Guild Wars 2

I keep seeing this a lot and from a PvP perspective, it simply isn’t true. I can’t really address the PvE side as there’s not established meta right now for the Revenant so it can’t quite be compared to other classes in that regard, though I do feel it is quite strong.

The truth of this is that people don’t FEEL like it does enough damage, because they aren’t see Da Big Numbaz

I had trouble calculating the exact Co-efficients in the PvP lobby because I couldn’t find the weapon strength for PvP Items, so the numbers provided are based on the PvE calculations I did in LA. These numbers will be near-identical to PvP.

Auto Attack
Full Auto Chain Co-efficient: 3.0
-Preparation Thrust (1): 0.8
-Brutal Blade (2) 0.5 each way – 1.0 Total
-Rift Slash (3) 0.9 Initial, 0.3 Secondary – 1.2 Total Important – This skill creates the rift on EVERY target, for a very high potential burst while cleaving – We’re only assuming 1 target here however.

This skill takes around 2 seconds. I’m not sure of the absolute exact time but it is very close to this. I’m guessing around 1.9 – 2.4 seconds, hopefully someone can time this more accurately in the future.

Precision Strike
Co-efficient: 0.85
Recharge: 4s

This skill is actually pretty respectable damage for what it offers. It’s a nice short-range chill. The only problem with this is the chill duration. It could be upped to 1.5 – 2s but we aren’t talking condis here.

UNRELENTING ASSAULT
Seriously, this skill has some phat damage. It sits above a kill-shot if you get every hit off on your target.

You’re actually looking at around a 3.85 coefficient
The cast time is incredibly short at around 0.75s and the recharge is pretty respectable. This skill is basically the Revenant’s Rapid Fire on a shorter.

I think the reason people complain about this is there’s not really any way to select one target and it’s somewhat lacking when faced with multiple foes. Each individual hit is around 0.55. I think the best thing here would actually be to make this cleave 2 or 3 targets, or add a “channel” effect to it.

People seem to think they’re doing “big damage” when they see big numbers. If UR becomes more of a channel instead of 7 individual little hits then I feel this skill will get the respect it truly deserves.

Comparisons

I wanted to throw in a few comparisons, regarding co-efficients.

Kill Shot: 3.25 at max
Rapid Fire: 3.75
Eviscerate: 3.0
Warrior Axe Auto: 5.0 (3.6s chain time, so we’re looking at around the same damage as Rev auto here)
100b: 5.31 (3.25s cast, roots, huge telegraph)
Lava Font: 3.207
Guard Sword Auto: 3.1
Whirling Wrath: 2.8

So when you look at these, there really isn’t much to complain about regarding Revenant’s damage with Sword. It’s not the damage, it’s the way the damage is presented and utilised. Make UA have a channel (stack numbers per phone) and maybe throw a small cleave in and it’s perfect.

So I’ve played basically every Revenant Beta we’ve had and I’ve really been enjoying the class. It’s definitely coming along really well but I feel it needs some improvements.

I’ll try and break it down into Legends/Weapons

Jalis

Jalis as a whole is neat in concept, but in practice it’s very clunky. The long cast times make this legend kind of useless. In particular the Heal and the Elite. The cast times are around twice as long as they should be, considering what you get. Second, Vengeful Hammers is just slightly too high of a cast time for where it needs to be.

The actual pay off of the skills is about right, it’s just too slow.

Regarding the Elite, it still needs refining. I feel bring the energy cost up to 60 and bring the cast time down to 1 – 1.5s would make this skill more effective. It’s just too hard to access right now. You’re spending just under half of the effect time casting it, so chances are by the time you need the damage mitigation, you’re already dead or the moment has passed. It needs to be far easier to access like every other invuln or protection skill in the game.

Shiro

Shiro is great, but it suffers from lacking any real survivability. The heal as it currently stands is basically useless. The base heal needs to be brought up, it needs to be instant cast and the ICD needs to be removed or brought down to be incredibly low (0.25s at most). It’s simply too weak to bother with for anything other than DPS.

Phase Traversal is really cool, but I feel it suffers from having a 1/2s cast time. This means that you can’t chain it with other skills well. It almost needs to be instant cast like Judges Intervention. I love the flavour of it, but it’s simply too clunky as a blink skill.

Impossible Odds is amazing and takes up an incredible amount of energy as it should. I think this one should be watched as it can be extremely draining. I’d say bringing it down to -9 Energy would feel a little better, but I think it just needs to see more play right now.

