Guild Wars 2

Need me to translate your message to german, so you can drop it over at the german boards? Get some other guys to translate it to french and spanish, too, then drop advertisement where it matters!

Still not sure whether I should join Yak’s Bend btw. The thing is, right now, I got godlike internet, but I’m gonna move in about a month. Now I got exams and don’t have much time to play anyway, after the exams, I have no idea, how well my then kittenty internet will take wvwvw, especially a connection to an american server.

A strong european presence could be exactly what you need btw. Doesn’t matter, how hard your oceanic team has to try, to stay at the top, if you don’t have an european presence, you won’t have any chance to catch up if you lost in the oceanic time frame.
Everyone in NA recruits oceanics, as it seems. My take is, just go against the flow. Get Europeans to cap everything back once the oceanics are gone and also prepare the map for NA prime time by capping and upgrading key locations, making sure, there is enough supply, etc.

Drop that rifle till you are level 80. It just isn’t worth it. Even on 80, it’s still rather lackluster. It’s a nice dueling weapon and good against bosses(ranged and high dps, can pierce through trash mobs and thus always reach the boss) but for any other purpose, it just doesn’t cut it.
So you either grab a greatsword or hammer to deal with the trash mobs and keep the rifle(a sword just won’t do well with a rifle at this point of the game. Trust me, I tried) or you switch to a different build.
I recently brought my warrior to 80 using sword+war horn, coupled with a long bow.
I simply like the war horn, you can drop it for any other off-hand weapon, seriously. My point is simply that when it comes to levelling, the ranged weapon of choice is the long bow. While your damage against single targets may not be as high as with the rifle, you can blast out a friggin huge flame field which deals loads of damage, then pop it with a blast finisher for AoE might. You can then use the combo field for burning effects on your arrows or switch to sword and leap through for a fire shield.

As I said, the warhorn is optional. I simply love getting around fast. If you don’t like the warhorn, grab a shield for some blocking action or a mace for some mace to face conversations.

before any of that:
Make turrets scale with stats!
Fix all the bugs!

Then see how it turns out.
Maybe THEN think about introducing such a mechanic.

^ ever tried to use an Elixir S on your Asura?

If it was an engineer, I’d say fine. But how the hell do you want to reflect a friggin MAGNET PULL? You could say, balanced stance should make the engi pull himself to you. That makes sense… But shield? Be glad, he pulls you and doesn’t simply pull your shield out of the weapon slot hehe.

did you have the revealed debuff?

(did a huge, “IMMUNE!” pop up when you attempted to stealth)

I wanna be a Skritt!
So I can stand in Lion’s Arch, asking everyone passing by: “You bring me somethin’?”

Hundred blades? Maybe go look outside PvP for once. Against mobs, it’s THE Skill you’d want to use. It hits like a truck and is on an 8(!) second cooldown.
I’m not talking about cutting down the skill itself, I’m talking about making it less spam-able. For pvp it will hardly matter. 100blades is more of a finisher once you got your opponent knocked down, immobilized or crippled and out of endurance etc.

Let’s just think about the following: What if 100Blades was on 15 sec cd? Would GS be unplayable? No, it would still hit like a truck but we wouldn’t see 95% of warriors running around with a GS just cause it can theoretically out-dps most weapons out there with a large AoE to boot while giving a ton of mobility, too.

Even more, let’s just think about it… Just theoretically… About swapping 100Blades and Arcing Slice.
GS would finally have a burst skill to be proud of while arcing slice would see actual use past lev 20+. In that case, the cooldown would be 10 seconds, 8’ish, when traited but it would need sufficient adrenaline supply. Also slightly less spammy than it’s now. And certainly not as much face-tank-value as you’d have to deplete your adrenaline, thus dropping your damage for a short while.

About the hammer, it’s nothing big, really, I just always felt like the AoE was a tad bit(maybe 10%) too big.
However, that one is debatable, as my view is probably warped by the fact I play an Asura and the AoE just looks ridiculously large in comparison.

sword is more versatile as an off-set. Doesn’t even matter whether you run power or cond.

If you really wanna main Rifle, grab a sword. GS just isn’t that fancy if you don’t main it.
Sword got a short cd jump(my asura loooves jumping around) and a cripple, a snare on the burst skill, can stack up bleeding which stacks nicely with the rifle build(which will certainly have “x% bonus damage against bleeding foes”) and leaves you an offhand to toy around with.

You can either drop in a shield there for nice durability when you get rushed by them pesky thieves or grab a war horn for the ultimate mobility between charge and the jump skill, plus it supports the team and you can make it convert conditions, tho the trait is not that fancy right now due to some issues.

