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I want to pose a question to Arena Net:
Are classes being balanced to fulfill certain roles or niches?
Before this turns into an argument about SPvP, WvW, or PvE I want to indicate that I am discussing all of them. I don’t care if you think Anet developers only play warriors.
In other MMOs, classes/professions have at least semi-clearly defined roles (either through design or through gearing and traiting) or they are pushed to fulfill certain shortcomings, in time.
Hint: This is where you (the reader) would want to step in and indicate that any class/profession can do X task as well as Y for Z content. But let me stop you there.
I absolutely agree there should be some cross pollination, we’ve seen this in other MMOs where a particular class is absolutely required for certain content, and that is typically avoided for those reasons.
Do classes fulfill a certain role now? Do you bring a warrior solely for damage and fury? Guardian for projectile reflection? These questions are rhetorical, do not bloat the post by answering them.
These are just thoughts. The main question being, What is the future planning for class balancing? Will I, in five months, switch my main to a warrior because of one small adjustment to Battle Standard? Will a Ranger trait be rebalanced to include a significant shift in weapon/sigil synergy? Should I make The Minstrel or wait to see if any changes will be made to Guardian Shield 4?
Please, inform the community of not what you are working on, but what your ultimate end goal is. I.e., I would rather know that over the course of a year, at some point, X class will be primarily designed to perform Y as opposed to shuffling around abilities for unknown reasons (primarily towards the current warrior changes: why shift things to provide more mitigation and longevity? Does Anet want warriors to be more durable, in general? Or will there be changes coming to condition damage and healing modifiers?).
Just some thoughts.
Aegis is nearly useless because theres no minimum damage threshold to remove it. It can be a 200 hit or 5k hit. Retreat is not mitigation and is basically useless.
I agree there should be a mitigation threshold.
Retreat provides Aegis.
Most of our usefulness comes through group damage mitigation and avoidance. I run 0/30/0/10/30, using sword/focus and hammer. Which provides the following:
Mitigation:
VoC every 70 seconds.
Retreat every 48 seconds.
Shield of Wrath every 45 seconds (individual only?).
Avoidance:
Sword 2 every 10 seconds.
Focus 4 blind every 25 seconds.
VoJ blind every 23 seconds (or on reset).
Hammer is used primarily for trash in fractals. Which this is where we can see the usefulness of Protection.
Not to mention I’m starting to really like Purging Flames for condition removal, simply for the 28 second cooldown. Pre PoV, it wasn’t attractive because two conditions could be removed through Hold the Line (same cooldown when traited). But, since it removes three conditions (to HTL’s one, when traited) and does damage, it makes so much more sense to forego anything other than 10 points in Honor (Vigor and Superior Aria).
Guardians aren’t bad, warrior is just a better choice and more versatile.
I wonder, in which cases warrior is better choice?
Bunker
Warrior > Guardian (Healling sig, perma-regen, high HP, 100% condi immune)
Damage
Warrior > Guardian (Hundred blades, eviscerate, killshot, perma-fury)
CC
Warrior > Guardian (3 hammer stuns, 2 mace stuns, 1 shield stun, cc utils)
Condi
Warrior > Guardian (bleed, cripple, blind, burn, torment, weakness, immo)
Healing/Support
Warrior > Guardian (perma-regen, banner buffs, shouts heal, AoE group rez)But don’t worry guys, you can still burst Courage and give everyone ONE block on a 90 second cooldown! That counts for something right? … Wait, blind condi does the same thing? … Crap, I guess you’re SOL.
In the brackets you brought only warrior’s capabilities. It’s only a half of a picture. Where the guardian’s, so we can compare?
So, as I’m reading this I’m moving a bunch of my stuff over to my warrior, but here are some things guardians do provide:
Wall of Reflection, when traited, has a pretty good use to reset ratio (almost 1:3, 12 seconds up time on 32 CD). It blocks a huge number of ranged projectiles and stays on my hot bar for almost every single encounter in a Fractal.
Shield of the Avenger is very good as well, offering a similar 1:4 ratio (20 seconds of use on a 60 second CD, which starts after it has expired). It feels clunky sometimes and, in my experience, will block most projectiles (some slip through between the spirit weapon’s casting sequence).
Stand Your Ground is good, though it is situational. Save Yourself and Hold the Line are useful only for those running 0/0/30/30/10.
Too many Guardian abilities offer boons that just are not very useful. Protection and regeneration are nice, but they do not make a significant impact on fights.
I’m on my 4th run right now (alt tabbed autoattacking the door behind Dulfy)
I’ve gotten 1 shard.
