Guild Wars 2

I cap my fps to 60 (though for some reason it caps out at 50 since lost shores patch, I think there’s a mis-digit in the code).

During the first couple days of play I capped out at about 95 fps in queensdale, but thought this was excessive.

Unfortunately, thanks to recent patches and DX9 single-core performance issues, I often dip into the 20’s and 30’s in dynamic events (shatterer, OUCH) and certain areas of lion’s arch.

everything maxed except sampling – running it on my plasma panasonic veira @ 1080p.

System specs:
gtx670 hand-oc’d by about 18% (run at about the standard max stable clock rate of 1246)
i7 2600k @ 4.6 ghz.

wow.. talk about loaded terminology.

wow.. talk about loaded terminology.When you’re facing literal ARMIES of undead at the temple of balthazar, using aoe is not “abuse”, it is the logical course of action.

style.6173:

Looks like he just got lucky on 3 crits in a row. Beyond that, when I play guardian thieves don’t even concern me.

But speaking of armor, why are d/d eles the BEST bunker builds? That doesn’t make sense.

Because water 30 is too overpowered in ele, but nerfing it makes the offensive trees even more horrendous for survival than they are now. (imagine thief squishiness with necro damage… bleh!)

Maybe next patch they’ll add some evasive, blocking, or reflecting to elementalists weapons and tone down the passive regen from the water line? (or maybe they’ll just do to eles what they did to eng and eles will become just as bitter)

Medazolam.3058:

You get one rare for every 15 hours played? Wow, that is terrible. Where are you farming? What are you killing? Those rates are just awful. Just out of curiosity do you do dungeons/fractals? If so how is your loot?

Also I know on Ferg, the farm parties in Orr get rather big on the weekends and we are a low pop server, do you group up to get more kill credit?

Just trying to help, you must be very frustrated.
Also I terms of selling vs salvaging rares, right now it seems like I get a lot of salvages with no ectos, that I could have sold for 20S or more. Also now that I don’t flush ectos down the drain cause I got the 77 clovers. Of course sometimes I get 3 ectos, random being random.

That’s the thing, I’m not farming, i’m just playing normally like anet wants me to.

Usually i’ll join guildies on event runs, explorable runs (no fotm, fotm is satan’s spawn), and spend the rest of my time exploring lowbie zones on alts for extended periods, but never in the same quadrant of the zone more than 40 minutes.

I’m lucky if my gold reaches double-digits in a month before dropping again for regears after a patch, or to gear up an alt that hits 80.

ANet has done a horrible mis-calculation if someone like me can be on permanent DR while being offline most of the week due to insane schedules working in highly-available hosting.

i name every character after the most storied characters related to the toon’s proclivities that I can find in my copious knowledge of anime. (if you’ve seen it on american tv, I probably haven’t used the name)

Mardukar.8327:

Not sure if this is the right thread for this topic

Does anyone hold this opinion? I’d like to think of GW 2 as a fantasy game… Guns, cannons… pfff, okay… Flying airships, okay… But Risen ROFL-copters? Charr Thundercat mobiles? It’s ridiculous. This game seems to be evolving in the same way the Fable franchise did starting of as fantasy and ending in ridiculous steampunk.

I’m just hoping that the developpers don’t choose to go down this path any further or next Guild Wars 3 will be more akin to SWTOR than to GW 1 in terms of setting

Nope, too few.

I prefer “high fantasy” elements to my games. The more scifi injected the better.

Voxdeus.1034:

So I followed this thread all the way through and it seems to have run its course.

Here are the big takeaways from what I can see:

1) Most players don’t think AoE is an issue
2) Some players feel very strongly that it is an issue, mainly mesmers and thieves, who incidentally, tend to have very little AoE compared to most other classes.
3) The biggest areas of concern seem to be WvW and world events.

Here’s my opinion:

1) The problem in both WvW and in world events is that rewards are given for “tagging” with no real incentive, and limited ability, to burst down individual targets.

2) AoE can be nerfed, across the board or on a case by case basis, but the underlying mechanics of the game reward AoE to the point that the equilibrium point between AoE and single target in these large group encounters would probably make AoE useless in any other aspect of the game.

3) Nerfing AoE would exacerbate other issues which already exist, like the tendency of players to want to zerg as much as possible in WvW. Good players should be spreading out and trying to flow around their enemies while holding strong points with inferior numbers. Bad players prefer to swarm their opponents without regard for strategic objectives or tactical positioning.

The game should reward and encourage good play, which if anything would point to a need for stronger AoE in WvW. At some point, players need to L2P rather than have WvW made into a bland meatgrinder. Without banging their heads against chokepoints defended with strong AoE, players will never learn how important it is to hold as opposed to just attack strategic points. They’ll never learn the importance of spreading out and flanking to create superior surface area in mass battles.

Good game design is presenting players with meaningful choices, not simply replacing one obvious choice (zerging and using AoE) with an even more obvious choice (zerging and employing single target abilities with no threat of punishment from AoE).

4) It would probably make more sense, though it would be unsatisfying to those who prefer single target DPS above all else, to simply ensure that mesmers and thieves have viable AoE capabilities, and going forward, look for ways to reward players that aren’t weighted towards tagging as many mobs or players as possible.

