Kalaina.8245

If you're running Smothering Auras with a ton of applications of fire aura, you probably don't need to run Diamond Skin on top of it. In PvE you're really just not going to be facing that much condi hate. Written In Stone with Signet of Restoration alone is probably going to give you higher overall healing than Glyph of Elemental Harmony unless you really need the burst heal. You'll have zero problem maintaining might, regardless. Elementalist sustain builds are really driven by healing power, and trying to do a simple sustain-oriented build without any investment in healing power. particularly one driven by Elemental Bastion, which scales very well with healing power, is probably not a great idea. Fire/Earth is typically a condi-oriented setup. You can run a very similar build with condi stats, .e.g. http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PGgAs2lZwWYMsL2JOSPntfA-zRRYRJNt3gLjEKi0TEHmFHl2A-e. This does compromise fire aura uptime, but the damage is probably fairly similar, and this comes a lot closer to turning the squishy elementalist into a tank, as you say. I've been running a similar level of bulk on open world ele for years and I've always felt pretty sturdy. Apothecary/Settler mixed with Plaguedoctor, full Plaguedoctor, or Plaguedoctor mixed with Minstrel are probably all workable for a burn condi setup. Maybe even some amount of Dire/Trailblazer, though those lack the healing power. Full Plaguedoctor and Plaguedoctor/Minstrel give the boon duration for high protection uptime. It's not quite 100%, though. While Plaguedoctor does offer probably the best mix of damage and defensive stats, a pure vitality setup does reduce the percentage value of heals. On the other hand, the 10% health from Balth runes scales well with vitality. Something like Apothecary or Dire is probably easier to get in exotic, though. This is more of a take on a survivable build that stays in fire 100% of the time, though. If you're after 100% uptime of fire aura specifically, then I think a power-based setup like this is probably better. Particularly, since you do need to run Conjurer and a conjure weapon to bridge the gap, and thus lose out on Burning Precision which is a bedrock of burn builds. I do still think some healing power would be warranted, though, probably with some amount of Zealot's gear.

Removing elementalist's ability to stack fury in fire fields essentially removes meaningful fury support from ele entirely, and the changes to Pyromancer's Puissance really don't make up for it at all. Ele can already share a lot of might and doesn't really need to be able to share more, especially not at the expense of its own. Nerfing Persisting Flames is fair enough, but as far as useful support-oriented alternatives go, we really need something better than this.

Give ANet a chance to address the technical issue that caused the rollback and restore whatever data they can. This was not an intentional action on their part. Any lost gems and gem purchases will be returned to you. When the situation is resolved (whether well or not), you can then submit a support ticket requesting any refund you feel necessary.

Regarding the long-term economic and gameplay impact of this change, I think people are vastly overestimating the number of players that have or would ever craft duplicate legendaries. The reality is that this change will increase the incentive to make legendary gear for people who don't have it, and given how much time and effort it takes, there's no reason to believe that they'll have a full complement of every possible piece of legendary armor and weapon after just a few months. Very, very few will make it to that point before they stop playing GW2. I wouldn't be surprised if the overall demand for legendaries goes up and stays up for the long term, but more realistically we may not see any sort of notable market change because there's already a good demand for legendaries among people that want them. As far as incentives for future crafting go, the only people this really affects negatively are the people for whom making duplicate legendaries is the main reason they play GW2. For the typical endgame player, there are going to be more legendaries to make that they don't have yet.