Thank you for testing this. For your runs where you didn’t get any shards, did you clear the courtyard and defend the shaman event?
Of course if you kill more mobs in an instance your chances of a drop increase, because you’re increasing the number of drops. Not sure what is interesting about this.
Read the posts. What I am suggesting is that when an instance is loaded, there is a 100% chance to include a certain item related to that instance (in this case, mists). If this is true, the implications are very important. Especially for future content releases that may follow a similar pattern.
Your posts never actually stated the claim that there is a 100% inclusion of the drop in the instance. You repeatedly phrased this as “the more you kill, your chances increase, up to 100%”. Which is interpreted as, “if you kill enough mobs, you’ll eventually get a mist” and as I said, that is completely uninteresting.
I’m glad to have assisted you in stating your hypothesis clearly. You’re welcome.
It’s a refining process. If you want to help test or offer constructive remarks, I would appreciate it. Other than that, your most recent reply doesn’t really address either of those points.
I’m one of those people that never, ever gets drops.
I’m sitting at 480something/500 fractals and I’ve only ever had enough mats to infuse 2 rings (on my guardian).
My regular fractal group disbanded due to burnout/disinterest. We always killed everything. My constant bad rng luck was the subject of discussion nearly every single run we did while everyone else got at least 1 of something except me. (lots of globby gloops tho!) I pugged with some regular people afterwards but we skipped trash more often than not due to time constraints.I took a month off gw2 and since coming back at the start of April I’ve been running 2 dailies on my ele and high 20s on my guard. I will sometimes run a 10daily on my warr/mes as well.
Total fractal mats I have ‘earned’ this month: 2shards. Both from separate Ascalon fractals and on my ele.
I’m pugging (nobody I know still wants to do fractals) and its 70% we skip maw trash, 100% chance we skip dredge/svanir forest mobs.
I currently have 3ess/0globs/2shards in the bank and my ele is now blocked from progressing (in the sense that my AR is reason enough to be kicked & replaced)
If I have it in me to bother anymore with fractals after I do another round of dailies today, I’ll toss my guard into ascalon and post what I more than likely don’t get. My guards personal reward level is only ~24 at the moment though.
I’ve had eight drops out of eight runs on fractal 24 (same level as my guardian). Let me know what your results are. Good luck!
I absolutely suggest you try soloing it. It’s not hard, by any means, and does not take that long. Just make sure you clear everything past the first gate.
I’ve also had my mists drop on the final event when the Shaman is doing the ritual, so keep that in mind.
Perhaps I need more information, because I certainly wasn’t able to kill a single mob past the Siegemaster, and certainly can’t spam VoJ.
More insight on your weapon/traits perhaps?
I mentioned my original build above, but it really doesn’t matter what build type you use. Anything that maximizes mitigation (blocking) and avoidance (blinds).
I typically will run Shelter for the heal (2 second block), Wall of Reflection, Sanctuary, and Retreat.
As far as the build goes, I think you can play with anything, but I use 0/15/30/20/5. X/15/30/X/X is probably mandatory, at a minimum.
The trick is in the pulls. Anything with warriors you need to either have Line of Warding down pre-pull (to interrupt charge) or be prepared to dodge a few times. Mages are problematic because a few of their cast animations are instant. Other than that, it’s really just positioning the friendly NPCs in between you and the hostiles. Once one friendly gets hit, they’ll start attacking and quickly gain agro. After that, it’s just tagging each mob and helping spam VoJ for might builds/blind up time.
Hope this helps.
I hope you’re correct, OP. Some of us (still) have pretty bad RNG, and others don’t know how good they have it. I’d love a guaranteed way that effort = reward instead of relying on the fickle kitten of lady luck.
I absolutely suggest you try soloing it. It’s not hard, by any means, and does not take that long. Just make sure you clear everything past the first gate.
I’ve also had my mists drop on the final event when the Shaman is doing the ritual, so keep that in mind.
in mid to high level FOTM, these mists drops are meaningless. I wouldn’t waste much time in low level FOTM trying to get these drops when you can just get infused rings in mide to high.
Yes. Again, read the post(s). I originally started out trying to find a way to game the system by soloing content. I discovered something much more important.
Of course if you kill more mobs in an instance your chances of a drop increase, because you’re increasing the number of drops. Not sure what is interesting about this.
Read the posts. What I am suggesting is that when an instance is loaded, there is a 100% chance to include a certain item related to that instance (in this case, mists). If this is true, the implications are very important. Especially for future content releases that may follow a similar pattern.
One starts to care less about things like this when he’s got this many mists..
