Guild Wars 2

zone.1073:

Make Heart of the Mists free to play (like League of Legends). In order for players to exit the lobby and enter PvE or WvW, they must purchase the game.

Expand the gem store with custom outfits and skins for PvP. Add in purchasable graphic effects to weapon attacks, purchasable taunts, purchasable emotes, customized finishers. Add in premium glory boosters that give even faster accelerations than the free versions. Etc.

There are so many ways to make profit from PvP. The first and most important step is to make PvP even more accessible, though.

That would be a really interesting idea actually, and it would probably benefit the game as a whole as well as fuel a lot of sales. I mean, who can possibly try spvp without wondering what this game would be like on a massive scale and wanting to try wvw?

However the problem remains: for people like me who don’t care about cosmetic stuff, what would make us spend money on gems? Weapon effects and finishers still fall under the cosmetic angle (although I could see myself spend a couple bucks on an entertaining finisher!), but apart from intentory bags most of the stuff you buy using glory are also cosmetic, so premium glory boosters wouldn’t interest me either.

They could possibly lock some of the more obscure pieces of equipment for free-to-play punters and make them unlockable with Glory, which would make glory boosts something worth spending on. Not all of them obviously, maybe let them start with 1/3 of them unlocked. Possibly even lock some skills?

Of course, I think running spvp servers must be pretty cheap bandwidth wise (max 16 players so not a lot of data to shift about compared to wvw), so it’s possible that making the mists f2p would pay for itself from added sales alone. On the other hand, it could also hurt them, as every MMO that goes f2p is basically putting out an announcement that “well, we tried, but not enough people thought we were worth paying for…”

These are just idle thoughts really, I’ve been thinking what possible incentive someone could have to spend gems if all they did was spvp. It just feels like a completely separate and cut-off part of the game right now, and while I think it’s great that we start off with every skill and piece of kit unlocked I just wish there was something besides rank that we could work for. I’m personally not too concerned with looks in pvp, because the game is just too fast-paced for anyone to notice it, so the cosmetic armour skins aren’t something worth striving for.

However, I DO care what my PvE characters look like, so the thought occurred to me: PvP transmutation stones, sold only on the gem store, by which you can convert a pvp armour skin into a normal armour skin (which can then be applied to pve armour)?

Just a thought! It would also be nice if there was a way to earn some gold in spvp.

Any other ideas?

No: it discourages large group fights by making running a more reliable way to win points than fighting. It’s nice for hotjoin because it’s simple for pugs to run and fast for beginners to learn, but it doesn’t have the tactical depth to sustain interest in competitive format.

Your guest makes a good point about how the necro’s utilities let them spread around a ton of disabling conditions even when they’re not specced into condition damage. I should switch to a power spec for wvw too I think…

Ah, I see, when you said “every single recording” I thought you meant older episodes too

I listened to the first two through your website rather than youtube and they were full-length, so whatever happened to snip them short must’ve happened either after or right before you uploaded the latest one.

I think it’s rather underrated tbh. It might not hit nearly as hard as wells but in cramped group fights area poison and weakness on such a long duration can turn a fight. I don’t use it generally but if I’m defending in the lord’s room in wvw and I’m not running wells I alwatys swap it in!
And yes it might only pulse once per 3" but with all the blast and projectile finishers flying around it’ll put poison and weakness on a lot more people than the ones it actually pulses on!

I’m enjoying these, it’s cool to hear more experienced players talk about the game!

Nay of the Ether.8913:

Whoever used to do tooltips in GW1 needs to be heading it up here. They were so painfully accurate that they had to make a view option to make the descriptions “concise” so that it didn’t take so long to read all the info lol.