I think this is a step in the right direction. GW2 balance has always been a world of local maxima, where balance changes have just been poking the current state of things to try and move it toward some goal, but never really taking a step back to look at the game as a whole. I think GW2 really benefits from a top-down approach like this, but I have two primary concerns. The first is that these nerfs seem to be done across the board based on the types of skills and traits that exist, but the reality is that these skills and traits fulfill different roles and have different levels of importance in WvW. So you're essentially nerfing things that are already underperforming; this would be fine if we had some reason to expect that these things will later be buffed, but it feels to me like this is the first step before moving back to the status quo of tipping balance toward a local maximum. I think you should rate every single skill in the game based on its damage, cooldowns, utility, and reliability. A skill that's hard to hit with (aka easy to dodge) can have a higher power level than one that's much more difficult to hit with. Similarly with a skill on a long cooldown. A skill with a lower cooldown, or one that's hard to avoid, should have a lower overall dps because you'll be more likely to be dealing damage with it. I don't see anything indicating that this kind of top-down analysis was done. When the ultimate metrics are damage and healing, everything should be rated according to how much dps and hps it can deliver, modified by how likely it's going to be able to actually deliver on that damage and healing. The second concern is this: "Condition damage reductions are a bit less math-y, but ..." I don't think there's a place for balance in GW2 that isn't mathy. There aren't a great variety of stat sets to be concerned about in WvW. You know what Viper's can do, and similarly for Trailblazer, Grieving, Celestial, Minstrel, Berserker, Marauder, etc. It should be more than possible to calculate the amount of condition damage that a skill will do, and that should be calibrated just like power coefficients are. And just like power skills, they should be rated on damage, cooldowns, utility, and reliability for a variety of possible stat combinations. Moreover, entire weapons should also be evaluated according to the combination of all their skills, and while it's not possible to make every weapon excel with every stat combination, you can at least make sure nothing overperforms (or underperforms) with stats that work best for it. You have a fresh perspective on what GW2 balance should be, and you need to take the time to really understand the game. The chaos theory is much less pronounced than you might think; the chaos stems from changes made just like this - without a full analysis of all the facets of what a skill or trait can do - and the resulting fallout. A controlled, math-driven take that actually includes numerical stand-ins for softer factors like reliability is necessary if we're ever going to get to a level of game balance that's healthy, rather than one that players grow used to and learn to tolerate.

My only must have is to have things automatically swap when I enter/exit WvW. I don't want to need to remember to swap my build every time. In the existing system, just have it save the last used tab. A nice-to-have would be being able to bind swap build template N and swap gear template N to the same hotkey. I will almost always be using them together, and overloading the hotkey like that seems like a straightforward way to allow this to happen. A disappointment with the current system which I don't expect to change is that I'd rather that my build templates didn't update automatically when I change traits and skills. I'd like to have to go into the templates UI and click a specific button to update them. A system where I can set my main build up on a hotkey (let's say Num1), then swap something out for a given situation, or just to try it out, and then hit Num1 later to go back to normal without having to remember, screenshot, or jot down my traits and skills before swapping was one of the major appeals of the idea of build templates for me. We can sort of do this with the account-wide build storage, but I don't see why character-specific build templates can't do it, too.

For the record, using only gw2efficiency data is a conservative estimate. The reality is that there are a lot more than 3,000 people interested in this achievement (and yes, there are more than 3,000 even on gw2efficiency), and that means higher demand than estimated. There are a lot more than 60,000 of these boxes that have been opened, and yet we've only seen a couple dozen of these drop, at most, in the weeks since release, which makes the drop rate lower than you might otherwise estimate. By constraining estimates to gw2efficiency users only, we can arrive at numbers that look more favorable than they really are, meaning an expected 1000 hours of gameplay per box is more favorable than the reality if you're grinding this out via new characters and map completion at a half hour per box. You could also just buy keys and open the vault every day, which means you'll get your (first) Visage after an average of 5 years using gw2efficiency-based estimates, or realistically speaking probably more like 10-20 years. At these drop rates and with the expected amount of demand, I think it's reasonable to believe that the price on these boxes will never drop below at least a few thousand gold per box. And yes, you do need three for the achievement.

Taking only into account the players who have a gw2efficiency account and who seem to care about Story Journal achievements, a very conservative estimate gives us around 3,000 such players. Thus far we've seen drops for maybe 10 of the Visage of the Khan-Ur items, or around 5/week. Due to this change, we can hope that we'll be seeing twice as many, which brings that up to 10/week. In order for all of these players to get their 3 helms, that's 9,000 such helms, which gives us 900 weeks, or 17.3 years. That's assuming that people continue to open these boxes at the same rate that they're opening them now. In an ideal scenario, we can hope that the price of these on the auction house normalizes down to some sort of realistic price like 5,000 gold. Looking at this another way, Secrets of the Khan-Ur has 22,571 unlocks on gw2efficiency. Additional Secrets of the Khan-Ur has 11,123 listed unlocks on gw2efficiency (for opening the vault a second time). Combined with reward chests from map completion, we can conservatively estimate that maybe 60,000 of these boxes have been opened thus far. That puts the helm droprate in the ballpark of 1 in every 5,000-10,000 boxes (0.01-0.02%). Let's be conservative yet again and assume that the drop rate is now 1 in every 2,000 boxes after today's buff. If you can make a new character, train them to level 10 and then map complete Grothmar Valley in 30 minutes, the expected average on these Visage of the Khan-Ur drops is 1,000 hours of playtime per box, if you spend your entire playtime directly and specifically farming for them and doing nothing else. And given that I've made six conservative estimates in order to get there, the reality is almost certainly bleaker than that. Nothing about this seems reasonable to me.

