Snowskau.4369

Line breaker is Staff's strongest support skill and you effectively cannot use it if you're tanking in raids. That's a pretty big L. I'm starting to think the skill should just be reworked entirely and it's boons put onto Defiant Roar. The animation for Inspiring Whirl should also be replaced. The windup feels to long while the whirl feels too fast, but that all goes out the window anyway when you're moving and your character's torso just snaps around in a single frame because the legs can't turn around. The animation straight up breaks. I'm also not keen on Balanced strike--my character lifts the staff straight up behind their head, but then brings it around at an angle. That doesn't feel very "Balanced". It just looks like the character is sacrificing so much energy from the swing in order to alter it's trajectory, instead of, you know, smacking the enemy with directed force.

The allied targeting mechanic on Line Breaker(3) is going to be extremely annoying to manage. I'd strongly prefer if the support version of this skill was the only (regular target) one. Allied targeting is cool but not in the way this skill works (or with how GW2 combat has been set up in general). As mentioned by Smoosh it's movement is also wonky in line with ancient 2012 skills. It's visual effects are also MUCH too prominent, as if FX issues weren't extremely dire already. It should be a lot more subtle for a 12s cooldown skill As mentioned by Smoosh, Bullet Catcher(5) is subject to being interrupted early by combat, but I also had it happen while freecasting by moving(WASD) at around the same time. All of the skills could do with reduced visual effects, really. There is absolutely no reason to shroud the entire encounter in FX just from a freaking autoattack. I see "level 1" but no "level 2" on Spellbreaker Path to Victory(burst). Is there supposed to be one? With the staff heals and support being this strong, I'm a little worried about how stacked it is into one single weapon. Since Warrior healing is still supbar overall compared to my other healers in testing (they can survive the SFTA Extremely Threatening damage aura without breaking a sweat or compensating), I would buff the healing traits throughout Tactics some more. I still very much enjoy the idea of warrior shouting at people to heal them. I'd also think about adding regen to Warhorn. I think it's necessary to bring up other Warrior changes to complete what Staff is supposed to bring to Warrior (what is the point of adding a healing weapon if the healing builds are fundamentally not good enough?). Bladesworn is perfectly poised to have a support build largely just by altering the top sustain traitline: River's Flow should act on allies also and not just self. "Healing power is increased. Healing allies or yourself increases flow rate." Unshakeable Mountain should give barrier to allies as well. Furthermore, I would change what activates this trait, seeing as staff has no ammunition, and I don't think I've ever taken this trait because of how it works (or what it gives). Alternatively, replace it with a healing trait (instead of the following proposal), to give Heal Alacrity BS some more alternative sources of healing. Immortal Dragon should give regen to allies. Could reduce personal healing to 5 or 6% to compensate. Since I also have always hated having to waste a utility slot on Flow Stabilizer just to make BS work I would request changing it and flow gain, in a way that would benefit all BS builds: Flow Stabilizer is replaced with "Amber Cladding". Like Detonate Cartridges, this skill tosses (something) to create an amber mist that grants Regeneration, Protection and potentially Resolution/Resistance/Stability/Aegis. Essentially just give this skill an actual purpose, that now benefits players. Could also give it barrier instead of additional boons, if only because I really enjoy overheal mechanics. The base gain of Flow is increased by 200-300% (near the equivalent of using Flow Stabilizer) Additionally, the Gunsaber and/or Dragon Trigger 4 skill could share Aegis with allies, potentially through Unshakeable Mountain, if no other allied Aegis application is added. With more Might, Prot and Aegis sharing, BS should become a solid support pick. I also loathe having to use Overcharged Cartridges but that's beyond the scope of this beta. As for Berskerer... Well, I would have preferred Spellbreaker being the support build, but that's too late now. As a healer, without axes, upkeeping quickness permanently could be too tight, especially with 3 shouts. Once again this may be a problem that we are forced to slot something in utilities that you have to press off cooldown just to make the build work, when you should want to slot something with an actual purpose instead, like more support skills. Making upkeep of berserk/quickness easier with the balance patch is a band-aid solution for how quickness application works but I can't say I have enough experience with qBers to give any useful input on this build. Seeing as Berserker has absolutely 0 support design I can't quite imagine qHeal Warrior being a thing. BS is at least potentially in a decent spot to become a healer or even raid tank. And, again, Spellbreaker could have filled those roles superbly as [boon]Healer... Path to Victory/Rampart Splitter is nice healing but if quickness application is going to be an issue, the build is dead in the water.

