OriOri.8724

I always find it easier to look at the #3 skill button to see if the shadowstep/swap is available or not. I find it a lot easier to see that then to look for a much smaller buff icon whose position can change on the buff bar

I don't think the nerfs were as bad as people are whining. Especially since you get a new vitality boost from the jade bot, which gives you more health overall. Also, most of the sustain nerfs seemed aimed at passive sustain, which had gotten out of hand anyway

I mean, based on the few changes they did make after beta 1, they are leaning all in on making virt a condi spec, again

There's not that much synergy. Virtuoso has a GM trait that increases bleeding dmg, and an adept trait that heals you for 3% of your condition damage dealt, and that's all the interaction it has with bleeding. The other bleeding traits are all about applying more bleeding, so there's no actual synergy between them and bladesong 2. Compare that to chrono's shatter changes which are much bigger (while still keeping it as power dmg, condi, CC for the first 3). Chrono F1 hits twice. Chrono f2 gets CD reduction for each clone that you shattered. Chrono f3 gets slow added to it. Virtuoso's shatters, in comparison, have added cast times (that are long too), can be reflected, and their F4 went from distortion to a simple block. It doesn't work best at long range, that's part of its problem. Its supposed to work best at long range, since its a 1200 range weapon on a long range DPS spec. That's what virtuoso was originally described to the community as by the devs. Yet dagger works best at close-mid range. It was originally introduced and described by the devs as a ranged spec. Also, its a weird argument to say that a 1200 range weapon and 1200 range utility skills are not intended to be a long range spec? Please tell me which of mesmers OH weapons keep enemies at range? Focus gives you a cripple/pull, pistol has a stun. Those help, but they aren't enough to keep virtuoso at long range from other players when virtuoso itself doesn't bring any additional items to the table in this regard. I still find it weird that people are claiming that because a spec that was introduced and billed as a "power ranged dps spec" has a good condi build, the design of the spec is somehow great? If anything that should be showing people that the design of the spec is flawed imo. Core mesmer, chrono and mirage all already have condi builds, we didn't need yet another spec that has one, imo. About generating more blades than you can shatter, that's also a problem with other mesmer builds, its not new to virtuoso. And its also something that we told ANet would happen when they increased the blade generation after the first beta. There are too many blades, and not enough bladesongs to go around. At least with extra clones they can still apply conditions to targets, but stocked blades contribute literally nothing to your fight. This is just another example where the spec design was never finished. You're allowed to enjoy it, don't get me wrong. But that doesn't mean it was designed well

There's so many. * One of the devs said in a livestream at some point that it was supposed to be a "selfish ranged power DPS class" but the kit doesn't support that * Bladesongs are strictly worse versions of core shatters. They didn't even take the time to give us new effects, its just new visuals and now they can be blocked and reflected, but the effects are the same. It would have been nice to see some work put in to actually changing up F1-4 to be different, instead of yet another spec where its power dmg, condi dmg, CC, and a defensive F4. * Mesmer is now the only class to not get an elite spec that added 5 new weapon skills. We've had 2 MH weapons and 1 OH weapon on our specs. We should have gotten dual dagger like spellbreaker had, which would also have been another 2 skills to round out the whole spec better * Dagger is a ranged weapon that works best and has traits for close range combat. That's pretty kitten weird, and feels more like people were designing a spec around visuals that looked pretty than anything else. If its a ranged weapon, on a supposedly ranged spec, it should be designed so it works best at range, not to work best at close range * Virtuoso has a condi traitline stacked on top of what is very clearly supposed to be a power DPS spec (they even told us it was). If its supposed to be power, go all in on power * For a "ranged" spec, virtuoso has almost no ability to keep enemies at range. It has a single knockback, which only knockbacks a little bit, has no mobility in the spec itself to get away from an enemy that gets close (and over time core mesmers mobility vs other classes has dropped significantly, so there's no help there), has no cripple and only a single way to immobilize enemies. It doesn't have the kit to stay at range It honestly comes off as an artist made some cool effects and the spec was designed around that. Even if its at the top of DPS charts (for now, mesmer always gets unnecessary nerfs), its a purely selfish DPS spec which offers 0 utility of any form, so it should be miles ahead of other DPS specs that bring their own utility, however little. And its not. It can't even be that great at the one thing its supposedly designed to be.

So the "power DPS spec" works well with a condi weapon equipped. And yet there are still people that wonder why I say virtuoso is an unfinished design

You're free to enjoy virtuoso dude. But at the end of the day that doesn't change the fact that its core design is unfinished. That's why mesmer mains don't enjoy it. Its an unfinished design, and frankly it doesn't matter how high the DPS is if the design isn't good and fun to play

Virtuoso is not fun for me either, but that seems like a weird reason to not buy the expac at all. There's a whole new continent, new story, new masteries etc.... Even all 9 new elite specs together are only a small part of EoD

I saw probably more people than normal in the maps when I was in them yesterday. I think that as time goes on and more players are able to login and play you'll start seeing more people. Not to mention all of the people right now doing the story, you won't see them when they enter an instance

While this doesn't affect me, I think it would be nice to see added for the players where this is an issue

While I think that the environments in GW2 are beautiful, I think possibly a better approach (at least in regards to your last paragraph) would be more intentional design from ANet to make the floors/environments in fights/areas with lots of AoE attacks and enemy fields a highly contrasting color to the AoE fields themselves.