Maybe that means awarding loot bags and badges for capping and holding points in WvW rather than, or in addition to, simply tagging as many enemies as possible in the midst of gigantic zergs v zerg battles.

Maybe it means awarding a loot bag or a number of items based on one’s participation in an event, rather than how many mobs were tagged and killed.

Maybe it means designing dungeon encounters in such a way that killing individual mobs quickly matters more than taking down swarms, or simply beating up a gigantic sack of hit points (fewer mobs, much harder hitting, many fewer HP).

Maybe it means, in addition to making sure that mesmers and thieves have real AoE options, other professions have real single target options.

If healing done, damage mitigated through boons, damage attributable to boons, and damage mitigated through “jamming” the enemy were even badly accounted-for and loot credit given, people wouldn’t complain about the tagging system.

I have a sneaking suspicion this is indeed the reason why they are talking about AoE though. They have a bad tagging system, and instead of fixing it they’re going to hose the entire meta-balance of the game. It’s rather sad, and they think they’re saving work but it will be much, much worse than simply taking the time and effort to overhaul the tagging system now, rather than later.

MelonGuy.2473:

Who else is still playing engineer purely because they love the whole steampunkish nature of the class?

Or, if you have another reason why, post it.

I’m making a baby eng right now and have an ele and mesmer.

I dumped the mesmer because it’s not engaging and ANet doesn’t seem to think the profession needs to be made so.

I like the ele, plenty to juggle, but only one viable build, need something with more builds to spend my time on.

Thus. engi.

I can’t say I don’t care about relative performance, but I have a high skill cap and can compensate.

thoughts on stats for each of the builds above?

pistols looks like prec/tough/condition damage, or pow/tough/cd (which i don’t think exists in the game?)

Atamaz.4195:

To tell in short my problems with engineer:
- Kit AND Turret need to acquire weapon stat AND weapon damage, only then we will start to do some damage comparable to other classes(sigil alone are not enough).
-Need healing to be a useful stat, as it is now 1000 healing give someting less than 200 healing, I’d like it affect some more super elixir(EG5) and the trait elixir-infused bomb(invention XI)
- we need a ranged and a melee weapon outside kit if we want a build not involving kit but something else like elixir or a viable turrets, pistol #1 do ~300 damage and apply a 2 sec bleed, rise the scaling with power or rise the duration of bleed, right now is in a pitiful state, P2 need to hit sometimes, P3 is ok; rifle is a mid-range suicide…things.

I love engineer and I will continue play that because is the profession which I enjoy the most but right now our flexibility just make us be a subpar profession that do nothing expecial in many ways.

why duration over stacks?

i’d rather have more built-in stacks. it helps front-load the dot damage.

cargan.5689:

Linking two threads so to speak, was following the precourser price thread in the BLT forum and thinking about this one as well.

Is all the work being done to remove botters and gold sellers from the game just undermined by people who go the pay to win route ( note some not all i dont have on my flame kittenant undies )

What else is there really to buy in game apart from seasonal skins or a few gold to craft up an alt.

Most precoursers are 500g+ now, well except for disco stu’s, a legendary 4 times that,are we caught in a cycle where Anet wants us to buy gems to finace our legedary drive, wants to nerf any way of gaining more than a copper and an old bone out of pve to kill off the bots and traps the player in the middle?

Account bound legendaries precoursers for sale on an NPC for 500 account bound daily tokens the bottom falls out of the gold selling market no need for DR, play the way you like OMG its starting to sound like GW2

Depends on how many tokens you get a day.

If you get 1 token a day you may as well just hit the stores for your next MMO now and not bother.

wildcode.5403:

While DR seems to be a pain in the kitten, from my understanding it was implemented as a fail safe to stop people exploiting an unexpectedly profitable event/dungeon/area. Yes people see it as a failed anti-bot measure, but it was put in place because there was lots of money to be had by speed running dungeons, doing certain events repeatedly, and farming certain areas.

I do believe DR should be removed from loot, just keep it for event and dungeon rewards, and let the economy sort itself out.

They shouldn’t put DR in period.

if any specific event is offering more rewards than others, then the event needs to be adjusted.

Then again, they could up the reward on events in under-populated zones as a means to get people into those zones.

DR is never the answer, though.

Sleel.8365:

garraeth.3267:

You can grind until your fingertips bleed.

Or you can be smart about it and have your legendary…well, last week.

Why? The only thing about them is the shines that are totally superfluous. No improved stats, just ages wasted getting comps to flush down the Toilet for a skin. When the Legendaries also have legendary stats, then they will be worth my time.

Course, I haven’t seen a Legendary I’d want yet so…. :P

I actually prefer the precursor skins to the legendary ones.

They look better period, and are great for trolling. (for every precursor, there is a regular named exotic with the same skin, and they’re usually cheap)

so, several weeks after my initial post in this thread, more hard data:

i’m averaging perhaps 1 rare every 15 hours played. Haven’t seen an exo except this one hour I decided to grab rares nobody wanted from the TP and flush them down the mystic toilet.

I’m still not making enough to re-gear my toon with even basic vanilla equipment if some patch turns my build inside-out, while my guildies are still averaging 6 ectos in the same 5 hour sessions + their normal gold rewards. (i play weekends a lot these days, and am punished for it, apparently, because i’m on too long?)

The reward from the chests defeating dragons makes me REALLY want to let zhaitan win to see if his reign is better than the pact’s.

