Both are pretty insignificant in most content imho. Retaliation is a nice to have side effect and can be situationally useful in pvp. In pve it is almost worthless due to the fact that you should generally try to not get hit as often, except in very easy content, which you should faceroll anyway.
Confusion is horribly bad in pve, due to similar reasons. In pvp it is probably even worse, the uptime is much too low to really have an impact, which in turn means you won’t have as many stacks as you would need to put pressure on your enemy.
I use zerker armor, with toughness and condition trinkets to balance it out a little because I did want my confusion stacks to do damage right away before they figure out they have it. I don’t have as much power as i did with my full zerker build but huge survivability opportunities to completely confuse the enemy as they try and figure out what build im running so they can adjust their strategies.
If you insist on mixing berserker with something else, I’d suggest berserker jewelry and the other stats on armor, you get more crit damage for free this way.
That being said, I too don’t like hybrids that much since both stats and traits usually don’t mix that well, and mesmer does usually not bring quick and reliable condition stacking.
In January we got the Prelude to Flame and Frost, the Laurel system, Guesting, more ascended infusions and Amulets.
Guesting was supposed to be in at launch, the laurel system and the stuff in it was basically creating one new vendor and the prelude was as underwhelming as it can get.
I don’t neccessarily have a problem with that, but I do feel they promised far more then they delivered.
I vote for interchangable skills as well. I personally don’t have a problem with the way they look now, but I could certainly appreciate more diversity in looks. Maybe certain weapons could change the way phantasms look like on your end?
In the meantime, if you feel the purple butterflies and poofing sounds offend you somehow, try to think about the guy on the recieving end. Sure, you just did some glass shattering and butterflieing, big deal, but someone out there just got totally anihilated by that. Now that’s effeminating. =)
If they were giving out ascended items left and right for having the hall I’d see were you are coming from, but this is just skins that are there to show you played gw1 for a while and that’s it.
That being said, I really enjoy my decked out hom. Have you seen the light armor attire? I think it goes absolutely perfectly with the mesmer class, in fact much better then anything in the game currently. And the flaming dragon sword! Oh my, the flaming dragon sword! How awesome it is to actually dual wield it with jormags breath, which would be totally impossible if I didn’t have it you know? God, I really couldn’t stand it, especially if I knew there were people out there who could have this awesome stuff and I can’t, and to think of how they might taunt me for it…
Tybalt.
Other then that, the story was pretty much crap, especially Trahearne’s personal story, starting at level 50. There was little to no character development, in fact there was not one memorable character actually, the “choices” we were presented with obviously only served to branch and reconnect the story bits, which were far too obvious. All those “friends” I was suddenly supposed to care about meant absolutely nothing to me, all in all there were stupid beginner’s mistakes all over the place.
The lore of the game itself was quite good actually, but the bad acting and generally uninspired storyline was a chore to follow after the first round, and all my twinks never got past ~35 maybe.
Well fixing rez-rushing is fine for me personally, but I find it hilarious how they still did not even try fixing condition builds for pve at least. That’s a whole line of builds and dedicaed utilitie ablilities across all classes utterly wasted, and we didn’t have that much options to begin with.
In a similar vein, there are so many completely worthless traits and skills (for example: ranger spirits, thief traps and now spirit weapons) that are so vastly outperformed by others that the pool of actually working, valuable builds is much much smaller then it ought to be, which I personally think is a pity since they went through creating all of those systems in the first place.
Now what I’m most kitten about it is that they were so close. I actually like the feel of combat and everything, but with the awful oversimplification of core systems of the game combined with a complete absence of attention towards the making-a-build part of the game is just sad and inexcusable for a project of this size.
I also like how the guardian equivalent leap of faith basically is the same skill and works flawlessly, yet they somehow managed to mess this up.
I often find my melee mesmer (sword/torch) holds up better than my melee ranger (sword/dagger), but it’s certainly varying levels of utility play and mastery of personal technique.
Have you ever tried pressing #5 while on your mesmer then? How did you cope with the sudden urge to whack one or preferrably both of the guys working on balancing over the head with something?
