Guild Wars 2

Vayne.8563:

Beldin.5498:

Jim Hunter.6821:

I’m pretty sure the only ones that are against having both options are the people on the open world side because they’re afraid they won’t be able to find a big enough zerg to spam 1 with.

If you spam 1 constantly you should know that you can activate auto-attack with ctrl-leftclick.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Auto-attack

Don’t know how I missed this comment.

No Jim, that’s not true. I can beat instances, and I can raid. I do just fine in dungeons and fractals.

But I didn’t buy this game to play instances. I’ve always wanted an MMO that was more about the open world.

And if you think you can just spam 1 in open world fights and win, I invite you to try the new jungle wurm encounter.

Yes there is plenty of content where spamming 1 does work. There’s also some content where it doesn’t.

It’s not you spamming ‘1’ that is the problem — it’s the other 99 players you didn’t invite to the party spamming ‘1’.

Instancing is just a means to an end: allowing organized, cooperative play.

If you can achieve that without instances, then that’s a great solution. However the low-effort, low-risk solution to pull that end off is instancing with raid mechanics.

The WxP change probably failed testing and got pulled from the release. When your release date can’t slip, you have to make tough decisions. A low-risk decision is to pull the feature until it’s ready.

It’s not a big deal and I have a hard team believing that WvW satisfaction relies on having the WxP feature NOW NOW NOW.

Be happy that they are moving in a good direction with some of these features, and that those features are in the works.

I agree with a previous poster that some Players just want to complain, and will do it regardless of what ANet does. I wish there was a filter for that noise…

I receive an ascended wep box (although it was Cavalier stats… who uses that?). Unfortunately I can’t remember if it was from a lord champ bag or a rank as I received both at the same time.

Great responses everyone. I understand that “perfect” balance will come from PvP (perfect in quotes for a reason). However I love the large scale that WvW provides. I want to roll with our coordinated guild groups, I want the epic feel that comes with large open field battles.

I’d prefer a PvP like regiment in WvW, but not via a necklace like PvP is currently. There’s a lot of individuality that comes from customizing your PvE toon for WvW — really enjoyable stuff that’s not present in PvP really.

In short I think this is easily achieved simply by stat normalization and elimination of the small set of time-based power mechanics (i.e. guard stacks).

I always wondered (and still do) why WvW does not have regimented gear/trait/skills. Remember Beta when sylvari “Grasping Vines” was AoE? — that was nerfed purely because of how OP it was in WvW (and it was better than the ranger elite).

I loved the lore behind PvP in LotRO, but one aspect of it that drove me crazy was the inability to compete without serious time investment (a rank 1 vs rank 11 was an incredible power spread).

I feel that GW2 has been heading in this direction in WvW. The biggest culprit is guard stacks. The next is ascended gear. If we start nit-picking we can include consumables and stack-sigils.

Guard stacks provide an advantage in combat, and that advantage is obtained purely by time investment. This is a different fundamental mechanic over the siege attributes as you’re not engaging in 30 on 30 siege battles (nor 5v5, nor 1v1).

Ascended gear provides an advantage in combat, and like guard stacks, it’s obtained purely by time investment.

It’s definitely not out of control like it was in LotRO — it’s trending in that direction however.

A possible solution:

(1) Remove time-based power creep features like guard stacks
(2) Normalize stats in WvW. If you have a piece of zerker gear, then you get a normalize set of stats for that gear, regardless of player level and regardless of gear quality (rare, exotic, ascended, etc). Every player with a zerker chest piece has the same stats on it, period.

… or just rework the whole thing. It’s fairly useless even with the Meteor gimmick.

Secretly I hope they make Celestial so all stats are at the secondary level of the other combos. Example:

Zojja’s Claymore
Power = 188
Precision = 134
Ferocity = 134

WupWup Claymore
All Stats = 134

Currently the WupWup Claymore is 83 all stats. However my dream is probably too OP as why would you take anything other than Celestial at that point.

