Guild Wars 2

“Only 2 weeks.” =-/

Not all that acceptable.

The whole Ascended gear thing has always alienated a certain portion of the userbase because it works against the way they play the game. I have personally tried to get this message across, and to offer ideas on a course correction so that players like me won’t feel ignored or alienated, but there just hasn’t been enough progress on the developer’s end.

And I really want this discussion to happen. Don’t get this off-track or closed or ignored due to conspiracy theories and bad behavior.

Estimated two weeks to make an Ascended Weapon. Main uses seven different weapons. I have stat variations for 3 of those weapon types, so let’s go with 10 weapons needed to be crafted. That’s 20 weeks or so to get back to the top of the power curve while retaining my ability to play different builds at top form.

I am sorry, but that’s just not in line with what this segment of the audience needs. We need a solution. Hell, normalizing Ascended gear in WvWvW would be fine. Giving the Legendary stat change system to Ascended would be fine as well. How it currently is set up is not fine. =/

I am not even touching on the impact this has on alts in competitive parts of the game.

I am very much in the OP’s situation. Some of my characters have five sets of gear. My progression is horizontal. Ascended gear does nothing but complicate things for me. I am a veteran of this game and other games to know well enough that the stat differences will matter.

I got way more excited about the addition of new rune sets like Perplexity than I did for any new Ascended gear. The Rune of Perplexity has actually added gameplay value to the game in a way Ascended gear cannot: it’s actually changed what I do and how I play.

But I am afraid to invest into my new builds because it might be nerfed and then all those laurels and whatnot I saved up would be wasted on a build that is no longer viable. So I stick with exotics, but I won’t be able to do that as more and more Ascended gear comes in. The stat differences will mean too much.

So the OP’s solution is what I would like as well. When I heard about the stat-swapability on Legendary weapons, I thought to myself that it would solve any future gear problems.

Unfortunately, they’ve already started down the multiple stat variants path with trinkets, so I don’t know if they’re ready to correct course with Ascended weapons. It would mean that all Ascended weapon crafting recipes would be the same, instead of the different insignia = different stat choice setup that’s been the standard.

While using the infinite Watchknight Tonic, any non-weapon clone creation does not work. Deceptive Evasion doesn’t create a clone, nor does Decoy, or Mirror Images.

Any weapon-based skill that creates a clone do work.

If confusion still hit hard the OP would have to learn to play.

Just saying.

Gab Superstar.4059:

etiolate.9185:

1. Ballistas get blocked by anything – Why can’t Balistas shoot over the edge of their own walls? It’s frustrating how often ballista shots built on tower/keep walls get nullified by the edge of the walls. The ballista itself is physically aimed above this railing of sorts, but ballista shots always tend to blow up at the slightest climb in trajectory. However, a ballista can shoot nearly vertical straight up despite the 3d model looking incapable of doing so.

Isn’t it a little silly that a Balli is better at shooting straight up than it is at shooting straight forward? This is one of the issues that keeps them from being used more often.

While their trajectory seems to be a bit off, I wouldn’t say that it neccesarily is that much of an issue.

etiolate.9185:

2. I was running a glam confusion mes build. Yes, laugh, but I wanted to give it a try again! However, confusion hits for around 200 don’t really do much of anything. The confusion nerf months back was too drastic. You could double confusion damage on Glam builds and it would still be mildly effective, but at least it would be effective. The current version is pitiful and not worth using. A zerg can still mindlessly spam through it, removing the whole point of a condition like confusion.

I think it is unfortunate that you look at Glamour purely as a DPS build. Glamour builds are still powerful. Remember that the Glamour fields are utility skills (and powerful such) in their own right. The confusion is something that’s being added on top of an already powerful effect.

I am pretty sure if ballistas trajectory was fixed then they’d be far more useful. There are situations where they should work but do not work just because of trajectory issues.

And I don’t see glam as purely DPS. I can do a glam build that doesn’t involve confusion, but the Glam Confusion build is pretty heavily loaded towards just that confusion effect. A glam build with Phantasm damage is far stronger than a glam confusion build and that’s mainly due to confusion not hitting hard enough to matter.

I have two issues that were particularly frustrating tonight when trying to ward off a major zerg tonight. We’re outnumbered probably 8-1 at the least. More likely 10-1. However, that’s fine because I got to test some things… and they were useless.

