Neva Eilhart.5347

Not only it's a joke, but it also tries hard to do things already done by Elementalist be it Core, Tempest or Weaver. This is the e-spec which lacks a strong vision the most. I can forgive them for hitting and missing with Willbender because it has a vision behind it. But not so much with Catalyst. So many things could be done and toyed around attunements and Elementalist : getting rid of attunements entirely and giving them pure arcana power, forcing Eles to commit to only one element but buffing it strongly... just look for example at how D&D has been handling the subclasses for casters in 5e. Throwing a static field on the ground which needs to be powered by some other obscure mana ressource being at the very bottom of the list of what would be fun (I thought the point of GW2 was to get rid of old Mmo tropes such as having CDs+ressource management).

Given how things have turned, I feel like you should list what you actually don't want the e-spec to be. Anet as a rule of thumb will do the exact opposite and you might end up with a new fun ranged weapon instead of this Catalyst thingy.

Feels like if you asked what is the worst E-spec, there wouldn't be much of a choice. Catalyst takes the spot and I'm not even maining Ele or remotely interested in playing that class outside of my Weaver.

After having played Mechanist, please put a breakbar on all pets regardless of their un/leashed state.

My very quick feedback on the Mechanist : - In PVE, it's got to be the funniest class I've ever played in GW2. I love having to seek shelter behind my pet. I love that it's easier to manage than most classes which requires you to play piano to get things done in open world. It's packed with every tools needed to get though open world parts easily. And I loved that I'm able to tune it the way I want (I liked the 2/2/2 or 3/2/2 traits). - In WVW, I saw my mech melt countless times in Aoes without even understanding where he was standing as he can move quite far and chase a target. I've had to bring in the shadowstep signet just in order to manage my mech erratic behavior (I used the signet to get it back to where I wanted instantly). Seems like Mechanist is going to be great in general PVE and subpar in competitive modes. Yet again, engineers have already two very strong specs in these fields so...

My thoughts on Untamed : - A lot (and I cannot stress this enough) of micromanagement to accomplish what feels more natural with Core/Druid/Animorph specs. You get weapon swap, the F5, the pet swap with both 3 skills, plus the unleashed versions of it providing 3 more skills. That's a total of 9 skills on pet to micromanage in addition to your own weapons, utilities and unleash mechanic. It's quite tedious to play (especially after having played the Mechanist...........) - Hammer is nice and benefits from quickness greatly, but the lack of CC on the unleashed version is hurtful. Greatsword feels almost better in every way even though it doesn't provide an unleashed version of its skills. - Speaking of which, I don't really see the point of being unleashed for yourself. Sure, you get the 3 pet skills for each pet and get a side effect if you choose to trait into it, but that's just on the activation. After that, no damage buff whatsoever remains on you, which makes me feel not "unleashed" at all. - The utility skills are okayish in general but some need tweaking (heal isn't great because you hurt your pet and Heal as One is better in every option with this spec), the teleport lacks some more bang, as the condi removal. The elite, on the other hand, feels great and game changing, as elite skills should feel. All in all, it seems fun to play, it's nice to have the pets a bit stronger (more hp is always good in this spec) but it feels like a chore to play around with due to all the micromanagement between all the swaps.

Shared Inventory Slots on sale pretty please ✌️

I guess I'll stick with FF14 and WoW when it comes to fishing. What I wanted was a relaxed way of enjoying the game scenery without any button mashing, and a way to take a break away from the main game activities (which, let's be honest, always end up in big zergs). Like the Ocean Fishing feature of FF14 which is a good example of how to implement a niche yet meaningful side activity. What I've seen in the stream is way off what I ever wanted fishing to be. As other people already said here, I don't think GW2 needs more button mashing and visual noise coming from zergs fishing for the same collections. I'm already guessing there will be tons of fish to turn over some NPC to get an ascended trinket and some fishing oriented skins, which will require tons of hours fishing and if the meta-oriented players find out it's more profitable to do this rather than any other meta, you'll end up seeing tons of skiffs running all over Tyria to farm nothingness all over again. Pretty disappointed with this ; I guess I'm just hoping now Cantha will at least provide us with strong maps and a pretty enjoyable story overall. Because everything else looks pretty "meh" and very unpolished so far.