Sword

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this yet. For PvE it’s great because the damage feels quite high. For PvE I’m not sure it’s in a good place. Unrelenting Assault needs to be an evade. Plain and simple. Just like the other skills where you lose control of your character. I’ve also found it to be kind of clunky where it will just stop halfway for some reason, but I’m assuming this is because someone blocks or evades it. I feel this should simply just move you to the next target if that’s the case.

Grasping Shadow is currently bugged and displays the range indicator as within range if you’re at 600 units. This was quite confusing initially and probably needs to be fixed.

Staff

Staff is actually pretty good. It really just needs some fine tuning for numbers. The only thing I’d say is add a blast to renewing wave or maybe reduce the cast to .75s. Surge of the Mists also needs an evade.

Hammer

I haven’t had a huge amount of play with this weapon this round, so I can’t say much other than it needing an evade on Phase Smash. I feel the cast times are still a little too long.

Ventari, Mallyx, Axe and Mace

I haven’t had any significant play with these. Mallyx does feel like it’s in a good place regarding it’s utility, but I haven’t tried it with Condi so I can’t really say.

Revenant as a Whole

As a whole, revenant feels far too squishy compared to Guardian or Warrior running similar stats and spec-types. It’s seriously lacking evades, blocks and invulns. It really, really needs those evades on the Mist skills and the cast times seriously need to be lowered. The class feels too slow and clunky right now.

I know that there’s a big desire to use the new tech, but the use of new tech shouldn’t compromise the playability of the class, as awesome as it is.

Weapon skills feel quite hard to access with such the current energy costs on them in addition to utilities having an extremely high energy cost. I feel either weapon skills or utilities need to be toned down on costs just slightly, maybe 5 – 10 points for some skills, nothing huge.

At the moment I’m getting “heavy thief” vibes from the class. It’s just lacking the actual sustain and damage mitigation of a heavy. I feel fixing Jalis and adding those evades could fix this quite a bit.

So with HoT coming and Revenant being able to use Melee staves, this skin is at the top of the list for things I want, but there’s no known way to acquire it!

I know you used to be able to get this in PvP, but you can’t anymore. It’d be nice for some sort of confirmation that this is an exclusive PvP only skin that has no Mystic Forge recipe, or even confirmation that a new acquisition method will be added.

I’d be more than happy to contribute towards the research if we got a confirmation for this having an existing undiscovered recipe.

FogLeg.9354:

*it is place to play instead of queueing. The problem is population inbalance, so many players flog into few servers leaving other servers empty. If you spread wvw population equally over ALL servers we would never have queues. So EotM is not needed.

*it teaches new players how to play wvw. Now, really? It does not teach anything but bad habbits and how to avoid fights. People who start in EotM and then try to go real WvW are horrible, it takes forever to teach them how to actually behave. So, EotM not only does not teach anything useful but it also makes harder to teach new people later.

I agree population inbalance is a big problem, but I do seriously see the need to keep EotM. Is is a good place for people to get a taste of running around in big groups. It can get people familiar with things like siege and that other players from different servers can attack you, as well as following Commander tags. I’m talking the bare minimum here, nothing fancy. K-Trains are less likely to happen if you greatly reduce or remove the incentive for them.

Not only this but even if we have a relatively balanced population among servers, there can still be queues on occasion and it’s good to have a place to go. Sure, in a perfect world this aspect to EotM would be completely unnecessary, but that’s not going to happen.

FogLeg.9354:

8) Increase drop rewards on player kills – well… I can see huge problem with this. Just like fixed PvP matches, this will be abused. You do realise that players from same guild, in same party can be fighting in wvw against each other. So there will be area, not far from spawns, where one server kills everyone in other server, then they run back and kill everyone in other server and in very short time everyone involved have gathered 100 kills and piles of godly stuff. I am quite happy with lootbags you get currently, with good raid you get plenty and something good drops out of them eventually.

I was pretty hesitant about the last one and I feel it’s one that’s less important, however there are ways to fix this. You could do a similar system to WXP and diminish returns or even put a 5 minute timer per unique kill. Nobody wants to kill 50 people, wait a whole 5 minutes doing nothing, then do it again. That’s inefficient, especially when they could be in PvE doing that.

 
 
I feel there’s some jaded responses coming through. Yes, I’m extremely unhappy about the state of WvW and it’s neglect, but I strongly advise people look at why people are farming in SW or doing dungeon tours. It’s because it’s rewarding. If WvW had better rewards it could pull those people in and retain them. It would also feel slightly less crappy to do a full day of WvW to come out of it with nothing.

