Guild Wars 2

Kain.3485:

i’ve done it, i like it, idk why people say that parts hard, hardest part imo has got to be the hold the ground part near the end

The torch room requires much more coordination and punishes individuals’ mistakes heavily. If someone makes an error in the point holding room, your team can recover. If someone makes an error in the torch room, it probably forces a reset. The big fight also allows for more flexibility in terms of team composition.

Thief can contribute:
- High DPS
- Interrupts
- Damage mitigation through blinds and a projectile-blocking wall, weakness
- Stealth
- Boon removal
- Some boons and venoms if traited

Koga.7215:

the only time blind is useful for PvE is maybe for trash in a group with no real tanky type builds that can take some damage.

You can blind big attacks and CC, which means your team doesn’t have to dodge, move, or get hit, and can keep DPSing in place, while stacking buffs on nearby allies and such. Perhaps it’s not necessary, but it adds efficiency.

I like your suggestion, it’d be awesome to revisit UW

I would change two things from your suggestions:

Hevosin.9187:

• UW should be a 10 man Dungeon, to reflect the difficultly and scale of what the players are doing (Venturing into the Underworld)

• Want to see a combo of Fractal and normal Dungeon concepts mixed into one dungeon. Will have Many paths, 7 for example, Each one involving one of the 7 Reapers. Once a player clears all 7 paths (different entry required for each path) A level 2 opens up, like fractals the dungeon gets a little bit harder with each level. This provides a perfect place and reason to add more Ascended gear into the game, as bosses would likely use Agony in UW

Instead of a tiered dungeon, I would just give it a single, rather high, difficulty (say, as hard as T4 or T5 would be if you tiered it). The fractal tiering makes organizing groups more difficult (I also feel the presence of higher difficulties trivializes the existence of lower difficulties, content with no purpose except to gate players), I don’t think that design should be reused. Or at most have two tiers, like normal and hard mode in GW1.

For similar reasons, I think a 5-man would be better, with 10 it would be much harder to organize a group, as well as coordinating/communicating during the dungeon. I enjoy extremely difficult game content, but not difficulty with social aspects.

I disapprove of builds that rely heavily on stealthing in combat. Yes, you can counter them, but the fights just feel lame.

The stealth style relies too much on massively uneven information between the players. I think fights should be a contest of quick reflexes/decision making/planning between equals, not an asymmetrical guessing game.

To me, fighting a stealth player feels like you’re fighting a cowardly opportunist who uses invisibility as a crutch, it’s a disappointing experience even when you win.

I suggest a couple of changes for the stealth mechanic:

- Make damage numbers appear when hitting a stealthed enemy. Simple thought experiment: If you hit someone invisible with a sword, you would feel that you hit something, maybe see some blood spurt out.

- DoT conditions (bleed, poison, burn) should reveal the stealthed player while they are active. “Reveal the invisible monster with fire/powder/liquid” or “follow the invisible thing’s trail of blood” is a common trope in fiction.

I think these changes make sense from a purely conceptual point of view, and they would also bring more nuance to a controversial mechanic.

Personally, I don’t think the jumping puzzles really belong in WvW (getting money for siege blueprints is trivially easy)

• By doing the jumping puzzle, you are not contributing to your team’s map control
• By trying to stop other people from completing the jumping puzzle, you are not contributing to your team’s map control
• If your server’s queue is full, not only are you not contributing to your team, you potentially prevent someone more useful from joining the game.

So ideally, I think everyone should just be peaceful in the JP, get it over with, and get back to fighting, otherwise you are wasting your server’s player slots. Optimize everyone’s actions for the best WvW fighting, stop with the jumping puzzle shenanigans.

Of course, the players have no means to enforce a ceasefire, so my policy is to only attack people who attack me, if I bother to do the JP at all.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

There is no indication of a titan living in Tyria prior to when the charr encountered them.

Dialogue from seer and forgotten NPCs in GW1 seem to suggest otherwise:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Ancient_Seer
After obtaining the bonus in Hell’s Precipice
“I wish to see this to its end. Over the eons, much has changed in Tyria. But not these Titans.”

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Forgotten_Warden
“Titans, ancient creatures dating back nearly as far as my own kind, have broken free of their imprisonment. While they plague this realm, many Margonites escape us. The forces of light must stop these Titans. Do you have the will? Will you take up the mark of the light and fight?

To me, this suggests that the Titans were not initially created by the Fury, existed in ancient times, and were imprisoned at some point (which fits their name…).

Some rough thoughts/speculation I came up with, maybe there are some holes and contradictions. The titans were one of my favorite enemy types in GW1 and it would be great to see more titan lore.
——

The titans were originally created as constructs designed to kill mursaat by the seers, before humans and their gods arrived. They were in built various forms to blend in with different geographical settings, and they were intended to sweep Tyria and exterminate the mursaat.

