Will I noticeably benefit from using a Magic Find booster?
Well, you should in theory, but even with a booster it’s still more likely to not get one then to actually get one from a run, if my past experiences are any indication. Whether you consider this noticeable is up to you I guess.
- Food items that give special bonuses upon a critical hit now have an internal cooldown before they can produce the special bonus again.
Nobody can say they didn’t see that coming I guess, stacking precision as a defensive stat to capitalize on healing from that item is now officially over. I guess that was long overdue actually.
Seconded, I too would like to see some actual variety in skills, but I heavily doubt we’ll see that, or at least anytime soon. The devs are dreadfully afraid of overstraining complete noobs, so we’ll have to make do with what we have.
The problem that the RNG is not very random and is potentially broken. Most people tend to have average drops while others have a horseshoe up their kitten and others yet, seem to be perpetually cursed.
Now, if it were actually truly RNG, it should be a rare occasion that you get similar items, that said, it happens way to often to be a coincidence. I think literally every time I’ve had multiple rares drop in a short period of time, at least 4-5 times that I remember off the top of my head, perhaps more, they were very similar either in build or type. i.e. Berserker…of the Air, or two tridents, two shields, etc. More than once I’ve heard of people getting two of the exact same item within minutes or even out of the same chest. I remember getting an item out of the Jormag chest (One of the two rare items I’ve gotten from that event in over a dozen times doing it), then a few minutes later getting a different item, but identically speced, from a wolf. Now, with the sheer myriad of weapons that can drop, this situation should be exceedingly rare…but it is not, hence this does not seem very random.
And would it kill them to weight the RNG towards items that can actually be used. Very rarely do I get items that can actually be used by my class.
Actually, a perfectly working rng will produce just that.
Both are right, they are going to spike in price once people see the new ascended accessories, and then steadily decline when the guild mission rewards actually trickled in.
This is obviously a faked SS. You can’t even HAVE 75 laurels yet, not for quite a while actually. Plus Ecto’s aren’t a currency, I highly doubt they would make them into one as they are already used for too many things as it is.
You realize that this pic must have been taken on a test server, therefore they might as well have a million laurels over there already? Beside, ectos are a currency right now, they are an important part in just about any “luxury” item recipe.
People complain when they don’t get stuff, it’s that simple. The whining is to be expected.
Exotics/precursors should be rare or everyone would have them. There are perfectly good ways to get around the whole RNG, karma and dungeon gear.
There are sure ways to get the same loot and people will still complain. The rest are just skins.
Rarity is no excuse for badly designed rng mechanics. Rng is an ok mechanic if there is some sort of cap on it. You could, for example, put a hidden counter in effect that would increase by 1 on each failed roll and after 1000 trials (arbitrary number, just as an example!) you’d get an auto success, resetting your counter to 0, which would also happen on a natural success roll.
By adjusting the numbers slightly, you could keep exactly the same overall rarity, because over the entire player population, things always even out anyway. You’d just save people from endlessly flushing stuff down the mystic toilet with absolutely nothing to show for whatsoever.
Are they going to be putting out more information about new types of legendaries today? I keep hearing guildies talk about it.
They never said that there would be anything new concerning legendaries in this update afaik. The only talk about them recently was that “somewhere along the road”, new weapon types would of course get new legendaries and they would like to do something like the process for eternity for other weapons too, but certainly not in this update.
The problem was never magic find, skipping content etc. The problem was and is… us. It’s a social game. If people were more friendly, open-minded and rational, then none of these topics would exist. Everyone would be in game right now working on establishing the warmhearted social interaction that is Guild Wars 2.
That’s probably what Anet had thought when they decided to add MF; the community will be friendly about it and work together to solve any disagreements.
Well you guys certainly proved them wrong.
Oh god no. How exactly does implementing a griefing system like mf help to form a sense of community?
Any game designer worth their salt should know that if you want people to be cooperative and friendly, the last thing you do is to give individuals the opportunity to work against the group and for themselves instead, it just doesn’t make sense.
The thing is, with the droprates being as low as they are, you’d need an incredibly high amount of pulls to find any discernable difference.
