[Where do Chrono Quick and Alac builds actually work?]

1 hour ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

The heal traits in Inspiration at least have to potential to be useful for a heal mesmer specialisation in the future.

Healing wells, though, honestly feels like they were a stopgap to replace the original 'all wells give 2s alacrity' trait, which never received a proper replacement. Although I guess it is somewhat useful for minstrel chronotanks?

That lost clone was only WvW and PvP. PvE still gets 2 clones off Scepter 2. I actually didn’t recognize this nerf took place since I haven’t taken a Scepter Mesmer in PvP or WvW ever.  It’s a pretty silly nerf, what logically would be the reason for it?  Clones too powerful in WvW??? Hahaha

[Where do Chrono Quick and Alac builds actually work?]

10 hours ago, Mell.4873 said:

Most of the time you can makeup for the lack of healing with Gear and the Inspiration grandmaster. Scepter can be amazing at helping the HPS since when traited it can generate a clone every second. 

The Attack Speed increase from Malicious Sorcery does not stack with Quickness.  If you are in a group with Quickness or are self providing it, then this trait is mostly wasted.  You do still benefit from the 20% CD reduction to Scepter 2 and 3, but for a GM trait this is pretty weak given that a boon (which is readily available in PvE) overrides the most powerful part of it.  Perhaps this is a more valuable trait in WvW or PvP?

Either way, it doesn't quite support Heal builds as you suggest.  As I mentioned in another post, Inspiration healing is pretty bad for Chrono as it is currently.  Yes clone generation can be easy on a static boss, but on trash or mobile bosses, those with phases etc, you can't reliably use wells or clones as a method of generating heals.  As someone suggested recently, perhaps traited Mantras would be more reliable, too bad they nerfed them a while back.  Perhaps a Quick Mantras Chrono would work, but its hard to take enough Mantras when you need Wells for Alacrity Chrono.

[Where do Chrono Quick and Alac builds actually work?]

1 hour ago, Ellon.4316 said:

’ve seen this said before but virtuoso is not that great for raw healing. Yes you summon blades faster then any other spec but when you are at 5 blades you stop triggering illusionary inspiration. So the healing of virtuoso is hard-capped at how fast you can shatter, plus you sacrifice healing power for precision gear to get close to the crit-cap that is needed. You cant provide alac/quickness so in short it only sounds good in theory.

The comment about Virtuoso being the better healer was facetious.  That Virtuoso is a selfish non-support oriented eSpec, but can make better use of Inspiration healing seems somewhat appropriate for mesmers as a profession.  You know, the profession where nothing makes sense.....

1 hour ago, Ellon.4316 said:

But to stay on topic, quickness chrono is fine. It might not have the highest theoretical DPS but most player can’t reach that benchmark anyway so as long as you provide quickness nobody will care about the DPS (you might get called out if your DPS is sub 3k). For alac I would go with mirage, besides doing decent damage especially in some fights it is also easily overcaps alac while being super-durable with ritualist gear (I’m talking solo fractals durable so if someone says it is a bad option just ditch that person and solo it). 

Quickness Chrono might be fine, but why would I play Mirage for an Alac build when Chrono should have the ability to be Heal+Alac?  My continued issue with Anet and how they have presented Chrono builds is that they give us the tools to be Heal/Alac/Quick/Power DPS in some combination but the Heal and Alac parts do not work effectively in many environments.

Put it another way, if Chrono is now not meant to be a Healer or Alac provider, could they get rid of those traits and skills and give us something else?  Oh hang on, we all know that they aren't going to do that, so perhaps they should figure out how to make those parts of the Chrono playable rather than leaving them rotting for most of the past year.

 

[How do you stick with one profession?]

39 minutes ago, Rogue.8235 said:

 

I have never drastically changed a single build I play to the extent you describe.  The only reason to do this is the pursuit of mathematical optimization.  In that case, you're less actually playing the profession and more executing the optimized mathematical solution of, for example, most damage per second.  