1. Ballistas get blocked by anything – Why can’t Balistas shoot over the edge of their own walls? It’s frustrating how often ballista shots built on tower/keep walls get nullified by the edge of the walls. The ballista itself is physically aimed above this railing of sorts, but ballista shots always tend to blow up at the slightest climb in trajectory. However, a ballista can shoot nearly vertical straight up despite the 3d model looking incapable of doing so.

Isn’t it a little silly that a Balli is better at shooting straight up than it is at shooting straight forward? This is one of the issues that keeps them from being used more often.

2. I was running a glam confusion mes build. Yes, laugh, but I wanted to give it a try again! However, confusion hits for around 200 don’t really do much of anything. The confusion nerf months back was too drastic. You could double confusion damage on Glam builds and it would still be mildly effective, but at least it would be effective. The current version is pitiful and not worth using. A zerg can still mindlessly spam through it, removing the whole point of a condition like confusion.

In regards to targeting issues: Will something like combat mod ever be supported?

The problem is that fighting a thief right now involves no tactics or interesting play. It’s all poke and smoke. You hit them, they stealth. You wait, they jump on you, you use your escape mechanic, and they stealth again.

It’s not only frustrating in that your escape mechanics still leave you to be hit afterwards and their escapes leave them invisible, but that even countering the thief over and over doesn’t change the fight or their approach. It’s just poke and smoke over and over and over. You have to wait on something like shadow refuge and a knockback to have any real semblance of a fight.

The distaste in player’s mouths doesn’t come from losing a fight to a thief, but simply having a fight with a thief. Win or lose, fighting a thief is unfulfilling.

Vetrie.7804:

etiolate.9185:

There are people who would complain that they come back and there’s a ton of content that is overwhelming.

They may also complain that the new content that was added months ago while they were away is now empty and there is nobody who will play it with them. (Sort of like going to Southsun outside of a relevant LS update.)

It should also be understood that the Living Story is a content delivery method and philosophy, not just a single feature that "has taken over the game’. The “Living World” may end up being an unfortunate choice of words by PR. What Living Story/World means is that patches will follow a story rather than just appear.

This doesn’t mean I am against there being more permanent content. I am all for that. I believe everyone, including ANet, sees the current ratio of temporary to permanent content as unsatisfactory.

You dont get it at all. This content was temorary , thats why there are no people there . You cant get anything there anymore. Thats why noone plays it. Temporary

This is not true. Most of what was added to Southsun outside of the magic find boost and the crab toss is still there. The new events, the NPCs, the growth of ‘settling’, and the big meta boss are still there.

There are people who would complain that they come back and there’s a ton of content that is overwhelming.

They may also complain that the new content that was added months ago while they were away is now empty and there is nobody who will play it with them. (Sort of like going to Southsun outside of a relevant LS update.)

It should also be understood that the Living Story is a content delivery method and philosophy, not just a single feature that "has taken over the game’. The “Living World” may end up being an unfortunate choice of words by PR. What Living Story/World means is that patches will follow a story rather than just appear.

This doesn’t mean I am against there being more permanent content. I am all for that. I believe everyone, including ANet, sees the current ratio of temporary to permanent content as unsatisfactory.

Noodica.5428:

Glitching into our EB Keep, hmm it seems that my respect for SBI has lowered even more than it already was

It’s a bug that is unfortunately common for that keep. You’re red now and you’ve just had that keep taken, so now you’re seeing it happen for maybe the first time. The worst part of the bug is that it occurs from natural PVDoor behavior rather than any modified behavior. It triggers as naturally as taco farts.

I was there when it happened, and we tried to tell the people who glitched through to not cap. We were taking the keep anyways (as you had like three or so people defending versus our much larger group), but we were hoping the pugs would wait for the gate to burn down to keep it clean. Pugs be like herding cats though.

thank you for the bags of loot

Since the latest patch on Tuesday, I’ve had constant issue with my target being dropped. This occured within the new dungeon and within PvP. It tends to switch target rather than drop target, often to an allied target if there are allied pets, minions or clones around, and does so every two or three minutes.

I haven’t been able to figure out what exactly triggers it besides the presence of allied creatures. I have target drops before, but they were rare occurrences in the past. This is a frequent problem at this point. I cannot rely on my target sticking and skills I use often miss because my target has switched to something benign.

