Vyriis.6258

The kind of Speed Clears you're thinking of are very different from how they were in GW1. Speed Clears in most games just consists of blasting through bosses with highly optimized group builds. GW1 Fissures of Woe and Underworld were maps with events spread out in all corners of the map that normally take full groups to complete while grouped up. Speed clearers would go in with the normal amount of people (Or in some of our cases half the normal amount) and we'd split up the events, one or two people per event, and finish the map in 1/10th the time. Highly optimized Solo/Duo builds and a great deal of mechanical knowledge of the events that you were tasked to do. You would ignore everything else except your task, running to it right from the start, and by the time you were done with your task everyone else would be finishing their tasks and the map would be cleared. There's just nothing in any game that I've played that even compares to GW1 Speed Clears; and no way they'd ever come to GW2 given how much they love their time gates and making sure the Hard Core players can't get too far ahead of the Casual players (Daily/Weekly reward and DR are the worst). (Edit: Only thing I could even think to compare it to would be the Deep Stone and Thaumanova fractals. I've seen pug groups and casual players struggle with both of these fractals where myself and other skilled players can easily solo them. If the maze room in Deep stone was available from the start instead of needing to do the side rooms first you'd have one person do the maze while you'd have two on Spider and two on Ele. By the time each of those was done you'd converge and do the elevator and final boss. Thaumanova has the four events that can be done nearly at the same time [if Sub 6 spawned as soon as the fractal opened]. You'd have one person do the heat room, one on the laser room, one in the labs, and two on Sub 6. Heat and Laser room would most likely be a Mesmer simply because of portals/blinks, Labs would be anyone who has pierce, and Sub 6 would be two with high burst. By the time Sub 6 dies the other rooms would already be in center and go right up to the boss with Sub 6 group joining slightly after. Now just need to turn this into 10 man content with several more events. Would still be "easy" enough for casuals to complete in a reasonable time while allowing more mechanically skilled players to split off in pairs to complete it much faster.)

To clarify: I did not mean he does it specifically at 5% intervals, just that he does it enough that it might as well be every 5%. It's way too frequent, in any event, that it makes the encounter unfun. Especially when you factor in how often the meta occurs.

The problem OP most likely has isn't the mechanic itself, but the frequency of it. Have done the meta several times now and have this same issue with it. The boss is already a damage sponge; having him go into an invuln phase every 5% just makes the encounter feel worse. Nothing about the encounter is hard, it's just unnecessarily long... Which makes it incredibly tedious....

Really not understanding what you're talking about.... I run Alac Mirage for Fractals and Strikes and have no issue maintaining 100% uptime on Alac while keeping my dps around where a boon support should be (More dps than Chrono on some fights). Running Staff/Staff and full Rit (no Sig of Insp.). Mirage also has the added benefit of maintaining 100% alac uptime outside of combat and between phases where Chrono requires a target. Run deceptive evasion and you will have absolutely no issue maintaining 2 - 3 clones while in combat. Only time mine usually die is when I shatter them and I'm usually right back to 3 right after they shatter.

Once in place the only thing that would cost over time is VA. Wardrobe is a small drop in the bucket when you consider they are wasting their time on adjusting every armor piece just for Charr; why not add a couple more races that share a similar mesh? On top of that: Raids, Strikes, and Fractals appeal to a small amount of people and there are no returns on them. In fact you have to keep making them or adding to them to keep them relevant so people keep playing them. A new race on the other hand would get that small number of players to buy character slots, build slots, equipment slots, etc. There is a return on new races vs no return on adding to current systems. I, for one, will be dropping cash on eight character slots, full bag slots, and all equipment and build tabs for all of them if they gave me Tengu. Small drop in the bucket, sure; but how many players out there would do the same if not just more character slots for new races. Those are returns they'd get. And who knows: some of the people who don't play Charr might play a different non-humanoid race if it appeals more to the animal or fantasy being they like; Not everyone likes steampunk Cat-cows. To add to this as well: Fishing was a system they had to add completely from scratch that has no returns outside of Skiff skins and Fishing Polls if people buy them. Minor amount of players enjoy fishing in game, but how many of them are buying the skiff skins and poll skins? Large drop in the bucket in development for minimal financial returns. And before you say "They don't have to keep putting resources into it over time". That begs the question: how many more of these sort of systems do you put in the game that small amounts of players want to participate in with very minimal returns on them vs investing in something that there has literally been a post on every month pretty much since the game dropped showing that there is a good number of players who want to spend money on such a feature? Also: Would almost be better if they hired on more VA's. This would have a bigger impact on future expansions as a whole for those that want to immerse themselves in the game with the ambient dialogue as we wouldn't have 50 NPCs around the world sounding like a variation of Braham or Taimi.

