Not only zergs are faster by constant application of swiftness, but they can more easily catch up with loners since it takes one forward zergling to put the fleeing people into combat and drown them in a sea of players.
There is a way to discourage zerging, it’s called add body blocking. Here is a video illustrating a mindless zerg getting owned because of body blocking. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdNn5TZu6R8
We already got 20s long skill delay at times, I don’t want to make it 2 minutes :o
Retaliation needs harsh diminishing returns when it procs multiple times from a single skill and that’s all. That way you don’t destroy the viability of the boon for small to very small scale encounters and it doesn’t become stupid when using aoe multihit attacks against zergs.
The fundamental gameplay won’t change. Even if you subscribe to the belief that the hugely chaotic gameplay due to the number of gap closers, teleports, evades, mass AoE etc etc isn’t a problem, there is still little opportunity for insight in play. What insight is there to be gained from watching two bunkers fight it out, or watching a frankly basic mechanic of portal + illusion of life? Battles are too short to talk about what teams may ‘try’ to do because by the time the casters are done talking, one team would probably be dead due to the fact that DPS >> sustain in all areas of the game.
Conditions come down to frankly a spam fest, it isn’t an issue of “oh well I’ll cover X condition with sets Y and Z” its “Let’s just get as many on point as possible because they can remove 4, 5, 6, 7+ conditions or more in a single CD cycle”. The only class you can currently effectively cover conditions is against the warrior and it is getting buffed to bring it in line with the other classes. Explain to me how having less viable ways of using mechanics is a step up from GW1? Your only option is pressure. Fair enough if they had replaced old strategies with new strategies, but clearly they haven’t. The most complex thing you could do is probably spam conditions, fear into a crowd and then epidemic.
I agree with those parts so much! GW2 PvP is a game of spam. Spam AoEs, spam conditions, spam evades, spam dodges, spam boons, spam particles effects, spam distracting kitten on the screen (mesmers are the worse)
This is chaotic, unreadable, unplayable and completely unfun to watch.
The problem with Arrow Carts, is the very idea of an Arrow Cart. They don’t respect any kind of physic and are ripe for abuse an exploiting because of that.
Also, whoever though that making “limited” camera angles be the restriction on a siege weapon aiming wasn’t thinking about making a robust cheat free game.
It seems like throwing grenades would be a reasonable response to a large group of enemies, but they are actually a much better 1v1 weapon due to the random spam and long duration of retaliation in groups.
GW2 in a nutshell : AoE is for 1v1, single target skills for zerg fights
Retaliation is worse than confusion. At least with the later you have a clear feedback and just need to remove the condition on yourself.
Removing retaliation from a zerg? Most classes cannot remove boons at all, let alone remove them from a zerg. Also it’s impossible to see if they have the boon up among the mass.
You have two weapon sets no? Hammer biggest weakness is blinds. When you face a blind spam thief you need to use your other weapon set or you could surprise Earthshaker him when you aren’t blind and chain stun him from there.
There is a high chance the thief has the trait that procs a blind around him when he drops to 25% HP or less though so be careful at that moment not to waste an important CD.
On Desolation right now, we just failed a Grenth event on the last part, after killing the priest. There was a Champion Risen Spider that took a full minute to display at least, happily mowing down people left and right helped by her seemingly endless legion of culled out suicidal risens.
I kid you not, there was only 3 mobs visible at most during that full minute and judging from the damage received and the number of players there must have been 20-30 of them around in reality.
The home instance of the Order of Whispers is the likely culprit here. It’s a POI that is outside the normal maps but still counts for the global achievement.
Stealth only prevents seeing the target and targeting it. So any skill that requires a target cannot be aimed correctly. But if you start it before stealth, it will work exactly as usual.
For us mortals, however, protection means that your enemy has to do 33% more damage to kill you, which is easily the difference between whether you survive to use your heal when it comes off cooldown or whether you can live until you have the endurance to dodge that next shatter from the mesmer or whether that next backstab will drop you, etc.
Actually, Protection means you have to do 50% more damage to kill someone. So it’s equivalent to 50% more effective HP.
Was fun, a lot of Deso players found themselves on the Vizunah side. Vizunah players showed in green as “Desolation Invaders” and Deso players showed their name :p
Disabling right-click to attack/interact is certainly the safest first approach to this issue. There are two problems, though. Anytime you have camera-look and targeting on the same input, you will have conflicting behavior. There isn’t a bug that targets are randomly selected, but rather the game trying to be smart at recognizing clicks versus camera movement. Even when you think you’re perfectly clicking on a target, most of the time you’re also moving the camera a tiny, tiny bit. There is a small threshold that determines whether your tiny movement should actually be a target selection. Lowering this threshold will reduce the chances of this happening, but is one of those numbers where we need to sit on it for a while to see if it ‘feels right’. The problem could also be solved by completely separating the different functionality of selection, auto-attacking, and camera movement. However, completely splitting those is not something we’re prepared to work on at the moment as it is a much broader-reaching change. I hope this helps clear up what’s happening and what steps we’ll take to change it. Thank you again for all the feedback!