I have auto-targeting off and promote skill target on. I use a Logitech G600 mouse and I thought it may be the mouse, so I updated the drivers and software, but this did not resolve the issue.

I said elsewhere, but from a Mesmer POV, I don’t understand what they were trying to do with these changes. It seems to have shrunk build diversity for the Mesmer class. I will try out some of the changes they made to interrupt skills, but the truth is that there’s only one part of the game where those new traits will be highly useful and that’s WvWvW. There’s not enough team fights in tPVP for the multi-interrupts to be worth it and interrupts are useless versus most of the more powerful PVE mobs.

The IC nerf is pretty major. It reduces the access to so many things that it feels like a drastic move at first. I’m not even worried about Phantasm upkeep. It’s the way it nerfs survival and control for every Mesmer build that leaves me confused.

And I don’t see a meaningful buff to condition Mesmer play which is one of the things I thought they were looking at for multiple classes.

I am not sure what they’re intent was with the nerf. The only thing that was understood was that IC was taken by about every Mesmer build out there. If that was the problem then it spoke to the necessity to have access to clones for the class to work. This is similar to how people had a lot of issues with the Mesmer in PVE at launch because Phantasms were behaving slowly at summons, making them often useless. Any trait that supplied Phantasms with a boon made them attack immediately upon summons. When this was fixed, Phantasms went back to the dreaded pause before attacking behavior and it screwed up the entire playstyle.

It was realized that for the Mesmer to actually function properly, it needed the quicker Phantasm attack behavior and this was subsequently patched in.

Here, if the intent was to knock down Phantasm build damage a bit, then they kind of overshot the goal. Illusionist’s Celerity was a part of Mesmer functionality, from everything to their control to their survival. Removing it from all but IP Shatter builds means every other build has less survival and control accessibility. It’s not the Phantasm CDs that hurt, but the reduced acccess to iLeap/snare, Staff Feigned Retreat escape, and block skills.

If those weren’t intended to be hurt then changing the trait to only affecting clone-producing skills would lower Phantasm damage and not hurt class functionality. If limiting all those functions was the aim then that’s pretty drastic.

Just to take a different look at the class: One of the things the Mesmer lacks compared to other classes is finishers. They really only have leap and projectile finisher, but truthfully only have constant access to leap. The IC change further reduces every Mesmer player’s access to finishers, for all those leaps are tied to clone creation.

I’ve never faced a server as cautious as Borlis Pass before. At times, it’s a good tactic, and at other times it just seems pointless.

I’m kind of curious as to how you came to be this way?

There’s battles where your caution has one-upped us, but there’s times where we have like 5 people defending a tower, and BP has at least 20 or so to take it. Yeah we have siege up, but siege is just window decoration without people to man it.

The range on it is the problem. Seeing it coming was never an issue for me. It was double pulls with two mesmers dragging you off a cliff-side where you aren’t even visible to the Mesmers pulling you.

How does a delay help this problem when the Temporal Curtain pulling you isn’t even visible to you? That’s how crazy the range is.

I love pulling people on my Mesmer with it, but I know it’s overkill at this point with the range.

I fully support GvG as an official mode. I think it would fill a need the game has, and also show players that there’s more than pure chaos in the large zerg combat. (Hint: We all aren’t just randomly running into each other and hoping for the best.)

They could probably build an area similar to the bottom of the Borderland maps for a decent arena map..

Now I wish I hadn’t missed out on Fight Club, but I didn’t want to ditch EB at the time. Next time!

Stop buying the RNG gemshop stuff and they’ll stop doing it.

I haven’t been doing the meta boss events lately, because I got bored of them.

I have been doing Southsun a lot though because the rewards are good and it can actually be challenging.

Normally, when I get bored of one thing in the game, I find that there’s always something else to do. This can be WvWvW, alts, spvp, dungeons, or world completion. If you don’t like the meta event train then get off it.

It’s been a long time since SBI had queues on all maps. I have a feeling the masses will clear out after the weekend or after their world completion.

Also, props to the small AR havok squad on AR BL late last night/early AM. I think half of that havok squad had their commander tags on.

I disagree about the idea that the people chasing goals/loot want challenges. In my years of MMO playing, I’ve find this to be less and less true. Even if you look at the goal oriented players, you will likely find these players to be the ones those most willing to skip content or exploit to lower the challenge.