They already added one currency to that update. There is currently a 1 currency per update policy, you’ll just have to hope that they add something else worthwhile to the fractals so they can use that one next time!
Yup, that’s an awful policy to follow. At first I thought karma would be the unified account bound reward currency, but since they completely lost track of that I suppose that trend will continue.
Enjoy your mystic crowns, ethereal badges and heroic tokens or whatever when ascended helmets, gloves and boots are introduced…
People who have many of them most likely got them from map completions which is a side effect of the grind for a legendary. As far as the droprates go, I too got the feeling that they were lowered as well, but afaik there are no conclusive data gathering sources that could validate such a notion.
In any case, the % chance of getting a fine transmutation stone is awfully low (I’m pretty sure I have not received one for the last month of dailies at least…), and since you are most likely looking for more then one you would really be better off grinding for coin and getting a pack of stones through the gem store.
It seems their official stance is they won’t remedy any kind of user error, you will most likely get a forum mod post that will tell you the same soon.
Balance, of course, is key, but not the kind of balance most people think about. I’m talking about balance WITHIN a class. It’s not about nerfing something that’s overpowered, but rather about making EVERYTHING seem overpowered. When everything is useful, that’s where the decisions come in. Balance between classes isn’t really all that important (except in extreme cases), because that’s not where we make our decisions. The richness comes from deciding from an interesting, powerful, and rewarding list of incomparable skills.
Spot on, that’s something I’d also like to emphasize. We do have a problem with build variety if there is a huge amount of skills that are essentially “noob traps”. When I look at a ranger and I see him using spirits for example, I promptly assume he’s a noob and will probably try to avoid him, and I’m probably right. The same is true for an overwhelmingly huge amount of traits of course, but those are just not as apparent.
One of the reasons people cry for new skills above everything is that many of the ones we have are in fact so worthless, they might as well not exist in the first place. I’m not going to argue that the current single-profession, weapon locked, limited customizability aproach is a good one for spvp (I’m in fact pretty much convinced of the opposite) but I’m pretty sad to see that even if we go under the assumption that those things are not up for debate, anet currently fails at balancing.
I think this is one of the major flaws of the way they locked skillbars to weapon sets in this game, which imho was a terrible decision. I feel I often have to go with one particular weapon because of either autoattack and one or two skills on it, which means the rest of the set is pretty much dead weight at that point. There are only so many viable choices for your build, and artificially limiting the way in which you can combine them doesn’t help.
If we at least had some way to swap out single skills on weapons, that would probably help already, and also I’d really like to see some of those completely worthless utilities + elites changed so we could actually have some choice in what we bring.
Well, if you tried some spvp you would probably realize that the people there would most likely wipe the floor with you. I don’t mean this as an offense, but rather to illustrate that there obviously is a difference between someone starting out and someone who has played for a while.
That being said, the game really is bland and repetitive in it’s design quite often, so while I wouldn’t say that it is particularly easy to play top-notch, it does get boring because you don’t really have that much options for building, because the overwhelming majority of your “build” is set in stone whith your choice of amulet and weapon sets, which really is quite underwhelming at times, especially if you compare it to what they did in gw1.
Nice vid, nothing breathtaking, but pretty solid. =)
I couldn’t help but notice you didn’t use consumables all the time, but that’s something I often forget as well. One thing I’d like to recommend is utilizing your second weapon set more though, and you did have a lot of unused initiative in those fights.
Personally, I love to switch to dual daggers with sigil of geomancy when I’m outnumbered. Try something like pistol from stealth → swap to d/d (which triggers 3 aoe bleeds) → 3xldb → hide in shadows, or alternatively 2 ldbs and c&d. That’s up to 12 additional aoe bleeds which is a lot of pressure (and they tick a lot longer then pistol shots too!), but you really have to manage your initiative more with it. =)
I’d like to second the sentiment that the warden could really use some sort of manual placement, but I can see how the targetting might be complicated.