I think the whole topic is about having different expectations about what the game exploration should be. For some, every fight should be a challenge requiring players to use every mechanic of their class (that is, when you're lucky enough not to have a zerg jump in and melt everything with spamming #1). For some, exploration should be a leisure activity you do to relax and break away from the mindless button mashing zerg metas or the more stressful instanced PvP/PvE. Discarding one over the other isn't relevant in my opinion. A Mmo should be able to provide both. You should be able to find remote highly dangerous locations in the different maps the game provide. I hated HoT for its overall difficulty but I admire what they were able to do with TD for example, because I know some people must have had a wonderful time fighting through it on their own while having this feeling of being truly lost in the jungle. But, the game should also provide you with maps (or maps sections) designed around an easier navigation and giving you time to enjoy the scenery. It is true that in HoT and more importantly in PoF, you can't even take a break for 30 seconds to admire the landscape before a group of 3 annoying as hell mobs come and target you. The fights aren't even that challenging, they're just ... there. Annoying. I think that's why Skyscale is so relevant now : at least you're able to fly over a bit, take a break and enjoy the scenery without having to deal with fights every two seconds. My bottom line is : maps should be designed with these two ideas in mind. Make sections of them harder where it's relevant. Make sections of them easier and without mobs interrupting you every two feet where it's relevant. I'm happy fishing is coming to GW2 because it desesperaly needs slower paced activities for leisure time. But it also needs challenging areas which aren't to be trivialized because of zergs running it, full of mobs able to 1hit you but hitting like a noodle when you follow a tag mindlessly (I hate the zerg mechanic). @OP (edit) : thanks for bringing this up, I agree 100% with what you're saying on trying to enjoy the scenery and getting ganged up by mobs every 2 seconds. Anet should lesser the mobs and aggro range in general and leave them as it is only in secluded areas of the maps.

I think the flames as a whole is a poor solution to answer the core WB mechanic, which is : deal as many attacks as you can in a short span to trigger the virtues effect. The easiest way to fix WB would be to make sure the spec is able to hit quickly so it can trigger the virtues as often as possible : give it quickness access in the traits. Unfortunately, quickness being a trademark of the FB, of course Anet discarded this solution and tries to shoehorn this flames mechanics into it instead, to grant you extra hits which will make your virtues proc more often. That's the only reason the flames AOEs are here in the first place. But as we've seen and as you're already stating, flames aren't a great solution. And quickness is off limits given it's the iconic FB spec tool. So my solution is simple : rework swords entirely (even other under used weapons such as the hammer) to give them quicker hitting attacks. Get rid of the flames entirely (they're not that good to begin with and the WB strengh is in mobility, not in laying static AOE fields) and rework weapon sets in new martial oriented skills. "Break the rules" for this spec, as Anet has stated.

I get where the OP comes from with this, but I think it has more to do with the powercreep status of the game than just Aegis. If you compare nowadays gameplay to the very first beta gameplay from 2012, boons are now all over the place, conditions too, and they've basically merged all the traits and skills to do plenty of different effects rather than just one. Traits which typically would only grant you one boon now heal you and deal damage and give conditions to enemies at the same time. So if you take out one mechanic, the other ones remaining unchanged would quickly become an issue. Bottom line : if you change how Aegis works, you'd also need to look after other mechanics / boons / conditions and traits, which got dramatically upscaled and tuned up over the years. I'm all for going back to a bit slower / more meaningful gameplay like the one we had in 2012 (which was all about dodging and using the right skill at the right moment instead of the button mashing we have now, especially on specs such as firebrand) but I highly doubt Anet would do it, and I highly doubt it would be popular either (nerfs are not welcomed in general, even if it's for the greater good, and zerg mechanics have been a gw2 trademark for way too long).

