Guild Wars 2

So you talk about not using a slaying sigil in an ascended offhand cause it’s too expensive to swap them around? Sure makes sense.

All that P/P discussion though made me want a P/P set to replace my shortbow in some specific PvE. In particular I mean the kind of solo bosses that I don’t want to melee at all like the dredge fractal final bosses but where AoE is of little use.

It’ll sure improve my DPS in those situations, I wonder why I didn’t think about it :p You can even make a very potent P/P build while using only two pistols staggered between the weapon swaps and use the acro trait for initiative on swap. All that for only two weapons.

Well one can make a warrior/elem in GW1 :p

Well, it’s not THAT unpredictable considering you saw him cast BV first, then enter stealth.

Also, BV can be stun breaked. And as far as I’m concerned, there isn’t many other ways a thief can actually stun you to justify not using your break skill.

MattyP.6954:

Why? Like any mechanic there’s counterplay. Why not interrupt the heal? Or poison? Or chill to increase the cd?

What’s your point here? You were talking about two completely skill balanced players. I don’t see a situation where they’ll both be completely unable to use any healing. Especially considering so much healing happens kind of passively.

Also, can a guardian even interrupt another guardian Shelter in the first place?

Todd.8162:

stof.9341:

Sigils always apply like Power stat applies.

A “cheap” offhand will work wonders for a weapon that is pure support, often like a warhorn, or pure condition damage like torch. You WILL still lose some of those valuable stats in the process though (Power/etc…).

Agree that it would take some spreadsheet & testing to determine if benefit from sigils outperforms loss of power.

Actually no not really. As I said, sigils always work no matter what quality of your weapon.

Unless you are talking about equipping a level 59 or lower weapon, thus losing access to the superior sigils, there’s nothing to compare here. But it’s ultra cheap to get even a level 80 green weapon anyway.

MattyP.6954:

Let’s put it this way: If stats were balanced against eachother, a duel between a Guardian with Nomad Stats and a Guardian with Berzerker Stats (skills, skill level, and traits being the same) should take about the same time as if both of the players had Celestial Stats. That is clearly not the case.

Running glass should be difficult, and, in PvE, it isn’t. Where’s the Risk/Reward calculus?

Most stats kind of work like that. Unfortunately, healing itself works on a whole different scale than other game mecanics. When the combo of your thoughness + healing allows you to survive a full healing skill cooldown cycle, you kind of achieve complete immunity to your attacker. Even if you aren’t close to immunity, you might get out of it a huge and disproportionate TTK.

There IS a reason why healing power scales soo poorly and this is it.

So, since healing doesn’t mesh well with the other stats, you end up with those “unbalanced” stats.

Zerker isn’t one stat, it’s 3 stats.

And it’s not one stat that outshines other in PvE, it’s all the offensive type stats that outshine the defensive type stats.

Sinister might very well become meta for some classes/build soon. I heard that engineer condition might be more DPS than direct damage already. You’ll note that Sinister is 3 offensive stats too.

And why do offensive stats outshine defensive ones? Because they actually matter.

The defensive stats are purely passive benefits. The offensive ones require active actions from the user to matter. They are more skilled. If you put in place a meta where builds with 1 offensive+2 defensive stats are better than 3 offensive, essentially you are enforcing a situation where bad play is more efficient than good play.

I don’t see that happening ever.

Sigils always apply like Power stat applies.

A “cheap” offhand will work wonders for a weapon that is pure support, often like a warhorn, or pure condition damage like torch. You WILL still lose some of those valuable stats in the process though (Power/etc…).

Except for thief, you use your main hand damage range stat for skills #1 to #3, and your offhand damage range stat for #4 to #5.

Thief is the same except for #3 which usually does one attack with main hand, and another with offhand, not always in that order.

The item bonuses to power/precision/etc… always matter though, just same as your helmet’s Power stat helps you punch stuff harder.

Damage can go down, but only if all sustain/heals go down in a similar proportion.

