Messages

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Guild Wars / Re: [POLL] NA Server Choice (Crystal Desert) - Not a clan, just join the same server

« on: July 26, 2012, 06:07:17 pm »

Check this list, too...
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/32389-world-choice-guilds-and-communities/

No guilds on Blackgate? That's Racist!


I think I'll just join the server that has the fewest guilds going to it, or perhaps the one that has the lowest population when I create a character. I think it takes a lot of the fun out of the WvW when your team dominates whether you're contributing something significant or not. And it's also less fun if there's guilds that take control of everybody by virtue of being big and vocal, but that have no strategic sense other than racing around in a big zerg trying to recapture the things they made no attempt to hold.

At least on smaller servers, I'll have better chance to influence random people so we can play smart, quality over quantity. Maybe we can even win while having that "outnumbered" bonus. But if we lose, at least we'd get matched up with other smaller servers.

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General Discussion / Re: Post a picture that describes your build the best

« on: July 10, 2012, 07:05:07 am »

(click to show/hide)

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Guild Wars / Re: Stress Test June 27 only for 4 hours

« on: June 28, 2012, 09:05:19 pm »

Oh, and this time in WvW, I was on the dominating WvW team. It was the absolute worst. I felt bad for even contributing to the domination. I much preferred it when I was on one of teams getting dominated so I could actually fight a battle that wasn't already won, and actually use strategy and look to coordinate a defense of a castle instead of just blindly zerging everything.

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Guild Wars / Re: Stress Test June 27 only for 4 hours

« on: June 28, 2012, 08:57:41 pm »

What are dynamic events? I thought they were the hearts.


As far as the difficulty in general, I thought things were nicely challenging, especially if you're under the level you should be for the area. It seemed like I would constantly be just under the level of the area when I only played PvE, and I'd even get some warnings on missions that it wasn't recommended at my level.

But once I played WvW for a while and gained a bunch of levels and much better equipment, I was finding those same PvE areas to be a pushover, despite the fact that it's supposed to bring your level down to match the area. I think there must be some bonuses that stay, like perhaps it lowers your vitality (health), toughness (defense), and all those other stats, but keeps the stats on your equipment?

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Guild Wars / Re: Stress Test June 27 only for 4 hours

« on: June 24, 2012, 02:52:08 am »

That GW blog post also says that they'd like to do this stress test before the next beta weekend. So there's at least another beta weekend.

But what has me really worried about the release date is the earlier blog post on June 12 that said they were looking to hire character artists, and part of the application process is to create meshes for the artist renderings of characters they provided on the page. So they've still got to hire people for that and have them create new meshes for characters... which I bet means they'll redesign all the characters (NPCs and players, and all the equipment), since they'll probably want consistent quality across everything. That's gotta take a while.

I'm thinking the earliest they'll release is this fall, but perhaps more likely is they'll have it out for Christmas. That's my guess, at least.

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Guild Wars / Re: Next BWE Friday, June 8th

« on: June 12, 2012, 06:27:10 pm »

Wait, golems can be healed? Can other siege equipment be healed too?

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Guild Wars / Re: Profession feedback

« on: June 12, 2012, 01:36:15 am »

Regarding those minions, I bet there's some trait line skills and bonuses that you can specialize in to make the minions very effective. That's how it looks with the mesmer's illusions, though probably to a lesser extent.


Mesmer
I've only played a mesmer so far, so I don't have anything to compare it to. My build is tailored to WvW. I'd say the mesmer's strong point is applying conditions (and boons) to debuff an enemy and deal indirect damage that way. For example, the mesmer has a lot of ways to put vulnerability (lowers armor) and confusion (damages opponent for each skill they use), and can put retaliation on allies (damages foes each time they attack the ally). The trait attributes can boost the duration and damage of the conditions, and there's trait skills that boost them further or cause additional bonus conditions to be applied when you do something else.

You can have up to 3 illusions alive at once. The illusions target only 1 opponent (whoever you have selected when you create the illusion). If the target dies, the illusions associated with that target just disappear harmlessly. You always have 4 special shatter options that, when used, will cause your illusions to be destroyed and cause some effect. The choices are basically extra damage, confusion, interrupt+daze, or distortion for yourself (you evade all attacks).