I don’t need phat lootz, but I would like more of a challenge. I’d like to enable a hard mode for dragon bosses and other meta bosses. However, I know as soon as something challenging is put into a MMO, people rush to find a way around the challenge. The “casuals” who don’t want challenge don’t care enough to be the ones doing this. It’s the self-proclaimed “hardcore” that rush to remove challenge, skip content and exploit.

Anytime people face a challenge in GW2, they try to reduce the challenge through brute force, often by increasing numbers. The game needs to be better at reducing the effectiveness of this tactic, but the tactic itself reveals that the people crying for challenging content are somewhat suspect.

Basic Functionality traits are my other big issue, and probably a bigger problem than the vertical power increase traits. Some examples of this are the traits that increase the range on certain skills.

The Engineer’s Rifled Barrel traits improves the range on all projectile weapons, which means that it basically improves the range on all equipable weapons. There is no engineer that wouldn’t benefit form this trait. It is basic functionality. The game says your pistol can hit this far away, but we’re reducing the distance it will hit from just so you have to take this trait for your weapon to function akittens best. This sort of trait shouldn’t exist because it’s a no-brainer. This a benefit that the weapons should have already built-in. It’s not an interesting choice. Like the vertical power increase traits, the only drawback is that your weapon will be worse at what it’s already doing.

In both cases, you have to take this boring trait and give up on more interesting traits that add new purposes and things to do. In some cases, a single trait commits both crimes. Grenadier for Engineers increases attack range AND damage. The choice is “your grenades work” or “your grenades now really work”. That’s weak design in my opinion.

Traits I <3<3:

Those that add new purpose to already existing things you do in game. My first two examples would be the Warden’s Feedback trait for Mesmers and Elixir-Infused Bombs for Engineers.

A large part of the 3 Warriors + Guardian + Mesmer uberteam combo is that Guardians and Mesmers can reflect. A key to the Mesmer’s reflect power is the Warden’s Feedback trait. This trait reduced the CD on Focus skills much like the Greatsword trait reduces cooldown, but instead of a vertical damage increase, it adds the extra functionality of making Focus skills reflect projectiles. Now my Focus off-hand went from a speed boost weapon to a speed boost AND reflect weapon. As opposed to the problematic traits, this trait allows me to do more with my character rather than just do the same thing but with better results.

Elixir-Infused Bombs make an Engineer’s bombs heal allies. This is a small little aoe heal burst that adds a new function to being a Bomb Engineer. It’s not just damge + secondary effects, but both of those things plus healing. This trait also pairs well the bomb on dodge trait. So not only do added functionality traits provide new ways to play a class, they can also make other traits better.

So, obviously, I’d like the vertical increase traits and basic functionality traits changed or removed. I find a trait like Rifled Barrels rather heinous and would just replace it with something new and add the old traits functionality as the standard range. What I would suggest for the vertical increase traits is to add more of the conditionals that certain vertical increases already have. These conditional increases are the type that increase damage if your endurance is full, if the target is burning or bleeding, or if you’re standing still. These conditionals offer more to think about when choosing the trait and offer more to think about while playing.

Now I’d like to hear other suggestions. I would also like to ask what people think of the tiering of traits now that we’re 9 months into the game. I feel there are certain traits never taken because of the tiering system. I know that a trait like Imbued Diversions is never taken because it’s in a direct power battle akittens tier with Illusionary Persona.

There has been talk of improving build variety and class playstyle through improving traits and I think that’s a good way to go about that particular issue. What I would like to then have is a discussion about what sort of traits need to be improved or entirely changed.

The two types of traits that I’ve never been a big fan of are the straight vertical increase traits and traits that do nothing but provide better functionality but no new functionality. The type of traits I love are ones that provide something new for the class, skill, or weapon to do. I think those type of traits are the linchpins for many popular builds.

Vertical Increase Traits:

Greatsword training for Mesmers, Explosive Powders for Engineers, Greatsword Power for Guardians, Physical Training for Warriors.

My issue with these traits is that they are very narrow in purpose and hence a bit boring in design. If you are running a Greatsword, then you’ll more than likely be taking something to boost Greatsword damage. There’s no drawback to using these traits and no new way of playing opened up by using these traits.