Nobody likes fighting a tank for 5 minutes without outcome.

MattyP.6954:

If you want to make a difference and stop gear elitism, then ANet needs to make it so that Glassy Gear sets clear runs quickly yet inconsistently and Tanky Gear sets clear runs more slowly yet more consistently.

This is what GW2 needs for sure! Random bursts of damage that randomly kill glass speced players.

It’ll surely be fun.

You know that when you select a Thief, you can see if he has Basilisk Venom applied to his weapon right?

It only uses 50 energy, not 100 :o

BV used to be instant cast too, on top of “unbreakable”.

On the topic of Karl balance, it IS a matter of balance, and something I guess should just not be commented on.

Who’s fault is it : the dev that tries to maintain some semblance of power level or the one that promotes power creep?

Rin.1046:

aspirine.5839:

BV should perhaps get a nice stack of poison applied. Would 10 stacks of poison be too much

As we already have a poison venom, how about adding 5 stacks of vulnerability, per application, to BV instead?

Skale Venom already does vulnerability.

What about a few stacks of Burning? :p

Basilisk Venom stuns for 2s only if you wait for the first stun to run off to apply the second charge so it’s kind of worse than a real 2s stun.

The only way for ANet to solve that problem is to devalue the sprockets into insignificance.

Broom.2561:

I personally like what they did in Age of Conan. You CANNOT complete raids if you don’t have members of ALL classes. There are no useless professions. And speed runs are impossible.

Unless each and every single dungeon/raid in Age of Conan is a timed tower defense game that can only ever be completed after you survive for 10 minute exactly, then speed runs are possible. Because two runs will take a different time to complete and so people will try for the shortest possible time.

Heck, people made a speed run for Monopoly on the NES.

Well the good side is, now that Ricochet and it’s kind of balancing nightmare is gone, you can push for more power in P/P to make up for the fact the set is kind of weak :p

It’s a similar issue in Venom Share : the sharing is so strong the non shared venoms need to be pitifully weak.

For starters, improving base the damage and bleeds of the autoattack would be nice I suppose.

Technically, the reveal on hit from the engineer wrecks a whole bunch of thief builds and utilities :o

The 10s CD on legend swap in combat, matching the weapon swap CD system from the time legend swap was meant to replace that?

In PvE, most classes use weapon swap for having extra cooldowns, not as a convenience swap between melee and ranged :o

There’s little to no PvE outside dungeons where you can get caught up irremediably and unpredictably with a melee weapon and cannot switch to a ranged one.

There’s very little situations in fact in outdoor PvE where a melee weapon won’t work well.

Nope. My guardian doesn’t run away, he dies trying!

Misguided.5139:

That’s fine, but I still (as many others) have a problem with the lack of weapon swap. You just argued (indirectly) that most revenants will be running around with swords (since that’s the high direct damage weapon set). What if I want to switch to hammer to deal with an annoying enemy?

Well, just equip it? My guardian runs around with a greatsword and a mace/focus in offhand, and switches to a scepter when needed.

FrostSpectre.4198:

Foes who have description: “Bleeds”
But in fact inflict bleeding with their attacks, rather than bleeding themselves.

“Retreat”, I think it should be named “Incoming” instead.

I can’t help thinking about https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk each time my Guardian uses that shout.

skowcia.8257:

Haha. Theres barely any resistance to cover your own self conditions let alone enemy one. The olny thing that is worth considering is boon strip but then again i play classes that doesnt have access to boonrip and are completely fine. 10%+ stats is no big deal either, i rather get (fixed) Jalis or Glint as they will offer me much more.

But those are numbers that can change a lot in between patches. As I said, it does feel like the revenant skills have mostly placeholder numbers.

fuzzyp.6295:

In a similar vein, I remember way back when some saying that originally there were options planned in the character select screen that included ‘Elonian’, ‘Canthan’, ‘Ascalonian’ or ‘Krytian’ or something like that for your characters background. I don’t remember where I read it or if it was even true but I always kinda wished they had kept it.

starlinvf.1358:

That part of the missions always struck me odd. From a new player perspective, with on insight into the lore other then what the game shows you, you’d have NO idea what the difference between the 4 sub-sets of humans are. The question itself is also kind okittenward. “We’ll have to hurry to save your sister. But first, would you mind filling out this census form?”

