Blood Red Arachnid.2493

I really don't. I think Anet is trying to maximize profits by relegating the old rune effects to DLC and breaking the cottage rule on legendaries to incentivize us to buy expansions. There was nothing wrong with the old rune system, so really what they're doing is their best to get money and not what is right for the community.

Yeah... the legendary relic isn't meant to act like a true legendary. It was just compensation for people who had full legendary runes that had their effects taken away. This created a different problem, since relics were one of the selling points of their new business model. Anet solved this by nerfing the relic completely. In any practical sense, all the relic does is make it so you don't have to spend a few gold on the new expansion's relics, and to make everyone who bought legendary runes feel a bit better.

Partly it is both. I started doing research on it for an argument, but I found it quite useful to know which professions were both forgiving of mistakes and would output a lot of damage with just a few skills. LI builds are important to me, because a bad case of fibromyalgia has made my old carpal tunnel injury effectively permanent, and my tremors keep getting worse with age. Figuring out LI builds isn't exactly magic. Just take into consideration how fast buttons need to be pressed, how many different buttons need to be pressed, how much readjustment is needed to use a build (player positioning and ground-targeting), and how much simple defense/durability a build has. Some standouts include the Auto-attack Rev, which just turns on Impossible Odds/Vengeful hammers and auto attacks, Bomb Kit Mechanist, and the Axe Signet Bladesworn. Frequently, I have to play the game with only one hand, because resting my hands on the keyboard aggravates my wrists. Basically, consider each build as if you've just had a dose of epinephrin, wacked yourself on the hand with a rubber mallet, and can only play the game with a 3 button mouse.

I wouldn't consider either condi weaver or BTTH power weaver to be LI. Fire Tempest only got the title nominally as the easiest build to play, but it still required pressing a lot of buttons relentlessly. Everything weaver does is far more active and also far more restrictive. Now the closest thing that we have to an LI build is Fresh Air Tempest, but whenever I tested it, it was barely better than just auto attacking with the sword.

It is par for the course in my gaming history. Ever since Phantasy Star Online, you needed to have the offensive buffs up at all times (Shifta + Deband), and this carried over into PSU. Another game I played was City of Heroes, where there were so many different ways to buff a team up that it was mind-wracking. Heck, even in Runescape the high-end fights expect you to be under the Overload Potion's buff for extended periods of time.

Somehow all the answers to this got broiled into a debate, and I didn't find them really satisfactory. So, I'll give a short explanation: It is an axis of power. No no, not WW2. Think back to math class, with the coordinate system. The X-axis, the Y-axis, the Z-axis, etc. To provide depth to the interactions in a game, a player needs options to excel at different things. That way they can have interesting strengths and weaknesses that need to be played around and use in conjunction with other players to overcome all sorts of different obstacles. Buffs are an internal collaborative system where everyone gets enhanced by one player who's weaker otherwise, while debuffs are an external system where the enemy gets weaker for everyone by one player who's weaker otherwise. Buffs are debated a lot, because it creates an all-or-nothing issue while playing in big groups like this. In a single player game where there can be a proper power budget it is easy, but in a group setting where you want everyone to be useful you'll get this issue. Either you balance around the presence of buffs and make everything too difficult otherwise, or you balance in the absence of buffs and make everything too weak anytime a buffer shows up. It is difficult to create a system where buffs aren't either OP or UP, so most MMO's take the safe route and balance around their presence, thus ensuring the presence of the buffer role in content.

I'm lamenting the loss of the Fire Tempest. It was the closest thing we had to a LI build for ele. All of those arcane changes remove its strongest skills, making it far less viable than it was previously.

It's not so simple, but I can explain. Human standards for aesthetics and beauty come from many sources, but in large part they come from judging the fitness of potential mates and rivals. Really, when we look at another person, we're looking for the signs of overall physical and mental health of that person. This is all done automatically and subconsciously, so we can't always put into words what we're looking at and why it's good. We just see it as "good" and/or "hot." That's the starting point. This all comes into play when designing our characters. As humans, we both want to be "good" as well as to look at "good". Well, most of us anyway. So, whether we're looking at our character or pretending to be our character, we're going to want the character to have a high social-sexual value. It isn't different from wanting our characters to be smart, or powerful, or strong, or charismatic. It is perfectly natural to do this. As we are empathetic, we extend our ideas and feelings onto other things, both animate and inanimate.