Be honest, do you guys enjoy coming out of a reset with nothing but a couple badges and maybe 50 blues/greens and 1 or 2 rares? I certainly don’t and after a while doing the same thing for crap rewards gets boring. This is the point I’m making. This is what matters to your more casual player.

Casual players provide the fat of WvW, they’re what fills it with bodies. Your hardcore players are slowly fading away because of the lack of content. I actually touched on this. If you want more players, you need good and unique rewards. You need to provide incentive for people to play the content, otherwise the majority simply wont bother.

Also just a note, this isn’t a “hate on EotM” thread. I want to constructively talk about the rewards of WvW. Yes EotM is part of the problem, but it sure isn’t the whole problem, nor is it the majority of the problem.

coglin.1867:

Rewards never brought players to WvW in the firs place, so in my opinion, that debunks that theory.

My logic is players saying “why would I play WvW when I can do X instead because that has better rewards”. Yes there are people who play WvW for WvW but look how small that community is now. Look how many people are playing EotM. Those players could be in WvW fighting instead but where’s the incentive.

Where’s the incentive for PvP or PvE players to actually play WvW outside of the actual experience? There isn’t one. The initial fun usually dies off for all but the hardcore players.

I’m not saying people don’t jump into WvW for fun or curiosity, but those players who aren’t super keen on the game mode would be much more likely to participate and treat it like the 1/3 of the game it is if the rewards were on par with PvP and PvE.

I’m using the same reasoning many players use for FotM being dead. The rewards suck. Sure, it’s awesome and people get into it because it sounds cool, but why would people keep doing it unless they REALLY want those Fractal Skins. They wouldn’t and they wont. They go farm SW instead.

Junkpile.7439:

I don’t see problem. If you wanna fight go EotM. If you wanna PPT and play map tactic go normal WvW.

Not sure if you’re baiting a response but it’s worked if you are.

EotM and fights really aren’t a thing. It’s so few and far between because the majority of players are there for WXP, XP, Karma and Badges. I’d love it and I’m sure others would too if EotM became the “fights map” and the others became the “PPT and Win” maps.

I think the full blown removal of EotM would be a bad move. A place for people to sit in while queued is good, so is a “training ground” for new players who just want to get their feet wet, but it shouldn’t be providing the rewards that it is.

A reward track would be fantastic especially since it’s something people are likely already familiar with, I just question how they’d implement it. Perhaps every 1 WvW rank would be equivalent to one of the minor chests and 5 ranks would be a major chest? That might also be a good method to implement unique skins. Throw in some Tomes of Knowledge, badges instead of dungeon tokens and some transmutation stones and that’d be really cool. Maybe add in some siege stacks for particular chests. I like that.

Kaiser.9873:

I have often wondered how many players EotM draws away from the lower populated servers just because of the higher payoff.

This is sort of my main point. WvW used to be a place people would go for XP and Karma alongside the gameplay. Yes, it could be extremely annoying to have “lowbie scrubs” in your zerg, but it helped bolster your forces and you could turn them into serious WvW players. Now a player looking for these rewards just pops into EotM and never has to touch the serious stuff.

Sometimes I wonder if the devs of EotM are saddened by what the player-base has done to the map. The fault really isn’t at ANet over EotM, it’s the community, which I think is honestly even sadder.

Fixing the Rewards

So fixing the content will help fix player retention, but how do we get more players back in to the format? We give people a reason to play.

I propose several very simple changes to make WvW a rewarding format (and yes, these will result in making a certain something slightly less rewarding)

 
1) Remove or highly reduce Karma and WXP gain from EotM.
EotM was never intended to be a farming map. It was intended to be a place to play WvW when you’re queuing or just want to jump in quickly and have a bit of fun. With the extreme ease of access to karma, this has meant that anyone looking for some serious karma and WXP gains (which WvW used to actually provide) will go straight to EotM.

 
2) Increase gold rewards on rank-up
I’m going off memory here but the average rank-up is around 15 – 25s. It’s really not much when you consider how expensive WvW can be. I propose this should be 50s – 1g per chest. Yes, this is pretty high, but look at how much gold you can get from PvE in such a short time. It’s incredible.

 
3) Remove or greatly reduce badge rewards from EotM.
For my next change this is extremely important. EotM is not “honourable” and it shouldn’t give you more WvW currency than actual WvW.

 
4) Unique Armour skins
WvW needs unique armour like PvP. It needs to require some serious investment and should take time to get a full set. This should be something like 2,000 badges per piece and limit it to 1 piece per 100 WvW ranks. This way players who do participate in WvW a lot can show it off outside of WvW. Yes, I know there is 1 or 2 sets that are in fact WvW exclusive, but these are extremely easy to get.

