Guild Wars 2

Hammerheart.1426:

I agree with some (not all) of OP’s proposed changes.

There is no viable Staff build in tpvp, everyone knows it. The question is how to we fix it without breaking Staff in wvw? Frankly, idgaf about wvw, and I wish we didn’t have to consider it, but we do.

Ok. Hadn’t even considered PvP. I’m into W3 or PvE dungeons. Glad to know that the proposed changes sit ok with you too. Leaves some hope we may see buffs to the staff.

For those asking why we would use Fireball, if Chain Lightning got a buff. Fireball IS AoE (not a great one, about 80 range, iirc) and can smack the clump of 5 things standing together. Since I’m coming at this from a WvWvW or dungeon perspective, clumping (frigging zergballs) is common, to the point of being ubiquitous.

Yeah man – comes down to a difference in what we want the play style to be on Staff. To get that combo, you’re setting things off at your feet – my desire is to set them off “way off over there” and hit the baddy before he’s at my feet. That given, leave earth 2, give me an AoE boom that I can use way off over there, and even, to preserve balance, let it not be a blast finisher.

EDIT: hey – thought. make earth 2 (Eruption – going to edit that now, my bad. not playing atm.) work like so: 1¾cast 6 second recharge; Shake the ground until it erupts and damages foes. -> press 2 again for instant finish.
This allows you to use it as your combo set-up, and me to use it as a burst of damage.

going to edit the OP to include the change – could make this the overall: “what i’d like from my staff” post.

Also, fwiw – “all your combos” amount to “area might” or “area heal/frost armor” or “area swiftness.” no “area burning” no “area weakness” no “area blind”. Not a single offensive combo to be found. Earth skill 2 is, theoretically, area bleed, on it’s own. It still won’t hit anyone who’s not afk though.

Reducing the combo to a buff situation. (If you’re already casting the fields, your allies skills will trigger combos.)

“Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL.” And I started jumpin up and down yelling, “KILL, KILL,” and he started jumpin up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down yelling, “KILL, KILL.”

Michael, yes, I do play staff. However, I’m eternally frustrated by how kitten the damage output is compared to the S/D combo. Damage – at range. NOT pure support, not a buff machine for the rest of my team, but damage.

I’m aware of why you feel that way about it, not being totally dim. (kind of insulting tone, eh?) My point is that combo fields, to put boons on your team (if you’re at range with a staff, you will personally NEVER benefit from those boons) are far less personally satisfying to me than actually killing things.

Scrambles, while I agree with the point about Earth skill 2, to a degree, I want our second hardest hitting attack to be useful for something other than setting up heal field combos or area might. Like, you know, actually hitting an enemy with that (purely theoretical) stack of pain.

For the rest of your post, if that’s how you play staff, you’d be better, far better, to roll D/D or S/D. Waiting till they’re on top of you to be able to do damage is pretty much the opposite of what I’d like to see from a staff ele.

Free Beer, my issue with the current set-up is that, we’re casters. The stereotypical caster is a ranged spell slinger, with a staff. A danger to you, unless you can close on him. As things stand right now, if I want to ability to kill anything, I have to build for S/D or D/D and play at melee.

I can live with the thought that if something closes on me, I’m toast. What I can’t live with is the simple truth that you can’t kill things (General overworld PvE aside) with a staff before they close on you. It’s the slowness of the skills, coupled with a few truly useless ones (mostly the gap creators, the ones you agreed with) that cause this.

The ideal mentality of someone facing a staff user shouldn’t be “oh, good – free kill.” it should be “close. gotta close. gotta close NOW, or I’m toast.”

EDIT: With regards to the necromancer staff skills, remember, the marks are instant AoE pain. Any AoE we have takes ages to actually do damage – to the point that the only reason someone get’s hit by them is that they’re AFK.

Same deal, looking for any NA open temple. (My home server, Isles of Janthir, has consistently failed to have it open for weeks now…)

Thinking of the “Master of Damage” from gw1. Would give you your DPS, and your single highest hit. We need him back.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Master_of_Damage

ok, the ideal, from reading through, seems to be

-shared AR with owner

-have F1 toggle attack and return-to-me

-F2 should be instant

-F3 pet dodge-roll/aegis (aegis for 5 seems simpler)

-pets need to hit moving targets far more reliably.

-do what you can for pathing. (to me this is really a L2P thing, use F4 to swap and avoid pathing issues.)

later, eh?

Stale

Ratty.5176:

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My main issue with this setup is lets say you pet runs off at an enemy and you want it to return, you have no real way to do this but to switch stance, and I’m not even sure whether it would even return to you in this case?

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What about some kind of automatic stance change.

F1 – Attacks your current target and places the pet into Aggresive mode, once it has killed target it will move to the next target.

F2- Pet uses special skill, if in Passive mode it will return to you immediately after casting.

F3- Pet current action is interrupted, it immediately makes a dodge towards you and then sets itself to Passive mode, returning to you. Once in Passive mode and the pet has reached you it will go onto Heel (No longer gaining any enemy agro, possibly become immune to AOE once in a Heeled state)

F4- Swap Pets.

What this would allow you to make it perform a dodge by hitting F3 and then return it to your target by immediately hitting F1. It would give you complete control on 4 buttons, retiring the Stance Change button. And stop pets running past you 20ft and agroing mobs, because once at Heal they no longer Agro.

