Guild Wars 2

kyubi.3620:

I think they could actualy reduce zerker effectiveness to put it on par with non zerker by switching crit damage to armor penetration ;/

Seems fair. Same DPS than other sets without their survivability.

Alexwalsham.2648:

What if we did something radical….

What if stats on Armour were removed? Keep trinkets and keep stats on weapons, But what if the main stat numbers were on the trait lines. What would people do then? Would people favour shooting for an optimal trait on a toughness line or going into the power or precision lines for the stats?

Most stats are on the trinkets and weapon already. Armor itself is comparatively low. Going radical would be plain removing combat stat boosts on gear. Now THAT would be great.

Jornophelanthas.1475:

Toughness, Vitality and Healing Power do not have any such interaction. Having a high Toughness does not increase the value of your heals, and having high Healing Power does not increase your maximum health.

Actually, yes, yes it does. It’s called “EHP” or “Effective Health Points” if you want to know.

Aza.2105:

I don’t think this is accurate. If crit damage is itemized like it is in spvp, then the difference between a zerker and non zerker build (who has 30 pts in their crit dmg tree) will be around 20%. Not that big of a difference.

Right now the difference between a non zerker spec with 30pts in their crit dmg tree vs a zerker with 30pts in their crit dmg tree is around 70% crit dmg. Huge huge damage disparity.

You speak as if crit damage was the only source of DPS in gear. Zerk still got more (or at most the same) power and precision combined than any other set in the game.

kyubi.3620:

Critical damage is finaly taking the nerf bat… good ill be watching the video with popcorns and soda, while considering how ill make my minion master and rampager build for ranger the next time i connect.

This is a glorious day for everyone who never wanted to run CD in the first place, now to get myself a swordshield or summon weapon guardian and a rampager sword warrior ready for the fun.

Nerfing Critical damage won’t prevent a DPS oriented meta. And even if your rampager gear does more DPS than a zerk user, you’ll still be unwanted past the first party slot since your DPS doesn’t stack with other rampager users.

Manuhell.2759:

Imho, toughness and vitality should have some kind of effect to some active skills like endure pain, blocks and similar, alike to how offensive stats work with…well, any skill that inflicts damage.

Toughness improves your heals already. No need for more.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

The armor never was the issue. The issue is that the risk related to using said armor isn’t actually there.

I read that as : “The armor isn’t the issue. The issue is the armor”

Palaryel.2463:

Also, someone wrote about toughness/vitality caps, toughness is soft capped at around 3k, as getting anything above that is giving you very little in return, while theoretically more of it will always be an improvement, the actual improvement would be to small to make it worth it. Vitality has no cap, and should not ever have a cap, it isnt logical to put a cap on vitality, players can adjust their vitality based on how much armor they have and based on their playstyle.

Power has no cap at all, but is a linear function, resulting in a steady increase for a particular amount of power based on your level, as such (theoretically) it would be the best dump stat (followed by vitality) for your leftover points once you have covered all your other needs. Sadly, considering the current state of the game, power along with precision and crit damage is the only viable PVE stat for reasons described above.

This is wrong. Toughness has linear returns, Power has linear returns. None have any kind of soft or hard cap. Linear returns can be seen as a kind of diminishing returns if you want, compared to multiplicative but both have the same scale.

Basically, think at it like that. If going from 2000 armor to 2250 at the same HP total allows you to survive one hit more (exactly, no rounding errors). Then for every 250 more toughness you get past that you survive one more hit. If that isn’t linear I don’t know what is.

kyubi.3620:

because you can actualy hit 100% crit rate without getting mass buffed with fury spotter and banner? Ah good one. Still you shoulnt be able to get 100% in the first place.

- It’s not as if it’s impossible to have 100% uptime on fury, spotter and banner you know.
- It’s not as if the cap isn’t commonly reachable that it doesn’t exist whereas NO other stat has a cap.
- The fact you should or shouldn’t reach 100% crit is completely unrelated to the problem at hand anyway. This is pure opinion on your part too btw.

There’s no diminishing returns on toughness. And the only stat that has a hard cap in the game is Precision which is completely contrary to your affirmation that it’s one of the only 3 that doesn’t have a hard cap.

Well it’s fine as long as you also cap HP gain from vitality to 2k and armor from toughness at 500.