 
5) Provide an alternate way to obtain WvW weapon skins
This would need to be on a similar scale to the armour. Alternatively run tournament far more often.

 
6) Make WvW Armour Salvageable
I honestly don’t even know why this isn’t base-line.

 
7) Fix the Achievements
Again, I don’t know why this isn’t already in. WvW achievements should be absolutely nowhere near as high as they are now, and not only that but there should be non-title achievements and repeatable achievements, such as “Kill X players within X seconds” or a repeatable track for objective captures (perhaps post-title).

 
8) Increase drop rewards on player kills
There is nearly no reward for killing players. Yes they drop a bag but it’s basically the same as killing a regular mob in PvP. Players should drop silver and a blue or green, minimum & guaranteed. Alternatively allow kills to give a currency that can be exchanged for rewards.
 
9) Other Unique Rewards
Things like minis, back-pieces, finishers and foods should be obtainable from WvW. Yeah, I know you can get a mini and finisher from the tournaments but I’m talking general WvW play here.

 
I know that seems like a lot, but it’s actually not. It simply comes down to decreasing the crazy rewards of EotM, increasing the current base rewards for WvW and providing some unique things that other game-modes have versions of (armour, food, finishers, back-pieces & minis). I’m also not going to touch on making the match-win rewarding because that’s much, much harder to nail down.

Conclusion

When compared to other formats and areas of play, WvW is abysmally rewarding. The opportunity cost of playing WvW is beyond poor, it’s sad. There’s no incentive to spend your time there over another area of GW2. It lacks any incentive to go and play other than the actual game-mode itself. This issue, alongside other on-going problems are causing the mode to bleed players, with no real influx of new ones. By adjusting the rewards, adding some new ones, fixing the other problems WvW has and maybe making EotM slightly less rewarding, WvW could truly enter a new age of activity.

Other Issues With The Format Don’t Help

WvW has gotten soooo so stale. With no drastic new content that truly effects the game, no new rule types or any tangible content updates, the players who do play for fun are simply getting bored. I myself am in this category. Hell I used to treat WvW like a part-time job. I would get on almost every day and play WvW, with maybe a FotM run in-between. I did it because I enjoyed it, but that slowly started to change. It became the same thing, day after day after day. So after my guild disbanded I kind of stopped. Why bother?

WvW has become boring and there aren’t even good rewards for doing it. The die-hards are leaving and I seriously doubt a new map will fix this. Alongside reward changes, WvW needs some drastic changes. There needs to be extremely strong incentives to defend, to split into smaller groups (I’m talking 15 – 30 here instead of these omni-blobs), there needs to be population balances. There needs to be so, so many fixes before it even becomes fun again. These issues are drastically impacting player retention.

I’m not going to touch on how to fix each of these, because each one is a massive can of worms on it’s own, but I feel that once those issues are fixed, WvW will be in a much better state to retain players.

I ran a WvW guild for a year on a lower tier server. On average we had 50 – 80 members at any given point. Across that whole time, across every single member, I can safely say that the absolute vast majority played only WvW or played WvW as their primary game mode. Personally I play and played all game modes (though I’ve drifted from WvW cause it’s dead and blobby).

The problem isn’t even that Mike has said these players are the exception, it’s that players who even choose WvW as their primary game mode are neglected.

See the problem isn’t that WvW doesn’t have enough players and activity to bother investing serious development time into, it’s that WvW hasn’t got enough content to maintain players. Why would people bother jumping into WvW when there is no support for it.

Why would PvE or PvP players jump into WvW? The rewards are terrible, it’s the same content that’s been there for 3 years and the barrier to entry is so high. Why would they when they can just jump into EoTM for some free karma.

If the devs actually spent time with this game mode and gave it some proper rewards it would be a thriving and fantastic thing, but it isn’t.

It’s the same reason fractals see next to no play and yet the big farm areas like Silverwastes do.

Just ask for a rollback man. They can do it. Just explain the situation calmly and kindly and ask if they can rollback to before the characters were deleted. They might roll it back too far but you should be able to ask them to roll it forward from there

Just tried that and still no luck

So whenever I start my game I get an extremely loud sound burst of what I guess can only be described as static. It lasts maybe half a second and stops. As you can imagine this is incredibly jarring. I’m in the process of doing a -repair, but this only appeared around the time I patched the game/upgraded to Win10.