My Female Charr Engineer now inexplicably has a permanent (conditional) texture error after getting to lvl 80. The error looks like a normalmap/shader imprint of a ghost object on the left back of her neck: https://imgur.com/m6F6qSd I've been leveling and questing on this character for many hours without issue. After going to Armistice Bastion, boosting to 80, buying and unlocking traits, and applying all my legendary equipment (everything but one amulet), the textures on her neck are permanently bugged, possibly after transmuting the chest and legs to the Leather Straps set. The texture bug persists through client and PC restarts, changing maps, well as changing all slots of equipment. The texture bug does not appear in the character selection screen or the hair/makeover kit panel (even though it simultaneously shows in the Hero panel) The texture bug goes away if I equip and show any armor in both the Boots and Gloves armor slots. No other slots affect the textures. Different armor skins do not seem to affect the bug. I've not been able to reproduce this on any of my other characters but I'm also out of free slots to try a new one While I'm here again, I could also remind you that one of the EoD female charr faces still has the glaring bone weight mistake where a single vertex from the upper lip is mapped to the jaw or something, now also demonstrated by an Astral Ward NPC (anet pls it should take like 1m to fix if I had access to the mesh working file): https://imgur.com/1fFvp9l

I get the impression the team forgot support Specter was supposed to be a thing because removing the resurrection ability from Shadestep absolutely eviscerated the support power of the spec while it was not compensated for this loss in any way, when the healing build was struggling for relevance in the first place. Not to mention, it was one of the most fun abilities to be found on the thief class. Now the healing build is even less effective than shout heal warrior, since at least warrior can bring Battle Standard. The team seriously needs to have a think about the support trait line because alac and some barrier isn't even enough to compare with nerfed support scourge.

Please impress upon them the need to separately toggle effects like bloom from the rest of post-processing. I'm gonna be besides myself if they rework the graphics settings and still don't allow us to simply disable the eye-melting nuclear bloom! I know it's possible because an amateur did it through the GW2Hook ReShade fork years ago and ever since that deprecated I'm once again forced to miss out on outlines and color grading because the game is effectively unplayable with this implementation of post-FX.

The female charr face with ritual scars and cheek frills added with the Nov 30 patch has a mesh wightmapping error. A point on the upper left lip is erroneously mapped to a jaw/lower lip bone. It looks extremely jarring during any kind of talking animation. It's been like this since it was added. Screenshots on Imgur.

What I'm saying is I don't think that should be necessary. I find it very strange that players would be going "back" from endgame to starter zones but seeing a converse increase in requirements. I think new characters should be able to get into fishing without having to do a relog shuffle from EoD zones and resources; they should be able to buy some basic +50 bait and tackle around the starting areas and cities that can enable them to start and have fun right away with a gradual progression that is more cohesive with the leveling experience, in spite of how ANet ended up implementing the unlocking of fishing.

"Really quickly" is subjective. I maxed my fishing first thing on release, but a lot of people might not want want to focus EoD straight away. A very common recommendation for new players is to hop into the PoF starting mission just to unlock the raptor, and then progress through the core game "normally" for that "true experience". Sure, if the player is a true fishing enjoyer and is well informed on the game's systems they can strategize it like that, but seeing responses on this forum, you might be expecting too much of completely new players who don't have friends or a guild to guide them. With fishing being such a staple feature, and applicable anywhere just like mounts, I think there should be nothing keeping you from delving into fishing right off the bat without first having to grind through end-game systems and resources and shuffling items through the bank just to make it work. It just makes so much more sense for the FP requirements to match the zone level, with starting value of Seitung to the max of end-game Orr and subsequent. People genuinely buy games just on the fishing minigames, but you might be surprised how easily some prospective players bounce off a game if they have to jump through some hoops first.

The only time I myself failed is when I went out of my way to test FP requirements, but you have to understand some people have legitimate disabilities. Accessibility isn't about making things easy; it's about giving alternatives to input or support options like easily readable text and symbology. From what I've read I'm not sure the fishing UI is quite good enough in this regard.