Assuming a 1/1000 chance to pull an exotic on a random mob, and a 2/1000 with 100% magic find, you’d need roughly 65000 pulls to be 95% sure that there actually is a difference, if my math is right (of which I’m not totally sure, but it should be in that ballpark).
@Setun: What you see as playing to maximize the Scepter’s strengths is just adjusting your playstyle to minimize its flaws. You’re not helping anyone by claiming that the Scepter is a good weapon. It’s passable and you can make it work. That doesn’t mean it’s good.
It depends on the context you use it in. For pvp, yes, the slow projectile speed and stationary nature of smite are asking for it to be evaded, but in pve it’s just all kinds of awesome.
#1 is ok dps for a ranged weapon, and the projectile speed is rarely an issue #2 is incredible dps on static single targets, which are not all that uncommon, and #3 is very nice utility to top it off.
I was actually surprised to hear that they said that bleeds were limited by bandwith, because it’s not like we really needed to transfer all that information constantly. I don’t know of their internals of course, but it seems they just got lazy and chose the approach that fitted most seamlessly in the calculations done for direct damage, and the bleed cap was only neccessary under the premise that condition damage was tracked like direct damage.
After all, the information that really needs to be sent would be a duration and a power value when the dot gets initiated, that’s it. Everything else could be handled without a transfer between client and player, with changes only applying when the condition get’s cleansed, the target dies or optionally, the caster’s condition damage value changes. I get that people will now jump at me and say “you don’t know how their backend works, if they say it’s really complicated and they can’t change it then it’s probably true”, but really, if they made a system that needs so much bandwith for such a simple calculation then why do we have to just accept it?
The issue is big because of PvP. Condition Necro’s and Trap Rangers are a huge part of the meta at the moment. If conditions get buffed and are tracked independently the name of the game will have to change to Condition Wars instead of Guild Wars. All of the sPvP and WvWvW Fights will come down to who can apply the most conditions the fastest.
The best way to handle conditions and it’s effects in MMO was already in place in Guild Wars 1. Why fix something that isn’t broken? I understand they wanted to “innovate” but they literally went backwards in this area.
Uhm… no? How often do you see people in pvp with 25 stacks of bleed? Granted, the attackers know that it would be pointless to stack them higher, but it wouldn’t actually change that much in pvp, while greatly improving the pve part of the game.
It is true that letting each player have a stack is unlikely to be the solution, however we do intend to solve this problem.
Like you solved the precursor problem with the scavenger hunt?
It is really disheartening hearing that this is not even being looked into.
You’re at a job, where you work maintenance for most of the machinery in a large factory. I mean couple of city blocks big. Your boss comes up to you on the first day of the week and hands you a list of twenty items which need to be fixed that week in order for you to get paid. You’re at the fifth thing on the list when someone who works in the department you’re currently in tells you there’s a problem with a valve.
“Is it not working?”
“No, it’s just acting like it’s not open all the way even though it’s not turning open any further.”
“I’ll look at it when I have time.”Of course, you still have fifteen things on the list, or no paycheck. Since it’s actually not outright stopped it’s lower on priority. So you move on and the next day you’re stopped by the same person from yesterday.
“Hey, you said you’d look at that valve.”
“I didn’t get around to it, I have these other things to do.”
“Whatever, you just don’t care. Lazy bum, why do you even get hired?”Tell me what motivation you have to actually go out of your way to look into that valve now.
Not that your analogy would make any sense, but actually it’s more the end customer tells the boss that the valve is stuck for 5 months now, because they designed it way too narrow for it’s intended use, and the boss replys with “yeah, that’s very interesting, but we don’t currently work on it right now.”
the animation of the skills tell alot about them
rush/bulls charge is you RUNNING to the enemy hence cripple and chill should rightfully lower that as you can’t RUN anymore
ride the lightning changes you in electricty
i have to see a cripple in electricty >>
swoop is you being lifted by WINGS.
i have yet to see cripple ( being unabled to walk ) affect WINGS
Well, to be fair, animations and game mechanics should be kept seperate entirely, and the inconsistency in charge skills is most likely just due to lazy implementation on the dev’s part.
