Shaman.2034

It hasn't changed even once in the game's history. The range is still 5,000 units for players outside of your party, and infinite range for players in your party. The 5,000 unit draw distance is a hard-coded limit for dynamic entities such as players, with players in your party allowed to render out further as an exception (but they stop being entities you can interact with after 5,000 range). You could construct an argument that 5,000 units feels like a shorter distance these days with the introduction of mounts, both in PvE and in WvW; but the actual draw distance has never changed, it's a fundamental component of the game engine.

Not sure what you mean, buying Gift of Research from Lyhr still costs the 500 thermocatalytic reagents, plus the 10 ectos. All of it is one giant noob trap because if you try to avoid crafting by paying the ecto tax on everything, you need an extra 6,000 ectos, or 2,000g. But leveling all 3 armor crafting disciplines to 500 only costs a total of 130g if you do it the lazy expensive way.

Spamming Electric Discharge for ranged poke damage, and bursting someone 100-0 were two completely separate use cases. When bursting 100-0, Electric Discharge was applied exactly once, in combination with a lot of other skills cast in a very short time, too short to leave Air and return for two or more Electric Discharge procs. It was always just a minor supplementary packet of damage, whether it was used for poking or bursting. And it's worth noting that bursty Fresh Air elementalist was never an S-tier build in competitive modes anyway, it was always a gimmick you'd use to take new people by surprise, and otherwise get your own character immediately deleted as fast as possible. Electric Discharge's damage was nerfed exactly once in PvP and WvW, in 2018, by 28%. Now it's been completely reworked into a burst enabler by stacking Vulnerability instead, which is arguably stronger. It was never OP for having Fresh Air to work with it.

I don't think the spell-when-swapping traits (i.e. Sunspot) would need any major changes. Think about it: Air already has its own Sunspot: Electric Discharge. It does more damage to a single target than Sunspot, provided that it crits, which it will if you're running Fresh Air. You can already do "Electric Discharge go brrrr" and it's not OP Flashing all your other attunements only to immediately return to your main attunement has several disadvantages inherent to the class's design that it completely negates any benefit you'd get from the relatively weak trait skills such as Sunspot. This is why Electric Discharge isn't OP even with Fresh Air I agree that pretty much all elementalist builds would feel better to use if they had an established "home base" you could always return to at any time. This makes it easier to recover or restart a rotation, and elevates your baseline performance without elevating your maximum potential very much, if at all. With a change like this, any build would still want to spend significant amounts of time in other attunements. All that really changes is what kind of filler you're using, because you return to your home attunement for its most relevant filler skills, usually the one that has the strongest autoattack for your build. This is why Fresh Air feels good, because you get to return to your best autoattacks after you spend everything else, instead of being stuck on lame autoattacks for several seconds. This is primarily why conjures are used as filler in PvE too, to minimize time spent on lame autoattacks. As one proposal, I think Persisting Flames could be replaced with "Flash Fire: Recharge Fire Attunement when striking a Burning foe. Fire fields created by weapon skills are larger and last longer." This removes 10% damage off the top to compensate for Fire-based weapons getting better filler, and it can be added back in later if ele needs more damage after this change. On the other hand, ele healing builds could use a straight buff, so Soothing Power could be made baseline and replaced with "Flood Water: Recharge Water Attunement when healing or applying barrier to an ally. Soothing Mist grants its healing as barrier to targets at full health."

Personally, I want a legendary aquabreather because, even though you rarely ever need any aquabreather, when you do need one it replaces your helmet's stats, and that messes with things like crit capping. Also you can't get exotic ones that hold legendary runes (because leggy runes require level 80 equipment instead of superior runes requiring only level 60), and only a select few core stats in rare level 80 ones. So you're essentially forced to get an ascended aquabreather to maintain build coherence when you step in a pond for a second. However, the tedious acquisition methods (pick berries until your eyes bleed) and crafting/stat changing inconsistencies (can't stat swap ascended breathers to Diviner's stats???) make ascended aquabreathers a huge inconvenience too. Rarely needed, but a massive hassle when you do need them, that's why I desperately want a legendary one. I don't care at all about having full purple in all slots, I just use Blood Ruby rings and backpacks as pseudo-legendaries and would use something similar as an aquabreather if it existed

Isn't that what legendaries already do? Provide access to things that other players don't have access to unless they go and do that specific content? See: Leadership and dungeon runes being on legendary runes; Living World and expansion stats like Diviner's and Ritualist's; rings and backpacks with full infusion slots without having to do fractals to infuse them; and so on. I don't get how legendary fishing rods, infusions and enrichments would be any different.

