Jheuloh.4109

The August 23rd update giving feline auto-attacks the benefit of quickness and finally fixing the EoD pets is great news! Will other pets be updated overtime to have their auto-attacks benefit from quickness? Without any other information to go off of I assume cats are being used as a test-drive so that any weird glitches or design consequences are isolated to just them, rather than having to deal with every single non-benefitting ranger pet at once.

UHHHHHHHHHHHHHH Full disclosure, r/woosh is in effect right now. The joke has sailed over my head.

It reads like ArenaNet wants to homogenize classes so that each of them provide the same buffs, leading into some variant of "Take the player, not the class." Sound idea on its own and the list of changes is impressive when taken as a collective whole, though it seems like not much has substantially changed on a per-class basis.

The hopium I have is that future Living Story seasons can have the initial quality of Ankka & Mai Trinn maintained all the way to the end. I would assume the rushed endings are because the problems of Ice Brood Saga reached critical mass and End of Dragons had to be released prematurely. I will also add that it felt like anytime focus was put on the dragons, there was a dip in the quality of dialogue. They were written to say exactly what they had to, nothing more and nothing less. The impression I have is that ArenaNet is tired of these stupid dragons who barely even work in the game engine, let alone as writeable characters.

Disable the white flash upon viewing a vista. The light, it burnses us!

A Reef Drake with the poison breath would be ace. A raptor as a variant type of a drake would also be spectacular. I wouldn't be surprised if ArenaNet speculated on similar ideas themselves since pets and mounts are closely related concepts.

Once upon a time I modded ARK: Survival Evolved. Then I moved onto mainline Unreal Engine because I kept doing stuff way out of bounds for what ARK was designed to support. I've sometimes considered making a business name so that I can be an uneducated moron as this name and keep it classy on the business persona.

Seeing Living Story Season 1 be made playable again has me ready to give ArenaNet the benefit of the doubt. SOON, I shall suffer as ye have suffered. Not for writing or programming specifically (I'm training my art skills), but for having to negotiate team dynamics? Yes.

Disclaimer: After about level 16 I PUG'd through the story missions lol. My perspective is driven by the unpredictability of rando's. Stat-wise, yeah, unless you were going for a 55 monk or some other really artificial play the range of stat variance between characters (after factoring in gear, runes, and +Damage abilities) was something like... 2x? 3x? Whereas ArenaNet is on record as stating the gap between high and low performing players is something to the tune of 6x. If someone said 10x I'd believe them.

Validating your statement: I'm a salty old veteran hailing from Guild Wars 1 days, I got the game as a Christmas present in 2005 when I was 12 and kept it close ever since. You mention that Guild Wars 2 gives players little to no guidance on how to perform; I would accuse Guild Wars 1 of having the same problem. While the numbers are smaller in Gw1, the potential for crushingly bad builds is a lot higher. Guild Wars 2 indirectly addressed this by limiting the range of options from "Literally any 2 class combinations" to "A handful of weapon and utility skills." In both games (up until the past couple years) ArenaNet just assumed most people would figure things out through their own curiosity, rather than needing to be explicitly taught these things.

It's unfortunate as I was wanting to have the Wallow active alongside my Reef Drake. But waiting 2-3 seconds for the creature to wake up is an eternity in a pitched fight and the grave-like silence of ArenaNet is disheartening. It would be nice to have official statements letting people know a bit more about what's going on with things like that. Even if it's basically saying they're unsure of where these issues stem from.

Understanding it is the easy part, recreating is trickier than I expected - but that might be because on my first attempt I was trying to modify existing movement classes to do that, rather than just start from scratch with those assumptions in mind. So I might have made it a lot harder for myself that way. EDIT: To illustrate, I got it partially working on the forward movement, like so: But left/right? Well...

Oh I didn't even know there was anything from ArenaNet about it, let alone the existence of Guild Chats. I'll have to check it out!

