Guild Wars 2

Wasn’t that the same day they inverted the authority control for the Gliding behavior? And are you running the 32-bit or 64-bit client?

I’m on the 64-bit client right now, and the only thing I’ve noticed is random, but massive load spikes on the system. But I haven’t been able to narrow it down to pure CPU load or all out stoppage from disk calls.

Reflections, Shadows, Shaders, Post processing all set to lowest possible, and enable effect LOD. This won’t affect static assets, like the UIs, but it lessens the impact of the game’s dynamic lighting behavior.

If your epilepsy is really bad, I would consider looking into tinted, photochromic, or polarized glasses to filter it out. If you’re not epileptic, then stop playing games in the dark. :P

Is it in all zones, or only certain zones?

The Engineer is a high skill cap, high reward, highly versatile class… it holds both the most difficult rotation yet highest DPS potential in the game, but still allows for very effective “sub-meta” builds with intelligent planning. Honestly, the Engineers biggest problem is having TOO MANY good skills. We continuously juggle between high DPS and high utility, with most utilities being strong stand alone, but the kits being too adaptive to give up. Seriously; with only a few tweak to a couple skills, they could theoretically do everything in one build.

Solo, we have high survivability through trait support, with good to exceptional DPS with our offensive kits. In group comp, we can do anything from condi clear, top tier condi DPS, vulnerability and condi stacking, blasting, spike damage, sustain damage, boon piling, and now world class CC breaking with the Scrapper. The only area we fall behind is the Guardian’s unmatched in-line damage mitigation; but its more then made up for with highly adaptive strategies to fit any situation imaginable…. and several you couldn’t imagine if you never played an one.

Now playing an Engineer has a little bit of learning curve. Its not difficult, so much as you have unlearn rotation behavior used by other classes, and expand your pattern memory to include another 15+ skills that has to be shuffled on-demand. Unlike most classes, the Tool Belt class mechanic is integral to both offensive and reactive, and contains some of your strongest skills on low cool downs.

The most useful utility skills, by far, are the Kits. Every build tends to incorporate at least one for the extra diversity, but many will run 2 or even 4 (cuz we have elite kits as well) just due to how powerful they can be in so many situations. In fact, they interlace so well with most builds, we end up thinking of our main weapon set as another kit.

For WvW, the Engineer will give you the widest build potential, utilizing the most diverse set of prefixes then any other class to date. Favored for WvW and PvP are Knights and Celestial for the mixed in defensive stats, complimenting our high sustain damage setup. Crit chance only needs to be around 40-50% base, as we have a lot multi-hit skills combined with some extremely strong proc’d traits, and relatively easy access to fury. Surprisingly, most of the boon giving skills are a slot machine, and don’t give 100% uptime for anything except a moderate amount of might….. but this ultimately is not a problem with the amount of sustain built into the baseline.

For comprehensive guides on WvW, http://wolfineer.com/ is the Oricalcum standard for build comprehension. The builds presented are NOT cookie cutter. They’re extremely well thought out, built around practicality and survibility, and openly encourages you modify them to match your specific playstyle. In fact, I use these guides to balance gear stats in PvE, as they’ll work on pretty much any skill combination that matches the damage type.

And if your doing weenie hoard farming (Mad Realm, Orr, and Tyria events), the Flame Thrower and Grenade kits Tag like nothing else in existence. It even makes the Guardian loot stick look like a single target weapon.

Axialbloom.8109:

Ayrilana.1396:

You could always farm the ore.

Or sell it and buy TWO precursors…

Sad but true…. its how I’m funding my Juggernaught

Kal Spiro.9745:

I feel like this breaks down to the same argument used with Elite Specs. I want to use this feature, and since I want to use it I expect to be able to use it immediately and have complete access to it. Anything at all that interferes with this is obviously a punishment and proof that ANet hates me and how I want to play the game.

The Elite specs and most of the HOT content was intended to go hand in Hand. Most Elite specs have strong CCs, which is a major requirement to the new Break bar system. It also opens up (in theory anyway) multiple new build types… none of which we can’t experiment with unless the Elite Traits are fully unlocked.

Of all the things that needed to be readily accessible, the Elite specs were clearly one of them. But in an ironic twist of fate, the Elites on most classes are extremely flat, lack synergy, and hinge heavily on their Grandmaster trait….

In short, they aren’t even worth using until their fully unlocked. Theres no point in a growth curve thats regressed in the beginning, when the even the weakest mobs in the new areas are significantly more difficult then existing mobs, and built to be defeated by the high end of build performance.

How dumb is this? Its having someone work their way up to an M50 LMG, then making the enemies bullet proof. You then tell the player he needs laser guns to defeat them, hand him a pocket laser pointer, and say this is the starting weapon for the laser. Its a huge Catch 22…. You’re existing strategy is severely hampered in this new environment, but still stronger then the regressed weapon that you need to level up. But you can’t level up the regressed weapon unless you use it.

It was clear they wanted to start the player with very little (or even nothing) and work their way up. But the difficulty spike was so massive, that not giving them the tools would make it impossible to get past the “easiest” part of the ramp up in a meaningful time frame. Even in early GW2 areas, the difficulty didn’t outpace the expected power of the player….. but there was also that speed bump between level 50-70 where the mob difficulty spiked with the expectation of build synergy, but players lacked the trait points to achieve it. Its not until you can work with at least 1 grandmaster trait do you get the raw power to start dealing with mobs, and then have enough to get the secondary traits you need to compound it to really see the class take on a real threat.

Behellagh.1468:

Masteries are account wide and were meant to be a long term goal, long term meaning months not days. It’s only grindy for players trying to unlock them all in a relatively few days. It’s like players who grind for achievement points. I’ve lived three years without a legendary weapon, what’s another couple of months on one or more of my 80s.