You can also use a myriad of third-party scripting tools (web search something like "how to remap a keyboard" to explore for one that suits your system and needs) to rebind your Escape key into something non-disruptive, for instance rebinding it to F1 since you accidentally hit it when hitting the original F1 key

As far as heal alac tempest goes, staff is much stronger in open world PvE than warhorn. Warhorn with either dagger or sword allows you to be precise and efficient with your boon and heal applications. Staff allows you to cover a large range and area, which is much more valuable outside of raids and fractals, especially traiting Geyser to be a big AoE revive from 1200 range. Open world bosses are designed to stunlock you to death or knock you across the map, and staff comes with easy AoE stability to ignore it. It's easier to combo staff blast finishers with water fields in between overloads for more AoE heals. Staff makes the build better if, like you said, you aren't doing raids and fractals.

You usually want to provide Alacrity anyway to justify yourself being a dedicated healer, and getting the self-Alacrity in turn makes you a more effective healer by lowering your healing source cooldowns. I can't imagine any context at least in PvE where you would want to take a healer that provides neither Quickness nor Alacrity When I play a healer in open world PvE, I normally leave the squad after joining their map, so that my buffs affect everyone near me with only the range as the priority. With a large excess of Regeneration uptime as a side effect of building for Alacrity uptime, it's very easy to distribute 100% Regeneration uptime across a dozen players or more. If I did use Elemental Bastion, I would certainly always leave the squad. You can simulate this in raids and strikes, or in any squad, by having your own subgroup. Then, you need to constantly reposition yourself so that your aura-granting AoEs hit different players. There is no easy automatic solution to get the heals to overflow, this is the best we can do

Sources of direct AoE healing don't consider players that are at full HP. That is, if you cast the elementalist staff skill Geyser, which is an AoE that provides direct healing, and your subgroup is at full HP, Geyser will begin to heal players outside of your subgroup. "Wash the Pain Away!" also works like this, as do the staff and sword autoattacks, and so on. This does not apply to healing from boons and buffs (Regeneration, Soothing Mist) because the system for distributing buffs always prioritizes your subgroup even if they would gain no further benefits. Since auras are just buffs, they can only be applied to your subgroup (unless part of your subgroup is out of range), so Elemental Bastion healing cannot leave your subgroup in the same way that direct AoE healing can.

I agree that this is the reason they've done it, and that it makes the weapon stronger. A bit stronger in some cases. It works out to 50% more strikes per time spent casting the autoattack, but it's still quite a low number of hits compared to almost all other weapons. If it wants to proc all the revenant things that favor rapid hits, this needs to be increased a lot more. So, not only does the change betray the weapon's fantasy, it's also just not that effective at addressing the motivating issue. There exist better ways to do this that preserve hammer's fantasy, and even enhance it and revenant as a whole. And they're not difficult to implement either, because they've already done it before. One such change would be to increase the cast time, and all targets struck by the primary bolt suffer a secondary strike after a delay. The same strike that occurs at the end of the sword autoattack chain. The skill description would probably read like this: "Hurl your weapon at enemies, creating a rift on them that explodes for additional damage after a short delay." I'll even do the balancing, just to demonstrate that this change can achieve the exact same goals as simply decreasing the cast time. Let's look at the numbers to establish what the change actually changed, and use that to construct how a delayed explosion version would look: Hammer Bolt (old): about 1.2s cast time, 1.35 power coefficient: 1.125 power coefficient per second spent casting, 0.83 hits per second Hammer Bolt (new): about 0.8s cast time, 0.9 power coefficient: 1.125 power coefficient per second spent casting, 1.25 hits per second Elementalist's Fireball has a cast time of about 1.4s. It is the slowest-casting single projectile autoattack in the game, so I'm going to use this cast time as the maximum length that players are generally willing to put up with for the sake of weapon fantasy. Increasing Hammer Bolt from a 1.2s cast time to 1.4s would certainly be noticeable, but not egregiously slow. I'd keep the original 1.35 power coefficient to leave room for the rift damage at a 0.225 power coefficient, preserving the 1.125 power coefficient per second spent casting. It stacks up like this: Hammer Bolt (old): about 1.2s cast time, 1.35 power coefficient: 1.125 power coefficient per second spent casting, 0.83 hits per second Hammer Bolt (new): about 0.8s cast time, 0.9 power coefficient: 1.125 power coefficient per second spent casting, 1.25 hits per second Hammer Bolt (mine): about 1.4s cast time, 1.35+0.225 power coefficient: 1.125 power coefficient per second spent casting, 1.43 hits per second Not only would this be a more effective change to address the issue; it would also feel a lot better to use and would look great with the existing animation.