The seers had a presence in the Ring of Fire, but the titan production facility was located in the Mists (for secrecy purposes), in a region that would later be known as the Realm of Torment. It was accessed through a portal in the Ring of Fire (Door of Komalie)

For whatever reason, the titans are deemed a failure (rebelled against their creators? perhaps this contributed to the decline of seer civilization) and their production stops, remaining units are sealed away in the Foundry. The Door of Komalie is deactivated.

After Abaddon is thrown into the Realm of Torment, the Forgotten repurpose the Foundry as a prison for Margonites.

Some titans were not sealed away, and persisted hidden in Tyria. Abaddon gains their allegiance by offering to free their kin from the Foundry. He used the titans to influence the charr, who may not have been willing to follow Abaddon directly, since he is a human god.

At some point, Abaddon’s forces overrun the Foundry and seize control, freeing the titans and bringing them to his side.

The Scepter of Orr/Staff of the Mists are control/production/enhancement-related devices for titans, created by the seers.

Part of Khilbron’s role in Abaddon’s plan was to retrieve the Scepter of Orr, for some titan-related purpose. The Sceptor of Orr may not actually control the titans, the titans may have been following Abaddon instead in Prophecies. The Scepter may instead be used for producing titans.

The Scepter of Orr may have fallen into Abaddon’s possession after Khilbron’s death. Perhaps there are two sets of titans, the original set created by the seers, and a second, more demonic-styled set created after Abaddon acquires the Scepter of Orr.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/The_Cold_Touch_of_the_Past
Abaddon’s minions search for the Staff of the Mists for some titan-related purpose

Abaddon intended to use the Foundry of Failed Creations/Door of Komalie as an entry point for an invasion of Tyria. This plan fails twice:

• Some time before the founding of the White Mantle, Abaddon reactivates the Door of Komalie from the Realm of Torment side, sending some titans across.
• The mursaat constantly monitor the Door, knowing what lies behind it, and they quickly react, pushing back the initial wave of titans.
• The mursaat block the Door of Komalie, unable to shut the portal down completely, but realize that maintaining the seal requires a large supply of souls. This leads them to establish the White Mantle as a front for their soul reaping activities.
• Another invasion is started and quickly stopped at the end of Prophecies.

I did a Path 2 run last night and Detha bugged out in the cannon room.

Before that happened, we ran past the gravelings and oozes, a number of oozes followed us into the room, and the event didn’t progress any further. We ended up clearing the oozes then getting Detha killed by luring the champion graveling into the cannon room, this reset her.

A remake of:

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Gate_of_Madness

AcidicVision.5498:

Headshot has a greater range, instant activation, no root, is a combo finisher and uses one less initiative. PW is unsafe for that and the worst possible skill you could be using to burn down defiant.

Range is irrelevant when I am in melee. The root as I said before is not a problem either. I don’t feel unsafe when I use PW, in fact, I feel safer because of the evade. If I have signet of malice on I am even safer because of the bigger heals. I will regain initiative from using PW because of traits, so it costs the same as headshot. 1/2 second stun is superior to 1/4s daze. The interval between interrupt-worthy attacks on a boss is typically long enough such that the time between PW stuns versus rapid headshots is not an issue. Interrupt-worthy skills generally have a big startup, so activation time is not really an issue either.

PW provides slower rate of interrupts than headshot but has other useful effects.

AcidicVision.5498:

Theres a problem with that also, that may or may not be a bug. You can move and dodge before the first hit connects but that doesn’t cancel the skill. The flurry of swings still happens and will even cancel a dodge.

Do a double-tap if the flurry hasn’t started.

AcidicVision.5498:

Pistol whip is inferior to auto-attack. Deals less damage and roots the player. It can’t even be used defensively on reaction since the invincibility frames have a long start up and end before the end of the root. Combined with virtually every boss and champion in the game having defiance, using this skill is begging to be punished.

I disagree, I think there are good reasons to use PW instead of auto attack.

The defiance stacks on the boss/champion are precisely why I would use pistol whip instead of auto-attack, it helps the group push interrupts in dungeons and such. For open world encounters where defiance stacks go higher, I don’t think it matters what you do, the monster’s death is inevitable.

The root isn’t a problem, if you need to move you can just tap a direction to cancel.

Depending on the enemy it’s often feasible to time the PW so that you evade their attacks, which saves you some endurance.

I feel like the best solution would be:

1. Anet clearly indicates to the playerbase that this kind of behavior is a reportable offense
2. Allow team members to see the character or account name of the player who deployed a siege weapon, so they can be reported

My guess is there are a relatively small number of people engaged in this, so it seems like overkill to change the game mechanics or put a cost on server transfers to deal with it. The right approach IMO would be to have some kind of mechanism to specifically target the offenders.

