Guild Wars 2

Greatsword #5 does relatively high condition damage

BTW, burning is a very interesting condition. High-damage, but not really compatible with the idea of burst. It seems that ANet indeed tried to design the Guardian with sustained damage in mind.

I’m all for making retaliation stronger but also much shorter duration and thus opportunistic.

Well, Guardians are active mitigation tankers. Meaning, they have lots of active abilities which allows them to negate the incoming damage. Protection, Blocks, Blinds, Dodge with near-perma Vigor. This all leads to the fact that a (properly played) Guardian will receive less incoming damage, than say, a Warrior. Take away all these tanking abilities and Guardian will indeed become extremely squishy.

Guardian’s lower health pool is in fact there to balance the active tanking ability. There is this notion of ‘buffer tanking’ – where you have a large HP pool to soak in the incoming damage, but don’t have much means to regenerate the buffer quickly. In GW2, Necros are an interesting class for buffer tanking due to DS. Guardians do not have buffers – if they had, they would basically never die. They would use the buffer to soak up one burst and their active abilities to soak up another burst, giving then additional time until the cooldowns regenerate.

Dabrixmgp.4758:

Our only condition damage is burning yet we have no chance to cause burning on crit where other classes have chance to cause bleeds on crit or chance to cause burning on crit. Why do we have a trait that grants 15% chance to crit with a one handed weapon in our condition damage and precision line ( Right-Hand Strength) yet nothing that grants burning on crit?

It is not difficult to ensure almost 100% burn uptime on the target even without that. Again, we have enough proc on crit (empowering might alone is very good).

Well, I counted three:

Empowering Might
Vigorous Precision
Glacial Heart

Incidentally, I also counter three for Warrior (or four, if you count in Sharpened Axes). Engineer seems to have five. You are welcome to do a count yourself.

Well you know.. on Guardian forums people complain about Warriors being a better class, on Warrior forums people complain about Guardians being a better class. And everyone else complaining about Warriors and Guardians being OP. Works as intended!

In all honesty: there are a number of ‘non-canonical’ builds that seem to work very well for the people who post videos on them. You just have to experiment and find your own way. The majority will always complain, this is the sad truth about MMORPGs. People simply have unreasonable expectations while lacking the understanding of the bigger picture. This game is still in beta, don’t forget it. They still do a better job balancing the classes than any other MMORPG I am aware of.

This is not really a ‘bug’ but I don’t really know where to post this.

Would it be possible to you guys to offer the wallpapers in 2880×1800 resolution as well? You have some high quality work out there and I would love to be able to enjoy it on my laptops native resolution.

Alarox.4590:

Obtena.7952:

Torch #4 is better than the GS AOE: it doesn’t miss and it’s not limited to a certain number of hits.

I literally laughed.

---

Whirling Wrath:
1251+ damage (actual damage is significantly higher http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Whirling_Wrath)
1668 DPS
8-10s cooldown
360 degrees
14 total hits

Cleansing Flame:
1000 damage
235 DPS
12.75-15s cooldown
Frontal cone
10 total hits

Whirling Wrath is significantly better.

You should pay more attention when reading The poster you quoted was talking about Torch #4, which applies 8-9 seconds of burning to enemies around you. Depending on the situation, this will deal more damage than Whirling Wrath. Not to mention that #4 activation ability deal tons of damage.

Ynna.8769:

This kinda changes the dynamic of Shelter. The trade-off with Shelter is that you gain less healing, but in exchange got a powerful block. If enough “unblockable” skills exist (and I have no idea how many there are) or the meta shifts towards unblockable attacks, Guardians will be left with no choice of healing skill in sPvP.
Admittedly, this is a “worst-case” scenario.

Unblockable attacks are things like traps and marks. Which makes sense – these are ‘area denial’ abilities, you are not supposed to stand in them. To be frank, Symbol damage should be unblockable as well. I am not aware of any ‘direct’ unblockable attack – and you are right, these would screw the game badly.

