Leo G.4501

If you've managed to do and complete the content without conjures being useful, I'd argue you can survive with conjures being slightly less than useful but keeping their interesting share mechanic.

You keep saying that but it's like you're attempting to remove agency from a subjective observation. It'd be different if this were a legal definition used in court or something related to science, but this is a consumer observation description. Why you trying to take away consumer agency? If someone wants to label something pay to win because they believe it, is there harm in that?

A high enough fall IS a kill. And you aren't denying yourself a tactical advantage, you're just not using it properly. If you need a knockdown then use a knockdown instead of asking for the rules to be changed.

I also suggesting having different criteria for the "fresh element" effect so it wouldn't be as simple as getting a crit. One could really tailor it in a way to be more balanced so it wouldn't be as broken as swapping elements so rapidly to proc these effects that easily but still fast enough to be meaningful.

At the expense of sounding whimsical, I disagree with this suggestion as it is a cool trick that still astounds new players. They need to make more skills cool, fun and flavorful, not less. Even if it's not meta, that shouldn't really matter since the game shouldn't be bending the knee to the meta anyway. I think it's fun and I often pick up conjured weapons when I'm on other professions. If I were suggesting changes to conjures, it'd be the trait (a fire aura seems rather bland for picking this up). I'd propose adding a drop/expiration effect; could be an icy burst around you if you drop/use up the time on Frost bow or maybe a "minor cantrip" when you drop a lightning hammer (to maybe tie into cantrip traits). That and I'd shift the bonus granted from holding a conjure weapon to AFTER you're done with the weapon but cut down the duration of that buff to 15sec instead of 30 (potential) sec. [EDIT: I'd probably also boost the effects like adding +% healing received to earth shield, +% burning damage to flame axe, +% outgoing healing to frost bow, +% stun duration to lightning hammer and +% max HP to Fiery Greatsword. Basically, they'd be nice short term effect you can grant yourself or one ally.] Overall, it's to emphasize using the skills you *need* from the conjure and putting it down rather than attempting to hold onto it for the whole of the duration. It'd be to add affects to summoning it and dropping it to further coincide with the fluidity of the Elementalist playstyle. A lot of past suggestions for conjures focus on ease of use (acting like a weapon swap). I think making conjures something you want to summon with an AoE effect + using 1 or 2 skills with it and dropping it for an additional affect + a stat bonus after seem easy, fluid, vibes with how it's currently used and maintains the fun quirkiness the skill type was created with. It'd really embody an attunement of its own since that's how we often use attunements now.

I think you are sort of talking past each other. Micah is right, it would widen the skill ceiling and skill floor by making skills more complicated than "push the button and get the effect" gameplay. It's a more complicated scheme by having the player select the distance they can move with a movement skill because often times, you want movement skills to occur immediately or as quickly as possible and that would be hampered if you had to not only direct the skill but select its distance. Even if it was all at once, it's still more difficult and prone to more errors because there are more points of failure. Then it wouldn't just be getting the direction and distance messed up, but misclicks, lag, premature ani-cancels, etc would make it more prone to screwing something up. But so long as it's one of the options available in the menu to turn on and off, I wouldn't care if it exists or not. On the other hand, saying the current forced movement is janky or that a more complicated aiming mechanic would be smoother seems like an oversimplification. The current "forced movement" isn't janky, it's janky when you either screw up or something doesn't go right. In at least 80% of the times I use movement skills, it does exactly what I need it to do baring certain movement skills that are bugged. The other 20% could be lag, human error, AI or janky pathing. So having a few times a skill does something weird earns it the label of janky? Well if a new mechanic like the OP suggested were added as an option, it probably would be just as janky and prone to error but just in a different way but apparently a hypothetical mechanic is labeled "smoother to use" despite not knowing any of the code behind it? Seems like a reach to me. But more options can't be bad...until someone complains about some other minute aspect of the game to make a mountain out of a mole hill.

As I was reading the rest of the thread, I was just about to suggest action camera (a thing I often have to remind myself exists). If they add more targeting options aimed to resolve your issue, I'm sure it wouldn't affect anyone negatively, but at the same time, you're not going to get a dev's man-hours threatening to get them fired lol.

On a serious note, are there no other specs for Scrapper? I don't play Engineer.