@TheeBlackDeath.5692 As someone who's been asking for Tengu since they first announced playable races, and as I planned on making the monthly "Playable Tengu" post since we're now heading away from the Dragon story line into micro story expansions: The sad reality is that with just under 50% of the player base playing Humans, at roughly 419.5m hours played, with the next race being Sylvari at 146.5m (a humanoid race, but plant), followed by Asuran at 142.3m (humanoid, but with the added small and cute feature), then Norn at 136.8m (Human, but big and clunky), with Charr trailing in behind at just 93.3m total hours played. (Numbers according to GW2efficiency). With the majority of people, when asking for new playable races, want something that is either humanoid (Kodan [humans with bear heads], Largos [Blue humans with wings], Dwarves [Small humans]) or something that's cute (Quaggan and Skritt) says a lot about what the majority of people want: more humans. This was also an issue when Charr were originally announced and they weren't coming with an "Up right" posture that some of the Charr in GW1 had. People don't want interesting, fantasy, bestial races to play; they just want more of the same differently skinned humans. Was about to say Anet wouldn't put the effort into something that not even 10% of the player population would play; but we have raids, fractals, and strikes, so.... My hope at this point is that they end up bringing "Guild Wars" back into GW2 and we end up with some major Faction vs Faction story line that introduces a few new races at once. Two bestial races (Tengu and some Merfolk type) and one humanoid race so the base players don't feel left out. Myself, for one, and a good chunk of people in the community that have popped up through the many "Playable Tengu" threads are of the same mind that we don't need the full story line to be playable (which would cut down on a lot of needed VA work); we just want to play as our favorite land dwelling Avians. And, again, with the new expansion stories the way they are they could more easily do this. Side note: I do find it odd they would add so many new Tengu models for EoD when the majority of Tengu we saw back in GW1 (In Cantha) were the Sensali and Angchu. We didn't have the Crane or Owl looking Kestrels. There was no need for that unless they have further plans for them.

This was actually one of the bigger arguments FOR Shortbow Mesmer back in the day. Thematically Dreamer fits Mesmer AND just imagine 3 clones firing off unicorns; oh the neighing would be maddening!

I'm assuming you're talking about PvP and WvW as Shortbow is used for the Viper build in PvE.

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We have this... It's called "Shortbow". I'm excited for Scepter. Hope it's a mid-ranged power/heal weapon. Having the auto change based on legend wouldn't be so bad either. (Heal/support for Ventari/Glint/Viktor, power for Shiro/Jalis/Archemorus, Condition for Mallyx/Kalla) In any case I just hope Revenant never gets a fire arm thrown on them; I would like one of the magic professions to remain a pure mage class (very salty about Mesmer Rifle....) Think they were just pointing to the fact that anet seemed to be hinting at pistol as a weapon choice for Rev, nothing about the actual legend. As we don't know if we're getting another trait line (and in this case legend) to come along with the weapons or not it will most likely just be the weapon. Scepter works well as it would be the base line "Revenant" weapon where all others are tied to legends; a weapon to channel pure Mist energy and could be tied to the Invocation line.

Pretty much, yes. It was the idea I had for Bow on Mesmer way before Renegade Shortbow was ever a thing. Love Shortbow on Renegade so why not change it a little and throw it on Mesmer? It's not supposed to be an elite spec weapon this time so it doesn't need to be completely different from what currently exists. Could also be, lore wise, what inspired Renegades to use shortbows the way they do.

Honestly hate the fact they ever put fire arms into the game. If they had just stuck to leaving them on the classes that aren't magically focused I would've been fine; but Rifle on Mesmer is pushing it. Especially considering Mesmer is supposed to be a more elegant "mesmerizing" class. Been asking for Longbow or Shortbow since HoT. Longbow that would actually work opposite Greatsword in that it would actually be a melee or mid range weapon. Either bow firing illusionary arrows from behind the target with the auto attack and having a skill that, instead of knocking back to range, knocks enemies back towards you. Skills 2-5 would be more "dance" in spectacle like how Bladesongs kind of make the character twirl around or float. Hammer would've been great as a mid range heal focused weapon so Mesmers could finally fill that niche properly. Auto could summon an illusion near the target that would whirl attack applying protection and providing a small heal to allies near it. The phantasm could be a targeted AoE that would spawn, do a slam with the hammer for a targeted healing and provide a blast finisher to combo with a water field that could be placed on another weapon skill. (These could also apply to Mace MH and OH combo) I just absolutely hate the idea of pushing firearms onto magic classes; especially one that is pretty much marketed as the "Magic Swordsman" type class. Was gross enough when Necromancer got Pistol, and it's absolutely disgusting that Guardian is getting duel pistol (way out of theme for a "Guardian") and Mesmer is getting Rifle (nothing about Mesmer says "Let me just pick up this boom stick and go be fancy").

