Jump to content
  • Sign Up

Sutepun.9450

Members
  • Posts

    21
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Sutepun.9450's Achievements

  1. Not sure about the Quick Herald changes, it seems like it will kill build diversity and create a very boring playstyle. In one hand, maintaining quickness is basically the normal DPS Power Herald rotation and there is a extremely reliable LI build for quickness now. But on the other hand, this will essentially kill off using Jalis as a "reliable" stability source since you need to keep up your upkeep skills for quickness uptime. With the current Quick Herald build, you can build up more than 9s of quickness in Glint and then use Inspiring Reinforcement twice within your Jalis loop and then return to Glint and reapply your quickness. Although clunky when compared to Firebrands, this loops quite well and supplies 2 instances in which you can apply pulsing 5 stacks of stability, when you immediately enter Jalis and just before you legend swap back to Glint (this means that you still "pulse" stability during Glint). However, similar to the Power Herald DPS rotation, it is incredibly tight with energy when not in Glint - to the point in which it is often recommended to not use Sword 4 and 5 during your non-Glint loop while you have your upkeep and F2 facet active. If you can't even use 20 energy, how can you even fit in 30 energy for stability. One argument is that you use the Facet of Nature active in Jalis for stability and just rely on hammers then for quickness, but even if you use the active of Facet of Nature in Jalis for stability, thats only 2 stacks compared to the at least 5 you get from Inspiring Reinforcement. This means that it will never probably be expected for a DPS Quick Herald to share stability, even with the Shiro/Jalis build unless they are running extreme boon duration in order to gain a quickness allowance to not be using upkeep skills in Jalis. Squads and parties will simply prioritize quickness uptime instead of stability even though the old build could have done both. This is bad for build diversity as the previous iteration of Power Quick Herald could be ran with Shiro or Jalis as the off Legend depending on the situation. This will potentially not affect Condi Quick Herald and Heal Quick Herald as much as Condi Quick Herald is not expected to supply stability and Heal Quick Heralds are probably running 100% boon duration for a generous quickness allowance if they are full or mixed Harrier armor (which most of the time they should be). A solution to the above problem would be to instead tie quickness uptime to the Facet of Nature uptime instead of a threshold of energy depletion. Although a lazy solution to this problem, this is in line with the current Power DPS Herald playstyle anyway, as you are expected to keep F2 up all the time. Facet of Nature uptime also has the benefit of allowing Heralds to plan their energy more flexibly. A Herald can easily manage their energy so they can plan to use impactful utilities and skills, such as Inspiring Reinforcement and Offhand Sword skills by hovering their energy between 20 and 30 energy. This will somewhat nerf Condi Quick Herald during their Mallyx loop, but you can just turn off the upkeep skill and be at +3 energy gain to keep up the facet for quickness uptime. Another issue is boon diversity that isn't quickness. Since you take Elevated Compassion now, the unique boons you apply is limited to specific combinations (e.g. F2 facet, might facet, fury facet or protection facet and F2 facet) that equal -6 upkeep to maximize boon uptime, while the old DPS Quick Herald can share almost all of the boons, albeit with not a permanent uptime for some of those boons. By not taking Draconic Echo also affects non-quickness boon uptime as the passive facet effects are not being extended, reducing overall boon uptimes. This issue also means that expected boons from different Quick Heralds will be different. Some may use the fury facet, some may avoid the fury facet in favor of only using the protection facet and F2 to make the build LI and still share quickness. Another concern depends if Elevated Compassion only shares quickness as a boon from upkeep. I know its unlikely that only quickness is being shared as the wording is left ambiguous to imply that this trait will work differently in PvE/WvW/PvP, but the same wording was used for Draconic Echo, which heavily implies the latter. The amount of DPS Quick Heralds that will join in future squads in which they only do Shiro/Jalis, no Facet of Nature, no Spirit Boon, and only press 1 on sword and ONLY share quickness so you literally have to pair them with HAM's, HAT's, and Druid's in order to cap the other boons seems to invalidate some of the new "heal" alacrity builds that are being introduced in the balance patch, as the majority of them cannot cap might by themselves.