I’ll post if the repair works or not.

Edit: that didn’t fix it.

When I get a chance I’ll be redownloading the whole .dat.

skowcia.8257:

At what cost? No weapon skills, no other utilities and so on. Besides that why i would use 20 energy for 2sec superspeed when i can use phase traversal instead?

Because phase traversal requires a target and will put you in combat? Since when do you need other skills out of combat anyway? Also it’s togglable so if the situation calls you can just turn it off… or you know… swap legends?

Revenant gets access to nearly 50% uptime on super speed with shiro. Sure, in combat this is a bit lower but their in combat mobility is actually pretty great.

Super speed is basically tripple swiftness, so a 50% uptime of that actually makes it one of the FASTEST classes.

Also Ventari has a trait that gives swiftness on the staff orbs.

So with level-ups no longer giving Skill Points/Spirit Shards, dungeons kind of got the short end of the stick. They no longer give around a skill point per run.

This used to be a really nice feature but it’s kind of been removed. Giving 1 shard per run would be really nice. I understand there’s a need to remove Skill Point bloat, but really it isn’t going to add as much as say, silverwaste chest farms do.

So since we have a new LA and there’s going to be Gliders with HoT, is there any chance we’ll be able to use our gliders in the new LA? Was it built with this in mind or is it strictly expansion maps only?

Yeah to be honest the cast time is way too long. Trying to utilize this in WvW is extremely difficult. It needs to be brought down in cast time. Somewhere around the 3s mark should do it, maybe a bit higher, or just remove the root. kitten Cast without the root would be fine.

Radius could go up as well for the base heal, maybe 450?

The halved heal and pulse time would be nicer too.

Most of the suggested changes are about right tbh. Skill idea is nice on paper, in practice it’s kinda useless. With the suggested changes it could be great.

You’d have to be running some sort of quickness. Maybe throw in Bull’s Charge. I’m experimenting with this now, though I kind of doubt it’s going to be meta.

Just adding my +1 to this. Would be good to know if the changes were simply scrapped or just forgotten. Mending and Frenzy could seriously use buffs.

They also talked about Healing Signet being nerfed and given Resistance as well as Physical Skills seeing some sort of adjustment?

They also mentioned on the stream that all skills that give haste have had the negative effects removed, but there is no mention of a change to Frenzy?

Is warrior still getting all those skills changes that were talked about last time?

Physical Skill improvements?
Mending made into a physical?
Healing Surge made into a shout?
Healing Signet reduction and given Resistance?
Frenzy having it’s negative effect removed to be inline with other classes?

Behellagh.1468:

snip

So? That means nothing. They still set up servers there. If anything it’s easier to get servers in Australia/OCX.

Sube Dai.8496:

Because they anticipated China have tens of millions of users.

And I believe lol only got an Australian server quite recently didn’kitten

Yes and China has how many servers? TWENTY-FOUR servers. Europe has half of china’s population and it has twenty seven. Why can’t Australia get 3?

Sure, maybe OCX/SEA is like 10-15% of the 3 million GW2 Accounts, but surely our numbers justify 3 measly servers in comparison to the 24 NA and China have each, and the 27 Europe has. Is it really that much to ask?

Seriously, this should have been implemented at launch. China has it’s own servers. Why can’t we have OCX/SEA servers?

We’d only need 3. Hell you could split them into English and Non-English, same as Euoservers. I can’t imagine we’d need a huge data centre.

If ANet wants to push eSports they should be paying attention to stuff like this.

How exactly is the stats on armour breakdown going to work?

What’s the ratio here? We get 600 points for spending a full set of points in one line, but this is split between two different stats.

Should we expect a full PVT gearset to go up by ~600 Power and 400 Toughness/Vitality or half that? How exactly is the stat distribution working?

Can we expect additional stats on gear, for example PVT actually being PCVBTF (Power Condition Duration Vitality Boon Duration Toughness Ferocity)? Can we get an example of a new gear piece?

What about other stats such as Condition Duration and Boon Duration? What’s happening to those? They’re extremely rare and currently only on one gear set (Givers), yet many builds use these stats via their traitlines.

I have two major concerns here, which are almost counterpoints.

One is that if we get a flat 600/400/400 point distribution to builds (e.g. a full berserker build just flatout gains the extra “total” stat points that were in the assumed primary lines) this could make builds far, far, far too powerful. For example we could be seeing full berserker builds hitting for an incredible amount more.

My other concern is we possibly only get an additional 300/200/200 to the builds. This scenario gives us HALF the total stats we had previously, which while keeps some very specific builds in check will leave many players (including myself) feeling a bit jipped.