Don’t forget that Sword has an AOE blind on 10 sec cooldown, which is a great defensive utility! The only thing I would like to change is the Zealot’s Defense, I find it too situational (as in – its almost always the wrong choice). For instance, it could get a real block (like 1 sec) in addition to the ranged block it has now; or, it could be usable while moving and the attack area would be wider.

I wouldn’t mind if Sword got a slight damage boost to make it on-par with the GS

Bartho.7896:

Yesterday i did 28 1-clover tries in row, (after failing nearly all 10-clover tries for 3 days), and i got 0 clovers from those 28 tries in row yes zero.

0,67^28 -> chance of this happening is 0,0000135.

…

While I dont think this RNG-system favours some accounts over others, I do think your system isnt that random, cause the amount of lucky or unlucky “streaks” is too common in this game.
When you have 4 rares salvage 3 and get 0 ectos the last will most likely give you 0 too, while when you salvage and get 1-3 ectos each the last will probably give you at least one ecto too.

Do you have some data to back it up? Similarly, can any other player report of a similar lack of luck with clovers?

The last part of your post is may be a hot-hand fallacy on your side. However, it is also not excluded that ANet’s random number generator is simply bad and can generate non-random sequences at times. It is difficult to say without having the details of how its coded.

JJBigs.8456:

ex. of bad weapon combos: 1h Sword/Torch

Why is it bad? I find Torch to be a natural complement to Sword, with close-ranged burning AOE and a decent single-target burst ability.

Lalangamena.3694:

TLDR:
the point of this post is how do you use staff 2 ? i need help with this skill
any tips that can make it useful?

You simply fire it on a cooldown, preferably if the enempy is close to you. It is almost impossible to hit a moving enemy from distance, but in a zerg at close range #2 does some nice additional damage. I never detonate it, I don’t see the benefit.

All the conspiracy theorists here should really learn some basic statistics. There is absolutely nothing strange about a small fraction of players appearing to have better than average luck.

Hey Brutaly,

weird, I was sure I remember it proccing of Zealot’s Flame in the BWEs… I might be wrong though. As for the rest of your post, thanks for explanation, makes sense to me!

Brutaly.6257:

Excellent, a combination of ignorance, prejudice and selfconfidence (ofc based on a bad self image regarding competence/knowledge) in the same sentence.

Unfortunately, you are the one who is misinformed here while Jalad is spot on. Inner Fire used to proc with Torch #4 in the beta. Then they changed torch skills somehow and I guess made a decision that a Guardian should not get a reliable Fury source. Right now, that trait is a bit pointless IMHO.

The did buff Hammer and Greatsword (yes, I consider it a buff) along the way. IMHO, Guardian is doing very well for all kinds of gameplay (solo PvE, group PvE, WvWvW and PvP) as long as you can get past the ranged damage limitations. There is a reason why Guardian is regarded as one of the top tier classes in the game (and if you don’t believe me, try reading other class forums for a change).

Now I absolutely agree that the recent SW changes are way to drastic. But this is a problem with pets in general. Increase their health slightly, make them resistant to AOE and make the cooldown start when the weapon is summoned and the problem is solved.

@Zeoli: excellent post!

I can’t decide if you are actually serious in proposing something like this… an immortal pet that would kill the enemy for you while you are hiding? That would be a bit too much both in PvE and PvP, don’t you agree? This is basically how Guardian spirit weapons used to work like, but they never had 100% default uptime or the damage.

lenexkabol.9438:

It just looks like they made the change but did not check if the hps and armor scaled with level because damage already should. Some one else posted that at low levels they are pretty tanky. If that is the case it should be a easy fix. But I don’t think spirit weapons should be stronger then every other pet or summon out there.

I think this is spot-on. Unfortunately, ANet are known for slipping here and there in their patches. They need more quality control.

I believe that any sort of pet should be killable in PvP – but it should be a decision of the player to focus the pet. I also believe that a pet should die within 7-10 sec max when focused – this gives the pet owner a window of opportunity to attack the enemy while they are busy with the pet. So its fair.