On the other hand, the Greadsword is mediocre at best as an off-set. You got 2 movement skills. That’s about it. I don’t think, you will spend much time 100blading opponents when you are planning on running a rifle as main.

I didn’t say, GS was bad, nor did I say, GS+Rifle was. The thing is, Rifle only pays off as a main set. If you are using rifle most of the time. Same with GS. So do the math.

Seriously, if Anet mainly nerfs big cannons like Meteor Shower along with the blatantly op stuff like hundred blades, I don’t really mind. Hammers from Guardian and Warrior could take a slight nerf too.

Actually I’m not all that concerned about the Warriors or Eles this patch. They still got loads of potential. The breaking point will be how Anet handles the Necros and whether Thieves get toned down at some points OR the nerfed classes get something in exchange to match the changes.

push
I love my warhorn.
I really do.
But most of the time I find myself skilling 20% shorter shout reg or some longbow/banner stuff over this simply because it messes up as soon as you got snares on you.
try fighting a spider which constantly applies cripple and poison? If you skilled into this one, you need to blow both warhorn skills at the exact same time or still use shake it off in addition, or they will stack the poison up to 2 minutes without you ever having a chance of removing it, cause cripple gets priority and the warhorn #4 doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do.

If you leave out this trait against spiders…
warhorn 4, shake it off, both gone.

If you use this trait:
use warhorn 4, it converts cripple to swiftness, then tries to remove cripple, chill and immobilze, which isn’t there anymore, then leaves the poison and you still need to use shake it off… OR use warhorn 5 and try not to get hit by the spiders while casting it…

what it should be:
use warhorn 4, warhorn removes cripple, trait procs and converts the poison

There really is not much reason of traiting into this right now. a shorter cooldown on shake it off gets the job done too and if you trait further into shouts, it makes way more sense anyway.

About the stomp: Thought about that one again.
If you are close enough to the opponent to stomp him, wouldn’t any attack he makes trigger your stun?

Yeah, man, I really disliked that one, too.
I so love Skritt.

Well, my Sylvari Elementalist is sure gonna have fun with Skritt during her storyline :>
Speaking about Sylvari…
Ever asked a Skritt, why they call the Nightmare Court “bad plant people”?
The response was so genius, I couldn’t stop laughing.

Rfreak.6591:

The most damage a bleeding can achieve is given solely by your gear (though necros kinda best at it), it requires close to no effort to land a hit, or 10 hits or even 20, and can be contributed (and will) by the whole team anyway, while keeping the distance and just autoattacking, without any kind of stress to the player besides bosses’ hard hitters and heavy aggro, which are pretty basic elements.

Damage of condition skills can be increased by:
-Cond damage
-Cond duration

Damage of “direct” skills can be increased by:
-Power
-Precision
-Crit damage

Also, there is triggering effects, on-crit-effects etc but they are available to both.

What I wannt to say here is, they are way more ways to increase direct dammage than there are to increase cond damage. The Gear argument is already invalid even before pointing out, crit dammage is way more readily available than cond duration.

The only difference between physical and cond damage is, cond damage does not get reduced by armor.
But as there is no way for cond damage to apply beyond a certain point in a boss fight, especially the cond duration is useless for anything other than confusion…(and fear and immobilize but they aren’t that good against many bosses anyway :>) because the boss will have ~2 minutes of cheap burning etc queued up anyway and be constantly on 25 stack bleeding from low profile rifle warriors with low cond damage.

The “S” in elixir S doesn’t stand for “shrink”, “stealth”, “stability” or “safety”.

It stands for “Stomp”.
And that’s how you use it.
shrink → FINISH HIM!
stealth → FINISH HIM!
stability → FINISH HIM!

The secret to how the Charr were able to fight on multiple fronts:

When testing my Ghostbore Musket, after jumping into a bunch of ghosts to blast them all away, Reeva prove her superiority by hovering above the ghosts. Death from above indeed, she performed a safe landing after the threat was dealt with.

All the jokes aside, the way, Charr are handled and referred to by other races strikes me as kind of odd. Especially the commoners should have a way more warped view.
I mean, come on, if this was playing in a medieval setting, the first thing to spread would be weird rumors like this. Charr can fly, Charr are the devil etc pp. However, the only ones who truly said something bad about the Charr were the survivors of Ascalon and they were like “so, yeah, this happened.”

btw the easiest way to cover a lot of distance as a small group is carrying 2 banners.
It’s absolutely ridiculous.

You don’t need to stick around and deal with their kitten. Just back the hell off till they get visible again or spam traps, marks and every other kind of auto trigger AoE for detection. Especially if you know they went stealth.
It’s not like it’s hard to deal with a team which did blow half their cooldowns for a sneak attack.

plus what bug?
Works as intended, move along.