Nope.

It’s not making real players suffer. Real players, as in players who play to have fun as opposed to grind, don’t even notice DR. It’s in place to block grinders, farmers, addicts. Those are incredibly mad with DR, which is one more reason it should stay in the game.

I’m a “real player”

I want to be able to make enough to get basic equipment, and can’t because my account seems to be saddled with the “perma-dr glitch” that has its own sticky at the top of this forum.

I most certainly notice it when my guildies walk away from an average chest event with 2 ectos while I’ve seen 6 on my entire account since the lost shores patch.

Oh, how evillllll. Someone wants to make a profit and be able to pay the company bills, and the salaries of everyone employed there.

Ever see the glassdoor reviews for anet?

If they paid their workers properly i’d be much happier, and so would all of you, because the better talent would stay there to make better balancing and economy decisions for the game.

Walorx.5129:

Hey, first off welcome to the wonderful land of Engineer! I would consider myself a vet since I have over 500 hours and 1k PvP matches on engi alone. The thing we do best is honestly everything. When the devs said “Engineers are the jack of all trades”, they really weren’t kidding. Many people argue that engis can do everything, but not nearly as good as other classes. In some ways, yes they are right, because it takes more effort on our part to do the same result as another class. HOWEVER, what we have is extreme versatility from our kits. Unfortunatly our turrets and gadgets are unviable for most instances, but the kits are where we shine! Ranging from the tanky tool kit, to the massive damage of the grenade kit, we can do anything! Keep in mind, engineers have a much higher skill FLOOR than any other class. But in comparison, a good engineer is absolutely deadly! (for instance my buddy, Five Gauge, is scary as balls with his 100nade build. Just shows that a good engi is a major threat in pvp). So yeah, just keep with it and have fun! Good luck on engineer and may the slick shoes be with you.

~Vöz

I’m seeing it so far.

I have my 1 utility slot atm, slotted grenade kit, and am able to keep very high uptime on either blind or snare on foes.

Thus far my barriers to personal story advancement have been the capacity to hit foes (lvl 6 finally dies vs ranged lvl 10 vet).

I’m looking forward to this one.

Would love to see some p/p builds, as, given the state of pistol with thief, this is probably the most viable toon to equip with 2 whispers pistols.

Redfeather.6401:

GW2 has to flesh out specializations and make them more effective, but I think it’ll have to be part of a learning process. First it has to be seen what the community can come up with from the mechanics they are given.

For example there was no ‘bunker’ specialization until somewhere in beta testing players developed one.

Bunker is boring.

I firmly believe that the emergence of a bunker as the pre-eminent and absolutely dominant build for any profession is a sign that their innate survival skills (via weapons, healing, and utilities), offensive capacity, and the abilities which predominate their battlefields which drive them to bunkers need a serious look. (ahem.. backstab, kill shot)

Bunkers are only good at not dying. They seldom kill anything, and their number output is pathetic. Its NOT an engaging playstyle.

Oldbugga.7029:

The structuring of a character needs to be a series of PLAYER choices, balance of attack, defence and avoidance. BUT IT MUST BE A PLAYER’S CHOICE. It would be wrong for a whole heap of passive abilities appear to mitigate AoE or any particular type of damage for that matter. Passives do NOT involve player choice and can exacerbate the original problem if not very carefully constructed….and they do not give the player any sense of reward for making the right choices whether they be skills in building a character or when abilities are used.

That said the devs need to make sure that all professions have the right mix of active/closeable/skills to enable those player choices to be obvious and meaningful.

Exactly.

This is the same issue causing D/D ele to be too suvivable while preventing viability of other ele builds.

water line has too much personal passive regen.

it involves no skill, none of them are active.

people should be required to think when they play, and flat-nerfing AOE will not do that.

think Guardian greatsword is a tad strong in sPvP.

combo-break it.

Mesmer is one of my fave classes to play. I think the changes they have made to them so far have been for the better.

Mesmer recently had a bug causing mind wrack to hit for double damage. Rather than stop the bug and “wait and see”, they took away one of the few engaging things they added to mesmer since launch: mesmer might-battery build.

The bug was the issue, not the might. Might doesn’t cause 200% damage at max stacks.

This dismissive and lazy attitude convinced me ANet is not committed to the future development of mesmer as an engaging class.

Guardian greatsword symbol of wrath is another one.

Greatsword was the PERFECT symbol support weapon for dungeoneering, but then they upped the symbol cooldown to 20 seconds.

They said it was to target perm-retal, but perm-retal was still there after, and greatsword symbol support was gone forever, most guardian builds now completely malign the power tree. (what they should have done if they were not outright lying to guardians: remove retal from the symbol and replace with fury, lower damage 25% to compensate)

ANet’s record with this game thus far is abysmal, and they need to step up their game. Most members of the community are able to target what their officially stated targets are in their nerfs more effectively with 5 minutes of discussion.

This is why this thread is here, and there’s so much uproar.

They need to also fix the dynamic event “kill tagging” system to give credit to support builds for a certain percentage of the kills made by the people they’re supporting.

Items which should go into kill credit tagging systems should be:
-the (rough) incoming damage blocked/mitigated by your boons and fields (protection, aegis, wards, reflects)
-the (rough) amount of damage done by others attributable to your offensive boons (might, fury)

People used to complain about engineer grenades for orr farming.

