GeraldBC.4927

That doesn't change the fact that it is a visible downgrade and it doesn't answer why the downgrade happened. And before that excuse is cited, yes it was perfectly easy to pull off. They probably already did. There's probably copies of an earlier version of in-game models somewhere on their computers that have textures much closer to the concept art.

LWS3 E5 Taimi's Pet Project There are multiple major reasons. I will not elaborate further.

I can't help but notice that the models of the Kryptis forces in promo screenshots and the rift hunting teaser look vastly different from what was presented in the concept art. The concept art featured abstract horrors, covered in mouths with large teeth and open flesh, the skin it once had ripped wide open or blended into exterior bones. A scary and fascinating enemy and more importantly, one very much in line with what demons in the guild wars universe should look like. But in the screenshots presented in the promotion website and in the teaser for Kryptis rifts, the in-game models of the creatures presented are just chunks of black stone, with thin lines barely calling back to what may once have been the stretched skin from the originally envisioned creatures. From a distance, they just look like some kind of generic crystal elemental. Was their design changed? Did the Kryptis at one point look just like in the concept art and then the teeth and flesh were simply painted black? If the concern behind this change was that it might not be suitable for younger audiences, remember that this is an mmo, rated 12 and riddled with adult themes at every point. The youngest people playing this game are teenagers and they would love stuff like the original design. It would fit more with how torment creatures looked as well.

I actually disagree. Adding Kryptis invasions to Central Tyria would be a great idea. Imagine the idea as a new player, you're wandering Kryta in search of something to do, and suddenly demons break into Tyria and people show up to fight them. That's definitely something that's more intuitive and prone to hook a new player than stuff like the riftstalker rifts or green steampunk monsters that don't die when you kill them.

Also another thing I forgot that is very important: The rewards for bounties are basically nonexistent, which is why they flopped outside of legendary bounty trains, which people don't really do anymore either. It's one event's worth of rewards, at which point you can go to any map, complete random events and get a better use of your time out of it. Make sure that the rewards for rifts factor in not just the time spent fighting the enemies, but also the time spent traveling to the rift.

My main concern with this idea game mechanically is the following: If you tier the rifts between solo and group rifts, that is one thing. But if the difference in rewards between tiers is too vast, people will feel like they are hard-locked into the group rifts or being punished for doing the solo variants. Putting a generic satyr-style demon in the game was a mistake and I wish Deimos was forgotten. It would seem more like what dragon response missions SHOULD have been rather than what they actually were. At least if we go by the 'teleport into a small arena, kill some random mobs, done' model.

I was thinking something similar, but with a different name. A 'tribute' item that takes clovers and trophies to craft. Just as a speculative example Mystic Forge recipe: Amalgamated Elemental Lodestone Components: 10 Glacial Lodestones, 10 Molten Lodestones, 10 Onyx Lodestones, 10 Evergreen Lodestones Mystic Forge recipe: Wizard's Tribute Components: 1 Gift of Condensed Might, 1 Gift of Condensed Magic, 20 Mystic Clovers, 3 Amalgamated Elemental Lodestones When the mini-expansion releases, people have tributes sent in the mail depending on how many legendary runes they have. If you have 2 or 3 legendary runes, you have 1 Wizard's Tribute mailed to you. If you have 4 or 5 legendary runes, you will have 2 Wizard's Tributes mailed to you and if you have 6 or 7 legendary runes, you get 3 Wizard's Tributes. Mystic Forge Recipe: Star from the Beyond (legendary relic) Components: 3 Wizard's Tributes, 1 Gift of Obscure Mastery, 1 Glimmer from the Beyond (precursor from a collection), Gift of the Star (new gift, might even involve items usually associated with weapons like gift of the mists)

You are far from the only one. Most of them were insufferable and should have been scrapped before they were introduced. It baffles me that they were kept prominent for so many years. I have more understanding for someone like Braham, because the circumstance he was born into isn't his own fault, but for the rest beside Taimi, not so much. I hope the 'isolation' with most of them involves their souls getting sent to the mists and staying there.