Its Grindy for all players, because the HOT ones contain basic mobility tools that are used extensively to not only get to the events, but also participate in them. The Event trains are non-existent to a Player that doesn’t have at least Bounce Mushrooms and Updraft. They thought they were being cleaver to prevent exploration burn out by locking certain mobility options behind the mastery progression…. but what ended up happening was players trying to quickly grind out the mobility options to they can freely explore and actually be able to participate in whats going on.

My first day in HOT was terrible, as I kept missing events due to having to take the long way to reach them. Worse still, the mastery progression UI is illogical, thematically. I have to kill mobs in order to learn how to open a Glider? Or do random events to understand how mushrooms work? You can tell from early HOT videos that Gliders were originally static bundles (like diving goggles) placed around the map for a specific purpose. But they disconnected this concept to make the connection between Exp progression and Masterys more obvious (in their minds) to the players who complain about stagnant progression.

Masteries should had been laid out like a skill tree, with the first few levels linked to specific guide objects/points to introduce the core mobility masteries, and make sure players got them early on. Had they done that, the current exp progression system wouldn’t have had the kind of crippling effect on players in the first several hours of Verdant Brink. It also would had made the idea of “advanced” masteries as expansive rather then mandatory to movement around Magumma.

Verdict: 3/10 – Obviously Rushed.

I could spend pages on each part of the game where I’ve encountered both good and bad; but boiling it down, I think everyone can agree on the following.

Map:
+ Gliders and Vertical mobility is the only unilaterally good thing with the expansion
- Unfortunately none of the maps make sense until after you’ve got Glider and Mushrooms unlocked.
- Its also clear they were going for a Metroid style exploration setup, but Verdant Brink’s opening area went out of its way to disempower the player in a bad way. From the beginning, its taunting you to use the 2 mobility options you don’t have in order to get around; and of the paths you can take without falling, its over crowded with pocket raptors AND a CC monster. Facing a huge difficulty spike in mob fights, while simultaneously disorienting navigation, is extremely frustrating from the get-go; And I can guarantee a large number of players opted to skirt around them for that very reason.

Masterys: The conceptual break down is fit for purpose, but it suffers from 2 glaring issues in how they’re used. First, the order of the mastery abilities are out of whack. Basic mobility should had been stream lined, and unlocked faster… or alternatively, the style of maps should had been presented in a different order. Verdant Brink’s pit falls would had been better as a second map, while the Hylek’s network of Tree towns should had formed the first half the of first map introduced to players (even if presented in a damaged state). This would had allowed players time to work on the initial exp requirements, while still enabling them to move vertically among the Itzel structures.

A second issue is that progressive discovery is pointless, as lot of things aren’t marked visually or purposely obscured. Using VB’s hero points as an example, even knowing where they are on the map, it still proved difficult to see how to get to them, much less understand what you would need in order to reach them. Understanding the map relies too heavily on advanced knowledge of the Mastery functions, and without that its difficult to tell if you’re supposed to be able to reach it or not. Its an aspect of Metroidvaina games to make it obvious when something is out of reach, but also somewhat obvious of what type of mechanic you need even when you don’t have it.

Elite spec: Speaking only for Scrapper, its a step forward, but suffers from painful lack of polish. The hammer is all around excellent, but I can’t help but feel it only reached that due to its simplicity. Its a strong stand alone that doesn’t play into any other skills, including gyros, at the level of synergy normally seen within the core specs of most classes. The gyros themselves are also clearly half finished, as the concept and theoretical power is excellent, but the implementations are just horrid. This creates a linger fear that they’ll never get fixed, as Anet has proven they’ll take years to even admit a problem exists; even dismissing player feedback when its objectively on point.

World Events: Also another area of undisputed improvement, but suffers greatly from the buggy soft cap behavior.

Story, WvW, Raids: All on hold until bugs are fixed, and my guild settles down and focuses properly on one task at a time.

epouvante.7392:

Scrapper is fine because engi is fine. Gyros are quasi not used, athe hammer is relly fine. The new mecanic is not really fun. A lot of time it´s hard to revive guys with the gyros (targeting allies is strange), stomp guys is also buged. Others elites have really nice new mecanic that change the profession so they have to rework the mecanic…

I’m liking the hammer as it is. Its the application of AI and inconsistent mechanics on the Gyros, that make a set of incredibly OP abilities, in their own right, into unreliable things in a sustained focused build. Like the Blast gyro’s path finding issues, the Bulwark taking raw damage instead of post-armor damage, Whirl finishers unreliable projectiles on the Shredder, and the Stealth Gyro’s inability to keep pace with a fast moving Scrapper.

The Purge gyro is the only one that reliably does what its supposed to; but the toolbelt skill is weak, and Healing Turret does the job of both the healing Gyro and Purge Gyro, as a single skill, and can be traited to be even stronger.

Djealo.7369:

Unpopular opinion here: I actually like underwater combat, especially on engineer. Why does everyone say that it needs rework and that the underwater gameplay in GW2 is bad?

The basics are decent… its the lack of build consideration thats the problem. Half the skills of every class doesn’t work underwater, and only the core (non-theme specific) traits do anything to enhance the skills that do work there. Since all the high level areas are at least 25-50% water by traversable volume, you’d think at least some plans were being made to give them the same build integration land based skills got.

But like a lot of high level content/areas, they’ve remained half finished since beta rushed to launch; just as Orr has several mechanical aspects of it in a perpetual unfinished state.

