarios – they’re brought purely for the support, and they’re generally the tank because less DPS overall is lost by putting the chrono in toughness gear. So if firebrand brings perma quickness and has higher personal DPS than chronomancer, then from a teambuilding perspective, you’re trading alacrity for better damage (assuming that there’s nothing else that guardian/firebrand brings, which seems unlikely). If the alacrity monopoly also gets broken, then chronomancers could be facing stiff competition to stay in the meta at all. (However much DPS that mirage ends up doing after the rebalancing, it almost certainly won’t be able to provide quickness and alacrity like a chronomancer can.)
No, thank you, guardian is officially dead if that’s all Firebrand is. DH is useless at power DPS, if all Firebrand does is give us a condi DPS build, even a raid-worthy one, we are still 2 elite specs behind every other class, especially those that have a condi build as base, a good HoT spec and are geting another. We are starting with 0 good builds and hope Firebrand can solve all of our problems. We are being asked to buy our buffs.
Well, we’ve already heard two things – condi DPS and perma quickness. Whether you’ll have both high condi DPS and perma quickness in the same build is a good question, but it’s there. We also don’t know what else might be there, beyond an unlock image and a few statements from a leaker. Personally, though, I’d say that adding perma quickness (good support) and a viable condition build is a big addition to begin with. How good it is, of course, depends on what else is there that we haven’t seen, and how much of that can be used while still being able to access the core guardian strengths.
(Also, according to the most recent benchmarks I’ve seen, DH is pretty high up in the rankings for power builds (behind daredevil, tempest, and power engineer for small hitboxes), and the gap between DH and the top power build is less than the gap between DH and the next power build down. The problem is power builds in general having taken a big hit.)
I know Power Necro hasn’t Thief or even Revenant killing times on melee but I’ve had faster kills with a Mesmer at that level…
Axe isn’t a melee weapon – it’s a projectile-less ranged weapon, and its balancing takes into account that it’s a weapon whose damage is hard to stop. If you want to do melee damage, generally you need to be using a melee weapon – so for core necro, you’d be looking at dagger.
I think the currently buffed axe is good for what it’s intended to do, but it’s not a melee weapon. Once you get a weaponswap, though, axe/X is a solid alternative to staff for a ranged option on a power build (it will generally do more damage to single targets but isn’t as effective against groups).
I haven’t been around the ogre village often enough to comment there, but I can say that you don’t have friendly chak around the Nuhoch area, or at least if there ever are, it’s rare enough that you can spend a lot of time in the area and never see them. You may be getting confused with the beetles that the Nuhoch raise and train for combat.
Isn’t breaking the mesmer monopoly pretty much exactly what was being called for earlier in this thread? Sure, it covers the same ground, but assuming that the mesmer will be automatically better is a bit of a stretch. In fact, if the Firebrand is able to dish out better DPS than a chronomancer while also granting permanent quickness to allies, they’d probably be quite valued, especially if the alacrity monopoly is also broken.
It’s also worth noting that the balance at the moment seems to be veering strongly towards condition builds for raids. They may rebalance back away from that before the next expansion hits, but if they don’t, then Firebrand might well be what saves guardian from the garbage heap for high-end PvE.
Busts are a fairly common form of sculpture, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that the entity being represented as a bust actually lacks arms and legs, it just means that the sculptor hasn’t included them.
Whoever made the design for mursaat tokens may have been using a similar artistic license. Because there’s a limited amount of space to work with on the token, they chose not to include the arms and legs so they could devote more space to the parts they considered more important to represent.
Now some might argue, well those are endgame maximised benchmarks on 1 target. To which I would respond:“Yes they are, now please tell mich which other class in this game loses as much dps as mesmer when switching targets?”
This… isn’t really the full story, though. Mesmers can burst fairly effectively, and in some areas, bursting a target and moving onto the next can be just as efficient as what other professions can do and more efficient than some more ramp-oriented builds. The benchmarks also assume that the target stays within persistent area of effect zones, which is usually a fair assumption for raid bosses but isn’t always in other content.
If you’re going up against pocket raptors or other swarmy enemies that don’t even have the health to justify a burst, though, that’s really painful.
They should redesign the profession to get rid off the tool belt, merging it with slot skills or whatever. Right now it’s restricting the potential of the profession and its future elite specializations.
It doesn’t necessarily affect the potential of future elite specialisations – a future engineer elite specialisation could easily have a feature wherein the elite specialisation has it’s own toolbelt skills rather than having those skills be determined by the slotted utility skills.
Missing out on the current toolbelt skills would be a sacrifice, but the only skill I can think of that would be rendered nonviable by losing the toolbelt skill would be the medkit, and that’s no great loss in its current state as it is (unfortunately).
It nowhere says they are sentient or have a hivemind. Just that they cannot be tamed.
At least in the ogre event chain that is. It has very little information or dialogue going on for that matter.
