The story in this game is not exactly compelling in general and the good parts end up being short and useless. Trahearne is… just a symptom of that.
Exactly. Somehow the game never made me care about people I meet. There is no personal interaction, no dialogue, no background, no nothing. When the game then proceeds to threaten/kill these characters and my character gives a speech how much he cared for them and bemourns their oh so tragic death, it feels just… meh.
There are points in the dialogue that really made me wish for a reply among the lines of
“You know what? No. I honestly don’t really give a kitten. At first I tried to, but then I really don’t. I mean I barely knew her for about 3 days, we were not really close, and to be honest I always found her quite annoying. There were no memorable moments we shared or anything, and now she basically threw her life away for nothing. I guess I should feel sorry for her, but in the grand scheme of things, entire races being threatened by an undead menace and all, I really couldn’t care less. Now move on please.”
Also, there are lots of wasted opportunities for storytelling in the game if you ask me. Think about the home district you never ever return to or care about for example, but I digress.
Yes, Trahearne suffers from a severe case of Wesley Crusher syndrome.
There is entirely no reason why the order’s leaders would suddenly decide to put their fate in his hands, despite him showing no leadership qualities or organizational skills at all, other then “the plot dictates”.
Then again, there are a lot of points in this game where the storytelling just plain sucks. All characters across the board basically have no personality at all, there is entirely no development to be found and the horrible, horrible out of place stage-acting doesn’t make it appear any better to say the least. MMO standard these days.
Dude, there are like 5 threads about it on the first page alone.
I just checked, the last dev response in this forum is on page 5 currently, then a whole lot of nothing and one on page 18 again. And they all are “Hello everybody,
the original question has already been answered, so the thread will be locked.
Thanks for understanding.”
I think it’s pretty much safe to say they don’t really read these forums. Besides, you are of course right in bringing this up though.
Oh, while we’re at it, I’d like some real elite skill please, or at least allow us to put utility skills in its spot, kthxbye. Or give us signet of rage.
Arg! My Eyes!
15char…
It was the first event in recent mmo history that had an enjoyable amount of actual, not numerical difficulty. Thus, it is awesome, but will surely get nerfed to the ground as the people unable to complete won’t stop crying about it.
Heh, I got a forum ban for pointing this out last time, but…
Making the desired exclusive items such a rare drop is causing their incredible prices, which in turn makes people run for the gold seller sites even more. If you’re aiming for the more expensive items, you can expect to pay ~20x (maybe even more) the price in $ if you buy keys through the gemstore then if you buy gold from outside sources, and you are guaranteed to get a return on your investment while you could end up with absolutely nothing if you go for the keys.
There is something very wrong with this, and anet really should have seen it coming if you ask me.
So, they actually listened, and the solution for people who hate rngs is… more rng? Brilliant.
Damage wise, kits are at exotic level currently, so any adjusting would mean that their adjusted damage could only go lower.
What I expect to see as a fix is that they’ll let the stats on the main hand weapon apply, so we can have as much as everybody else, and in the course they hopefully enable sigils to work with kits as well.
A one time event that happens around the usual timeframe for updates would be incredibly stupid, so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it actually lasts 24h again.
Shrapnel Grenade - Can we get doubled cd and 2 bleed stacks per grenade instead?
in Engineer
Posted by: wintermute.4096
..assuming you hit with all 3 grenades each throw. Theorycrafting aside, grenades are only really strong against mindless mobs that routinely stand in a hailstorm of grenades to the face, and equally mindless players (I’m not saying it does not happen, mind you.) If they toned down their damage to the same level as everything else you will never ever see people using them. People who are actually moderately aware/not grabbing coffee right now can already casually stroll aside while I haul my grenades around, the effective damage is quite a bit lower.
In fact this is what I’m most afraid of, that people will actually manage to get the only useful kit engis have destroyed so we have “options” again, consisting of a bunch of equally useless kits that come in a wide range of flavors, so everyone can build their kitten exactly how they want…
Actually, I always found it funny how they had to show their whole “mixed tech” idea. I mean I totally get what it is supposed to say in a more abstract sense, but I always have to think that all those asura technology stuff could be utilized better if they didn’t felt the need to strap it onto a giant zeppelin just do demonstrate unity. The sylvari really are the only ones whose technology might be considered worthy to merge with, but it seems this is more of an inherent advantage of being able to manipulate plants the way they do.