The engineers got a huge leg up, because the kits work almost identically underwater (Grenades however get huge usability buff from the working auto attack). The other classes however give up their traited weapons, projectile attacks have horrid damage, only spears have even a single good burst damage attack, they all have long cool downs, none of the underwater weapons synergize with utility skills at the level of land based ones, and only the Ele’s attunements give access to enough weapon skills to keep pressure and DPS up as a solo unit.

Game AI also has a bad habit of not understanding the 3rd axis, as they only approach up to the melee range of their attack, but the attacks themselves don’t always include the vertical element in its hit detection behavior (which is also an issue with player skills).

Like I said, the basic of it aren’t bad….. but the other mechanics don’t follow though to support it.

I’m in a PvE conundrum at the moment when it comes to the Scrapper. The Gyros are insanely powerful, but the odd AI and rule sets applied to them make them unreliable for any type of sustain. The lack of synergy is also a major let down, as otherwise these would pair extremely well with the Core traits in Inventions and Tools.

So either I go with 1 Gyro, HGH and a ranged kit + explosives, or go inventions, but lose my better ranged options.

To boil it all the above, Eles live and die by their rotations. Engineers easily flow in and out of rotations, and can easily change what their rotations are doing to react to the situation. The key to Engineers is understanding build and combo synergy, and represents this meta-ideal of Guildwars 2 better then any other class (save the Guardian).

Every Engie build is represented as 3 postures and/or rotations. Their offensive posture is what they normally do for combat, and can actually be 3-4 different mini-rotations to adapt to what your fighting. Their Defense posture is how you execute recovery or group support, doing anything from condi cleansing, healing, or boon stacking. Lastly the “Panic Button”, which either a single skill, or series of skills used to get you out of a jam.

As an Example, a simple (if sub-optimal) PvE farming build is the Juggernaught. Firearms, Alchemy and Tools for traits.

Firearms: Uses High Caliber, Marksmen, and Juggernaught.
Alchemy: Protection Injection, Backpack regen, and HGH
Tools: Reactive lenses, Streamlined kits, Adrenal Implant

Juggernaut generates might and upkeeps a single stack of stability at all times. You run with this outside of combat so the stacks are ready when you enter combat. The other 2 passively boost offensive capability, and have no overhead to taking advantage of.

HGH and the Alchemy line serves 3 purposes. HGH grants long lasting might (and combo’d with Might runes its down right ridiculous), and cuts the cool down of all Elixirs. The 3 minor traits are your Condi protection. The Tincture minor combined with HGH makes your elixir tool belt skills grant might and clean 1 condi PLUS the normal effects of the skills when thrown. Tincture also extends your boon uptime, for better upkeep. This makes up the bulk of your defensive skills, and can be adapted to both support yourself and allies around you.

Tools is where you get sustain capability from. The 2nd minor reduces the CD on your thrown elixirs even further, bringing B and H (your work horses) down to 16s each, and the stronger U and S to around 32s. Reactive Lenses is a free auto stun-break, protecting you from anything that bleeds past your Jug Stab (giving you time to dodge out). Stream line kits = 100% swiftness uptime. Adrenal implant combined with the first minor (grants vigor) allows you to dodge as much as you need.

Gear choice is any power/prec focused prefix, and zerks is more then doable in Tyria. Rifle is the obvious choice; which I’ll get into more later. I run Elixirs H, B and U for the Wall skill. Elite is your choice, but Supply drop has a strong stun on impact and health packs for those dicey fights; while mortar gives you another elixir healing and 1500 range attacks those things you don’t want to get close to.

The rotations are simple. Run with FL out to build might. When entering combat, you have 3 choices…. might stack with Elixirs, open with FL 4 and 2 for burn + might + burst opening combo, or swap to Rifle* for opening knock back. Note that even with no condi damage, Burning is strong additive damage in pretty much every situation you can imagine. Fun fact, Stability will negate the self knock back of Rifle 4, giving you a free opening CC…. also works to clear movement CCs for no penalty. Anyway, FL AA is weak in DPS, but its the second best tagging skill in the game (#1 being Nade 1). When you need burst damage, you quickly swap to rifle, unload 3, 4 then 5, in that order. For high sustain, you do the above, then back to FL, hit 5 to blind, dodge back, FL 4, Fl3 if theres a break bar, then FL 2 and detonate after its pieced through. At the end of the rotation you can use elixirs to restack might, and continue DPSing with rifle AA for higher damage, or FL to resume building jug stacks while the other skills finish cooling down.

Defensive posturing is also pretty simple. Save your H main for healing. Use thrown elixirs or a shot of B to clean any soft CCs or heavy dmg stacks that put you in danger. Use thrown elixirs to help support allies, B for stab, and H for general condi cleaning or minor defense boost. If you feel like gambling, throwing B can also give some swiftness while traveling (and at 16s CD, its ready in no time). Elixir U thrown gives you a wall thats both useful in world boss fights, and makes good, long lasting cover for random situations. U’s main is also extra stun break, while I use the quickness to mine/log faster while roaming, or with FL 1 for giggles.

Obviously this isn’t even close to meta performance, but it has very low execution difficulty and is extremely flexible for Tyria PvE content. Prior to HOT, I used to take a Grenadier version of this (with Rocket boots) into WvW zerg fights, because of its extremely high mobility and range, making it a great mid and back line build. I can use the range to play pressure, while the tinctures were a cheap condi cleanse and boon boost for the backliners. And if I ever got immobilized, or just wanted to get across a small ravine? Rocket Boots!!!!!!!!

Malpractice.7850:

Irenios given us a broken spec, with a great hammer, but even #3 is consistantly broken making you turn random directions.

Hes stated Toolkit #5 is fixed, Gyros and fixed, and Function gyro should have better functionality. This is all lies as well.

Hes broken our Bulwark.