We only harvest the small, fast growing trees… the big ones are still there.

@ Carighan — I’ve said the same thing in other threads but you can’t do much to convince some players.

As I’ve mentioned before, if you picked your Celestial gear for purely for the +crit damage, then you made a mistake — you should have picked another stat combo.

I’m confident that Celestial’s overall stat contribution will be increased to compensate (ANet has said as much already). It makes me even happier that I invested in my Celestial gear.

Axialbloom.8109:

I think it should have a 20% chance to completely melt the node, making it inaccessible to everyone.

Best idea I’ve heard in a while… gave me a good laugh, thx!

That’s a great summary Tongku… well said.

Wintel.4873:

juno.1840:

Staff ele brings a lot of versatility to a team

No, bringing versatility and support is the job of guardians, warriors, engineers, mesmers, etc. They do that drastically better than Ele’s.

You probably think that way from playing fire-bot too long

Staff ele brings a lot of versatility to a team — all of which is lost if you just play fire-bot. Very little brain power goes into staying in one attunement.

If you want to run that build and play that style, knock yourself out. It’s allowed in the game.

My original point is you can’t L2P if all you do is run in one attunement. Leveling is your sandbox to learn the basics, and attunement switching is a core skill for elementalist. After L2P, if the OP wants to become a fire bot then no harm done. However the reverse is hard.

I think this has been blown out of proportion. Burning Speed does not become some epic skill because it gets evade.

If you are immobilized, then hitting burning speed keeps you locked in place. If you are stunned, you cannot magically use burning speed.

The only improvement is now you’ll evade once Burning Speed starts. This is consistent with the other Burning XXX skills that the elementalist has (i.e. Burning Retreat). It matches other skills in the game such as Whirlwind Attack and Power Stab.

It makes sense and I’ve often wondered why Burning Speed did not have the evade to begin with.

guanlongwucaii.3162:

juno.1840:

scerevisiae.1972:

glass cannonish staff + signet of earth for the immob. use earth #4/#5 when SoE is down.

don’t bother switching attunements in PVE, it’s not worth the effort — you’ll just end up killing stuff way slower.

just stay in fire and nuke.

Disagree on the “don’t bother switching attunements”. If you want to be the worst ele you can be at level 80, then by all means follow that advice. However you should learn to play smart, and then practice playing smart. Leveling is the training ground to learn the smart behaviors. Otherwise you get to 80 and do the same stupid stuff and your team mates think “this is the worst ele ever”.

you shouldn’t be switching attunements from fire as a staff ele because all the other staff skills are pretty garbage for DPS. and yes, DPS is what you (and every other party member) should be focusing on in a dungeon. the inability to swap attunements is probably the biggest disadvantage to the staff build, which can provide among the highest DPS in-game.

if you want a more flexible build with regards to attunement swapping dagger/focus fresh air builds are probably better.

I’ll make sure I never run a dungeon with you — an ele that stays only in fire attune is not an ele I want in my team. You can play that brain-dead style if you want, but you are not doing your mates any favors.

Yeah that sounds harsh, but if DPS was your only role, then why are you playing a staff ele?

scerevisiae.1972:

glass cannonish staff + signet of earth for the immob. use earth #4/#5 when SoE is down.

don’t bother switching attunements in PVE, it’s not worth the effort — you’ll just end up killing stuff way slower.

just stay in fire and nuke.

Disagree on the “don’t bother switching attunements”. If you want to be the worst ele you can be at level 80, then by all means follow that advice. However you should learn to play smart, and then practice playing smart. Leveling is the training ground to learn the smart behaviors. Otherwise you get to 80 and do the same stupid stuff and your team mates think “this is the worst ele ever”.

It does require more thought. Do you spend your heal skill or not? You don’t spam healz for the obvious reason of efficiency. Why would you blow your heal to get above 90% health if you currently at 85% health? It’s a waste of a heal, however it makes diamond skin active again.