I’m sure eventually everyone will be drowning in them. One of the points I wanted to make is that maybe some things that we as a community have considered to be controlled by RNG are not so.
There’s been extensive testing on mystic forge creation for precursors, usefulness of magic find, and diminishing returns on T6 crafting drops. I’m not satisfied with the information returned on many instances of these tests. Too many times do players give up and conclude that the returns on certain items are attributed to random mechanics.
While I was attempting to help people (like me) who are having issues acquiring mists, the second line of thought is this: What if not all things are random? I mentioned above how clearing an instance is (in my testing) directly correlated to drop rate. Here is what I imagine the code would look like.
X = Number of NPCs with a drop table killed.
Y = Chance of receiving item
If X < .15
then Y = .10
If .15 < X < .25
then Y = .25
…
If .95 < X < 1
then Y = .95
Those numbers are obviously completely made up, but done so to illustrate that Anet may be using some definitive code for gating mechanics (mists are gating mechanics for fractal progression).
I tried Ascalon fractal solo on my guardian and to be honest I was surprised when I got vial drops (I only tried a level 1) I got 2 in one level 1 run…
It only took me 20 minutes to complete it without any deaths or any problems, I’ll run it a few more times to see how many vial drops I get.
Btw the MF conversion recipies require a Master’s Salvage kit, which isn’t expensive, around 15s, but still if you can avoid the cost, why not?
I’ve not really considered doing lower level runs, although the 24 level version isn’t very hard.
Thank you for testing it, let me know your other results.
7 of 7.
Has anyone attempted this besides me?
My question would be why? Are you really low/out of them? With the MF conversion i got mats to do tons of upscale with only a few shards. I don’t think i have ever been held back on a conversion by these mats, have you?
Once i had the relics or P. relics to buy the items i always had the other mats.
Before last night I was.
I’ve not done many fractals (117 logged). But, I had plenty of trinkets that needed to be upgraded so I could access the higher level fractals. Out of the 117 runs, I had only see three vials drop. No globs and no shards.
Now I’m mostly running them to see how sound of a theory it is. I highly encourage everyone to try this.
Six for Six.
Video posting soon. Will link while I run a seventh/record a seventh.
. I think it’s just a coincidence in your case, for one to confirm it you would have to do at least 100 fractals in such way, with at least 50 % mists drop rate.
We’ll see. I don’t think that getting an essence on five out of five runs is coincidence. I would like the community to try this since I cannot realistically run 100 fractals.
Also, I’m sure some will be lazy and not clear the entire instance.
Just finished a fifth run with one guildie. I got a Shard, but he didn’t.
80 Guardian
Gear: None (You will die quite a few times).
Trinkets: Zerker
Food: Omnom
Traits: 0/15/30/20/5 (Other builds will probably work. 0/15/30// is required).
Concept: Spam VoJ for avoidance (through blinds), increased damage output, and heal through AH.
Personal Notes: The NPCs will bug. If you die and they stick by the door, just hang by them for a minute or two while the arrow carts pull them away from their stagnant position.
Note: MF gear is not needed if my theory is correct. The theory being that as the number of NPCs killed in each fractal increases, so does the chance for an essence to drop. Up to 100%
Preface:
Like many players, I began to tire of the RNG associated with drops in this game and thus searched for information on how to “game” RNG. I found a few posts discussing people running Frac 10 Swamp to get Globs, but found out that the drops were subsequently nerfed.
After reviewing information, I found that many players had significantly higher drop rates in Dredge fractal. I assume this had something to do with the inability to skip a significant portion of the NPCs. So, I decided to try it out in a fractal that I (as a Guardian) could solo with ease. Ascalonian Fractal.
Information:
I’ve not done extensive play testing on this, and as such am requesting a larger number of players to try it out. Here is my theory.
As the number of NPCs you kill in a fractal increases, so does the chance of a mists essence dropping.
This afternoon, I ran Ascalon four times. Three times at personal/fractal level 24 and once at fractal level 10. Of those four runs, I received 3 Shards and 1 Glob, respective to their fractal levels.
I cleared everything past the gate, with two of my Shards dropping during the Shaman event at the end.
End:
I’d like to see a bit more feedback concerning this. I have no idea what other classes might be able to solo this fractal. I will post my build as a reply.
RIP Blackgate 4/7/13 12:08 PM
Just heard the news too, it’s a shame guilds are jumping ship so quickly.
Count BG out 3 more guilds.
Which guilds left BG?
Those SoR guys are some classy folks.
I wonder if people on SoR are feeling a bit used by JQ right now.