Some enjoy this type of gameplay, and I don't wish to detract from that.  However, recognize that the pursuit of optimization is less about having a favorite play style and more about mathematical optimization.  If you don't find mathematical optimization fun, then realize that there has yet to be a balance change that requires a complete change of build, down to the gear.  

For context, I play every profession.  My most played are thief, warrior, and mesmer in PvP, and I have never used a meta build.  All of my builds are of my own making based on how I play and my decision-making tendencies during a match.  My least played profession in PvP is revenant.  For PvE and WvW, all professions are equally played.  Again, I have never adjusted builds based on balance changes because they're effective.  Any drastic change I make is because what I originally built was just that bad to begin with.

 

It’s not about metrics for me, I mix meta and non-meta builds. It’s about how the profession build plays.  The feel of combat is more important to me than the results as long as the build has merit.  Unfortunately how various builds play has changed over the years to the point that almost all builds have been notably affected at some point, some multiple times. 
 

and that isn’t saying it’s all nerfs, as some changes are intended to be buffs. But some meta buffs or updates do sometimes affect the tools other builds use in a negative way. 

[What would you choose to work on if you would be the boss of anet?]

I’d start with a profession overhaul. Ground up reworks of each profession with a focus on playstyle in PvE/WvW/PvP.  I’d look at game flow including skill animations and effects and focus on the essence of combat for each profession/espec.  I’d also scrap and rebuild the boon system  

Once this had been attempted, I’d split the rest of the work into revamping existing systems. PvP: rework of Arenas, Ladders and rewards. WvW push into Alliances, and update reward system.  In both I’d also dig deep into bug fixes that have negative impact on combat and competitive results. 
 

In PvE I’d review NPC Mob balance across Core and each LW and Expac. Tighten up or rework some existing Metas/World events (looking at PoF and EoD maps specifically).  The goal would be to make encounters more balanced from Level 1 to EoD.

Lastly I’d consider revising rewards by streamlining what loot is given and how we use it (or dispose of it). 

[How do you stick with one profession?]

On 12/16/2022 at 2:41 PM, Doctor Hide.6345 said:

I seem to have a problem in games in which I can't stick to one class/job/profession. I am this way with all MMOs really. I am on one class and gear it out according to snowcrows or metabattle, and then I get the urge to play another class because it has something else I want at the moment. How do most people just stick with one and just settle down? I can't escape the Jack of all trades(professions) it seems and just be a master of one for the long run.

You don’t stick with one profession. You swap them for the next best thing, and continue to learn the game mechanics and understand each professions well enough. At that point you will have one or two builds that work really well for you and you will enjoy.
 

After that, you will continue to swap professions based upon the buff/nerf of the patch cycle.  See once you understand this game the reality is that the devs have been hamfisted in updates to the professions so that what you play changes year over year.  Meaning you either get used to your fav profession not playing the same so you rebuild/regear/relearn it every once in a while, or you swap to a different profession and invest the time and energy into learning that one until it gets buffed/nerfed and you decide to change again. 
 

Embrace being pretty good at like 4-6 professions. 

[Where do Chrono Quick and Alac builds actually work?]

10 minutes ago, Nezekan.2671 said:

No, heal chrono is not good. So if you want to do alacrity Chrono in fractals, you want to be full damage build that provides alacrity. I recommend mix of Assassin and Diviner gear, so you have 100% crit chance with fury and some boon duration. With this build, you want quickness firebrand that can heal. Good combo. Then you get 3 dps.

So the takeaway is that Mirage and Chrono offer no viable heal build with Alacrity, or without. Meanwhile, Virtuoso running Illumination has potentially the highest HPS of any Mesmer healer and is less positionally restricted.

My complaint is that being just quickness, just alacrity or just a healer doesn’t appear to be good enough to always get a spot.  I do think that either Alac or Quick support should be tied to viable healers (3 support roles/2 support slots per group).  Even both Alac and Quick could have viable healing builds to allow for players to opt in or out of healing as the group needs. 
 

Perhaps I am wrong about this but why would a group take a support that can only ever offer 1 type of support?  

[Where do Chrono Quick and Alac builds actually work?]

