Guild Wars 2

Shiren.9532:

I think it’s because warhorn locks you into dagger or scepter. A lot of eles wanted a new mainhand, not a new offhand. Warhorn will always be limited because it locks you into the existing mainhand weapons.

And a new mainhand would lock you into dagger or focus offhand. I don’t see how it’s better that way.

Let’s be honest here. The effort needed to craft a new ascended armor set is huge. I’d go 100% zerk and any survivability/tweaks would be done with jewelry, starting with rings.

MomentofWeakness.1246:

You are seriously exaggerating if you really think that every single player that does WvW would all go to 1 single server…

No but there 0 chance the populations will end up balanced.

Look, even the “I want to play with my friends” thing only makes population imbalance worse. Because if a server has more population, then those players have more friends too. Allowing friends to enter will average into making the population imbalance worse if such a policy was put in place.

MomentofWeakness.1246:

Not really, from day 1 of this game being released Arenanet has always said that they want us as players to “play the game however we want, with whomever we want, without being forced to do things we don’t want to do [I am paraphrasing here but that is the essence of what they said].”

This new change simply goes against their own ideological principles of how the game should be.

At one point, “play how you want” has to make room for practicality and quality of life.

There’s nothing practical or good in letting every single GW2 player enter the same winning WvW server just cause they want to win because it’d destroy the very same WvW people want to enjoy.

dzeRnumbrd.6129:

The servers aren’t full though. Just because Arenanet says it is full doesn’t mean it is. We have no queue on JQ since reset. Does that sound like a full server?

In SEA timezone? This doesn’t matter.

In the server real primetime? Wait until HoT is released and we’ll see if it’s not full.

Aetrion.8295:

That’s one of the main reasons why I think in order to make healing really fit with GW2s sensibilities throwing healing at people needs to be a positive thing even if they aren’t taking damage.

It does feel too much like a win-win situation for heal stat. Either you boost DPS, or you save the life of your team. There’s no risk to that play really so it should NOT be as rewarding as full blown DPS by a long shot.

Fox.3469:

Seriously this is so wrong, there isn’t a class in the game that doesn’t have knockback or blind or fear or daze or stun. Bohoo you have to change a utility skill or you have it on your weapon.

I wish people would stop calling mechanics that encourage you to think to hard.

You know blind doesn’t work correctly agaisnt rapid fire attacks right? At best you mitigate one attack in three. And those are rangers. Not every classes have mantra of distraction for easy ranged interrupts :p

Mostly, I tested as a D/D thief and they aren’t too bad since they down so fast. But their rapid fire does 2500 non crit damage per arrows, and this is before they get their might stacks.

I tried dagger storm and it kinda works with a caveat : you can reflect the killer shot, but not the burning ground it creates and it leaves you standing in it after. Still, except for that it works as well as one can expect.

But mostly, the “problem” with those mobs is that they are another boring very high pressure ranged mob. With rapid attack speed. They are the melee Zerk counter people have been asking to be added to the game.

And my zerk gear was expensive to make, I have 0 intention of going back the ascended route to make another. And no intention to fill up my bags with gear swaps just because of a single mob in the new zones :o This isn’t a fun thing at all to do. I’m NOT buying an extension only to have to start farming a new gear set again. If I wanted a “vertical progression” style MMO I’d have more than enough choices

Just dodge doesn’t work since it eats up your two dodges to clear a full round of rapid fire. If there’s two snipers, or even if you cannot get close enough to kill that lone sniper, the next rapid fire will kill you.

In sPvP, rapid fire rangers aren’t too strong because you get plenty of places to LoS them. The current map doesn’t feel completely fitting for that.

Some classes don’t have the anti projectile uptime or CC required to clear those mobs correctly. I think zerk thief will have a very hard time in that place for example.

Aetrion.8295:

A whole bunch of play styles currently have no useful role at all in PvE content except maybe being regarded as “training wheels”. Arguing against attempts to make things a little more equal, because you think the mere idea of a healer being useful to a group is a worse imposition on you than not ever being able to be part of performance oriented play is to them, basically just shows a huge amount of entitlement and self importance on your part.

Those roles ARE training wheels. And making them more effective will make them effective training wheels. Aka a low risk high reward situation.