Now, AOE is a problem – especially in PvE. Either the pets should get some passive AOE defence, or they should be smarter in avoiding it. E.g. if the player dodges, the pet should dodge as well; in addition, the pet should run out of red circles.

lenexkabol.9438:

I would rather it be changed from 5% damage to reduce mace skills cool down by 15%-20%.

I like this! Or it, could reduce the cast time on the chain finisher.

I don’t get it… probably the most class-breaking bug has apparently been fixed, but people are STILL unhappy with the patch? Go talk to Rangers and Necros with their pet AI…

Destroyer.1306:

Sylosi.6503:

Also in the ‘world polish’ section:

• Weapons now continue to grant bonus stats while bundles are equipped.

I assume kits are bundles.

Edit: athuria beat me to it

Holy guacamole. I think this is huge? Must test!

This IS huge. This is basically the only thing which kept me from rolling an engi!

I don’t see why its a big issue for them not giving the dates for different time zones on the website. This could be even implemented as a small macro in the forum, no big deal. Would clearly save some confusion. These are apparently those little convenience things that would cost absolutely nothing to implement but nobody seems to find time to do them.

Jazhara, let me guess, you are not a programmer? I read the links you quoted before. Its not multithreaded rendering (no such thing exists), its a way to build command queues and synchronise rendering calls from different threads. Which of course is a very cool feature, just not the one GW2 will likely to benefit from – simply because a game like GW2 with its relatively simple geometry shouldn’t suffer from too much API overhead in the first place. And, if – as you say – the game already has three actively used threads, then offloading some rendering call is even less likely to produce performance benefits. The question is how they utilise the API in their rendering thread. If there are performance problems due to how their engine works, they are better off improving the rendering system instead of trying to band-aid the problem by leveraging command buffer creating to different threads.

Tralmek.2537:

I prefer to switch seamlessly between the two, so I’d rather take a few extra bugs and a slight hit in performance in order to play my games without having to boot out of OSX.

The problem is that is much more than a slight hit in performance – its a difference between playable and unplayable. Under Windows, I have a very smooth experience running 1920×1200 at high settings. In OS X, I have to turn everything down AND play at 1440×900 AND it still struggles + there is major stutter when turning the camera.

Jazhara Knightmage.4389:

again, alot of dx11 features could have been used to boost perf

Could you elaborate on this? Specifically, which DX11 features would be useful for GW2 performance?

You mentioned multithreaded rendering earlier. First of all, multithreaded rendering is an oxymoron because the rendering is – by definition – single threaded. The rendering commands must be synchronised into a single command queue before being sent to the GPU. I don’t have much experience with DX11, I briefly looked through the docs right now and it seems that it allow you to sync command buffers from multiple threads + load resources in other threads (I am confused that this feature is seemingly new – OpenGL has had it for at least 10 years now). Anyway, all the ‘multithreaded’ calls are then combined in a single thread and sent to the GPU. Now, you will only see a benefit with this technique if your main thread is already CPU limited. This happens for instance if you have to use lots and lots of API calls per frame (e.g. it takes lots of commands to set up rendering of a particular part of the scene). I doubt that GW2 – being an MMO – requires any fancy stuff like that. The game is not particularly low-polygon (like WoW), but its not exactly high-polygon either. And it does not use any complex scene structures like destructive environment, meaning that the geometry can be precomputed into batches and rendered in a cheap way. Basically, there is nothing I can recognise in the GW2 graphics which would warrant usage of expensive API calls. If the rendering of the game is indeed CPU-limited (which I don’t know), then its more likely because of inefficient coding/geometry batching – and they should concentrate on fixing that, as no multithreading will solve it. And besides, until we know the particular details how the engine handles rendering, we have no idea how easy or difficult it is to make it multi-threaded.

P.S. I have seen claims that GW2 uses deferred rendering. Is there an official source on this? I find it rather unlikely. Or are people saying it simply because it uses FXAA instead of multi-sampling?

It depends on what one understands under ‘range’. Guardian will be very weak if you really want to stay at the long range and snipe moving targets. But its also not Guardian’s purpose.