True that, the gw1 tooltips were tiny little masterworks of rules-writing! Like little RPG-haikus! :p It was a complicated game, and yet whoever wrote them managed to make the difference between this:

Hex Spell. (5…13…15 seconds.) Steal 15…39…45 Health whenever target foe hits with an attack.

and this:

Hex Spell. For 5…13…15 seconds, whenever target foe attacks, that foe takes 10…46…55 damage and deals 1…12…15 less damage.

perfectly clear and comprehensible!
(Could of my favourite skills there btw:))

Yeah man, I always change traits around depending on whether I’m besieging, defending, or running around in open field fights. I’ve yet to find a build that works for everything unfortunately. And while your allies might not be on the walls, they will be where you’ll be laying your well of power or well of blood (hopefully), so that’s up to 5 allies per cast who’ll be getting protection.

Yeah last update broke condition duration gear, I’m sure they’ll fix it soon.

Anchoku.8142:

Anyone know for sure how Well of Blood works on an ally? I assume it is a % heal based upon the ally’s own heal and HP stats so it would naturally be different for each player.

They don’t get the initial heal, but they get the pulse heal for the 10" duration as long as they’re standing in the well. The pulse heal is based on your own healing power, not the target’s.

That was a really skilled engineer you faced in the second match! Also, I had no idea they had stealth skills!

Come on you guys can’t really complain about this, it’s FAR MORE POWERFUL than if it worked like “provides protection to the necromancer when a well is cast”! And it’s exactly the kind of trait I think we should have more of, one that provides a lot of group synergy.
I agree it’s a badly written tooltip, but it’s hardly fair to say that it’s useless when combined with Focussed Rituals: your group still get the protection even if you’re not inside the well, and focussed rituals is really intended to turn the necro into a backline support character so you shouldn’t need the protection.

Yeah that’s my understanding too, applies to allies inside the well. at the moment it’s cast.

I will sign this. I think the idea the devs had that professions will either have lots of fields and a few finishers, or lots of finishers and a few fields, so as to encourage teamplay. It’s a great idea, but they didn’t really think through what they were doing, as the professions necros work best with are mesmers (who also have more fields than finishers, so no go there), and elementalists (who have a lot of both fields and finishers, so they kinda disprove my theory!).

Also, dark and poison fields aren’t really the best, people actually prefer water fields for the healing and fire fields for the might, so if there’s also an elementalist in the group you’re kinda ruining things for everyone laying down your fields as well.

Perhaps this belongs more in the account issues subforum, but here goes anyway:
If I wipe and reflash my Android phone with a different ROM, do I first have to remove mobile authentication from my GW2 account?

Sorry guys, I’m not gonna say balance in this game is perfect, but it’s a lot better than any other MMO out there, so I don’t think you have cause to complain. I mostly pvp with a condition necro, and I accept the fact that there are some professions I’m going to have trouble with (eg bunker eles). And even so, once in a blue moon, either cause I caught them with all their cantrips on cooldown or because I’m just better than them, I’ll beat one, and it feels pretty good! In GW1 that never happened, some builds were just hard counters to others. If you have trouble against specific classes, ask for tips and practice.

Yeah it does work, it’s just that the numbers on the recharge metre don’t change: they just start rolling 66% more slowly

Was in an sPvP match, switched teams for autobalance, the team I switched to lost (make of that what you will :p ), but I still got credit for my “monthly wins” achievement. Is it a bug because of the autobalance team switching or is it intentional?

JudasCarnage.2850:

But in the last two weeks I have learned the hard way that this isn’t GW1 pvp, it’s flawed in so many ways.

Amen brother, GW1 pvp felt slick and polished, like it was designed by people raised on Quakeworld and the whole online arena ethos. GW2 feels like it was designed by MMO and MOBA players.

While I’m sure some people dc due to their connection dropping, I don’t think it’s such a widespread problem as the number of dropouts would suggest! If a match starts with 4v5 that means that fully 10% of the playerbase can’t stay connected for 20’ – and I KNOW this isn’t the case! I’m sure your network logs will bear this out!

The real cause for the amount of dropouts is the length of the queue. It’s unreasonable to ask people to hang around in the Mists (where there’s nothing else to do) for 5-10’ waiting for a match to start. They get bored, and they decide to do drop-in instead, or go do pve.