In that instance, I'd implore you to take my latter advice to play a different profession that can apply quickness easier....at the very least, not at the expense of your dog. And we complain about Anet all the time. I'm certain they realize how much heat they get for their changes. I've pretty much given up on Bladesworn completely.

If the boss just teleported off the arena, then do you really need quickness at that particular moment? I know I'm not a huge strike/raid player, but is it going to kill you not to have quickness for 3.5sec? Is it that hard to just...not have quickness until it's time to unload after everyone is gathered on target once the foe telegraphs the boon-ball phase? Or if it's such a big deal, why not play a profession that has a different/easier means of applying quickness? [EDIT] Just wanted to add, having a boss move around and an arena that can insta-kill you if you fall off are called environmental hazards. They're there on purpose. You have to *learn* these hazards and *adapt* accordingly so that you don't make mistakes like using the wrong skills that root you in a damage puddle or get sucked into a zone that stops you from acting, or in your case, use your skills incorrectly and launch yourself into an abyss. I mean, they already do have some instances that baby you and teleport your corpse to an accessible spot if you fall. Sometimes you just have to eat your losses and git gud.

That's not true. Sometimes they put in innocuous/irrelevant changes that don't do anything like adding a '+' to numbers that buff (so swiftness goes from looking like 33% speed to +33% speed).

Hah, didn't even know about that. At the end of the day, they probably could shave back a lot of power across professions and lock more of it behind comboing but I'm sure that wouldn't be a welcomed path.

Personally, my main issue with trying to build for combos is they (the devs) usually separate combos and combo fields to a degree. Some professions have more access to fields + combos than others while others have more fields but no combos and again others have more access to combos but lack fields. I don't have an issue with this directly, just that it hampers the effectiveness of combos in general. To you and others: let's lay a hypothetical and you could add [x combo bonus] to a rune set as an add-on 4th and 6th bonus. What would that bonus have to look like to be worthwhile? Take into consideration that most of the unique aspect of runes were cordoned off to relics and combos would be purely 'extra', what would a hypothetical prospect for combo expansion via runes look like? Just as a rando idea: Runes of Fire (adds 30% Might duration and 20% Burn duration) could 100% projectile combo finisher chance and 350 range to projectile combos if you have 25 might + additional 150 radius AoE short duration burn via fire projectile finisher around target. On the other hand, Rune of the Forgeman (toughness based + 50% burning duration) adds a 33% chance for a short fire aura (1 sec) on every combo'ed leap + having a fire aura reduces burn damage by 20% and combo leaping through a fire field cleanses/turns any burning you're suffering to 10% HP.

Would be nice if they did more to specialize playstyles to take into account combos and finishers. Traits like Powerful Synergy was niche but unique. It's gone now. Now we have other avenues to augment a build to change functions. Runes seem like free real estate to bolster a specific combo or combo field. Or a new relic that was basically Powerful Synergy. Or more traits that change the function of your fields and how combos interact with them.

I mean, you could have a redesign of staff with more melee and leaps along with its support while cutting its range and I bet it'd make the weapon better in PvP but...if no one likes staff in PvP, why bother trying to make it more viable by morphing it into a PvP weapon? And you just peeve off players that had something they liked in PvE. Same deal with Arcane Wave: if it was garbage before, is it better to take something away from one mode to give to another? Why stop at Arcane Wave? Why not make the Glyphs better PvP tools too? Who needs the elementals glyphs, am I right? This isn't me defending Arcane Wave tho, just pointing out they've been doing this game of musical chairs for a long time and when you're not winning over as many new players as you did, the shuffling can lose more players than it helps.

As an owner of Binding of Ipos, Warrior needs dual Focus melee. Just gotta make the books float behind you or above or maybe forming 'wings' out of the pages or something.

Knocking foes off of platforms (potentially to their doom) is just as good, if not better than getting in their face. I also feel it puts higher value on skills that do allow a Warrior to get into people's faces such as leaps, Bull's Charge, Magebane tether, that Staff pull, immobilizes, if they ever buff bolas to be a pull, etc. How many terrain abusing knockback does War have vs get-in-face skills?