That being said, I don’t think it’s one of the more terrible issues the game has with balancing, just a minor flaw among others, and eles are already on their radar. At this point, they should probably consider themselves lucky if they don’t get the GET DOWN treatment rangers got in late beta. Then again, they might just pull another smiter’s boon on them.
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Why would we have to lose epidemic when it can only apply to max of 5 other targets
Because of exponential growth, the power multiplication in coordinated groups would put time warp to shame. Assume there are 5 necros and 2 targets (A and B ). The necros stack 50 aoe bleeds up on both, which is only 10 stacks per necro, so a rather conservative estimate.
1. A50 B50
2. necro 1 epidemics A -> A50 B100
3. necro 2 epidemics B -> A150 B100
4. necro 3 epidemics A -> A150 B250
5. necro 4 epidemics B -> A400 B250
6. necro 5 epidemics A -> A400 B650
Granted, that would need some well coordinated play, but it would put good groups way too far ahead of pugs in scenarios where this would be possible.
Note that I’m not at all saying the bleed cap does not need to be lifted, just that this single skill would need to be adressed as well if they did.
The fact that anyone thinks infinite condition stacks is even remotely balanced is laughable.
Not at all. The only thing we’d have to lose is the necro’s epidemic skill, that’s for sure. But other then that, condition builds need a stack of roughly ~20 to get even catch up to berserker builds, which is what makes them so worthless right now.
It’s actually not a question; it’s a mathematical fact. Necromancers do more condition DPS than any other class. The only class that comes close is ranger.
Really? I’d be surprised if that “fact” were true. Last time I looked, they couldn’t even reliably maintain 25 stacks of bleed by themselves, assuming they do not have a convenient secondary target that would humbly stay in range for all the necro’s aoe and kindly waited out their epidemic…
What’s funny is that condition builds are not only worthless now, if they don’t change the system they will get even worse when the transition to full ascended is completed.
So that the marketing department can advertise with steady updates? Other then that, no idea really.
Obviously a lot of work went into it, but then somehow, somebody terribly dropped the ball on that one.
As for the rest saying it can be done quickly and easily and everything else… you don’t know what tools their engineers have developed for the backend. You don’t know how it works… you haven’t seen it… you don’t know what flaws it has and why… you know absolutely nothing about their code, why it operates the way it does, and why it doesn’t operate in another way.
And we are not payed to understand their backend tools. If an internal system is not capable of doing a very simple task, I don’t need to know how and why exactly it is broken, I only care for the fact that it doesn’t work.
If the engine can’t handle a task like this, somebody kittened up when they programmed the engine, so “it’s just broken because that’s how it is” really is no excuse.
All in all… I think he gave a great and informative bit of response there… with a good deal of transparency. What I derive from it is that they have technical limitations right now that limit the amount of bandwidth their servers can use, so they put caps on things in order to preserve the quality of the combat. You would be even more annoyed if your dodges suffered massive latency.
You seem to have never been exposed to statements of officials of any corporate entity before. Ask yourself, under the assumption that somebody responsible for product quality really kittened up. How likely, on a scale of 1 to 10 is it for an official in front of the gathered consumers, to admit, yes, we totally kittened up?
No matter what crap you told them, you’d always get an “oh my, that’s a very interesting idea, I’ll totally bring that up on the next dev meeting.”
Says the new item WILL be sounbounded, so I am guessing it was one of the changes?
As far as I remember, the item originally said soulbound, when it really was account bound. None of the mechanics ever got touched at all, it was just the wording on them that got changed.
Actually, I would favor the full system we had in late gw1, where you could store your full attribute distribution + skillbar and change them whenever you wanted (in outposts, which in gw2 would most likely mean just out of combat.) Seeing how they established this with gw1 already, I really wonder how they could think less convenience would be a step forward.
Someone just messaged me in game and mentioned that using a masterwork quality item would do it. I tried it and it worked! I never used masterwork previously when it used to work. Curiouser and curiouser…
Edit: One thing that I did notice, even though the transmute worked, the item remained soulbound and did not become account bound at any point.