And the ogres can tame a lot of things that PCs can’t… at least, not yet.
Hrrrmn. I’m not sure about the ‘clearly not a mursaat’ part. It’s not a complete mursaat, granted, but a bust of a mursaat that shows the head, torso, and back tendrils, but not the arms and legs, may have a silhouette similar to that.
Interesting observation nonetheless, however.
Oh, it’s certainly possible. However, I think there are better explanations.
As I’ve noted previously, Jennah makes it clear that she’s made ‘preparations’. Now, if this storyline had happened in Rata Sum instead of Divinity’s Reach, people wouldn’t bat an eyelid – it would just be another asura device. People forget, however, that while humans don’t match asura in magitech, they do have their own ability to enchant magical devices, and they’re better at cooperating with one another than asura. To me, it’s hardly surprising that what the ruler of a powerful nation can do, in the heart of her capital city and after having made preparations expecting an attack, is greater than what the player character can do with battle magic that rarely takes more than a few seconds to prepare and execute.
Maybe PC mesmers and guardians have the potential to raise city domes too, if they had the luxury of spending a few months preparing the spell, and possibly a few magical devices or allied spellcasters available to augment it.
Sorry I didn’t address this thought. Magic doesn’t seem like something organic that can grow and expand on it’s own, like a blood cell for instance. I feel that magic is replenished due to the Six’s connection to Tyria. They left the world, but still fill it with their magic in a way similar to how Regeneration boons refill player HP. Elder Dragons absorbed the world’s magic as they slept, and would take in a lot more when they came out of hibernation.
Going into the Guild Wars lore, the actual source seems to have been the Bloodstones. After the modifications made by the gods, the Bloodstones were steadily releasing magic back into the world, but this was magic that was present in the world before the gods arrived. Eventually, this reached the point where there was enough magic to trigger the awakening of the dragons. None of this magic, however, was that of the gods themselves – while they may have invested some power into terraforming Tyria, the replenishment of magic after the Exodus was coming out of the bloodstones, not from the gods.
If there had been no intervention after that (the dragons had been left unopposed, and the bloodstones had been left in their ‘release magic’ mode) then it’s likely that the magic level of Tyria would have eventually settled to an equilibrium where the dragons consumed magic at the same rate as the bloodstones released it – until the bloodstones eventually ran out and the dragons consumed what was left until the magic level dropped below the threshold for them to return to hibernation.
If they do make the elite spec petless, I could see the various ranger shouts made to summon a spirit that does whatever the shout would have normally made the pet do. So S&R, for instance, summons a spirit that revives somebody.
Personally, though, I’m hoping it doesn’t remove the pet entirely. Possibly make having the pet and not having the pet be on a toggle, so that people who really don’t want one can remain permanently in petless mode, but the option is there to keep it around or switch between the two modes if you so choose.
You men the role that they sword up and down would never be in the game and is useful only in raids?
They never said there’d be no healers. They said there’d be no need to wait for healers – there wouldn’t be one or two professions you have to wait for to get a healer, you can take a party with any set of professions and somebody will be able to go healer if they have the gear.
Personally, though, I quite dislike druid. Part of this is that I simply don’t enjoy it, but from a more strategic perspective, in the current meta it is a healer that you’re potentially left waiting for if you don’t have one – it’s so much better than the alternatives that you have to have one. This is going against what they promised in development. Druid in a vacuum is fine, but other professions need to be able to offer viable alternatives – both to avoid the “we really need someone to play X” wait, and so that people who’d like to be the healer but who don’t enjoy druid mechanics can take an alternative with different mechanics.
The Six left the human world, yet their powers are still felt. That, coming from Anet, indicates that just being in the Mists doesn’t mean their magic is contained. Think of radiation from a nuclear rod. You put it in a normal plastic air tight container, and the energy still goes through. I feel magic from the gods acts in this sense. They’re on another plain of existence, and yet magic coming from them passes through dimensions. Going off this idea is where I believe that the Elder Dragons can in fact consume a part of the Six’s powers.
The power of the gods is felt in what they did before they left and in the power they had already invested in what they left behind. This includes humanity itself – humans appear to have divine racial skills because humans have a portion of the divinity of the gods (see the Gate of Madness mission dialogue). What we’ve been told is that the gods have not directly influenced events in Tyria since Kormir’s ascension… until LS3.
You’ve also ignored my previous point – the dragons aren’t even draining magic from Tyria at a rate that is greater than replenishment. It’s a pretty big stretch to say that they’re then able to drain the gods to almost nothing through some tenuous link to Tyria that probably doesn’t even exist.
Going back to Lyssa, it is written in lore that she cares about humans. She thinks differently from the other gods. If Anet says the Six left the world to let humans fend for themselves, Lyssa is the only person who’d probably step back in while the others would be focused on something else.