You can make those roles higher DPS but only if you make zerk much safer without them losing DPS in the process else it’ll not be balanced. But this will just make the game easier and it’s already too easy.

Fox.3469:

Yeah, if i have to teach you how to knockdown or stun or blind or daze or whatever, common man.

Blind has barely no effect on their rapid fire attack or their ground target dot, let alone the two together.

Exedore.6320:

On Toughness and Diminishing Returns:

As I showed before, Toughness itself does not have diminishing returns as a whole; only the damage reduction portion. However, it does have diminishing effectiveness relative to other stats. After a point, you get more effective HP from adding vitality than adding toughness. To make a character more survivable overall, you want both toughness and vitality, and possibly some healing power.

Well Power is the same. After a point, you get more effective damage inceasing your precision or ferocity (or both) than power.

One can consider those two opposite stats : effective damage and effective HP. The division of the two giving you the time to kill someone.

Effective Damage increases linearly when you increase power, precision (up to 100% crit chance cap) and ferocity. Yes, all those three stats have linear returns on effective damage. But of course the three combined together give us something different. Roughly, effective damage = O(power*precision*ferocity)

Effective HP is much more difficult to work with, because of healing. If we assume say that each player can and will use a single healing skill in a fight and nothing else, effective HP is = O(toughness*vitality*healing)

Which is the same as damage :p

BUT, something to consider which is rather hard to put in maths is : the longer you live, the more times healing power is applied to your survivability. Each extra second of life can mean an extra tick of regen. Every 20s of survival means one more cast of your 20s cooldown heal.

In that sense, effective HP scales MUCH faster from healing power than toughness*vitality*healing. When you get enough HP and toughness that you can cast one extra heal before you die, you get that much closer to casting yet another heal. Up to a point where you can outheal the damage received. Which means you’ve reached a point where you have infinite effective HP. Something that can only be reached through a scale like O(thoughness^healing power) or something absurd like that.

This risk of infinite effective HP and the explosive nature of the scaling of that through the synergy between toughness and healing power is the reason why healing power has such a tiny contribution to heals.

All that is why you cannot really compare the scaling of damage and survivability : because the game is trying to walk a thin line between “impossible to survive” and “impossible to kill” and that any slight increase on one side or another can send you straight into an extreme.

Well their way to make the place challenging is so similar to Soutshsun Cove : loads of rapid fire wielding ranged mobs. ¤Fun¤ ensues :p

Although there’s a clear tell for their rapid fire, the duration of the attack is so long you cannot dodge it correctly.

The problem with snipers is that they follow that burst skill with a rather long duration high DPS rapid fire type skill which is pretty annoying and dodging it entirely requires two dodges in the first place.

And since this attack tracks, it does feel very anti zerk.

Let’s not forget also that their chanelled shot seems to leave a trail of fire on the ground that pulses and hurts at rather high frequency too and gives them LOADS of might stacks at each pulse. And NPCs are dumb. If you see what I mean :p

Of course stealing is possible. Just unselect all targets and press F1. Bam, bountiful thief procs and gives you swiftness.

The snipers feel overtuned, all the other mobs are weaklings. Typical GW2 balance though.

Revenants still don’t have underwater weapons either.

The beta account seems to be a single copy done somewhat before the BWE started. You cannot do anything about it for now.

Well 1 condition is already quite a lot. Also for swiftness I’d take … Trickery. With bountyful thief.

Hylgeriak.8250:

oh yeah, back in those glorious days…“6/8 lf 2 healer” – half an hour later “kitten this kitten, no healers around…I call it a day, cya!”

Yeah.

Thank god for Hero healers though. With the correct build they probably play much better than most human healers anyway XD

There’s the Zealot gear set with Power major and Precision+Healing. It’s craftable too. Keeper is the name of the ascended set version.

Well ok replace Zelda with Doom 1 or even the first Wolfenstein, the one that is older than Doom 1.

It’s just that you saying “the HP system is the standard system that was designed around having some form of trinity” is stupid. There has been HP in games for ages before a notion of trinity even got conceived.

