ScottBroChill.3254

dude, anet has the professional game designers. They should be expected to find the solutions for problems outlined by the community instead of relying on the players for both the problem and the solution. We review and critique stuff, if we have solutions thats cool too, but it's totally acceptable to tell them "this doesn't work for this reason" and then have them figure out the solution.

They just need to make it function like a glyph, whichever one you etch sticks to the bar while you swap attunements. You etch fire, you can swap to whatever attunement while it's etched and charge it up, then fire it off no matter what attunement you're in and you get the volcano. you can't let it build up over time and release on it's own because how are you going to aim it. The glyph solution would also ease up on the rotation so you aren't stuck using skills just to feed the etch and wasting cooldowns, you can use whatever skill on whatever attunement you want to use that would be most useful for the situation.

yeah the whole 4 attunements covering all grounds as a core foundation didn't leave much wiggle room for class expansion and espec focus. They could have had it so ele still has less weapons and more skills, but they get to pick what element they want and then have just a normal 5 skills, but them being stronger or more frequent use to make up for it, and allowing ele to focus on a tailored build. They could have had an espec that allowed ele to use two attunements much like the rev legends. They could have had it so ele has 20 skills per weapon, but you get to pick the 5 you want so you mix and match. Basically ele's mechanic could have been a prepared spell book that doesn't lock them in but insteadyou get 5 totally build tailored skills. This kinda stuff would also allow ele to have harder hitting skills because it wouldnt have to be balanced around have so much utility and survival baked into every build. But a mechanic of having 4 attunements means there stuck with that many skills, and theres no way to change the mechanic for especs. The only one that felt like a true mechanic change was weaver.

Just a tip for self sustain, water skill 4 is a big heal and 5 is a big condi cleanse, when you need extra healing or cleanse just know you can use the catalyst elite skill, elemental celerity, to let you use them again right away.

From a pvp perspective, I find some issues in trying to make an effective build. The spear looks great, but it's at odds with the rest of the ele class. It almost feels like a penalty when taking an elite spec with it. Skill 5 mechanic I don't think is effective in it's current form, low damage, etc. In regards to the elite specs Tempest- This I've found to be the best one to use because you can actually benefit from overloads because it allows you to deal actual damage and gives you an extra heal. The only issue is everything on tempest is close range, so you might as well just take another weapon. Second, both the overloads and skill 5's are fighting for time to camp the same attunements, but that could also be a good thing If you really just want to camp an attunement and be a straight up fire wizard. Weaver- What can I say that hasn't already been said. Camping for skill 5 just goes against the design of the mechanics, traits, and skills. None of the minor traits do anything for spear. Stances don't really benefit the spear from long range. The spec was designed to make ele survive in melee range and to have at least some damage on dual skills. It's just not an optimal traitline, or I need to look at it from another angle and use skills with more thought at control. Catalyst- I find it's hard to take advantage of the f5. Someone else said the energy generation on it is bad and I'd have to agree. And at the same time you gotta deal with skill 5 and f5 being in two different place, It's really hard to aim everything and keep track of locations. Like I put skill 5 down and have to cast in it to charge it, I also place f5 down either at my feet or at target, because in order to get auras and stacks of EE I need to combo fields, and since spear is ranged, I need a field near the target making me use f5 for that, or use my damaging blast at my feet inside of skill 5. But then in order to gain quickness I need to be in the f5 field, so yeah, at my feet it goes. Oh, and the lack of auras on the weapon is just another missing element that goes well with catalyst. The augmentations are good for damage though. Having said all this crap, I got completely destroyed by a good spear catalyst so it could be user error and bad build. Another thing to note, you need stability to be able to use skill 5. The amount of times I get cc'd when I get it charged, only to have it disappear in .5 seconds, is more than 50% without stability. Then add in the fact that it's a chaotic mess that I'm too bad to be able to hit with most of the 5 skills, excluding fire cuz its a giant circle, causing it too just be a waste. This is a skills issue, but is it worth the hassle and hoops to jump through? For Skill 5 Find a new way to implement skill 5. It's beautiful but it's flawed. it goes at odds with the class design the abysmal time limit is no fun another case of fire my skills off fast even if they miss or the skills are random doesnt work with weaver only volcano feels really EPIC water, air, and earth are all kinda hard to hit a moving target with It shouldn't be both time limited and require 3 skills to cast while in the same attunement. You only have 5 weapon skills. It feels like it was designed to be used with arcane blast. The old arcane wave would have also been great for it, but the new version puts you in melee and isn't insta cast. This may be a stupid idea but why not just make skill 5 like a giant glyph that shares cooldown across attunements, you get the skill of the attunement you casted initially, and you can fire that off in any attunement you want. Change the visuals so instead of the giant moving pool of color under the etching (which looks awesome, can't knock it for cool factor), it's just a faint hue of light that allows you to see other things going on, that way you can adjust the skill to be able to be active longer without it being visual penalty for telegraphed attacks and danger circles. You can either make it like how it is with casting skills inside of it to charge it up, or you can just make it charge by standing in it for a bit of time, like capping a point in pvp. This would make it so you can't cast skill 5 for every attunement swap, but it allows it to work smoother without needing to spazzing and casting skills like theyre going out of style. You could also bulk up the numbers more and really add to the big powerful glass cannon ele, and would probably make balance easier. And You don't have to worry about it being some unfair one shot snipe build, it still takes time to charge up so it's not like a thief, mesmer, or ranger in stealth where you get ganked out of nowhere with no ability to react. 3 out of 4 skills are skill shots with big visuals, it's easy to dodge and react to.