Hes constantly posted in ranger forums, changed their class, given them fixes, and kept them in the loop.

He’s given us jack kitten. And i think we should really keep this thread at the top in hopes of getting a better dev, that actually cares about engineer.

He doesn’t have Fans in the Ranger forum either. Hes been ignoring a lot of critical feed back on the ranger’s awful trait synergy against its skills, and of everything ever done to the ranger, only 2 extremely niche builds readily compete with the rest of the meta, but have much higher execution difficulty in comparison.

not to mention their complete avoidance of addressing the mechanical behavior of pets. The 95% dmg reduction, while reasonably effective at keeping them from being one shotted, doesn’t even begin to address the mountain of problems that keep them from being a pro-active part of those builds.

The first question should be which adds more DOT short or DOT long potential, depending on which game mode you play.

Expertise is only really helpful in situations where things get capped abnormally, like PvE Tyria, or if you need your controls to last longer for some reason. In PvP, with condicleasing in everyone’s build, long DOTs lose most of its potential. In this latter case, you want your DOTs to be more potent (condi damage) so they deliver more damage in the short time their up.

Something to think about.

One thing that got overlooked, and is driving me insane…. Why are Gyros not eligible Underwater skills?

With the exception of Shreader, due to ground targeting, none of the other Gyros behave in a way that would prevent them from being functional underwater. In fact, they’d be great additions because their skill functions are just AOE passive effects. Even the Tool belt skills would be incredible for bunker and support roles in their own right, since the tool kits don’t synergize the same way they do on land.

Just considering what they are, so much of it makes perfect sense with the limited underwater combat we have now.

One thing that got overlooked, and is driving me insane….

Why are Gyros not eligible Underwater skills? With the exception of Shreader, due to ground targeting, none of the other Gyros behave in a way that would prevent them from being functional underwater. In fact, they’d be great additions because their skill functions are just AOE passive effects. Even the Tool belt skills would be incredible for bunker and support roles in their own right, since the tool kits don’t synergize the same way they do on land.

13% higher then before the patch? Theres cast and after cast delay, so its more like 3 second cast for the DPS calculations.

I’ve been waiting on the mesmer concept outfit that Lexi and Brenda wear.

Engineer condi builds are really strong in WvW, and works for both offense and support. Dire gear (Cd/V/T) armor, rabid trinkets (for extra prec), weapon stats are open depending on what you think you need more of. Elixir gun is always a good choice, and the mortar kit works great for zerg support since it has long range and several condi fields.

Builds vary based on your favored playstyle, but its hard to go wrong the HGH build if you need to test the waters. It gives you access to condi clean up, simple might stack, and lots of boon spreading.

Of course theres always Wolfineer.

http://wolfineer.com/condition-engineer/

The event chests was done specifically to remove the variance associated with mob drop tables, and focus us on event completion rather then event farming.

Honestly, if you think SW is unrewarding, you probably weren’t around for year 1 orr, with its messily 110% fully boosted magic find, in full explorers gear, spending days on end farming for a hand full of T6 mats, maybe 1 or 2 lodestones/core, and few dusts to show for your efforts.

You’d have to be completely AFK in Camp resolve, on any class other then Ranger to not get ungodly amounts of loot. And the only reason I mentioned the Ranger, is because that pet on auto attack is more then enough to get event credit.

On the subject of Engineers….

http://www.wolfineer.com/

Everything you never knew you wanted to know about engineers, in a massive guide covering everything from applications for EVERY skill (the good, the bad, the potato), to rune/sigil synergy, build theory, and build guides so well tuned, and so easy to understand, it may as well be renamed the engineer meta.

The hardest part about understanding the game is that none of it makes sense until you have access to multiple traits. They are largely interdependent on weapon, gear stats and traits. Traits are the easiest to modify on a whim, but changing gear for different builds can get expensive. Fortunately, Power based builds are universally efficient in PvE; so Berserker and Soldiers stats end up being used in most of those builds.

For you I’d recommend taking Guardian to compliment your brother’s Warrior. Both classes high survivability independently, both are capable of good damage output without sacrificing survivability, and they can synergize well, with him giving offensive buff stacking, while the guardians can provide strong group defensive buffs and in-line group support with only trait shuffling.

For solo play I would recommend the Engineer, as it offers the highest build diversity of any class in the game, has a moderately high skill cap, is inherently hybrid, and offers a wide range of group support in most coherent builds. Build difficulty also ranges from “potato” to “I don’t have enough fingers” to suit your mood and activity. My only gripe with the engineer since the trait revamp is wanting to take all 5 trait lines; because its really easy to incorporate kits and utilities with the way the class is set up.

Endless Soul.5178:

The outfits are nice, but really the only outfit I’d like to see that’s Guild Wars 1 related is the Elite Noble.

A version of it exists.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Heritage_armor_%28light%29

Unfortunately the dye channels are really screwy on it

The long missing Mesmer concept outfit.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/a/ad/Lexi_Price.jpg

https://d3b4yo2b5lbfy.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/wallpapers/Mesmer-Final-1920x1080.jpg

Its not practical, because events themselves are designed to draw attention. It also assumes groups sometimes take a while to congregate in order to hit critical mass for certain big events.

This concept is 2-fold in Orr, as prior to the champ trains, it was difficult to get enough players on the map in one area to work an event. Couple this with the fact that the events in Straits of Devastation and Malchor’s leap were long push/pull chains, it was exceptionally difficult to help new players progress through the areas once most players made it to, and started farming in, Cursed Shore. This later moved back to Straits with the Rally point Karma train, but has since been replaced with the Dry top chest train in popularity, and that later replaced with Champ trains and Silver wastes chest runs.