Those two remarks go hand in hand. There was probably a birth option to choose your origins (with maybe a restriction on the char builder to look correctly?). Which once it was removed, pushed the writers to do a small hack in the corresponding story part to fill the missing info.

Thieves damage now is 100% replaced by old style conditions. As a corollary, two thieves damage will not stack with each other in anyway.

Aberrant.6749:

Precursors have such a low drop chance that having 3 times that (300% mf) isn’t going to make much of a difference.

No actually, it has a huge impact. You should get three times as many precursors (btw, 300% mf is more like 4 times the drop rate)

What you wanted to say I guess is that having 300% mf won’t be noticeable.

Well that’s your mistake here. Make a zerk warrior and just press Berserk Stance into Rampage when the thieves attack

It’s in the second part of the PS, the line where you decide to save your sister. Logan asks that I guess to select what your sister looks like. So that you don’t have a Canthan looking sister while you yourself are Elonian for example.

skowcia.8257:

Unless weapon skills wont get modified based on legend theres inst any reason to mix Mallyx with something else than mace. Not to mention that these attack speed modifiers are stupid and they always ending up being broken. Just ask ally to get quickness.

That’s actually wrong. There’s not really a reason you cannot take Mallyx in a power based build. The legend does give you loads of resistance which is useful by itself. A boon strip talent, an elite that improves all your stats by 10%. A talent that moves people around. A heal that removes all conditions at once.

Add on top of that the elite form that copies your conditions around you. Applying weakness, slow, blind or vulnerability around you is useful, even as a power build!

I completely see myself switching to Mallyx with a dual sword setup in a condition heavy situation to get loads of resistance and send back the CC style conditions to the attacker.

And once again, most of the DPS revenant issues are due to weapon coefficients and condition application rate from those. Which are just numbers that need tweaking first, and mostly a situation where the weapon set meant to be high direct damage wasn’t available in the first place.

When was the last time you saw a main hand mace warrior in PvE for example?

Magic Find only increases the chance to find something. So if the guy with 0% magic foind couldn’t ever get a precursor to drop, then 10000% magic find wouldn’t help either.

Basaltface.2786:

Or the boss requires you to do a little bit of everything and then you are screwed. “Oh man, i wish i had the (fictional) block skill equipped, but i dont need the rest of the legend it comes with”. " oh come on ,now he goes ranged and i got my swords equipped". “Darn it i cant catch the thief running away cause i got the staff equipped, i also got the dwarf so i could get myself a speed buff to catch up but the staff got no blast finishers”

Actually, the staff got a skill you can use to chase and catchup people XD

Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, nowhere in GW2 do you have a situation where a boss randomly pops out from a wall and engages you without warning. You always know what is coming so you can prepare before the fight. If the fight as a phase with completely required range, then just go in the fight with a hammer. DPS won’t be optimal in the melee phase but it’ll not be that bad.

DresdenAllblack.1249:

I could care less bout meta. But with the other classes I can still play a number of different ways because I can still burn things down. On Rev I couldn’t, at least this weekend I couldn’t

Just consider this : the problem with the revenant weapons was probably that the number tunning wasn’t done at all. For example, the mace/axe set had very bad condition application numbers.

Nobody should assume anything about the revenant weapon coefficients/condition application rates after playing the beta because the numbers are probably all going to change.

Numbers :o 8s might be too long for sure :p

Or maybe that elite stealth shouldn’t unlock the sneak attacks.

The weapons aren’t really tied into the legends. The only caveat is the condition legend requires the condition weapons.