I mean it’s not like there are that many different approaches to knowing about avionics, and I’d bet the asura would know a hell of a lot better then just about anybody else, but maybe thats just me.
Grenades are only as strong as they are because basically you are expected to not hit all the time. With proper targeting I’m pretty sure they’d nerf the damage. This is why personally, I like my grenades how they are. I would appreciate an auto attack setting that just pushes that button for you in long pve encounters, but other then that, manual targeting pretty much has to stay I guess.
Anet repeatedly stated that they wanted to appeal to esports scene somewhat, so this might have it’s merits and I too could very well see them implementing it soon. At least limit it to pvp and free tournaments / the first 10 levels of pve only or something among this lines, basically bigger demo without a time limit would be cool.
Wait, you’re saying starter armor in an mmo is ugly? Consider my mind blown…
Currently, kits just are the way to go for power dps. You could probably go for condition damage to use pistols, but just your rifle alone is pretty weak. This does not mean you shouldn’t use your rifle at all, it’s just that the rifle’s auto attack is really bad compared to just about everything else, and it is the only ability you can actually use at full range.
The best ranged damage you could get in wvw is grenades, they are so far ahead that everything else the engineer could bring just pales in comparison. And that’s not because grenades are teh imba (they definitely pack a punch though), it’s because rifle is just that bad at range.
Constant in-game spam mail from gold sellers.
in Account & Technical Support
Posted by: wintermute.4096
If you get a verification email, that means somebody has your account name and password, and was only stopped from logging in to your account due to the verification system. You should probably make sure to change your password to something you didn’t already use anywhere else (and you shouldn’t do so in the future) and, just in case, check if you used that password with anything else and change those account passwords accordingly if you care about their security.
That being said, being hacked is not in any way connected to the gold spam you see in the ingame mail. You see hacking and gold spam mentioned together often, because the gold sellers often first hack an account and then use it to spam advertising, but that does not mean that receiving said spam could pose a threat in any way.
Most notably: does ctrl+T still work on a mesmer? As in, being a called target puts a mark in your head that clearly distinguishes you from your clones?
Also, afaik, the real mesmer always has that little arrow over his head when in downed state, the clone does not.
Well, the first poster saying there are no no cond/heal/tough pieces seems to be correct. Pwr/vit/tough is quite common though.
Don’t have the time to check ingame, but have a look at these:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ascalonian_Clergy_Vestments
also, the karma rewards come in different variations depending on where you buy a piece, see here:
http://dulfy.net/2012/09/08/gw2-templegod-karma-armor-sets/
Actually, I would rate mesmers slightly below rangers even. A ranger can at least acknowledge that his pet will be utterly useless and spec for more arrow damage, notably piercing arrows, which makes him generally somewhat useful throughout the dungeon, and only slightly lacking at the boss fight.
A mesmer on the other hand, will be lacking in damage for everything but the boss. There is almost no real aoe to be had for trash, and the admittedly decent focused damage they can dish out has too much of a ramp up. The theoretical damage is nice, but if the group is focussing primary targets like they should, you will rarely get your phantasms out for more then 2 cycles and then be struck with quite a harsh downtime, spamming subpar autoattack.
Whats worse, the alleged strength of the mesmer, to shine in drawn out boss fights, does not really occur to me at all. Setting up your 3 phantasms for continous fire is what I would call a “win more” strategy. This is because in general, if a fight allows you to just stack up your 3 phantasms with little to no danger to them and a free line of fire all the time, that fight never was really difficult to begin with. On the other hand, when things get hairy, and the mobs/boss start to down your team, your phantasms get blown up almost instantly, so your damage output plummets somewhat. I find this less then reliable performance bothered me a lot, so put my mesmer on a halt for now…
Well, considering they are not a numerical upgrade to the otherwise quite easy to achieve exotics, I do not see a problem with this. Those things were put into the game, specifically to appease the grinding crowd, who enjoy working towards something like that, and although I don’t see me doing it myself, I find that totally reasonable.