The reason for the queue taking so long, of course, is that the playerbase is fragmented between drop-in (8v8), 1-round tournaments, and 3-round tournaments, so it takes ages to complete a roster, and even longer to complete 8 rosters as required by 3-team tournaments. There are three easy solutions to this problem:

1. allow people to queue up for a match from anywhere (pve, wvw, etc), by integrating the interface of the tournament NPC into the PvP window. That way they can keep mucking about in pve while waiting, which will result in less people quitting in frustration, and you’d get teleported there as when you queue up for wvw. Additionally, as an added safety you should decrease the window of time for people to accept to join a match from 2’ to 1’. That would give the matchmaking system 1’ slack to replace any dropouts.

2. scrap one of the two tournament types! I don’t see why we need both 1-round and 3-round tournaments! They’re cannibalising each other’s players! The queues for 3-round tournaments in particular are INSANE, so my first instinct would be to scrap those. Plus, having to play 3 rounds of matches with the same team is even more frustrating if someone drops right before the first match. But whatever, even if you ban 1-round tournaments instead it’ll immeasurably improve 3-round.

Back before the game was released when everyone was complaining about Conquest being the only gametype, the design team’s reply was that they didn’t want to repeat the GW1 situation, where the pvp playerbase was split between TA, RA, Codex (briefly), Tombs/HA, and GvG, with none of them having enough people, so they were forcing everyone in GW2 to play the same thing. So, having forced this unpopular gametype on all of us, why go and split it up between 8v8 drop-in/drop-out, 1-round free tournaments, and 3-round free tournaments? It’s still fragmentation if you join a different queue, even if it’s for the same match type!

Before the recent patch came into effect, people were complaining about the length of the queues in paid tournaments and asking that free tournaments be banned to amalgamate the playerbase. So, having gotten rid of one of the two tournament types, why go and split the remaining type into two? That doesn’t solve the problem! You have your casual gametype (drop-in, where people can disconnect with no consequences for their teammates cause someone else will take their place or the game will rebalance), and tournament – why have two of the latter?

And as one of those people who are bored to death of Conquest and are asking for the return of GvG, I really have to raise my hands up in utter disbelief at a game that has THREE different pvp gametypes and ALL OF THEM are Conquest! If you’re happy with fragmenting the playerbase at least make one game mode something else! Allow those of us old-timers who want to pretend it’s still 2005 a tiny little ghetto GvG gametype, and keep everyone else in the same queue so it’ll move them into matches faster!

Tried it out in spvp for 3 matches today, the healing was excellent but I really hurt from the lack of condition removal. I doubt it would work against a decent team in tpvp where people would know to target me as soon as they saw the fiend die.

Bas.7406:

@Manuver – The original base heal was 185 it is now 926. 185 to 926 is a 80 percent jump. As a sales guy, I know my profit margins. Think of it this way, you are selling something for 926 that cost you 185 you just made an 80 percent profit margin. It’s very simple take 926 and multiply it by .20 that gives you 185 all they did was take 185 divide it by .2 and that gave them an 80 percent jump.

Dude if 185 is 20% of 926 that means 926 is 500% of 185! Percentages aren’t reversible that way! An 80% increase would mean 185×1.8=333
Not that I’m complaining!

Bellamy.9860:

manveruppd.7601:

Rennoko.5731:

80% more healing from the blood fiend!!

Has anyone tested to see if this only affects the siphoning-on-attack it gives you? Or does it affect the base heal as well? Also, is the siphoning also affected by Bloodthirst now?

Only affects the siphoning. But the number doesnt fit in anywhere. Siphon was somewhere at around 260 and is now at 926. The siphon part is unaffected by healing power. The activate is roughly the same at somewhere around 4k healing.
The Blood fiend attacks roughly once every 3 seconds and the healing can be increased with vampiric master and bloodthirst by another 114. So the vampiric master is only a choice if you go all in on minions.

Woah, 926 per hit? That is WAY more than 80%, it sounds more like 600% if it really was 260 before! I assume that’s just its own innate siphon, and the Vampiric Master siphon is separate (the 114 you mentioned), right?