If there's any knowledgeable software devs floating around The Oasis, I beseech your wisdom regarding mounts. I acknowledge this is an exceedingly arcane question. Something that has fascinated me is the turning circles that the mounts have, togethee with the automated turn-in-place system to keep the mount from being unwieldy when it needs to change direction while idle. I've been attempting to recreate it in Unreal Engine 4 by modifying the built in Character movement but I'm at a loss for what terms to research or how to explain what I'm after to people. I've tried beseeching people for help within Unreal Engine communities with little luck as I've found it a massive struggle to properly explain myself to interested parties. It feels like there's some standard software engineering concepts that are eluding me. Guild Wars 2 is hardly the only game with that kind of vehicle-ish movement system for mounts, but it does seem the most refined of the lot.

This feedback is based on open world PVE and instanced gameplay. The Good - Commanding all 3 pet abilities is a most welcome feature. This does admittedly get tedious when you're dealing with creatures that have short CD abilities that are just flat damage bonuses, though I'd consider an acceptable trade for being able to command things like the drake's blast-finisher or wyvern's wing buffet. - The F1 ability for the Unleashed Pet, Venomous Outburst, is a wonderful addition to the pet tool kit. The Smokescale doesn't have such a monopoly on mobility anymore. For me personally, Venomous Outburst and full control over the pet's abilities is worth the price of admission. - I think the consistent spell list for the Unleashed pets is a good thing. While pets were initially sold on being a variety pack, that's where a lot of the historical imbalances come from. Having a consistent spell-list, especially that teleport granted by Venomous Outburst, helps level the playing field as far as mobility is concerned. The Bad - Attack My Target being replaced by an ability means that you are dependent on having an ability off cooldown to direct the pet to a target. This isn't a breaking issue as it can be worked around by using a low value ability as a functional equivalent, but it's not particularly graceful and is against the spirit of allowing the player full control over the pet. - For how heavily focused The Untamed is on disables, the Hammer only having its disables available while the pet is Unleashed feels unwieldy. Perhaps if it was the case that disables were stronger while the pet is unleashed it would be more palatable. It's clear that Unleashed Pet = CC and Unleashed Ranger = damage. The cooldown on swapping Unleashed seems just long enough to get in the way of that intended back and forth play, rather than serving as an aid to it. - The passive +/-15% damage dealt and +/- 10% damage taken modifier for Unleashed feels so small as to be functionally invisible and conceptually comes off as very arbitrary. Were it me, I'd treat Unleashed as damage resistance for the pet to give it a chance at surviving focused fire and a damage boost to the ranger. The description for Vow of the Untamed is also awkward. - The Hammer's knockdown and Daze available feel difficult to utilize due to the lengthy wind-up times and the fact that they're only available with the Unleashed Pet. The disables available on other weapons and utility skills are more reliable. The Ugly - The Unleashed pet's abilities feel like just a small splash of damage in practice and the additional effects don't sufficiently offset that. Between the low base damage, underwhelming utility (Venomous Outburst excepted), and the -15% damage output imposed on the Ranger, in PVE I found myself gravitating towards keeping Unleashed on the Ranger at all times unless I wanted to reposition the pet or damage an enemy's break-bar with the Hammer. - Natural Fortitude and Unnatural Traversal read like they were short changed on time or creativity. Unnatural Traversal is also wholly invalidated by the Greatsword and Sword. Unnatural Traversal I believe could be redeemed by either bolstering its secondary effect or lowering the baseline cooldown to 15 seconds. - This requires more investigating, but at present it seems Exploding Spores doesn't reliably knock-down targets, even when factoring in the presence of break bars or stability. Verdict When it goes live I'll almost certainly be playing the Untamed through thick and thin, but someone less sentimental about the animal companion and more interested in asking "Is it good?" has very good reason to steer clear of Untamed. It has a good core to it with Venomous Outburst and full command of the pet abilities, though tends to get in its own way with excessive modifiers, technical limitations, and under-tuned values. I had no trouble playing mainline PVE with the Untamed, but I wouldn't touch it for WvW or sPVP as it does nothing to address the issue of pets melting under focused fire in WvW, nor the brutal cooldown multiplier for swapping a dead pet, nor their difficulty with attacking a mobile target (Venomous Outburst excepted.)