What I liked the most about revenant hammer is that all the animations felt like they had a lot of weight behind them. They were slow and deliberate, like the hammer I'm wielding is actually heavy and will hurt a lot when it eventually comes to a stop against something. The very long cast times that resulted in large single packets of damage is what made it unique, and helped it achieve the fantasy of being a hammer, as opposed to some other thing you can wave around to achieve the same functions. Hammer Bolt had its total cast time reduced by about a third, and its power coefficient also reduced by a third, so its total DPS remains the same, but strikes more often. This has very minor benefits, in that it can trigger Impossible Odds slightly more often, and proc more projectile combo finishers. But it doesn't apply any conditions or Might or anything that could stack up higher with this speed increase, so it's very minor gains overall. But the downside is that hammer is now a rapid fire projectile weapon. It no longer feels heavy and impactful, it strikes quickly for moderate damage instead of slowly for big damage. It may as well be a longbow. This is part of an extended trend where high cast time, high damage skills are reworked into low cast time, low damage skills. Whether the total DPS remains the same or not, this is turning everything in the game into a fast-paced spam frenzy. I worry that they're coming for elementalist staff next, to push faster cast times as the "fix" that it needs. How about some high risk, high reward fantasies? Commit to a long cast time, and be rewarded for finishing it? Why are all of those gradually being patched out? The original Hammer Bolt animation looks really silly when it's this sped up. I don't expect my words to have any impact on balance decisions whatsoever, but it at least deserves a new animation that fits a more rapid activation. I think it would look better if, instead of swinging the hammer in a full circle, your character swings it left, then right, left, right, stopping in a half circle to release the projectile. And please ArenaNet, consider more carefully what the impact is to the RPG side of the game when changing how weapons feel to play for the sake of balance. You know from the new weapons feedback that the feel of the weapon usually matters more to players than its numbers.

I don't think favoring multihits deserves to be a mechanic in any case, it just serves to make already strong weapons stronger. Particularly hammer and sword. I'd like a version of Catalyst that's playable with staff without any extra penalties besides taking staff (lol)

You just need more boon duration. If you're using Celestial gear, you must be using a condi framework, so take Firebrand runes. I play power quickness catalyst at over 80% boon duration, where only 3 spheres altogether provide 22 seconds of quickness and is sufficient to allow plenty of freedom within the rotation. You don't need to force yourself to perform tight 4-sphere rotations to be effective, and you want to build extra resilience (i.e. boon duration) into the build anyway to account for dynamic situations. Given that you're using celestial gear, I imagine you're not optimizing the build for raid speedrunning, so don't make yourself play that way

Cosmetic infusions that change a character's skin will also change the hair on sylvari and charr characters. The screenshots lower down on the wiki page demonstrate an example of this behavior. It may well be a bug, but this behavior is consistent across all cosmetic infusions that change a character's skin.

This is intended. The idea is that the requirements get less specific, but reward less progress. "Complete Destroy the Ravenous Wanderer Meta-Event" is incredibly specific. As a reward for doing this specific task, you instantly get full progress. "Complete Events in Gyala Delve" is moderately specific, requiring you to do events in one specific expansion zone. As a reward, you get 2 credits of progress per event. "Complete Events in Maguuma Jungle" is not very specific at all. These are core zones, and you have several to choose from. Since you have the most freedom of choice this way, you get the fewest progress credits, only 1 per event. This is how it worked last week too.