I don't even think it needs to be more serious, it just needs to have more emphasis on fantasy and the escapism attached to it. Less modern city life, less emphasis on checking social boxes and more on the wonder of strange hidden landscapes and wizards practising their craft in isolation.

But you will be able to combine scholar runes with a thief relic, which will probably make for a good temporary setup until better variants are discovered and popularized.

The Skiff playing a major role in SotO is highly doubtful. In maps consisting of a city in the sky and a bunch of islands in the sky, there simply isn't room to be sailing around the map on a boat. What I do imagine being possible unless Arenanet sleeps on this, is the following: The city might have rectangular or cross-shaped pools of water like in a Roman bath house, and if we're lucky, one will be large enough to have room for fishing holes which feature some new fish that's relevant to new cooking recipes (disregard this part, I was getting fishing systems from different games mixed up). And the island map might have one island with a little lake that also has fishing holes. My personal hope is that both those things are true and that one of the two is set up in a way that is suitable and reliable for fishing legendary fish. Factors pertaining to that are -of the fish available in sky maps, none of the legendary ones require dawn/dusk -of the fish available in sky maps, at least one legendary fish is available during the day -of the fish available in sky maps, at least one legendary fish is available during the night -of the legendary fish available in sky maps during day and night, neither require mackerels -the list of fish available during the day with the bait needed for legendary fish during the day isn't longer than necessary -the list of fish available during the night with the bait needed for legendary fish during the night isn't longer than necessary I would love to spend time fishing somewhere other than sandswept.

Surprisingly enough, it's the old one. Despite her troubled relationship with the company. Way back before HoT, there was some drama where her colossal ego clashed with Arenanet's unwillingness to fall on their knees and give her everything she demanded. In a move definitely not prompted by Felicia's behavior, Arenanet had her character lobotomized after HoT. I didn't believe my own eyes on that last one either, but you can look it up on the LWS3 section in Zojja's article on the wiki. I look forward to seeing how they explain her suffering serious brain damage and somehow just walking it off.

I never got why people react to the news that way. I got the skyscale the old way too, but seeing that new players who play the expansion will get it more easily made me go "Thank god they'll have an easier way, imagine having to do everything you currently need to do."

My guess was that since the promo stuff seemed to tease the Kryptis attacking Tyria in some form, that there would be some kind of Kryptis invasion events in core maps just before expansion release. I'm starting to think I was wrong.

I find this a very positive development. Maybe I was wrong. The fixes to sand sage and blood as sand, as well as the since discarded idea to increase Devouring Darkness' CD to 25 seconds (which would have destroyed any semblance of a rotation if implemented) makes me think there might have been a genuine misunderstanding. And CMC has since tried out scourge or at least read through all the traits. I was thinking of posting my thoughts on all the specs I played since the balance patch on how they play and one major thing with the scourge was definitely the base duration on alacrity. It was so miniscule, it hard-locked heal alacrity scourge into spamming everything constantly and running 75% or more boon duration just to barely sustain and condition alacrity scourge was outright impossible. I'm looking forward to trying to make a decent condition alacrity scourge after this change. As for other specs Specter It is definitely true that prior to the above changes, you could just go into shroud, spam your skills for a few seconds and instantly cap out without any effort. Hopefully this doesn't change too much after the nerf. The main issue I saw with heal specter is that its healing (and barriers) are a little on the weaker side and make keeping people alive in damage intensive bosses difficult. Especially during shroud, those 600 points during shroud are like a drop in a bucket. Also I feel like the conditions inflicted by shadow shroud could do with an increase somewhere. It doesn't have the strength you'd expect from a 'shroud' behind it. Scrapper Even after thoroughly trying it out, I still think quickscrapper is broken and not in a positive way. The SC build looks like a mess and even making your own ends up janky as well. The whole combo idea might be able to work in some way, but currently it isn't intuitive enough to draw in people willing to play it. My suggestion would be to expand the range of eligible finishers onto whirl finishers. That way people who like gyros can stick to gyros and it even frees up utilities more, because now your hammer 2 if lined up with a combo field generates quickness as well. "But then people will just default to 'shredder gyro' over 'throw mine'." If this is an issue, simply nerf the amount of finishers in the gyro and buff the damage on the mine. Some adjustments on 'big ol' bomb' might help create options as well. Herald I have no complaints about the way quickness herald works whatsoever and I think the complaints about the three second intervals on quickness were unnecessary as well. Harbinger The damage increases from blight on the tooltips of several traits in the tree are inconsistent and confusing. Also I maintain that the 50% nerf on blight's condition damage increase was not necessary.