The underwear isn't part of the character model. At least, no more than any other piece of armor in the game. It is sort of an open secret in this game that there's a base model that is used in house and gets worked on to create new armor skins. Most armor pieces replace part of the base model that they cover, but others will still have the polygons and textures underneath. The base model is just the skin texture, effectively a nude model but with no genitals. EDIT: I get the feeling people are actually confused as to why I'm posting this, and not just being passive-aggressive. The point I'm making is that there's no fundamental differences between any piece of equipment that we wear, and our characters in their underwear. When we equip something in game, we're replacing that part of our body with another skin that is designed to slot in to the rest of the character model. The underwear is exactly the same, except it is the default for when no piece is equipped. We aren't truly putting something on or taking something off, model-wise. The only reason why we don't have dyable underwear is either because dye channels weren't put onto that particular skin, or they were and the channels simply aren't enabled client-side.

I'm wondering why out of all things to hit that Anet chose random bits of alacrity. Alacrity as a boon is only good for long term fights when applied for long durations itself. I.E. if a skill has a 30 second cooldown, under alacrity it will be 24 seconds, but that is only if you have 24 seconds worth of alacrity on you for that entire duration. The boons that make the balls so strong are protection, regeneration, stability, fury, and might.

Does the moon around Tyria have ley-lines? I know waypoints use them, but I'm not sure how asura gates work. If there's no lines connecting Tyria to the moon, then it is possible that the gates wouldn't work.

There's a lot of talk about power creep in this game, but historically nothing we have now compares to what Ice Bow, Meteor Storm, Fiery Greatsword, and Lightning Hammer used to do. FGS was just changed to function differently, but the others all have that "this skill does reduced damage for each hit." If we're to compare them on base damage, most big-hit skills are in the 3.0 to 4.0 base damage range, with some exceptions (I.E. Soul Spiral 8.4). Frost Storm, originally released with all hits, was base 24 damage with equivalent stacks of confusion, which soon got changed to bleeding. Except... it did this twice, so really it was base 48 damage and unloaded more conditions than the game could handle. Originally it was balanced around having a wide area, but after we discovered dodge and wall stacking tricks to focus the blasts it became even stronger. It was overly polarizing. The conjures made it so the best comp in the game was double ele for every party. Aside from that, Anet has been increasing the damage of all other utility skills, making ele less dependent on conjures for competitive damage. This was done to curb the power ceiling, and also to make rotations easier for the average player. The thing about big reworks to skills is that there's a soft rule in design where you don't step on what other people have already done. Conjures, however neutered as they are now, are still their own thing, and making them like kits removes the functionality of sharing a weapon.

The initial point of Conjures was to give an ally a weapon as well as yourself. The dungeon speed clears would load up on Ele's for awhile because they discovered that FGS did immense damage while corner stacking... that Ice Bow did immense damage in a big area... that Lightning Hammer also did immense damage but could also spam blind. Each of these were scaled back, but for a long time the best technique to burn something down was to have multiple ele's drop conjured weapons and unload on the boss. When conjures were nerfed to not scale so well with size, this put them in the awkward position where they were technically the best DPS option, but also were cumbersome to handle in a realistic fight. It's hard to pick up the second ice bow against something like the Vale Guardian, whom doesn't sit still during the third phase. It was at this point where we started thinking of them as cumbersome kits instead of their own thing. In order to get allies to use conjures again, we'd have to go back to the old skills that did immense damage. Anet is deliberately avoiding this, so I'm not sure that we'll ever see conjures get fixed. Personally I use FGS in WvW as a second weapon swap, mostly to do ranged damage but also so I can zip around to avoid AoE's and run from fights. It works quite well in that regard.