I think what holds Chain Lightning back is the fact that it can bounce back to the first target for double damage when there's exactly 2 targets in range. So, they should just double the power coefficient and make it unable to bounce back to a target already struck -- or, since that's probably too much computational load to put on an autoattack (having to constantly create and delete don't-bounce-back-here flags), have the chaining effect be something kinda like mirage greatsword ambush, where it sends 2 secondary bolts outward in a radius from the original target. That would open up an opportunity to add synergies to the skill, such as increasing the number of secondary targets to 4 when the primary target is Blinded, which gives it an interaction with Lightning Surge. Something worth the long cast time and slow projectile speed in an otherwise non-damaging attunement. Or, if staff air attunement is just meant to be a CC machine, take Virtuoso dagger auto flurry mechanic and give it to Chain Lightning, where every 3rd successive hit on the same primary target causes a bonus electrical shock that deals 1/4s Daze. That has trait synergy with Lightning Rod, and again makes it worth the long cast time and slow projectile speed -- it would take 4 seconds + projectile travel time to stack up to 3 consecutive hits, so a tiny Daze is totally worth the setup, especially since it's a projectile that can be further interacted with. Adding a flurry mechanic also gives staff more potential to be used with Catalyst. Say that the flurry does 3x rapid weak hits, each applying a stack of vulnerability, and then the 4th Dazing hit is a modest burst of extra damage (0 damage in competitive modes as usual for CCs). That would let staff charge Catalyst energy faster, allowing it some more synergy. Ultimately staff suffers from a lack of identity, and would benefit from having some identity firmly established. It has more problems than just Chain Lightning, but they can't really be solved until staff has a solid identity. Is it damage? Is it control? Is it support? It's trying to be all three at once in different attunements, which is anti-synergistic with modern elementalist that wants to be constantly rotating through attunements. That creates dead spaces in your rotation no matter how you're trying to use a staff. If you're playing support, Fire is a dead space. If you're playing control, Fire is still a dead space. If you're playing damage, Water and Air are dead spaces. At this point, I don't even have a strong preference toward a specific identity, I just want it to have any cohesive identity so I can feel good about using a staff in some build.

Of course I have more than one character. My issue is not with the story. My issue is with the open world dialogue outside of story chapters. The story is an isolated activity. Open world PvE is the main repeatable content thread of this game, so it is not isolated; it is where one spends most of their playtime. I have trouble reconciling everyone in the open world being called Commander/Wayfinder. And I really hate Peitha continuing to communicate telepathically with me when I'm not doing the story. That's really easy, though. Open world zones have always been snapshots in time. They are stuck in the moment in time in which they were created. I don't need to make myself imagine anything or do any work for this to make sense, it just does naturally. All RPGs are like that. It gives the player the opportunity to go back to the past, to replay those moments in time as they were. This doesn't even register as a problem to me. Again, all I'm really asking for is to be treated like a random mercenary in the open world. ArenaNet has applied a mix of dialogue in open world in the past, but SotO has made the open world dialogue extremely story-focused to an annoying degree. It constantly feels like I have a story chapter turned on, whereas previous content doesn't feel that way.

This is only true if your starting point is the base 1000 Power that all naked characters have. However, this is not a useful starting point, and not what's commonly used as a starting point either. The rest of your analysis is correct: strike damage has no "base damage," it just has a power coefficient. Suppose that a character equips Berserker stat gear in all equipment slots, with a full set of Scholar runes, and eats a Sous-Vide Steak for 100 Power and 70 Ferocity. This is the fundamental structure of a power DPS build. This character, with no class-specific bonuses, has 2,657 Power. In that case, adding 10 Power is less than a 0.4% damage increase. To increase this build's damage by 1% would require 27 Power. To double this build's damage would require another 2,657 Power, not just 1,000 Power. This is a basic example of diminishing returns: the effects of adding +1 Power are not equal at all levels of Power; in fact, it diminishes as the total Power grows higher. You can't just say that adding 10 Power is a 1% damage increase, that's only true in one very specific situation no one really cares about (going from naked to +10 Power somehow? with a single piece of low level green or blue gear?). Even then, after you've added 10 Power and are now at 1010 Power, adding another 10 Power is not another 1% damage increase: increasing from 1010 to 1020 is a 0.99% increase, and it keeps decreasing as you add more Power. You are technically correct in your specific case, but your result is not generalizable to practical stat analysis. In general, you cannot say that +X Power is a Y% DPS increase, both because of profession and build choice differences and because of the effect of diminishing returns.

But like, I genuinely don't understand how one can imagine oneself to be the Commander and all other players are not the Commander at the same time. There are no paths that lead to that conclusion for me. It's trivially obvious that everyone receives identical dialogue during open world events - I do not have the unique special edition Commander's copy of the game, after all. Then, in the simplest case, the game is telling everyone that they are all the Commander. It's not overthinking it, I might be underthinking it. I feel like I'm saying that 0 = 0, it's just the most trivial consequence of giving everyone the same game copy and then putting them together in multiplayer content. If one imagines that all other players are not the Commander, that's an extra step one has to take, which necessarily makes it a more complex idea. That is a (valid, but yet) imaginary construction which differs from what's actually happening, and needs constant maintenance to preserve the illusion. That feels like overthinking it, to me. I would need to constantly put in work to maintain the fantasy that only I am the Commander, when I know as a trivial fact that everyone is told they're the Commander.