I see a lot of threads about fishing but so many posts are fragmentary or just bickering about reaction times, opinions, it's very existence, WOMM and so on. I want to make a thread for collected constructive feedback, directed towards developers. First I want to address the existing systems. Both visual and audio feedback within the minigame is rather poor and arbitrary. For some reason I can see the '!' markers of other players, both above their names and the minimap(???) which is not only completely irrelevant, but also extremely confusing if I'm standing next to one. The splashing and movement of the bobber is rather hard to read, especially if other people are fishing in the same hole. The audio cue of a catch is extremely hard to hear if not actually inaudible sometimes, and contrasts bizarrely with the loud and prominent bell chime you get just for casting into the water(Which really isn't needed--these two cues could be swapped, for a better experience). Often times my character will animate like they're about to be pulled into the drink by the rod (playing charr), but it seems to have zero correlation to events in the minigame. The animation really ought to be tied to fish snagging, which would help immensely with feedback. Catch difficulty being random and having no correlation to fish rarity or size is a miss. It seems strange that the green leading bar can go sicko at 600+ fishing power only to give me some blue-quality aquarium fish, while a giant legendary-quality swordfish is the easiest and most docile catch of the day. The minigame suddenly being difficult should be a sign that something significant is on the line, making it exciting instead of leading to disappointment. Fishing hole FP rating being higher in starter zones than EoD is extremely counterintuitive. Imagine being a new player wanting to fish on their journey through leveling an alt, having only dabbled in EoD on a boosted character; it is either a contradictory and unreasonable spike in difficulty without masteries, or an actual impossibility for a lack of bait or tackle that can only be acquired in EoD zones. A staple feature of fishing should be immediately accessible; I think there should be basic fishing suppliers in starter areas that enable the player to engage in this fun minigame right off the bat rather than having to grind end-game content first, and fishing requirements should be cohesive with the leveling experience. FP catch calculations as of writing this appear to be bugged, much like Magic Find was for some containers previously. Somehow I catch multiple legendary- and ascended-quality fish before I get a single exotic, or the chance seems to almost wrap around and give me nothing but blues and trash; phenomena that seems corroborated by other posts on the forum. This just compounds the frustration of trying to catch the single last exotic in a collection and somehow getting every other possible catch instead. Every collection I am near to finishing has stalled on one exotic instead of a legendary or ascended, that seems wrong. Dawn/Dusk requirements are currently ludicrous. The game has neither an in-game world clock(there is apparently now a Tyrian Time option) or an actual day/night-cycle(the sky literally crossfades or stretch wraps a second texture over the first with no sunrise/set), which forces me to rely on out-of-game third-party apps just to know when to fish, but also "dawn" and "dusk" apparently last for a measly five minutes at a time, every hour. I apparently have just five minutes, or about 6-9 attempts, to catch one single fish that is somehow the rarest of the lot thanks to bad RNG calculations. I don't dislike the idea of timed fish but this doesn't seem implemented or communicated well. Dawn and dusk are also kind of subjective to people living up a hemisphere and you need external knowledge such as the wiki to truly know the exact periods. Having to constantly navigate between your fishing equipment and the collections hidden in the achievement tab in the hero panel to figure out what bait to use where and change accordingly is extremely fiddly and frustrating. Bloat and browsing in the hero panel has always been a problem and it's getting really bad with EoD. I can't think of a solution besides just adding another window for some of the features currently stuck in there, such as achievements. I'd also like to leave suggestions. The minigame is decently engaging, but barebones and likely lacks longevity. I seriously hope it is being expanded on much like mounts were with utility skills. Fishing should at least have a size system and record, if not also a leaderboard. Showing off the size of the creature you reeled in is a pretty staple thing in fishing. Having a record to beat gives you both additional goals and dopamine hits. Fishing should have a tacklebox where I can store bait and lures. It would at least partly alleviate the hero panel bloat and having to shuffle bait around characters and inventories, and enable me to check both collections and equipment simultaneously. It could potentially feature fishing suggestions or tracking for the current zone/hole, freeing me from the frustrating achievement panel. Further mechanics and skills should be added to the minigame with masteries. Some people seem to have such poor hand-eye coordination or reaction time they struggle to even beat the fishing tutorial, maybe add an electric shock mastery that stunts the fish and locks the green bar for a duration. Imagine a utility that lets you chain-catch or double mooch, or an elite skill that summons a laser shark that blasts a load of fish out of the water. The design team is usually pretty creative with gameplay so I'd trust them to make something fun. Fly fishing? Rocket fishing? Fishing in the mists? For context I have been fishing for days now throughout the game world. Fishing was probably my most anticipated feature of the expansion. I know there is no way it could have compared to FFXIV's mature and extensive fishing system (that features an entire class, a creative questline including cutscenes, as well as multiple types of fishing(you can fish on a ship, underwater, in sand, or in space)), but it definitely could have been much worse, such as the copypaste click-the-bobber non-content in other MMOs. I'd have to describe fishing as being in the state it should have been in August 2012, but beggars can't be choosers, better late than never, etc. Very glad it's here but it still needs work to shine as I hope it can.