Not including a legendary relic would be nonsensical and go completely against how the rest of the game is designed. Every single slot within the equipment section of the character menu (barring aquatic headgear, which only affects under water combat) has at least one legendary item you can get for it. Armor, weapons, sigils, runes, trinkets, aquatic weapons, everything is covered by legendaries. It would make zero sense for relics to be any different. In fact by now something occurred to me: Why not place the relic slot in one of the armor pieces, like chests or shoulders? That way if you have the legendary armor piece, you can swap non-legendary relics in and out of it at no cost or effort just like you already can with runes and sigils.

I see nothing wrong with this. Do it, Anet. Implement the relic system. "But what about the people upset that their efforts to get legendary runes are being invalidated?" First off, their efforts are not being invalidated completely. They still have their legendary runes with the new system, right? Those legendary runes are still something that they have for free on every character, that people without legendary runes have to buy or craft. The runes aren't going away. Secondly, the people complaining about the change are all people who have gone out of their way to craft - 2 legendary accessories - at least one legendary ring - at least one legendary backpack - at least one legendary necklace -18 legendary armor pieces -multiple legendary weapons -6 legendary runes - at least 2 legendary sigils Does this sound to you like crafting one more legendary item will break the game for them? No. The solution to this, is to implement relics exactly the way you imagined them, and then simply include the ability to craft a legendary relic. Maybe lock it behind a collection that involves all the things done in SotO and resources specific to the expac. It's not extreme or unprecedented, you did something very similar with LWS4E6, tying a mount that completely changes overworld gameplay throughout the entire game leading up to it, to what's basically just a series of DLCs. All the tools needed for it to work are already in the game in some form. The legendary armory system works flawlessly. If you think including a new slot within the character menu that affects combat is difficult or impossible to do, remember you already recently did this with jade bot cores.

That is the issue though. You are forced into a dating scene and your options are limited to those of a one-armed man, a cactus and a bird. Who exactly is this supposed to appeal to? The entire date scene was a cringefest from start to finish, whether it's the Commander's antics or Min's behavior. Assuming this HAD to be in there as part of a setup for the next chapter/episode/expansion (which I doubt) I would have appreciated an option along the lines of either: - "I would rather not involve myself in Rama's personal life." or: - "I think this is a terrible idea and I refuse to be part of it."