1 hour ago, Nezekan.2671 said:

Power Alacrity Chrono could work in Fractals as replacement to power alac renegade. You have similar dps, more cc and various utilities.

Question, does Heal Quick Chrono work either?  If Heal Alac and Heal Quick Chrono are neither viable then we end up being second tier support to professions who can Heal+. 

[Where do Chrono Quick and Alac builds actually work?]

I’ve been trying out some lower level fractals with Heal Alac Chrono and it has been pretty uninspiring. 
 

I can tank anything but offer so little DPS that I can’t kill much. 
 

I can’t die but healing from Wells is super hard to time given the heal is stuck to the wells on a 3 second timer. Inspiration healing via Clones doesn’t do much if anything, as clone generation is pretty poor with this.  The Insp clone heals don’t smooth out for the wells and people are always moving around missing the well heals anyway. As such, people die or are over healed, no sense of healing balance. No sense of accomplishment from being a good healer or healing effectively. 
 

The Alac sharing part is by and large okay.   At least on bosses I can dump all my wells early to stack Alac and then spend the rest of the fight waiting to dump more wells for the team.  
 

Shatters are awful if only due to clone generation being garbage. There is very few times I can pop a 3 clone CS and use it effectively during a boss fight and less so during trash mobs.  The other shatters are rarely used at 3 clones, simply because having 3 clones is a bit of a rarity. 
 

My take is this feels like I am waiting for the team to stack between encounter mechanics. I am aware of encounter mechanics but my primary focus is where is the team standing.  Sometimes preplanning where to drop my wells to ensure I give my team Alac and maybe a heal if they stick around.   This is awful gameplay. Struggling to put circles on the ground where people may or may not actually stand?  
 

It is possible I suck at Chrono after not playing it since pre-EoD but it may also be that the design team has turned chrono into a giant Terd Ferguson with poor design choices on top of poor design choices.  
 

The wells play style sucks, clone generation and shatter usage sucks.     Why does this build feel like I am fighting uphill to do very little. 

[Get rid of Quick and Alac Boon]

36 minutes ago, Gaiawolf.8261 said:

I'm of the same mindset. Boons would be so much more fun and dynamic if you couldn't keep them up 100%. Quickness would rock  if it was just available for short durations to quickly burst something down. Time it with your team for max effect. Alacrity could be for when you you really need to fire off a useful skill in quick succession; maybe make it recharge the next skill used 100% faster but only lasts a few seconds at most (oh that gives me 2005 GW vibes!). Other boons could be buffed and given the same treatment, which would make everything so much more dynamic and strategic. Of course, all this would require a major rework to the boon system.

and probably the boss encounters as well.  I could see the combination of Breaking Defiance Bar -> Exposed Boss Debuff + Burn Phase where the burn phase we are using those short duration Alac and Quick buffs.  This is along the lines of what WoW did back in the day (not sure if that has changed).  You then adapt the encounters to have defiance bars inline with the proposed Alac and Quickness CDs.

I would also be for this type of approach.  However I wonder if a change like this would have a negative impact on PvP and WvW.

[Get rid of Quick and Alac Boon]

2 hours ago, the krytan assassin.9235 said:

Meh, both quick and alac are way to embedded into the game to be removed. Even with all quick/alac uptime being cut in half, groups would probably look for a 100% uptime by adding more boonsupport in. 

Completely removing quick/alac uptime wouldn't work either. People are used to playing with quick/alac nowadays and without it it just feels slow. There are even some builds that cant function properly without the buffs (like catalyst and untamed). We're simply to deep in the Rabbit Hole to suddenly take a different path. Gw2 devs have chosen for the boonmeta and quick/alac are simply a part of that. 

Not at all.

This is software, and anything can be changed.  The core issue with Alac and Quick is that in most PvE environments you can have near 24/7 uptime of Quick and Alac now.  This was not the case prior to EoD, but with EoD we now have multiple specs presenting Quick and Alac alongside the Jade Protocols.  Jade Protocols actually mean that you can run selfish DPS and still get the (virtually) fulltime Quick and Alac with no-one else around.