Ultimately, the event chains are designed to be won by groups, and intentionally fail back to their start point with the idea that a frequently cycling, or use of standby events as a way to gather group momentum for the later parts of the meta event. Graveborne is one such start point, as is Nebo Village.

SkiTz.4590:

simple – hard mode dungeon. Adjust the rewards accordingly. They dont have to be the “most rewarding system in the game”… just some kind of 5 man/group content that a lot of guilds would love to see / run.

Granted we have fractals, but thats it. So few instances of group content…

Now I will say this – hopefully the new challenging content reveal will be 5man+/group related instead of this open world zergy stuff like Silverwastes…

There’s really not much a point to complain about dungs at this point. Just hold off and wait to see what this new challenging group content is gonna be in HoT…

Hard mode isn’t a solution, because its just stacking even more statistical imbalance that we’ve already found ways to beat. The fundamental flaw of the old dungeons are their encounter designs. Its a problem that exists in all areas of PvE at the moment. Basically they stack HP and power so they take longer to kill, and threaten any tanks in the group; causing them to win a war of attrition by default. Because of this, players only have an advantage if they can front load a lot of damage and kill it quickly, which halts the DPS of the mobs and bosses. This is the element that gave rise to the zerker meta, as people became more familiar with the encounters, got better at active defenses, and devalued defensive stats as their returns become weaker the stronger the mobs are.

The second element, Stacking, is the result of potato AI behavior of mobs in general. Because most of our attacks are either cleave or AOE, our damage is most efficient when mobs groups are stacked tight enough to maximize our target limit. It also helps significantly with dodging, as stacked mobs will focus their area denial attacks, leaving more open room to dodge into as a safety net. But probably the most important, most boon sharing and support effects are all short ranged.

If you compare old dungeons to fractals, you’ll notice the old dungeons used the 3 common quest archetypes for all their “objectives”. “Stay in this room until you’ve killed enough things”, “go retrieve X things” and “stand here and not die for 3 minutes”. The Fractals on the other hand had much better encounter and objective designs, which focus more on mechanics and organization, rather then raw DPS . Task concepts are simple, but surprisingly effective; and task delegation isn’t difficult so long as people understand the mechanics. Check points are frequent, and close to the action, and very rarely requires players to rerun a gauntlet just to rejoin their group. And of the fractals I can remember off the top of my head, we’re not hampered by the NPC companions; who draw all aggro possible in the normal dungeons.

Love it or hate it, Cliff side fractal is the most well implemented of the bunch. It causes players to focus on the mechanics of the hammer, utilizing coordination, carrier rotation, and their build abilities to enable the Hammer carrier to do his job. What surprised me is that the environment pressure was “just right” to the urgency level of the Corruption stacks, and the overwhelming condi stacking by cultists. Another thing that surprised me, is that build competency has a major payout in this fractal despite the focus on the Hammer. Even on lvl 1 Fractals, if a player can’t handle their build, they probably won’t survive long. This simultaneously makes it either the easiest or most difficult fractal depending on how survivable each person is, and how well they contribute to the team momentum.

Now the traditional dungeons did have their moments; incorporating some elements of coordination and personal endurance. But the difficulty modulation of these segments were incredibly unstable; making them among the least traveled paths for each dungeon. You also see similar issues with the Living Story fractals, which were tuned too easy during their original runs, and made awkwardly difficult with the mob stats when scaled up for fractals. Molten Facility is the least affected by this, because the encounter setup separated the fight portions from the mechanical portions. Aether blade went the opposite way , by combining the environmental hazards with the fight sequences.

Beldin.5498:

People are more critical these days and often even over-critical and leave a new
MMO often after short time because in memory the old ones were sooo much
better, while infact nobody would play those old games with their mechanic
anymore.

While mostly true, its not the entire fault of the players either. We’re at a point a genre’s industry cycle where a lot of Clones are being produced in a very short period. Coupled with this is a higher expectation by players, and constant comparisons of huge, technically complex MMOs with smaller scale matched based or single player games.

Whats accelerating the burn out is a string of highly revolutionary game play being hampered by both the expectation, and rampant over-use, of reward schedules. We’ve made a ton of advances in game player in just the last 5-8 years, with most MMO titles moving towards more elaborate, action oriented combat, physics, as well as major expansions on the idea of build theory, role/team cohesion, and reinventing class archetypes for better dynamics. GW2 and Tera are actually are the same high level concept, but took different approaches to its application.

With the continuing merger of FPS games taking on classic RPG elements, and RPGs games adopting more real time combat mechanics, we can see the individual elements being innovated…. But what we’re not seeing are those innovations being used to their proper potential. RPGs are notorious for clinging to classic reward scheduling out of a fear that without it, the game can’t survive. Part of the issue is that this is absolutely true for the mass market. The WoW generation has been conditioned for continual rewards over time, and tend to get frustrated if they feel they aren’t making ample progress. This in itself can largely be attributed to the “gold star” approach commonly found in western based cultures; which have heavily adopted the idea metrics being the measure of success.

And you’ll see this eventually echo’d in every MMO since 2000…. End game, progression, and rewards are the focal topics as to why someone gets bored with a game. Even single player sand boxes have fallen into this trap, leaving this generation of Single player meta titles in one of the most confusing states I’ve ever seen games in my life. Multiplayer games excepted to have the fidelity and singular attention to players as single player games, where choices are supposed to critical; while Single player games have become expected to have endless re-playability and content output of a well established MMO. But when these opposing ideals collide, no ones expectations can be properly met. This is even harder with Sequels, as the popularity of the first game for many franchises tend to come on accident. This seems weird… but looking at Blizzard’s history as being an Inversion of this concept it’ll start to make sense.