Tornado? You'll loose the temporary damage boost from Weave Self, but this averages to about 8.3% loss. Tornado is a load of CC for when it is needed. Back when I played the competitive PVE side of the game, I would bring Tornado on my CWeaver builds for particularly high CC fights like the EoD strikes.

Pretty sure they aren't. Audio is handled client-side, so the presence or absence of audio isn't going to change the connectivity between your computer and the server. Graphical processing and audio are handled by different parts of the computer.

Funniest thing: most GW2 players hate most of GW2. That's why they decided to introduce mindless grind armor instead of telling people to play WvW/PvP/Raids.

I can explain the population decrease and the prevalence of single player games a bit. Back when I was a kid, the novelty of the idea of an MMO was a big part of its appeal, but the younger generation have grown up with that always being a thing. There's a certain age range where all the popular MMOs dropped, and if you weren't in that age range then it wasn't going to be your "thing." Most potential players centered around WoW, and that basically consumed the market. This was also a a time when IIRC channels and chat rooms were still a big thing, so the MMO was like having a game attached to your chat room. Then Minecraft ruined everything. It's not that it did anything wrong, but its runaway success has changed the way the industry views multiplayer activity. There's little reason to actually make some big, sprawling collective server when you can use asynchronous methods (I.E. Soulsborn series) or player-owned server systems to accomplish the same goals. The RTS is in a similar rut, since the publicly available Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 engines means you can make your own content and games within them, and there's been little success in the genre outside of them. The ease of streaming games has made every game a social experience instead of just MMOs, and now we communicate with voices and videos of our face instead of text boxes. Monetization has also changed, with gacha mechanics proving to be the superior money-making model over subscriptions and expansions. The great time commitment also poses a problem, since the next generation of kids spends all their time scrolling through their endless feed of social media gossip and quippy short videos. It is difficult to comprehend, given that we're all MMO players here, but enough scope and hindsight has taught me a horrible truth. MMOs are a fad; a product of their time and place. I don't think the genre will ever truly disappear, but the market is shrinking and the kids aren't interested. Going to consoles or putting more into the PVP scene isn't going to fix this.

I've found the Dual Skills to be useful in WvW. On the rare occasion where I'm zerging and not running tempest aura support, I'll sport full Marauder Staff Weaver, walking around in Earth/Air attunement for group swiftness and quick access to Static Field and Unsteady ground. The greatest asset of staff to groups IMO is the wide area group CCs, paired with Lightning Rod to spread weakness. The reason why I do this on Weaver as opposed to Tempest or Catalyst is the move Pile Driver. It hits like a truck, which makes it great for hunting down individual players in the skirmish. Depending on circumstances, I'll either swap to fire and throw down Lava Fonts + Pyroclastic Blast, or I'll swap to water for Lahar and Ice Spike. In the very short term, having access to one or two additional skills means quite a bit. I found that fights rarely stay under Meteor Shower, but Pyroclastic Blast + Lava Font can lay down some hurt pretty quickly without forcing me to belly up for their casts. Tempest can go through the attunements faster, but runs out of skills quicker and relies on the overload channels as its only backup. I won't lie, the air overload can be quite useful in the skirmishing phase, but it puts a gigantic target on your back and it requires camping air for uncomfortable amounts of time. The biggest strength for Tempest are all the shouts, which spread boons and some pretty strong effects far and wide. Catalyst's elemental celerity is strong, but the traitline as a whole doesn't give much for staff users, and neither does its utilities. Weaver provides the damage, cleanses, a few extra skills, and the only cost I really feel is the lack of quick access to Magnetic Aura from earth attunement.

I'm of the mindset that Ele should have some things to call their own. I'm not sure what the benefit would be to proliferate shocking and magnetic aura to more and more players. A long time ago, there was a rune set that could give you magnetic aura, and that feature was removed because of how overpowered it was.

The way I see it, this is a one time opportunity to get Legendary Relics and future-proof all of your builds for whatever updates and expansions get launched next. As the game gets bigger, the chances of players not buying every xpac gets bigger, so making the rune now can provide great benefits in the distant future.

