Moira Shalaar.5620

Ranger Condition-based druid has been overperforming in PvP, and we've brought down some of its defensive tools with the goal of making it a bit easier to take down. Refined Toxins: This trait has been removed and replaced with Survival Instincts. Gain increased outgoing strike damage and reduced incoming strike damage. Increased outgoing strike damage when above 50% health and increased incoming strike reduction when below 50% This is another example of Anet balance identifying a problem with an elite spec and then trying to resolve the problem by gutting a core specialization. This punishes nearly every condition build that Rangers have, leaving core, Soulbeast and Untamed condi builds all weaker because devs are unhappy about druid. But then not only do they take this away, they don't even replace it with some other condition trait. At the micro level this is problematic for its too broad impact, but even more on the macro level this highlights this seriously flawed approach to balance. If there is a problem with an elite spec change the ELITE SPEC rather than further gutting core traits that have universal impact.

Originally Commander tags WERE 100g. That changed quite a while back, although ANet very nicely gave a heads-up that the price would be changing. I ended up buying my tag way back when because of that warning, not because I was any way competent to tag up, but because I hoped then that I might someday be, still waiting for someday to come. Those were the days! Don't forget having to carry 50lbs of schoolbooks compendiums without the benefit of ascended backpacks that kids get these days!

Anet did a livestream that talked about the upcoming patch including new relics.

I also grabbed the T6 mat boxes and Laurels (to buy t6 mats) early on for legendary crafting.

But how are we supposed to get our daily recommended exercise if we stop cycling with a buddy? 😉 I'd agree that while this diminishes the value of the multi-account/login reward model, over all this is both healthier for the game and better for players. I'd much rather actually be rewarded more for playing content in game on a single main account than to be rewarded for how quickly I can swap characters and press F and then change accounts to do it again.

I know that they are done with elite specs, but they ought to find a way to make a commando "spec" that could be used by all classes for the next Xpac. 😄

There is an issue with the RNG where for some people the egg doesn't show up even though they have checked all the nests on both maps multiple times. For myself I found it in one of the last nests to search on the second map, but I have guild members who have gone through the whole set and keep trying with no egg so far. I like the earlier suggestion that each nest checked increases the likelihood of finding the egg in the next nest.

As far as I am aware the scrolls/gizmos that you can purchase to travel all take you to non-expansion maps, i.e. Living Season 3 but not HoT, Living Season 4 but not PoF, Icebrood maps but not EoD. Etc. The sole exceptions are a couple lounge passes. I know I have the Lily of the Elon which came with one of the higher levels of pre-purchase bonuses. EDIT: The other way around those was to use guild halls that came with that expansion, something not presently offered with SOTO EDIT 2: oops forgot about Arborstone!

I have a surname that I use across all the characters I create which helps for name uniqueness. I start with my character concept, say a condition/bleed/poison ranger or a minion necromancer then I look at foreign (to me) languages for words in that range, and then occasionally tweak the word to make it sound slightly more like a name and off I go. I have yet to have one of my character names come up as already used.

That is FANTASTIC! I've been using his guide for my couple Mac's and have even interacted with him since the most recent change. I'm looking forward to giving this a try!

I'm getting a different problem, or else a pair of problems. Yeah, it is an older machine (2015) but the graphics glitch is that it compresses everything left so that the right 20% of the screen is black. Added to that is the fact that the crash dump seems to flag the problem as having to do with CEF, NOT dx11. This is a windows machine running win10, not WINE on Mac. I'm not at that machine right now and will try to remember to update this post with the rest of the relevant stats later. Maybe the two have some interoperability issues so that a problem on one kills the other? IDK. It's been too many decades since I worked in tech and I'm out of practice deciphering these things.

The problem is that their initial implementation of DX11 was flawed and they never got around to fixing it forcing a lot of us to use the aforementioned bandaids. Now that they have ripped the bandaid off we discover that yep they still need to fix their code that was seriously flawed in the first place. The question is really only whether they actually patch it or simply write off everybody who was forced to use the bandaid as being edge cases.

yep, same here and loading in without the DX9 causes some seriously bizarre graphical glitches. Have a full screen game but the UI is stuck on the left half of the screen. Tried changing resolution to see if that would help and the game crashed and now can't get back in. I really wish this weren't such a common occurrence with updates. Also would have been really nice if these kinds of changes were mentioned in the patch notes instead of needing to be discovered by trial and crash.

I don't think I was aware of that gem store item and will be investing in that too, however I was more talking about the in game unlocks that typically have accompanied the LS episodes. That said, I would absolutely buy a home instance themed gizmo that would allow us to customize the placement of our nodes in a private instance map

From LWS2 through Ice Brood Saga Home instance nodes were made available for users to potentially invest in that corresponded with some material or currency that related to the latest episode of the story. However after Icebrood Saga with EoD there wasn't any Living World season and the recent announcements seem to indicate that ANet is moving away from that model of content. I'd like to ask that the home instances not be forgotten in the change of business/story telling models. Please release new nodes/chests to continue expanding on our home instances. Thank you.

Legendary Relics would have been a perfect thing for Anet to have anticipated the need for and announced in their rewards post right up front. ofc I'm still waiting for my legendary Jade bot cores & accessories. . . . .

Yep. However right now if I log in I can change my ranger main from running full berserker/scholars to say celestial/diviners with just a few clicks, no extra anything in inventory. Then as my situation changes maybe I decide for nostalgia sake I want to run soldier's stats with runes of durability, and again with a couple clicks I can do that. After the update I will have that functionality for STATS but will have to keep or acquire a durability relic, scholars relic & diviners relic to be able to make the same changes AND keep them in my inventory for any future changes.