It’s still possible to transmute the skin to white/blue items, which will make it account bound, I just did the same yesterday. It seems that there is a bug with the transmutation stone though,
you have to put the visionary helm to the left and the white helmet to the right side might be the other way around, but the position in the interface matters. I know it shouldn’t but I am pretty sure that that’s what fixed it for me. I know for certain that I had the visionary’s look and the lvl10 white stats under each other while the button was greyed out, switching the order around fixed it for me.
If you really want to use sword/shield you would have to go for a more condition oriented build, since much of the damage from 1h sword comes from the bleed effect. You won’t see awesome crits here, and the damage is rather low anyway. If you really want to 1h, consider axe mainhand, which is not as common, but a really strong contender(some even say it surpasses it when you can’t affor to channel 100b) to the gs warriors damage.
I dont see how you can compare necro damage with warrior right now.
My necro has more berserkers equiped than my warrior but a simple comparison.
I go to cursed shore attack a 80 undead mob. Warrior can just do 100 blades and its 15-16k damage each time the mob is dead in 3.5 sec. No banner/on my mark, just perma fury from signet/FGJ
The thing is, you really can’t. Warrior has much more damage himself, while also bringing that much more damage buffs for the team (FGJ, banner with +90 prec, +10% crit damage).
Actually, I find it kinda funny how people want to prove that necros are worthy with that one cof speedfarm, because that doesn’t even play to the strengths of the warrior, and even there he’s got the necro beat.
Remember that cof consists of almost exclusively single target encounters, except that very short skirmish at the start. Now for necros to even get in the same ballpark in single target dps as warriors, they have to wear single target daggers for weapons, while warriors actually deal aoe damage the whole time.
While this is hardly noticeable in cof, it does have much more impact in encounters with multiple enemies, like higher fractals for example. There, you can usually bring a guardian to pull the mobs together and have your warriors squash them with ease (while also having much more durability thanks to omnom pie procs), while necros would have to pick them off one by one.
Poison is the hardest hitting condition next to burning per tick unless you max bleed stacks, it all adds up fast, so don’t discount poison in pve.
Poison and hard hitting? Seriously, poison is not hard hitting at all. Stacking in duration pretty much kills it damage wise, it can still have some situational uses for it’s utility, but that’s about it already.
It is roughly equal to 2 stacks of bleed, but won’t benefit from your dedicated +x% bleed duration runes and traits, and it is at even more danger to be “stolen” by someone else (thief dagger auto, other necros, and rangers mostly), so it will effectively have problems outdamaging even one stack of bleed.
Back on topic,
I do not deny the fact that you probably can kill pretty much everything in PvE if you’re running with a decent group and you will not fail simply because you’re bringing a necro.
Playing one though requires you to jump through a million hoops, only to get the same outcome a different class can get with ease.
There literally is nothing a necromancer can bring to the group that’s unique to the class, or make it stand out among the rest.
This guy got it right. You can of course feel free to enjoy your necro if you like the style, and for solo pve really anything works, but there is a reason none of the speedrun / high level fractal groups are holding their breath for a necro to join. The class has numerous shortcomings that you have to play around in order to be at least semi-effective. You can make up for that, but even if you excel at necro, you will still not catch up to the usefulness of others.
(edited by wintermute.4096)
Just tested this in the mists, it does work for Illusionary Swordsman at least.
My method was
1. +5% crit sigils on two steady swords and soldier amulet with no traits at all vs.
2. +5% crit sigils on two steady swords and berserker amulet with full dueling (=crit damage) traits.
Even with a very small sample size, the disparity between no crit damage and full crit damage was huge enough (~1800 vs. ~2600) as to not be attributed to random fluctuations.
These stats work with a necro who will have the train that gives a 66% chance to apply a bleed on crit. It’s perfect actually. More chance to crit which means greater chance to apply additional bleeds which do more damage from the condition damage. I guess it depends on your class.
Well actually… That doesn’t even come close to what power builds get out of it, because condition builds lack something comparable to the crit damage stat.
That trait for example is 66% chance to proc, which only works if you actually crit, for 1 whole second of bleed. Given your average attack rate, that is almost unnoticable.
Power builds on the other hand, can get over 100% bonus damage of any given attack if they crit, no strings attached…
Mf is the reason we need an inspect feature. If you want to screw over your team fine, but expect flak for it.