This in turn impacts your skill and attunement rotation. You have to adjust and shift into water to maintain your 90% HP when maybe you would have gone to a different attunement instead.

So while diamond skin is partially a hard counter, it does require changes in your play to make it effective (and that in itself requires skill).

I’m sure this has been suggested multiple times by now, but I’m going to suggest it again.

I would like Listings in the GUI when placing Sell Orders. Right now you only get listings when placing a Buy Order.

The listings are important because you can tell if if someone is trying to game the Sell Orders by putting in an artificially low order (which will be followed by 100 in-game lemmings placing 1c below).

I prefer not to have to use an external website for information the game should be providing by default.

For clarity: Listings is the list of orders you see when going to buy something. IT lists the “price per unit” and the number of available/ordered at that price. It show this for the first 20 prices.

I need a +100 button for Bombsaway… +1 is just not sufficient.

I think it’s fair for a player to design a build that’s max tank, min damage, and still have max pet. Your proposal makes that build not possible.

I think ANet did it right by decoupling your gear from your pet. You can hit like a wet noodle but have a good pet purely by investing in beastmastery.

This proposal will just push more people into zerkers which is already a problem (that problem being the lack of build alternatives that are on par with pure zerk).

Staff for every reason that SubZero mentioned.

Keep in mind that tags (doing enough damage to a mob to get kill credit) are important in PvE so you can get your loot and XP (especially in large events). The Staff AoE is one of the best methods of getting those tags (seriously we have it very good compared to many professions in that regard).

To put it a different way, consider the pet with today’s implementation:

Damage = MIN to MAX
MIN: beastmastery at 0 points
MAX: beastmastery at 30 points
MEDIAN: 1.0

With your proposal it’d be: 0.5 * MIN – X * MAX
0.5 * MIN: beastmastery at 0 points, gear with no power nor precision
X * MAX: beastmaster at 30 points, full zerker gear
MEDIAN: TBD

So the first big question is what would be the MEDIAN for most players. If the MEDIAN drops below 1.0 then you nerfed most builds. If it’s above 1.0 then you buffed most builds.

The next big question is what is what’s X? If X is 1.0 then you didn’t do anything other than nerf pets (i.e. MAX stayed the same, but MIN dropped by 50%). If X is larger than 1.0, how much larger? How much damage should a glass cannon pet do? Is 2.0 the number you want? Is that OP?

So where I’m going is you made the system more complex and there may not be a corresponding benefit. If you go to the extreme and get a little more pet damage, was that worth it? What if the pet damage for most players drops (MEDIAN)?

@kyubi:

Pet damage is impacted by the beastmastery trait. So it’s not “static” as you say (more beastmastery = more pet power stat = more pet damage).

With these changes, you’d essentially get a freebie (i.e. better pets without spec’ing into beastmastery). As it stands currently, you have to sacrifice traits (points into beastmastery) to make your pet more effective.

If you switch pet effectiveness so it’s based upon player stats, there is no sacrifice — you get a high DPS pet just for using high DPS gear (which most players use right?). In addition, you make pets wet-noodles for tanky ranger gearsets. So it reduces build variety in that way.

Yes I know you are saying beastmastery still has an impact, but if that’s true then what did you gain by making your player stats also work? You nerf’d the pet damage to compensate, but then if you go zerk is your pet any better than it was before? If no, then you came out as a loss over the current implementation. If yes, then you effectively nerfed beastmastery and screwed every ranger that put points there.

rhodoc.2381:

I dont know if this is OP or not but i think this is open for more skillfull play than the current diamond skin.

I disagree. The current Diamond Skin trait requires skillful play to keep your health above 90% (which is hard or even impossible if you receive any focused damage).

This idea just promotes further attunement spam. There’s already enough mental gyrations that should be occurring for attunement switching — what conditions you have should not be a part of that thought process.

Phantasms can be dodged (and put on full cooldown with no phantasm for the duration). If you want that for your pets then I think you might need medication.

Phantasm and clones die when your target dies. I’m thinking you wouldn’t want that feature either.

