Surolam.1490

Charge up your Jade Sphere (F5) by hitting baddies, something like a warrior's adrenaline. Once you put it down, you're claiming a spot on the ground. It's not a huge AoE, but you get nice buffs and better skills while staying in it. Also, the middle hammer skill, 3, can be chained across several elemental attunements. Hit 3, swap attunements, and repeat until you've got four balls circling you smashing anyone who tries to melee you - then fire them all off at once. I found myself planning attunement swaps so that I could set up specific combos much more than with other Elementalist specs. The base class "feel" is still there, but with a noticeable, interesting shift. IMO, it's neither heavily over- or under-powered, but is a worthy addition to the game. It has a significant change to the _rhythm_ of play, and getting your combos & sequences set up is more important than for most of the other elite specs we've seen.

The base class "feel" is still there, but with a noticeable, interesting shift. IMO, it's neither heavily over- or under-powered, but is a worthy addition to the game. It has a significant change to the _rhythm_ of play, and getting your combos & sequences set up is more important than for most of the other elite specs we've seen. Once you charge up your "flow" (a.k.a. adrenaline), and pull the "Dragon Trigger" F2, you need to sit there for a few seconds to get max effect - no movement, no skill use. Also, you just have to be in combat to gain flow, you don't have to actively smash things, so it may pay to kite folks around for a bit before you pull the Dragon Trigger. Flow charges more slowly than adrenaline, but there are some skills & traits to help with that. You choose between three "Burst" skills which are all useful in specific situations, instead of having a single per-weapon burst. The off-hand pistol is okay, and the utility skills are decent, but the real action here is in using the Gunsabre (F1).

The greatsword is going to be great for melee combat against large numbers of enemies: lots of AoE and gap-closers. If you want to commit to DPS or to tank / support, there are traits to help with that, but I personally enjoyed combining the two legends & roles on the fly. Also, the targeted dodge/AoE attack is a thing of beauty. The base class "feel" is still there, but with a noticeable, interesting shift. IMO, it's neither heavily over- or under-powered, but is a worthy addition to the game. Because of the flipping right-hand skills, it has a significant change to the _rhythm_ of play, and getting your combos & sequences set up is more important than for most of the other elite specs we've seen.

One variant / feature I'd like to see is the ability to _rank_ my guilds in terms of how hard Alliances will try to keep me with them. Not sure how this would work on a low level, but I usually play WvW with one particular guild. I'm also in a smaller mostly-PvE guild that occasionally does WvW. I'd like to play with both, and maybe alliances will allow that, and my mostly PvE-guildmates will presumably say they want to WvW with that one... but on the rare occasions when the PvE folks head to WvW, I'd like to join them - even though 90% of my WvW time will be spent with the WvW guild.

Today's stream answered several questions and made me more interested in this feature: * Fishing is not going to be something you can do while AFK. * Skiffs can interact with each other if players are in the same party and (presumably) ignore each other when not. * People riding on skiffs (other than the owner) have things they can do to contribute to the experience. All good things IMO.

Possible solutions / mitigations: * A per-player cooldown on tactivator use... Perhaps half an hour to start with, then tune as needed? Find a balance between roamers / scouts being able to defend against legit threats and making tactivator use uninteresting to trolls because they're rarely available? * Allow a reporting mechanism similar to that in PvP when a player is useless / counterproductive... Can be supplemented with a team-chat announcement of the name & guild of whoever pulls the tactivator. * If tactivator is pulled and no attack occurs within a few minutes before / after, perhaps the person activating it automatically gets "dishonor" analogous to leaving a PvP match early: decreased rewards, booted from WvW for a period, or barred from using tactivators. * Restrict use of tactivators to when the objective is "under attack"... If no guards have been killed, and no damage has been done to walls / gates, is there any reason to use any tactivator?

I thought the balance was good, and liked the options in Shroud. Being able to tune on-the-fly between "glass cannon" and "tank" feels good, kinda like Holosmith's "overheat" mechanic. I was disappointed in the pistol and utility skills though. I felt they were effective but uninteresting. The pistol skills felt very similar to Engineer's main-hand pistol skills, and all the elixirs were just boons. What about an elixir which gives you a pulsing poison field? or an aura similar to Fire Shield / Frost Shield, but doing bleeding & poison to attackers instead of other conditions. Maybe a thrown elixir that does something similar to Illusion of Life or gets actual corpses up and active for a bit? To make pistol skills feel a bit more interesting, maybe one of them could trail a narrow poison field? They were visually good, but felt overly familiar.

I really want to see all my PCs (or at least several of them) sitting in a bar, hanging out. I figure this would make a nice option for the character-selection screen. Basically, I want to see my characters sitting around in a bar, as if they're between missions. Perhaps they wander in & out. Maybe they occasionally speak to each other. (There are probably some greetings & farewells in the audio already recorded from the voice actors.) I'm not looking for complex or controllable interactions. I don't need access to their inventory or any information about them not readily available on the load screen. I want to take screenshots with several of my PCs present at once. Perhaps some banners or emblems on the walls for the account-wide rankings, as an upgrade for the current load screen. The bottom character-select bar could be retained as is. The game already contains several fully-rendered 3D locations where this could be set: Each of the six major cities has a bar or restaurant. Additional locations could be drawn from Tarir, Amnoon, the PVP lobby, and the various Lounges. I think the 500-gem price for a mail carrier is appropriate for each location the characters can appear, or perhaps a little more: All of the locations, character models, and audio already exist. I also think many players would be interested in such an upgrade. We just need a little coding to link them together.