this is the staff we deserve! super stoked on all 3 from today. But the giant symbol on the ground looks cool, big magic attacks, air attunement seems to not be useless support. And the charge up mechanic on skill 5 gives us the ability to have a stronger nuke, no complaints here until I see it in action.

I dug using it for open world and meta events. It aint no pvp weapon that's for sure, but it's nice to have a capable ranged weapon that doesnt rely on skillshot after skillshot. I know its in the same camp as scepter, but scepter I just don't find that fun to play in metas and all that, plus condi builds are a little more relaxing to play. I used to love scepter back in the day but haven't seriously yused it for years. Regardless of whether its a top dps golem build or not, it's a nice tool to have. But I'd like to end this comment with the fact that they could have done better on the style aspect. It doesn't really have any of the pizazz of most ele weapons or any other professions weapons.

So i've heard. But don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Pay to win and bots aren't really an aspect of the gameplay and content, though. But yeah that ruins the game as a whole despite how good a game is.

So apparently I'm late to the party but just found out about throne and liberty. That game looks like what I was envisioning gw3 to be and it's also under NCsoft. Edit: visually

Nahh man, if I'm enjoying the game I'm trying to unlock stuff no matter what. There's still so much time to grind for the stuff you haven't gotten yet and accomplish more and the game is still getting new stuff. I'm not playing any game forever but I'm not going to stop gaming on mmo's for 5 or more years just because I'll be done playing it by then and playing something new. That's 5 joyless years. I'll be done playing most games I play now by then, too, so if I'm still having fun, I'm still playing.

@Cyninja.2954 Wows engine is the same, but again they rake in more money, have more players, have healthy stream content. WoW is a cash cow, it's not the same scenario. Guild Wars 2 is working on much smaller margins. Again it's succesful, it has a lot of players, there are whales that keep the game profitable, it's a fun game, but it makes much less money than the other games. The people funding the game just want bigger numbers. And you may know a lot of people who spend a lot of money on the game, but that's not the whole community. I spend money on the game for sure, but the average player is spending less money than the subscription based games. People still spend extra money money in subscription based games so it's not like it's a special financial advantage. It's a fact that it's profitable, but it's less profitable, otherwise they would have a bigger studio. And the pvp thing doesn't support you're argument. All it does is support that they spent less resources on it. They kinda just missed the moment to improve it and make it worth continually supporting and everyone left. They obviously aren't going to go all in on it anymore because it's much harder to pull people back from a bad experience and get new people than it is just retatining people. It would have been a smarter idea back in the day, but not now because guild wars 2 is no longer known for pvp. And I was just saying it was healthy for gw1, it provides endgame content without needing to constantly release new stuff. You could say the same thing about raids. But it's very noticable that big name streamers drop the game when there isn't high end competitive content, and those streamers are usually whales and they usually get other people to buy stuff and also get people interested in the game. There's a reason you see so many people on reddit that are like "I had no idea about this game, it's great!" But imagine how many of those potential customers are being missed because they don't see the game anywhere besides word of mouth. I'm not saying it's necessary to have strong pvp, just saying it has it's benefits, along with other competitive content. And it's not just that focusing on three game modes is the issue, it is extra work tho. But we can just see and look that they focus on a lot of temporary content that can instead be funneled into end game content. They have discontinued dungeons, a raid wing once in a blue moon, fractals that get less attention, dragon response missions that died off, strike missions, convergeances, bounty hunts, a lot of good metas and a lot of metas that just got left in the dust, etc. If we're talking about too many game modes, lets look at all the pve waste and all the new systems that are dropped. But pvp is also related to the style of the game and combat, they started off with no trinity. That throws off the dynamics of pvp when people don't have roles. Then they kinda shoved in a trinity after time that is less optimimal if they had designed around it in the first place. They took away premade teams which is just a shot in the foot to pvp, no one likes solo queing. Barely any pvp rewards, the ones they got now were added when it was already dead and the legendary pvp armor is just the ascended armor, same with wvw. I guess in my eyes the one glaring issue with this game is that it is just mindless pve content. I have fun playing it, but it can get boring fast. New maps and metas are cool, but they turn into the same old same old after awhile because they end up requiring no skill and barely any involvement. The original soo wan meta was awesome because you actually had to know your build, coordinate, and there was a high chance of failure. It made succeeding fun. I guess another thought I have about this is if NCsoft is pushing for a new title, then why? Is doubling down on the casual playerbase going to improve how the new game does in comparison to this one? My main focus would be on how do we get streamers and influencers more interested in the game to improve it's reach and market share which will ultimately get more people buying the game, expansions, and cash shop items.