In short they are different animals (pun intended).

P.S. Rangers already have a trait line that boosts pet stats. Having the pet stats further increase off the player stats would be a bit OP maybe?

Can’t really have more than one “fresh” trait as it would create a scenario where you could spam as fast as the global cooldown allows. Example would be air-fire-air-fire-etc…

That would create a pile of attunement boons (if traited) as well as addition attunment effects (i..e sun-spot in the scenario above).

It works for air right now because you get only swiftness from the attunement spam.

I guess ANet could always add a cooldown on the Elemental Attunment trait.

You’re not doing ele any favors linking an extreme build which pulls off a single move every 3 minutes.

I’m sure I can make a vid where meteor storm hits some poor ambient bunny for 250k — oooooooooo big numbers!

My point is it’s cheese and there’s so much more to the class than meteor + tornado combos every 3 minutes.

LordByron.8369:

juno.1840:

If players crafted Celestial just for the +crit dmg then they crafted the wrong set of armor. That’s not the design goal of the armor (balance is).

Oh please instead of wasting so many words on “balance”

Explain wich balance is obtained nerfing one of the weakest set with lowest dps in a nerf aimed at TOP dps…

Balance:
DPS:
DEFENSE (PVT) < BALANCE (Celestial) < OFFENSE (ZERK)

result after patch

BALANCE < DEFENSE < OFFENSE

soo balanced …..

“oh please…” PVT is not defense… it’s primary power. Knight’s or Sentinel’s would be more DEF.

P Fun Daddy.1208:

juno.1840:

@Ozoug: The amount of +crit dmg it provides is disproportionately large compared to the other stats. It should not be the same as zerk when all the other stats are lower than the secondary stats on zerk.

The fact the +crit has remained so high this long should be considered a bonus. It should not be a surprise to see +crit on celestial come into line with the other stat bonuses it provides.

The problem is that that was one of the only things about celestial that made it worth crafting. It’s already useless for the most part in PvE, and its pretty much useless for everything but elementalists in PvP/WvW (even then that’s arguable).
It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to make the most difficult armor set to get the least useful. I agree that it makes sense for the stats to be equal, but with the level they are at now it will just be equally bad.

If players crafted Celestial just for the +crit dmg then they crafted the wrong set of armor. That’s not the design goal of the armor (balance is).

Ulion.5476:

DeWolfe.2174:

Completely agree that Celestial doesn’t scale very well as is and hits like a wet noodle because of it. They really do need to make Ferocity a major stat on celestial and have the others “all stats” as minor stats.

Celestial does more dps than full soldier and about 15-20% less dps than full berserker. With the removal of magic find and ferocity the overall celestial stat need to be buffed. I thought A-net would have exchange magic find for something else by now.

Assuming this is true would you expect a generalized set like Celestial to do more than a full soldier set (which has power as the primary stat)?

I don’t think that is reasonable.

Don’t get me wrong, I run all celestial on my Ele (weps, armor, trinkets, all). However I’m not upset with this change because the current +crit dmg on celestial is out of line with all the other stats. It makes little sense.

If you took celestial only for the +crit dmg then you made a serious mistake. You should have picked any other armor set with +crit. Anyone that says they wouldn’t have picked celestial otherwise is not being honest with themselves.

The interview with Collin said March. You can find the interview link in the General Discussion forum. Balance comes with features now, and those come less frequently and separate from Living Story.

@Ozoug: The amount of +crit dmg it provides is disproportionately large compared to the other stats. It should not be the same as zerk when all the other stats are lower than the secondary stats on zerk.

The fact the +crit has remained so high this long should be considered a bonus. It should not be a surprise to see +crit on celestial come into line with the other stat bonuses it provides.

+1 for the OP — totally agree. Also +1 for Oozo’s “risk vs. reward” analogy, well said!

GoddessOfTheWinds.2937:

I agree that the air attunement on staff needs better DPS. Currently, it has too much CC (which are wasted in PvE). Water is in good standing I’d say and Fire needs a little something.