It’s possible that she thinks differently, but caring about humans is not the difference. While the gods were still intervening, Dwayna intervened to help individual humans a few times (there are even a couple of quests involving avatars of Dwayna in GW1 on this theme). Kormir was human, so presumably cares about them. Grenth was possibly motivated by caring about what happens to humans in the afterlife. And that’s just off the top of my head.
I think it is possible for someone to be a god of war and be more restrained than Balthazar, however. You can be a god who doesn’t murder people in a fit of rage, as Balthazar did in GW1’s history. You can be a god who advocates fighting in defence of yourself and your friends, family, and allies, instead of rampant conquest because you think your victims will be easily defeated… as Balthazar did according to the Orrian scrolls. You can be a god who promotes using tactics to overcome your foe with the least loss of lives over whipping up your troops into a vicious rage and simply charging. In short, you can be a god of war who promotes restraint and protection of those who need it over rampant aggression.
Athena, while she has her flaws, is an example of this – she is a goddess of war, but she advocates using peaceful means to settle conflicts it at all possible.
PS The Rodgort theory is plausible, but note that what we’ve seen of Rodgort seems to indicate a dragon or a dragon-like demon.
(edited by draxynnic.3719)
To me, the real problem with Eir is that she was a member of an existing profession. Do we really need a Legendary Ranger Stance?
Asgeir Dragonrender seems much more likely for a norn legend.
They should have gone with a Flame Legion legend instead. An evil shaman, who can summon dark fire and Searing crystals. Some good condi spec with lots of burning.
Or Bathea Havocbringer. She was a rebellious member of the Shaman caste, but enough of a blank slate that they could give her magic arrows without it seeming too far off.
Mind you, I don’t remember Jalis throwing his hammer in GW1. :-P
Well, whatever the reasons, I do agree on the aspect that Balthazar was never a good guy. I mean, he was always the god of war and honor, so a fair fight before anything else. (until recently, that is, his behavior is somewhat contradictory with the plagues and documents I’ve read)
When you compare him to other gods, he’s propably not as selfish as Abaddon (at least, not until now), but he never was the good guy Dwayna is/was.
Melandru, Lyssa and Grenth I’ve always pictured as neutral good gods, like, they help humans unless the humans do messed up stuff. Melandru’s shown to bless people, but also punish those who harm nature excessively.
Sure, but this doesn’t say who killed Balthazar’s father.
Regarding the gods, prior to the current chapter I generally categorised the gods with the following alignments:
Dwayna: Neutral Good
Melandru: Neutral Good
Lyssa: Chaotic Good
Grenth: Lawful Neutral (he’s generally portrayed as harsh but fair – oh, and as a bit of a killjoy)
Balthazar: Neutral (he was all about honour, which is generally a lawful, even lawful good trait, but he’s too temperamental to be really called lawful, and he’s certainly too free with killing to be good)
Kormir: Lawful Good
Balthazar’s portrayal in the current chapter pushes him towards the Chaotic Evil end of the scale – he appears to have given up on honour, which was his anchor to the Lawful end of the spectrum, and apparently being willing to sacrifice a world for his own empowerment certainly pushes him towards Evil.
This thread seems to be making the assumption that Balthazar’s father was a good guy and that regardless of who killed him it was wrong to do so. What if he wasn’t? What if he was more like Menzies? A god of fire and war who was interested only in mass destruction for the sake of it.
This is an aspect I’ve considered myself – for all we know it was Balthazar’s father who was responsible for the catastrophe, and Balthazar was carrying his father’s head in triumph (a pyrrhic victory, but triumph nonetheless).
Which just reinforces that we don’t know, and anyone who claims to have the answer had better have sources to back it up.
One other thing to consider is Fields of Ruin Event Completer is one of today’s dailies, so it might be a good time to try to find a rift someone left open.
And the only thing in said video that is relevant is a brief moment of what is clearly speculation somewhere around 19-20 minutes in. WP recognises that we don’t know what actually happened there and makes a couple of speculations.
Unless you have some source that I haven’t seen, we have no idea what the story of Balthazar’s father was. Could be Menzies killed him. Could be Balthazar killed him, for whatever reason. Could be that some other party killed him for reasons unknown. We don’t know.
I think IMO that the fact that Balthazar did not come to DR and the fact that he had Lyss Mirror to hide his identity are related somehow…maybe he is being help to recover his divinity, with conditions of not interfering with humanity?
Just having a good laugh imagining Lyssa saying : “Balthazar, I will help you restore your divinity. Just don’t not interfere with any humans. But you can totally blow their planet to pieces by killing two elder dragons at once though.”
“Lyssa told me not to interfere with humans, but if I blow their planet to pieces by killing two elder dragons at once, I’m not technically interfering with humans. Directly, anyway. She might not agree, but by the time she reacts, I’ll have my powers back, so if she throws a tantrum or two I can live with that!”