Honestly as soon as virt was announced and only had MH dagger I knew it would not be a great spec. That point made it clear that they didn't care to invest significant time in designing it. The core design of it is so weak, so all over the place, so little internal synergy that it will never be fun to me without a complete rework

Yes, they told us target caps were being reduced to 5 for skills. But what you forgot is that time warp was balanced around being able to give quickness to 10 allies at once. When they reduced teh cap to 5 allies, they didn't also rework time warp to be a better skill to compensate. Most skills that had their target cap reduced were just being brought in line for general balance changes, but this was a heavy nerf to time warp that makes it worse than well of action in most situations. Its pretty weird that an elite skill is now outclassed by a utility skill that has 1/4 the cooldown. Timewarp should have also seen a CD reduction to go along with this change

I didn't test it that much, but it seems to be smart enough to not actually salvage these items, at least for me. They just show up in the salvage window

https://imgur.com/a/5c7QAur See image, copper fed salvage o matic thinks that candycorn is a salvageable item

Could we get a new achievement filter to hide completed categories from the page? So for example in my screenshot if that filter was available and active, I wouldn't even see the "Return to Flashpoint" category at all. https://imgur.com/a/SKmndkb I just think it would be nice to more quickly be able to see which categories you might have already completed in their entirety with a quick glance at the panel. Or I guess more accurately is to be able to quickly see which categories you haven't finished yet, instead of seeing categories you've finished. Especially in the "Story Journal" and "Side stories" meta categories, which both have dozens of sub categories each. I know I'd appreciate this, hopefully other players would find it useful too, and as a filter it would be completely optional for everyone to use/not use it as they want to

That's just a weird argument. These collections were released with HoT, when MC cost a few silver each. The collections were created and balanced around the idea that obtaining the mystic weapon was cheap, and most of the effort would be the HoT map specific drops you'd need to obtain. You were working for a skin, not just paying 30 gold for it. These weapon specialization collections were never intended to be expensive to complete. Just look at teh PoF ones, where ANet dropped the mystic weapon requirement in favor of spending a single MC per collection. They really should go back and adjust the recipes needed for the HoT collections as well now. All the more so considering that when mystic weapons were introduced they were cheap skins, no reason for their price to have skyrockets just because they need MC

The key difference between the HoT masteries you are talking about and the IBS mastery tracks are that the HoT ones are individual tiers on mastery tracks that are lackluster, whereas the IBS has entire tracks that are effectively just as useless. The itzel lore track gives you access to bouncing mushrooms (which ANet has been really good about including in almost every map released since HoT), speed shrooms, adrenal shrooms, and a vendor used for a ton of collections. Nuhoch lore track gives you a new travel option (which, I'll admit is not the most exciting thing when its limited to just HoT maps, but it at least is effective on all 4 maps), vendor for a ton of collections, ability to do treasure mushrooms, and makes some of the more annoying enemies in HoT easier to fight by giving you ways around some of their abilities. Exalted lore track gives you a vendor for a ton of collections, ability to access more of the maps via exalted markings, summon exalted allies from the beacons/use the armor in events, and technically gives you more mats from mining, no matter how worthless auric slivers are. Yes, the tracks have some problems and are not perfect, but they are at least useful. The IBS tracks largely are not. The raven lock track is only required to actually do the story, and to fight the map's boss. The essence manipulation tracks only affect fighting the enemies in those maps. They don't actually offer anything to the player, not even unlocking new collections.

To me, the issue with the IBS masteries is less about how unimpactful they are on gameplay, and all about how repetitive and highly specialized they are. The 3 essence manipulation tracks are identical. Its the exact same mastery you are unlocking 3 times because each track only applies to one of the 3 essence types. That's 9 million exp and 1/3 of the entire masteries (by required mastery points) in all of IBS that are exactly identical. That's bad game design. Then raven attunement mastery track is only useable on a single map in the entire game. Dragon slayer only affects dragon response missions. Out of 6 mastery tracks available in IBS, 3 of them are exact clones of each other for no reason other than to provide "more content", 1 of them is only usable on a single map, and 1 of them is only usable in DRM. If they would just have combined the 3 essence manipulation tracks into 1, I think that the entire IBS mastery tracks would be a lot better received overall. They could also expand Dragon slayer to also impact strike missions imo (and for that matter, I still have no clue what the gameplay differences are between DRM and strike missions, and don't understand why they are separate at all)

I'd like to see some of the current dailies shifted into weekly achievements with bigger rewards. Mostly the LWS3/4/IBS ones. And change the daily strike mission to a weekly as well. That way you could just do all of the strikes on one day and be done with it for a week, instead of having to do a strike every day. There's just too many kitten dailies now.

Over time its really not that expensive, and its a pretty nice profit for doing nothing but logging into another account once a day. If you bought a second copy of EoD it would cost $30, which is worth 2,400 gems. With the current purchase rate, that is ~730 gold worth of gems. And on that second account if you just login every day for the 10 seconds it takes to get your daily login reward, you would get ~34 gold worth of mystic coins and ~20 gold worth of laurels (if you use them to buy light crafting bags and sell them). Even rounding down to 50 gold / month worth of login rewards, you would have your investment paid off in a little over a year. Yea there are better ways to get gold, much better. But considering that this one requires no effort, and it only gets more valuable the longer you play, this is a pretty kitten good way to earn a ton of gold in the game for no effort at all

Yes, but I think that's not a great option if you are trying to change your main since you have to pay for it. And you would still end up losing any bag slots you had bought for that character since they aren't transferable. FWIW I don't think we need race changes in the game at all, but switching mains can be more involved than just unlocking waypoints

I imagine it wouldn't be that easy for ANet to give the option to only deactivate part of the effect. Maybe they could add an option for legendary effects to not appear on clones in PvE? Or have it toned down on clones or something

To me, virtuoso is not a fun spec. I will always recommend chrono over it

I don't see how this is any different from alacrity in functionality? All you are asking for is to change alacrity from a boon to a unique chrono effect, which only affects chrono, and mostly nerfing its effectiveness?