That being said, it is not even that much of a barrier, at least if you listen to the guys who already made some of those.
TLDR: It is a prestige thing. If you feel it is too much for you, don’t do it, problem solved.
To answer the original question: no, there is entirely no incentive to go support in DEs, insofar as that you can not gain any loot/contribution by healing or buffing and will have to resort to damage for that. Furthermore, people are usually not specced for support in general pve because to spec anything but dps does nothing but slow you down on the way to 80.
That being said, my 80 warrior whom I use for dungeons currently usually remains in his support/banner spec for DEs nowadays, so I’ll always put my banner down of course, and I suppose there might be others who do the same. And if you are in one of the rare events that are not the overfarmed orr areas, helping people to succeed at the event quickly does actually help you as well, provided you manage to tag the mobs inbetween anyway.
Ok now YOU listen closely. If we all work together… blah! Blah blah blah!
No. Calling pragmatism negativity does not make a completely moronic and illogical plan that mainly consists of loopholes work. I merely tried to point out that, as long as there are player transactions of any kind, you can and will have ways to circumvent anets monitoring. And I’m pretty sure they will not any player bans based on a hunch because of the hustle that would certainly create, that would be the last thing they’d want on the pr side.
You should consider a career in politics though.
I love the part where you said 10/7 was the worst patch in any mmo ever. Like you scoured the forums for any complaints you could find about the game, incredibly exaggerated them and posted them here. I’m just waiting for a “OMG fix kitten or I’ll quitz!!!!” post now.
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, thanks.
PvP does work. The game is not unplayable, it does not crash randomly for the majority of players, neither does it fail to load “9 out of 10 times”, at all. There are some bugged abilities like you would expect in any mmo, neither of which are gamebreaking. Nothing to see here, move on.
Balanced skill in pve =! balanced skill in pvp, because mobs are just so kitten stupid. Look at eles for reference, an earth spec bleed build does wonders in pve, you alone can keep up bleed stacks up to the cap, in a pretty big aoe, and keep bosses permanently weakened, which is insane damage and utility. You might occasionally miss something, but if your team is kind enough (and it is in their best interest to do so) to kite mobs through your aoes, you can maintain a very high hit rate usually.
In pvp, no one ever stands in that circle.
The trait and the sigil will stack insofar as that both get a separate chance to proc, which could very well happen on the same attack, yes. The sigil would then go on an internal cooldown of ~5s (unsure about the exact number) before it could proc again, but the trait would be unaffected by that.
It has been reported that multiple sigils of the same type could net you an increased proc chance each strike (multiplicative), but that they would share their internal cooldown, and no doubleprocs could happen.
Vigil armor is rare so it will not have max stats, which are only found on exotics. That being said, their stat layout (power/vitality/toughness) is arguably the best you can get for a warrior so it is a good start if you want something powerful right now.
The quickest way to get “perfect” pwr/vit/tough exotics if you don’t care for the looks currently is getting the chest piece for 42k karma at the karma vendor near arah and the rest of your exotics through the catacombs of ascalon dungeon.
Wow, the stubbornness is strong in this one… It is not about a data trail, and it never was, you completely fail at logic.
Ok, listen closely: There is no way to trace a purchase outside of the game, therefore there can be no way to trace it ingame. You would have to entirely block people from transferring money or goods to one another, shut down the trading post and make every single item in the game bound to account to achieve any sense of blocking illegitimate transactions.
Still don’t believe it? Let’s give another practical example: Imagine you were a gold seller, and you know someone is about to ban the people you hand gold to. The simplest way to get around it would simply be to go around town and hand out gold to random strangers, problem solved.
It does not have to be much, so lets be generous and say you hand out 10% of the gold you sell, and you always approach people with the same sentence about how you give up the game and want to give away what you have, and simply make sure your customers are among those people.