The Scepter is high DPS at short/mid range and excels at taking out stationary targets like wall defences. The Staff is amazing in group settings, capable of some serious support AOE damage when built properly – just don’t try to fight 1v1 with it.

That said, I’d also like to see some speed increase on the Scepter #1, but that’s more a quality of life question. People just have to understand that Guardian has its limits – just as any other class out there.

A longbow causing burns with some sort of cleansing ability would fit the theme of the guardian perfectly.

Disable Java Applets in your browser – problem solved. No modern web application front-ends (with very few exceptions) uses Java Applets anymore, so there is not much reason to keep them on.

P.S. I sure hope I could have said the same about Adobe Flash

Well, I see the clash of two different approaches in this thread. Some people prefer to base their gameplay around utilising their build (these people will be obviously pro-change) while other people like the ability to adapt at any point (these people will be agains the change). I don’t think there is anything in either these approaches which makes them inherently better or worse, they are just different. If you want, the first one is about picking your strategy beforehand and concentrate on tactics while the second one allows you to change your strategy without any penalty for doing this. The second approach makes the game arguably more complex (but in a messy, chaotic way which obviously negatively affects gameplay balance).

Myself, I like the change very much. I like the ‘deck building’ aspect of GW2 and I believe that once you start playing with a deck you shouldn’t be able to change your cards. This makes it more important to thing out your strategy beforehand. Also, the change penalises ‘extreme’ builds, which is a wonderful thing in my book.

Gaile Gray.6028:

Guys, I’ve been working to help players for a long, long time. (12 years with ArenaNet alone.) And I’ve seen some situations that just blew my socks off, that I never would have expected, where family members get into huge tussles over ownership of a game account, or when couples, even married couples, write us to appeal for a resolution to a shared account situation.

Gaile, you misunderstood my question. Again, I would never ‘share’ my account with anyone (that is, give away my login credentials), and my GF never ever asked for it. I was simply asking if its ok if I let her play once in a while on my account, while I am present and watching. The account is still mine, she simply has her character she plays once in two month or so.

Buying her an own copy of the game wouldn’t make any sense, as a) she does not have a machine capable of playing GW2 and b) she does not have any time for gaming anyway.

EnemyCrusher.7324:

I recommend you log into your own account and let your friend play while you advise/supervise. Since you log in, no login information needs to be shared.

Of course this is just how we do it. I wouldn’t give anyone my account details, girlfriend or not.

But surely its ok if I let my girlfriend play once in a while (literally – once in two month) on my account?

Nike.2631:

Then please, please PLEASE change the flavor text in the tool tip. Say we are “wreathed in flame” or some similar verbage that suggests we are going to have a blue-white fire aura, but not be personally ignited/BURNING. Honestly, the way it was phrased seemed to specifically call out that it would proc the trait… Tooltip change and it all goes away – pretty painless I would hope.

It actually used to give you fury in the beta, so I think the current tooltips are just a relict from that time…

I also find it very unfortunate, as this would have been very nice Sword/Torch synergy burst build…

Deria.9158:

if (Player.getClass == WARRIOR && Player.hasTrait(FAST_HANDS) == true)
weapon_swap_timer=5;

Seriously. If it is any more complex then that, then you’re doing it wrong.

I sure hope they are doing it differently. What you propose would lead to an unmaintainable, unreadable mess of code.

The way to go is to have a DSL describing the traits etc. and a code generator emitting a reduced state machine-like implementation of that description.

Slic.2406:

I understand they are almost always criminal in some way. But you seem to not understand how CRIMINAL your own gem prices are. The amount of gems you get a dollar is simply that – CRIMINAL. It is an abysmal deal, most players will not ever use credit cards in your gem store, because you seem to not understand how to offer attractive deals to your clients. This is also a fact statement, none of the 80+ players I have talked to about the gem prices have been even remotely happy with the dollar -> gem conversion.