People stick with mmo's because of sunk cost fallacy. Since they pay every month to play they have spent way more money on the game, there is much more invested than just time. To move to another mmo while the current one still garners that many monthly subscriptions would be more ridiculous than gw2 moving to gw3 because we don't pay subscriptions. The game is designed around playing it and then being able to stop whenever because there isn't a gear treadmill and once you've bought the game and expansions then you own it, no need to pay extra money just to access the game you already own. And yeah, every engine will become outdated eventually, but the only reason for Anet to try and make something with a newer engine is because they do risk more player dropoff than the other games due to the sunk cost fallacy. I haven't spend $180 a year for the past 20 years on the game. GW2 was designed to run on a potato when it was released, that's why fps is so bad when there's a lot of people because it's not optimized to run on current cpu's that utilize multithreading. They wen't from dx9 to dx11, but it was such a marginal difference it didn't do much on that front. I'm sure it allows them to due more, but it's still a fact. Something like black desert runs infinitely better with even better graphics. Gild Wars 2 thankfully doesn't rely on predatory spending, but it results in having to actually make really good content to keep people in game. They are working with 2012 tools. Well actually they are working with older tools because it's using GW1 engine. I'm not the dude this is the response to, but pvp was kind of fudged in this game. The original intent was to make Guild Wars 2 an esports mmo, but it didn't pan out. Guild Wars 1 was a heavily pvp mmo. The thing with pvp is that it can keep people playing without needing the subscription. Hardcore players love pvp and they love competition. Having more pvp means it's more exciting to stream. You can have actual tournaments people want to watch. Guild Wars 2 has a really small streamer base with only a few big names. This as well as a bunch of other reasons is why a lot of people don't really have the game on their mind or they think it's dead. It's a missed opportunity to keep hardcore players interested when theres a content drought, and to have free advertising that gets new players. And also GW1 was a small game. But look at the team they had at release, it was much larger than the GW1 team. So to assume they don't, or can't have the resources to make a large game is ridiculous. They get money from investors to develope a game so the developement team will be temporarily larger than it will be for maintening the game. And I really don't think it's safe to assume anything. Everyone's just spitballing what they like or don't like about the game. The reason GW2 studio is smaller is a direct correlation to it's success. It is a successful game monetarily and still profits pretty good, but it's a smaller studio because there's less reliable flow of money into the studio. The question is are we at a crossroads where they are weighing out the current profits with desired profits. Being that it was at a shareholder meeting, shareholders might think more money needs to be raked in and have approved of a new game. For the other mmo's it would be silly because they can have the subscriptions and can ride the wave on that even when they have a bunch of bad expansions. They're just a much more lucrative business model than Anet deliberately is against, which is great for us, but the studio is a business and takes profits into account. They might just being seeing more profits along the horizon and it's really up to the financers of the game to decide when it's time.

honestly if we look down the line 5 years from now, how old does that make all the big mmo's? pretty old and dated so if we are talking about gw3 going up against the big baddies, it won't be against them in 2024, but 2029. At that point there might be vacancy of of current gen mmo's. Everything will be so dated that pulling off a rewarding mmo with current graphics and systems would be amazing. I think there would be a place for a gw1+gw2 style mix that could corner a nice market. So gw1 world vibe I think was helped by it being instanced, you felt more immeresed with just your squad traversing the maps and it added to the preparation and strategy part of the game. Then add in the action-y combat of gw2 and movement and stuff and you got a less dated gameplay style that is more involved and fun. You could have a lot of content and end game content smashed into instanced style grouping, public or private, like strikes, convergeances, dungeons, fractals, raids, etc. but with it more focused with less game modes. Large scale wvw I think would have to be in it, I don't play it really but its incredibly fun and can be made better from the ground up with what they have learned. And better pvp, bring "guild wars" back to the game. And then also, I like the old way and classic way of having skill bars. I like the old limited amount of skills but being able to take anything you want. I think builds should be more modular and I feel like build crafting should be a higher priority. Player made thematic builds are fun, making builds in gw2 feels like trying to hammer a nail with a screwdriver. Sure you can eventually get the nail in, but it's janky. bring on the gw3 or new ip. Send it.