Actually, we know that the gods didn’t create Tyria. We’ve been told by the devs that they arrived on a Tyria that was devastated by the last time the dragons awoke and they made it into something habitable again, but there was a Tyria before the gods arrived.
Do they have the capability to create worlds? On that, I’m going to go with ‘probably’. They appear to have the ability to shape landscapes in the Mists, and Tyria is said to be formed out of the Mists – creating a world is probably similar to creating landscapes in the Mists, albeit on a much larger scale. They may not be able to do so quickly, but I think it is within their capabilities.
Regarding the ability of a mortal to defeat and absorb the capabilities of a god, I have a few comments:
First, we have never fought a god at full strength. Abaddon was still chained when we fought him. Dhuum is a fallen god. Balthazar in the most recent chapter explicitly says that he was weakened… and in his case, we don’t seem to do much more than annoy him before he completes his objective and leaves.
Second, we don’t know that just anyone can assume the power of a god. Grenth was a demigod to begin with. Kormir was mortal, but the Voice of Lyssa speaks of giving Kormir “a special gift” with which she could “make a decision only a mortal could make” – this suggests to me that, while Kormir didn’t know it at the time, the ‘gift’ was the capability to absorb and replace Abaddon. After all, the choice to give up one’s mortality and become a god is not a choice you can make if you’re already a god.
Third, we’ve been told that the reason the gods have taken a hands-off approach is that they want humanity to mature – and to do so, they need to leave humanity to figure out their own solutions to their problems. While this has never been stated in-game to my knowledge and is therefore subject to being changed, this indicates that far from being afraid, the gods actually want humanity to grow stronger.
In terms of general power: the Elder Dragons have been said to have power rivaling that of the gods, which if we flip that around, indicates that a god at full strength has roughly the power of an Elder Dragon. Since we’ve seen two Elder Dragons fall, this suggests that the right mortals working together could bring down a god at full strength as well (possibly including developing some sort of eye protection to protect against the blinding effect?). However, like we’ve been seeing with the Elder Dragons, destroying a god without some plan for the aftermath could well have consequences – in fact, this may well be the entire reason the gods imprisoned Abaddon until a suitable replacement was available.
While I would disagree with it being like we “breathe oxygen” (the Elder Dragons release it in sleep only as far as we’re aware, that would be like if we only breathed in while awake, and only exhaled while asleep), the key phase is your second sentence:
They just absorb it from the world.
The Six have not been on the world since they woke (began consuming magic), only while they were asleep (while they were exuding magic).
So by your following line of thought, the Six Gods would have been getting stronger and stronger prior to their leaving, not weaker.
To expand further on this:
Magic itself has been getting stronger on Tyria since the gods left. Right now, it’s at the strongest it’s been since the last time the dragons were awake. While the dragons are absorbing magic from the environment, in the current circumstances they don’t even seem to be able to absorb it fast enough to prevent the ambient magic levels from rising, which suggests that they’re not exactly pulling in magic with such a high suction force that they’re able to drain other powerful magic entities that aren’t even present on Tyria, even if the artifacts and temples they’ve left behind establish some form of link.
Zojja has been away for how long? Couple of weeks? A month maybe? 2? Relationship with Caithe is still a bit strained after… how much time in game? 1 month? You free Zojja/Logan a couple of hours later you kill Mordri, when you leave the bloodstone explodes and so it goes on. Even saying that there had only DAYS between ‘Zojja freed’ and ‘Caudecus attacks’ wouldn’t be much of a stretch. Sure there are some in-game comments that suggest otherwise, but while players might have been waiting for many month (or years) the characters haven’t.
With the exception of the gap between the start of Heart of Thorns and the end of Season 2 (lorewise, there was no gap to speak of), officially time in Tyria is actually synchronised to real-world time. You can see this in the story journal, which gives the year in which everything happens – vanilla in 1325AE, LS1 in 1326-1327, LS2 in 1327-1328, HoT in 1328, and LS3 in 1329-1330, with Head of the Snake being the first 1330 event. So, yes, officially at least a year has passed in Tyria between the events of Heart of Thorns and Caudecus’ attack on Divinity’s Reach.
That might be tolerable if the maps at least portrayed an advancing war effort, but Verdant Brink was mostly defensive in nature, likewise Auric Basin (which was mainly about the Exalted, who don’t really join the Pact or anything), and Tangled Depths was a map-wide sidequest about dealing with the Chak, who don’t have anything to do with anything. Silverwastes has more relevance to the fight against Mordremoth than most of HoT. So you get to Dragon’s Stand without any real sense of how an effective force was actually assembled there, or for that matter having much in the way of heavy-hitting superweapons other than just running up to the boss and smacking it in the face. The Pact brought more firepower to fight Tequatl than they did to Mordremoth.
They do build up, actually.
Verdant Brink is essentially a ‘survive the immediate aftermath of the Pact Fleet’s destruction’ map. Most of the event chains end with troops moving deeper into the jungle, evacuating, or establishing a secure camp, at least for the time being.