Guild Wars 2 intrinsically encourages players to get invested into the storyline because of how bulky and elaborate it is. There is full voice acting, tailor made animations and events, instanced missions, fully formed story arcs, etc. It is also true that Guild Wars 2 eschewed the traditional monthly subscription model. Living World as currently embodied serves ArenaNet as a way to extract revenue from story-invested players that arrived late, and as a thing to encourage existing players to keep logging in periodically which potentially brings them back into regular playership and encourages gem-store purchases elsewhere. I believe it made sense back when it was conceived but with FFXIV: ARR having become increasingly established it feels too much like FATEs have skinned the corpse of Guild Wars 2's events and its storylines are a lot more cohesive than anything Guild Wars 2 has to offer. It's a much smoother ride and while it's still a pretty dense game (from a general public POV), it explains itself about as well as it can. Whether sub-based or not, both are meant to be long-play games which compete for a player's time. For someone caught off-guard by chunks of the storyline being gem-walled, I imagine 4 whole living world seasons is an intimidating looking purchase. They can get one episode to test the waters, but that doesn't take away the reality of the sum total cost. How expensive that purchase really is can be debated, especially when gold-to-gems enters the equation, but that's fluff around the core fact of purchasing parts of the core storyline. While I lean towards OP's point of view about the story of Guild Wars 2 being laughably crude and disjointed and not at all conductive to natural play (even to veterans), I also have to admit that if I were ArenaNet, I wouldn't really have many options to change it without throwing the entire development team into this. If tomorrow Living World is suddenly just bundled into the expansion purchases and did not inflate the price tag of the relevant expansion packs, what fills in the void? This void-filler would need to have something that pretty much guarantees most/all of the player-base would rather literally buy into it. Mounts and to a lesser extent Gliders seem like they're doing a great job of that, if all the highly visible skins are anything to go by. My first impulse would be to have story-fillers like character backstories or worldbuilding events (such as the sinking of Old Lion's Arch) be purchasable missions, though I acknowledge that from ArenaNet/NCSoft's POV that might read as a high risk, low reward endeavor.

Yeah, in all seriousness I get it. I've noted elsewhere that every class seem to just be a grab-bag of traits and abilities that sound cool and fill up the slots but don't really paint a bigger picture. We figured that out by sorting order from the chaos of traits, abilities, and gear interaction. The results are pretty weird, as in Chrono Tank or Banner Slave. Plus there's all sorts of funky stuff like Beastmastery being the place to go for Greatsword & Axe mastery as a ranger. That stuff rubs like it should belong in Skirmishing but Skirmishing is full. It doesn't seem like ArenaNet has a ton of manpower available to sit down and go through every single class with a fine-tooth comb to give them more direction and making their minutiae easier to read, if there is any interest in such things. So every class just gets the lowest effort nerf/buff possible and anything deeper can get really outlandish from a player's perspective because nobody is on the same page about a class's kit.

I'm impressed this thread's still going!

Ranger critters seem like they would do well to be touched up ability wise. It seems like the creatures that have survived in competitive PVE and PVP content have a gap closer (Smokescale's smoke assault, or the pouncing cats, or the iboga's pull), potent CC (like blinds or chill, which ravens & owls hit on, or knockdown which Smokescale has), or breakbar damage (as in rock gazelle, or electric wyvern, or canines, or once again smokescale; this one is closely tied to potent CC). All of these must be easily executed; Entangling Web should have brought spiders into play long ago, but their projectile speed is laughably bad. Smokescales have that nifty smoke field on top of all that. No wonder they survived an avalanche of nerfs to damage they took some years ago. Most pets are functionally trash mobs scaled to player stats. But they still have trash-mob ability behavior, and are still balanced around launch-day principles. It would be nice for drake breath attacks to be blast finishers, and for them to be able to turn in place while channeling their spell ala bristlebacks. Knockback on the tail-swipe would be nice, too, since their big brother electric/fire wyvern has that on wing buffet. Or for hyenas to not have a 50% base damage penalty to offset the packmate they can summon; that balancing feature seems out of touch with the whole point of summoning the packmate! Or for spider's entangling web hit to either hit 3 targets or behave like a miniature of Muddy Terrain. Or for canines and pouncing cats to have a leap finisher. Creatures granting swiftness to allies seem to be out of touch; if it was super speed or quickness that'd be a different story, super speed doesn't seem to have been devalued as much as swiftness has and quickness is always welcome. Jungle Stalkers would be fine if it weren't for the 3 second cast time. Pigs have always been out of touch with reality. Devourer's retreat is also incredibly out of touch with how the AI uses it. Most of the pet abilities (Forage & Devourer's Retreat excepted) seem conceptually fine, just that they need a shot of steroids; better casting properties, a more liberal application of combo finishers, numerical buffs here and there.