People are arguing that Quick and Alac are not needed to clear content, and that is potentially correct, but in PvE, have it up 24/7 and we know that fights will be balanced around having these boons up, so perhaps having it 24/7 will lead to it being required for more content going forward.

When a boon is up 100% of the time it loses its character.  If Quick and Alac stacked like Might, it may feel different, but as they can both be always on when you gain the boon, what are they actually adding to the game?  They added power creep by allowing more groups to always have Quick and Alac with less investment from the players.  There is nothing unique or interesting about these boons now, and I would suggest that if having these boons 24/7 in PvE was the goal, they could have just reduced the CD and cast times of all skills across the game and still ended up in the same place.

So, I guess I agree that yes, Anet have defined this playstyle and meta, have continued to push towards this path, but it is a terrible choice and one I would like to see changed.  The change I would prefer to see is Quick and Alac boons having longer durations, lower base power, but can stack to 3 or 5 times to provide full utility.  This makes it a lot more like Might, where you are working towards having max stacks, but can gain partial benefit with less than full stacks.  This would reduce the effectiveness of Quick and Alac in many parts of PvE but offer support builds the ability to work towards max stacks of Quick or Alac and being effective support for the group, potentially engaging Support focus builds as opposed to DPS builds that are nerfed cause they offer support as well.

 

As to the OP, I think that it is time Anet showed us what they want.  Is it Heal Alac or Heal Quick or both.  Since there are 3 support roles and 2 support slots, and as Anet has shown they want to homogenize the game to 'make it easier for players to figure out' they may as well hard define if Alac or Quick are intended to be Heal primary.  This would help define the Healing roles by basically fitting one of the two primary boons with it.

[How to complete Holiday Food Drive?]

Wiki link for the thing

you can see the food types and TP cost associated on that wiki page. Bear in mind the price is spiked since it’s the first day.  You can also get those foods from opening the various presents. 

[I keep dying, Do I suck?]

Solo open world builds are okay to use gear with defensive stats. Look for Marauder for power builds as an example.  Going from berserkers to marauder is a minor DPS loss with a notable vitality gain. If you have unlocked EoD you can gain access to Jade Bot Enhancements such as the vitality from the core or the boons from Jade Bot Protocols. 
 

As well, spend a few minutes looking at builds on Metabattle to see what traits and utility skills are used. You may find some choices that will make open world solo play easier. 

[Musou black?]

You could technically make a shader that acts like Musou or Vanta blacks.  I’d be game for something that absorbs light as opposed to the technicolor dayglo Funtimes we normally see. 

[What GW2 really lacks to me (in comparison to WoW)]

1 hour ago, VanDBellen.4913 said:

 

I just needed to get this out. I really like this game. It has a lot of really special things. And the lore is awesome. But everything seems so.. worthless. 

I played WoW for years, all those Vanilla, TBC and WotLK items I got are long gone and forgotten. I leveled, I geared, I did all the things and then poof, gone because new expansions and new levels rendering all my hard earned gear garbage.

Seems to me that worthless may be relative to the player experience. One could argue virtual items you don’t own (aka game characters and items) are worthless as well. We may ascribe value as we invest time and energy into gaining these items and expanding our character, but ultimately we don’t own them and we don’t control our access to them.

[Not happy with current balance patch direction]

For the ‘good things’ they have done, there are tons of broken skills and traits that still need attention.  They still lack parity in the different support specs, ranging from OP to Unplayable.

While some professions builds are totally okay and fun to play, there are many that are not fun or just unplayable.

Combined with the lackluster content since IBS, WvW in year 4 of being updated to a new system, PvP being questionable at best, probably dying, there is less reasons to play GW2 today than ever. 

[Where do Chrono Quick and Alac builds actually work?]

So post Nov 29 update and none of the build sites show Chrono Quick or Alac builds as being meta or better than viable. Is this correct, no big brain players are making Chrono support work in any game mode?  

[Mail Carrier Satchel number 2?]

1 hour ago, Farohna.6247 said:

Back to the original post (thanks for all the input on my issue!)...why did you receive a second bag?  Some bug?  Eh well, just hold to it I suppose.