Auric Basin is mostly focused on a siege on Tarir, but it’s also in part the Pact survivors gaining a stronghold from which to go on the offensive. Holding Tarir is essentially the ‘turning point’, from which the Pact goes back on the offensive.
Tangled Depths is the start of that offensive. You might have missed it if you’re just running around, but the culmination of the Tangled Depths meta is to blow kitten in the side of a mountain from the inside so that the Pact forces can catch Mordremoth by surprise through entering Dragon’s Stand in force without going through the Mordrem army in Dragon’s Passage. Yes, the chak are often the main enemies there (although two of the four pre-gerent chains end with striking blows against the Mordrem), but that’s because they’re basically evading the notice of the Mordrem by going through chak territory instead.
Dragon’s Stand is then the conclusion of said offensive.
We’ve all seen those pictures of a knight blocking a dragon’s fiery breath with their shield, haven’t we?
Being more serious, though, a shield block probably shouldn’t be able to stop all of the damage from a flamethrower. On the other hand, there are things in the game defined as ‘blocking’ where it’s quite reasonable, looking at the graphics, that they can block a flamethrower – the mesmer shield 4 skill and the elementalist Arcane Shield come to mind. Meanwhile, there are a lot of projectile-hate skills that theoretically should be able to stop the stream of flame from a flamethrower, but don’t because it’s not technically a projectile.
There are swings and roundabouts. From what I see, flamethrower does seem to get used a lot in high-end play, albeit rarely for the autoattack. I am curious about lordhelmos’ build, though…
That’s just your theory, however, so you can’t state it as proven fact in support of another theory.
We can easily point out other interpretations:
1) By and large, the dragons have only been seen to drain magic energy from Tyria. The gods are not in Tyria. Therefore, such leeching is unlikely to affect them. You claim that they retain a link to Tyria through which their energy can be drained – however, there is no evidence that such a link remains.
2) As you say, there are other possible causes for Balthazar’s depowering. Menzies. The other gods deciding he needs to be taken down a few pegs for whatever reason. Some other threat we don’t know about.
3) We’ve been told why the Six have been silent – they want humanity to learn to stand on its own feet rather than having the gods hold their collective hands.
4) You have faith in ArenaNet not making the story overly complicated? Overly complicated is what they do. We could probably list dozens of plot threads that have been left hanging because ArenaNet let things get more complicated than they could handle.
The primordial elemental forces in the Norse mythology are: Muspelheim – the primordial elemental fire and Niflheim the elemental ice. When the ice and fire collided over the abyss Ginnungagap, Ymir and the cow Audhumbla were born.
Uranus and Geea are not the Chaos (primordial elemental force). They were born from Chaos. The same with Tiamat and Apsu – they are Gods born from Chaos.
What you describe here are fights between Gods. Nothing unusual here.
Under this argument, the Elder Dragons aren’t primordial forces either – the Mists are.
Imhotep – according to all the documents – was a human worshiped as a God of science. This does not make him a God. Because, in North Korea, the leader is treated as a God on Earth. This makes him a God?
According to Egyptian mythology, yes, he was a mortal and then he was a god. If you’re going to use mythology as your backing for defining a god, you have to accept when mythology throws up exceptions to your rule. And if you’re throwing out those exceptions because they don’t fit your rule, then that’s entering circular reasoning and No True Scotsmen territory.
Exactly this. We have no rules defining a God in Tyria. And this is the reason we try to figure what a God means, by comparing them with what we know.
Can you point to the set of rules used by humans to define a God?
Assuming you don’t have access to genetic data, how do you define a cat?
One could point to a number of characteristics that are usually common to cats, but many of these have exceptions that are, nevertheless, still cats. Sphinxes have no fur, for instance, and Manx cats have little or no tail, but both are still considered cats. Cats are generally considered to be carnivores, but if someone trained a cat to eat a tofu-based diet instead, does that mean it stops being a cat, or does it just mean that cats can live on other diets?
Set the definition to tightly, and you’ll start excluding things that definitely are cats. Set it too loosely, and you’ll start including things like ferrets and dogs that aren’t. Some definitions might even do both.
And then there are things that some cultures have attributed to cats that turned out not to be true. For instance, some cultures believed that cats developed shapeshifting abilities over time – if it was demonstrated that they actually don’t, would that mean that they should declare them not to be cats and start referring to them as small furry carnivores? Or does the understanding of the word ‘cat’ simply get changed to reflect the true reality and you move on?
It’s the same with the gods. In the context of Tyria, the term ‘god’ is defined by what people use the term to refer to – and among the playable races, that means the Six and beings like them. If it turns out that gods do not actually have some of the properties assigned to them, we simply change our expectations of what a god is and move on.
That said, if you must have a set of characteristics, here are a few I might consider, in roughly decreasing order of importance:
1) Has power beyond normal mortal limits.