If Anet now really proceeded to ban people for taking something from a random stranger, well the kittentorm would be a sight to behold…
And to anyone who now says something among the lines of “well, it would at least drive the black market gold price up!” – No bobo, it won’t. Like, not at all. Because acquiring the actual ingame currency is not much of an issue, and the number of “fake handouts” could be significantly smaller then 10%. Oh, and no, you can’t just message everyone to not take gold from strangers or face the consequences, people are too stupid for that.
Yea, wanting to do a dungeon once per character is of course very very exploitive, because its not like we are going to need more tokens to gear up as well. Oh wait.
I agree that it is subjective. =)
I personally like the whole phantasm motif (gameplay wise) very much, and I think that the difference we see to the plethora of unikittenfects we had in gw1 is not really a bad thing. I remember when I started to pick up gw1, I had to constantly look up tool tips of all the weird hexes and buffs affecting me so that I could get a grasp of what’s going on, and I feel that this was an unnecessary barrier really, because “translating” the effects to a more coherent ruleset would have been almost as varied, while being less complicated.
As it seems, the devs consciously decided to reduce the amount of different gameplay mechanics (notably those of other classes) affecting individuals, so the split up their functionality to the different boons and conditions we have now.
The aesthetics of it appear a bit questionable to me as well though, the gw1 mesmer seemed to have a bit more of a menacing vibe to his skills, twisting the nightmares of an opponent against him, making him suffer under imagined burdens and all that. Somehow the way the phantasms explode in pink butterflies does not make me feel like that.
I would love to see a way to customize some of those visuals in the future (and this would be something I’d have no problem if it were store exclusive hint hint), but I have no high hopes for it in any case.
If you feel you have to put a timer on the rewards, do so, but give us numbers. There really is no reason not to give us numbers, because dedicated players will find out what they are. So instead of forcing us to keep track of the counter externally, please just let us view it.
I just don’t want to run a dungeon on my limited time only to find out that I would have gotten 3x the reward had I waited an hour, thats all.
This one is of some importance I guess, because if it is not acknowledged, a “fix” for something else might accidentally hurt the responsiveness of the class a lot.
Found this on the guru forums, so I’ll just quote it:
“With Vengeful Images, your Phantasms attack immediately upon cast. Normally, or without the trait, the Phantasms have a slight delay. With the trait, they attack upon summon. The difference in effectiveness is pretty noticeable. With the Vengeful Images trait, Berserker becomes a very reliable cripple. With the trait, Warlock will manage to get its cast off before it blows up to a nearby fart. With the trait, Warden gets its attack off and traited reflect off when the Mesmer casts its spell. It turns Swordsman into a very reliably timed damage spike.”
As you see, only traiting the phantasm boons will make the phantasms work correctly. And as all those traits themselves are (hopefully) subject to a revision, I really hope they don’t end up broken.
GS + Longbow is a beast. Aoe damage is preferrable and while I agree that conditions in general are not that great, pulsing aoe burn is awesome, much more so if you manage to routinely combo with yourself.
Try building adrenaline with gs/signet, swap to bow and do f1, combustive shot, arcing arrow (combo1), fan of fire, swap back to gs, whirl through your own field (combo2), and bladetrail behind you (combo3, can hit twice).
Be sure to invest in the 5s weapon swap so you can swap in and out of longbow quickly. This should pretty reliably tag any number of mobs.
3. Turn on “Fast Cast ground-targeting”.
I’d personally advise against doing this. Having an indicator where the spell will land is great. If you are holding the right mouse button, it will show the indicator where your mouse was when you clicked, and you can just press the spell’s hotkey again to trigger it, since left click doesn’t work when holding right click.
That depends on circumstances. In a keep fight I usually like to turn off fast targeting to place aoes on the walls, but in ground fights I feel I’m a lot slower with just a single key press.
Also, don’t discount eles condition damage. If you slot full bleed duration, a single hit with eruption will hit for ~1.3 heavy golems worth of health if it really ticks to the end. Granted, it’s easy to just step out of it, and people will rarely let it tick to the end, but at at ~5s cast time aoe (although blasting staff is bugged for it atm) it does somewhat pressure condition removal, which alone is somewhat valuable.