Ordering your companion to move to a ground-target location is a fundamental and basic ability that should be on every class that has to manage a pet. It should have been on ranger since it's inception. No matter how good you think they can make the AI it still will find itself in places other than where you need it to be at the moment and not being able to move your pet when you need it is unacceptable.

I've tried a bit of condi and power, a bit of diviner support, but I've had the best time on a healer build where I basically just replaced scrapper. That being said the "best time" is pretty awful for one fundamental reason: Pets are awful to use in GW2 simply because of the very poorly implemented controls. Half of the time my mech is is the wrong place, on the opposite side of the boss, sitting at max range so that none of the buffs it's supposed to give to the group are getting applied. Having to wrangle this barely functional AI with commands that somehow manage to be even worse than Ranger was previously makes this spec dead-on-arrival to me. I basically only have the Ranger Pet Combat Toggle key to attempt to maneuver this POS to where it's supposed to be, which means I have to constantly be turning it off and back on again so that it spends a significant amount of time not doing what it's supposed to. It is incredibly frustrating to play. Because it's a wider design problem not specific to one class I made a thread about it in general; if you want to curse even more classes with the terrible pet system you NEED to implement an actual control scheme for companion units. With these specs more reliant on pets than even Ranger used to be I think it is untenable for Mechanist and Untamed to be saddled with control schemes that are this bad and non-functional. In other words: The inability to direct your companion anywhere except a functionally random spot around an enemy target (which is now locked behind cooldown attacks) or to a functionally random spot near the player (which is now more jank than before) is not acceptable. Having to sacrifice a whole utility skill with a prohibitive cooldown for this basic function is not acceptable. The game needs actual companion commands.