2) Has dominion (although it might be shared) over some aspect of reality and/or mortal behaviour.
3) Provides some form of afterlife to their followers
4) Is linked to the Mists in some fashion.
5) Can, if they choose, share some of that power with their followers through blessings.
Note that all of these characteristics also apply to the Norn animal spirits, to Raven at least. In fact, the norn consider the animal spirits and the gods to be more or less equivalent, except that while the animal spirits represent animals (obviously) and any abstract concepts they are associated with are linked to that animal, the gods are more directly linked to abstract concepts. Which may be as good a definition as any – a god is a spirit that represents an abstract concept.
I was fairly neutral towards her, but I don’t think all the hate is really warranted.
Alas, I prefer the theory that Kormir was chosen due to her proximity to Abbadon and her exposure to his Divine Magic from the start of the Nightfall story. She inadvertently prepped herself to be a vessel via her contact.
And possibly more important, stayed sane through all of it.
Another part of it is that even some of her mistakes showed her suitability to be a potential replacement. It was her curiosity and thirst for knowledge that lead her to excavate the vaults of Fahrunar, which helped to trigger Nightfall… however, these are traits that would be desirable, possibly actually required, to take the mantle of the God of Knowledge.
It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s part of the reason for the gods coverup of Abaddon being so incomplete in the first place. They wanted Abaddon to eventually be discovered and fought, but only if a suitable candidate was present to replace him. So they buried knowledge of Abaddon sufficiently that it wouldn’t be stumbled on by just anybody, but not so deep as to be unattainable by someone with the drive to seek knowledge despite the dangers, tests, and warnings.
In many polytheistic beliefs the Gods were created from Chaos by the Primordial (Elemental) forces residing (or composing) the Chaos – see Scandinavian Mythology – the “apparition” of Ymir and the Cow Audhumla / Greek Mythology – Geea and Uranus / Japanese Mythology – Izanagi and Izanami etc. All the Gods were created from Chaos by the Primordial/ Elemental Forces. No God, in any mythology had ever fought against these Primordial Forces.
Really? Uranus got himself castrated and overthrown by Cronus, who in turn got overthrown by Zeus. In Babylonian mythology, Apsu and Tiamat represented the primordial forces, and the Babylonian gods killed first Apsu and then Tiamat. In Ymir’s case, while I don’t recall off the top of my head how Ymir died or even if that is known in the present time (there are a lot of gaps in our knowledge of Norse mythology – what we know came out of surprisingly few sources that survived Christianisation), the gods used his body to create the world afterwards, and were then at odds with the jotun, which were also representations of primordial forces (albeit younger ones). And that’s just off the top of my head.
And finally – no human had been “promoted” to the state of God. Because even the Gods cannot create Gods.
Imhotep says hi – and, again, that’s off the top of my head.
The problem with coming up with a set of rules to define what a god is and then declaring that something isn’t a god is that each mythology tends to have different rules. In Tyria, the primary religion through which we define the term ‘god’ is the human one.
Now, something has clearly happened with Balthazar that put him into the ‘fallen god’ category, one way or another, and doing so may have changed his priority (note that, while the gods didn’t create Tyria, human mythology says they moved to other worlds when they left Tyria – Balthazar might be unconcerned about Tyria specifically because it’s one of a number of worlds the pantheon has influenced). Whether that reflects on the rest of the pantheon or not… at the moment, we don’t really know.
The Black Citadel has statues of heroes from other legions, so I don’t think it’s an issue of being the wrong location to have a memorial to her. It’s probably more a case that, as Aaron said, by the time anyone would have considered a memorial, nobody knew what she looked like.
Keep in mind, also, that the charr have a ‘Victory at any cost’ mantra. Bathea may have been the first rebellion against the shamans, but all she really achieved was to have her gender oppressed for over two centuries, and the rebellion that finally succeeded had nothing to do with her. Humans would probably put a memorial for her if she had been a figure in their history, but the charr might well view her not as a hero, but as a loser who isn’t worthy of recognition.
In the artistic design process, the Destroyers started off as a race for Utopia called the “tanneks”, which in the first concept art pass were fairly close to classical demons. They wanted something more alien, so they were redesigned into faceless, insect-like creatures with glowing guts. When development shifted fro Utopia to GW2 through EOTN, they got used as the minions of the Great Destroyer and, therefor, Primordus.
The point is, the insect-like aspect has been part of the artistic design of Destroyers as far back as they’ve been called Destroyers, likely before they became minions of an Elder Dragon (what we know of Utopia indicates that the story there was going in a different direction). So the legendary wyverns having insect-like features is just a continuation of that.