I think that more than makes up for its low base heal. Getting it killed before you can use it is still an issue but you just have to keep your eye on its health bar and pop it before they drop it. The only downside is losing the condition cleansing of Consume.

Anchoku.8142:

Honestly, I hope Arenanet’s next balance patch does something to improve spectral builds. Spectral could be a tank build with lower aggro risk and improved mobility and escape, though with naturally lower damage, if the developers can figure it out.

You see that’s the problem with this game, that every skill fits a particular build best and is suboptimal in every other build. In GW1 you had skills that were mediocre if you actually focussed on the attribute line they came from, but if you took them as a secondary they suddenly became the lynchpin of your skill bar! Like Offering of Blood -no blood necro took it as their elite, but boon prot monks loved it! Or thumperbunnies with all their warrior hammer skills. I know this game is never gonna be THAT customisable, but would it kill them to make skills that can fulfil multiple roles? Or which can be given different effects using traits? I think necromancer staff is a good example of a flexible weapon that can be used in many builds, I’ve seen both power and condition necros using it. Also Blood Is Power, great skill. And I like how Death Shroud can be specced to be used either offensively or defensively (even though, tbh, it’s probably my least favourite class mechanic of any profession in GW2 – transform skills just aren’t that interesting!). But these are the only examples I can think of in necro, most other skills only fit one kind of playstyle.

Nah, you have Corrupt boon for more effective removal, and optionally Well of Corruptiontoo. And there’s A LOT of conditions in pvp lately so I like a bit of extra removal from Deathly Swarm. And you DEFINITELY need the weakness! I used to run with horn offhand (the #4 interrupt is godly, can pretty much guarantee a kill if you catch their healing skill) plus speed buff to run between points, but I had Weakening Shroud to give me weakness. If I’m going to use Terror in that slot then I need my dagger offhand!

HiSaZuL.2843:

It’s pretty disappointing seeing half your bar on cooldown, I agree. But I do think they’re SUPPOSED to die, I mean they give you quite a decent DPS boost, which if your enemy doesn’t deal with will bring him down! If they go to the trouble to throw a lot of aoe around to negate them they should be able to. This game is about countering your opponent’s moves after all. But it sucks being forced to start at less than optimal effectiveness, cause that’s just unfair (no less than starting out with 0 life force though, and we’re ok with that). I think slightly reduced cooldowns (like literally 20% less on the longest ones, 10% on the shorter ones) would balance it just right.

And I do agree that it’s ridiculous that we can’t use the Golem underwater. All the other ones work fine, so I don’t see why they arbitrarily chose Plague as our one underwater elite. It wouldn’t be so bad if the stupid thing didn’t go and literally jump in and drown itself whenever you walked within 100m of every tiny puddle in the game, so that you’re then start with a massive recharge even though you didn’t even go in the water!

HiSaZuL.2843:

Golem doesn’t even warrant being an elite. It has less damage then some clones… and on par hp with thiefs elite… which summons 3. Point is they are lacking in survivability. Mostly due to aoe killing them instantly and partually due to the fact they don’t regen so you never start combat with your minions being fully healed…If MM could provide even the slightest in combat passive healing from damage or passive it would solve it partualy or at least let them all heal ooc. And if they just plainly gave summons aoe resistance… it would solve half the problem on the spot. If they all regenerated ooc and had some resistance to aoe my gripe would be solely with underwater lack of golem and being stuck with elite that punishes MM.

Well you can’t really compare the Golem to a skill that only has 30" duration and 4 times the recharge. TBH I’m happy with its damage and survivability, I only have a problem with its AI.

As far as ordinary minions go, hbowever, I completely agree, they should give them ooc regen. Or at the very least allow us to dismiss and resummon! Having them clinging on by a sliver of health makes me feel like the opposite of a GW1 minionmaster, who started out pathetically weak until he got his first few minions up and then became an unstoppable juggernaut. GW2 MMs get weaker as the fight progresse, which is psychologically rather dispiriting. If I run to the next point with 2 minions almost dead and 1 on the recharge I might as well lie down and let them kill me.