Well, in defense of healing signet, I have to say that looking at it as only 200hp/s (passive), 166hp/s (active), or 199.02hp/s (active + faster recharge) tells only half the story.
There usually is some time between you taking your first damage and activating the active, so a few ticks of regen always trickle in before you activate it, meaning it always provides more effective output then either active or passive alone.
That being said, I still value healing surge a bit higher, and I’m admittedly unsure about scaling with healing power invested.
Correct, Also, this is what applies the weird red-brown particle effects to come from your character. This took me days to find out. Yw. =)
So, no amount of being asian will save you from sucking with eles as the rest of the world does now. =)
No seriously, this bug absolutely needed to get fixed, as it was easily abusable. No line of sight/range restriction meant that even a single ele could whittle down any siege weapon the enemy has, with no way to even try to find him/fight back. That’s obviously not intended behavior and definitely warrants a fix. Maybe even a 1500 range would have been ok for it, but unlimited range is an absolute no-go.
At least with the golems in the mists, I got non crit attacks with the rifle’s burst despite getting the buff icon on swap and not wasting it on auto attacks. Did anyone test if this holds true for actual opponents?
For levelling, gs signet build gets the job done.
For dungeons, axe pulls ahead by quite a long shot, but there you should not wear full crit damage, and you should not dual wield them.
In pvp, bull rush + frenzy + hundred blades is fotm for a reason (and really the only thing warriors seem to be used for generally) also, the whirl does give a bit more mobility to the warrior, which is nice. Other then that, the axe is usually better there as well.
(edited by wintermute.4096)
For all those that complain about elementalist being Underpowered
in Elementalist
Posted by: wintermute.4096
An Elementalist has trouble dealing damage due to the fire abilities dealing damage in a specific location when the target just walks out of it, so a 10 second AoE will generally get 2-3 seconds of damage on the target.
On top of that, the Earth (aside from bleeds not setup as individual stacking) is designed around AoE bursts, where the heavy damage abilities, your target just walks out of it as well.
This was my experience exactly. I once went to the mists and tried to get the most dps out of an ele, just to see what he could do. There I found that (at least as good as I could judge it) the builds with the best dps throughput where aoe condition based, utilizing eruption and burning for damage. A single eruption can be traited to be a ~4 second cooldown large aoe that kills a large golem with a single cast if you stack durations, and you can easily maintain bleed cap aoe, should anything live that long (actually, the golems die to fast for even one abilities dot to tick down, it can do quite a bit more if you factor in might stacks, consumables etc., depending on circumstances you might get 1.5-2 large golems worth of hp from one cast aoe), and it only gets better if you stack a burning glyph etc. on it. Awesome, I thought, and brought that build to pvp.
There I had to realize, that none of this ever works on anything but golems/pve mobs, because real players are just not dumb enough to stay and sit in the big red circle that gives away all of your good attacks.
Whats worse, I found all the attunement swapping nonsense that gets forced onto eles does not really make them more versatile, quite the opposite in fact. You are rarely specced to really take advantage of more then one element, especially if you’re still levelling, most people will have a “primary” element and use the off-attunements to fill the gaps in their rotation, when nothing that fits their specc is off cooldown.
What’s worse, all the different elements besides fire come with an assortment of mostly utility/support spells. Thats nice in theory, but in practice I always get the feeling that even when I might want to switch to an element to use one of those utilities now, being locked out of the attunement I was in afterwards does me more harm then good.
Also, probably most importantly, elementalists are probably the only profession unable to change their engagement range on the fly, which I consider especially punishing for a class that goes down so fast if it doesn’t adjust quickly.
(edited by wintermute.4096)
If you think thats bad, have a look at the foreign translations. The voice overs in the German version are so absolutely horrible that they at least make the English one look better. Every dialogue was obviously recorded completely devoid of context, the intonation of single voice clips is an abomination, and their timing is off all over the place. That the voices rarely fit a character does not make it better.