Players should have the option to trade their relics or some other token for the Fractal weapon skins (currently random drop only). The current system is very frustrating and discouraging if you are only interested in a specific skin (I want the sword). I only have a 1/19 chance of getting it whenever a Fractal item drops, that’s far too low of a probability IMO.

None of the other high end weapon types (legendary precursors, dungeon weapons, mystic forged items) force you to rely on weapon-type RNG, and I think that’s a good thing.

Imagine the mass frustration if legendary precursors were account bound and there was only 1 generic mystic forge recipe instead of weapon-specific recipes.

The special mystic forge items (whisperblade, volcanus type stuff, mystic skins) craft a specific weapon, not a random weapon from a larger category of weapons.

The other dungeon skins can all be acquired with tokens, why are the Fractal skins different? If the intent was to restrict them to players in higher levels of Fractal, that could be accomplished by using a new token type that can only be acquired in the higher levels.

In short, the current system feels frustrating, inconsistent with more player-friendly systems in the game, and the RNG element is not necessary for restricting the skins to those who can successfully complete high level fractals.

I would propose that the legendaries be easier to get with new recipes. The current recipes or new recipes of similar total cost would produce a Farmer’s Badge. When you get 5 Farmer’s Badges, you can trade them to an NPC and unlock the “Legendary Farmer of the Gods” title, + a new shiny icon next your name that emits light, darkness, rainbows, fire, ice, and nature stuff. And an emote where gold coins and globs of ectoplasm spiral around your character.

Then I can get my skins in a reasonable amount of time, and those who want to publicly display their eliteness have a flashy way to do so. Sounds win-win to me.

I could fight this, if it were not for the fact that every time they position swap or stealth it takes them 2-3 seconds to render on my screen and for that duration I was just bombed by their copies while i was forced to wait to see their position, and they spam 3 second invulnerability 3 times in the duration of a 30 second fight whenever i actually get up to them.

This sounds like the main issue, the mesmer is essentially getting a lot of free stealth, that can easily mess up a fight…

Lyuben.2613:

And to say that engineers have 1500+ is false. Grenades CAN go that far, but they are not viable or effective at that range for very obvious reasons you would find out about, if you took the time to use them in PvE and PvP.

I don’t think grenades are totally useless at 1500 range. They’re terrible for hitting moving players, but I think there’s some use in WvW. You can attack people defending on tower battlements and such from a fairly safe distance, you can safely target a downed player and kill them from afar while punishing/discouraging revivers. You can use them to hit siege deployments, and they’re a decent area denial tool in large fights.

I don’t play sPvP so no idea what situations arise there.

In PvE, they can still be viable at long range in my experience. It’s not uncommon to have a situation where an enemy is fighting an ally and they aren’t moving much, you can get a few volleys in. When they’re moving, you can sometimes lead them, the AI can be predictable and doesn’t really attempt to avoid your incoming grenades. Even then, my gut feeling is that 1500 range is not a good range to be at in PvE, few battles are that dangerous and you can provide/get better support when you’re closer to the fights.

I would say they’re situational at long range, but not totally worthless, which seems acceptable to me. They provide good damage at a very safe distance at the cost of versatility. I wouldn’t mind getting speed or damage buffs though. An extreme case where the grenades hitscan would be highly amusing.

coglin.1496:

Don’t worry about that finisher post, It is completely inaccurate. ALL of the projectile finishers are 20%. Not a single one is 100% as he implies.

We have a HUGE amount of blast finishers and a great deal of projectile finishers. I got no idea what that Devinchi guy is referring to.

Thief pistol clearly has a mixture of 100% and 20% projectile finishers, what do you mean?

I don’t think he ever said engineer is lacking in a raw count of blast finishers, his post was more about how engineer is not particularly good at applying blast finishers, which is correct.

Engineers have long cooldowns for their blast finishers. Only the shield has a blast finisher (with 30s cooldown), the rest are tied to utility skills with fairly long cooldowns. Turrets are weak, I would never bring them over other utilities. In addition, it’s far too tactically situational to rely on turret detonation for blast finishers.

Eles have many blast finishers on their weapons, some with very low cooldown (6s).

Necro’s staff #4 is much more versatile than any engi blast finisher since it’s instant and 1200 range.

If traited, ele, necro, and warrior can trigger blast just by dodging, with low cooldown.

Guardian with hammer can trigger one every 5s. Warrior hammer can do the same every 10s.

lackofcheese.5617:

Archer.6485:

If you need the item sink, just make the cost whatever the average amount of items thrown to obtain it was. The amount of items sunk will remain exactly the same.

That would work to an extent, but a recipe consisting of several thousand rare items would be highly inconvenient to implement and use.