Yeah pretty decent patch overall! I like that axe is now more viable. I’m not sure I like how they seem to be funnelling us into very specific builds for each weapon though. It’s like they decided that MMs should be axe/focus bunker builds with soldier’s or cleric’s gear and they’re buffing just the right skills that will steer us in that direction. What happened to designing traits with proper cross-attribute synergy and letting us come up with sick, unbalanced combos on our own? That was the best part of GW1, steepling your fingers and chuckling maniacally as you gazed at your skillbar :p

I don’t think the Spinal Shivers changes are enough to tempt me to use focus. Reaper’s Touch is still pretty mediocre, if it also inflicted Weakness it would be good. The regen is nice if you’re running Cleric’s gear (although you should probably still be using Staff in your off-set anyway so you could get it from that) but won’t save your minions if there’s a lot of aoe. Frankly, I’d much rather take the condition transfer and weakness of dagger, or the interrupt from horn. Especially if you swap out Consume Conditions and use Blood Fiend – I don’t think it’s viable (even in pve) to rely on Putrid Mark for your only condition removal, so it’s either Consume or dagger offhand: I’m not leaving home without at least one of the two! I could go 30 into blood and get the minion condition removal, but let’s face it, they won’t survive in a fight long enough for it to be useful. (I’m not moaning about their survivability, it’s just a fact, there’s a lot of aoe flying around and they can’t heal themselves or dodge!)

As an aside, I personally didn’t even know Necromantic Corruption wasn’t working! I’ve never used it, I just don’t like random removals, I prefer knowing it’s coming at a specific point.

Bas.7406:

Look, now you are talking about the AI in general which was my point. The Minion AI is pretty good a majority of the time and excellent compared to other non-controlled AI. 95 percent on all minions not named Flesh Golem. Why Flesh Golem is so much worse? I don’t know. Though it’s at 70 percent of the time now.

Actually, only 86% of all minions are not named Flesh Golem :p
(Yeah I know that’s not what you meant, I’m just being a pedant)
I’m fairly certain the AI problems are due to pathfinding, and specifically a total inability to process the z-axis even for minor obstacles that don’t even block los and players would jump over. Ranged minions are indeed a lot more responsive (even though they sometimes try to attack from behind a wall, something I’ve also seen mesmer illusions do).
Incidentally I also have a ranger alt and my pet stands around quite a lot of the time! But for them it’s not a problem as you can override its behaviour with the F-keys.

Bellamy.9860:

Minion heal was at about 80 for the flesh golem, dunno if different minions heal for different amouts

Yeah 79 for the Flesh Golem, I tested in mists. Don’t remember if I tested for the others too. Logically it should scale inversely with their attack speed, but it’s not like our own siphoning does so it’s probably the same.

Rennoko.5731:

80% more healing from the blood fiend!!

Has anyone tested to see if this only affects the siphoning-on-attack it gives you? Or does it affect the base heal as well? Also, is the siphoning also affected by Bloodthirst now?

Wayfarer.2051:

Ca anyone tell me if Vampiric Rituals also affects allies?

IIRC it affects anyone standing in them.

Yeah I also think paid tournaments had to go. They were pretending to be “the pro league”, but the game was far too immature to have such a thing. Think how long it was after Prophesies was released that the first GW1 tournament was held!

However, I don’t understand why they have both 1-round and 3-round ones. I suspect the 3-round ones will have a lower population and longer queues. Pick one and stick with it!

Also, give us a few different game modes, there’s only so much conquest you can do before you blow your brains out from boredom!

I use marks in sieges all the time, it’s quite nice being able to clear the walls! I wish Spectral Grasp didn’t have such a slow projectile speed though, I like pulling defenders off the walls.

It’s in open-field zerg fights that conditionmancers are lackluster.

You sure all cooldowns are shared? I thought it was all cooldowns of the same type. eg if you have an “on swap” weapon and an “on crit” sigil, their cooldown won’t affect each other.