Meh... you're probably right... *sighs* I guess I'm trying a bit too hard to come up with builds to try and fix what we got as Willbender for now, but it's like when I'm looking at the Physical Skills, despair a bit and end up slotting meditations or shouts. Even signets are somewhat more useful.

A bit of a detail maybe but, I've found a very interesting interaction between Tenacious Defense / Communal Defense (in Valor branch) and F3 on Willbender. You can open a fight, drop everything you got to maximize the procs on F3 granting you Aegis very quickly, and watch that F3 cooldown being recharged very quickly because of the amount of Aegis blocks and no internal CD to Tenacious Defense. Paired with some Alacrity given by Phoenix Protocol, it seems it could be very powerful... I've tested it and it pretty much guarantees F3 is up every 12 seconds or so. What do you guys think ?

Lol, I just saw a Harbringer chaining 2 Veteran Hydra kills near Amnoon in a matter of 10 seconds each or something. Meanwhile, my own Hydra on WB was at about 60%HP. If only she would stay in my flames as these golems from the preview stream did...

Tried hammer for a couple hours in PvE with WB, some of its toolkit works great (#5 to prevent enemies from getting out of your virtues flames for example), some of it is terrible (#1 AA is too slow without any quickness to land with such a high mobility-based class). All in all, I'm now wondering why Anet keeps introducing new weapons to professions via e-specs when some of their core weapons are still broken to this day. Instead of giving e-specs new weapons (and new skills which are to be balanced - so far off hand sword is terrible in all game modes for WB), just give the e-specs new reworked variations of old school weapons.

Wait for the dev to code the golems to backpedal out of the virtues flames. There you go, perfectly healthy 9 golems surviving a willbender hitting like a wet noodle.

Just let average PVP Joe understand how WB works. They'll backpedal out of your flames, and your virtues will fall useless. You won't get any significant boon out of them. Plus, the interupts and knockbacks you have as WB are so telegraphed a remotely decent PVP player will know when to dogde or proc stability in a couple of days. And finally, your mobility locks you in animations which... pretty much act like you're the one being interrupted/dazed/knocked back. So all in all...

I'd like to add two more major design flaws to your very on-point list : 5. Some traits work in complete opposite directions, even when they're supposed to work together. Like Restorative Virtues and Phoenix Protocol. Both are supposed to help you enter virtues more often, but one (Restorative Virtues) is relying on you spamming the virtues and enjoy their first tick of boons as an upside effect, the other one (Phoenix Protocol) forces you to stay as long as possible in F2 to maintain decent enough Alacrity, while also getting max heal from HoT Regeneration procs. 6. For an e-spec which was advertised as an "Assassin" spec (dev quote here), it baffles me how strong it is when you throw it into a zerg (where your virtues proc so often you get 20 useless stacks of stability... given you're in a zerg, no ones needs so much), and how weak it is when actually doing assassins' work (meaning taking one specific target). It's a terrible side effect of the virtue trigger mechanic you already listed as #1 on your list. I can see where Anet wants this spec to get, and quite frankly despite all the clunkiness I really love what they have in mind. But the execution is terrible so far. It needs tweaking, from taking out animation locks to dealing with the virtue trigger mechanic, to reworking traits and giving them better synergy.

I find some interactions between traits very off putting... Phoenix Protocol encourages you to stay as long as you can in F2 to gain Alacrity and get max healing over time... but as the same time, if you want to maximise how quickly your virtues recharge, you have Restorative virtues which acts as the exact opposite, encouraging you to quickly shift from one to another to maximise the CD recharge while getting boons for entering the virtues... I've tested both the traits enabled and just Phoenix Protocol alone (and another Master trait like Vanguard Tactics) and I couldn't see a real difference between Alacrity maxed out if staying all the time in F2 or just spamming the 3 virtues pretty much on CD... which seems kind of odd ? So far I've found it works better if opening a fight on F3 to gain some stab + aegis, then drop symbols / consecrations for max virtue ticks while switching to F1 and then F2 (if Restorative Virtues is selected), or going directly for F2 to get max Alacrity and get F3 back as soon as possible.. But nonetheless the traits seem to interact in a counterintuitive way...