Love me some Guild Wars 2, but would also love a Guild Wars 3 or a new IP or something in the same universe but not the same rehash. I think gw2 was a home run, but no matter the game there is always stuff that is learned and with Guild Wars 2, they threw basically everything at the board and saw what stuck but now there is a lot of bloat in the game that definitely becomes confusing for new players. I love the wiki style interaction of playing the game because it just makes all the info cohesive, other games it's not as good. It's like a players manual and I dig it. And lets not forgot how old the engine GW2 is running out, I'm sure it creates a lot of limitations, especially in performance. But for me, I would like a change in how skills, traits, and professions are. I prefer a little more autonomy in skill selection and I feel like everything being tied to weapons kinda ruins some customization, and then it feels like trait lines and customization like that just lacks a lot of depth. For example, as an ele player the ele was designed to always be a jack of all trades, but with the attunement system it constantly makes the weapons funnel into each other and kind of forces the same thing over and over again because there's a lack of ways to modify how the attunements work, as opposed to like every other class who can have there class mechanics totally replaced with something new. Let alone not being able to specialize in one or two elements to create a good rpg fantasy. Traits are also a little wack because you can only take so many traits of a specific line and are forced to focus on three trait lines, and with so many useless traits there isn't a lot of build discovery. I really liked the guild wars 1 system that was inspired by magic the gathering, it created a lot of fun builds even if they weren't optimized. Playing spirit strength ritualist in pvp with a bow was just kinda funny because people just don't expect it and it could catch people off guard. The hardcore pvp was also really fun and required a lot of communication, having a few ele's time out their big skills to spike targets down just felt like you were playing basketball and then excecuting these cool plays and strategies that felt really rewarding to pull off. And let's be honest, waiting for monks or ritualist healers to be able to play wasn't ideal, but the trinity is a popular thing for a reason. Having a role is fun and in GW2 we now have a sorta trinity that was designed to be not a trinity that results in weird role identity, and the homogenized boons/conditions and no unique hexes or enchantments really takes away from class identity. But really gw2 is getting old, new ideas seem to be running out, there's limited weapons which kind of makes new weapons for some classes not make any sense but they're stuck with that system and now they have to figure out how to make hammer ele work, which I don't mind ele hammer, but there's no more casting weapons to add to them. They should have added different load outs for different weapons instead so for example ele could have like 3 different styles with the staff so it's not stuck being a useless piece of garbage that's a relic of 2012. But I love guild wars 2, it just seems some foundational designs, over time, have become limiting in how they can keep expanding the game. And I feel like we are nearing that mark with how new things are just kind of the same. I don't think thats exclusive to guild wars, but more so with any game that goes on this long. Computers have gotten better and I think it's worth looking at an engine that can run on a potato from 2012 and now look at average computers of 2024 and beyond and make it more optimized. 30fps in a city and large meta events is just ridiculous, it's something you get used to, but turning the camera fast makes it really noticable. On teapots stream, sneb was talking about how there's all these little things in the combat that the majority of players don't understand and there isn't anything telling them. Without arc dps, you won't really know you're just dealing 5k dps and that that's poor damage output. For most people it's a spam autotack game and that keeps people from actually learning the combat.

well I've been using pistol in open world group content and it's been not too shabby. Warhorn seems to be the best offhand for it. Being able to have a ranged option outside of scepter is nice, especially with less ground target abilities, easier to focus on catalyst fields. I liked playing catalyst as a buffbot with it, but weaver and tempest will get you more dps easier. The bullet mechanic does seem a little much, but like everything with ele it seems overly complicated at first but when you start to kinda know what the skills do it isn't the worst, but It does feel unnecessary. Idk, at this point I don't think it's a terrible weapon, it gives ele another option where its lacking which is ranged combat and feels a little better to play for open world group content than scepter. I think my biggest gripe is it lacks a cool factor, but it's fun enough to where I'll probably stick with it for awhile.