Many of these vertical increase traits are tied to weapons, but others are tied to particular skills or just a singular skill. For a Phantasm Mesmer, your build normally takes three traits just to increase Phantasm Damage. That’s three traits just to increase Phantasm damage rather than offer new viable reasons for using your Phantasms.

The problem is that this just isn’t helping build variety and that there’s too many of these type of traits. In one way or another, they are just +1 to X.

D I V A.6018:

I watched the live stream today and Jonathan Sharp actually answered my question about more game modes. I am really excited that Anet slowly but steadily realizes that conquest is not the best game type.
GW1 had the best PvP of any game known to me. And still has, although not many people are left playing it.

Dividing the playerbase… hm. GvG was always for hardcore players. HA was for experienced players and hardcore players. Random Arena was 95% Random-PvPers and 5% hardcore gamers.

I don’t see the point why Anet would reject a simple and easy 4v4 DM Arena?

if Anet really wants to encourage people to try new gametypes via custom arenas, then why are our customizations so limited?
DIVA

Yeah, you can’t really do alternate game types with Custom Arena as it is now. As well, you are playing on maps designed for one game type. It won’t work as well as a map designed for the sort of game modes people want.

Right now, it’s mostly stating what you’re trying to do in the Custom Arena title and hope people play along. You can’t enforce anything via rule changes. Custom Arenas are an inadequate solution to a problem that’s existed since beta.

Well there’s another map coming, but guess what? It’s cap point.

The sad truth may be that they fully invested into Cap Point and nobody told them it was a bad idea. Now they have their entire combat and balance set up around it and don’t want to bail on it.

If ArenaNet is serious about its spvp mode, it won’t show with custom arenas and spectator mode. It will show when they admit a mistake and go a new direction, one that points away from Cap Point.

Hey folks, can I get a clarification?

On backpack regenerator, it says it does not show regeneration boon. Does this mean you still get the health regeneration but it does not show or that there is no regeneration applied? I never see regeneration and just assumed the trait didn’t do anything, but if it does regen then I’ll keep it.

Mesmers were always good in small skirmishes. However, if you try to run any shatter build into a zerg you won’t find it so effective. Clones don’t like aoe too well. As well, if you’re going to small skirmish then you might as well go power/shatter.

The confusion nerf in WvWvW is a huge red flag to me as a player concerned about the game’s future balance.

I have a short story to tell. It’s called..

Confusion – WTF do you think this skill is about?

As Poison is a condition that punishes players that heal without cleansing, confusion is a condition that punishes players that spam without cleansing. So confusion needs to hit hard in order to matter and deter people from spamming carelessly.

Confusion builds are major trait and utility skill hogs. You have to sell out your build to make confusion matter. It’s funny to think that anyone is complaining about the power of a condition that requires so many traits and stats and skills to even be effective.

Confusion whining increased once culling was fixed. Why? Because zergs became an even greater part of the WvWvW game and aoe confusions were effective against zergs. Yet, unlike shatter or power phantasm builds, confusion builds like the glam mesmer are rather weak outside of the few skills the class depends upon. They have less survival than a glass cannon shatter Meesmer or the Phantasm Mesmer, and offer less overall outside of confusion weeding out careless players. So without confusion having the heavy damage it needs to even work, the build is pointless.

As well, a condition Mesmer relies heavily on Confusion and Bleeds. So without confusion hitting hard to deter spamming or punish spamming then going condition damage is a questionable choice.

What does that leave confusion as? A bit of extra damage ON OCCASION for a shatter mes. That’s all. Confusion almost HAS to hit for 1k+ to matter. It falls off so quickly and requires so much investment that it is pointless otherwise.

If you keep neutering the condition then you might as well not have the condition. The punishment is the purpose. It’s like removing the heal debuff from poison.

Which ability does the most damage regardless of any other factors is not all that relevant to discussions of GW2’s combat. Many of the abilities that people have complained about balance-wise are not the main attack abilities. Heartseeker thieves, Confusion from Mesmers(shatter, scepter 3, glams), Guardian Retal(multiple abilities), D/D Eles(boons and combo fields), and so on.

The only time I am sitting still spamming 1 is on some of the too-easy meta bosses. Normally, my combat experience is mobile and reactionary.

