Guild Wars 2

Diovid.9506:

This is done in order to future-proof the mechanic…

Ah, I see what you’re saying. That makes sense.

It’s disappointing that the simple act of swapping my skills around will become increasingly slower, longer, and less practical over time though. The skills I bring to defend a gate are not the same skills I would like to use to bring down a roamer while running to said gate, or even the same skills I would use to attack a gate. That extra minute it takes me to swap my skills now can be a huge delay, especially when I swap them every 5-10 minutes as the situation calls for it. It makes it easier to get ganked as I’m changing them while running to the battle.

I love scrapper, but I also like to change my skills constantly to fit the scenario I’m encountering. One thing that seems just odd is the fact that I can only use my hammer or gyros if I trait into scrapper. So if I want to use rifle but also have the blast gyro, I have to give up a trait line that’s useful to most of the build.

It seems kind of arbitrary. What if I want to spec into Explosions, Tools, and Firearms, but still be able to swap to Sneak Gyro at a moment’s notice? Can’t do that.

In fact, if a new player started playing this game, and they haven’t been watching dev posts and other communications from ANet, they wouldn’t understand why it is this way. The “specialization” line looks like any other trait line and behaves like any other trait line except for this one curious feature where 6 of your skills and one entire weapon option disappears if you don’t trait into it. And it may not even be apparent to someone why they disappeared, because they may not even notice that it was the trait lines that made this change.

All in all, the scrapper is awesome! The gyros are useful. The hammer adds another approach to my combat. This is just one minor annoyance that gets in the way of my style of play.

If you detonate supply crate underwater, it detonates all turrets, even those that are not part of the supply crate. Underwater only; works fine on land.

To reproduce this, simply go underwater, plant a turret (harpoon, rocket, net, or any combination of the three), then use Supply Crate, then detonate Supply Crate only. You will see all of your turrets detonate.

It doesn’t appear to matter what order the turrets were created in, and it doesn’t appear to matter what traits you have. I tested this with no equipment equipped and all traits turned off.

Great elite. Especially when you trait your turrets to make a reflective barrier. Summoning a field of reflects that you can stand under is pretty cool, and the stun is a great bonus.

But the best use of Supply Crate, now that the Deployable Turrets trait was removed, is to put some decent damage turrets down on a remote location, basically using it like Deployable Turrets. But look at the turrets we get from it: Net Turret, Flame Turret, Healing Turret.

Net turret is alright. Not really complaining about it. Flame turret is okay for its fire damage, but now that we can overcharge our supply crate, flame turret is just disappointing, and condi damage doesn’t work on siege weapons in WvW. I’d rather have a rocket turret that can dish out a ranged knockback when I overcharge it, or rifle turret that can fire a volley at the arrow cart on top of the keep walls, or a thumper turret that can give a solid AOE knockback.

And then there’s healing turret. We get med kit drops as an F5 skill, so having a heal imbedded in the normal function seems redundant. It would be silly to use your 120 cooldown just to summon a healing turret anyway. Again, I’d rather have a damaging turret. Healing turret is awesome as a heal skill centred around me, but it’s hard to make good use of it when you want to drop it on top of a group of enemies or on top of a keep wall.

It should be noted that Supply Crate has a pretty good selection of turrets under water. Just not on dry land.

So Supply Crate ends up being used for its stun and (if traited) its reflects. That’s about it. I’m still using it though, because those are still some pretty cool abilities. But it seems like it falls short of what it could be.

Beyond that, I think I’m loving the changes to Engis. It really feels like we are the artillery.

TLDR: Waah waah… I don’t like the turrets in Supply Crate.

The traitline updates are coming for everyone, regardless if you have HoT or not. What about the specializations? Are those also coming for everyone, HoT or no?

What about guild halls? If I am a part of a guild that has a guild hall and I don’t have HoT, am I still able to enter their guild hall?

What about the new WvW zone? Is that for everyone or just people with HoT?

It just occurred to me: Did engis lose deployable turrets?

Our granades are reduced to 900 range and we’re losing deployable turrets? Say it isn’t so! Engis were the best class to take out siege in WvW by far.