The clunkiness I talked about mostly came from that feeling of being overpowered when running in a zerg context with tons of enemies ticking in my flames to boost my virtues (just go F3 -> whatever symbol you have to lay on the ground and enjoy insane damage and stacks of stability / aegis / whatever floats your boat), opposed to when you're not in an aoe situation, where the class feels far more powerless and struggles. Thematically, it should be the other way around : assassins are supposed to be good at picking and chasing down one target, and be just average when in a zerg, right ? I mean, I've gone to the tangled dephts and when you get away from any other player there, you see the limitation caused by the "5 attacks to proc your virtue" mechanic. EDIT : one other problematic thing I've noticed : even when traited properly with virtues GM trait, F3 doesn't grant you stability right off the bat. You have to wait for the shadowstep animation to finish (about 0.5 seconds to 1 sec) before getting it. Which is pretty counter intuitive and flawed.

For a first try, pretty much this. The whole spec feels very strong when tons of enemies are packed because of the amount of "ticks" you get with your flames (even more if you trait for example in larger symbols). It feels very lackluster when you face less enemies, or when they're very mobile, as they don't stand in your flames, preventing any mechanics tied to your virtues to kick in (like stability, alacrity if traited etc). Moreso if you rely heavily on them to get condition removals and stability. Otherwise, you have to rely on consecrations, which aren't feeling great paired with WB's mobility, or shouts which could be great except you're not a buffing master as other guard specs. Overall, it feels very clunky. It should be great against mobile enemies and a little weaker against non moving targets. It feels completely the other way around.

This. I was hoping for the WB to bring back old underused weapon kits such as the Hammer. If it ends up being only a matter of a number of attacks you can deal in a short span, it favors GS far too much which is already used in pretty much all builds. I don't care about numbers/traits for now as they'll get tweaked, but the general feeling of the spec seemed refreshing at first, and ended up to my eyes being nothing more than a core guardian on meditation steroids.

You're right to an extent. The whole open world game design has been revolving around meta events, huge zergs and champ trains since season 1. If you want to play the open world, chances are you're going to run into a crowded event during your playing time, whether you want to limit it or not. Chances are you're going for a JP or a vista and you'll end up amidst a huge fight on the way. I personaly enjoyed way more the first year of GW2 after the launch because it had a good balance between something happening and nothing happening at all. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining the core of the game being meta events and zerg, I'm just happy they're putting something different into the world to give the players another approach to it. Fishing is a nice addition because it's a first step towards another type of activities. When you look at other very popular Mmos, these kind of activites are here to enable players to take a break from the main gameplay loop. That's why they're so popular among players (even though fishing in Wow, compared to FF14, isn't the most fun thing to do because you just click at the right time, it's still a nice break from questing). GW2 would improve tremendously in my opinion by adding more activities like that, which don't involve meta events at one point or another. GW2 is one of the fastest, if not the fastest paced MMo I've played. No queue times, no long journey from one point to another. There's always something happening around you. Which is great, but can become overwhelming from times to times. Having activities inside the game (and I'm not counting standing in LA playing fashion wars as a game activity per se) which enable you to enjoy the world without feeling overwhelmed by the amount of things happening in it is an improvement to my eyes.