The complaint was not that grenades were too powerful, it was that the tagging system did not account for anything other than damage done to enemies, which in an MMO with support and control as major roles is just plain “D – U – M – M ‘dumb’”.

RashanDale.3609:

i agree with them that AoE-damage is too important in WvW right now.
most of the time you dont even have to bother with single-target stuff in bigger group-fights.

what game are you playing?

Your solution to stopping mindless zerging and button mashing is to make the anti-group tools more useless?

People would be more intelligent with their deployment strategies if AoE didn’t have a target cap and was actually more powerful.

People who pack-up in groups of 10 to 50 and zerg should be punished severely for their mindlessness. It’s the only way zerging will stop.

Iason Evan.3806:

plasmacutter.2709:

Iason Evan.3806:

In this forums we also need to start talking about what Jonathan is saying as well. There are some weapon sets where AoE is an issue for some professions. They will address those specifically. That is fine. What they need to work on is how they communicate that. I see what ArenaNet is talking about. They just didn’t communicate it well.

So which weapon set is “overpowered”

lolengineer with grenade kit hitting for less than environmental weapons, or bunker eles whose 45 second cooldowns don’t hit as hard as a rifle warrior auto-attack? maybe the “miss thrower”?

or maybe its staff necro (trying. to. control. urge. to. gut. laugh.)

cough kill shot cough backstab cough still cough being hack, cough IGNORED!

I don’t think any one of those builds is OP at all. I don’t think anyone thinks that. If you would like to have a serious discussion fine, but mentioning those builds doesn’t make sense at all. Countering Thieves isn’t all that hard. Proc a block.

I am having a serious discussion. I’m asking what AOE you see as overpowered, becuase the ones I’m seeing are either heavy-hitting with massive cues and cast time and/or massive cooldowns or range trade-offs, or hit like wet noodles and could honestly use some kind of buff (grenade kits should, for instance, do significantly more damage to foes with at least one condition, this would produce a “rotation” in that kit rather than 1, 1, 1, 1)

even “spin-2-win” has a tradeoff and should remain as-is on guardians (not just in pvp, in pve too!)

I honestly think ANet wont admit where this is coming from because I think it’s coming from the old complaints that certain AOE classes were able to tag up on way more mobs during dynamic events.

This is not the fault of the AOE damage, this is the fault of ANet not properly incorporating support into event and loot credit.

If I give 20% crit to someone by aura sharing, or give them protection, or aegis the damage stopped by that protection or aegis, or the damage caused by that extra crit, should be factored in and I should get looting rights on anything killed by people I support.

AOE should not be nerfed because of this, the “tagging” system ANet never wants to talk about needs to be fixed instead. That’s much harder work than just making AoE classes suck even worse everywhere OUTSIDE dynamic events.

jobah.7241:

plasmacutter.2709:

jobah.7241:

Wise people acknowledge when they know nothing. And therefore they know that it is ignorant, borderline stupid and embarrassing to pass judgements about it.

You can always discuss your Own experiences, wishes and expectations, and I think that is excactly what A-net wants you to do.

But why in gods name are you already hating on Anet just because they mentioned that they will be looking at AoEs in the game (they said it seemed to be a problem in PvP).

Don’t you understand:
- You know NOTHING about what they intend to do
- they probably still don’t know themselves

By the way, there is other possibilities than just nerfing AoE damage. Just to give an example, they could change some AoE skills to single target skills, bouncing skills, give them more or less control – and so on.

And why are all the Elementalists so mad. Are you so sure that you will be the victims? Or do you just like to hate?

Because, NOTHING needs to be done about AoE – that is why we are “passing judgment”.

Nobody was complaining about AOE, aoe-related professions have become increasingly irrelevant and pushed into bunker-builds, and anyone who understands the meta-game understands how many more things would be broken when aoe gets “adjusted”. (these types of fundamental meta-balance adjustments generally take years to weigh and are thus saved for expansions by most AAA houses, talk about anet’s hubris here.)

Meanwhile, single-target focused professions have been buffed into the stratosphere despite people being literally downed and stomped in 2 seconds due to their already-insane burst.

Then the comment about the 0/10/0/30/30 ele build that is the only viable build for ele left in the game, and the synergy-of-which should be emulated, not “watched” or dismantled.

Add this to the terrible lost shores patch, and the way mesmers, eles, and engineers have been handled vs warriors and thieves, and you have a recipe for utter cynicism boiling over into rabid hatred. Most of the people in this thread have been down-right civil given the circumstances.

Well, I hope they will look at both the “single” target damage AND the AoE skills AND improve encounters with mobs in PvE (less piles of trash, better AI, less stupid bosses). Too much AoE and too much trash in the game, it ruines the gameplay a bit (no challenge). In PvE (and WvW i guess) it all depends too much on killing large groupes of enemies with “AoE” (or multitarget skills) as fast as possible.

tweaking mob density and making AI smarter is excellent.

AOE still needs to be powerful though.

1 – few weapon skills as-is (and those with more aoe on their bars should be keeping up with the others — and no, they shouldn’t have more single-target, homogenization is BAD in an rpg where people are supposed to get stronger in groups)
2 – everyone zerging in wvw – target cap needs to be removed to punish people for stupid.
3 – with how hard things hit in this game, any diminishment of aoe in pve needs to have a corresponding increase in personal survival skills geared toward 1vsMany fights.