Ruprect.7260:

Gab Superstar.4059:

King Amadaeus.8619:

Well they got culling/haste fixed….Confusion was next, after that I am guessing the nerf-dogs next target will be backstab thieves…People just won’t be happy until they whine enough to get FAILNET to come in and save their bad playing selves….IF confusion is killing you then, you fail, plain and simple….Now sometimes you get stuck with confusion and cant just run away, sucks don’t it…Sometimes I get stuck with 10 stacks of bleed and cleanse/heals both on CD, that sucks for me and sometimes I die.

I want that nerfed, in fact I want it nerfed to where no one dies, no one even goes down. We can just run around and do no dmg to each other and all get participation trophies at the end of the week.

To the people whining about confusion, I say this: go back to the games you came from.

Because Confusion = Spiteful Spirit, Empathy, Backfire, etc from GW1….People all dealt with them, and the hilarious bads like you whined then too.

This is not correct, and if you really do believe this then I don’t think you played GW1 very extensively.

Iruwen.3164:

Yeah I know, who needs facts when you have an opinion.

Again, theory crafting is absolutely not facts.

I could say that, since X weapon has 90% accuracy, and since weapon Y has 80% accuracy, in a fight between the two weapons, weapon X will always win. This is not correct.

When people say that “well, he should have paid mind to the purple circles around his ally in the corner of his screen while he was busy dealing with the necro and in the middle of a cast and trying to stay alive” it’s just not credible at all.

There are many variables outside of what people conceive on this forum that have a huge effect on how fights play out.

(In reality I think people are just playing ignorant in a futile attempt to not have their precious confusion nerfed. A futile attempt because it’s pretty much set in stone that I will be nerfed).

I have never died to confusion. I could care less if it is nerfed because I will just go back to shatter spec, which I may do anyway because this glamour build is a gimmick spec and only works well in certain situations. I have twice the survivability and damage potential in a shatter/phantasm spec. It was fun to play with glamour in WvW but it is no better than anything else. I feel more useful on my necro anyway. I see a lot of well necroes around too, maybe they need a nerf too.

I sort of feel the same way. My Glam build only works right now because people seem unused to dealing with confusion and because people are rolling in zergs. Outside of using glamours at choke points or on top of contested spots, the build doesn’t really do much damage.

It’s only a build that’s working due to culling being fixed and the change to beam attacks. Once people adjust, I am not sure it will continue to be as viable as it is, and its viability is limited as is now. Shatter Mesmers are much better for chaos squads and sneaking around. Phantasm Mesmers are good all-around, and if coupled with reflect traits, works well against a zerg like the Glam Mes does.

Confusion gripes are mostly a L2Play issue. I do think they should look at the issue of dodge traits triggering confusion, because that feels somewhat outside of confusion’s purpose. Weakness is the anti-dodge condition, but confusion is actually a more effective anti-dodge right now and that’s an issue.

But blowing yourself up because you spam through confusion is your own fault. It’s also one of the few player builds that works well against a zerg, but only a mindless zerg.

Nike.2631:

etiolate.9185:

I hate the online gambling aspect of these skins. I don’t buy black lion keys due to it. I would be far more likely to buy the skins if they were available directly via a set price on the gem store.

Then I hope you like looking at other people’s whistfully, because you are never going to have one.

Straight up question – would you pay 4000 gems for one?

(that hugely lowballing the cost assuming they’re as common as 1-in-50 in the boxes…)

No, and like I said, I understand the gambling system may be making them more money. They are just making less money from people like me and hurting community relations.

I hate the online gambling aspect of these skins. I don’t buy black lion keys due to it. I would be far more likely to buy the skins if they were available directly via a set price on the gem store.

However, due to people with poor self-control, I imagine the gambling system makes more money. This is exploitative and reflects poorly on ANet.

I really like the combat in the game. It does have a high learning curve for an MMO. It’s also only a tab-target skillbar combat system on the surface level. Underneath, its an action combat game with RPG skills. Once you get better at parsing the battlefield, learning the many skills of the game and what to expect/do then you start to get into the flow. It just takes longer to get to that point for some people than others.

I’d prefer a change to the scoring system. The way it works now, you gain more by winning briefer periods of time where you are out-populating a server than you do winning by small amounts over long hours during prime time. As has been seen, this has an overall negative impact on the game’s population towards WvWvW. ArenaNet hoped that server transfers and such would balance things out, but that was sort of a naive approach to player behavior and obviously did not work out.