Razjel:
6/10.

so let’s get this straight. We are looking at one of the best marksmen, Tyria has ever seen. Proficient with rifles, always in full protective gear.
I’m talking of no other than Peacemaker Napp.
Based on modern psychology and neurology, he developped a technique to strengthen his allies by shouting sentences like “for great justice!” and is bringing his research into practical use as we speak.

both are loads of fun.
The Guardian hammer is more fun tho. That knockback gotta be one of the most fun skills Guardian has to offer.

just grab anything which doesn’t die instantly and doesn’t move around in weird patterns(I’m looking at you, d/d ele!)
Even a ranger skilled for pet torpedo would make a nice commander.
“FOLLOW THE PET!”
“CHAAAARGE!”
“erm… chief, how should we follow it when it just climbed that wall?”

What I’d be more concerned about is the RACE to pick as commander.
For example, screw Asuras, you aren’t going to be seen like that.
Grab a Charr or Norn, they can be easily spotted, especially when they have a huge blue icon floating above their heads.

You guys know the reason, my male asura warrior joined the order of whispers?

Go figure :>

I was like “holy kitten, that chick is hot!”

Charr are somewhere between WW1 and WW2 technology wise but they still don’t have quite the infrastructure.
Mind how it was back then: At the front line tanks, a bunch of trucks etc…
…And behind that large amounts of horses carrying supplies. Charr are no better… No… Even worse, cause they don’t have railways, large roads etc while constantly having to fend off partisan attacks on their supply routes. It’s not like they CAN have enough transportation to both wage war AND carry supplies.
Now take into consideration, where the real front line is for the charr. The heavy equipment is needed to take out the dragon’s servants.

from a powerplay/diversity perspective, you gotta look at toolbelt skills and ELITES!
(cause engineers Elites suck balls)
So you are looking at the following choices:
Asura: Great toolbelt skills, Pain Inverter is nice for an adapted TANKCAT build(no cat tho, let’s call it TANKMIDGET instead) Elites are so bad, I’d take supply drop all day.

Charr: Got the style. Besides the always powerfull shrapnel mine, they don’t bring much on the table tho unless you are into drawing hidden pistols with a profession using pistols anyway. Charrzooka is a bit lackluster for an engi too as engi can have all of that anyway.

In addition:
Norn: Got arguably the strongest racial elites in the game. Always a good choice for professions with lackluster elites
Sylvari: Can bring an additional 2 second block and 3 sec invulnerability:D:D (seriously, going too tanky will hurt your damage)
Human: Might actually be quite decent, considering the toolbelt skills. Also, Reaper of Grenth is murder with all the tanky builds out there. Another fun combo might be big ol’ bomb -> avatar of melandru -> mass entangle, might be a kitten to set up tho.

All the racials aside, if you simply want to roleplay, unless you know how you wanna set up your Asura, the Charr is the safer choice lore wise. It’s rather easy to think of any generic engineer, really :>
Anyway, Iron Legion might be nice but I’m still loyal to Ash! Go eat your cogs, Iron cubs!

That’s what armor is for… And no, not roll… You won’t get up, once you are on the ground with heavy armor :>

While I do love this Idea(seriously, DO IT!), I still think, the cooldown should be increased when this change is implemented. like, increase bleeding duration by a second and put the cooldown all the way up to 8 seconds. Having blast finishers at 6 sec cd would be a bit too strong as the ranger got access to pretty sick combo fields contrary to the guardian who can deliver a 5 sec blast finisher but doesn’t have that many different fields and the type available to guardian is pretty basic to say the least.

Still, having blast finisher on greatsword would make the weapon actually useful. Right now, the only real reason to get greatsword is swoop. Daze and block etc are nice, but you get it for the mobility.

Weindrasi.3805:

In Guild Wars 1, you could only play human and charr were the bad guys. Arenanet wanted the charr to be terrifying—a combination of a hungry big cat and an angry demon. They were made big as part of that fear factor.
In Guild Wars 2, you learn the charr perspective on their war with humanity—and discover that there’s another side to the story. If Arenanet toned down the main villians from Guild Wars 1 by making them small, a lot of people would be very upset. So it’s not really an option.
You’re forgetting that a lot of magic is used in fighting. With magic, it doesn’t matter how big or small you are—if you shoot a wave of fire at an enemy five times bigger than you, it’s still going to burn.
Even with plain old swords, humans aren’t nessecarily disadvantaged. They’re small, fast targets—hard for a big charr to hit. If a human gets under a charr’s sword thrust, he can use his own sword and gut the charr.
Then there’s technology, which basically uses the same logic as magic. A bullet to the head, or a bomb, is going to kill you whether you’re four feet tall or ten.
Charr and Norn only have a real advantage in unarmored, magicless, weaponless, hand to hand brawls.

this.
Just look at the Charrs fighting stannce… The way, they need to lean forward while walking on two legs really screams for smaller foes to duck in below them and impale them with an upwards thrust.