Terrorsquad.4802:

Look at the date, March 2015, far before HoT got announced.
Who are we to say that concept art is not an important HoT Story NPC?

If it really meant this was Sniper Thief Class Specialization, Im quite sure they wouldnt be that stupid to already post it March 2015.

I don’t really see Thief-like armor either.

There are no facts..

You misread. The concept art is even older than that since it was uploaded to the wiki 5 years ago in 2010 !

Bot developers probably know already how to autoloot without the feature anyway.

BrooksP.4318:

The issue seems to be that GW2 combat system is designed in a group or jack of all trades style whereas the HP system is the standard system that was designed around having some form of trinity.

I didn’t knew that the first Zelda game on NES was designed around having some form of trinity. Or maybe I misunderstood the concept of HP in that game.

No you don’t see ? 3 Legendaries. Which weapon type goes in a pack of three?

That’s right, underwater weapons! It’ll be a spear, a trident and an harpoon gun of course.

Considering ANet is still working on the Warrior, it’s increasingly likely it’s the thief reveal next.

Of course, it could be the forge or the druid too :p

There’s quite a nice condition removal trait in trickery you know :o

And seriously? Forced to take Acrobatics? The trait line is kind of meh no matter how you look at it you know.

Thief with weapon cooldowns? No chance

It’s also a 5 year old image. It was probably from a time in dev where ANet was thinking about Rifle thief.

After all that time passed, you really cannot make much out of it. If the Thief didn’t get the rifle at the game release, there must have been a reason. But now that 3 years passed, the game changed, the understanding of the game by ANet changed a lot too.

Seriously, our ranged options were constantly nerfed, starting with a Shortbow range nerf, cluster arrow travel speed drastically slowed etc…

Do you really believe that after all those long range fight nerfs, we’ll suddently get a 1200 (or +) range weapon with more damage and/or burst than what we currently have? It just makes no sence.

If thief gets a 1200 range rifle, it’ll be weaker damage than our current tools.

It works for skills currently in cooldown only. I don’t mean in cooldown when you apply chill, or those that enter cooldown while chilled.

While you are chilled, you can see all your skill cooldown timers turn blue and go more slowly. That’s what chill does. Spending 1s of chill only shaves out 0.6s of your skill cooldowns.

Elementalist attunements are cooldowns too and are affected by Chill. It’s a common complaint by Eles that chill nerfs them so much. On the other hand, they are so full of condition clear … Best time to chill an elementalist is right after they leave water attunement.

Zero Day.2594:

Sagat.3285:

There is nothing left to nerf.

Traps. They haven’t nerfed those yet. And underwater skills.

They nerfed the Spear assault thing already, don’t give them more ideas :o

Thief went from nice underwater to completely boring.

This has been complained about since before the game release. And they still didn’t do anything visible.

Except that the Druid is getting a caster style staff and the datamined one looks exactly like the one on the thief image http://i.imgur.com/xA8qvVk.png on a posture that is much more reminiscent of a martial usage of a staff than a caster one.

Also, your analyses suck since ANet already clearly said that underwater weapons aren’t getting used outside water (at least for the first elite spec round)

DiscoJacen.1590:

Don’t you see that the ONLY thing they did was just change labels on servers? We just went from full to medium big woop. We’re not medium in WvW pop, we’re empty. They labeled everything as medium to avoid lowering prices too much and/or avoid admitting that there is a population problem. DO YOU REALIZE how kittened up that is?!

Yeah I think ANet should label your server “Empty”. I’m sure it’ll attract lots of WvW players that way.

GW2 cannot mix and match armor pieces of different type in the first place. We used to be able to at least preview a mix and match and in some situation, big rendering issues happened. I guess the different types have different shader settings or something.

So you cannot mix and match outfits either probably for this reason. Or rather, they made the outfits all one piece to not have to deal with that mix issues.

arenta.2953:

they changed Ele’s “sepcialization page” from sword to horn

they can do it to theif.

There never was a sword Ele “specialization page”

Tyr.6097:

I have still a little hope, that the elite spec is for rifle and could have some traits that affect pistols. The whole mess about pistols is depressing.

I think it’d be weird having to buy HoT and use an elite spec to improve core weapon. My bet is that none of the elite spec traits will affect pistols no matter what.