I think by far, the best mesmer weapon is the staff. The main attack applies bounces off an enemy to either another enemy or an ally, and grants a random condition or boon on each bounce, respectively. Then you've got 2 instant illusion-creating skills, so you can use these first. You also have a personal chaos armor skill that'll apply conditions to foes and boons to you whenever you are attacked. And last is the chaos storm AOE, which will apply random boons to allies and conditions to foes. Not much to dislike here.

I think the best alternate weapon set is the main-hand sword and either the focus or torch in the off-hand. The sword is the mesmer's only melee weapon (besides the aquatic spear weapon). I think the 3-combo primary attack it has is most useful for debuffing a target rather than dealing damage, because the first 2 attacks apply 5 second vulnerability, and 3rd removes a boon from the enemy. The next skill is a flurry of rapid attacks, but most importantly here is that you'll have 2 seconds of distortion, which meaning you'll evade attacks for 2 seconds. The 3rd skill creates an illusion that leaps forward and cripples your target. You can then press the skill again and you'll instantly swap with the illusion and that'll immobilize the foe for 2 seconds.

Using this sword with the focus, you also get a wall of energy skill that grants swiftness to allies that cross it, and cripple to foes. That makes this set quite effective for chasing down foes. The other skill here creates an illusion that creates a defensive bubble that protects itself and allies from projectiles. With the torch off-hand instead, you get a skill that causes you to go invisible and blind those around you, and then reappear 3 seconds later, burning those around you. So you can imagine why this might go well with the melee main weapon. The other skill for the torch is an illusion that puts out confusion and retaliation.

As for the other personal skills, I'm using a charr-specific skill that tosses out a landmine that cripples and bleeds the foes that trip it (yes, even more help in chasing down enemies or escaping). I've also got a skill the revives downed allies in an area instantly, and allows them to be fully revived if they then achieve a kill. And my final skill is another charr-specific skill, a battle roar that gives fury and might to nearby allies.

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Guild Wars / Crafting

« on: June 11, 2012, 10:10:55 pm »

So, what's the deal with crafting? I was playing as a jeweler and artificer, but I think everything I crafted wasn't any better than the things I had already found. Well, except in cases where I had no equipment like rings and earrings...

I'm not sure if the level of stuff you craft is based on your character level or your crafting level... but it seems the loot I find is generally close to my current character level and often with nice bonuses. Or I can buy better stuff with karma. The stuff I was able to craft didn't seem to be selling for much on the player trade market either. So I'm not sure what the benefit of crafting is.

Won't you eventually reach a point where you've crafted the best thing you can use and so you'll only craft things to sell? And then won't there be an abundance of top level crafted items on the market? I was thinking it might be a good idea to be a chef just for this reason, since the food items are the only things that are consumable and so will be useful to continue to create forever. Am I missing something here?


Also, I've gotten some rather nice items using that mystic forge (the fountain in the middle of the trader/crafting area) in lion's arch. I just throw in even crappy items, and I get an item that is quite good for my level. Supposedly, using rarer items increases the chances for a better item returned, but I generally have at least 2 blue items in the mix without even trying.

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Guild Wars / Re: Next BWE Friday, June 8th

« on: June 11, 2012, 09:46:30 pm »

Yeah, the WvW was never balanced when I was playing. There was 1 dominant team that seemed to have a ridiculous number of people, crushing anything they came across with zerg-power. At the end of the last day, they made like 25-50 siege golems and cut through the gates of any forts we had like butter...

However, I was able to organize some our team for a bit to beat back the zerg. The key was to defend a fort using lots of siege equipment, as well as having people down on the ground fighting to act as a buffer to keep the enemy away from the walls. We were able to destroy much larger enemy forces quickly and easily like this. It was a lot of fun crushing a huge army like that so easily, sending the zerg into retreat.