Options would be:
1. have it ground targetted and make it lock to the nearest target on either cast/spawn
2. have it ground targetted and always locked to your target
3. have it ground targetted but only permit placement in melee range of your target (don’t know if this is possible with the engine though)
I think I’d prefer 3, or in the best case scenario some sort of toggle for it, but I doubt we’ll realistically see any changes. It’s not like the devs really care for quality of life changes in skills, and there are some that are far, far more broken then this.
Also, the game in it’s current state maybe very comparable to early Prophecies in number of skills and variations available. That is, GW1 skill range within 12 months of release may be quite similar to the way GW2 is now.
This is just not true. Even though the overall number of skills might be similar, the ability to combine them is severely limited compared to gw1. Even if there is a similar overall number of skills to begin with, locking skills to weapons makes for fewer
choices, 1 profession only means less possible interaction between them, and locking damage types to equipment (power vs. cond damage) makes for fewer choices still. These are the foundations of the system they used in gw2, the potential for growth is much, much smaller then what gw1 had.
Also, there is no build variety because the system was intentionally simplified, so I doubt we will ever see any true depth in this game. This game originally had the dual profession system gw1 had, and then they threw it away to cater to the AAA audience.
No matter how much you might want it, the game has to bow down to the lowest common denominator to make it accessible at all costs, i.e. casuals and noobs shall be artificially prevented from gimping themselves as much as possible, so the customization options are inherently limited. I too would like this to change, but I fear it just won’t happen.
Seriously, get a grip. This game is by no means difficult, even the boss you mentioned as “impossible to doge omg!” has been soloed on multiple occasions by now. When you mess up, you die, and for that to be meaningful we need we need some sort of immediate punishment. Before this, it was hardly even possible to fail most boss fights, because as long as you could keep him in combat, you would wear him down eventually, even though your group sucks.
We need to allow bad groups to fail, and denying rez does just that, better then a casual <10 sec jog from the last waypoint at least.
It depends on where you want to use it. It does less dps then dagger on single targets, but it cleaves, so it will pull ahead significantly on more then one target.
Also, it does synergize well with pistol offhand, mainly due to black powder, which can be pretty awesome in coordinated groups where people know to stand still and keep mobs inside it.
I’d say it is definitely underrated.
1. bleeds only tick once per second, so this is why it seems to be rounded down
2. the duration cap is +100%, no matter what (except that one necro scepter trait that modiefies base duration AFAIK)
3. the tooltip is nearly always wrong
4. food goes up to +40%, you definitely want to use this
Let’s give a conservative value of rare greatswords at 40s
That means you gambled 800g off on the forge instead of saving it up and buying it.
Not sure why you are complaining – you gamble and lost every single time. It’s no one’s fault except yours.
Actually, the designer who made rng such a crucial part in legendary acquisition and thus created the whole ordeal is to blame too. Without that, there would be no need to chose between gambling/safe way in the first place.
I love how the weapon that emphasizes clone play the most is the one which gets the big flashy pink ray of obviousness +5.
It really should get a sound effect like “over here! I’m here, look at me here! no, those guys are clones, that’s me shooting that ray at you!”
Back in beta it applied confusion on autoattack which was deemed to strong, so the devs decided to entirely kill that weapon and confusion builds along with it.
Currently, the game caters to the lowest common denominator in every way possible. Anet have made it abundantly clear that they want to restrict any kind of complexity in the game as much as possible, so while I can see the merits to such a system, it just won’t happen.
Nothing is solved. Can you think of any, apart from gear inspection, reliable ways of early identification and elimination of MF leeches, AR leeches, full P/V/T players joining speed runs, etc?
I don’t want ungeared noobs in my speedruns and fractals as well, but it seems we can’t help it. Anet has decided that we can’t be allowed to sort out leeches and burdens on the group, we have to pretend they just don’t exist and carry on.
The additional stats are a huge increase, between 12-15% per ring and 15-18% per amulet.