Palaryel.2463:

The reason why zerk gear is most effective in PVE at the moment is because the faster you kill something the less the chance for it to kill you. Nothing else!

Funny, and I was thinking the faster you kill stuff, the less time the run will take. I stand corrected, thanks!

The reason zerk gear is the most effective in PvE is that, barring some serious low skill level issue, you cannot fail dungeons and the rewards are identical in all cases. And so the only criteria left to decide if a run was better than another, is to see which one was the fastest.

Zaithan is to be considered an aquatic dragon here in the sense that his seat of power is on an isolated island. He can only use as Risen what he caught. He can only catch what is on Orr or is caught by his navy. Also the tiny parcel of land north of Orr he already invaded.

Subterranean races tend to live near mountains, far away from the sea so are mostly safe.

Silferas.3841:

kyubi.3620:

well then we can always reduce zerker damage by half. Best way to balance thing will keeping active defence a key feature.

I am starting to feel like you are here just to make people angry.

But I’d be alright with that as long as damage is halved on EVERY single set in PVE. That’d make encounters take longer and therefore make it more challenging for berserkers.

Well the issue then would be that PVT is far too faceroll and easy. The solution is obviously to shave some tankiness from the set and put it into Precision and Crit Damage.

Or as I said, there is no zerk issue because the best thing we can do for the game is decide that PvE = zerk gear and everyone uses the same gear and the PvE content is tuned for that one

kyubi.3620:

maybe youd rather have your critical damage reduced by half its value or your precision and crit damage put on diminishing returns ;P it would result into the same thing cept youd be next to on par with everyone else damage save for a 0.5 time increase at best.

I’ll take zerk for a 50% run duration reduction any time of the day. This goes beyond build flavor !

Arvid.3829:

Sure you can, but surely you don’t think speedruns should be the intended way to play a dungeon? Off course they should exist, but surely they are supposed to be for skilled players and not the norm? Isn’t there a problem when it does become the norm?

There’s a lot of room between a casual dungeon run and a speed run aiming at some world record.

As a casual dungeon runner, I know what I enjoy the best between a 1 hour run and a 20 minute run.

The design of guild wars 2 is flawed on a that point though : control is useless because bosses are mostly immune and ANet doesn’t want to make a fight were you are required to constantly burn a boss defiant stacks it seems.

All control is good for is trash mobs. Trash mobs you can skip. Trash mobs you can kill without control.

Arvid.3829:

I still remember the first time I did CoE p2 as a normal run, where Subject Alpha has 2 aoe’s that look very much alike except in one you are safe in the middle circle and the other you are safe in the outer circle (I wonder how many people still know this even exists). You have to look closely at the slight differences in animation to see what you have to do now. It was/is honestly very cool and unique in the game. Later, I needed some armor from CoE, so to get the rewards quickly I did a lot of CoE speedruns. It’s a very different (and I would dare say easier) experience and sort of fun as well, except every encounter with Subject Alpha is basically a quick time event: dps, dps, dps, red circle, 1, 2, dodge and repeat… It’s getting old pretty fast. And it’s like this in every dungeon pretty much: you either do a normal run and encounter some fairly unique situations, or you do a speed run and reduce everything to the same ‘stack-buff-dps-dodge’ but get rewards faster.

Meh, you think we stack that fight because it’s faster? Wrong. We stack it because it’s much much safer that way. Alpha creates a random AoE around every player. When people are spread all over the room and moving around, it is a mess of multiple overlapping circles and you never know where you are. You decide you can stay in the middle of this AoE and get killed because you were also inside a second circle.

When all 5 players are in melee range, the fighting arena is kept clean and you just have to dodge all. This makes the fight safer because you don’t have a complex though process on if you have to dodge or not, on if this spot is safe, or this one.

Stacking is not meant to maximize DPS in the first place but to bring order to a fight with no clear aggro rules. The boss won’t run away to some ranged player because all his targets are up his face. And since the game tuning is made so that all melee players can survive because, play of you want, then it means you can go 5 melee and survive too.

Bonus points : melee damage is higher than ranged damage. Well it’s also much more dangerous too.

Proven.2854:

Basically, investments in becoming a primary control or support player is crappy relative to investments in becoming a primary DPS player.

There is no investment into becoming a primary control player. At most, you need a level 1 white weapon or two and to be naked. There is no stat in the gear that you need to invest into to control. Ok, maybe you need runes and sigils at most.