Iason Evan.3806:

In this forums we also need to start talking about what Jonathan is saying as well. There are some weapon sets where AoE is an issue for some professions. They will address those specifically. That is fine. What they need to work on is how they communicate that. I see what ArenaNet is talking about. They just didn’t communicate it well.

So which weapon set is “overpowered”

lolengineer with grenade kit hitting for less than environmental weapons, or bunker eles whose 45 second cooldowns don’t hit as hard as a rifle warrior auto-attack? maybe the “miss thrower”?

or maybe its staff necro (trying. to. control. urge. to. gut. laugh.)

cough kill shot cough backstab cough still cough being hack, cough IGNORED!

jobah.7241:

Wise people acknowledge when they know nothing. And therefore they know that it is ignorant, borderline stupid and embarrassing to pass judgements about it.

You can always discuss your Own experiences, wishes and expectations, and I think that is excactly what A-net wants you to do.

But why in gods name are you already hating on Anet just because they mentioned that they will be looking at AoEs in the game (they said it seemed to be a problem in PvP).

Don’t you understand:
- You know NOTHING about what they intend to do
- they probably still don’t know themselves

By the way, there is other possibilities than just nerfing AoE damage. Just to give an example, they could change some AoE skills to single target skills, bouncing skills, give them more or less control – and so on.

And why are all the Elementalists so mad. Are you so sure that you will be the victims? Or do you just like to hate?

Because, NOTHING needs to be done about AoE – that is why we are “passing judgment”.

Nobody was complaining about AOE, aoe-related professions have become increasingly irrelevant and pushed into bunker-builds, and anyone who understands the meta-game understands how many more things would be broken when aoe gets “adjusted”. (these types of fundamental meta-balance adjustments generally take years to weigh and are thus saved for expansions by most AAA houses, talk about anet’s hubris here.)

Meanwhile, single-target focused professions have been buffed into the stratosphere despite people being literally downed and stomped in 2 seconds due to their already-insane burst.

Then the comment about the 0/10/0/30/30 ele build that is the only viable build for ele left in the game being “watched”, the synergy-of-which should be emulated, not “watched” or dismantled.

Add this to the terrible lost shores patch, and the way mesmers, eles, and engineers have been handled vs warriors and thieves, and you have a recipe for utter cynicism boiling over into rabid hatred. Most of the people in this thread have been down-right civil given the circumstances.

its not about selling them, it’s about the capacity to do anything but vendor.

No items should be unsalvageable without good reason.

stof.9341:

Perma-crippling melee only matters when your whole group isn’t melee either. Also, any boss fight that can be beaten by that “tactic” is bound to be a boring badly designed encounter anyway.

Melee can juke in-and-out of melee if a foe is crippled so they always have endurence when in an enemy unit’s attack range.

Stripping boons? Which fight does it matter that much? I can only think of a couple places where Protection can be removed. Most encounters with annoying boons, those are reapplied every 2s by some turret or add anyway.

between sword clones and shatter, boon stripping is a mesmer-only specialty. The sword clones do a full rotation, which means a boon stripped every 3 seconds per clone. The dueling trait for shatter means mesmers can spam boon removal pretty much at will. Turret or not, when a mesmer is traited for it, those boons stay DOWN.

Shutting down ranged. Except it doesn’t protect your melee teammates often, and except the mobs that have attacks that ignore reflect barriers in the first place. But yeah, projectile protection is one of the few real services some classes have in a group outside of applying Protection, Aegis and healing. Btw, guardians can stop projectiles too.

Anyone who has a reflect knows you can drop it right on the feet of ranged and they will shoot themselves even when targeting a thief that’s in their face.

Red Falcon.8257:

Again with this?

There is no such thing as a legendary “grind” because you’re not meant to grind them, you’re meant to save for them in the very long run – infact, legendaries are merely aesthetic so I don’t see why one would want to grind them.
Also, if they didn’t require a lot of time to aquire they would lose the point of being legendaries.

If you decide to grind 25 hours a day for something that’s just aesthetic you’re really messed up.

Can’t save for something over the very long run when the trend lines between average gold intake and precursor price are rapidly diverging.

Anyone who feels “special” with a legendary in their current state needs to ask sane people what they think.

Whenever I see a legendary in gw2, i think “gold buyer”, whereas, even in the dark regions of WoW, at least someone with a legendary has to have:
A – a supportive guild
B – the capacity to take their tongue off a frozen flagpole while in combat
C – experience in most of endgame

I look with disdain on people who have legendaries in this game because it involves zero skill, and either insanely good luck (of getting one of the “lucky” accounts with anti-dr) or a fat wallet.

Hellkaiser.6025:

cargan.5689:

Sadly because he keeps running the same event tequatel has run up against the DR dissapointed by the drops, the problems with players corpses dissapering before he can loot them and the clipping problems during his fights meaning he gets back stabbed before he can breath on people, tequatel it apears is now using under map botting

Cannot plus this enough…. split sides… awesome… lol

He missed one:

The dragon must be an engineer.

Grief that annoys you?

Imagine grief that elated you!

“yay, my parents are dead! YAY!”