But then again, Mallyx legend can be used by berserkers as an anti-condition role : lots of resistance, elite that gives base stat bonuses and application or non condition damage based conditions. All that can be used by a zerk player. So you use say a build of Shiro+Mallyx with Sword/Sword. And once the boss you fight enters it’s heavy condition usage phase, you switch to Mallyx.

Or you fight a boss that is far too hard in melee, just equip a hammer beforehand in Shiro stance.

Or you fight a heavy CC situation, Shiro + Dwarf for protection and stability.

This slot is actually a completely separate account. Anything you do in that slot has no effect on the rest of your chars/banks/etc…

So yeah you’ll lose it but you cannot really use that slot for anything else than temporary tests.

It’s an elite, it wouldn’t be broken as hell really :o

Especially considering that with every patch, there’s more and more talents/traits to apply revealed on us, which would obviously override the elite here since the effect is that we do not get revealed for damaging stuff, not that we don’t ever get revealed.

But it might be too soon for that. In a year or two once everyone has it’s two “reveal thief” talents it’ll be the right time for such an elite.

Akuni.8604:

Err what? Cloak and Dagger allows you to have near unlimited stealth, there’s hardly only 2 stealth skills with huge cd. Never mind also the minor trait a stealth thief has that stealths if cc’d.

Minor trait which doesn’t exist as far as I’m concerned.

C&D is rather situational in it’s unlimited stealth too. Cause it requires you to land a melee attack with a rather long cast time to apply stealth. Block, Blind, Evade, Invulnerability or plain Miss will cause a huge loss of initiative without giving you stealth.

Am I the only one thinking it’s better to wait for HoT and potential new sources/sinks of spirit shards before going on a spending spree?

Laraley.7695:

Let’s be honest, Diamond Skin rewards you for absolutely nothing, which is not healthy for the game. There should be some skill involved and also counterplay, I think that it’s been enough of things that has no counterplay.

Let’s be honest, Toughness/Vitality rewards you for absolutely nothing, which is not healthy for the game. There should be some skill involved and also counterplay, I think that it’s been enough of things that has no counterplay.

There’s a trait in acrobatics that remove one condition on you each time you hit some with only a 1s ICD ! It only applies to weakness, vulnerability and slow though.

Oh and you need to be >90% HP :p

Those are actually the dungeon weapons one can get. Say, you decide to pursue the Ascalonian Catacomb reward track : https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ascalonian_Catacombs_Dungeon_Track

As you can see, at tier 2, 4 and 6 you get this weapon box : https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Catacombs_Weapons_Box

You basically choose the weapon you want from all the AC exotic weapons available.

It does seem indeed the “easiest” way to get the exotic weapons you want. I’ll get a few underwater weapons that way I think :p

The “cheapest” I think with plenty of choice is to buy them from WvW vendors for tokens + gold. Be careful though, you cannot get back the runes you put in those since they aren’t salvageable. That or you get dungeon ones.

But buying an exotic weapon for gold isn’t too hard. If you got lots of extra spirit shards you can also mystic forge a few for rather cheap.

Zeem.2564:

So yeah, they’re basically telling us to play something else. Balance? Yeah right.

Hmm, yeah and what’s the link with “balance” in the first place?

Ok well he applied twice the vulnerability bonus it seems :p

That or he used a ranged with this trait : https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Hidden_Barbs

PowerBottom.5796:

diamond skin is simply dumb and has to be reworked completely…. My suggestion is tying a DMG/duration-reduction to certain conditions depending on your attunement:

Diamond-Skin Conditions applied to you have reduced duration depending on your attunement:
Fire: Burning-duration decreased by 33%
Earth: Bleeding-duration decreased by 33%
Water: Weakness/vulnerability/blind-duration decreased by 33% (debilitating conditions)
Air: Chilled/cripple/immobilize-duration decreased by 33% (movement-impairing conditions)

Could be pretty cool to use and involve lots of skill to know which condition will land on you next and the opponent has to know what conditions to apply when, depending on the CD’s of attunement-switch.

This trait is barely not even worth a first tier minor trait slot XD