As for support, short of the pure healing support, there is no stats either. Still, healing support isn’t that good in the game because ANet doesn’t want primary healers anyway. In fact, most group heals have very bad scaling with healing power compared to your personal heal.

So, a support or a control player that geared into anything other than Zerk isn’t necessarily optimal. Because you DO dps some inbetween control or support actions.

kyubi.3620:

4. support are not needed right now because zerking guys can do the same role without specing for it and down boss in so little time they get to avoid all the dangers of the fight

Wrong. Supports cannot gear up for support, there’s no stat in gear for that role. Well there’s a tiny amount of boon duration on a single gear set but it isn’t a very relevant set.

You support by traiting for it and using the correct weapons. And zerk speed runs use support builds because they provide more DPS and survivability to the team than solo DPS boosting builds anyway.

Support doesn’t mean healers. Support is anything that helps your team while not really doing direct damage. Stacking might, stacking vulnerability, giving fury, placing a banner that boosts crit chance etc… All that is support and there’s a lot of it in the best zerk groups.

Once again, the reason Zerk is the best gear is because it’s the best gear for Damage role, gear doesn’t matter for support role and gear doesn’t matter for control. So you might as well take DPS gear for all 3 roles. The only case where DPS gear isn’t the best is for a healing support type but it means a healer role more than a support and ANet doesn’t want this role in GW2 anyway.

Shadoekin.3928:

Anyone who tries to claim that just anyone can go in with a random build and setup and merely slap on tanky gear is obviously trying to cover up that fact.

Well, on the other hand people seem to imply that putting zerk on 5 players and stacking is an automatic win in PvE.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Given that most of the instant-kill attacks are targetted, stealthing stops the boss from charging it if you were its target. Even for those that are AoE, thieves have a large number of Evade skills. Necros have 0.

Stealth doesn’t disjoint ANYTHING. Neither a spell cast time or channeling nor a projectile in flight

The only way to use stealth to avoid a targeted attack is to stealth before it’s even started. Which has the nice side effect that the mob will just wait for you to get out of stealth to throw it in your face.

Black Box.9312:

It wouldn’t be required. It should just never be EASIER to run without defensive gear than it is with it. Having one person build defensively should not make things more difficult for the other 4 zerkers in the party.

Having some player that doesn’t have any synergy with the rest of the team will never be efficient anyway.

The problem here is that people think you need tank stats. You don’t. You only need the correct weapons, traits and utilities and you can be a support. In fact, the meta speed run teams are done with 5 support classes each boosting each other in a way. One will apply AoE might and Fury, another will reflect projectiles, someone gives full party 100% up protection, one applies constantly vulnerability etc…

You don’t need PVT gear to do any of that, so why can’t you support AND use the highest damaging gear possible?

My opinion is that, in the long run, having everyone use exclusively zerk gear in PvE is good for the game because ANet cannot balance correctly the dungeons for both extremes and so if you are expected to be using only a single gear set, it’s that much easier for them to turn instances into interesting situations with carefully tuned challenges.

As it stands currently, bosses health goes from “hit it till hell freezes over” PVT teams into “blink and you’ll miss it” zerk teams. This is not a compelling environment.

So you want ANet to change the dungeon design so that you require the presence of a tank in the group? Maybe you want a healer too?

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

1 – All classes have a way to avoid insta-kills apart from their dodges, such as stealth, evasion, invulnerability, blocking. The necro is the only class that does not have access to a way to survive a huge damage spike.

Yes indeed. It’s well known that a stealthed thief is invulnerable and I routinely use C&D to soak up the dungeon bosses instant kill attacks.

fadeaway.2807:

What would you say to frequent low damage attacks which are enough to kill you via attrition if you don’t bring enough toughness/healing, mixed with a dodgeable high damage attack?

What would you say to a boss that kills everyone in the room if he isn’t beaten in less than 20s ?

Carighan.6758:

That’s not how balance has to be, though.
What if zerker setups were simply nerfed to no longer provide such a big advantage? Indirectly, too. By making it so that they cannot avoid a certain portion of damage, damage which more defensive setups could easily soak, but a berserker team will have to stop attacking and rezz each other instead?

So basically, you want zerk to be on par with speed/efficiency with tanky specs. So you want zerk to be high risk/high reward and tank to be low risk/high reward?