AIR:
Auto-attack needs to be faster, and maybe more single target focused.
Lightning Surge idea : approved!
Gust needs some damage to make it worthwhile in PvE
Static Field should damage when the foe cross the field (even with stability). Stability should only help on the stun part.

EARTH:
Auto-attack needs a buff to make it worthwhile. Currently nobody use this auto-attack as it is BAD. More vulnerability, more range and/or simply more damage is needed.

The CC is epic in WvW — hands off!

Remove it and the staff’s value drops substantially.

EDIT: Also the weakness on the Earth auto-attack is the real value of the skill (not the vulnerability). I would be extremely disappointed if the weakness was removed.

I like the proposal. However it’s missing something from my wish list which is:

- faster single-target auto-attack skill

I was hoping the earth auto-attack would be a good single-target DPS skill. It’s a great skill but the damage is a bit too low for my tastes. Chain lightning would be better with a faster cast and maybe conversion to a “beam” weapon instead of a “projectile”.

Kayge.6398:

MrSilver.5269:

…
This change has left a very sour taste in my mouth, and I have shelved my elementalist as a result. My WvW guild can get someone else to drop water fields.
…

What change are you referring to?

The change that hasn’t happened yet — that’s why these rant threads are so funny.

You’re going to get little sympathy as a thief… especially using words like “cheese build”.

Most of the player base (as in more than half) feel that the stealth mechanic is total cheese.

I totally agree that without stealth the thief has no survivability — but that’s a direct consequence of how stealth was designed and implemented in this game. To remove stealth is the same as reworking the entire thief profession.

As for cleaning torment: it’s really an anti-thief condition. You should not be able to clean it easily without making some sort of sacrifice. At the very least it should impact what utilities you take. At the worst you should have to sacrifice offensive traits for defensive ones. Otherwise your build decisions are meaningless and the game becomes junk.

Rune of Cauterization: Immunity to bleeds

I agree it’s probably OP, but it is interesting.

Players don’t like hard counters although I think they’re useful to minimize extreme builds. I mean would it really be smart to make a build completely around bleeds? I don’t think so, and if a hard counter exists then I say “good!”

EDIT: However you can also provide trade-off like:

Rune of Cauterization: Immune to bleeds, take double damage from burning

Xenon.4537:

Since celestial has higher crit damage than zerkers, I would think that it would still be higher even with ferocity. Yes it will be lowered a bit, but it would still be slightly higher. By the way how can someone have calculations already when we don’t know any of the numbers or formulas?

Not correct based upon the information we’ve received. The celestial will have a ferocity stat at the same level as all the current stats (47 in the OP’s example). So the drop in effective critical damage for celestial gear is more than the drop in the zerker gear.

There’s little that can be done here other than bump the stat bonuses on celestial a bit to compensate. I’m not sure we’ll see that either.

As someone already said, Celestial is a generalized gear set. It doesn’t make sense that it has such a high +crit dmg right now — almost like it was an accident or something on the dev’s end. However if it was intentional, then maybe the celestial gear will get slightly higher stats in general.

Charak.9761:

Jski.6180:

Compensate for what? Every one who did crit dmg is going to do a bit lower unless you intend to build a condition guardian your not going to need to changes any thing. Crit dmg is still going to be ontop vs pure power dmg. Unless you think they are dropping vit they are not.

Its because Precision is becoming Ferocity and crit damage removed

those 18 points of precision I shifted to Vit, means about a 1.5% crit damage loss

Wrong…. “+ crit damage” is becoming “Ferocity”, not Precision. You still have precision, and all places that previously had crit dmg now get ferocity… that simple.

The thief might have had:

25 stacks of blood lust (from sigil) for +250 power
WvW bloodlust for +50 power/precision
WvW Guard stacks for +100 power/condi dmg

Combine that with a glassy DPS build and those numbers are no longer “rare”.