If you head over to snowcrows, browse the thief section and look for an alac heal specter build, you will notice that there is none because it is (to their implicit claim, I don't know for myself) not viable to play. They are trying to change that. Let's not go that far. All it is, is one or two people acting on their preferences in an unhealthy way. I can already picture one of the balance devs reading all these posts and at this one thinking "Well what else are we supposed to do then?" And to that, I actually do have an answer. It is okay to have biases, it is okay to have preferences. But instead of pretending they're not there publicly and neglecting weaker specs on purpose to avoid engaging with them, you should embrace those biases and preferences and act on them. The current approach seems to be "I don't like this spec, so we're just going to nerf it into irrelevance so I don't have to see people play it." Instead, turn this into "I don't like this spec, so we're going to rework it completely and turn it into something I do like." Some people may not like it, but it actually improves the game this way. But before anything else, I think the easiest remedy to this problem is for the devs responsible for the changes in question to actually play the specs they are nerfing. For scourge specifically, I'd recommend trying the 'it's totally viable bro' challenge on the scourge. -You have to play exclusively scourge for one month -You can choose and alternate between scourge builds, but you can't switch elite specs or characters. -You have to play the post-patch nerfed version on the live servers. -You have to complete fractal CMs every day and every raid wing once a week. If you fail to complete one of them, you need to try again until you succeed. -You can't bring any friends or fellow developers, you need to operate entirely on pugs -You have to complete a total of 10 additional meta events in the overworld. You can't complete the same one more than once. If you find this unbearable to complete, simply buff the spec until it is no longer unbearable. And then buff it some more for good measure. I know you'll have the constant urge to swap to mechanist, but you want the cold truth? That's because mechanist is easy. It's unilaterally stronger than most if not all heal specs. There is a reason why I main engineer over necro and it's not because of how much I love engineer. It's because the engineer can actually perform every role and do it almost as well as the best alternative if not better by a large margin. You complain about the scourge's barriers being op, remember? But how strong are those barriers really? If you dump all your barrier skills at once, you barely hit a little more than barrier cap. A HAM can do this just by autohitting the boss, that's not even mentioning command skills or barrier signet. And on top of barrier spam so strong, the "OP" scourge barriers only match a fraction of it, the mech also can spam ridiculous amounts of alacrity to go with it. And on top of that, you've got these monster burst heals between med kit 5, med kit 4, mortar kit 5, elixir gun 5 and you can do them at range and split them as well. It's not remotely comparable to well of blood, which you need to help keep the camp alive and which will hurt if used on a faraway player instead like on Q2. So knowing all of the above, who are you kidding with claims of wanting to make scourge support 'viable'? Who the hell is going to handicap themselves with a scourge alac heal - even weaker than the scourge is as it is - instead of just waiting a few minutes for a HAM to come along? Or a HAT or HAS if necessary. I'd rather see you destroy the scourge we know and replace it with something good than to see you toss it in a corner and just leave it to rot there.

They're already a shared entity for conditions, it shouldn't be difficult to do the same with boons.

Watch me solve this supposedly insoluable conundrum: Reduce the costs for natural harmony to 8 and purifying essence to 10. "But that's op, there has to be a tradeoff!" I can already hear you say, but no, that is not true. You see the tradeoff is already there, namely the fact that you are forced to keep protective solace on, lest you stop granting quickness.

Side note, when I say 'drastically increase the healing power coefficient on vampiric presence', I don't mean increase it by like 25%, I mean multiply it tenfold, put it in the same ballpark as the renegade elite skill (while you're at it, buff that one too).