You could implement that by having an NPC that sells stackable crafting tokens, and another NPC that sells precursors for stackable precursor tokens. Then add a mystic forge recipe with crafting token + 3x rare or exotic weapon of the same type, which outputs some fixed number of precursor tokens. I think that wouldn’t be much more inconvenient than the current MF precursor system.

Please make masculine versions of the girly legendaries so that the men in the room can have some hard edged slaying weapons to bring to the battle that we will feel are so kitten that we will be admired by all other men.

You are never going to get meaningful respect from others by waving a flashy item around, FYI.

I agree that the legendaries should have more variety in terms of visual style, more “dark” and “violent” items are needed. But your concerns about masculinity are childish. A real man stands for his own desires, and does not care about society’s arbitrary gender standards (though they might coincide at times)

That mentality reminds me of idiots who somehow believe that certain drinks are “girly”.

When we went in to the Lovers stage, entire squad was annihilated. We try various strategies, separating them, switching kiting and attacks but to no avail. Final conclusion is, still we had to have a tanker good enough to absorb damage and healers to AOE heal and cannons to AOE damage.

I’ve done AC, CM, TA, SE, and Arah story mode with a group of friends, and I feel like the Lovers fight was the hardest boss in all of those dungeons. I think we did AC when we had ~lv60 gear, the rest with 80 exotics. We did eventually get past them though, I think the trick was to have one person use boulders to knocklock one of the bosses.

To offer a contrasting experience, we actually completed all of those story modes except TA with 4 people (that was the only story mode dungeon we were able to find a 5th person for…), so they seem doable to me. I would agree that they might be harder than advertised, though.

cryptomega.3745:

Well, I agree on your first point. Mindless grinding, luck of the draw .. either way. If you truly want to be “distinguished” then asking for a way to make a reasonably exclusive item more obtainable seems counter-productive.

I can’t speak for everyone else, but I have no interest in being ‘distinguished’. I just want to see my character with certain visuals. What others have or do not have is totally irrelevant to me. Everyone can run around with rainbows and liquid metal, I don’t care.

But the decision of “how rare” the end item is is entirely up to the designer

Yes. So why insult people who seek to change the designers’ opinions? Is that not the point of this thread? Is that not legitimate? Wanting easier legendary acquisition does not automatically make those people ridiculous whiners.

The distinction is the perspective on what “exclusive items” should really be.

Just to be clear, my perspective is that item exclusivity is silly. I want certain items for my own aesthetic satisfaction, not to draw attention and envy from others. The cost is far more than I am willing to pay, so I seek to have the cost lowered.

As an aside, I think one is “entitled” to whatever you have the power and will to attain, through whatever means. If you don’t have something or cannot enforce your claim to something, you are not “entitled” to it. There is no real metric for determining if someone “deserves” something. People have desires, and they try to fulfill those desires, that’s all that’s real. Introducing the word “entitled” just distorts and clouds the discussion.

cryptomega.3745:

You people are all ridiculous. What, exactly, is legendary about an item you can obtain within a month or two of playing time?

What’s truly ridiculous is the notion that willingness to do mindless grinding somehow distinguishes a player from others in a positive way. What’s also ridiculous is the petty desire to restrict the character aesthetics of others.

I don’t see “entitlement”, I see people who understand the value of time better than you do. I see people who hate RNG and RNG-driven market prices because RNG is the antithesis of skill. I see people who only care about aesthetics and think the cost of legendaries is too high relative to their aesthetic value.

(I often see “entitled” now in gaming forums, it seems it’s merely a pejorative thrown at people who aren’t sufficiently submissive towards whatever system is being discussed)

Shakki.3219:

No, it has to be even harder as it is now…. It’s still pathetic to get one seriously.
Only because you don’t get something you want directly all start crying like a 5y old child which wants his toy….
Work for it, in life you get nothing for free.

The legendaries are poor value; the cost is far too high for the benefit they provide. In real life, I also reject bad deals, instead of being submissive and accepting unreasonable conditions. I think a sensible person would try to have the precursor acquisition requirements changed by speaking out on the forums, instead of throwing themselves at the mercy of RNG.

I do plenty of work in real life, games are for fun.

I suppose some players are like those who enjoy showing off luxury goods in public though…

Shakki.3219:

So it would be better if everyone would get such a legendary weapon within days or weeks of ‘normal playing’? I doubt it and it wouldnt be worth to be called ’legendary;.

Personally, I think it would. People like me, who only care about character aesthetics and care nothing for displaying “achievements”, just want pretty skins. To be honest, I look down on people who care too much about showing off, standing out in a crowd, and being “special”. What’s wrong if everyone has the pretty skins they want? Can you not value the item on its aesthetics alone? Why does it matter if other people also have that item?