Blizzard is good at one thing….. polishing another’s concept. What they can’t do is innovate. They have this ability to identify and distill the best elements of genre of games, and combine them into a well crafted game of a given scope. So why do their sequels suck? Its a combination of 2 things….

1. Most of their games so finely tuned, that innovating them essentially breaks them. Its a problem with every sequel they’ve had with the exception of Diablo 2 due its refocusing on Co-op play.

2. The Ladder community tends to destroy everything. They smash records at such a speed, with such precision, that Blizzard struggles to keep up with them. Its the fall out of their efforts to give a challenge to the Ladder/Competitive community that eventually throws the entire game out of balance. GW2 see this problem in the form PvP balance and End game crafting…. changes made for these things are so focused on stymieing the progress that Meta defining are capable of, usually end up hurting the game for the masses in some indirect form.

There is also the old story about the game’s AI being too smart during beta, causing them to change it thinking it would scare people away from the game. Now the complaint is a complete 180, as the player hit the wall for the single functional facet of combat that its managed to offer.

With so many things going on with this discussion, I’m not entire sure if Anet truly understands what direction they need to take. And with their history of abandoning a direction when the short term gains wavier, I’m very worried about how long HOT will actually stay interesting.

Klazmaunt.2591:

Majic.4801:

I’m all for fractals being more rewarding to play, but have no interest in them personally, and would prefer they not displace other PvE daily options, like world bosses and map events.

I’m all for world bosses and map events being more rewarding to play, but have no interesting them personally, and would prefer they not displace other PvE daily options, like fractals and dungeons.

Everything is inherently in competition with each other, because we can only 1 thing at a time as players. Personally I love it when all dailies line up, because it saves me a LOT of time by being able to do them all at once. Double fractal dailies are my favorite, because I can get 3 pristine relics for 1 hours worth of work, rather then 3 trips over 3 days.

I don’t farm fractals regularly, so this is by far the cheapest way for me to get ascended rings when I’m putting together a new build for a class. That may not make sense to someone who thinks ascended is unnecessary, but I spend a decent amount of time in WvW, and a 5% increase in stats is very significant at the scale it operates in.

Depends on how they throttle, and it also depends on how your AV (if it does) tries to mess with raw downloaded data. IT should show you a kbps rate if something is actively downloading. As long as that changes periodically it should keep going.

ZeddBv.1487:

sirsquishy.8531:

You would be better off buying a used M4600 from ebay (269~) slapping in an i7-2720QM (80~) and a M270x (149~) then buying the laptop you have listed.

While Behellagh is partially right, buying a new laptop and wanting to game on it is going to require a pretty heafty investment (800-1100 MIN), but if you jump back a couple generations you can put one together for about 500~

And for the record, on that M4600 I just talked about..I am getting 60FPS locked (vSync) at 1080p on medium settings.

Thanks for the advice I’ll look into those thing. At the moment I just wanted a laptop that could run gw2 and make it look good. In about half a year from now I will be able to invest 1.5 – 2k into something that can run gw2 and good for PhotoShop

Keep in mind that GW2 is extremely CPU bottle necked, so GPU mostly helps with resolution scaling rather then raw performance. For your currently setup you’ll want to turn down the model scaling and model count settings under video to help lower the load. Its not so much the texture/mesh load on the GPU, but it saves a LOT of CPU overhead for the culling behavior so it doesn’t swap and load model data as much, as well as cuts down on the animations and particle triggers.

The downside is that you can’t WvW with these setting, due to very delayed enemy displaying… but you really wouldn’t want to go there without stable frame rates anyway.

This bug is thats been around since launch, and comes and goes randomly with game updates. Essentially the game’s audio engine queuing locks up, and gets stuck in a loop until you force the game down. Older versions of the bug used to persist until the system was restarted; but I haven’t seen it happen in a while. In either case, it starts to chew up CPU time like crazy; but for some odd reason music playback will continue the same track correctly, though unable to change it. This suggests the audio engine is actually still working correctly, but the game can’t issue it new commands (or refuses them). If left alone, or trying to exit normally, it’ll result in a general crash of the program; or rarely an “unkillable” process.

Theres no reliable way to reproduce the problem. But does tend to happen around longer world boss fights, where the audio engine is very likely to get hit with a large number of triggers at the same time.

Generally this problem goes away 1 or 2 patches after it resurfaces, comes back a couple months later for 1 version, then goes away again. In the interim you can try sliding the Audio buffer towards Stability, however it won’t prevent the problem when fights are big enough.

its too late to get sample data from the rest of the thread….. but what harddrive, what AV, and what version of windows. And did this happen following some kind of Windows update?

With all the engine modding their doing right now, its not the surprising the Mac port is going to be unstable until the Windows build out is stable. Performance problems are creeping up across the board, but whatever the Mac client uses to convert it is amplifying it.

Or we could change the functionality slightly, by having Air blast “spread” a stack of burning to surrounding enemies. There would be a question of the compound effect, since it has the mechanical potential to Splinter Barrage a group of burning enemies with +4 stacks (assuming 5 strike cap on attack). This could be good or bad, depending on how much spike damage results from it.

As a side suggestion, what about a traited ability to make Air Blast cure burning on friendlies?

Casia.4281:

What are gadgets and turrets?
Engineers are and have been balanced around using grenades as your primary weapon, despite pistols, rifles and harpoongun seemingly having that purpose..
And using kits and the afore mentioned actual primary weapons for 1 or 2 specific skills out of the 5.
Pretty sure that is not what any of us actually signed up for.

Can you actually give any good reason for grenade barrage to be 40-200% better then every other toolbelt skill? even untraited.. nevermind vulx7 or shrapnelx7

EG is used for 1 skill exclusively. Acid bomb. That is engi balance. have all this stuff, you use for 1 single OP skill on your bar, and swap out of the otherwise useless kit.