It didn't fail until people went off to do other things and allowed us to be overrun (no buffer of people fighting on the ground). It seems quite easy in many forts for an enemy elementalist to just drop an AoE on the walls, killing the seige equipment operators and destroying the equipment itself. And you can't place arrow carts or ballistas farther back on the wall, since the arrow carts require you to be able to see and click on the ground you want to attack, and the ballista needs a clear field of view. In fact, the ballistas needed to be place right up on the wall's edge to avoid being blocked the lip of the wall (which would leave you unable to shoot anything except very distant targets). So you need to have a decent army of allies fighting on the ground.

I wish there was another day to play because I would have tried to organize some recon so that we could know when the enemy army was coming so that we could get back defend with sufficient numbers. There's limited waypoints to respawn at, so it shouldn't be hard to have some people keep an eye on the routes an enemy army would come from, especially on your home map.



Apparently, money is supposed to get easier to obtain as you level higher, so blueprints may seem cheaper and cheaper. Once money isn't a concern, supply may be the main factor. I only saw a supply camp empty once, and it was while we were rushing to build siege equipment to defend a local fort. But if blueprints become even more affordable, forts may routinely become well defended with equipment that you need more than just a ram to attack, and you may even see equipment being built during pitched field battles.

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Guild Wars / Re: Rate your beta experience

« on: May 25, 2012, 06:41:31 am »

No, it's a cosmetic fix more or less. It says they go in the direction you look if you have no target.

It wouldn't be just cosmetic if you can use this feature to your advantage. For example, the skill mentioned early teleports you to where you last fired an arrow. Wouldn't this allow you to pick a spot by looking there and firing?

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Guild Wars / Re: Rate your beta experience

« on: May 15, 2012, 10:08:56 pm »

Yeah, i know. But who's gonna change their weapons alot in PvP? "Oh, my dual pistols are out of range, let me get my rifle. *5 seconds later* Alright, they're in my range again, let's switch back."

I haven't gotten around to the PvP yet, but I do weapon swaps in PvE on my mesmer. The staff I have is long range with some skills that have a considerable recharge (the AOE chaos field or whatever). The sword pair is melee. So I could use a bunch of the staff skills, then go in with the swords and soak up a bit of damage for the group and make my heal useful. It seems a lot more effective to use all those skills available, rather than just sticking with one if the range is appropriate.

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Guild Wars / Re: Rate your beta experience

« on: May 09, 2012, 08:24:42 pm »

- skill system
It's beyond belief to be honest how can you can go from Guild Wars 1, which had fully customizable skill-bar, where you could make any character you desired, from an archer-healer to melee elementalist, focus your toon around any elite skill you wanted, mix whichever classes you chose. That's what I loved the most about Guild Wars, the freedom of character creation and usage, so many options, so much variability, nothing set in stone.
In Guild Wars 2 whole left side of your skill bar is locked to your weapon. Longbow has pre-defined 4 attack skills, great sword has pre-defined 4 attack skills, you can't do jack about it, nothing to be changed to suit your style more or alter the general idea of your character build. I played my ranger to like level 14, I'm bored to death already with the skills I'm forced to use. Surely I could just switch to shortbow, but that doesn't change the fact that you don't define your character and his weapon choice, your weapon choice defines your character and your gameplay, two guys using shortbows will have exactly same main skills. I can't imagine the boredom of the next 65 levels of using same 4 skills.
Apart from those pre-defined "main" skills you have your second weapon, ie. melee weapon for ranger, which has another pre-defined 4 skills of it's own, you can, and most people probably do, switch to it in combat, that's one positive. The fifth skill is healing, everyone has it, you can't put anything in that slot apart from a healing spell, you can pick one of three or four.
And then, finally, you have 3 "utility" slots, which you can change. The problem is that there's a total of maybe 15 skills to choose from, for ranger about 5 of them is, from what I could tell, PVE only. On top of that you have traits, which are utility too.
I think by now you're starting to get the picture where this game went from fully customizable 8 slot skillbar and 120-140 skills per profession and you could have two.

This is what I'm worried about most. I didn't get to play too much in the Beta Weekend, so I was only able to use the various weapon skills (which are basically a small variety of skill presets to choose from) and my heal. From what I can see from the other skills that you can pick and choose (including 1 elite skill), there didn't seem to be much wild variety. Well, not at least at the level of GW1, where you can have 2 classes at once and combine all types of things together in strange ways.