TL;DR: The inability to direct your companion anywhere except a functionally random spot around an enemy target (which is now locked behind cooldown attacks) or to a functionally random spot near the player (which is now more jank than before) is not acceptable. Having to sacrifice a whole utility skill with a prohibitive cooldown for this basic function is not acceptable. The game needs actual companion commands. Context &The Problem Ranger as always been hampered by the relatively poor control of it's companion, and both Necromancer and Elementalist suffer even worse with practically none at all. I think many players would know the frustrations of a necro's minion having taken aggro and refusing to move with the group, potentially sabotaging the encounter or at least forcing you to just sit there and wait for them to die. The complete lack of summon controls has been used as a balance excuse for these classes; to make them feel different from Ranger's bond, but I think it's really a cop-out. It only serves to make these utilities tedious and undesirable outside of shifting aggro in solo content and a headache for potentially the whole group. The current beta event for Untamed and the Mechanist, seemingly sharing the same pet ability framework that manages to allow even less control than Ranger's previous abilities, starkly exposes how bad the implementation of pets within GW2 really is. Untamed (and Mechanist) swaps from the core Ranger pet interface by replacing the F1&3 abilities previously used to control and move your pet to instead directly operate only the pet skills. This was presented as affording better control of pet attacks, but failed to mention this means you can no longer tell your pet to focus a target, or use the "Return to Me" command without now manually skill-clicking the undersize icon on your hotbar. Although the combat toggle fucntion (that you have to manually keybind) can be used to similar effect it may require a second press if you're already in Avoid Combat and is a sub-par substitute. Mechanist now suffers the exact same frustrating issues of minimal and lacking control, despite potentially being able to use a fifth (F5) bind for control unlike Untamed which needs it for the spec's Unleash mechanic. All of this serves to really press the issue of pet management having to compete with or be completely superseded by the highly limited class ability slots that at best max at 5. The terrible implementation of pets and pet controls were the sole reason I detested ranger until Soubleast (despite playing druid quite a lot more) and no matter how awesome Mechanist looks I can tell you from taking it into various encounters and content that (the lack of) managing your companion completely kneecaps the playability of this spec even if the summoning quirks were ironed out. This video by Paper Roll on YT explains the issues of the new ability scheme in detail before the beta was even out and I recommend you watch it. Pet control NEEDS it's own hotbar and keybinds. In many other hotbar MMOs this is exactly the case; and they allow you proper control of often more than just one pet through individual control bars. With WoW as perhaps the most familiar example, one can tell a pet to go to a location, and/or tell a pet to stay in their place.These basic skills are useful not just for avoiding bad pulls or guarding a location, but can be used to good effect luring enemies or avoiding bad positioning and damage independently from it's master. Though non-Hunter pets seem to have been stripped of abilities over the years, I have on the account of some WoW-playing friends that several do still allow some degree of control beyond the summons in GW2. In FFXIV the situation is similar and more than one class gets to fully command and move their summons in this way. Is your support AI out of place from the group? Just move it where it needs to go. Is your pet about to eat a massive attack? Just move it to safety. Even at the best of time previously on Ranger, if you had to do either of those basic things, you yourself would first have to move to the desired location well in advance, then force recall your pet (and account for the offset of where it may position itself at your side) and hope the AI will path itself in time. The amount of jank trying to line your independent pet up for an attack or tactic makes the prospect impossible and you just have to hope it goes in the vague direction you want it to if it should matter. And that's before they made positioning your pet even more untenable with Untamed and Mechanist by removing the attack and focus command and replacing it with different combat skills on potentially significant cooldowns. Again I would direct you to the linked video where the presenter goes through the various consequences. I had and have serious issues because of this playtesting Mechanist as despite my jade golem being traited for melee I frequently find it standing at maximum range for the hitbox, opposite of where it needs to be so that none of the boons are getting applied to the group like it should, and my only recourse is to toggle it to passive, wait for it to react, wait for it to path and move to me, and now just hope it goes to the right spot when I toggle it back on, which is a massive waste of time and way more steps than it should be. Again, I should be able to just tell it to go where it needs to go. Potential solutions My idea for the longest time of a "simple" solution that doesn't even necessitate changing the Ranger key-count is that when no target is selected, the F1 Attack command is flipped over to "Guard"* which commands your pet to move to and stay at the ground-targeted location within 1200-1500 units. It stays there until recalled or max distance is exceeded. Even in the midst of a fight, all you'd have to do is detarget, aim your pet to allies or safety, and resume combat--no wasteful player movement or waiting required. Overestimating the simplicity of technical development is easy, but seeing what the engineers have done with Thief's Specter scepter targeting and effect flips it does seem plausible for such a mechanic to be implemented. I have a vague recollection that this flipping behavior has already been done in game, but I'll doubt my memory. This one single ability could complete Ranger's pet behavior, but it still leaves every other class including it's own new spec in the same unacceptable current state. With the F-skills above the weapon bar having to be dedicated to class mechanics, pet commands NEED their own place and input in order to be sufficient. I think then the best case scenario would be for a new hotbar located and otherwise hidden either above the class skills and resources, somewhere around the (left of the) hotbar (as to not interfere with boons and condi displays), or potentially along an edge of the screen. The size of it's icons I think should match the current pet F-skills in dimension. This hotbar could be hidden--just like the current pet hotbar is--until a friendly creature is summed by the player. It should include the existing Attack, Recall, and Passive/Aggressive *(previously "Avoid Combat" and "Guard" respectively) toggle abilities. It would additionally have either one or separate abilities for Move To and Stay. The AI instructions for what constitutes as Guard/Stay could be as simple as responding to combat as normal when attacked, or additionally accounting for the aggression setting. A pet's combat skills being fully accessible as how Untamed now makes it is something I think Ranger should always have as a baseline. If the F4 swap is moved to the new hotbar it can be replaced with a button that tells your pet to automate skill casting--or keep the swap where it is and put such a toggle on the pet hotbar instead. Even if the designers are fixated on other classes having less control over summons, they should least be afforded the recall command. ArenaNet clearly wants to play with companion AI and summons for GW2, and I think openly have avoided such systems for so long simply because of the bad, lagged pathing and atrocious controllability which has caused players to loathe and revolt against their addition so far (remember gyros? remember what people where warning about "engi golemancer"?--much of it is unfortunately accurate). A new hotbar wouldn't fix slow AI and pathing, but it would solve a massive crippling issue of both existing and future pet implementation. I'm pretty confident a lot of players have had opinions on GW2's pet & summon positioning problems and how to solve them so I'd encourage you to post about it. I'm curious whether people would want a new pet bar or think a simple skill flip is sufficient, or have had other ideas so I'll attach a poll. I'm sure there are some old threads or suggestions somewhere but I haven't been able to sift them out through the thousands of pages of "pet" or "summon" mentions, what with the current beta discussions on.