- Ruby Orichalcum Amulet of the Berserker with Exquisite Ruby Jewel gives
90 + 25 = 115 Power
64 + 15 = 79 Precision
5%+3% = 8% Critical damageMark of Tethyos Houses gives
94 + 32 = 126 Power (9.6% more)
67 + 18 = 85 Precision (7.6% more)
5%+4% = 9% Critical Damage (13% more)
Also has infusion slot which gives +5 stat of choicehttp://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ruby_Orichalcum_Amulet_of_the_Berserker
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mark_of_the_Tethyos_HousesYou’re exaggerating.
Nonetheless, the difference in damage output between full exotic and full ascended is quite substantial, because of the way stats interact. We are looking at a difference of roughly 20-30%, not even counting procs on crits, and that is a very conservative estimation.
I really do get tired of pointing this out, it seems every thread stagnates at the point were the uneducated masses claim that “the stat difference is minuscule”, where clearly, it is not.
Yes, there are some aspects about this game that made me really wonder whether they just kicked out anybody who actually worked on gw1…
Ascended gear is a good example, so are the inability to quickly change and/or save builds and gear, near-absence of build variety and skill-to-weapon locking. It has been said before and will probably get moderated again, but gw2 really took all you loved about gw1 and threw it out the window.
I can now add to the people complaining about the problems.
Okay, so it would seem as if a party of three can’t take on the manor, even when two of them have high-end equipment.
Also an entire, full, five man party can’t take down a simple ascalonian monk in AC.
They said they’d balance the dungeon to compensate for the waypoint patch, but so far they’ve just made things unnecessarily hard.
Lots of players are completing those exact dungeons regularly without much hassle. I know I have done so on numerous occasions. And seriously you can’t beat a single ascalonian monk with 5 people? There are videos of guys who soloed this path on youtube you know…
I know we are not allowed to spell it out on the forums, but seriously, if this is not a l2p issue I don’t know what is.
Well, if all this expansion does deliver is “an expansion’s worth of content” by anet standards, I wouldn’t hold my breath for it.
Seriously, should we just give up about this or what? 5 months into release and still condition builds are entirely obsolete in dungens/fractals/bosses of any kind/organized group play.
Any condition build worth running is able to get >15 stacks of bleed continously by itself (and this is a very conservative estimation, should actually be for most cases), burning is always up anyway and poison does next to nothing. This invalidates quite a lot of build options, and it’s not like we had great build diversity do begin with…
Has it occurred to any of you that maybe it really was just a bug they wanted to fix?
I love spirit weapons myself and am sullen about the whole ordeal too, but really, it’s not a nerf. The balance team and bug-fixing team are two different groups.
The whole thing sucks, but there’s no reason to bite ANet’s head off. Hopefully we’ll get some news on improvements for pets later this year, but in the mean time, let’s get one thing straight.
This was most likely NOT a balance-related nerf. It was a bug fix that ended up weakening the skill type.
There IS a difference.
Now that is just nonsense. It is pretty obvious the designers went out of theit way to make spirits non-interactable entities in the first place, and then considered it too strong in retrospect (whether this is true or not.) Ranger spirits were the same once, until they decided they were too strong and nerfed them.
The shield was so obviously the only one to stand out for spirit weapons, and the nerf seems almost perfectly tailored to get rid of it. If you can’t make this connection for yourself you are just denying the obvious.
Also, it is highly unlikely nobody on the team ever noticed that for 5 months (although not entirely without precedent…), and even if it were true, it would only serve to make the devs responsible look even more incompetent.
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If you are doing a support build, or ANY pve team build on a Mesmer and you don’t take time warp, you are severely crippling yourself in terms of the utility you bring to the team. There are situations where mass invisibility is appropriate. However, there are 0 situations EVER where burning one of the mesmer’s powerful elites just to provide boons to your party is even remotely acceptable.
This. Time warp > all.
Also, I personally get the impression that all that support building is not really worth it. I mean you are severely limiting your damage output for mostly just a few stacks of might, I’d wager that the benefit that brings to the party might not even be worth going out of your way for it. As a rule of thumb, 1 might is ~1% damage, and that’s not all that much if you can’t sustain it.
