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Flapjackson.1596

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Everything posted by Flapjackson.1596

  1. This weapon showcases how important visual clarity is. The bullets need better indicators, and players need better agency in general over how they can modify their UI and reduce the visual clutter on their screens.
  2. Ally targeting is lame and will always be lame in this game as currently stands with our UI limitations. The staff isn’t bad but feels too much of the gimmick is weighted in skill 3. I also don’t see this lifting up heal Warrior builds enough to make them appealing when the core Warrior kit is still hopelessly outclassed. Core Warrior traits and utility need an overhaul. I can’t get behind this playstyle when realistically in PVE the staff will only be used by two hyper-focused DPS specs, Bladesworn and Berserker. Design wise and thematic wise that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Anet, rather than stitch together builds that meet boon/healing metrics, how about you first fix the floor of this profession to better accommodate a supportive fantasy. It sticks out like a sore thumb when Anet tries to force things to work and it really pulls you out of the game.
  3. This weapon is very solid and a good addition to Heal Herald’s toolkit. I know the barrier is overtuned so I won’t be surprised when it’s nerfed. My feedback is that the visuals of the weapon are extremely messy. The auto blade is obnoxious. I’m also not a fan of the choice to make all the skills red. Feels like you’re limiting the color scheme compared to most rev weapons just being the muted misty color. We watched Kryptis so now we can use a scepter and it’s all red? It’s a weird stretch.
  4. The weapon is easily one of the most settled out of all the beta weapons. I’ll be sad to see it go. My only feedback is to spice up the Phantasm a little. Given you’re wielding a gun, it would make sense to give rifle an ammo skill. An ammo Phantasm would be a unique thing for Mesmer, and you could use it tactically. Space out the ammo to increase CC coverage, or use both to generate a firing squad and have a big CC.
  5. Hard to form an opinion on it when this reveal was so barebones. Hoping the stream addresses important questions like how does this work with current war specs being heavily damage focused, how does the burst operate, how well does a support zerk function without rage skills, etc I still stand by my take that spellbreaker is thematically the only spec that makes sense for support but quick/alac ruin that fantasy because we can’t have healers without quick/alac.
  6. Another unique stacking buff. Adding a mechanic to a weapon is interesting, and I hope that doesn’t backfire, but I can’t support adding more bloat to an already messy boon bar. Can we get proper UI customization some point this lifetime before we pile more on? GW2’s resistance to adjustable UI with its myriad of boons, dozens of non-combat buffs, and dancing buff positioning is frankly absurd.
  7. By overperforming builds, do you mean virtually every DPS build or do we have a concept of what an "acceptable" DPS benchmark is? Is Scourge overperforming? Is every DPS build overperforming? Is it overperforming when boon builds pull over 35k? What do you actually want here Anet?
  8. The Wizard’s Vault has some fantastic value for players: Clovers, MCs, gold, ascended gear, and of course the Legendary Weapon chest. Not all choices are equal however. The Vault has some items that are undeniably scams: - Large crafting bag for 40 - Revive orb for 95 - Vision Crystal for 150 - Lesser essence of gold for one thousand acclaim (really Anet?) - Build storage expansion for 500 (a scam here and in the gemstore when notepad is free on all computers) - Essence of luck (not even exotic) for 6 - Obby shard for 50 (also hilariously limited to 20) GW2 is no stranger to purchases that are noob traps for uninformed players. Most of these traps are due to the economy shifting prices over time however. The Vault is new. Anet knows the value of every item in there. You can’t reasonably tell me they think an Obby shard is worth 50 acclaim, putting it only 10 under a Clover or 20 over a 30 cost gold. That is insane. Anet is either ignorant to the value of things they put in the Vault, or they are purposefully listing bad deals for players. If many of the traps are intended to drain leftover acclaim, then they should be unlocked once a player completes the rest of the purchases. Don’t litter in terrible deals among the decent, good, and great purchases. Experienced players aren’t going to bite on them. All you are doing is setting up the eventual bad experience for newer players once they realize the game itself has scammed them.
  9. I do too, I think there is a lot of potential for wacky and fun ideas. I’m talking about the fact that removing those effects makes the runes themselves just raw stat boosts. Added to armor that is just stat boosts. Which you augment with infusions which are just more stat boosts. Surely this can get paired down a little? Or go all in on niche stat buffs like alac or superspeed duration.
  10. You said runes won’t be removed, but will we see adjustments that emphasize more unique boosts like boon and condition duration? The loss of the set effect for runes introduces a redundancy between gear stats, rune stats, and infusion stats. That’s a lot of gearing being just raw stats. While I support changing runes to a more functional and flexible system, the new runes don’t sound very compelling. The flavor that stood them apart is becoming relics now. I’d also support addressing infusions which have been sorely needing look-overs on AR and cosmetic infusions.