Personally I believe the 600/400/400 route is the better one (again this is assuming we’re going for a pure gear set spec) as while it could leave certain builds very powerful, it does leave them falling very very short in other areas (e.g. absolutely 0 toughness or vitality). It also means we aren’t actually losing any total stats at all.

TL;DR – How exactly will armour work in the new system and what total increase can we expect, assuming a pure 3stat build as an example?

or in other words

What is the TOTAL increase of stats we get from GEAR going to be

So I just bought the new Bass guitar from the store and I’m a little miffed.

It sounds like an Organ! It sounds nothing like a bass guitar and is incredibly unresponsive. I’m a bass player in my spare time so as you can imagine I was extremely disappointed when I purchased this. I was really hoping for an actual bass sound.

I understand ArenaNet want to put a certain “charr” take on it, but as I said it sounds like an Organ, not a bass guitar. Compare this to the other instruments and they actually sound quite a bit like what they’re supposed to be.

Regarding the responsiveness it should really be on the same level as the Lute but it isn’t. I’m sitting on relatively low ping and it’s incredibly unresponsive.

What’s up ANet? Usually your sound team is great and I always look forward to the new instruments but this time you guys really fell short.

I would have posted this in the Crafting section, since it doesn’t exist anymore…

Has any progress been made on this? Do we know if it was a PvP skin or a forge recipe? Have we had confirmation that it’s actually in the game? Any information on it?

Congrats on the position, buuuut…

I kind of feel like your WvW experience and post history isn’t exactly reflective of you being able to represent the WvW community or really be called a “specialist”. Whilst I’m sure you have a keen interest in WvW I feel like someone with more experience and a more active post history (you’ve made 3 – 4 posts in the WvW forum as far as I can see, the rest are mostly regarding builds, though this of course doesn’t factor in archived posts, I believe).

Compare this to the dungeon forum where our Specialist has placed in a Tournament, as well as being a dungeon forum regular and it feels a little… well… off.

That said, take the bitterness with a grain of salt. The WvW community has largely been ignored for a long time with only minor improvements and some “tournaments” (lol) so there’s a bit of resentment towards ANet and putting someone who is well… maybe less experienced than the wider WvW community as a “Specialist” doesn’t really help.

Anyways, best of luck.

I’ll give that a go, thanks.

It is pretty strong, I just wish I could get it off more! I think maybe 0.5s would be better but eh, can’t have everything.

Hey guys, I’ve been playing Guardian on a serious level for maybe a month now after having mained Warrior since launch and I’ve been spending quite a lot of time in tPvP with my Guard. I’ve basically been rolling a pretty standard medi build using Focus and I had a question for some more experienced Guardians about Ray of Judgement…

How the hell do you use this effectively? I’m nearing my Champion Paragon title and I still can’t get a hang of this thing. I understand it’s better off at far range, but as I’m usually fighting on a tight point, I can’t really back up and I’m finding that half the time it goes on the 3s CD because it doesn’t have LoS.

I understand the mechanics of why this happens (my target has likely moved out of my LoS cone) but I was wondering if anyone had any tips to get better at using this somewhat clunky skill.

Also just gonna add that a 0.75s cast time is kinda silly on a skill like this, but that’s just my opinion.

Honestly I think a retexture would work wonders for the finsihers

Hey guys I’ve been working on a damage calculator over the past few months adding bits and pieces, I guessed here might be a good place to share it, as well as get it double checked for errors (I’m just one guy who barely knows any Excel).

It’s pretty straight forward to use, just punch in the numbers and it should spit out your damage for that particular skill. I recently added a very, very rough DPS calculator as well.

Feel free to share it around as much as you like and edit it to your liking.

Enjoy

https://www.dropbox.com/s/pnu8em25desf64y/Damage%20Calculator.xls?dl=0

The links bigmonto provided are super great.

Regarding the build you’ve got at the moment, you’re really going overboard with the tankiness. Hammer’s biggest advantage is it has some incredibly hard hitting skills that also CC, which results in a super strong attack chain if you trait for damage.

You’ve got a trait in there that wont effect you since you aren’t using a Warhorn, so you want take something else instead, Empower Allies is super great.

If you’re roaming I’d definitely suggest a much zerkier build than this, but if you’re zerging the toughness and vitality should keep you alive (nobody needs 30k hp and 3.k armour. 2.8k (2.9 with 1 in Defence) and 20 – 25k HP is more than you’ll ever need)

For PvP your best bet is honestly the standard hambow.