GW2 already has a number of achievements locked behind RNG, and there's nothing wrong really with that. For the majority of those achievements, the drop rate is high enough or the AH price settles to something reasonable enough there aren't any real issues. In practice, the RNG nature of these achievements isn't important. With Merchandise Collector, we're looking at an item so rare that, even with doubled drop rates, we can reasonably expect that the price on these will continue to exceed 5000g in the long term. And given that you need three of them, you're looking at 15,000 gold or more. No other achievement in the game comes even close to costing that much in gold. It's important to avoid getting stuck on whether or not RNG and prestige skins are conceptually wrong, and to instead assess whether or not that sort of thing makes sense for this particular situation. Firstly, are the Khan-Ur helms worthy of being a prestige skin? I would argue this is a clear no; they are neither flashy, amusing, awe-inspiring, nor anything like that. Further, they present a solid, immersive skin for the subset of players who want something like that, and I believe the game mechanics should make it easy for players to achieve that sort of style, as players engaging with the game's setting and lore is something that should be encouraged. Secondly, does it make sense to put a prestige drop like this into an achievement? I'm no stranger to the idea of achievements that cost 1000g or more, but no other achievement comes even close to costing as much as this one does. This presents a marked departure from prior achievement design, and we need to evaluate whether or not it's healthy from the perspective of those who play GW2 primarily based on achievements. I would argue that no, especially given that farming gold is one of the least interesting and engaging activities that an achievement can require of a player. This doesn't meaningfully enhance anyone's experience of playing GW2. Thirdly, even given that such a prestige achievement exists, does it make sense to put it in Story Journal? I believe this is an extremely obvious no. For a number of people, hunting the achievements in the Story Journal section, with the goal of ticking all of them off, is GW2's core gameplay experience. By including an achievement that the vast, vast majority of the players will not be able to acquire in that section, you make the experience of playing GW2 that much less fun for them. How could any advantage that having such an achievement provides to the game possibly outshine that disadvantage? Overall, I think this whole situation is a terrible inclusion in the game; not because it's RNG-based, not because it introduces a rare skin, but because it just doesn't make sense in context of the game as a whole, and because the practical results of its inclusion detract from the game's enjoyment far more than they add to it.

Will there be a way to single click/keypress swap both our traits and our equipment? Or will we need to swap build template and then equipment template afterward? I could see this being weird for people who don't have a 1:1 association having to remember which equipment goes with which build.

A couple of implementation questions: Some guilds have members from both NA and EU. If they set themselves as a WvW guild and people from both regions go to pick them as their WvW guild, what happens? My main WvW guild is a PvX guild with 400 members, around 40 of whom actually play WvW. For alliances, would this guild count as having 400 members when its WvW presence is notably smaller? And a couple of broader questions: In NA it was normal for servers to tank in certain weeks in order to get into more favorable matches. This also had the side effect of making worlds open up for transfers when their lack of playtime is artificial. More favorable matchups may help prevent this, but may not eliminate the problem. Will there be any systems in place to handle this sort of thing? A significant portion of the WvW community doesn't find a defensive ppt-oriented playstyle enjoyable, and accordingly prefer being in lower tiers where they're more likely to be matched up against others who similarly don't care about points or winning. Likewise, a number of people prefer being in lower population matchups where they can feel more impactful and be involved in smaller scale fights. Will this algorithm be working off a base assumption that all players want to be in high-population matchups that care about winning through score?