But left click already selects! There’s no need to take months of fine tuning the tolerance of right click camera move until it feels right if you disabled completely the right click select/double click effect!
Well, except the classes with lots of vigor and invulnerability or blocks, like elementalist and guardian. Or the ranger with a lot of evade on his melee weapon skills too. For sure they can get very strong healing.
So we got mesmer, thief, elementalist, guardian, maybe ranger too. That’s the majority of the cast already :p
the problem was that the patriarch’s autoattack cleave has a way to high range, cripples AND does way too much damage. a poorly designed encounter so to say. when you expect one player to kite this thing and 4 others to load up traps you cant expect the kiting player to have constant vigor + dodge EVERY attack or get destroyed completely
I remember failing in a PuG on that boss exactly for that reason. The ghostbuster thing wasn’t that great but we were managing it slowly. But once it was time to DPS the boss properly, he’d tear our melees apart with that autoattack. Often my warrior got hit three times in a single swing losing 75% of a full HP bar and getting a strong bleed covered by a long duration cripple. Such a pain! Remove the conditions, heal as you can, try to attack the boss, get hit AGAIN by that cleave attack while you were nearly perfectly in his back getting dropped to 5% HP with that bleed ticking again, covered and far too few condition removal to handle it.
I’m pretty sure I could have gone all ranged and slowly kill it but it sucks having to do so. ANet should never have created bosses that hurt melee that much and give all classes ranged weapons, it just gave them a free ride to create bad encounters.
Advice to budding developers (because Anet’s won’t learn): NEVER put stealth classes in a mulitplayer game.
Well, stealth is alright if it is implemented properly.
Look at games like LoL/Dota – there is stealth there too but because there are counters (wards, dust of appearance) and because stealthed characters don’t have the best mobility and burst in the game it can be balanced.
You also can’t stealth every 4 seconds.
No but Weaver (in Dota) can get invisible 4s every 6s and moves at the max possible speed for the whole duration while moving through all the creatures/players as if they weren’t here and damaging them in the process :p
Or there’s Riki which is permanently invisible except 1.5s after doing an action that breaks it before he goes back unseen.
And nearly every single hero or item that goes invisible gets bonus movement speed in the process.
And Nyx Assassin got one of the strongest burst in the game he can do from out of stealth, very well capable of killing in a single rotation of about 1-2s any weaker hero :p
But yeah, there are tools used to reveal the invisible heroes around. Which also have their counters all. Dust can be purged from yourself, see invisible wards can be destroyed and don’t move and don’t last long and the gem of true sight drops on death so that you can loot it and use it yourself, or destroy it instead.
Although I won’t enter the debate on “there has been a nerf, no there hasn’t”, I did get 6 salvages in a row giving no ectos before already, it’s not something new.
In SAB, all the players were rescaled to the size of an average asura. There’s no reason they cannot rescale all players to an average human size in the mists either.
I’m under the impression that Thief has access to more dodge skills than other classes
Even counting a sword mesmer which gets a weapon skill giving 2s of evade followed by 6s of cooldown and a class tool giving him invulnerability nearly on demand?
I’ve done 85 with a master kit since the patch. I never got more than 1 ecto at a time, 48 ectos in total. Now if the 90% ectos was still holding the chance of getting only 48 ectos out of that sample size is near 0. I think it’s the lack of the 2 and 3 drops that is messing with the average.
Geotherma I prefer using GuildWarsTrade to see the a more frequent sampling with less averaging.
That curve change looks so brutal and stabilizes so quickly right after, it looks more like a couple speculators making a stock of ectos than a supply change.
(’cept the infusions are really awkward, do they even add any stats other than damage against guards?)
I’m hoping they are +4 or +5 Power/Precision/etc in addition to the +Guard damage/defense, but I’m not getting my hopes up.
I’d rather them have the agony resist built in. So far that effect is the only thing worth spending a dime to get infusions. And that way we won’t have to farm two ascended sets to do both WvW and fractals.
1. Separate soloq
2. Reduce spam in the game. Skill spam, dodge spam, aoe spam, particle effects spam. This game is in dire need of some tightening.
3. Automatch system that actually tries to make sure all 10 players are here before it starts the game. Look at how DotA 2 does it if you don’t understand what it means.
No they are not too hard. ALL the karka abilities are avoidable and are pretty kitten obvious when they are going to come.
Southsun has the best designed mobs in the game, i hope in the future we see more of the same style but with mobs with less hp and just more of them in general. But are they too strong? Not if you can play even in a basic level… they are just challenging then.
Southstun does not have the best designed mobs in the game
- Reef Shalk : complete pushovers. No threat at all. They are even worse underwater since they don’t do anything at all except attacking once every 4s.
- Reef Rider : complete pushovers. No threat at all AND a huge hp bar that takes ages to kill
- Reef Drake : do I need to talk about those?
Karkas, meh they aren’t bad but still could use some improvements really. Mostly, I’d say the problem are the young karkas.