If you are unhappy with a product or service, you don’t have to purchase it. What’s the problem? Of course people want to have all and they want it for free. Well, they can’t. I find the gem prices to be fairly reasonable. Its not more expensive then other games of this sort.

GregT.4702:

3) Goldsellers clearly are in competition to Anet in that they benefit from the sale of a product (in game currency) that Anet also benefits from the sale of, and their profits in this regard are mutually exclusive. Even if they value their product at exactly the same price as gold on the TP, they would still be a more attractive option to players, and would still be profitable, because of (a) real world currency exchange rates, and (b) eliminating Anet’s cut of the transaction.

This is ultimately wrong, because – as said above, ANet does not sell gold. They sell gems and allows you to exchange gems and gold with other players. If gems were worthless, nobody would want to give gold for them. The only thing ANet profits from is gem purchases, they have absolutely no profit on gem to gold exchange.

An example to illustrate: assume that the entire player-base is ready to spend around 1000 gems per month in total. Thus, ANet will profit from selling these 1000 gems. Now, it does not matter who bough the gems – whether 1000 players bought 1 gem each or a single player bought 1000 gems, the profit is still the same. Now assume that 1000 players want to have 1 gem each but they don’t want to pay real money for them. This means that the rich guy who bought 1000 gems will be able to sell these gems to the players, in exchange for gold. What happens if the rich guy buys 1500 gems instead? Well, he is left with 500 gems over, because nobody wants to buy them. This will teach him not to buy too many gems in the future.

What I am saying is that ANet’s profits do not depends on number of gems-to-gold sales, they depend solely on how attractive are the services in the gem store.

Psientist.6437:

Hello and thank you for not ignoring this so close to the end of your day. You do not need to argue but mustn’t you discuss this. You are a Goldseller.

Thats a pretty dumb thing to say (no offence intended). ANet does not sell gold – they sell additional services and allow other players to trade their gold vs services you bough) And even if they were selling gold directly, they wouldn’t be a gold seller – because a gold seller is by definition a third party who exchanges in-game items ultimately obtained through usual gameplay for real money. The problem is that the goldsellers play the game in the way which ultimately destroys the game economy while stealing hacking and cheating other players.

AFAIK, all teleport skills in the game behave this way (Thief’s Steal and Infiltrator’s Arrow sure do). I agree with Kita that there is some path probing done by server(client?). I guess this is supposed to prevent abuse (jumping puzzles etc.). Moreover, this is also a problem with backwards evasion skills (e.g. Thief’s Disabling Shot) – if there is even a slight elevation behind you, the evasion will be interrupted. I hope they will tweak it a bit in the future, it can be rather annoying…

Ceronose.6019:

So if I want to buy gold from gold sellers, why shouldn’t I do it other than the fact that gold sellers have better buisness than you(ANET) does and you are trapping us (your customers) into buying gems from you only. I think it’s unfair and I don’t like being forced into buying from a certain company when I should have the freedom to choose. Thank you for your responses.

In all respect, but this passage is so incredibly stupid that I had to read it several times to believe my eyes. Please do not take this as an insult, everybody writes stupid things at times (I sure do) – it is also not my intention to offend you, simply point out that your proposition fail on many different levels that I don’t even know where to start.

What makes you even think you are entitled to freedom in this matter? Accusing ANet of monopoly on gems is like accusing McDonalds of monopoly on Big Mac – it simply doesn’t make sense. This is not a product essential to your life – its a computer game, created by a specific company, and the in-game store is that company’s main source of income. If you disagree with their business practice, then just stop playing the game!

Besides, how would ‘buy from others’ even work? The only way I see it, ANet could sell gems to a third party gem reseller. Which also doesn’t make any sense, as the gems will ultimately become more expensive.

Finally, you are not buying gold from ANet. If they were to sell gold, the economy would been inflated already (which does not happen, if anything, we see the opposite). You exchange gems for gold with other players, gold which they earned by playing the game. If you are not getting much gold for your gems, it simply means that a) gold is valuable (given that its rather hard to get) and b) more players are willing to buy gold than buy gems.