I also put in Balanced Stance as you can never go wrong with it on your bar and I put on Cleansing Ire to fight against conditions. I swapped the runes to Strength, but you can also take Hoelbrak if you’re still worried about Condis.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fJAQJASTjMdU5ZnHmhwJagqgC7iHA6uh0nwHkCA-TVSBABG/AAoZ/BzUCelyvKV/RiDBgGHBg80FAwFAgUAMJMC-w

It’s honestly just a variation of the meta-battle build though to be honest.

Mending love, yes, shield love yes, greatsword change… no. Trait changes… no.

I’ll mostly I’m a huge supporter of greatsword actually being a useful weapon if used correctly, but the main issue with the weapon is 100b. The rest of the skills are actually really great, Arcing Slice, WWA and Rush (when it hits) are all awesome skills, with Blade Trail being okay. Increasing the target limit to 5 wouldn’t fix the problem as it still functions the same in 1v1. Greatsword is already pretty strong AoE wise as AS, WWA and Bladetrail all function in an AoE fashion.

It’s a tricky problem to fix without completely changing the playstyle. You can’t simply unroot 100b as that would be way, way too strong and putting a stun on the weapon would result in the same thing.

Perhaps giving the weapon some more passive effects may help such as increasing vuln out put, some form of condition somewhere or even increasing some of the damage in different areas of the weapon such as auto, bladetrail, AS and Rush. One thing to keep in mind is ArenaNet likes to keep weapons “thematic”, so things like Chill, Burning, Poison, etc wouldn’t fit.

To be honest though it’s sort of a high skill ceiling weapon outside of PvE. You need to be good at using it for it to be useful, but when you do get good at it, it has the potential to be incredibly powerful.

Okay so I know this is only borderline PvP and it’s (probably?) not something the actual PvP team works on and is more likely to be a thing the Art team focuses on, but I figure this is best posted here.

Simply put, the Dragon finisher is kinda crap. The models and animations are pretty neat, but when you compare the finisher to something like Shark or Phoenix rank, it falls really short and many people I’ve spoken to agree that Dragon just doesn’t look they great.

I personally feel it has to do with the Dragon looking very grey and almost textureless. It does have some fine detail when you look at it closely, but it’s quite colourless and feels quite bland. My personal suggestion would be to maybe add a little more colour or shading to it or even give it the same ethereal look that all the other ranks have.

I know this is a bit lower on the priorities list but I feel that the highest ranked finisher should be the best one. I welcome any other opinions on this.

I was devastated when I actually took the time to read the OP, only to find out this isn’t an ArenaNet employee and this isn’t actually being implemented.

The lore panel, the top damage, the stats, the hero panel, it’s all amazing.

ANet, please please please hire this guy or at least take some of these examples and use them!

I had a question about matchmaking. Does anyone know if blocking/blacklisting someone prevents you from being matched with someone?

PPK is a positive change.

Removal of white swords is absolutely kittened outside of T1. Does ANet even play WvW outside of T1 and on off-hours?

This is absolutely stupid and just encourages K-Training and Hacking.

Quite a lot of interesting and good suggestions have already been made, so I wont go for anything in-depth.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fJIQNAseRjMdUFajHehwJaAmgCbnPBXT7AQZW85A-TFTDAB9oEj7DBAFHBgHeAARpk4JlDvo+DI6DAwEnEnAAIUCSz+DkBgZCA-w

Basically all I did was change Warrior’s Sprint for Vigorous Focus. You already have a boatload of swiftness and mobility from your signet and movement skills. Warrior’s Sprint is kind of unneeded. Similarly I got rid of your points in Strength. To be honest you can go without the ~2k HP since Warrior already comes with a trillion HP and you have quite a bit of condi removal/reduction already. I put these points into Discipline for a 3% per boon on target DPS boost (usually between 6 – 15% depending on what you’re fighting) and a 10% DPS increase to Bleeding foes. Because you have a passive bleed chance and bleed on sword auto, this is basically permanent and these two traits together give a huge DPS increase compared to the 100 power from Strength.

I’d probably recommend Balanced Stance over Dolyak Signet since you have no signet CD reduction (tbh you could take Signet Recharge over VF if you wanted, which would provide a higher uptime on Fury, Swiftness and Might).

Another thing I’ll say is while theoretically the Might from Forceful GS gives higher damage, it can be a bit difficult to sustain (I’ve got over 5.5k Hours on my warrior and I still have issues sustaining 15 – 20 stacks unless it’s a bigger fight). You get more reliable damage out of Slashing Power, in which case you can go like 4/0/4/04 with 2 points to put anywhere. Up to you though.