- Very ambiguous model making the back hard to see
- Opening attack that makes them total pushovers for classes that can reflect projectiles on a low cooldown and kind of a pain for the others
Then the Veterans ones are weird too. They look the same as the non veterans except they include a rush attack with no visible cue that practically kills anyone that gets trampled by it, and in events where some of those are mixed with normal ones it’s a pain for no real reason
Flanking strike is not overpowered. It’s only useful against classes with lots of boons. Moving on.
And that’s fine. FS was buffed to counter classes with a lot of boons. I get that. Instead of just making FS more reliable with better boon removal, they added:
-FS does not need to hit to activate LS
-Unblockable
-High Damage (4-5 K crit is a bit high for a spammable unblockable boon removing attack)
They just need to tone down the damage and not make it unblockable. Bottom line is, for 1 init, this skill is kittening awesome.
The old FS was already unblockable on the hit that removed boons. No point in having a blockable boon removing attack because of Aegis you know.
If you want to create build diversity than limiting the options is the wrong approach. I would rather have more bunker killer specs, if the devs feel like bunkers are too strong, than nerfing bunkers directly. This would promote build diversity way better.
The way I see it, the amulets are not much customisability. They are rather limited. And since they go to such extremes, don’t they actually limit the choices by making some combos that are too synergetic plain better?
Trait lines on the other hand are very fine grained choices we can make. And they got a lower cap on the total stats you can get. And they present an interesting choice in the traits themselves.
As I said, I won’t pretend it’s a miracle solution but it might work.
On one hand, we got some saying that defensive amulets are the problem. Others say the offensive amulets are as much as a problem.
Which is why ANet HAS to try a week or two the “no amulet for everyone” mode No more OP bunker build, no more insane burst, everything is decided by the traits and trait lines you take
FOTM doesn’t really give you laurels. I don’t find them useful for dailies. It’s not a bad way to get the rings though, much better than with laurels even.
I noticed a similar problem against Drake broodmothers in Karka land. I’d get hit by their attack that applies a single long duration stack of poison (and 0 other condition), and if I used signet of agility too quickly (instead of waiting like, 3-4s or so) the poison wouldn’t be removed.
There is something fishy going on with conditions from some mobs that make them uncleansable shortly after you receive them or something.
That’s not a bad idea really. ANet said in the sPvP chats that thief base damage was too low which is why they have to gear up with little to no defense. And they got too strong of a burst at the same time?
I wouldn’t be surprised to see a slight reduction in backstab damage and maybe HS to go with a sharp increase in dagger autoattack damage.
At times, PvE in this game gets so annoying, so random. Are those plain bugs or is that veteran supposed to do stuff like that. The attack came instantly at melee range.
Pray remember this is a level 60 area, during a level 60 event that isn’t supposed to be a group one. A warrior got around 12k HP here without vitality gear.
Let’s not mention the fact that mob also hits every second for 1000 damage with rockets.
Why does it feel like half the hard PvE content in GW2 is either mobs with instant cast 90% HP bar removal skills with no visible warnings or constant DPS pressure through attacks that are practically invisible like those tar elementals?
Most people, the vast majority, don’t care much about ascended gear. The people who most care about it are hard core WvWers and min-maxers. I’m not convinced either group makes up the bulk of the population of the game.
So basically, we got two populations in GW2 : the hardcore WvWers and the min-maers that complain about ascended gear, and the people that don’t care that the gear exists?
Pray tell me then, is there someone that is happy that the gear exists at all? :p
The only way to make a boiling oil trait worth learning is if it allows us to replace the pot of oil with the Iron Forgeman from Sorrow’s Embrace story mode.
From the update preview:
“Now you can purchase Ascended rings and amulets and upgrade your WvW abilities with six new Infusions that give your character special WvW bonuses! Just speak to the new Laurel and Badge Merchants on each map”
My guess is that we will be able to benefit from 1 unique infusion for each piece of ascended equipment. If this is true players will basically need to get a second set of ascended accessories for these infusions, not just one extra piece like for the utility amulets.
I see those 6 more as 2 offensive, 2 defensive and 2 utilitarian infusions.
Prediction :
- (O) Increased damage when using siege
- (O) Increased damage against guards/mercenaries
- (D) Decreased damage from siege
- (D) Decreased damage from guards/mercenaries
- (U) Increased WXP gain
and one last utility :p
I find it funny that the ascended apologists in this thread don’t even notice the new special WvW infusions ANet is adding. They’ll probably go far beyond a simple +5 to a stat and will be required to be optimal in WvW. It does depend on how useful they’ll turn out though but it it’s something like 5% more PvP damage or 5% less PvP damage (offensive or defensive), it’ll be required to have them to be optimal.
In a sense, it’s even worse than the added stats on ascended compared to Exotic.
Probably a lucky crit by a thief using the +20% damage on players under 50% HP and you where under 25% HP too for the highest HS range.
HS spam is bad because it does ridiculously weak damage on high HP targets, thus making the thief waste a lot of initiative. But the skill IS still very strong on a target under 25% HP. Slightly weaker than backstab.