Ari Kagura.9182:

I enjoy playing my Grenade Engineer. Then again, I also do more than spam 1. Almost always, my other skills are generally on cooldown meaning that something is getting a ton of bleeds, blinded, chilled, poisoned, and/or barraged by a crap ton of grenades.

However, it’s one of the more trickier professions to play because it takes a lot more to make the best out of your Engineer compared to say a Warrior, which is rather simple to play. For the most part, I have enjoyed every moment of it. That’s not say its a perfect, bug-free profession— it isn’t, but I’ve been stubborn enough to deal with the changes and adapt to them. In a personal note, someone can wave to me a bunch of DPS spreadsheets like dollar bills to a hooker, but my take is that if you got the skill and knowledge to know your profession and how they work, then it shouldn’t matter much. I know my usual group doesn’t complain about my performance when we do dungeons, and we clear the content on a timely matter.

I agree with this so far.

I’m in early leveling and am liking eng so far, though I am picking up these gaping holes and wondering whether they get filled in.

Currently running P/P with grenade kit and find the synergy amazing.

Whenever I’m out of endurance I always have a blind, glue, or chill to kite with.

I’d like to see better condition damage, though, because what is “just at par” in early leveling on conditions will quickly fall behind as cond damage becomes more gear dependent.

That screenshot and Auesis’s anecdote are evidence enough that the “RNG” system is not as random as it seems.

One or two extra over the course of many FOTM compared to friends is expected in RNG, but the law of averages says the quantity of drops should even out.

This is clearly not the case.

Their drop algorithms (particularly DR) are broken.

stof.9341:

Well, most MMORPGs longevity comes not from their crappy combat system but from the addictive grind designed to keep you around playing for a long time. This doesn’t need to be the norm, GW2 could be the one to change that.

Too bad combat in PvE so far is bad. The only part that works is solo PvE because it’s designed to be easy and doable by anybody. But group content? Most dungeon encounters are plain bad. Chaotic unstructured messes that only work through lack of trinity either because you can roflstomp DPS the mobs with warriors or you got a guardian or two around to allow you to survive long enough.

Fact : GW2 combat still has the holy trinity around. It’s just that guardian is both tank and healer in a single package and the rest are DPS, some good (Warrior), others bad (the rest)

I played mesmer support by shutting down ranged, stripping boons, and perma-crippling melee.

Preventing damage is better than any guardian or elementalist’s regeneration.

vinceftw.5086:

Lol, aoe kings complaining. I’m not saying you need a nerf per se but if you compare to mesmer, you just kill mobs in 5 seconds. I saw a video of 4 elementalists holding back 30 people in wvw, that’s impossible with other classes.

That could have been done with any other profession in the hands of that group.

They were pros facing a group of people who were too stupid to use stability to provent the CC and lock them down.

That’s the beauty of this game: skill actually wins here – at least until ANet decides it shouldn’t anymore.

It is aoe, yet you don’t see warrior subforum filled with whining topics about incoming nerf.

Maybe that comes from the fact that warriors already do twice the damage of any other profession in comparable gear and build, so they don’t have to worry about losing a little.

That’s like someone on faux news claiming the economy is fine in 2009 because they only had to sell one of their paintings to cover the loss on their portfolio.

Shockwave.1230:

FluffyDoe.7539:

Shockwave.1230:

Lots of people are mistaking combat problems for specialization problems…

…Personally I find GW1 to be a superior game from a combat perspective, because of the specialization it allows for. But the actual mechanics of Guild Wars 2 are obviously superior. That’s just one person’s opinion, though._

No offense OP… but it sounds like (to me) that you’ve just contridicted yourself by saying that the combat specialization problems don’t have anything to do with combat.

A game’s combat is how you fight (plain and simple). And essentially in GW2, combat requires everything from weapon skills, traits, to mechanics such as mouse-targeting and keyboard controls.

And I believe “class specializations” should fall under (if not already) there as a subpart of combat.

EDIT: Read what the poster above me wrote & you’ll absolutely understand why in the case of gw2, its class specialization is absolutely related to its combat design.

We’re pretty much getting at the same thing. The problem isn’t in the combat mechanics, it’s in the lack of specialization offered in builds.

When we ask the question “What can players specialize in?” It’s not much, everything revolves around the weapon set and there’s only a handful of weapon sets. Many builds have access to a lot of the game’s mechanics, but a high quantity of mechanics doesn’t mean a high quality of mechanics. Options for players to choose a few of them that the player wants to specialize in is something lacking significantly.

They need to increase the synergy between weapon sets and traits.

Since launch they’ve done the opposite.

Gretsword was so prevalent among guardians because its toolkit made it useful for every build in different ways.

Then they nerfed the symbol cool down – breaking its synergy with a great many builds because so many traits are tied to symbols.

This was a terrible design decision.

Synergy should be increased, and synergy-breaker or synergy-jammer abilities put in for counters.

Ellisande.5218:

MisterEction.9382:

So, if I understand this properly, when I’m running around soloing in PVE and 2 of my 5 skills are AOE on my skill bar, only 3 will be worth using on the single mobs I encounter most of the time, so I’ll press 1 pretty much all the time after accounting for cooldowns on my other 2 single target skills. And, when I aggro multiple attackers and get swamped, and I use the 2 AOEs, they’ll be doing less damage to the multiple mobs, which will all be hitting me for their full damage.