Another thing to remember is, at least with the Ascalonians, it’s been over 250 years since they came to Kryta. That’s around ten generations. Think of that as your Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Grandfather being Ascalonian. Sure there’s going to be some cultural undertones, but ultimately everyone in DR is Krytan.

The best real world example I can give is the British Empire settling Australia around 250 years ago. Really only 22% of Australians are descended from British exiles, yet how many define themselves by or even know of that? Probably less than 1%. It simply doesn’t impact the culture or the day-to-day life of individuals in the same way being Ascalonian really isn’t a huge deal in Kryta today. You’re Krytan, with Ascalonian heritage in the same way you can be Australian/American/Kiwi/Canadian/etc and have British heritage but act nothing like a British person.

Well if you want Hella Tank Mode, you want 2 points in strength for extra vitality. You also want the new Furious or Bountiful Sharpening Stones for the extra 100 vitality or toughness. Alternatively there’s Potions of Karka Toughness which grant 150 toughness and take up the utility slot.

That said, honestly nobody needs THAT much armour or health to survive. If you’re a competent player then a Warrior’s base health is more than enough and 2.8k (read: 2.9k the second you put 1 point into defense) is actually a lot of damage mitigation. That’s assuming you have a guardian or two in your party to keep boons on you. If you don’t then you may want 3 – 3.2k armour and you could honestly go to 20 – 25k HP, but the better you are at playing and commanding, the less health and toughness you need.

Just remember, while you can sit in that AoE and push through the enemy, not everyone else will be able to because of their own stats. It’s very easy to make this mistake while Commanding so you will have to be careful if you run this build.

You could honestly run something like this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fJAQNBiYDbkpjyQr8wzD6QDUFUYX8AQ3Nk+E+gXA-TlCBwAGVewT9nlKxk8EAlgAuAAV3fIluBGHEgEmneYihUA6pMC-w

While offering your party some excellent support and buffs, you’ll be pretty tanky and do some great damage.

What about Arcane magic? I doesn’t appear to come under any of the other magic types and it has it’s own mastery line?

I’d assume there would be some Elementalist who’s specialised in Arcane magic, though I’d question if this is still “Unique” and not just “Uncommon”.

Is anyone gonna say it?

No?

Ok I guess I will…

All these suggestions are terribly pay to win. You want something non-p2w that everyone serious WvW player will buy?

Siege Lockers. A new “tab” you can open to store siege in and drop siege from wherever you are, without having to keep it in your inventory.

New finishers. These are probably ANet’s #1 source of revenue from WvW players.

Stonemist Lord mini.

Permanent Repair Canister.

Super cool guys on a super cool server! Would definitely recommend joining if you’re looking for a WvW guild.

I have to agree. This map is a poor choice, especially when the map selection totally RNG and it only takes ONE person to select it and you can be stuck with it.

This and there’s the fact that people are expected to change there build completely in around a minute. This would be fine if we had Build Templates but we don’t.

To add onto this, the map is set up in such a way that whichever team gets the first wipe will win the match, almost every time, which for competitive play is stupid. It might as well be 100 points per kill.

The new carapace legs are beautiful, but there’s one problem…

Your feet clip through them when you run. This is on a male human, I can’t speak for other races but I’m assuming they have a similar problem. This doesn’t happen to other armours of a similar type (long buttcape/cloak thing), so I’m assuming the fix is doing to these whatever was done to those.

I honestly hope Anet doesn’t start catering to people like this even more than they already have. This is what you get when you hold everyone’s hand the entire way through the game.

I’m sorry but if you can’t figure out those mechanics after it was literally fed to you not 20 minutes before you attempted it you probably need to work on your problem solving skills. The fight is honestly incredibly simple and I can’t understand how people had difficulty with figuring it out.

So when you preview the chest piece for the Carapace or Luminescent Heavy chest piece, the weapon placement for 2h weapons that angle towards the left is much, much lower than all other chest pieces, causing many weapons to clip with the leggings and shoulders.

The weapon types with this bug:
Greatsword
Longbow
Rifle
Shortbow

This is the case for all weapons and not just a particular few. An example is attached.

I’m hoping this can be fixed before the armour is actually released

I suppose after looking at the Tequatl/Zhaitan comparison you’re right.

The distance probably does have a lot to do with it, though I do get the vibe that Jormag is bigger. I think that tooth would still have to be one of his larger ones though.