I also play a conditionmancer in wvw, and like others I find I do ok in small fights but badly in zergs. Things die so quickly with all the aoe flying around that your conditions have very little effect. I often don’t get credit and loot for kills despite stacking every bleed and poison in my arsenal at them, and Marks are not triggered by downed opponents so can’t even help clear the corpses.
I find I’m more effective using Well of Blood and Well of Power to support my own zerg, but, of course, there’s no XP or loot in that, and neither of those is going to save your group from a portal bomb as the healing/condition removal they provide is gradual.
I’ve been thinking of switching to a power build with wells (something like kidbs’s) because I’m tired of feeling like I don’t make a difference.

Having said that, in other situations the conditionmancer build works well. Small group fights, sieges, a corrupt boon/epidemic combo can be pretty powerful even with the huge amounts of condition removal you get in wvw (pretty much everyone will have some kind of aoe condition removal that affects allies as well, and in large groups all that stacks up!). I just wish there was a build that worked well in all situations!

And yeah, I also agree that we have far too few escapes compared to mesmers, thieves and elementalists. I have a lowbie elementalist alt whom I’m levelling up in wvw, and I find that while I get downed A LOT more often (lower HP plus lowbie armour that’s apparently made of paper), most of the time I can run off with a mist form and come back, whereas my necro is as good as dead if he’s downed.

Yeah I also think it’s an interesting idea! I would love to see the idea of health-sacrifice return, and LF might be a way to do it.

You need to talk to Rallin (sp?), he reformed Necro Raiders from back in GW1. In fact I ran across them a few times in wvw last week (I’m on GH, they’re on AG). Only managed to kill one of them, and he was an ele, clearly he should’ve rolled a necro… :p

I love keeping up with this treasure hunt, I think it’s great that there’s things about this game we still haven’t found! I too suspect it’s a sub-80 zone and am leaning towards Ascalon purely because of how the thing looks. My initial impulse was to think Rotscale but it seems you can’t go to where he used to spawn in GW1.

I think they said both teleporting AND stealthing make you drop it. Otherwise I’d walk up to it with Spectral Armour on and just trigger the teleport as soon as I pick the thing up, like I do with the repair kit at Kyhlo! :p It’s not much but it’s a bit of a head start
However they also said you WILL still have access to weapon skills, so ride the lightning should work very well. Eles are pretty hard to pin down.

It doesn’t matter that much, your nametag is still the same size, they can see you.

reedju.5786:

Vampiric builds in s/tPvP are where you see the most QQ and for good reason. We only have our traits and incredibly few healing abilities that can be augmented with stats. In PvE vampiric builds are sustainable (can be) but in sPvP we are barely sustainable and don’t offer the damage/support other builds with the same survivability offer.

Yeah there’s justr too much burst damage for them in spvp. I tried and died

Jump into spvp and try them both!

EDIT: Cause, you know, you can change up your gear/runes/traits for free in there, it’ll let you try things out and give you an idea how things work.

Didn’t realize that Bloodthirst affects Life Leech, though it makes sense really. Is it also affected by healing power if anyone knows?

Gotta congratulate an AG thief who managed to stop me and my small group from taking Pangloss Rise in EB tonight! Realizing we were too many for him to fight off even with the support of the NPCs, he stealthed and ran off, let us kill the NPCs, and then, as we were capping, he revived the camp supervisor and delayed us just long enough for a bigger group to come and squash us!
Only a few seconds more and it would’ve been a different story, but, whoever you are, well played!

I see, that’s pretty interesting! So in theory you could make it tick twice if it lasts ANYTHING over 1" if you timed it right? Though I imagine it would take a lot of practice to time the fear right, and a lot of the time you don’t have much option on when to use it. You’re gonna need to interrupt that stomp, or to stop that thief from bursting you down, etc.
Still, I might go practice putting a few bleeds on the dummies in Mists for a few minutes, just for the hell of it Thanks for the info!

One minor question Nemesis, curious why you chose Nightmare runes. An extra fear is all well and good but the low chance and long cooldown mean you’d need to be extremely lucky to get it when it will be useful! Necromancer runes give 10% more Fear duration (no increase to other conditions, but as you yourself have said they get cleared so frequently that too much duration is pointless) and a tiny little bit more HP as a bonus.