Hi there, Long time returning player here, as I've been playing GW2 since lauch with a few in-between breaks. As the new expansion is coming soon, the only thing really appealing to me is how fishing could be a great asset for the general pacing of the game and the open world overall design. What I've always been loving about GW2 was the feeling of exploration and the tension coming up from playing through events while having to use your set of skills wisely. I have very fond memories of the game's very first beta weekends, and of course the first year of exploitation. Then came LW season 1 and with it, the zerg logic started ruining it all with huge meta events, champ trains, giant blobs spamming #1 and visual zergfest all over it. From that point, my interest in playing the game went downhill. My skills didn't matter as much as before, as Anet decided (because of the powercreep which is inherent to the Mmo genre to an extent) to merge skills and have them do different things at once (skills which previously only healed now healed and dealt damage at the same time, skills which only buffed now buffed and debuffed at the same time... you get my point). The weight behind the decision of pushing one button slowly felt as if it was taken away from me. For the next couple years, I remember playing the game jumping from one zergfest to another, doing activities to earn currencies only to buy more skins to rince and repeat this zergfest. When they announced PoF, I had very high hopes for a return to a slower, heavier meaningful gameplay loop in the game, because of the lack of huge meta event based maps (contrary to HoT which was only based on these). It did achieve that in some ways (bigger maps having a better flow for exploration, smaller scaled events providing a welcome break from huge zergfests). But I never got that feeling of running through Kessex Hills, meeting a few players along the way to do some escort, and eventually saving the day when popping out the right skill at the right time I got when the game first launched. Now with the new expansion and what has been teased, I have some of my expectations back thanks to two things Anet announced : - The implementation of fishing, which, even if it's just a small feature, can start providing a side activity to take a break from the neverending zerg/event loop. Gw2 is such a faced pace game, which doesn't even have queues or whatever (compared to other Mmo's), you start playing as soon as you log in, which is great. But I feel like it can only benefit from slower paced activities, things that can allow you to soak in the beautiful world without having tons of meta event info popping up your screen and having a hundred faceless players running around with particle effects all over. I really hope fishing won't be tied to anything fast paced such as meta events or such, because of that very reason. - The new design of scaled enemies, who will have different skills based on their rank (vet, elite, champ...). I'd rather have a harder encounter which will require to dodge and use my whole set of skills, than having an elite mob who is an HP sponge and is able to one hit me without even being able to see it because of the particle effects. Implementing different behaviors for foes based on the amount of players around can bring back some feeling of importance behind the skills you'll have to use. I don't know if I'm the only one to feel this way but I really hope Anet scales down on the zergs and start really polishing the game to make it a more enjoyable roaming experience. I don't think anyone enjoys spamming #1 to get some gold for hours. Given the competition going on on the Mmo stage, I think it is time to give back some meaning to the gameplay of Gw2 and start designing and implementing ways to give players opportunities to do more than just joining a zerg all day long. I really hope this xpac will be a first step towards this.

Just wanted to clarify something and to remind folks of an important fact after reading 43 pages of protests against lootboxes : What ANET proposes here with mount skins IS NOT what other games referenced in this thread are proposing (Shadow of War, BF2 to name a few). I can't stress that enough.The huge difference being those games are proposing lootboxes containing PROGRESSION ITEMS inside. ANET only gives you cosmetics, as they already have in previous RNG boxes (on a different scale, I'll give you that).If you feel truly disgusted by this, then you should feel EVEN WORSE for those single-player games (which don't have the maintenance cost and update necessity of an MMORPG) forcing you into buying RNG boxes to prevent hours of boring farming. Because where ANET sells only cosmetics, those single player games are now entirely designed around tricking you into buying those boxes, by fixing impossible farming objectives in-game or whatever. Those boxes are necessary because otherwise you can't progress in the game. Here in GW2, as lame as it sounds, if you don't want to buy those mount skins for whatever reason , you don't buy it. You can still finish the game and enjoy the Pvp without being two-shot by folks you have bought hundreds of boxes. So drop your pitchforks for a bit about that, because ANET is definitely not the worse company around these days. Reminder, they are developing a subscription free MMO, not a single player game with small server maintenance costs. And I don't think the whole "you can't earn it through gameplay" is relevant because of the gold into gems thing. Yes, you can eventually convert enough gold into gems to buy yourself a mount skin, by just playing the game the way you want. Now back to those mount skins, I think the main issue here is that people should be able to buy the skin they want. Even if you sell it for a higher price tag, which would be fine in that particular case. ANET has already been doing that with gliders for one year (which are selling at a higher price : up to 600 gems for a specific glider, 400 for a random mount). Take WoW for example, you already pay a 13$/month subscription, yet you have a cash shop full of cosmetics items, with mount skins you can buy for 20$. People are buying it because they know what skin they're going to get, even though it's already overpriced for a subscription based MMO.