The Lost Witch.7601:

While you have a point in PvE Juno, I think that your suggestion could lead to disaster scenario’s for damage spikers in PvP and WvW.

CreativeAnarchy brings up the solution that is in my eyes the best. Changing encounters to include more pressure damage.

I’ve elaborated on that (and other things) in this thread a few months ago.

Except that damage spikers themselves would have less-than-optimal dodge due to glass build.

I’m sure my proposal of making it’s effectiveness based upon defensive stats (vit, tough) would be a bit difficult to polish on ANet’s end. Then there’s effects to consider, say you dodge an attack for 55% dmg reduction but the attack also include a debuff like blind or bleed. So should it be RNG (55% in this case) to completely avoid the debuff, or should the debuff be reduced in duration (again 55% reduction in this case)? Interesting ideas that create another layer of depth to builds.

True Orpheal, but it’s a mechanic that’s independent of your gear which is one of the causes to DPS gear being better that sustain gear (there are a million posts on this throughout the forums so no point in debating it here).

One way to put value into non-DPS gear is to associate the innate defensive abilities of Dodge with non-DPS stats (i.e. defensive stats… gasp).

LordByron.8369:

Skilled player should be rich and not tp barons at the expenses of skilled players…..

That’s the beauty of tying BiS gear to difficult content. You cannot obtain it by playing the market, you have to get into a skilled team and beat the content. This then causes new problems like “I can’t find a good team” and “I hate gear scores!”

Personally I’m a fan of tying BiS gear to content rather than grind/wealth. However there’s something to be said for accessibility and grind is universally accessible with enough time.

Magi.8643:

Currently celestial armor and weapons are equal in % of critical damage they each have however after the patch ferocity will be equal any other secondary stat on celestial gear meaning that there will be a loss of critical damage there.

Right but not a total loss. Do you think it should have same +crit dmg as zerks? It will be close actually since zerk’s will have ferocity as a secondary as well.

This system will also allow for new stat combos with ferocity as a primary stat (although why anyone would go with that, I’m not sure).

I died on the hill down from the waypoint to the Shadow Behemoth. I was like “wha?”. Full health to dead (not downed) in just over a second. Fortunately there’s the waypoint right there but it was one of those “this is really stupid” moments.

You have iZerker and you can also use Sigil of Fire on your GS. Both are decent AoE.

Not every class plays the same and there are pros/cons with each. None are perfectly suited for all situations.

If you want AoE without carrying a GS for iZerk then you may just be out of luck — go run a staff ele for spammable AoE (but don’t complain when you have a hard time with quick single target hits, nor the ability to survive while running solo).

EDIT: 1H Sword is also AoE, but in melee range — still it’s an option. Also consider GS2 + F1 for a near-instant AoE tag.

TexZero.7910:

I’m going with no.

Dodge is active combat and damage mitigation. That’s the fun part of combat.
What your suggesting is basically going back to the dark ages of MMO’s where stats are everything. Toughness and Vitality make a difference and can still be useful without any changes to them.

Stats are everything — that’s the point. If you’re a clutz you don’t dodge as well.

EDIT: You have choices that’s the point. If you spec glass canon you shouldn’t have the exact same defensive abilities as someone who specs brick wall. That’s why stats are important.

Actually if you read the summary here I think you’ll find that celestial will be just fine:

http://dulfy.net/2014/01/17/gw2-ready-up-skill-and-balance-developer-livestream-notes/

In short, the +crit dmg on celestial get’s replaced with ferocity at the same levels as the other stats. I think that’s actually a very good thing!

I had proposed in another thread the following with regards to making defensive stats more worth while:

Vitality: Impacts energy regeneration. Higher vitality means you can dodge more often.
Toughness: Impacts dodge effectiveness. Say base dodge is 50% dmg reduction. Higher toughness would increase the damage reduction amount.

So dodge would then have varying levels of effectiveness and frequency based upon how you stat defensively. I think this is a neat alternative to nerf’ing zerker and DPS based builds/stats.