Nemesis.8593:

The only thing this build can’t do is kill a good bunker elementalist and of course the ranger’s QQ build… god that build…

Yeah, eles are pretty much impossible to kill with any condition-based class, so it’s not a problem with your build: they just clear the conditions far too frequently and efficiently, have multiple heals on varied cooldowns, and even have passive heals and condition clears that work even when they’re CC’ed! If they’re already low then a Corrupt Boon can finish them off, but if you’re alone forget about it.

I also agree with you that it’s really easy to sit back and observe the mistakes… it’s like watching a movie, or even when you look back at your own decisions… you think “oh man… if only i would have done it like this…”. But you wouldn’t have, since now you know… but when you are there in the moment you don’t know.

Yeah of course, even the best players make mistakes under pressure. I’ve seen some dumb mistakes made by some very good teams on Observer Mode back in GW1.

Rennoko.5731:

If you wait right before their health bar ticks down with the bleed, then cast fear, you only need +30% or so to get two ticks.

Most people see two ticks fairly frequently with 50%-80%.

Oh, I didn’t realize. You saying that the Terror damage is linked to the timer for bleeding? So it ticks whenever bleeding ticks?
If so doesn’t that imply that each condition is on an internal timer for the entire stack? Or does the game keep track of exactly when each individual bleed on a stack of 12 bleeds is supposed to tick for its damage? If each bleed does tick at different times (and it kinda looks like it does because the numbers seems to be floating up more or less constantly rather than all at once every 1"), then which bleed does the Terror damage sync itself to?

Not bad! Didn’t think it would work in spvp since yhou can’t get the full +100% duration with no food buffs, but seems it sort of does. Did you change any of the traits and gear or are you using your wvw setup?

It really shows off the Terror change to best effect. You were right in that old video you made that necromancers had no useful burst and asked for Fear to be changed. It’s a shame that they chose to do it using a trait though, it means you have to structure your whole build around it and precludes the use of many other useful traits in that slot.

In GW1, their balance policy was “when everyone is using the same build, then it’s too powerful”. I never liked how they nerfed things to the ground rather than toning them down incrementally or making alternative builds stronger, but I agreed with the sentiment. I worry that if people cotton on to how useful it is to have some kind of bursting capability Terror will become the new Ether Prodigy and we’ll see some kind of drastic nerf to it.

I still think Reaper’s Protection has a ridiculously long cooldown though, considering how many CCs you get in pvp. Very useful when it works. Maybe they should split it.

Thanks, both of you.

It does pull them all the way to you, but only if there is no obstruction at all in the way. Sometimes it’s possible that you have line of sight but there’s still stuff in the way that can stop the pull halfway (like low rocks etc).
Generally yes, it’s not a great pull (not compared to the aoe pull the mesmer has that doesn’t even need light of sight!), but if the enemy is close to the edge of a wall it’ll do the job. I only equip it if we’re besieging something, I’ll swap it out with a speed boost if we’re on the run or something like Poison Field or a well if we’re in the lord’s room.

Is Immobilize a control effect that can be broken using stun breaks? I know it’s listed as a condition rather than a control, but Fear is also a condition and yet is affected by stun breaks.

No I’m pretty sure it stacks (you can test it in Heart of the Mists if in doubt), but it’s capped at +100% duration, so people using +bleeding duration gear can exceed that.
However, the +33% from Lingering Curse is special in that it can take you over the +100% cap.
No idea how that interacts with +duration from food, whether that’s still subject to the +100% cap. Never tested with food.

I kinda miss that in GW1 your skills were unaffected by your weapon. It let me run around with an Icy Dragon Sword just cause it looked awesome (and I had pale blue/purple scar armour to match) :p
(Not in pvp of course, there I had a furious spear so I could build up adrenaline for my /W secondary skills)
I did toy with making a Spinal Shivers build so I could actually use the IDS, but it kinda sucked.