Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Squanto]

If everything's on cooldown, you can't do anything. This promotes a feeling - a wrong feeling, to be sure, one learned in other resource-based games and that does not apply on GW2 - of wasting time when you should be taking an action. (Moving may or may not count; generally not because it may cost you a more effective action.)

I'll disagree on movement, as if you try to go through AC while ignoring the red rings of death on the ground, you are going to be dead in seconds.  With my GS guardian, I usually spend more of my attention on where I am than if my abilities are on cooldown.  The only weapon skills I vastly care about are the leap and chain pull for movement and CC.  Granted, I have had those "useless standing around feeling" times while I played my necromancer, but thats because I use the minions that are laughably squishy (not to mention the ranged one's AI keeps deciding the best spot to stand is right next to the enemy) and all get killed in about 5 seconds of fighting, leaving me with one of the more plain weapon skillsets, with few useful skills to use.  On my ranger, I actually use a sword and axe for the fun dodging around sensation.  Movement was designed to be a big part of the game; that's why there is dodging, the ability to use abilities while moving, all of those jumping puzzles, and why enemy ground targeted attacks hit harder than 10 ton trucks (but only after you're given enough time to dodge out of the way).

[Hugehead]

If everything's on cooldown, you can't do anything. This promotes a feeling - a wrong feeling, to be sure, one learned in other resource-based games and that does not apply on GW2 - of wasting time when you should be taking an action. (Moving may or may not count; generally not because it may cost you a more effective action.)

I'll disagree on movement, as if you try to go through AC while ignoring the red rings of death on the ground, you are going to be dead in seconds.  With my GS guardian, I usually spend more of my attention on where I am than if my abilities are on cooldown.  The only weapon skills I vastly care about are the leap and chain pull for movement and CC.  Granted, I have had those "useless standing around feeling" times while I played my necromancer, but thats because I use the minions that are laughably squishy (not to mention the ranged one's AI keeps deciding the best spot to stand is right next to the enemy) and all get killed in about 5 seconds of fighting, leaving me with one of the more plain weapon skillsets, with few useful skills to use.  On my ranger, I actually use a sword and axe for the fun dodging around sensation.  Movement was designed to be a big part of the game; that's why there is dodging, the ability to use abilities while moving, all of those jumping puzzles, and why enemy ground targeted attacks hit harder than 10 ton trucks (but only after you're given enough time to dodge out of the way).

And red rings aren't the only attacks you can dodge, some ranged enemies actually throw projectiles that you can just walk out of the way of.

I'm the "Leader" of the DFC guild. I didn't really make it for the greater forum community, but if people want in I'll try and invite them within a couple days of them requesting, since I haven't been playing much recently.

[EveryZig]

If you want to always be using a skill than play elementalist. Their attunements are somewhat of like weapon sets (and actually count for 'effect on weapon swap' items), except you have four of them.

[penguinofhonor]

They don't actually count. I went to the heart of the mists and tested it.

[RedKing]

re: the attack damage outputs, I see the different weapons as encouraging different playstyles/roles in a team or even solo.

With my Mesmer, if I go Scepter and offhand, it's pew-pew time on single targets and quick generation of duplicates.
If I go Greatsword (and an illusionist using a 2H sword is awesome), it's all about engaging multiple targets simultaneously and having some serious damn damage output.

If my Guardian uses a Mace, he's tanky and gets lots of defensive shields. If he goes Sword, it's much more offensive-minded. Shield offhand gives me, obviously, shield options. Torch offhand lets me set myself on fire for an area DoT, or breath fire for a cone DoT/cone cleanse on allies.

I am seriously digging the idea of having different roles (offensive, defensive, buffer, debuffer, crowd controller, healer, etc.) be swappable and embodied as weapon choices. Champions Online has a similar mechanic where you can switch between offensive, defensive and utility at the click of a button (and even change costumes with it). It's a way of making sure that you don't spend three hours yelling "LF HEALER!". Anybody can be a healer, they just need to switch gear. Anybody can be a tank, they just need to switch gear. Obviously, characters who ARE Guardians or Warriors will make a more effective tank than say, a Mesmer using a staff. But all in all it still makes for a flexible system overall.

It's definitely a different paradigm than the old days where a warrior was a warrior was a warrior and would only ever be good as a meatshield.

[Jelle]

So uh I've been getting a bit higher lv on my mesmer (first character) and starting to make more plans regarding to build.
I'm 30 now so still a bit limited as to traits but it never hurts to plan ahead.

I'm curious wether mesmers can still be played a bit like ye olde GW1 interupters. Obviously you don't get to see the enemies cast bars as in 1 but I've noticed some traits revolving around interrupting enemies skill.
I'm also imaginging that with the shatter refresh signet you could use diversion pretty often. Throw in another interupt utility and blade offhand interrupt and you've got some good interrupting power.
I'm just kind of wondering is it viable?

Or another idea was a more tanky retaliation based mesmer. I've not tried yet but would sceptre mainhand blade offhand work? You would have two blocks, and with a certain trait you get 3 seconds of retaliation after every block. Build a bit tanky and voila.

Whatever I do I probably won't do the cheesy phantasm spam that appears to dominate currently, such a dull strategy.

Oh one more question if you don't mind, how much does weakness stack? I see I could be getting lots of weakness by getting a shatter trait in conjunction with blade main hand and add some weakness duration enhancement from a trait. Seems interesting if it doesn't get capped to fast.