  2. One of the things that I don't like about the chrono well changes is that ranged quick/alac isn't possible anymore. This is a small issue, but when I tank in raids, I like to put my wells on the party, especially in fights like QtP where it is not realistic for me to be in melee range of the party. The quickness and alacrity traits shouldn't be tied to shield 5, because this will kill build diversity for boon supports. What I would have done is to make the boon share mechanic based on a different action. For example in StM there could be a mechanic that makes you share some AoE quickness when a phantasm is turns into a clone in addition to shattering. An example for Stretched Time would be that it functions as an AoE Persistance of Memory and that phantasms spawn with alacrity. Something to make it different in terms of how boons are shared rather than shatter for boons.
  3. This is a small issue, but when I run Virtuoso in this particular fractal I have noticed that when the Jellyfish Beast boss uses the "Spin" attack (the pull and stun attack), the F1-F3 Bladesongs are more likely to be cancelled as the boss juggles you within the hitbox to make the targeting think that the enemy is suddenly behind you and thus gets cancelled instead of going through with the cast. I understand that this is a core tradeback of the Virtuoso bladesong mechanic, but the boss makes this annoying because you can't really do anything to prevent the cancelling of the bladesong if you decide to use them. If you use Trident 3 to get out of the pull, you just get pulled back in anyway before you can react and if you max range the boss, you just get sucked in anyway. And when you mitigate the stun through the use of stability, you get "interrupted" anyway and you're stuck there overcapping blades. Is it possible to make the boss draw center slightly offset from the center of the boss hitbox so that even when you get pulled it is less likely for a bladesong to get cancelled?
  4. This has probably been said before, but maybe we could add a toggle in the options menu that makes the third autoattack chain attack's action bar is a different color so it's easy to see when you have reached the third autoattack chain. Sometimes its hard to visually count autoattack chains in a real fight unless you have developed a lot of muscle memory. So making a visual indicator of the third autoattack chain would help some people learn the auto attack chains easier.
  5. A possible rework for the virtues would be a focus system, where a willbender still has access to passive virtue effects, but only access one set of passives at a time. In terms of UI, make it similar to the mesmer clone tracker, where there are empty circles over the virtues. When you activate a virtue, a flame will light up above the last used virtue. In addition to the current virtues existing functionality, you can make it have a weaker version of guardian passives that is usable until you use another virtue. The weaker versions could be: Lesser Justice: Number of attacks to trigger: 8 Lesser Resolve: Regen is half the effect of normal. Battle Presence can only share Resolve when "focused" in Resolve Lesser Courage: Cooldown is 60s This would solve the problem of certain trait synergies being nerfed on Willbender in comparison to other specs (e.g. Fiery Wrath, Radiant Power). Even if you don't want to rework how virtues currently work, consider putting the UI tracker for what virtue effect is used currently, as it will be useful for players to track their virtues in situations where they cannot reliably look at the fields like in open world PvE zergs and maybe WvW zergs if someone decides to use it there.
  6. For Harbinger UI, maybe a visual indicator for blight on the HP bar? You can just do something simple like green wisps pulsing bottom up from the orb with intensity depending on how many stacks you have. In terms of blight, it has little to no interaction with the elixir skills. You can probably make the effects of elixirs also dynamically scale with how much blight you have on you. For condition rebalancing, probably decrease torment and redirect the application to other ones, like poison.
  7. Ranged cleave is usually not necessary for the majority of bosses, and even if they were necessary there are still effective alternatives compared to "nerfed" ranged DPS (assuming staff weaver was the offending class), such as guardian scepter, necro axe, mesmer phantasms, revenant sword 2 and sword 4, or engineer rifle/grenades.
  8. I'm making a video that requires my character to be crippled while walking, and the easiest way to do that is to use plague signet to draw long duration cripples from NPC's, but i can only find 2 locations in which I can do this. I'd like some more map choice for this part so are there any more locations besides Vendrake or Demoralized_Seraph which has long duration cripple when drawn from plague signet?
  9. I do agree with the length of fractals being another problem with the newer ones, especially when they reduce skip potential like preventing portals from being taken when you're holding a treasure in Siren's Reef, but the fractal team is most likely not going to do a short fractal like we all want for a while since the development cycles of each fractal production is too long. The length of fractals seem to be a consequence of thinking that short fractal equals no effort being put into what is like at least 8 months of work. Future fractals should be shorter and focus on bosses and smart skip potential, but this post was just a solution for long fractals currently in development from being not too pug unfriendly.