Note: by Heel, I mean coming to Heel, next to Ranger in Passive state (I realise I mispelled it Heal originally.)

As someone who has given up on my ranger due to the varied pet problems, this is the most sensible idea in the entire thread. Give the pets their own vigor bar, so bashing F1, F3, F1, F3 won’t allow for an immortal pet, and we’re laughing.

I’d rather have them remove the limit altogether, and have it work that “you walked into that BIG RED CIRCLE OF DEATH? die then.”

Seriously, let AoE hit the entire area in question – suddenly the squishy caster is worth taking down, and anyone running through a barrage is taking a risk of being hit, instead of arrows passing harmlessly through people.

Apply this to everything though – shouts, boons, traps, everything. if you’re in range, it hits you.

I know someone is going to cry that this makes “X” class overpowered, but I’m saying flat out right now, they’re wrong. Sure, in theory a few ele’s could hold a bridge, right up until a couple guardians casting aegis bring the zerg to eat their faces. then you have the fun of boon stacking, which suddenly makes that sigil that removes boons on critical hit (think there’s a necro well that does too) useful.

Open the whole can of worms, and let battle commence!

I’m more in support of removing the need to go into W3 for map completion. Really, all I manage to do when I attempt to complete the maps in question;

1) deny a spot for someone who actually wants to battle in wvwvw

2) provide amusement for the people who camp out at all the vista/poi’s on the map, one would assume purely to gank folks like myself who’d prefer to not be battling other humans, but still want map completion.

3) once in a great while, actually prove to be a boon instead of a burden to my world whilst in W3. (this is not common – generally i’m not even good wall fodder…)

see grumpy cat. NO. reasoning being, the moment we have duels, we’ll have people whining to have the game balanced into 1v1. again, no.

Kitten the fractals – make them just as the OP said – statue triggered, same as GW1 was. UW and FoW were two of the best parts in GW1.

Also, I would greatly prefer that they were 8 man dungeons, a la GW1.

Bloodtide Coast, Molehead Cave. If there is a spawn timer, and it’s supposed to be set for 95-120, it’s failing. Using a stopwatch app, I’m averaging 11 seconds from a Risen death to a new spawn in that spot. (from a sample of 20 minutes, with the longest respawn time being 27 seconds, and too many instants respawns to count.)

If it’s simply that there are far more baddies being spawned than there are spawn points, maybe get someone to fix it that a spawn point = 1 baddy.

over 600 hours played, one lvl 80 char, two alts who are 75 and 58, and not one exotic. less than 20 rares. most of what i get, regardless of what i’m doing (dungeons, killing dragons, personal story or area completion) is “sell junk” items.

I know I wanted to get in on this conversation but didn’t know how to approach it, your example is perfect.

Right now there seems to be a focus on the places where the re-spawns are below the 90-120 rule. But can the 90-120 be questioned as well? This example is one that does bother me, you kill the trash mobs, then get to the boss, usually Champion in my case but Vet can happen to. While fighting them, you have to fight the same trash mobs again (I feel ok calling them Trash, as they aren’t real I tell myself), that doesn’t feel right. Also like going into shallow caves, you fight your way in and way out the same thing. I get deep caves, but some are like 50 yards deep and you fight the same coming and going. That is where 1 minute and 30 seconds seems too fast even.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to test this out in the wild? For example if it’s deemed these respawns are a bit aggressive, then adjust to 100-130… Await feedback, if more is needed 110-140. Rinse and Repeat.

For things with Champs I could possibly even see them having their set trash mob and they don’t go back on the respawn timer until the Champion goes down. So perhaps an hour ago someone cleared the Champs henchies (I’m starting to feel bad calling them trash) but failed at the Champion, the team coming in at that point doesn’t have that Champs henchies to fight, just the Champ. I could see that.

Then when you kill the Champ the chest ALWAYS drops. I couldn’t resist. I’m also of the belief that really making a Champ drop a chest every time and that it can have ascended pieces as well, completely revitalizes the open world game. Such a little step could do so much good. Also have a 50/50 chest drop on vets or something like that.

Anet, you guys should hire this person.

agreed. turning it off should have been an option since day one.

Just came from doing AC exp. mode. The only battles the group bothered with were the spider queen, the burrows, and the end boss. I’d write this off as a one time thing, but it’s been EVERY party I’ve joined for AC the last few weeks. (was path 3, btw.)

This last time, the “trash mobs” were skipped entirely, leaving the trap hallway full of gravelings, all traps still active, just, run, run, run. Didn’t touch the Lieutenant, didn’t do much of anything but spam “retreat” and “stand your ground”.

If the only skill required is to spam run skills, and smoke the burrows, then I’m doing it wrong. (Built to support a fighting party, on a guardian.)

Throw in doors that only open if you defeat the mobs on the way, or something. The fact that it’s possible to run past 99% of the content in story mode dungeons implies strongly that something is broken.

Would add more, but that’s it. Opinions welcome, (I doubt you’ll convince me that skipping almost all the content is how the game is meant to be played, but I know the interwebs well enough to know that people who want to skip stuff will be coming out of the woodwork stating that doing nothing but spamming run skills is fun for them.)

Later, eh?

Stale

I just love you guys for this. Seriously, it’s what i’ve been begging for since game release. All we need now is a tick box or slider so people can choose what’s best for them. (this is best for me).

Thank you!