Arlette.9684:

With that being said, there’re 17 different gear sets in the game atm

Not really. There’s one PvE set and 17 PvP sets. Zerk is for PvE, the rest if the evolving PvP meta.

Inimicus.7162:

Said balance: The final dungeon reward box needs to contain less than 50% of the total loot for the dungeon… more like 30% or less, and the rest needs to be distributed such that skipping anything means a massive reduction in the quality of the overall run

Irrelevant. The speed of clearing all the trash or just the bosses is still in favor of zerk gear. What has skipping to do with the discussion at hand?

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

All it would take to bring Zerker gear in line with other gear is adding frequent, low-damage attacks to PvE enemies. That way, the Zerker characters simply cannot dodge/block absolutely everything like they can now. Cooldowns will become much more important and defensive stats will make more of a difference. Zerker geared players would have to occasionally back off of their target, heal up, and in general play more catiously than they do now.

Or they’ll get more Thieves with offhand pistol smoke field.

People misunderstand the issue with zerk dominance. First, I’d like to say there’s two opposing issues at hand :
- direct damage is better than condition damage
- offensive gear is better than defensive gear

First point : easy to fix. Just up the Armor and lower the HP/healing of all the mobs in the game so that their EHP against direct damage is the same. Another issue is the poor stacking of multiple condition players but so be it. If one Rampager condition player is equivalent to one Zerk direct damage DPS it’ll already be a big improvement.

Second point is the main issue. The problem of GW2 is that damage gear > everything. Why? Because the GW2 “trinity” is damage, control and support. And because GW2 content can be done by any random setup.

What is the gearing choices we have? It’s very linear in fact. There’s on the left “defensive”, on the right “offensive” and gearing means choosing your position on that scale and that’s it. So where is the Damage, Support and Control? There is none.

So, what is the zerker issue? People complaining that Support and Control has no use? Well you know what? Even if ANet remade all dungeons to require one heavy control and one heavy support player in the team to have any chance of success, they’d still be using zerker gear to improve their DPS.

In a nutshell, short of the the Condition/Direct damage flavor choice, gear choice in GW2 is you selecting if you want the dungeon run to be hard and short, of easy and slow (and boring) and there’s nothing ANet can do to fix that short of redoing their whole gear system.

zilcho.7624:

I do believe skill is enough to let you distinguish between actual ability casts and autoattacks. But anything beyond that I just don’t believe. I think it’s more like “oh hey, my random evade dodged that warr’s stun… err I mean I was totally watching for the stun animation all along”.

It’s just confirmation bias. If you always dodge abilities, which is feasible, a lot of the time you’ll dodge something you really wanted to. Then you convince yourself you did it on purpose, ignoring the dozens of times you dodged something you didn’t care about.

There’s an element of self fulfilling prophecy here. I do believe that the current meta is shaped to combat the difficult to read animation and combat.

IE, good players are those that understand you cannot really dodge the important skills except the very very few that are massively telegraphed. And so, having a build that has “more dodges than you need” so that you can use them on cooldown or close is stronger that one that has just enough and tries to use them when it counts.

On another post, Jumper said :

Dodge rolls just don’t feel right to me right now. Even back when watching players like Teldo, when a player hits full endurance he just dodges. Doesn’t matter if its to avoid autoattack damage.

So we got the GW2 PvP meta history of the like :
- full burst
- evade spam
- tanky passive damage that doesn’t care if you dodge (spirit ranger, conditions that proc on crit etc…)
- CC lock burst

Yoji.1420:

If I saw a warrior staggering around, squinting and fumbling all over the place barely able to track my movement I would hardly run away from him shouting in my general direction.

Yes I can hear you shouting, and I find it a hilarious spectacle.

A blind warrior that shouts “Fear Me” in range can see again. The logical conclusion is that warriors are actually humanoid bats in disguise that use the power of echo location to move around even when blind.

Jumper.9482:

Pistol Whip – Increased damage by 15%. Increased initiative cost by 1 to 6 from 5. This ability now dazes for half duration when hitting from the front and stuns when hitting from the side or behind the foe.

Pistol Whip already got a rather massive 3/4s cast time before the stun. It’s hardly a good “interrupt” or meant as one. The stun duration is supposed to be 1/2s which is rather short. Transforming it into a half duration daze is hardly worth mentioning.