I have np keeping 2-3 phantasms up once they are up, with the illusion HP signet personally. I’m always swapping between the GS melee illusions and the staff ranged illusions to OT, DPS or cripple/Vulnerability the mob.
It does take a min to get 3 phantasms going but 3 illusions is a matter of seconds. With illusion builds that’s 9% less damage taken and 9% more damage inflicted right there. If AE is pretty intense ill put the ranged illusions up just to keep em up as I work in melee ones… rinse repeat, as I cycle in Chaos Storm. With 3 illusions up I haven’t found a dungeon mob that beats on me through chaos armor and a staff.
GS final hit is 2100+ against the training dummy, and the berserker’s final quad hit is 1200+. It’s not the burst damage you might see in others but I’m often the last alive soloing the mob while the others are rezing and running back.
I do agree the movement speed sucks as IMO the focus isn’t worth the speed buff. I have the rune of the centaur set which is power/precession/bleed and final stack is swiftness every-time we heal, which if you like the mantra heal is constant.
I’m not saying i wouldn’t like to see some improvements and we are not OP in a dungeon, but Mesmer isn’t for auto-attack and take a nap imo. My build is meant to Tank/OT close up (staff) and phantasm/GS ranged damage. I wear Berserker and Valkyrie Armor for high Power and crit%. Sword is Berserker, Staf is Valk. I keep feedback up most dungeons to both damage projectile users as well as a 3rd instant trigger of chaos amor.
hope this is helpful.
1. 1200 on spatial surge is not the damage of the final hit, it is the damage of all single tics combined.
2. Bleeds on a mesmer are pretty mediocre compared to what others can do. Dedicated bleed builds can use a combination of runes/equipment that ramps up bleed duration as much as +~60% or more, before consumables. Mesmer’s can’t really do this because condition duration does not transfer to illusions.
A mesmer will maintain roughly ~15 stacks of bleed using duelists, provided nothing gets in their way or destroys them (which is not very likely in reality.) He will also require a somewhat lengthy ramp up time for every new mob he engages and can’t really shatter much without cutting into his sustained dps. Now look at an earth specced elementalist. They can maintain bleed cap by themselves, in a large aoe radius and with more cond damage then the mesmer can.
(edited by wintermute.4096)
Well, I did not mean this to come across that offensive, point taken. I do however, not agree with your sentiment that the mesmer’s problem stems from a lack of polishing, and more from problems with translating the classes’ concept to pve. The same is true for Elementalists, who suffer from extreme squishieness and rangers, who basically can’t use their pet at all in dungeons for example. Warriors, for example, happen to work extremely well in solo pve because dealing quick, raw damage while maintaining a good baseline survivability is part of their concept.
Personally, my idea for a fix would be pve only traits, that change what your skills do to make them work better in a pve environment. For example:
- Unfailing Phantasms: Your Phantasms are invulnerable until their first attack animation is finished. Ends after 5s if they can’t find a way to their target. (Yes iwarden, I’m looking at you.) =)
- Autonomous Illusions: As long as your are in combat, your illusions switch to your target, should their current target die before them. Only works for targets already engaged in combat with you.
- Selfish Staff: Your Winds of Chaos move twice as fast and no longer have a chance to cause vulnerability (this is actually a huge boost to staff single target damage, since vulnerability does absolutely nothing for you if you’re alone and using a staff, maybe its too strong even), they now always prioritizes enemies over friendlies, regardless of range (because 5s of might are worth next to nothing, and fury is equally pointless for a condition build, which you should be if you’re using staff clones).
- Escalated Elasticity: Your clones’ staff attacks bounce as yours do.
- Vigilant Warden: Your iwarden now can be placed as a ground targeted ability, but needs a target selected to link to.
Don’t nail me on anything, just throwing around ideas here. =)
(edited by wintermute.4096)
Meanwhile classes that have been polished to a near spit shine are still being tweaked while mesmer just gets their tooltips adjusted. It’s a little bit aggravating,
Subjective much? Enlighten me, which classes would that be? Maybe a look at the other classes forum will help you find examples. Oh wait…