However, where I think GW2 might make up the difference here is in the traits. The traits you can choose from can alter all your skills in certain ways. In a way, these are skills that are "always on" and actually are the most wild and interesting. I think whenever I get the chance to make a build, I'll be looking at the traits first to see what styles of play they would allow, and then choose the skills that best complement those chosen traits.

For example, here are the mesmer traits:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_mesmer_traits

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Game Balance Discussion / Re: Class balance ?

« on: December 24, 2011, 11:18:17 pm »

Oh yes sorry Kay, I forgot that some people in this game are just most epic gods, whereas the rest, even the best players, are total noobs and can't do anything but die, because they are too stupid to play this game

Just about every time I see cav killing some people at the start, it's because they are either running forward completely oblivious to anything around them, or they are AFK. They aren't even trying.

I don't think balancing the number of cav to each team is going to stop that, and even if it did, I still wouldn't think it'd provide much of any balance to the outcomes of the battles one way or the other. I mean, an advantage in cav numbers doesn't mean the team is more likely to win. I see teams with a big cav advantage often get slaughtered as they have to charge into numerically superior infantry (who are beating their infantry in numbers) since it's easier for there to be "spare" infantry who are aware and stop the charges. And you also get a lot more pileups as cav get in each other's way. Personally, I actually like being on the team with fewer cav...

But most importantly, I like the variety of battles that you can get when there is no class-based balance.

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Game Balance Discussion / Re: Class balance ?

« on: December 24, 2011, 04:00:01 am »

Please what? o.O

I can't count how often the last guy is a guy on a horse (and no, I'm not talking about horsearchers) who tries to kill the other 10 guys of the other team and thus delays the game for ages or lets it end in a draw...

Yeah, that's great and all, but we're not talking about 1 cav surviving to the end. Is there a point here?

Well, I for myself actually talk about the first minute or maybe two minutes of a battle. When the team is attacked by 10-15 horses from all sides without any chance of real cover.

Well, you can't fix stupid. If people can't be bothered to work with teammates or simply look around for themselves and dodge/downblock on their own, it's really their own fault. They just need to learn to deal with cav. I certainly have no problem slaughtering cav while on the ground, let alone surviving. I don't think there's a need to force some sort of class-based balance so that the poor players on both sides are equally susceptible being killed for being stupid.

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Game Balance Discussion / Re: Class balance ?

« on: December 24, 2011, 01:14:42 am »

I think you're mostly just seeing things. It's also a bit of what Joker said. People tend to rush in to get the nearest potential kill, so they fan out to encircle the enemy as much as possible or chase off to do some lone ninja attacking... and few people have the patience to actively defend against cav by sitting in a 2nd rank of battle, and the loner ninjas end up being a target of an overwhelming force of archers and/or cav. And sure, if the other team had fewer cav or archers, these "tactics" would have worked batter.



I see teams get beaten round after round and usually can't pinpoint the cause as any class being disproportionally assigned to one team or the other. I think it's just that when one team does win easily and happens to have lots of either archers or cav, you notice it. But every time the cav-heavy or archer-heavy team loses, you think nothing of it. But if you think about it, how many times have you seen a team win easily and then have to chase down a bunch of archers to finish the job? That's an archer-heavy team losing. (Cav-heavy teams tend to lose cav regularly throughout the battle, rather than being the last ones left).

I think what you're seeing is just that when a team beats another badly, the cav and archers become the most visible in finishing off the losing team. The remaining cav have an easy time chasing down and cleaning up the remaining enemies, and all the archers end up shooting at the same few targets with no threat to their own safety. So at the end, 5 cav looks like a stampede, and 10 archers look like a firing brigade. If it's just 10 infantry cleaning up, nobody seems to notice and blame an infantry imbalance.

Also, when a team is winning easily, it tends to make it a lot easier for archers and cav to survive (since the enemy is becoming overwhelmed and is less threat to archers or cav), while infantry tend to continue to die on a more regular basis (since an outnumbered group of infantry can still tend to get nearly even kills against more enemies, until their number dwindles and they become surrounded).