Gahagan.4302

Hi. I made a video that breaks down the upcoming changes to Mesmer, Engineer, and Warrior in the patch preview, with a focus on how these changes may (or may not) change up the meta next month, and what other changes could be made to improve the gamemode overall. Give it a watch if you're interested:

Responding seriously, it's very likely this was Greatsword 5 from a Reaper. The claw is able to travel up terrain, like walls, and then pulls backwards towards the Reaper in a straight line. It works differently from other pull utilities like DH F1 and Engi Magnet, which require direct line of sight. Mesmer Focus 4 and Firebrand Justice 3 can get you if you're on the edge of a wall, but GS5 can get you in some places that may look very safe otherwise.

Hi. I've struggled to find good guides and videos for commanding in World vs. World, so I'm going to start making some myself. We'll get to talking about specifics for fights and objective capture/defense eventually, but this is just some basics to get people caught up who may not have commanded before. I hope you like it, and if there's something you've personally wanted to know about commanding in WvW, you should let me know, because I'm sure there's other people with the same question. Video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHd1NiXnJFM

Now have all of the bad dragons have been defeated, there are no dragons left to be hunted, which leaves Dragonhunters in a weird place balance-wise. I suggest that the profession be reworked to better reflect the career changes that many Dragonhunters have had to undertake as a result of the game's story progression. For example, with their expertise in hunting large, powerful, mythical animals, Dragonhunters have found good employment as cryptobotanists, hunting other mythical animals (like horses). Others have taken up work as information security specialists given the proliferation of jade tech. I find that thematically it doesn't really make sense to have Dragonhunters as an elite spec, as the profession has been largely obsoleted in the game lore.

I wouldn't take something that David Sirlin writes and just go "ah but that's just one guy's personal opinion". Sirlin is very smart, and has pretty a pretty good track record with having opinions about how to balance MMOs. But then, maybe OP is Brad McQuaid's alt account.

Some classes have definitely benefitted from that. Firebrand the most, probably, because it was very common to trait the cooldown reductions on Stand Your Ground and Hallowed Ground on traits that were otherwise really underwhelming. But Scourge is in kind of a weird place now, despite a cooldown reduction on a bunch of your Punishment skills, and some classes didn't really benefit from core skill cooldown changes at all -- Warrior and Revenant come to mind, they just didn't have any traits that do that. I do think that change is probably fine, selecting traits based on whether they reduce the cooldown of one or two of your skills isn't really that interesting from a build perspective. But there's a lot else going on in these proposed changes as well.

Curious to get people's thoughts on it. This is my first time doing a video on the patch preview, rather than the actual update, so there's a bit of speculation, but I enjoyed making it and I think it could generate some good discussion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stD2UrdKgk4

To add to Ruthless' suggestion, which is a good one, I think you should also have the option to convert supply directly to points. Servers will often fully tier large keeps, which means that any incoming dolyaks are wasted. Servers which are skilled at defending should have an extra means to increase their points, beyond what a fully tiered objective provides.

Scrap the whole system -- just shuffle links and hosts every week to keep it fresh.

Agree with this. It's also not necessarily about the existence of the cast time, but the length of the cast time. Any cast time over a half second or so is a pretty tall ask for WvW. Tuning down the benefits for the initial Mantra cast, but also tuning down the duration of that initial cast, would likely make them more interesting to use. Just throwing a random idea out -- the initial charge of a Firebrand's heal mantra gives an additional boon, but subsequent casts don't. This generates incentives to use up your Mantra charges to regain the benefit from the initial cast, rather than cause you to hold onto charges you already have.

Between the note about Firebrand changes, and this, I'm excited that Anet has finally gotten a clear vision for how to balance professions going forward, and are willing to communicate it to players and change it based on feedback. I don't think that's always been true. Looking forward to what the changes look like when they go live -- having some more class diversity in PvE and WvW would be refreshing.