Yeah. Been playing Alac Mirage for my group in Fracts for a while now and had to swap back to Rev after this nerf. Would watch the Alac on myself fall off every couple second and whenever I looked up to see how the party was doing there'd be no alac on any of them, and if there was it'd be gone before I could apply more. Trying to chase people down to give them 1s of alac just doesn't work. Tried Alac Chrono, and the Alac uptime is definitely there, but it just doesn't have the space for utility, boon, and a reasonable dps compared to most other Alac classes (Or Mirage before the nerf). And forget trying to run the short lived, wonderful, Heal Alac Mirage... Can't keep up Alac while constantly dodging; forget trying to throw a mantra cast in there....

Other problem with this is that it's 100% on self with only a maintainable 3 seconds. The point of a boon support is to maintain it around 90%+ of the time on allies. This is not possible now unless you are always stacked within 600 range; which is not going to happen a lot of the time. Compare this to the classes that can burst stack several seconds of alac while everyone is stacked before you have to separate and Mirage is not viable.

We have a heal spec that works in end game very well. Staff/staff mantra Mirage with deceptive evasion. Juggle your dodges and mantra casts and you maintain steady heals and boons. With access to jaunt for both more clone spam and ally chase you can keep people topped off easily (as long as they don't eat every mechanic).

Again: you start your post with "what pro raiders want". Pro raiders don't want to be slowed down for no reason. Give us reasons to slow down or a challenge if we want to go faster. We have bosses that slow us down and people HATE them because it's a none option. It's just slow down because..... you have to.... Slowing down because of some sort of dmg mitigation or invuln or HP increase is only increasing the time it takes with no option of trying to get better and faster at it. That's what pro's want; to get faster at difficult content. Slowing us down for no reason other than "casuals can't keep up" or "they're skipping mechanics" is not challenge. "... movement and evasion that you can't do as everything is dps focused." Movement and evasion that we've gotten used to over multiple runs and are able to do them without thinking about them. If we can avoid them by pushing dps; even better. The bigger problem is not that we need to slow encounters down, it's that pro's get too good at content at a faster rate than the casual community can keep up with so it isn't a challenge to us while remaining relevant to casuals. You increase the time it takes or mechanics or anything about it to challenge pro's and your casual community suffers. The content we want to be challenging also isn't open world in the first place. We live for our instanced content that scares casuals. 50 man blobs pecking at the ankles of some giant training golem isn't interesting in any way. A boss that charges your small squad with seven different mechanics out the gate, half of which will down you if you don't evade them, is what we want. This is why challenge motes are put into raids, fractals, and strikes. Once we learn the base modes we can up the difficulty. You know where challenge modes are not? Open world. Because it would separate the community and scare off casuals from wanting to attempt it.

You say it's wrong, but it's factual. Increasing HP only makes the encounter longer; not challenging. This has been proven already when they decided it would be a good idea to just increase fractal boss health back in the day. It was just more time spent doing the same mechanics we'd been doing. Does higher dps allow us to skip mechanics? Absolutely. Mechanics we've dealt with so many times that going through them now doesn't matter because it's like riding a bike. You may not have done them in a while but as soon as you see them it's a natural function that you don't really think about. Not a challenge in the least. Thus why I suggest adding more mechanics if X amount of health is lost in Y amount of time. This would essentially be turning encounters into CMs without having to specifically switch to CM. Again, though, this can only be done in instanced content. You try to do anything to open world and you're just asking for casuals to not play your content. You start your post with "Pro raid/strike people complain....", but then as soon as we start telling you what we're actually looking for you're telling us we're wrong and that "Of course you'd be against it". As mentioned earlier: Increasing HP to "make content more challenging" has been done before and us "pro's" know this and don't want to see it happen again for any game mode. The problem is is you're looking at -- Taking longer = more challenging -- It's not. You're also probably not thinking about what most casual players are like vs what most raiders are like. Casuals are perfectly fine running Soldiers gear (Power + Tough + Vit) while sitting on a Ranger with a bear hitting all their skills off cd thinking they're doing their job as a dps. While a raider (who, by the way, is probably running a dps meter [apparently not the people you want to talk to here]) can see that their own dps is slightly low while they're pushing their full rotation in Berserker/Vipers gear at 30k+ (vs the casual who's barely above 12k). As I said in my original reply, and others have pointed out, it would be more of a "challenge" to add more mechanics if thresholds are met. As I also mentioned, though, this wouldn't fly in open world due to the fact that casuals don't want more mechanics to deal with (half the time dying to highly visible, telegraphed, attacks). Soo - Won (Dragons End) opens with an insta down AoE that takes like 5 seconds to actually go off that still downs half the squad. Dragons end also fails half the time because there isn't enough dps, even though the top 10 players are doing twice the amount of the next 20. So, sure! Let's add more health because the top 10s dps is forcing the average up so now it's going to fail even more. DPS meter "fans" don't like this idea because it makes no difference to us dps wise; you're just wasting our time at this point. We'll do the same amount of damage whether the boss has 140 million hp or 200 million hp. No different from switching the training golem from Weak to Crazy Strong. At a certain point a raider isn't even going to notice most mechanics that go on because it's second nature and the only thing we're worried about is pushing our dps to make the encounter go by faster; so why force us to stay longer? Give us more hurdles to jump over in our sprint to the finish (And I do mean hurdles; none of that insta death bs that they like to toss in).