For comparison, look at a warrior with axe/horn and traited banners. Permanent regen, 90 precision, 10% crit damage, 50% of swiftness and vigor even untraited and before boon duration, all of that for everyone in a 1200 range and they don’t even have to do much to sustain that.
I think magic find should go, not on the basis that it’s a selfish stat.
But because in its entirety, it’s useless.Sure you have have a few times more to earn some better loot, but you’ll be quickly neglected by the effects of Diminishing Returns after a few drops.
And a chance 1/5000 rather than 1/10000 isn’t really all that worthwhile of an investment.
1. Going with your example, 1/5000 compared to 1/10000 would be extremely worthwhile, given enough trials. It’s not like you only kill 1 mob per hour.
2. Mf does not interact with dr.
3. Mf is indeed crap because it is a selfish stat, and that alone would justify removing it, if the devs were actually consistent with the rest of the game
3. Stats in WoW work multicatively too… 1 Stamina = 10 HP. 1 Str = 2 AP for certain classes. You get my point right?
Right. Except that this is totally not what multiplicative means in this context.
There are numerous posts in this very thread now that better illustrate how power, precision and cirt damage interact in this game, and how it is different to the example you provided.
For reference: Multiplicative in this instance means every point of power gets more valuable for every point of precision and crit damage I have and vice versa. This is not true in your example, where strength and stamina do not interact at all.
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The simplest solution is usually the best: make other people’s character sheets viewable. This would fix the problem, without causing annoyance to people by removing a load of equipment. You don’t want MF in your party? Look at what they use and kick them.
An inspection feature has already been suggested.. I don’t want it. It’s nobody’s darn business what armor I am wearing. All it does is promote elitism.
Whether inspect in general is a good idea, I would absolutely love to have a visible indicator of mf on other people. If people insist on gimping their parties for personal gain, fine, but at least let their victims know about it.
Nice, thanks for the link. I other news, high-five for python!
Shield was a staple in high level fractals, then those 2 kittenheads responsible for balancing went all smiter’s boon on all of them. They are in line with ranger’s spirits now.
Unfortunately you did.
Unlike bleed,the burning condition ticks every 1second,so if you can’t reach the next second then no damage is dealt.
For example lets say you got an ability that does 1second of burning, if you reach +90% condition duration that will get it up to 1.90sec duration,then only 1 tick will go off.The +% burn duration can help with the Fiery Wrath trait in the Zeal line,to keep the extra +10% damage.
Well that blows. How did you know all that?
Actually, a lot of tooltips on skills/traits are labeled inaccurately, some don’t give substantional information that would be required (read: internal cooldowns) and then there are some that are just downright misleading.
No…. just no. Scepters are supposed to be range weaponry. Look at the other classes that use them. Yep, that’s, right. Ranged. What’s your ranged options for Guardians, other than slotted skills? Scepters and staffs, which staff is less ranged.
Like Greatswords are obviously melee weapons? Flavor is of no concern when it comes to gameplay mechanics. Also, guardian scepter actually is a very good single target dps weapons for pve.
It is completely neglectable in pvp for most of the time, but that is not entirely unheard of. Quite some weapon combinations are worthless in pve and good in pvp and vice versa.
blabla.
Any arguments?
Utter failure across the board.
1. You compared chest to shoulders.
2. The relative difference between the stats of the actually relevant pieces of equipment (“elementium plate” vs. “magma plate”) in wow is actually even smaller then the difference between exotic and ascended pieces in gw2
3. The stats on the wow armor were “strength & stamina”, whereas gw2 has Power, precision & crit damage, all of which get increased by the same relative amount when you step up to ascended. The difference is, that the stats in gw2 work multiplicatively, (i.e. actual damage is: base (power) * crit chance (precision) * crit damage) so increasing all of these variables by the same amount (say, 10%) turns out to be a much greater difference in their product.
back on topic:
Yes, despite previous claims, they completely abandoned the whole no-grind philosophy. If we project the same progression logic, full ascended gear is expected to perform 20-30% better then full exotic, and it will most likely require grinding. Look at the “manifesto” again, what they promised there and what the implemented now are directly contradicting each other, no matter how you look at it.