And the force, a human can bring into an upwards thrust with a correct stance should be enough to pierce through armor. After all, compared to a horizontal thrust, there is nowhere else for the force to go.

I love it until I run a jumping puzzle and my charr decides to switch to quatropedal walking in the middle of it.
As a char, you gotta decide whether to use skills during a jumping puzzle(and then use them regularly to stay bipedal) or to use no skills at all. Changing the animation mid way can make you fall off quite easily.
It’s no big deal once you got used to the animations but at the beginning, I’d advise against running any lethal jumping puzzles.

Aside from that, the four legged sprint is kitten!
edit: kitten = kickkitten

well… medium tier 2 and the priory armor seems fine.
The rest looks horrible once you zoom in on the tail…
(only checked on gw2armor so far tho)

What I’d suggest just from browsing through gw2armor is priory armor with a tier2 headpiece.

well, the fact still stands, both becoming the president and becoming commander are impossible to achieve with talent alone. You simply need enough funding, the rest doesn’t matter. From this angle, the current system works fine.

Sceinna.3561:

As a friend told me “Imagine you could buy jobs in real life, wtb president of the united states for $100”.. of course jokingly, but it kinda feels like that with commander, it’s not because you can afford it that you are qualified for it.

Viewing it from this angle, the commander system is surprisingly realistic oO

yes. even better. stack golems on top of the treb :>

Einlanzer.1627:

boomerangs

as a 2000 range environmental weapon or not at all.
We don’t need any more of this “returning weapon” bullkitten which poisons every single game out there.

read tooltips…
There seems to be a big difference.
On most skills: “blocks projectiles” or “protects allies from projectiles”
On swirling winds: “Destroys projectiles”

If you view it that way, it suddenly makes sense :P

Slot 3:
P/T: Reposition: Evade backwards while leaving a small fire wall at your previous position.

D/T: Flash-Stab(bad pun, I know): Blind your foe, then stab him in the guts with the dagger, applying 3 stacks of bleeding

S/T: Burning Strike: Strike with both weapons at the same time, dazing the opponent. If you get blocked, burn the target for 2 seconds.

Slot 4: Dance of Fire: Whirl around at high speed, confusing nearby opponents and evading attacks.

Slot 5: Light and Shadow: Become invisible for 2 seconds, leaving behind a fire field.

edit: Just a bunch of ideas. By no means is this meant to be a complete skill set. They just don’t really synergize.

ThiBash.5634:

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the whole point of changing underused trait lines to make them viable for use? And if so, doesn’t that use also per definition include WvW and PvP?

Now, if you were aiming to discuss wheter this change makes Fire a viable alternative, then we’d have something to talk about. But dismissing a trait that just got buffed because nobody uses it simply because nobody uses it is fairly thickheaded.

that buff didn’t do much because fire has one big problem: 95% of the traits only work while attuned to fire.
It needs one or two more allrounders.
As of now, there are 2 traits worth investing in and they pretty much exclude eachother.
First one is 3 stacks of might for casting cantrips, second one is flame aura on using signet(triggering all other aura traits, basically giving fury, swiftness, protection, …) The rest is fairly strong in its own right but doesn’t have much of an “allround” feeling. 30% to burn on crits is nice too but the traits which benefit from burning foes are too far off.

For a classic attunement swapping dagger cantrip ele, the fire traits are pretty much lackluster, except for maybe the 10 point trait giving might on cantrip cast.

I never said, fire was uberstrong. But it’s also far from useless. It got a bunch of traits which can pack quite some punch and a bunch of traits which can actually have terrific synergy with other traitlines.
The problem with fire right now is, it doesn’t pay off to put any more than 20 points into it. The grandmaster traits are ridiculously narrowed down to fire attunement only.

so all I have to do is tell you a build wich incorporates fire and works for pvp right?

Thrashbarg.9820:

@ above post:

It actually works quite well with earth attunement (offhand dagger). Swapping into earth and dodging into a field followed by earthquake>churn is 3 blast finishers in about 2-3 seconds. Other than a full banner warrior I don’t know any class that can blast that fast (thieves can more consistently, but not as rapidly) and even that warrior would have to blow all his utilities. If the blast came in any other attunement you’d have to swap into earth after dodging anyway to hit the other 2 blast finishers. Churning Earth blast triggers at the beginning of the animation along with the cripple effect, so it’s easy to get 3 blasts inside one field.