That sounds like fun.

That pretty much sums up the problem with this dev decision.

The point of AoEs is that they can and are used to kill groups of mobs. If they cannot kill groups of mobs then they do not fulfill their purpose. The fact that single target abilities can also be used to kill multiple mobs (albeit more slowly) or that AoE abilities can be used to kill mobs individually (albeint less efficiently) is completely irrelevelent to deciding whether AoEs are fulfilling their purpose of killing groups of mobs.

However the fact that the skills can be used interchangeable albeit with limited effectiveness is support of my belief that this unneccessary distinction between single target and aoe damage is the actual root cause of the problem which could be fixed by simply makign all abilities AoE abilities and then rebalancing accordingly. And let’s not make any mistake, when every ability operates exactly the same then the game will be much easier to balance than it is now where every ability does not operate in exactly the same way.

Making all abilities aoe and rebalancing accordingly would most certainly stop zerging.

imagine aoe backstab!

Erasculio.2914:

Kromica.2831:

plasmacutter.2709:

Kromica.2831:

Erasculio.2914:

SteepledHat.1345:

DR is used to extend the “gameplay experience” under the guise of deterring bots.

DR is great for the game. It’s not there to stop bots. No, it’s there to stop something far, far worse: grinders, farmers, addicts and exploiters.

If grinders and farmers are the enemy people need to stop complaining about tp prices because guess what its the farmers and people that enjoy grinding mobs that usually help keep prices low.

I’ll support that when I can get foefire’s essence for under 15g like the rest of the exotics. ¬.¬

Well as long as we can’t farm prices stay high.

It’s very cute to hear people saying how grinders are the heroes of the average player, spending their valuable time to keep prices low.

Unfortunatelly, that’s just a big, fat, orange kitten.

Grinders concentrate gold, and thus are capable of buying things at increased prices, making everything more expensive than it would have been without them. If grinders did not exist and players earned money only by playing the game normally, everyone would be able to afford everything, since there wouldn’t be such a huge gap between players with a lot of gold and players with significantly less gold.

Grinders, farmers, addicts and exploiters are all bad for the game. ArenaNet is culling them away, but of course the grinders cannot understand how is it possible that a MMO is not cattering to them.

The problem is there is not enough inflation in this game.

Concentration of gold is just like concentration of money – it flows toward the top and into the hands of the “lender class” unless you encourage a certain amount of inflation by increasing supply to the bottom-end of the scale.

(example: you buy a house. At first, that mortgage payment is a hefty chunk of your income. As time goes by, you get ‘cost of living’ increases to your wage or otherwise advance. The house payment becomes less and less of an issue)

If they made the average person’s play more profitable in terms of gold, it would “water down” the purchasing power of people who have exploited snowflakes and godskull because their relative gold advantage would be diminished.

The number one thing they could do to harm this kind of concentration would be to patch-in that precursors are account-bound on pickup. Everyone who has focused on cornering the precursor market would immediately be out massive amounts of gold and be stuck with tons of financially worthless precursors.

After that, they could increase the supply of popular items to bring the price to sane levels.

The major lack that i’m seeing in most professions is trait and ability synergy.

It scares me that ANet is “watching” D/D 0/10/0/30/30 eles because this build’s synergy should not be “watched”, it should be “emulated”. If there were more builds with this level of synergy, and more utilities or weapon skills which were designed specifically to counter those synergies, it would be much better gameplay.

The things that were done right in terms of ability synergy:
D/D elementalists (self-comboing and abilities dependent on the secondary effects of other abilities).

Greatsword BEFORE the SoW nerf when SoW was part of the aoe rotation.
(It provided skills which synergized with traits to make greatsword highly versatile for many builds – hence why it was universally used before this nerf).

Things which suck:
third-combo-attacks on weapons — they’re simply not worth it and require it connect with a target to produce it, which makes them completely undependable.

most “+ x damage or y effect” utility skills.
Those should be shifted to traits, and utilities focused on countering synergies in other professions.

There is a wiki article on DR on gw2wiki that is fairly accurate IF YOU DON’T GET BUGGED.

If you get bugged, I believe the only way to remove it is to run FOTM.

DR is account wide and zone-independent.

Wolfheart.1938:

I love DR because it allows me, someone who plays the game to have fun, not to make money, to have a reasonable amount of money. In 800h+ of GW2 playtime I’ve never encountered it, so this mean it affects only people that are after a quick buck and just repeating over and over and over again whatever currently gives more g/h. If we had no DR everyone would be repeating CoF/AC non stop all day erryday making tons of gold while I’d be stuck with barely anything since I want challenge and run high level fracs/Arah/WvW.

Debating whether you’re being facetious or not.

You spend your time in FOTM, the only place left in the game where DR does not “stick” to accounts.

Anyone who does not do this makes jacksquat for gold and gets perhaps one rare in 15 hours of play.

It seems FOTM is “required” to remove DR from accounts now, because I haven’t done one notice the only people who have terrible drops are the ones that don’t periodically enter FOTM.

I’d love to see the actual cutscenes change based on your personality makeup.

I’d love to see my characters start spouting hilariously biting cynicism like myself.

must play a warrior or pure DPS guardian (symbol support is pretty much dead thanks to SoW cool-down) to be playing 1550 hours and not felt the sting of ANet’s capricious, over-nerfing hand.