I think people who like him aren't really bothered by the big story beats and are more focused on the moment to moment interactions. Treesus gives credit where it's due. If he were a real person he would actually be good company, much more agreeable than the drama-mongers of Destiny's Edge. Flipside is that he may come off too dry in the very theatrics driven story of Gw2. I'd have to play it again to really refresh myself on this but I don't recall him even having much in the way of sly banter or dry humour that would've been perfect for how Trahearne carried himself. Or maybe cranking up silly awkwardness. "Wait what?" - Some NPC after hearing something that sounds like an innuendo. "No wait uhh I didn't mean it like that!" - Treesus, upon realizing how he just came off

On the post above me: I would say every class should have some kind of Healing, CC, DPS, and Tanking spec type just like how Guardian does basically everything provided you trait for it. "Uhh, warrior healer?" - Some poster I just made up Yeah, bannerslave to the max! "Tank ranger?" - Another made up poster This is probably the 1 thing ranger pets are consistently good at. Beastmastery even has that cool taunt GM trait. On the OP: Every profession certainly has their balance-ism's, though I also keep hearing and to a lesser extent witnessing that 2 players can have a literal orders of magnitude difference in their effective power level because of the way equipment, traits, runes, abilities, etc interact, along with how tuned in the players are to the fine-print of ability usage. It seems almost futile to gauge profession differences when the aforementioned is at play. I wouldn't call it a waste of time but I can only imagine that stuff making ArenaNet's life harder rather than easier. Not fun either when abilities are the only thing that can really be seen in gameplay.

Insanity mode 3rd elite spec request: Both pets active at once. - 30% to player stats. EDIT: This was a joke post at first but now I actually want this.

A /petstay command for ranger pets and necromancer minions, to make for better screenshots. When activated, the pet stays in place, using neither movement nor rotation. For necromancer minions or other characters which may have multiple persistent allies present, there could be additional commands of /petstay1, /petstay2, to indicate which minions should stay in place if only some are desired to be rooted at a location. /petstay is effectively /petstay0 affecting the highest equipped minion skill the player has.

My take on this is that Gw2 has a lot of fine print on its traits and abilities. Nowhere near as much as there could be (Gw1 veterans laugh at Gw2's relative simplicity), but for someone who doesn't immediately "get" the way things are supposed to go together I can appreciate it being prohibitively complex. Some fresh faced player is having to pour through the fine details of 45 traits per class, and then 5 weapon skills & the other 5 skills. A grand total of 55 things to understand with an extremely high probability of "Wait, my build actually sucks?" after spending potentially hours on it. Were I able to adjust these things I would think to heavily simplify traits. Cut the "Pick 3 of 9" aspect entirely to make it so that all a player needs to do is just have the trait line. Also label their role on the end like "Tactics [support]", "Beast Mastery [Tanking]", "Illusions [Debuffs]" and adjust functionality to be more strongly focused on the listed role. For abilities and the actual combat, Gw2 makes itself out to be like a typical MMO where combat works best where you stay planted in 1 spot until the game tells you to move. In practice I would describe Gw2 fights as having more in common with shooters of all things. It behooves you to stay mobile at all times. Except for if you have a channeled ability, and the game isn't consistent about whether you can move while channeling abilities or not. Plus, it's easy to cancel a channeled ability on accident through fat-fingering or just not realizing that it even can be cancelled. People who like the high mobility play-style Gw2 promotes will gravitate to it naturally. People who aren't drawn to high mobility have no real alternatives.

LMAO Gw2 starts with "Lets get the band back together boys!" Then the power level skyrockets at Claw Island and the story starts turning into the development of Cool Magical Things Except with Treesus it was some weird half way world between that and "Grow a spine and some powers, son!" Super exhausted story arc that didn't break the mould even a little bit. Which for how front and center that was, made me want to eat my non existent hat. I'm trying to be even handed with my posts for the sake of discussion but full disclosure - at the end of HoT I was one of the psychos sharpening the veggie knife. :P