  11. I am content with the fact that we will be receiving compensation towards a legendary relic, but it would be best if the matters of “significant progress” and “a quarterly update” were specified soon. If we get the legendary relic released in the 1st quarterly update, so be it. If it waits to the 3rd or 4th…. Then we have a problem. Regardless of how much value actually shifts between runes and relics, it stands to reason that for an unclear period of time players will have to manage without. Given a core appeal of legendaries is that you are future-proofing your account, I hope Anet does more to assuage people that other parts of their legendary progression, basically the backbone of the economy, are not subject to future change. That goes against the point of pursuing expensive QoL items. They are never worth the cost on value alone but their permanence and universal nature are so strong. Soul bound relics for how many months is a big shift.
  12. @Rubi Bayer.8493 Tangential to the conversation of compensation, but I hope the blog post discussing the changes to the rune system will address the loss of “uniqueness” that runes have if the set bonuses become relics. Sigils and relics will offer unique bonuses that let them stand out. Gear, runes, and infusions will all be incredibly similar in their function for the average player (basic stat increases). This redundancy should be addressed. Runes could double down on more unique effects like buffing durations of specific boons or specific conditions. (Ex. Rune of the firebrand, rune of the krait) Infusions are a complicated topic because AR has hardly been touched since its inception and it’s controversial for being a generic wall that also limits cosmetic infusions. High time for an overhaul?
  13. My guess is either a free legendary relic or a significant push along the path to getting one. I think the relic change will be good for the rune system, but hopefully it doesn’t come at a cost of a major QoL decrease for those who currently have legendary runes. If people have to wait a significant time to get back to their current level of QoL, or if legendary relics aren’t even on the table for this expansion, then the relic system would be in some ways a decrease in the overall experience for players who spent their gold on legendary runes.
  14. Rotations to a certain extent are an unavoidable part of a combat system, particularly one with minimal resource cost for using skills. I agree that Anet has seemed to lose focus on the problems with how Gw2 handles rotations. There are three major pain points they haven’t addressed: 1. How much “real estate” should a damage rotation take up on a skill bar? Should classes that commit more of their skills to a damage rotation be rewarded with more dps? Is damage cost for bringing utility fairly distributed across builds? Should more damage be weighted towards auto attack chains to shift emphasis on skill usage? 2. Skills do too many things. This is a major headache because it isn’t easy to determine what the intended use for a skill should be when it does a dozen different things. Skills that do too many things at once make it challenging to properly react to combat because you always end up wasting a portion of the skill. This can be very frustrating when key parts of the skill like stab or aegis get burnt because a player had another purpose for it. 3. How much “real estate” should boons take up on a skill bar? This is in part a duration and gearing issue. The duration of boons and the boon duration required is inconsistent across builds and leads to very frustrating gameplay when Anet is stingy on boon duration. If you can increase boon duration, then you typically have less skill demand. You end up with less damage though for taking BD through gearing. The push for max damage encourages players to have worse feeling skill usage just to keep up boons. Utility at the cost of damage is fine, but is a smooth gameplay experience worth sacrificing? Boons must be provided, so they will inherently make the skill usage feel worse the more emphasis you give them. Druid will be much better off after the 7/18 buff, but it still begs the question, which parts of a spec’s kit are acceptable to be roped into boons? Should the major selling point of the spec (i.e. the big celestial form) be dedicated to the monotonous task of maintaining a permanent party buff? Should the gyros on scrapper do this? What about the overloads on a tempest?
  15. Indeed. I accept that everyone, myself included, are accustomed to the feeling of perma boons. Our strategies and class balance all depend on them. I don’t need the game to be downscaled to a state without boons. I just want us to stop beating around the bush and accept that a state of play that is basically constant uptime should be the new default and not in the hands of players. Let me focus on more interesting matters.
  16. We must always be results-minded as players. The changes the devs make to the product ultimately only matter in regards to what happens, not what can theoretically happen. Theory is valuable for the devs because giving themselves more design space is useful. For the player, all that matters is what the actual reality is when changes are made. Opening up option is theoretically flexible but as OP stated if every spec uses the same weapons because they are simply the best combination then we end up with a much more generic end result. The solution should be to focus more on the unique aspects of the spec beyond their weapon though. Not all elite specs hold equally strong identities outside of their weapon (cata and vindi for example).
  17. As a support I want to dedicate my focus to more interesting aspects of the gameplay. Using stab and aegis effectively, healing players, CCing enemies. I don’t want to be putting a lot of my attention on using my abilities strictly to maintain boon uptime. Upping the duration will help, but looking at this follow-up only some boons on some builds are being given more of a buffer. There are still things that are going to be a hassle, like managing prot on Druid. I know some people might think this is good. They like that you have to balance multiple decisions. One of those decisions, Boons, is really dull and an annoyance to juggle with the more exciting things I mentioned. Let’s have healers focus on the fun things. Let’s have dps boons focus on the fun things. Anet pledged to make certain boons like might more of an afterthought, but this just takes the bad system and places it front and center again.