Kromica.2831:

Erasculio.2914:

SteepledHat.1345:

DR is used to extend the “gameplay experience” under the guise of deterring bots.

DR is great for the game. It’s not there to stop bots. No, it’s there to stop something far, far worse: grinders, farmers, addicts and exploiters.

If grinders and farmers are the enemy people need to stop complaining about tp prices because guess what its the farmers and people that enjoy grinding mobs that usually help keep prices low.

I’ll support that when I can get foefire’s essence for under 15g like the rest of the exotics. ¬.¬

Kacigarka.5176:

plasmacutter.2709:

Kacigarka.5176:

ALL I SEE here are pure speculations.

You know nothing about what exactly they change and how exactly they do it. But you are making up stuff about how Anet is bad, how they are runing your way to make goald, how lazy they are to fix wvw. What are those reasons, bla bla bla.

BUT YOU know nothing. YOU have no statistics. Areanet has them. They know exact numbers, they see whats going on in big picture.

YOU ONLY know what you see at YOUR screen, nothing else. So stop these speculations already.

Just wait for the changes, its their game after all and they decide what changes they make.

We do have statistics though.

We have the number of posts complaining about overpowered AOE before their announcements (0%)

We have the percentage of posts complaining about single target bursts in pvp on the forums before their announcment (about 60%)

we have the fact that nearly 100% of the toolkits of the weakest professions in the game for pve damage are aoe.

We have the fact that the normal MMO rules of “aoe doing less than single target” should go out the window when you have such an inflexible set of weapon skills available in combat already, and we don’t want combat to become even more shallow.

We have the fact that AOE is the biggest counter to zerging, which is a problem in this game, and the devs want to kill that.

We add these up with ANet’s announcement and rightfully are frightened that devs could be this out of touch, and are this interested in putting an end to player fun in general while completely ignoring un-reactable thief insta-gib combos.

Oh .. 60% of actual player base? I didnt see 1-2 milion posts complaining about it, did you?

Even if there was 1000 players complaining about it, there are 1000x more players ingame who dont care about it.

Let’s apply this fallacious and dismissive logic to your post as well:

This post has enough replies to be a representative sample when paired with other threads like it which have cropped up in this and other subforums.

For every post like yours supporting the destruction of depth-of-combat in this game, there are 30 against.

Clearly, under your own “logic”, your thoughts can be dismissed.

And saying players in-game don’t care about cheap deaths to thieves they can’t touch, that’s funny. I hear spvp is very much “alive” in this game. If anything, the complaints against thieves in this forum are less prevalent than the complaints in-game.

Kacigarka.5176:

ALL I SEE here are pure speculations.

You know nothing about what exactly they change and how exactly they do it. But you are making up stuff about how Anet is bad, how they are runing your way to make goald, how lazy they are to fix wvw. What are those reasons, bla bla bla.

BUT YOU know nothing. YOU have no statistics. Areanet has them. They know exact numbers, they see whats going on in big picture.

YOU ONLY know what you see at YOUR screen, nothing else. So stop these speculations already.

Just wait for the changes, its their game after all and they decide what changes they make.

We do have statistics though.

We have the number of posts complaining about overpowered AOE before their announcements (0%)

We have the percentage of posts complaining about single target bursts in pvp on the forums before their announcment (about 60%)

we have the fact that nearly 100% of the toolkits of the weakest professions in the game for pve damage are aoe.

We have the fact that the normal MMO rules of “aoe doing less than single target” should go out the window when you have such an inflexible set of weapon skills available in combat already, and we don’t want combat to become even more shallow.

We have the fact that AOE is the biggest counter to zerging, which is a problem in this game, and the devs want to kill that.

We add these up with ANet’s announcement and rightfully are frightened that devs could be this out of touch, and are this interested in putting an end to player fun in general while completely ignoring un-reactable thief insta-gib combos (and to a lesser extent 15k kill shots from the warrior you’ll never see in the zerg).

That’s positively stupid.

What is the point of openers on theif if they’re going to be broken from stealth?

I’m all for thief nerfs (LOLBACKSTAB), but wth is the point of this mechanic, to make the already anemic group utility of thieves even worse? To make thieves stay in wvw where they belong and never dare pop their heads in fractals?

What is it? they’re already squishy when not actively burning initiative to evade.

OP, if you are still posting, please talk about boon stripping, stealing, and corruption.

There are numerous traits one can take to do this that will completely destroy the ability of D/D to maintain boons at crucial moments and allow them to be destroyed.

agreed.

I also don’t like the idea that eng tosses out a giant neon sign to their foes that they are changing abilities.

Glue shot needs a lower CD by about 5 seconds to bring pistol on par with rifle for survival — or you could just fix it so blind works FULLY on champions so a dual pistol kit works for active-mitigation.

pistol needs some unity:
poison dart volley is more power than condition based, while the rest of this is pure condition.

“The way you describe yourself I’ll take a guess and say that you probably don’t want to stick to a role like glass-cannon/support/bunker.”

Very true.
On my mesmer I went for something unorthodox: boot-strip and ranged-shutdown build. (all 10/30/5/20/5) – was amazing for group play and still did respectable damage.

I like “renaissance” or “JOATMON” builds that are highly flexible or accomplish their intended roles through unconventional means.