If they ever tried to revisit core builds to differentiate them enough to be their own 'faux-elite spec', I could see adding some unique play in this direction if only to add a new spec that isn't directly boosting the elite specs too. You could also have different triggers that aren't the same as Fresh Air like, for Fire, upon killing a target while Fire attunement is on cooldown, sacrificially immolate that target and nearby foes (cast burn around the target) to instantly recharge Fire attunement...this means you only get the bonus effect if you defeat someone within the window of attuning to fire before it's off cooldown. Or for Water, while below the threshold (below 25% HP or after cleansing 5 conditions on yourself or allies), activates a unique effect that will expend itself to reset Water Attunement...meaning it's a more versatile attunement refund that will either allow you to swap into Water immediately OR swap into Water for free. And for Earth, it could be an automatic trigger that if CC'd, instantly swaps you into Earth but doesn't put the attunement on cooldown (with an ICD of course).

And to get the passive effect to stick, they likely will lessen the other effects of the trait and/or remove other effects of the trait and/or weaken the signets and/or just make more of the passive and active effects copies of other signets. The reason Elementalist had the Written in Stone trait from the beginning is because they had notoriously bad signet effects so likely the idea behind that trait was to shore up shortcomings of the skills that way. Even after they've been improved over the years, they still have the SHORTEST cooldowns on signets, which in itself undermines the strength of the trait to persist the passive effects. [EDIT: What I'm saying is, the progenitor of the effect of persistent passive signet effects now probably has the weakest version of this trait due to power creep.] You don't need to explain what signets do to me (I assume you're doing that for the audience or something). I know what I said. Spreading around unique traits more and more will make the game more generic. It stifles coming up with better ideas that could be the next "retain passives of signets" mechanic that could have been but instead we took the simple boring route and made more skills function the same. Like I said, it's a nitpick. Take it or leave it. Everything you said just strengthened my conviction in my opinion lol. I'm sure Guardian and Mechanist desperately needed signet reworks 🙃

Nitpick: I hate that everyone's bright idea for signet traits is to just copy Elementalist's special trait without any actual consideration for making them a different style on every profession. I suppose it's not your fault since the devs have started mindlessly doing the same thing (according to the wiki, they started shuffling around the 'always on' effect started around 2021 with Mechanist and then again in 2022 with Guardian) genericizing traits and skills as the game gets older. Personally, if you can't hack using unique trait features as they exist now or suggest improvements to how it provides that unique feature, perhaps using signets just isn't your thing and you should use a different skill type. Or maybe improve the active or passive portion of the skill to make it a more worthwhile tradeoff for not having the passive/timing the active effect vs just giving a trait that encourages spamming them on cooldown.

It should also remove a dodge (only 1 dodge) to balance it better with similar dodge mechanics LIKE IT'S SUPPOSED TO DO. Even with only 1 dodge, Vindi was pogo-ing all over the place, but now it's just creeping the dodge roll meta with the only inconvenience being it slows down your rotation cause you can't do stuff while in the air. Imagine the devs trying to introduce another e-spec with a unique dodge lol

Having no dog in this expansion race, I do share this sentiment though. It's kind of discouraging to see. I understand they wanted strengthen the skeletal outline for structured content but it looks lacking and forced at the same time...like they're specifically designing these weapons not to be cool or to have a theme or power fantasy, but rather trying to fill a meta. They're just vehicles to give this profession a condi off-hand or that profession a support main-hand. I dunno...maybe the devs had higher expectations on what this expansion was going to do but had to cut corners because they were reshuffling other systems. But if they were mainly just reshuffling stuff (masteries, reward tracks, runes/relics, weapon master), shouldn't they have been able to polish more?

Would be hilarious if the next e-spec is the Adrenaline Junkie. The Adrenaline Junkie no longer has bursts or adrenaline and uses every mainhand weapon with both hands. In exchange, all their non-auto skills are bursts. GS #2 - tier 1 Arc Slice GS #3 - tier 3 Arc Slice GS #4 - Current Arc Divider GS #5 - The best version (3-spin Arc Divider) Copy/paste for all mainhand weapons.

Because more than 3 is too many.

Wouldn't this be better as some sort of achievement? Why would you have to buy this? Maybe with gold, but why gems? Coming from another game with multiple player titles, I don't see it as a big issue.