I mean, I generally like a lot of the changes engis are getting, so I’m sure I’ll adapt, but man… I liked kittening off people on the walls.

So if the engineer is getting F5 toolbelt skills, what will be the toolbelt skills for racial elites?

While I think your (the OP) analysis is good, it ignores the biggest advantage a soldier’s geared character has over a glass cannon: it survives a lot better in a multiple-enemy environment. There’s a good reason people go high defence in World vs. World. Soldiers can wade deep into a zerg that’s dealing lots of AoEs and come out the other end intact.

But you’re right about the enemies in PvE. Dungeons and other situations are easy because people use the Line-Of-Sight tactic; stand behind an obstacle and pull, and the enemies just cluster together on top of you. All of those ranged attackers are no longer in a situation they were designed for. The glass cannons can blast the area and hit multiple enemies, and they just go down quickly.

If the enemy was smarter, those ranged attackers would walk around the obstacle in a wide arch, still keeping their distance, but finding line of sight. Or the enemies themselves would use more ground-targeted AoEs, or at least have them available to counter that tactic.

It’s also pretty common among a few bosses that their most devastating attacks are only performed when players keep their distance. When you get into melee range, they just stop doing the really hurtful stuff.

So what the OP suggest is correct: the enemies need adjusting, not the builds.

MaXi.3642:

i dont see this as a problem, its a war and you lack the army, its bad but everyone must deal with it… just hope you will move to lower tier and there wont be night guilds

I still see it as a problem, since it’s not war; it’s a game. People are obligated to participate in war when it is needed. Not in a game. Anyone who wants to play WvW at night just has a bad time because they are always outmanned. In the case of my server, it doesn’t appear that we will go down a tier either, because we do quite well during the day to make up for it. In the end, it just means people on my server can’t play WvW at night and expect to have any fun. I do shift work, so sometimes I’m on until 4:00 am and other times I have to turn in before midnight. I know what it’s like in both time periods and I see all our hard-earned, fully upgraded keeps get wasted by a zerg with only 7 of us to defend commander-less.

On the flip side, I don’t expect their night crew to actually get good at the game. Frankly, they use dumb strategies and waste resources, but it works because they have numbers. They’re not getting any challenge.

One Prarie Outpost.4860:

Close down the boarderlands at night?! Are you high? Blah blah blah!

I admit solution A would be better, and probably easier to implement from a technical standpoint. The times are yet to be decided. The time doesn’t have to match spot-on when people log off, just get approximately there. I’m sure ANet has easy access to statistics on when the majority of people log off. And the fact is that a majority do log off at certain times in the Americas.

If the points were worth less at night, that doesn’t mean you can’t play. Obviously there will still be Australians, New Zealanders, people who work odd hours or don’t work, etc. on NA servers. It just means there’s less incentive to prioritize night play. The inter-server trading that’s going on, where people in odd time zones are almost literally being bought, wouldn’t be very cost-effective anymore. That’s the point.

In World vs. World, my server is suffering from a sever lack of a “night crew.” We tend to do quite well during the day, but once everyone has to go to bed, our opponents’ night crews log on and take over everything. It’s frustrating, especially because we once had a night crew, but they were poached by a higher tiered server. This higher tiered server even paid for everyone’s transfers. We lost 3 night time guilds because this other server was desperate to have a night crew.

The whole idea that a server requires a night crew to succeed is ridiculous. Some servers are designated North American and some are European. Yet North American servers want Europeans and Europeans want North Americans on their servers. And it’s frustrating to work so hard to gain and upgrade your battlements, only to have them handily taken with no resistance at night just because people want to go to bed. Equally frustrating is when you can stay up, but you’re just a handful of people against a horde of Europeans and Asians.

So I thought of a couple different solutions. Both of them involve establishing a server’s “night time.” That could be, say 11:00 pm to 6:00 am, sever time. Those times aren’t set in stone of course.

Solution A: Make everything worth half as many points during night hours.

Solution B: Close down the borderlands at night. Even at the latest hours, there’s usually still enough people on Eternal Battlegrounds to keep a good fight going.

If either of these are put into place, I think making server transfers free for about 1 week would allay complaints from Europeans who only came to North American servers because they were given incentives to do so.