If I wanted to improve Pistol Whip risk:reward ratio I’d say, increase the cast time to 1s (or even 1.5s !) and stun duration to 3/4s. Maybe reduce the range on the stun part. Basically, making it more telegraphed but more punishing if it lands. The problem is, not the skill itself, but the rest. The problem is we got instant cast shadowsteps that mean no matter how difficult to setup you make the skill, you just have to press the right key at the right time to make it land. And worse is, one of those keys is F1 so you don’t even have to get an utility for it.

If it weren’t a special rule, I’d solve that making Pistol Whip the only skill that gets interrupts if you shadowstep during cast/channeling.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Yeah the 7 time gate thing is interesting there is a bit of a challenge to communicate something like that clearly

Limited stock NPC selling a required component which caps at 7 items max and refills his stock one item per day. Make it required to use one for each craft. Everything can be explained rather easily in the NPC tooltip.

As for the economic impact of having all 7 crafted at once, as long as the stock starts at 1 for the day you release the patch it shouldn’t affect much.

Travlane.5948:

so if anet finished grammar school it would read:

“Refill YOUR endurance and cure 1 condition on yourself and each near ally”

Except for the pesky fact that that it refills endurance for your allies too you know.

25 skill points is too much I agree. The value is completely tuned for the PvE players that got huge amounts of useless skill points. Thankfully, contrary to GW1 there’s no need to buy the other classes skills here since there’s no dual class XD

Krayiss.4926:

Alot of us dont have 8 char slots so we delete a char when we want to play another class. DO NOT FORCE US INTO PAYING MONEY FOR EXTRA CHARS SLOTS ITS SO LAME.

Any1 else do this?

Please Anet reset them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Don’t be so cheap. The game is B2P so they have to make money somehow to pay for the servers you use. Buy some char slots once and for all and you’ll be ok.

The problem with your reasoning is that you act under the wrong belief that elites are good skills.

They aren’t. The only special thing they have is that they are the only skills you can equip in the last slot. They could the the 3 worse utilities we have by far, we’d still have to choose one of those or go with one empty skill slot.

Skelk Venom tuning is on the base of Venom Share though. As usual with all venoms.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

It seems the simply concept of status checking is beyond your comprehension. Yes, that is what you want but how do you implement something like that concerning projectiles?

By just doing it.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

You will have to create a duplicate of each and every skills (yes, including non-Thieves) and place a switch that swaps a skill when the player is in stealth. To the player, it’s looks like the same skill, but under the hood, there will be a skill without stealth flag and skill with stealth flag. Logically, having two types of every skills is the only way to ensure that Reveal doesn’t trigger on skills with stealth flags.

Whaaaaat? Guys this is a perfect example on why you should never ask non coders counsel on how to code stuff.

They could also, you know, add code like :

if attacker.IsInStealthed:
projectile.ApplyRevealOnDamage = true

Big deal. Look at the thief shortbow and we can discuss slow projectiles. And it has no immobilize skill available.

Once again, it’s not as if adding a cast time makes it that much harder to aim.

1s cast time in no way means pindown will fire a where you were 1s ago though. It won’t really make the skill any less accurate.

IceVyper.6810:

The issue is that people are prevented from purchasing the tier 3 armor because of said underboob.

And I’m prevented from buying the Sylvari T3 light because it’s ugly.

Wait, it’s not ugly, it’s more a matter of opinion, I don’t like it.

Which means I didn’t make a light armor using Sylvari at all.

If you don’t like the cultural human medium T3 set, you shouldn’t have made an human.

The very fact that it isn’t in public but in the game is the reason why such armors exist. This is a game, a fantasy. It’s OK to do stuff that isn’t “allowed” in the real life because of that. It’s even a big reason why we play games in the first place.

Only damage from attacks launched while the thief is in stealth should reveal. Unfortunately, that’s not how it’s done.

But isn’t Fiery Greatsword typeless? So why would improvisation recharge it ?

PopeUrban.2578:

You know, I’ve never thought about it before, but what i thieves for a 1200 range torch set in stead of rifle?

Torch is an offhand in GW2. You can see for example that they are cheaper in dungeon tokens than the other one handed weapon. There’s little chance they’ll make a main hand torch or shield or focus anytime soon, for sure not before they use up all the other options.

Shadow Arts is our healing/support trait line mostly. The Venomous Aura with Leeching Venoms is a kind of heal trait and is improved by healing power. This is why.