  18. I am on board for this idea. Tying the application to things that aren’t any specific skill keeps the build flexible. Blast finishers happen all the time on Druid regardless of what you are doing. Comboing staff 3 and 5 or warhorn 5? Dazing or healing with CA 3? Using any spirit now? It would let Druid be able to apply their boon without feeling disruptive to any part of their kit because you have so many options on how to apply it.
  19. I’m not certain why we are arguing over minute changes in alacrity for Druid CA. We try to get these builds to barely apply their boons when done without mistake and while being on group the entire time. Meanwhile other things are looking swell. The new leap finisher quickness for scrapper is working well. The mace option makes quickness super easy to keep up. Why can every boon build have elegant solutions like that? Put Druid alac on blast finishers. You have warhorn 5, staff 3, CA 3, and all your spirits. That is a ton of options so no matter the situation you won’t be tied to a singular thing. Let Druid be flexible again!
  20. It is in part a numbers issue yes. Even with full ascended and buffs though you still run into situations where you lose boons the moment you’re off group. Things like giving alac on G2 Kite are just off the table now. I wouldn’t fully call it a numbers issue though. Putting Quick and Alac on key components of spec kits overloads the function of those components. It goes completely against their stated goal to not do that, while behaving in an anti-synergistic manner because the moments you need to give Alac and the moment you need to heal/cleanse/etc are not the same. Thing like quick on blast finisher or alac on barrier are the most elegant paths, but not every build fits into those models. The devs chase their tails constantly shifting Quick/Alac between core components that then get overloaded and specific skills that then get spammed off cool down. They just can’t win. It’s not a battle I find worth fighting.
  21. I agree. Renegade stands out because it achieves what the devs intend, which is for boon application to be as unobtrusive as possible. Which just begs the question, why are these boons even in the hands of players in the first place? They are too powerful. Everyone knows permanently having them is too powerful. Every build gets balanced around the assumption the uptime on them is crazy high, yet it’s still something that is in control of the players. Why? What is the point? I see these boons as a “net-negative” experience for the customer. Either you have them and it’s normal, our you don’t and it feels bad. They can’t make the application feel positive or rewarding because then it’s not guaranteed, and becomes an issue.
  22. Day one of the new balance patch and we are already seeing the struggles for some boon builds. Druid in particular is getting attention for having questionably low application of Might and Alac. The Alac is a necessity for Druid to be comparable to other healers, but forcing it into CA has upended the flexibility Druid previously enjoyed. Now you use your big healing form to give Alac. This means you can't time it for when you need, well... actual healing. You can't control your glyphs as well because your time spent in CA is dependent on your Alac uptime. The entire build has to dance to the tune of an obstructive boon. This is what I dislike about balancing around these boons so much. Builds become less snappy, less flexible, less responsive. People claim flexibility is increasing because more builds can do Quick/Alac, but I just see more builds becoming shackled to these boons. There is no freedom here. I would rather the devs end this eternal headache of which build gets which boon and how they apply it. Make these things baseline. Make the game easier for us and yourselves. Make elite specs stand out by things that are actually interesting.
  23. I do feel that for balance patches that are intended to be “big” and encompass all the gamemodes, the quarterly patches, they should warrant multiple rounds of feedback. It doesn’t make much sense to me to have a single preview stream at the beginning of the month, then not communicate on updates until the days right before the patch goes live. If we end up getting “here’s what we changed” on Friday, then we are just right back to the last minute communication Grouch said we’d avoid after the disaster it led to last June.
  24. The unique buffs argument never held much water for class identity because it’s a dull form of expression, so I think any argument over class identity should first lay out the unique elements of a class outside of buffs. The boon corrupts on Necro are a good example. Necro has always been this dark, corrupting spell caster that can debilitate enemies and even themselves. Those corrupts are getting removed though because they are too problematic for boon balls in WvW. Auras are a cool and unique component of Ele that highlight their control over the elements. They can be traited to do all kinds of things, representative of Ele being a Swiss Army knife. You can’t take the GM aura trait though on heal tempest because then you don’t give alacrity. If you don’t give alacrity you aren’t competitive to other healers. This is what people really mean when people say the boons homogenize things. The fun, fantastical elements of classes that make them stand out are not the priority of the dev team. They are low on the totem pole. Boons are what matter. They smother everything else in a classes kit. If your class can provide something cool and useful and also give boons, then the cool and useful elements will be nerfed or removed when tuning has to happen. The classes must conform to the status quo which is boons matter more than anything.
  25. Engi core skills are pretty great with kits being amazing. Elite spec utility goes wrong with things like Harbinger vials where you had to take multiple to upkeep your blight but the skills felt like the same skill over and over. Uninspired design. For core utility that is weak and needs attention, look no further than Core Ele and War utility. Laughably bad compared to things like Guard, Mesmer, and Engi.
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