  10. TL;DR: fractal releases are seeing useless and poorly explained mechanics for the sake of keeping "story". To resolve this, plan future fractals around progressive mechanic design as well as make Dessa say more things about mechanics Currently, there is a common pattern among the recent releases in fractals in which I would name "mechanic bloat". This bloat often reduces what would be a interesting and arguably fun fractal into a thing that the average player would avoid playing when it comes up as a daily. This is increasingly becoming more of a problem as more fractals are being released and should be drawn to attention to for future fractal releases. What is mechanic bloat in my context? This refers to the addition of irrelevant and contextless mechanics within a fractal that does not develop for future fights or is poorly explained when it is introduced. Using Siren's Reef as an example, there are two main examples: Blasting Black Pete and Captain Crowe's Grim Lagoon (red AoE) and Teeth of the Deep (green AoE) attacks. Blasting Black Pete, in all honesty, is a useless boss. If this boss was removed right now, a new palyer would not find anything harder to learn than now since this boss does not have any impact in how the fractal progresses. It does not provide a mechanic that one would take to a future fight and does not even help in explaining ANY mechanic in the fractal. There are so many useless mechanics that does not get carried to future fights. A player can destroy mines with cannon fire, but outside of that fight when do you use that knowledge? What other mechanics does he have? An example of an arguably good mechanic design is the minotaur boss in Deepstone. It teaches players to use the Special Action key to "reveal" it to make it vulnerable to damage, which translates to "revealing" tiles in the maze, and then to the final boss in which you reveal lost tiles in the battle. Captain Crowe's two main pug killers are really not explained at all. People still do not know that the Grim Lagoon (the red AoE) does NOT damage trash mobs like a flux bomb does, but instead gives them quickness and protection. Similarly, some people do not know that the Teeth of the Deep attack (the green AoE) is shared between the players inside with 5 players being almost 0% damage. These mechanics are not explained due to the assumption that players are familar with "raid-like" mechanics of red being bad and green meaning share. This negates the idea of fractals being a "precursor" to raids as it would assume that you would know that fact beforehand. In order to prevent this from repeating in future releases, a fractal needs to focus not only on story but on cohesive mechanic progression. Using Siren's Reef as an example again, I would have proposed these changes in order to reduce mechanic bloat as well as make it easier to explain mechanics: the introduction of a second path similar to Aquatic Ruins and Underground Facility, and more dialogue on Dessa's part in explaining the mechanics. I would introduce a "First Mate Shane" NPC that would lead the original path of the fractal right now and introduce a new diverging path in which the fractal team follows Weyandt and Captain Strohm. First Mate Shane acts as a leader to follow in this fractal as well round off the narrative, Strohm telling Shane to take the rest of the crew and find a ship as well as makes Weyandt's story on Strohm giving him "leadership" act more believable as he has to convince the second in command. In the original path, I would introduce a red bomb AoE attack on Blasting Black Pete that acts similar to Sabetha bombs while giving the trash protection when it detonates. This can then be followed by Dessa saying something like "It seems the excess ectoplasmic discharge from this skeleton is empowering the other ghosts, don't let those explosions touch them!" to warn new players that red equals bad. In the Weyandt path, the first boss would be a ghost that controls sharks, in which does a lesser version of the Teeth of the Deep attack and makes Dessa say something like "Those sharks may seem real, but its an illusion created to single out your allies to pick them off, try grouping together instead!" teaching players that green is good. Then you can do a segment after this in which Weyandt sends you off to collect something or to disable blowing winds while he feeds Strohm the poison and then when you come back Weyandt escorts you to the ship and the normal ship part starts. These changes all include progression of mechanics that you would eventually see as well as reinforce the idea of certain mechanics. With this said, the future of fractal development should also focus on a cohesive mechanic progression to prevent players from avoiding potentially fun fractals in the future. Fractals should actively state what is good and what is bad from the get go instead of assuming that these players have knowledge. Futhermore, mechanics should be developed through the progression of the fractal as to make it more fun to learn mechanics leading to the final boss.
  11. On the tooltip and before at least February, the Kalla elite skill Soulcleave's Summit used to have a fire field on its effect. However, it seems it has lost this combo field.
×
×
  • Create New...