It was crazy powerful when every single roll was a blast finisher, but man I had a blast while it lasted.

and where does the quickness to pull off evade → quake → churn in 2 seconds come from?

Aether McLoud.1975:

boozer.7815:

Otaur.9268:

a worthless duration increase to 30 fire trait

Mmmk. If you feel that buff was “worthless” then you have no clue about how to play an Ele to begin with, so there is no point in further discussion until you do so.

It seems you are the one without a clue. No tournament build has 30 fire. No tournament build even has 10 points into fire because it’s such a bad trait line.

its not used in tournaments so its bad, is it?
its not used in tournaments so it sucks in pve, wvw and spvp?
what a narrow-minded view this is.

I do hope, this crude solution to the problem is only temporary while ArenaNet works on a better solution like letting people who left mid fight stay in the world for 20 seconds or so.
Not like I have any problems with my connection but the current solution is bad for a single reason.
There is tons of situations, where you are technically in combat but could actually /dance and go afk for half an hour without any death. But log out and you are dead.

female norn.
Scars all over the face. Had to make a point :>

did you run a RAM test already?

the best looking cultural armor sets for thief on male side?

Human female I think

yes.

If it’s culturals, I’d say, Sylvari got the best ones. Even tho they are plant like, they are functional in all three needed aspects.
Concealing the face while not being all “look, me haz kitten mask!”
They also look pretty functional, unlike the human ones (cough)

Tho, for me, the best thief armor is still from the Crucible, maybe with a different chest piece mixed in.

If we are strictly talking culurals:
Human: Tier 1 looks unpracticable as hell, the mask looks ugly at best.
Tier 2 looks alright
Tier 3: Who the hell would actually buy something like that?

Sylvari: Tier 1 looks great, the mask is a bit fancy looking but still alright.
Tier 2: A toned down version of Tier 1, the headgear looks like a veil. Fits the thief nicely.
Tier 3: Now, THAT’s some armor! It actually looks protective and speaking of medium armor and culturals at that, that means a LOT!

Asura: Don’t even bother. They might look well on a rifle engineer but that’s about it.

Norn: Norn Culturals are generally kitten but the tier 3 actually looks quite decent.

Charr: Don’t bother. Tier 1 halfway usable, the rest is garbage.

For reference:
http://www.gw2armor.com/

My thief is a female Norn and I’m not even gonna bother buying any culturals. Maybe later when I got culturals for all races, a ton of gold and really want a certain Title. But else, I’mma get the Crucible armor and maybe swap out the chest piece with something more practicable.

well, the high level spawn points are always contested…
At some point, I got so frustrated after having to do a long walk, I simply grabbed my rifle and solo’d that inquest champion golem as revenge for making me walk the whole way.

Simple explaination to the numerous instant movements:

A shadowstep skill(pretty much 99% of the thief gap closers) will only work if you could WALK the same path in a STRAIGHT line.

A teleportation skill(the downed skill seems to work like that) will only work, if there is a PATH leading to your destination. Don’t know how far the path finding goes but as a rule of thunb, if there is any way to reach your destination without jumping, a teleport will take you there.

Lastly, Portal will take you anywhere from everywhere.

muh… German here, gotta proxy it :X

edit: Could have been a good vid but the texts ruined it kinda.

well. A sniper rifle would be fun :>

if it’s a mesmer, just have a guy sit on the oil, another /sit on his face and a few in reserve till he’s gone. The best option, however, is to simply pull/push them away from the doors before finishing them.
However, I’d still be for being able to cut off the heads of defeated players to prevent revive… Or move the corpse…

Aervius.2016:

Bad idea.
Shadow Refuge on no cooldown would mean perma-stealthed Thief (+4 allies) not to mention that a SA spec’d Thief regens a LOT of ini with Infusion of Shadow.

It would basically mean that any thief player with a brain would take nothing but Stealth skill Utilities so as to offset the cost of the skills.

Cooldowns are fine as is.
Like many people have already said, it would effectively take an entire redesign of the Thief class to balance it.

1) not like permastealthing impossible right now
2) I’d rather spam blinding powder over shadow refuge. Allies can walk freely and you keep blinding opponents. Shadow refuge just asks a necromancer to throw all his marks and wells in it.

lol
they must be like “THERE IS A ZERG IN OUR SPAWN!”
“lolwut”
“troll”
“like hell”
“no way”
“BUT IT’S TRUE!”
“never”
“stop kidding me”