I have no idea and no one since has said they also got a second bag. I’d almost suggest clicking the email toggle off and on every day this week to seeing it re-triggers the bag for you.  Imma try it just in case I can get a few more lol

[Mail Carrier Satchel number 2?]

3 minutes ago, Sobx.1758 said:

Worth a try, I know for a fact it triggered it instantly for me and some other people the first time they introduced that bag. Worst case sceniario you've made like 5-10 clicks and nothing changes 😄

It’s what I did the first day these were available, and received my first bag within 24 hours. 

[Suggestion.Work out the kinks before messing with elite specs and releasing it, please.]

Who cares how the professions actually play?  Anet doesn't!!!!

The hack and slash continues with no consideration to the actual playstyle of any professions.  It is obvious that they are undermanned with a team that doesn't have the time, care or brainpower to find better solutions.

I can't be bothered to play this game seriously when at any moment they may adversely affect multiple profession builds in multiple game modes with a single patch.  Every 2-3 months this past year, there have been major changes to all professions, work that should have and could have been done in one or two patches with a decent team and vision.  After the holidays, we will see another round of hacks and bandaids to clean up this patch and mess with other 'outlier' builds that are 'not performing as we would like'.

It would be nice if Anet let us know what their goals are.  Is it to make all professions relatively unplayable?  To make the playstyle so poor for most builds that the enjoyment of combat is totally gone?

 

[Mail Carrier Satchel number 2?]

I logged in to check the new items on sale and received a second Mail Carier Satchel.  I have not used the first one I received; it is sitting on an alt character.

Was this meant to be a one-time item or what's the what here?  Did other people receive a second Mail Carrier Satchel?

Edit:

The Mail Carrier Satchel was awarded to players who subscribed to GW2/Arenanet emails via their account login.

Mail Carrier Satchel

Someone in game also pointed out that these appear to be account bound not soulbound on equip as they were released.

[Mirage in WvW after patch]

3 hours ago, Mell.4873 said:

Well, we can only hope

Or we could stop playing. We have options. 

[Plush Mount skins]

3 hours ago, Viria.1680 said:

The cuckoo is cute, but I was hoping for a bunny. What's more, since they're going to cycle through the mounts before revisiting any it means there's no chance of a plush bunny for *years* if at all.

bnuuy 😞

 

2 hours ago, DarcShriek.5829 said:

Like you, I would rather have a stuffed springer.  I'm kind of surprised by the choice.  Nothing wrong with it, it's just not what I was wanting.

I agree, the plush cuckoo is nice but a plush Springer would have been preferable for me. I may skip this one as I just bought a different Springer cuckoo mount skin recently. Maybe when it goes on sale, if I’m even playing the game at that point, I’ll consider buying it. 

[The Confused Button]

4 hours ago, Rovaeden.8546 said:

The Confused Button seems to be the "dislike" button here, but in reality it reads like "thinking is hard, so I press"

 

Am I missing anything?

Why do you guys use that button as opposed to another?

I’ve scanned the thread and see you found a reasonable answer.

However I also tend to be rather literal and determined that the Confused and Laughing emojis mean ‘literally’ nothing as they have such varied definitions depending on the post and person adding the emoji. 

The Like and Thanks icons have fairly easy to understand meanings, yet I absolutely ignore all emojis when they are added to my posts.  Who knows how smart, stable and sober the person was when clicking it???

On the other hand, since the Confused and Laughing emojis are allowed as is, I am sure people use them to troll other posters who do care about them. 

[Another WvW/Gearing question]

Druid’s wear leather so Leatherworker is fine. However it is fairly easy to buy exotics from the trading post or earn and buy them with WvW currencies.  You may find the time and gold investment in leveling Leatherworking slows down your acquisition of the gear you need. 
 

You may find better value in leveling cooking to make ascended feasts (the top food type) buffs. 
 

As for flying mounts, you can earn the Griffon or Skyscale by completing the associated achievements in PoF and LWS4 for these. These mounts are for PvE zones only. However, in WvW the only mount you can use is the Warclaw which is earned exclusively in WvW via reward tracks.