Its not balanced around Nade Kit….. we just ended up uisng nades in the majority of builds because it has a high chance to proc Shrapnel, and works as both power and condi. To top it off, despite being made med range, we use it at all ranges because its still an AOE delivery mechanism.

As for our main weapons; Despite being powerful, they’re very sluggish. This fact helped further push toward kit mains, and Rifle/Pistol bursts. What forced us into rotations for non-grenade kits were the cool downs.

So its not so much that Grenades were OP, simply that they have natural synergy by way of mechanics. The solution isn’t to nerf grenades, but actually resolve some of the problems with other kits, that cause their synergy to be lost to odd mechanical limitations. If anything, Shrapnel as a trait is incredibly strong, and becomes OP when proced Enmass.

For bomb kit, the elephant in the room is Skill 1, which is a power based in a condi heavy setup, an attack with no utility, and weak synergy due to its cycle time. A partial solution would be to make the Skill 1 a heavy hitter type like the other bombs with a cool down. However, I’d much rather see the Bomb kit’s mechanics be rethought into a more controlled mechanism. Off the cuff, I would consider making all bombs manually detonated, using Skill 1 as the trigger skill. But this makes its handling a little clunkly, as players will want to drop them like traps, and then swap to ranged weapon to maintain pressure. Another alternative is to trait them so they convert to sticky mines, that center on target before detonating.

Another design flop is us taking kits for only 1 or 2 skills due to utility. Elixir gun is taken almost exclusively for its Stun Break and condition clear…. which is fine because its a support tool. But then we look at the “versatile” tool kit, that on paper synergizes well, but is too clunkly in practice to use as intended.

The net result of these individually small discrepancies is making the class more rotation heavy like an Ele, rather then being reactive like it was designed for. I feel this would had been less of a problem if the Tool kits were snappy (swapping in and out for a specific task) , and the Main weapon the one we default to for applying pressure.

I agree with the OP, but not for something silly as a keyboard layout. A better reason is making it easier to read at a glance. I imagine most people don’t read the icons details directly when monitoring cooldowns, but instead go by orientation. After being conditioned to see the right most toolbelt belonging to my 9 kit, I get thrown off pretty regularly by confusing F4 and F5 and their related skills.

A simple separator or thick line divider adds enough of a point of reference to get that 1:1 layout similarity to the Utility bar, making it register faster, and reminds the viewer that its linked to the Elite skill.

The best options in order of general usefulness….

1. Watchwork mining pick. Produces sprockets on gathering, which sell for 2-3s each. Also the only reliable way to get them in large amounts.

2. Copper-fed salvage-o-matic. Hands down the best gem investment behind the watchwork pick. Equal to a Basic Salvage kit, and costing 3 copper per use, its a major convenience item for anyone who farms. Since theres no reason to use high grade kits on trash loot (up to green), you use this for the base 10% chance at higher tier mats, use Master or Mystic for rares (to get ectos), and Save BL kits from daily and map completion for Exotics (for dark matter).

3. +1 Bank Storage. Allows you to hold on to various rare items for later, and can double as raw material storage.

4. +1 Material storage. The first level of this doubles the storage capacity of all slots, with a quadruple storage potential if you refine mats for storage. More cost effective for mat storage then bank space. For resale, mats are generally worth more in their raw state (just be aware).

For the most part you don’t need Bag slot upgrades, as the 5 you start, those filled with 20 slot bags = 100 slots. Most people use one Invisible bag for spare gear, consumables, etc, which leaves you with 80 for loot collection. Its also recommended to either craft (if you have the armor crafting) or buy a Craftsman’s bag (for salvage collection) and an Oiled Leather bag (to collect junk items). Equipment boxes are unnecessary since you want gear near the top for easy review anyway.

Because cookies?

Conditions are viable….. Crit damage is just better. As for why. Because they want to release the logical combinations last, so we’re more likely to grind the other slightly better on paper stats, only to replace them later.

I never understood why some people are so intent on playing MMOs in bubble.

I would argue that stats need to be de-emphasised, and make their synergy to traits more meaningful. The problem right now is that stats only stack in certain functions, but not others… and their relationship to traits only extends to how much of a flat % bonus it can give to a derived last mile value (like damage).

Tons of Influence, and treasuries full of gold. And LOTS of people during the only required fight currently know in the claiming process.

I’m trying hard not to think about this, because hype is the fastest way to disappointment with Anet. I don’t wanna be a downer, but the highlight of the entire HOT hype train was the Shrio Rev… and that isn’t enough to salvage all the lost potential of the class.

The concept for the Revnant (both lore and mechanically) aren’t inherently bad. What is bad was the implementation, and stiff coupling of the weapons to specific Legends.

What many people were initially expecting, and hoping for, was the Legend channeling to play off the weapon skills, giving the Rev two, distinct playstyles that they could switch to on-demand. Like an effective cross between an Engineer and an Elementalist.

I akin this concept to the WoW Druid. They weren’t built as main roles, but when played creatively, are as good at specific roles as classes dedicated to them. In order this idea to work, there needs to be large degree of synergy between the 3 elements of weapons, utilities and traits. If successful, it would had been the perfect jack of all trades character, that could juggle multiple tasks within a group as needed. In short…. it would had represented everything the Guildwars 2 Game design has been said to innovate since its inception. All this without needing to copy the other class mechanics.

But unfortunately, it only fell deeper into the Trinity trap by making each potential role extremely rigid, and designing it to be paired with a specific weapon to reach its intended minimal functionality.

Based on the trend with the other classes, Elite spec requires that you trait it in order to use the weapon and make the utilities available.