Mostly I play it as a synthetic form of work. I can't just sit passively; it drives me mad. I have to do something, albeit in a limited way. Though now I'm at a point where I'm just collecting chests with several of my toons parked at them, as I have accomplished my most recent goal of crafting all underwater legendary weapons. It's a bit odd, though, as I am sort-of in a post-gold state atm. I'm waiting until all of SotO is released and seeing if there's anything objectional before buying it, so I'm in a state of stasis right now.

Yes. It is one of the many ideas I've had to spice up WvW, and that is to effectively put a raid-level boss that wanders around the map. It gives rewards upon defeat, provides a randomized event for players to fight over, and also has the option to be really cool looking. It's got to be hard, though, because it can have up to 150 players fighting it.

For PVE, it's weakness is that it isn't virtuoso. More seriously though, the greatest weakness of chronomancer is that it is dependent on continuum split for it's spike damage, and that can go awry really easily. The enemy moves, sometimes the little flashing mark gets destroyed, sometimes the phantasms get stuck on terrain, you get hit by CC, etc. The shatters are also weirdly different for some reason, and often don't work as well against mobile targets. The strengths of Chronomancer are the innate run speed, the ability to give either quickness or alacrity as a boon, a mighty strong burst rotation with continuum split, as well as Gravity Well for arguably the best CC in the game.

For fractals I'm never sure it ever becomes necessary. Though I haven't run Silent Surf CM, so I do not know what specific mechanics are needed. There's only a big mechanical change in fractals when the Challenge Mote (CM) is engaged at the higher levels. There's also the random instability "No Pain, No Gain", that makes boon removal much more important. The most niche thing needed in fractals is projectile destruction, but it isn't always necessary. Since it is a 5 party team, most of the mechanics from fractals involve standing in the right place, using CC, or using a special ability that is given to each of the players. It is raids where you'll encounter necessary mechanics. For example, the first boss Vale Guardian has a phase where it splits into 3 spirits, each one with a different weakness. One of the spirits is nigh invulnerable, unless you can remove a custom boon from it. Without boon removal, the boss is impossible. Vale Guardian isn't the only boss like this. You'll find weird mechanics that require strangely profession specific abilities around half of them. There's a skip Ele can do at the Twisted Castle, some pseudo-instance death mechanics can be cheesed with Rebound, Aftershock can be used as a pinch reflect against Matthias, and the off-hand Warhorn has a couple of push skills that can be used for some mechanics. But, very often, the special mechanics of a raid will require a mesmer, ranger, or a necromancer to fulfill a need. Strikes are similar to fractals, in that they are far less mechanically dependent on profession skills. Even their CMs are largely about moving to the right spot, jumping over a shockwave, or other things that all professions can do. I cannot speak about the SotO strikes, but know that the challenge motes for the harder EoD strikes are... rarely done, but they almost demand a ranged weapon in order to maintain DPS through all of their movement mechanics. For all but very few cases, high DPS isn't mandatory. The raid bosses can be auto attacked to death if you have competent builds and players. Some of the later strike CMs can be a damage race, though.

The rep that Ele has comes from historical problems. Back when I was raiding, Ele didn't have a quickness or an alacrity build. Heal Tempest had high healing and might, but nothing else, Scepter required manually aiming dragon's tooth, etc. and so on. In the run up to and release of End of Dragons, ele received several things that made it far better for structured PVE. Tempest have alacrity, increased defenses via Hardy Conduit, and received many damage bonuses. Weavers gained greater AoE barrier and condition damage, and their healing stance has been buffed for more group heals. Catalysts received the best (for awhile) quickness build in the game, as well as global stat boosts with Elemental Empowerment. In the past few years, Ele went from an awkward sort that had no real role to being capable of doing nearly anything quite well. The rotations are easier, too, for they are much less reliant on Conjure chaining than they once were. I can't speak much for PVP, but in WvW ele can be quite the monster. It's a celestial meta right now, and Ele capitalizes on every one of those stats. I run a Weaver myself for roaming, but the ability to share magnetic + shocking aura makes Catalyst and Tempest powerful group support, and they throw out boons like Halloween Candy.