What I suspect is going on behind the scenes lore-wise is that since Primordus largely makes his own minions rather than corrupting existing creatures, he has the ability to assemble whichever features he feels are going to make them the most effective. So they all have an armoured exoskeleton, because that makes them harder to kill, and that’s ultimately where the insect-like part comes from. If he thinks a Destroyer will be more effective with mandibles or sensory antennae, there’s nothing stopping him adding them on, even if the form is broadly based on something else such as a wyvern, troll, or harpy.
Well, the Bloodstone explosion has been said by multiple sources to have been set to be even bigger than the Jade Wind if it hadn’t been sucked back in. One character suggests that the explosion was looking to be big enough to take out Lion’s Arch – I’m pretty sure that would have made it bigger than the Jade Wind.
Agreed, we don’t see magic cravings in the creatures affected by the Jade Wind… but they’re also not communicating why they’re attacking (well, we know the history bhind naga and wardens, but I don’t think either of those were hit directly). We know that Elder Dragons can absorb magical energy from their victims (it’s a large part of why they’re a threat, in fact), and it’s possible that the reason the dragons, kirin, and so on that were affected by the Jade Wind are hostile is because they’re hungry for the magic bound in the life force of their victims.
PS On the question of Shiro holding more magic in his body than would normally be possible – it was supposed to be a gift from Dwayna, so it’s likely the magic is ‘packaged’, for want of a better word, in a way that makes it easier for a mortal to contain… at least temporarily (the ceremony is supposed to release the magic fairly quickly, just not so destructively).
(edited by draxynnic.3719)
Similarly, dragons were not always universally evil – until GW2 introduced the Elder Dragons (yes we saw Primordus and Kralkatorrik in GW1, presuming they’re not retconing the statue into being a dragon champion despite repeatedly telling us it’s the Elder Dragon itself, but we didn’t know their names, or that they were dragons, until promotions for GW2 began post-EotN release), we actually had more good named dragons than evil: Glint, Gleam (though name was unknown at the time, he was in GW1), Kuunavang, Albax and arguably Shiny, versus Kunvie and Rotscale.
For completeness, there’s also Miella, Snapjaw, and Sourbeak. I think there might also be some bone dragon bosses apart from Rotscale.
However...
In Factions, we’re told that the Jade Sea dragons, the Saltsprays at least, are only violent as a result of having been driven insane by the Jade Wind. So they aren’t naturally evil – they’re under the effect of corrupted magic.
Similarly, Rotscale and his buddies are undead, and while in Guild Wars you can’t make the assumption that something is evil just because they’re undead, it is true that undead beings often act differently than how they would in life, either due to a corrupting effect from the magic that animated them, or because the magic that animates them does not allow them to retain their free will.
So, if we just work with Guild Wars 1, there are in fact no cases of an evil dragon where it could not be explained through being corrupted in one manner or another.
(Come to think on it, this does make me wonder about possible links between bloodstone madness and the madness of many of the magical creatures that survived the Jade Wind…)
Arguably, engineer is tossed under the bus just as much. Yes, the trenchcoat works for an engineer, but a lot of the sets have a tattered, criminal/outdoors look, a duellist look, and/or are accessorised with throwing daggers (which engineers don’t use). I actually have a harder time finding sets that look good on my charr engineer than on my sylvari thief, although admittedly half of that is charr clipping issues.
Ranger works well with most, although a lot of those armour sets have assassin-esque facemasks.
One could justify the trenchcoats on thieves for the reason that most ninjas don’t actually wear the classic ninja garb while on assignments – inconspicuousness. Copying ranger/outdoorsman garb allows them to be reasonably protected while not looking altogether unusual. Of course, this breaks when you put a facemask on top.
The real problem, when you get down to it, is that, for the other classes, it is reasonable that the sets will be shared. Some of the heavy armour sets do point more to some professions than others, but at the bottom line, armour is armour. Similarly, mage’s robes are mage’s robes, although some of the more macabre examples are oriented more towards necromancers. For the medium professions, though… well, you can expect the three to have very different looks. Trenchcoats work for rangers and engineers, as you point out… but rangers and engineers will have very different accessories (a ranger is more likely to have knives, collections of herbs, and various tools for surviving in the wild, an engineer is more likely to have potion vials and a more mechanically-inclined toolbelt). Thieves are generally similar to rangers, but depending on what the thief in question is doing, a long trenchcoat may be completely inappropriate.
That said, there are some examples which avoid the trenchcoat look, either as a complete set, or by combining sets, some of which are reasonably high-end (Glorious and Illustrious being high-end examples). So there are other options. This does, however, make the argument that all the armour within a given weight should have a similar look even weaker – it’s a rule that’s already been broken. It does make sense that the first set of legendary armour should follow the trend of the majority of the existing armour of that weight, though. (TBH, the medium legendary kind of feels like an upgraded Arah set.)
Except it is being done. There are quite a few points where one race has different dialogue to the generic dialogue. Here, however, they dropped the ball. To add insult to injury, there’s the example I cited – asura have different lines to MOX than other races, simply because it happened to be an asura that a spider ate.