Dynamic VSync is a very poor choice. I had to force disable it through the NVIDIA Control Panel. The game still only having 30 and 60fps cap options was always a very bad neglect seeing as 90+Hz monitors have been increasingly common since 2012. You never want to be using V-Sync if you can simply limit your framerate from going too high; even if you don't and you screen starts tearing I think it's still preferable of the atrocious input lag you get when you enable V-Sync. The problem I was having before fiddling in the control panel was that If the game can't handle a stable maximum FPS, Adaptive V-Sync will cut the framerate in half. I could be at 100-140 FPS, which still feels smooth, and suddenly the game will decide to cuck me and hard throttle to 72 FPS. Every time it does this, frame time doubles from 8ms to 14ms and the game will stutter as V-Sync is toggled. This may happen almost every single second, leading to constant stuttering and input lag like molasses. Haven't had any performance or game-feel issues since I forced disabled it. Yeet V-sync the kitten out of here. Please get simple framerate limits working ANet.

I'd like to drop feedback on just the gunblade model specifically, as one artist to another. I think there is a notable mismatch between the rendering style of the weapon textures and the rest of the assets in the game--it lacks any drawn-in shading as if the whole work progress was done in a software environment with fancy PBR shaders doing the work of AO and depth, failing to account for the lack of these in-game. Whereas all the textures on my character and the rest of their equipment have deeply contrasted texturing and shape outlines, the weapon appears extremely flat in comparison. There is a too significant imbalance between the darkness of the handle fabric and the rest of the weapon, but even the darkest spots on this asset doesn't really match the rest of the character. If I had access to this thing in Substance or PS I would just go in there and accentuate the edges and pits a lot more. As for the model itself I at least have to applaud the handle not being cylindrical (blade aligment is such a simple principle, you have no excuse for failing this!), though the rest begins to fall apart on inspection. The barrel not lining up with the cylinder(?) is such a simple mistake and the way the blade comes out of the complex cylindrical heating-gun-thing underneath looks as if it were two different models just haphazardly clipped into eachother (there is a notable break in the glow texture where the red-hot blade paradoxically meets the hollow bore and just ends), and I feel like that heating contraption should have continued it's shape through to the handle instead of ending halfway. If there's anything I would unfortunately always lambast ArenaNet's art team for it's a widespread seemingly complete and fundamental lack of comprehension of function and purpose when it comes to equipment or vehicle design, where it's usual to just kind of maybe tack on some part or element they remember seeing on a real tool without having any understanding of it's purpose. I have to admit I've wasted several showers and idle moments imagining holding a presentation on simple basics for your art department. Another way to describe the arrangements of its' elements is that remind me a lot of a map artist mashing together different pillar, plate and ring assets to create unique towers and architecute, but... This is a single asset. I don't think it should be built like this. I've attached an imgur album with annotated screenshots. I'll leave other people to detail the actual spec but it does feel jank and ineffective when compared to other warrior builds right now, outside of smacking an idle boss. As much as I would like to say that a different flavor of DPS is okay, reality is not so kind. You seem to have a very clear idea of it's style, but not of it's role and purpose. I feel punished for taking it.