It might have synergy with pistol sure, but traits directly affecting it? Unlikely.

Tyr.6097:

For me, it was always a problem. It sucks, not having any long range in certain encounters where everyone and his grandma can reach the target, while you standing nearby doing nothing.

The only encounter I remember it was a problem was the TA tree with spiders which was removed.

Sigmoid.7082:

I wouldnt say chill is weak at all. The things it does are pretty strong, reducing movement speed by 66% and tripling cooldowns. Its just that its not readily enough available like other conditions that it has its effects felt and is a nuisance. It also has skills that remove it specifically because its a movement impairing condition.

If chill would be reliably reapplied all the time then i feel it would be something much stronger but anet has everything granting chill on low duration ( see sigils and runes and most ice fields ) or behind a few long casts ,awkward mechanics or ICDs.

Which is kind of proof that ANet considers Chill OP and doesn’t want us to have too much of it.

You might find the skills that apply chill weak, but the condition itself for sure isn’t.

SlyDevil.3952:

The twirl attack hits in all directions, I’m not sure if it’s at the same time though. If it is sweeping from left to right it could remove the blind on a previous player.

It clearly happens even when I solo a tentacle and it’s always when you reduce a tentacle HP to 0 while it’s attacking or just about to attack.

The permanent retaliation from hounds is the most boring and annoying PvE mob feature the game ever implemented XD Just let it die.

Yeah it’s basically that. If you kill a tentacle, it goes invulnerable until it retreats in the ground rather that die. So if you kill a tentacle while it’s doing it’s whirl knockback, it turns invulnerable and purges all conditions at once, finishes the attack which now will not miss, then it does the retreat in the ground animation.

So it’s rather easy to control : if it’s about to do the knockback and die at the same time, hold off on DPS until the attack actually misses.

Try throwing it in the Mystic forge and it should display say that the item counts as “Spark”. Or maybe it’ll say it counts as some other item and you are sad but I really think it’ll count as “Spark” :p

ReaverKane.7598:

We also have clear evidence that datamined stuff aren’t final, as shown by the datamined skills for sword that was then replaced by warhorn on Tempest.
Datamined stuff isn’t final and basing yourself strongly on what’s been datamined is setting yourself up for disappointment (aka every elementalist main who was psyched for sword main hand).
I’m not really going to speculate much, it can be going either way, but i’m going to say this, Arena net is kind of compulsive about patterns, and its not the first time they killed something just so it fits the pattern even if it really doesn’t make sense (as in when they maimed Consuime Conditions to make it “feel” like a Corruption skill).

True, but still there are different levels of certainty with datamined stuff. A few sword skills that look like copies of dagger skills is very cheap. Having done artworks for a thief staff traitline and having modeled the ingame weapons already (staff and the revenant shield) is another level. Those are much more expensive for ANet and they had basically no reason to start art producing those unless they were rather confident it’ll be the elite spec weapon.

Gav.1425:

Will reflect still defend you, at least, from projectiles?

Ventari Revenants will be rolling in their graves at this… and, yes, in the grave if reflecting gets gutted.

Ventari tablet can only absorb and not reflect projectiles : http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Protective_Solace

Sell them to an NPC then

And rifle will replace P/P and Shortbow ranged weapon role …

Straegen.2938:

In my case even more traits went belly up as Long Range and Master of Deception were removed. The P/P builds lack a built in stealthing component and had limited movement so MoD was very useful to get Blinding Powder, Shadow Refuge and Shadow Step back quickly.

Its like Anet looked at the P/P build and went, nope too powerful. Then looked at the PU mesmer and said, nope not powerful enough.

Master of Deception is still available : https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Concealed_Defeat

Ayrilana.1396:

Yeah. What’s to prevent someone who has completed the highest fractal level of swamp from advertising a service to host it so everyone can do it repeatedly to progress their fractal levels? You can easily reach 100 in a day at that rate. I’m also pretty sure that swamp would be used for the daily tiered rewards as well.

That’s assuming that :
- swamp ever shows up between 50 and 100
- the underwater fight exploit isn’t fixed
- their fight isn’t rebalanced to be more in line with same level fractal difficulties