Well then, I’m sure that many more lines will be added since it’s already being done and the cost is low enough.
That’s the thing. They’ve done it for some pretty minor things, and didn’t do it for the first appearance of a being that is literally one of the gods of one of the races, and likely highly significant in the history of another.
If an asura can get a different line for telling MOX to leave a spider behind, not having different lines for charr and humans coming face to face with Balthazar is totally dropping the ball.
Ele seems to be getting sword rather than axe from the leaks thus far, while the idea of mantras for them comes up because the screenshot shows numbers on the utility skills – although this isn’t the mechanic that is actually used for actual mantras. I’m sceptical myself – the difference from the existing mantra mechanic makes me think it might be a different mechanic. Possibly more like Diablo 3’s “charge” skills, which can be used multiple times, with each charge having its own recharge.
That said, it’s entirely possible that two elite specialisations will get the same skill type added. Both tempest and reaper got shouts, after all.
Except it is being done. There are quite a few points where one race has different dialogue to the generic dialogue. Here, however, they dropped the ball. To add insult to injury, there’s the example I cited – asura have different lines to MOX than other races, simply because it happened to be an asura that a spider ate.
Like I stated many times in my previous posts: It can’t be that hard (as in, yes, it is feasible) to slightly differ the dialogue for every race to fit their racial demeanor and tone
Keeping in mind of course that each additional line of dialogue needs to be recorded (and paid for) by 40 different voice actors. (5 races x 2 sexes x 4 languages). It’s an additional cost and time added to the budget of the game. Of which these costs, since the budget is a finite amount, is then subtracted from the budgets of all the other work that needs to be done.
tanstaafl
(there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch)
That’s pretty much the point. They’re ALREADY having to get all those voice actors in, so having some of them speak slightly different lines isn’t actually that much of an extra effort.
In fact, we see it later in the episode – asura get different lines every so often, including when interacting with MOX. Missing out on giving charr and humans a slightly different response when a god shows up does become a significant oversight in that context.
Guardian dared come close to Mesmer at quickness stacking, and Feel My Wrath’s cooldown was increased by 50%. Mesmer has both quickness and alacrity and is not sharing. But at the same time, they invalidate Guardian’s defensive support with their AoE distort and to rub it in, they are the designated tank of the meta. Oh, and the leaker said mirage is currently doing about 80k dps in test, so don’t forget to bow down to your butterfly overlords.
Okay. With Mesmer and Guardian being my top professions, this one I can get into the nitty gritty on…
First, mesmer players have been complaining about being relegated to support for a while now, so a DPS spec for them will be about as welcome as a proper support spec for guardian. Regarding that 80k DPS test, the same leaker pretty much said that WOULD be nerfed. This actually worries me a bit, to be perfectly honest – golem tests often relate to perfect raid circumstances, and ArenaNet is balancing PvE around raids now. The end result could be one where mesmers get the same DPS as other professions if everything works perfectly, but in most practical circumstances they’ll still hit like a kitten compared to the competition.
On the quickness thing… keep in mind that you’re comparing one skill to an entire build. Even nerfed, Feel My Wrath with the trait has 13.9% uptime, 11.1% without the trait. Time Warp on its own is about half that. Time Warp with Continuum Split and a trait can get up to 15.7% uptime, but that’s using another skill, locks your traitlines, and doesn’t provide Fury. Without Temporal Enchanter, it drops to 13.1%. (Note that all these figures are without extended boon length or Alacrity)
Of course, mesmers can reinforce this to get perma-quickness through Alacrity, boon duration increases, and other skills that provide quickness, but to do that they have to have a strict build and rotation. FMW gives all its benefits from just pressing 0 (or whatever you have your elite bound to) on recharge.
Firebrand/Purifier is the make-or-break spec for me. But to work, they first have to take a fine comb through all the garbage of the base class. Hearing from the leaker that there’s no healer in xpac 2 is not good news. And knowing their track history, they will load the tomes with condi removal and defensive crap that is useless in pve, so they can avoid nerfing Epidemic.
Personally, I’m really hoping to see the druid monopoly broken. From a similar viewpoint, breaking the mesmer monopoly would probably also be a good thing. (Frankly, I just don’t like professions having monopolies in general.)
This, however, might not need a spec as healing-focused as druid is. Druid took a profession that was relatively selfish at its core and made it into the primary healer – it needed to add a lot. Guardian, by contrast, was, pre-HoT, one of the best support professions around – even with some nerfs since, it probably doesn’t need as much to be comparable. If they base the new tomes on the old ones, in fact, we might see guardians that can compete with both druids in healing and mesmers in quickness application (possibly not beating either at their own game, but two guardians might be able to sub for a mesmer and a druid). Now, that’s an optimistic viewpoint, but it could be that the reason there isn’t an elite spec as support-focused as druid is because other professions don’t need as much of a boost to become a support character as ranger did.
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