Miku.6297:

starlinvf.1358:

Don’t confuse incompetence as intentional design. We know for a fact that these stats, when first added, were theoretically better then most existing compositions for at least half the classes in the game.

For the which profesions was Zealot’s, Sentinel’s, Nomad’s, or Sinister theoretically better for? You can’t mean PVE; the first 2 have defensive stats in them, and Nomad’s is extremely defensive, which has NEVER been considered theoretically better in PVE.

All 4 of them? Guardian should had been obvious. But like I pointed out, they never lived up to their potential as a useful stat. The reasons Zerks is Meta, and the reason we keep going back to it, is because it actually scales correctly.

On the theoretical side, Zealots and Sentinel’s should had allowed for mixing defensive stats into offensive main builds. But they didn’t add enough defense to make up the power loss from crit scaling. Zealots is arguably the most viable of the 4 for Guardians- But ultimately there was no reason once people realized 550 Healing power (traits + armor) accounted for no more then a 15% boost in actual HP gain from most healing related skills/traits.

Nomads is a mechanically more efficient version of clerics gear, and sinister should had boosted the Guardian’s burn potential by a significant amount without sacrificing direct damage. But even with recent condi change, Sinisters seems to roughly break even against Zerk builds, being lower in short fights, breaking even in medium length fights, and possibly gaining in long fights. But thats assuming you can maintain ideal condi uptime. It should had been perfect for Engineers, since they hybrid condi by design…. but that doesn’t show gains unless you can maintain perfect rotations.

Summed up…. Mob AI behavior ranks, on a scale of 1 to 10, as “Potato”. Theres actually some rather interesting AI behavior that never gets quantified, because most mobs are stupidly aggressive by default. Did you know mobs are attracted to Toughness? I didn’t until I saw it on the forums. Did you know some hostile mobs are supposed to be afraid of you? Did you know them running is triggering the “Fear condition” behavior without the actual condition? Did you know thats why bats and moas run, only turn around and attack you again after a few seconds?

The path finding issue however is new. Whatever changes they made for the Revenant cascading AOE had some kind of side effect on ALL path finding behavior in the game. If its not a Projectile (which is a free traveling object in 3D space), then something as small as uneven terrain can cause path resolution to fail. You can see this a lot with Ground hugging attacks, and especially with Blink skills.

Talyn.3295:

ScribeTheMad.7614:

lulz

A gear tread mill has two key factors

1) New Tiers are continually added. -Hasn’t happened
2) Each new Tier invalidates previous tiers. -Hasn’t happened

Stat choices aside, the fact my warrior is still using the exact same exotic greatsword I purchased for him shortly after hitting 80 almost three years ago now, invalidates your entire argument. It is just as viable today as it was then, despite the ascended introduction to the game.

Peace

Don’t confuse incompetence as intentional design. We know for a fact that these stats, when first added, were theoretically better then most existing compositions for at least half the classes in the game.

The incompetence is the fact that these new combo never lived up to their potential, because of the Dev’s reluctance at fixing the underlying mechanics that would make them work. Condition damage was broken for how long? Only now (after Sinister stats were released) had they tried to fix what was holding them back from fulfilling their intended function within the build meta. And yet, despite the intent of the rework, they waffled on several decisions that made condi damage even less scalable then it was before. Any theoretical advantage was then lost, as the combined damage of TWO whole damage vectors couldn’t even come close to the scalability of the one vector that is direct damage, despite that vector having the most counter elements.

When the game launched, Toughness as a stat didn’t even work. I can’t even remember when it was fixed in relation to when the first batch of LS events came out that added new prefixes to the game. There are still SEVERAL prefixes which are exclusive to a handfull of items, many of which aren’t even exotic, or can only be obtained via deprecated prefix items that got stat selection to back fill.

Just because its not vertical, doesn’t mean its not a treadmill. The fact that we’re constantly encouraged to pursue them, putting inordinate amounts of work into obtaining, and then having to repeat the process again in the hopes that the next prefix might do what it theoretically should….. Thats what makes a treadmill.

Aetrion.8295:

Hitpoints don’t mean the same thing in every game.

Where they come from for the purpose of roleplaying games is stuff like D&D and other table top games. In those games their biggest function is not determining whether or not you die during a fight, but setting limits to how much adventuring you can do before you have to rest. These are also the games that give us the roleplay archetypes that people want to be able to play when they ask for tanks and healers. As a result of games like D&D measuring your progress not only by how quickly you can kill a monster, but by how many monsters you can take on before you have to make camp there is a significant emphasis on having party members that can extend your parties endurance throughout the adventure.

……..

So here comes guild wars 2, they simply said: Why bother with the trinity, the only thing that makes bosses dangerous in WoW is their mechanics, so we’re just going to do a game where bosses are all mechanics, no noise that you have to heal through. Generally a really good idea, but it left hitpoints in an awkward spot, because they still work the exact same way that they work in a WoW style MMO in the way they are gained and lost, but the game no longer has any primary mechanics that work around hitpoint modification.

Hence why I think the way to actually go forward with the genre is to make hitpoints do something meaningful again. Maybe we have to stop calling them hitpoints, maybe they should just be called “Strength” so that it’s easy to understand why running out kills you, but getting more makes you do awesome stuff.

I think the HP system should no longer just be a clock that counts down how long you have to kill the enemy, but should be more like the endurance of a boxer. In boxing when you get hit a lot you’ll quickly lack the strength to attack, but if you attack too recklessly you’ll also lose the strength to defend yourself.

This is probably the best post discussing trinity that I’ve seen to date. +1 and I’m saving this link for use in other games.

Imagine world boss frame rate drops….. but times a thousand.