As to why you shouldn’t buy from criminal, game-destroying elements which gold-sellers are, many in this thread have given a great explanation, so I won’t repeat it.

I defeated him at level 12, with three other guys. Nobody was even downed once (I did die, but it was because of a misplaced jump ^^). The fight was surely fun, but it wasn’t hard at all.

@kagejuin: the weapons are upscaled as well, to a comparable-quality level 80 weapons. What one is missing are the additional points from the traits (I am still not sure whether these are upscaled as well, need to do more testing) and trait abilities. Basically, the atributes of an upscaled lvl 10 character are around 30% less compared to a fully exotic geared level 80. It is a significant difference, but you can still contribute a lot.

It is rather clear to me that ANet does not buff or nerf based on whine, they have their own statistics and adjust the professions in accordance to them. The only thing the Assasin Signet change does is basically ‘flatten’ the spike damage. The backstab 2-shot build was never really viable agains skilled players, after the change is becomes less viable agains inexperienced players. Which in my book, is a good thing.

Have you seen the Guardian forums lately? People crying about nerfs and threatening to quit the class, the game and go kill a puppy.

Darth Danny.4032:

I prepurchased the game and have have 2 lvl 80 characters and a lvl 65.

I dont think its wrong for people like me to benifit from these events more than others because we have worked harder and prepared.

I also prepurchased the game and took part in all the BWEs, yet my max level character is 50, because I play on multiple characters simultaneously + I have a job that takes lots of time.

I don’t see how it is fair that I should be punished for this. GW2 is supposed to be an accessible game without the progression/exclusive content elements and this is the reason why I bough it in the first place.

The game has tons of ‘sexy’ armor skins, both for male and female characters.

Ronah.2869:

@WeLoveKanjimari.6725

I will answer you.

Localization for different languages involves more work in the programming field than only the translation. Translation is fast and easy, sort to speak, but adding coded in the program that will recognize and associate them with the respective language is different. To put it simple, localization makes the developers create almost an entirely new game.

Sorry, but I doubt that you were ever involved in creating a ‘real’ software project in a competent team. In general, in a competently designed software localization is as simple as adding new entries to the database. You don’t need to code anything at all . Translation (especially translation of small snippets) is an extremely complex process because you always have to translate in context.

On Bootcamp, I play everything high 1920×1200 with 30-40 fps. On Mac, I am forced to go down to 1680 × 1050 med/low to get a slightly lower performance.

chrisaw.9763:

If you seriously believe you can see NO difference between 30 FPS and 60 FPS (simple test) then you, sir, are either a genetic anomaly or you just haven’t tested. Don’t believe the hype, test things for yourself.

In all seriousness, this depends on a game. For some games, going from 30 to 60 offers almost no improvement. Some other games look choppy even with 60. In my experience, GW2 at 35 fps and high settings looks and plays much better than GW2 at 60fps and low settings.

Be very careful when quoting scientific experiments, as the context may wary greatly – whether humans perceive an image change or not greatly depends on the context. For normal video imagery (with fluent changes in the picture) you don’t need much. Movies are in 24 fps – and they look good because the frames include motion blur. I am looking forward to seeing the Hobbit though

Yep, I fully agree with everyone here. Skill descriptions are often vague and trait description are even more vague. Take the Guardian’s Inner Fire: ‘When you are set on fire, you gain fury’ and the Zealot’s Flame ability of the Torch offhand: ‘Set yourself alight, periodically burning up to three nearby foes’. One would think that these abilities synergize, but they don’t.

@Evan: I understand that its difficult to keep descriptions in sync with the ever changing balance, however, I believe the issue is in how your workflow is set up. If I am not mistaken, right now adding the description is a separate step (which results in ever present problem of code<→doc sync), but one should generate the description directly from the code in the first place.

Didn’t you already ask this? Again: the ‘beta’ label is only the client – both the Mac and the PC client have access to the same game, same characters and same everything. All users play the same game together, there is no ‘mac only’ or ‘pc only’ game world.