They won’t admit it of course, but that’s just how it is, there no room for interpretation here, they literally just threw that “manifesto” out the window, whether you like that or not.
From my understanding, the laurels were added for those players that do regular PVE, not dungeon runners, not WvW players. What I’m trying to get at is that I hope (and pray) that they add a challenging yet more rewarding way of getting all that gear, the same gear you get from Laurels but from difficult content instead. But I will redirect you to threads on Raids and similar “hard” content, and how lots of people are totally against them. I can understand why nobody should be left out, and the Laurels are a great way for everyone to get their gear, but shouldn’t there exist hard content to reward them FASTER? Effort should be rewarded in my opinion, and there is little to no reward for it atm, just pure RNG (and to an extent, grind)
This is also higly debatable. I’d even say that those who enjoy wvw are actually the ones who are the most incentivized to grind out that ascended stuff, because in wvw, assuming players of equal skill that would normally have an roughly equal chance to win, a player with 30% stat advantage will beat the lesser equipped player any time of the day, extreme crit streaks and etc. aside.
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By definition, it is possible to tag every mob, but the circumstances have to be right, saying it’s a high pop server is like telling someone to deal 50% of a mobs life to a mob that has 51% current hp while 3 people are actively hitting it. Again, there is still a possibility that it can come out working, but it’s not going to happen every time.
I’d put it this way:
Can a mesmer reliably tag all of the mobs when there is no contest anyway? Yes, he can.
Can a mesmer reliably tag all of the mobs in a situation where the ability to tag mobs actually counts, due to them being contested? No he can’t.
It might happen for some of them, you will probably be able to get gold reward anyway, but I think it is a generally accepted fact that mesmers have the worst skillset for that particular situation. Really, show me a class that does worse at it.
So all the teleporting farming bots will be sylvari, all the ranger bots will be norn and we’ll have to log over to our asuras to open bags…
Seriously though, I see where you are coming from, but I really think races should not have any numerical advantages over one another, however small they might be. They do have different skins and everything and thats ok as it is.
Also, holding on to Jugs of Karma for any reason is an economic reason. Economics isn’t about money, it’s about scarcity, the reason you hold those jugs is because you’re mitigating risk on a scarce resource.
Actually, the reason we are holding jugs of karma is because right now, there is absolutely nothing you can buy with them (except mediocre exotics with bad stat combos), provided that you do not go for legendaries. * hint *
Yes they should, because then I could invest in gems and sell them afterwards to make a huge profit…
That’s a bit silly. Torch is a lovely weapon, just one that requires careful usage.
Sorry, but… No. Torch is a crappy excuse for a weapon still. If you are that desperate for stealth, slot it in your utilities, but don’t sacrifice your entire off hand for it.
Runes of the Adventurer x6 is nice for a Condition Mesmer Build. Its main stat granted is Condition Damage (183) with a little Power (50), and its x6 bonus is that when you use a Healing Skill, you regain 50% endurance (10s CD). So you hit your Heal Skill, you can dodge and spawn another Clone.
Otherwise, its Runes of the Undead (If you are going a massive Toughness Route) x6 or x6 Crest of the Rabid or x6 Coral Orbs depending on whether you want Toughness or Power. Still debating if Runes of the Thief x6 actually works like I think it may.
Actually, 2x Centaur, 2x Undead 2x Krait stack for condtition duration, just throwing that out there.
Also, I don’t mean to burst your bubble, but personally I feel that condition mesmers in dungeons are playing below their potential. Other classes (thief, engi, probably ele as well) can rack up ~20 stacks of bleed faster and more reliably. If you party with one of those you are pretty much dead weight, damage wise.
Well, before the patch the main issue with spirit of nature was that it would die in one hit from anything that would have a chance at downing your party. Now, they “fixed” it to instead die in one hit from anything that would have a chance at downing your party.
Does that answer your question?
Just be happy others can’t see your mf stat. Actually, I’d make the trade in a hearbeat.
Because Magic Find stat was such a praised success…