It's even worse than that. Healscourges can already give regen via Staff 2, so the regen on the well does exactly jack kitten. And just in case some employee or anet defender wants to think "ugh, it's so much easier to criticise than to come up with a solution yourself, he couldn't do this better either" keep reading because you're actually going to get some constructive criticism. First off, let's get a few misconceptions out of the way. "Giving the healscourge actual healing (as opposed to just barriers) AND alacrity on top of the barriers he has would be op." Not true, seeing as heal alacrity mechanist and heal alacrity specter both have all these things at once and are considered just fine by both you and the playerbase regardless. I can see slightly nerfing the barrier amounts as a maybe, but not by NEARLY as much as you plan to, and only if the scourge gains something beside alacrity, like additional healing. "If we improve something on the scourge, it has to come at a tradeoff." This is only the case if you're dealing with a spec that is already on top of the meta and recommended by top guilds all around. I can see this argument used to justify 'tradeoffs' (aka nerfs) on a mirage or a mechanist. To the scourge, this simply doesn't apply. You could unilaterally buff the scourge as a spec and it wouldn't overshadow other specs, because those other specs are already stronger as is. There is zero justification for this "there needs to be a tradeoff" nonsense. You could give the scourge everything suggested below and even more, with zero nerfs, and it still wouldn't be as good as the heal mechanist. Now for the actual suggestions on how to solve the issues at hand. Question: How do we turn the healscourge into an actual healer with actual healing on top of barriers? Answer: By simply giving him tangible amounts of healing. -drastically increase the healing power coefficient on vampiric presence -make life siphon not just heal yourself but up to 10 allies around you -slightly reduce the strength of scourge's barriers (but NOT EVEN CLOSE to as much as you currently plan to) and in exchange, add some healing to every barrier application Question: How do we reconcile the viable-for-endgame alacrity heal scourge we want to create with the transfusion-stacked-revival-rescue scourge that people know and love? Answer: By separating them from each other and making them mutually exclusive. -rename transfusion into 'cauterizing sand', move it into the scourge tree and replace "Feed from Corruption" with it. -grant an additional effect to 'Sand Savant' which causes every application of barrier to also apply alacrity like with the mechanist, but at a drastically higher base duration than for the mechanist because you apply barrier much less frequently -optional: make 'Necrotic Bite' (dagger 1 third attack) add a small amount of barrier to yourself and nearby allies like the mechanist's mace 1 That way the player has to choose whether he wants to be an oldschool revive healscourge or an alacrity healscourge. The only problem here is that the alacrity healscourge loses a lot of valuable healing because he can't run transfusion, but this is easily solved by giving him additional healing elsewhere. In general, a lot of these problems and solutions would probably be way more obvious to the balance team, if they simply tried out and actively played multiple different specs with the same role and compared it for themselves. If you actually played a healscourge, you'll learn to really appreciate being able to constantly heal with no cooldown or cost like with the mechanist's medkit 1/2 / mace 1. Scourges don't get that luxury. Neither do revenants by the way.

I watched the entire balance stream and was going to come here and give some choice words on some balance changes, but Yve.2045 above has already addressed some of them very accurately. But aside from that Necro As another person said, I think on page 15, taking away boon corrupts from the scepter doesn't improve WvW in any way. The meta in WvW already consists of forming boonblobs and simply spamming boons to keep people alive. It doesn't need less boonstrips and boon corrupts, it needs more. Give the necro his boon corrupts back, give him even more boon corrupts and give more boonstrips and boon corrupts to other classes that previously didn't have any, or give more to others that didn't have as many. Taking away the scepter's boon corrupts or other boon corrupts in general, only hurts the necromancer in pve by taking away a lot of damaging conditions from passively corrupted boons. It impacts the necromancer uniquely in a way that other classes and the players thereof, never cared about in the first place. I guarantee you no mesmer, elementalist, revenant or anything else ever cared if the necromancer gets to apply a few more stacks of poison, bleed or torment. For reasons described above, this change feels like it is designed to hurt necromancers just for its own sake, with no conceivable reason to justify it. Harbinger Why would you take this spec, a spec that is already barely played at all and looked down upon for being weaker than other specs, and nerf it further? Why would you take the damage increases from blight - one of the most crucial components of his kit and cut it in half? Which harbinger hurt you this much? Scourge I understand that you want to curb an easy 3-button alacrity spam, but cutting the lifespan of a shade down to a third, essentially forcing a weaker version of sand savant onto everyone, is not the way to go about it. The game already has a solution you claim to address here baked into it with how it treats conditions given by shades. Simply have all the barriers and alacrity apply once per application, rather than once per shade on every application. Having multiple shades out so you can tackle multiple enemies at once is crucial to scourge's kit and class identity, especially condition scourge. In general you seem to either have completely forgotten that condition dps scourge is a thing that exists, or at least you pretend to have forgotten. The "forced discount sand savant" thing also means scourges can't utilize Sand Sage anymore and that is after it has already - to my memory at least - cut down from a general condition damage increase to a simple expertise increase. Overall an abysmal set of balance changes, not just for points addressed above but across the board with all classes. It seems to me like someone on the balance team, Cal Cohen specifically, had some incident where a necro, a harbinger, scourge or both, repeatedly killed him in pvp/wvw or where one of each outdid him in dps in some encounter. And how he's dead set on brute forcing a shutdown of that ever happening again in a way that affects everyone else in an undue way.