As danikat mentioned: this only increases the time it takes to kill; not the actual difficulty. The fight just feels like a training golem at that point. This is how they tried to "fix" this problem before when people were clearing dungeons and fractals too fast in the day and the backlash was sever. We would take way longer on already biking fights. What the hard core end game players want are mechanics that force people to actually learn to play the game. What would need to happen is new mechanics being added to fights if certain dps thresholds were met. When you start clearing 50% of a bosses health in x amount of minutes new mechanics start appearing. In the end, however, this only works for instanced content. You put any of this, your suggestion as well, in the open world and every event would fail. This game has too many casuals to make open world any harder than it already is. Dragons End being a good example.

My group runs heal herald when our HFB is out for our daily runs (t4s + cms) with no issues and no noticable drop in healing or boon uptime. So it's definitely viable. It's also what's used for HTcm at the moment, so should be easy enough to find a decent build for it.

Those would be trait lines. Specializations are Herald, Renegade, and Vindicator (specialized trait lines). [A bit confusing given the wiki has them listed as core and elite specializations]. If you want to play power Rev you want Devastation (sword game play). If you want condition you want to go Corruption (mace game play). Then beyond those you want invocation if you go power and most likely devastation as your second choice if you go condition. Retribution last for power (doesn't add much except a bit of survivability) and invocation last if going condition. But really beyond devastation or corruption (power or condition respectively) you want invocation and then the others are a toss as far as leveling goes.

Given they were drawn to Asuran Magi Tech they could follow in the footsteps of Oola who succeeded in combining golemancy and necromancy. Your character could be trying to do something similar. In which case being part of the Iron Legion would be a fine fit.

After recently playing Monk on Diablo Immoral with the Legendary "Reaching Rebuke" that turns Exploding Palm into an offensive dodge; makes me wish Anet would turn Vindi dodge into that. In effect it does the same thing as Vindi's dodge (Launches you into the air and you come crashing back down dealing damage in an area [as well as applying the exploding palm debuff]) but has an air time roughly the same as a normal dodge in GW2 (keeping the two charges) and is ground targeted instead of allowing movement while it's active (which I think would be better [would rather instantly pop up in some ones face than disappearing for 3 seconds first]). It gives a better feeling of "I'm using my dodge for offensive engagement" than Vindi's current state.

On that note, though, I don't really want to keep discussing this on a thread that has been hi-jacked and derailed. >.> If a moderator could maybe move the conversations that went from "Next legend and weapon" to "who exactly uses the mists and what do Revenants actually channel" to the lore section I'd be happy to continue discussing.

Well, that's not quite true. The necromancer is pulling magic from the mists. As far as we can tell, much of their magic is using the threads of death connecting Tyria to the underworld and realm of torment to fuel their magic. What we see in game isn't quite expressed too clearly so we can only speculate based on in game descriptions and evidence given to us by characters and lore. Necromancy seems to have a connection to the realm of torment and underworld which you can tell by looking at their minions. Stygian , which are partially formed Demon spawn look identical to the minions the necromancer summons. It would seem that the energies the necromancer is calling on are from the mists, a specific part of the mists but this is speculation. But it can't be ruled out that the necromancer's magic isn't connected to the mists because there is evidence that it most certainly is. Ghastly Breach the scourge elite is "breaching" the realm of torment as the skill describes it. So they are able to pull directly from the mists in cannon. How much of their magic requires this connection to the underworld and realm of torment? I'm not entirely sure. Necromancers have more questions than answers. As do Revenants. It would be nice to explore both of their respective magics further. Though I do agree there are more questions than answers when it comes to the mists and death magic and how exactly they differ. Stygians and minions are not the same. Lore wise minions are simply animated corpses; they are not summoned from another realm. They are made up of the bits and pieces of broken bodies around them, nothing more. The reason they look the same is most likely due to them not wanting to make new assets. It does throw me off, though, when they introduce skills like Ghastly Torment, and even Shadow Fiend, which do both directly connect to the mists (seemingly in the case of Fiend, though this could also just be a ball of condensed death magic). As you say; anything we can come up for these would simply be speculation.