So actually, if you play the story with other people, only the instance owner performs the Commander's dialogue, and all other players hear it from that player's character. And only their name shows up in the chat log, etc. It's handled quite well. I prefer to play the story with my partner as the instance owner, so they are the Commander and I'm just their nameless assistant. Yes, and what I'm saying is that all open world meta events should be like that! It's how massively-multiplayer content storytelling should be done.

I don't see how you draw that conclusion. They are all the Commander in the storyline, because they are responding too, whether it's shown to me or not. It doesn't need to be shown, I know it's happening. I think that you're speaking along the idea that every player is playing in their own phased version of reality in which they are the canon Commander and everyone else around them is just someone else. So when there are 99 players together, there are 99 separate realities taking place concurrently. This is over-thinking it. There is only 1 reality that everyone experiences together. It is impossible to reconcile a single instance of reality with the fact that all 99 players are addressed as the Commander. But it is also just as impossible for there to be 99 separate realities. But my entire issue is that you can't see your character as part of the horde, because you are constantly addressed as the Commander, even outside of the story. I want ArenaNet to design open world zones that do let you see your character as part of the horde.

That's a rather self-centered viewpoint. This is not a single-player game. I don't view myself to be the center of the show where all other players are random mercenaries. That's neither immersive nor conducive toward social interactions with other players. And it's impossible to separate the knowledge that every other player is also simultaneously receiving identical dialogue. There is no line between me and other players, there's just us. We're doing this thing, together, and I'm not the most special hero out of them. I'm the same as anyone else. Modern meta-events literally cannot be solo'd or even carried by one player, so there's also no gameplay justification for reconciling this. The closest (but still very weak) point of reconciliation is that a player may create a squad and become the commander of that squad, and so perhaps they are acting as the canon Commander for the duration of the meta-event - but the NPCs still talk to everyone equally regardless of their role within the squad. And multiple squads very often exist simultaneously in order to coordinate different areas of the meta-event, which just means there are multiple Commanders again.

I agree that GW2 would never work with a silent protagonist - it never had one to begin with. You were always fully voiced and assigned a character to play in the story. However, what I think could be viable is for them to tone down the number of spontaneous character interactions in the open world zones. And I don't mean story steps that take place in the open world - I mean the random dialogue thrown at the Commander/Wayfinder whenever you're not doing any story. The main problem is that you cannot reconcile the Commander/Wayfinder against any multiplayer content. You can't have all 90 players in the zone be the Commander, there is only 1 Commander. And statistically, it's not you. Ideally, all references to the Commander in open world would be toward a third person. Lines like, "Hopefully the Commander shows up to help out, but we'll take all the help we can get!" But this is not a new thing; it was first started in HoT where NPCs started shouting stuff like, "Commander, over here!" Mostly short phrases. These were annoying at first, but I've learned to ignore them, because they aren't very substantial. But they've become increasingly invasive over time, and in SotO it is just too much. You can't go anywhere without Peitha chiming in with a whole monologue to remind you that she's half-possessing you the entire time you're in the zone. "MMM. THESE... FRACTALS... AS YOU CALL THEM... CURIOUS THINGS... I'VE SEEN THEM BEFORE, IN THE MISTS... ONES THAT... FORM ON THEIR OWN... THEY DON'T ONLY TELL STORIES OF YOUR WORLD... I FEEL THEIR FEAR... I FEEL... SYMPATHY... FOR THEM." Some Astral Ward NPC will say something as part of an event, and Peitha will jump into your head with a response, like "WOW... YOUR PEOPLE ARE KINDA DUMB... AND CLOSE-MINDED..." Like, thanks, but I didn't ask. Also I'm not the Wayfinder right now, I'm a nameless mercenary helping 99 other nameless mercenaries take down a worldly threat. It isn't just Peitha that does this, but her monologues are the worst because her voice is so loud, slow, and bass boosted. And you get the whisper pings like a real player is trying to whisper you. I would rather that open world NPC call-outs are all vague, like when Vanak Faithwalker (Amnytas) calls out for help with, "I need any Ward in the area on my position, now! I have a plan, but I need help!" TL;DR: More separation between open world PvE and story dialogue. Treat me like a random mercenary in open world. Treat me like the Commander/Wayfinder during the story.

As of today, this event still stalls, blocking progress toward Finding Sibaha.