If the game divied up the match into mini-matches of even time periods and rewarded points for winning time periods, it would put each time period more in balance with each other. Your server may have drastically lost map area when your population was asleep, but you make that up through bonus points for winning more overall time periods during primetime. Until you do something like that, you will have the current situation where periods of population imbalance matter more than the more competitive times of day.

Jackums.3496:

If you’ve played a confusion-built Mesmer, you’ll know that outside of confusion, our damage output is pretty dismal. If an enemy cleanses our confusion burst(s), we can do little but defend and hope we don’t die whilst waiting for our skills to be ready again. I think that fact that we have to spec heavily into confusion to make it really worthwhile is great enough a cost for the damage we can potentially get from it.

That said, I can’t speak for the Engi. I don’t feel a nerf is necessary, though.

Yeah, you have to sell out your build and skillbar to confusion to make it worthwhile and the condition damage you carry doesn’t apply to much other than the confusion and bleeds. Mesmer is not a class that can cycle through its weapon skills and keep up conditions like an Engineer, Ranger or such.

This is awesome.

I would love a chiptune keyboard you could play like the bells.

Gamers need to stop using the term “hardcore”. It once meant something, maybe 15-17 years ago, but it got adopted by Microsoft to sell the Xbox as having a gaming heritage to the public, and Microsoft’s rebranding of the term kind of messed up the original meaning. It then became a buzzword that’s been thrown around like a frisbee at a dog park.

I doubt the OP can even describe his idea of “hardcore” even while thinking he/she is missing it.

Even with the increase of people looking for Laurels, there’s probably not enough people doing spvp for the higher rated players to get queues versus similar ranks.

grrrrr >|

I crafted a set of Exalted light armor and then crafted a set of Runes of the Undead to apply to them. Before applying the Runes, the items showed up as tradeable on the Black Lion Trading Post. After I applied the runes, I could no longer sell the items. The items are not listed as soulbound. If I try equipping the items, the game asks me if I want to soul bind them. The items are listed as Soulbind on Use and have never been equipped.

But there is no way for me to sell them. There is no “Sell on trading post” when I right click on them and they do not show up in my inventory to sell on the Black Lion Trading Post.

You changed your question and now I’m confused. Count my vote as wanting another game mode other than Conquest. The Conquest game is too limiting in what types of roles you can have.

Conquest + Weak Traits = Horizontal Game is completely lacking.

I’m glad this was added to help small guilds, that they reward influence and that they are repeatable. I am glad for all of that, but to release Guild Missions as they were sends a message of developmental oversight on the company’s part.

I also worry about how much incentive determines player behavior. If the personal rewards are still with big guilds then it will still cause problems for small guilds.

Also, and this seems important, but small guilds are often more personal, tight-knit groups. They are specifically the types of people who don’t want to work with other groups. It’s actually larger guilds already in the business of amassing more people that are more likely to want to ally with other guilds. Small guilds are less prone to ally with strangers because it goes against the nature of their existence.

Also, (once more), you are sort of introducing a problem into the game and telling your customers to solve it for you by allying with each other when you don’t even have a system for guild alliances in place yet.

No

The conquest mode limits the type of roles to burst or bunker and has negative effects on damage balance due to trying to accommodate this meta. It’s just far too limiting.

It’s worth noting that if you plan to use this to group heal that the radius of the heal is very small. You’ll want to be in weapon swinging radius of your allies.

emikochan.8504:

Ascended should just have been exotic with the extra slot, with all sorts of interesting infusions.

@etiolate There is yet to be any content outside of fractals you need ascended to do. It really doesn’t matter for the vast majority of the game. Nobody is going to turn down an ascended piece if it comes their way, but I know I wouldn’t care if the stats on mine went away.

The actual effort required to get them is not very high, you just play normally, and you get them.

The effort or time to get them is pretty high. It’s all time effort. It’s not a “get better at game” effort. It’s a more a test of patience than skill. Normally, I only see that junk in sub-mmos.

I don’t think people realize how many other players don’t even have exotics. It’s not for lack of interest in them, but the gold/time required to get fully kitted out in exotics. For daily players, having the karma to get Orr exotics is easy. For weekly players, its not so much.

Again I ask, are we running around in Masterwork items? Are we stopping at Rare items? We aren’t. Why? Because it matters. We know we are playing our character at non-optimum levels. We know the true usefulness and strength of builds and skills are best determined at max-stat levels.

Be honest please.