There are indeed several problems with the basic mechanics of conditions in this game. From the top of my head, I’d list them as
1. Bleed cap has to go. You need high stacks to even come close to direct damage builds, and even if you run a condition build, hoping you won’t run into another one, you won’t get your full damage potential in groups because many classes will stack bleeds themselves as a side effect of what they do, cutting into your damage. (warriors have it as a mandatory trait in melee and by default on their ranged, thieves will want to use caltrops even in power builds, rangers always have bleed skills on their pets, engies on rifle and grenade specs and so on…)
2. There is little synergy for condition builds from traits, and all those mandatory traits that say +10% damage just don’t do anything for condition builds.
3. Itemization doesn’t work that well. For Power builds we have power, precision and crit on every piece of equipment, which work together. On condition builds, there is just raw condition damage on every piece and that’s it. Runes have bleed duration but for every other piece, I just care for the cond damage and would often actually prefer cond/vit/toughness if it were available, because nothing else really does much for me. I’m also excited to see how they go forward with ascended items, because if they don’t adjust their parameters, direct damage will definitely pull ahead even more, by a huge margin once ascended sets are completed.
Better late then never I guess. It shouldn’t be that much work to do a lfg tool, seeing that we already have a webbrowser for the trading post right now.
Well, anet said they’re not gonna play whack-a-mole…
Shame they said that AFTER nerfing ranger into oblivion when closed beta ended, and kicking him in the balls with the “shortbow animation fix”So lets hope for some good general buffs on weaker classes.
What they say and what they do are completely unrelated things I guess, just look at the manifesto ordeal. I was originally trying to say something much nicer in another thread, but it was “moderated” while I was typing it…
Basically they don’t give a kitten about core gamers who really want to crunch numbers and care for balancing, if the casual crowd is happy with bling bling and flashy effects, then everything is cool for them it seems.
Set up the run with your guild and keep it a secret from the rest of the player base. If only damage dealing guild mates are there you have no problem. If some condition damage toons show up make condecending comments and then run away to find another empty zone to do events in.
Yes, this is exactly what I think will happen, despite what the marketing department thinks players will do… Note I did not say that I adcovate this behavior, I just think that it would occur as the logical thing to do for some.
People won’t want to admint that their “babies” are inferior no matter how much facts you show them. I won’t say remove those classes, but there are severe, unadressed mechanical issues with some concepts in this game.
They can play around it and say “see, I can still make it work” or “a necro player will always outperform a bad guard player!”, which does nothing but detract from the argument. Everything else being equal, some classes can’t bring as much as other classes to a party.
For example: You can’t reliably do any good damage with condition builds in groups. The bleed cap prevents it, there is no player skill factor here, it is just mechanically impossible. If we accept this, a lot of the builds that work well solo fall apart. Necros completely, thiefs with bleed builds and most rangers (who have other issues too of course).
Mindlessly defending something that just doesn’t work is only denying the truth that some mechanics in this game definitely need to be addressed, and that the developers so far have been either unwilling or unable to do so, as sad as it sounds.
From what we know, they can participate and help out and get personal rewards for that in the end. Why would they just stand around?
I was not thinking they would stand around doing nothing, just that they won’t be able to keep up with the full exotic-bounty hunters who initiated the event in the first place. One example would be that they bring condition builds, which makes them do effectively zero damage while still ramping up the scaling. This could effectively lead to them only extending the time it takes to kill the mob.
Normally, that isn’t much of a problem, but if the timers are supposed to be challenging, it could be.
Actually, I don’t like the choice to have a passive 25% skill blocking a skill slot either… After all, out of combat speed is mostly convenience, and personally I don’t like to spend build resources on mere convenience features.
It’s not like we had an overabundance of awesome tactical options in fights even with those slots though…
As we know from the interview, one of the guild missions revolves around the guild travelling around the world to beat certain bosses within a time limit.
So, my question is: are those bosses scaled in any way? It’s kind of a dilemma I guess, but I could totally see random noobs in queensdale that ramp up a bosses’ being yelled at because the scaling as more of a hindrance then actual help.
If it were not scaled, well… That would be a problem for small guilds and empty severs everywhere.