[Squanto]

Oh one more question if you don't mind, how much does weakness stack? I see I could be getting lots of weakness by getting a shatter trait in conjunction with blade main hand and add some weakness duration enhancement from a trait. Seems interesting if it doesn't get capped to fast.

Speaking of which, I rally don't like how some of the buffs/debuffs stack.  As a guardian, i have tons of spells that cause burning.  Enough that with 2 other guardians, we got up to a 60 second burning duration on a champion event monster we were fighting.  However, that doesn't really help at all since just one guardian can keep burning on pretty much constantly a whole fight with the right build (a.k.a. like mine).  There should be some critical point where it just starts increasing damage instead of duration, so in a 5 guardian group you don't build up a 5 minute stack by the time the fight's over, since that is all wasted dps that never got used.

[Zangi]

Depending on how you are specced, activating the virtue of justice also gives other benefits like might and blind.

[Hugehead]

Oh one more question if you don't mind, how much does weakness stack? I see I could be getting lots of weakness by getting a shatter trait in conjunction with blade main hand and add some weakness duration enhancement from a trait. Seems interesting if it doesn't get capped to fast.

Speaking of which, I rally don't like how some of the buffs/debuffs stack.  As a guardian, i have tons of spells that cause burning.  Enough that with 2 other guardians, we got up to a 60 second burning duration on a champion event monster we were fighting.  However, that doesn't really help at all since just one guardian can keep burning on pretty much constantly a whole fight with the right build (a.k.a. like mine).  There should be some critical point where it just starts increasing damage instead of duration, so in a 5 guardian group you don't build up a 5 minute stack by the time the fight's over, since that is all wasted dps that never got used.

As a primarily fire elementalist, I can confirm that having burns only stack for duration is quite annoying, since I can keep a near constant burn on a target, and when anyone else with burns comes in, the enemy often ends up with 30 or 40 seconds of burns by the end of the fight.

[BurnedToast]

Yeah, burns are handled very poorly. In addition to over 100% uptime from groups (or even single classes sometimes) making for lots of wasted damage on some skills you've got people with lower damage burns who will NEVER see their burn tick, meaning they might as well not use their skill at all.

That's one reason condition damage is considered sub-optimal for dungeons right now, more then one person specced condition means that the slightly lower damage guy (even if it's just 1 damage less) won't be contributing very much since his poison and burn won't ever tick (or won't tick often). I've even seen bleeds hit the cap (25 stacks) in dungeons, and quite commonly on open world bosses so sometimes those might even get wasted.

It's the same exact problem WoW had with warlocks on release (but worse because everyone shares the same conditions) - due to DoT stacking (or rather, not stacking) more then one warlock was really bad for your group. Anet needs to do what WoW did and make damage conditions from different people stack - so everyone gets a single stack of burning, a single stack of poison, and 25 stacks of bleed (not that afaik any class can actually stack 25 bleeds alone anyway).

It's not like condition damage is so massively higher then power damage that this would make everyone forced into condition specs,  and even if the overall damage is higher having a DoT vs a burst is it's own disadvantage (especially in PvP).

[EveryZig]

They don't actually count. I went to the heart of the mists and tested it.

It only works in combat, and it only works with some of them. As far as I can tell from testing, runes that cause conditions or boons (like the one that slows nearby enemies or the one that give you might) work with attunements, but runes that effect your next attack (like the one that makes your next attack poisonous) do not count.

[penguinofhonor]

Huh, that's weird. But I guess it makes sense since you don't want people swapping their weapon ten times before combat to stack up the bonuses. I should have realized that.

[RedKing]

Starting to get into crafting a bit now. I love, love, LOVE whoever's idea it was to make the bank universal among all characters and instantly accessible from the crafting stations.
Goodbye, bank runs.
Goodbye, muleing.
Goodbye, mailing myself three pages of crap to break down for components to mail to my other characters.

I'm rapidly coming to feel this is the current pinnacle of MMO evolution. They've taken so many good innovations from the painful lessons learned elsewhere.

[BurnedToast]

Huh, that's weird. But I guess it makes sense since you don't want people swapping their weapon ten times before combat to stack up the bonuses. I should have realized that.

All(?) of the weapon swap sigils have an unlisted 9 second internal cooldown, so you couldn't do that anyway. I guess you sort of could with the might one (20s of might iirc) but all it would do is let you get to the max sustainable stacks a little faster.

Starting to get into crafting a bit now. I love, love, LOVE whoever's idea it was to make the bank universal among all characters and instantly accessible from the crafting stations.
Goodbye, bank runs.
Goodbye, muleing.
Goodbye, mailing myself three pages of crap to break down for components to mail to my other characters.

I'm rapidly coming to feel this is the current pinnacle of MMO evolution. They've taken so many good innovations from the painful lessons learned elsewhere.

On the other hand, you can't access the trading post from the craft station (which is 90% of times I want to use it), you can't repair armor at any vendor, there's no dungeon finder or even LFG system of any sort (other then spamming chat), you can't mail your alts stuff (forcing you to port to the bank on two separate chars), WvW balance is completely and utterly broken in a predictable way that I can't imagine they didn't see coming, and like I said early the way conditions are handled is really terrible.

They've come up with (and copied) a lot of good ideas, but some of the stuff they didn't copy and some of the decisions they made are really strange.

[Greiger]

Shows how dedicated some folks are. 

In WvW and somebody says their chair is shaking and then starts describing stuff that's happening.  Earthquake in Maine, never left the computer.  Some people have either a great news reporter talent, or really really like GW2.