Also, the bleedcap is here to stay due to technical issues. They will say more on it later probably some made up “you shouldn’t hit it too often anyway” excuse.
So condition builds stay dead, meh. :/
I’d even go as far and say confusion just sucks everywhere. It’s not like I wouldn’t like the concept, but in pve it is just abyssmal dps and for pvp you don’t have enough ways to reliably pressure with confusion stacks.
All it needs is one condition removal skill, and if your enemy is in a situation where he can afford to just go on defence until the stack tick down you are pretty much screwed.
Am I wrong to assume that most of the hysteria comes from people thinking the base armor stat increase of Ascended armor would be the most significant boost?
Yes you are. A full set of ascended gear in power/prec/critdmg is going to yield approximately 20-30% higher damage output, compared to full exotics hitting the same target. because there is interaction between power, precision & critdamage. Raising all of these by 10% each will result in a damage disparity that is significantly >10%.
That is unquestionnably significant, it has only partially happened by now but the trend will obviously continue.
Also, you are showing some unrelated info there. Nobody cares about the value of stats at low level, and not everyone can be using fury all the time in every build, actually, only warriors can. You will have a hard time hitting the cap unbuffed without sigil stacks, fury or precision stacks even with ascended gear, so that is irrelevant as well.
Furthermore, you never sacrifice power for anything in a damage build, it is always power primary, precision & critdmg secondary.
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Don’t worry. They announced that the ranger was having too much worthless skills that would get looked at months ago. Judging from this, any projected nerf to eles won’t happen sooner then maybe the 3rd expansion.
Effectively forming groups for fractals would be vastly more slow and tedious without gw2lfg.
The whole “no lfg tool to make people socialize” did never convince me anway. Think about the time before everybody and their dog used that site, 99% of the lion’s arch map chat was “lfm2, level 16, 10ar req”. That’s basically a primitive text form of what a lfg tool offers, only worse because much fewer people get to see it.
I have never ever, seen anybody having an actual conversation because of lfgs, the only thing I could even vaguely imagine would be someone berating someone else about how much ar would be needed for any given level.
TLDR: GW2lfg is here to stay, the game mechanics basically demand it to. Might as well implement it properly now.
You summed it up pretty nicely, I too feel like scepter just doesn’t work. You simply don’t have enough reliable sources of confusion to make that spec worthile. You can start out with scepter #3, but any viable opponent will likely dodge at least half of the tics, and then you are mostly left with shatters, which just don’t stack high and fast enough.
Your clone generation isn’t exactly awesome as well, while scepter sure is nice, you will often find your chain interrupted before the third hit because you had to dodge etc., and the clones come in relatively long and predictable intervalls, meaning they are rather easily dispatched as well.
So much for the scepter alone, and what’s worse it doesn’t really mix well with just about anything else, due to being condition based while more of your viable options are power based.
I really wanted to like confusion, because the concept sounded pretty neat, but at the moment it just isn’t worth it, maybe if scepter got back confusion on autoattack, but other then that, I don’t really see it.
Simply said, no.
Some builds use 1h sword for more procs of on-crit effects, everyone else uses gs for a reason. And nobody uses torch.
Sword does need right handed strength to at least break even in damage, gs has similar damage with better utility. Torch is just worthless imho, #4 does have decent spike (but no real dps) #5 is worse then autoattack damage.
Death Blossom is TERRIBLE DPS, it is a PvP ability.
If you want to roll condition in PvE go Necromancer and you will cry over all the time you wasted thinking 3 bleeds was good.
One of the reasons that I don’t run my d/d thief in pve is that I regularly hit the bleed cap too easily on my own, which makes for bad group synergy and does not play well with my rotation. Clearly, a lack of bleed stacks is not the issue.
I think one of the problems is that the engineer is being marketed as the epitome of versatility, which sounds cool in theory, but is not all that great in practice. They do get kits instead of multiple weapons, but they have to trait for their kits to be effective just like anyone else.
For example, the grenade kit is one of the best kits available if traited for, which is fine by itself, but it is practically worthless untraited. So while I do have the option to use it in every build, I practically won’t ever do so because I won’t have the traits to make it worthwhile.