I named mine after one of the Cylons. When they start allowing skins for the Mech I am absolutely going for one that will make my mech look like a human/norn/asura/sylvari (No Charr, just can't quite like that design).

This nailed half the problem in one. The bigger issue goes back to the initial change instituting the "Mechanical Genius" game mechanic in the first place. But the fact that they think the problem is a penalty visibility issue shows how profoundly they do not understand this problem which leads to continuing to try to implement wrong solutions.

They may not have touched reaper proper, but as with several other changes in the past year or so the hits to core necro reverberate to reaper as well. In this case the signet change that will no longer allow signets to impact shroud. That means that shroud will take a hit in power if you use the signet of spite, and you will stay in shroud a shorter duration than if you had been using signet of undeath to generate life-force to stay in shroud longer. Signet of vampirism will no longer heal you passively while you are hitting multiple opponents in shroud, etc.

Looking at Anet's history of responding to community unhappiness, they seem to have a tendency to not say anything until they have missed their real window of opportunity, then to offer platitudes while simultaneously staying the course. That leaves the few times they have not done that as rare exceptions. The fact is that expressing our disapproval on this forum notwithstanding, as consumers of their game we have very very little in the way of levers to apply influence, and that might be a good thing in some ways. Given the degree to which many cannot even agree on the forums on what would be a good idea/course of action, imagine a world in which all of us were button mashing trying to pull every lever of influence to try and move ANet in our preferred direction. The company would crash, and be unable to relaunch. Hmm, wondering now if my experience with the game client is influencing the metaphors I use. That said, their functional policy of extended silence has always been a pain point with the community. Perhaps there are business reasons of which we as a community remain ignorant. I'd really like to believe that because it is all too easy to become cynical, disappointed and frustrated.

Some of these changes are exceptionally bad for the game and really need to not be included in the 6/19 update and either completely reworked or the existing traits/skills left as they are. ENGINEER/MECHANIST: "Mechanist's penalty for being too far from its mech is something that we've been keeping an eye on since it was added to the game. We think there's room for improvement, and in this update, we're changing the penalty from a mech stat reduction to an increased cooldown for the mech command skills. We believe that this change will make the penalty more visible and easier to understand." Mechanical Genius: This trait has been reworked. Instead of the mech incurring a stat-reduction penalty, command skills now take longer to recharge if activated while the mech is farther than a range of 360 away from the engineer. You completely miss the problem going on with the present iteration of mechanist which can be boiled down to two main issues: 1. Visibility - The problem isn't a lack of visibility/awareness of the PENALTY, it is a lack of visibility of the MECH itself. In content where there are 3-20 Mechs, picking out my own Mech is nearly impossible, completely without considering visual effect bloat. If you want to make a visibility change so that players are aware of the penalty, then you need to make the player's own mech highly contrasted from those belonging to other players AND give some sort of high contrast visual indicator when the mech & player are separated by too great a distance, maybe something like the colored screen border used for raid effects & reaper. 2. The bigger problem is that AI management isn't fun. Roll back several years to before PoF, this is a large part of why Rangers wanted an option to do full damage without a pet penalty. Simply changing the kind of penalty for distance only doubles down on a bad change and makes it worse. Micromanaging a pet isn't skill level, it is frustrating. The mech will forget to attack, its own DPS is slowed down, and who knows where the AI decided to park it in the first place, certainly not in the first, second or third space I would have picked. This one needs to be straight up rolled back to its original state. If the concern is that Mechanist has too high of DPS for too low skill cap, drop the raw base numbers to give it a solid middle tier DPS. Or if you absolutely HAVE to have options for increased skill, then do something with combo effects to boost it out of middle tier to a higher tier DPS. Maybe tie those to active use of signets? Something other than forcing players to micromanage a bad Pet AI and trying to find a pet that is lost on their screen. NECROMANCER: "Scourge has always been intended to be a viable support option, but the lack of quickness or alacrity has held it back in endgame content outside of specific cases. That won't be an issue anymore, as we've adjusted Desert Empowerment to be that source of alacrity. With scourge support likely becoming more viable in general use, we felt that its reviving power was just a bit too high and have made some adjustments to bring it more in line. We'll be keeping a very close eye on alacrity scourge's performance and will follow up as needed." Signets of Suffering: This trait has been reworked and causes signet skills to remove boons from affected foes. This is seriously punishing to a lot of builds. Reaper has taken hit after hit to its shroud duration and this is yet one more that reduces the viability of reaper shroud focused builds by taking away the signets passive affects while in shroud. But then this also impacts every other aspect of necromancer because it guts the signet lifeforce generation that is core to how the necromancer works. This one needs to be left out entirely. Boon Strip vs. Boon Corruption Unholy Feast: This skill now removes boons instead of converting them into conditions. Spiteful Spirit: This trait now removes boons instead of converting them into conditions. Enfeebling Blood: This skill no longer converts boons into conditions. Lesser Enfeeble: This skill no longer converts boons into conditions. This is straight up nerf to necromancer across the board. Boon corruption is a key part of what makes a necromancer. This nerf gives a hard hit to condition based necro builds. Finally, worst for last: Desert Empowerment: This trait has been moved to the grandmaster tier, replacing Feed from Corruption. The barrier from this trait will now only apply around the shade and will affect 5 targets. This trait now also grants alacrity to allies when you grant them barrier. By placing this in the grandmaster tier so that we must choose between barrier generation and the larger shade, this effectively destroys the role of the support scourge in a way that is not and cannot be made up by adding alacrity. Scourge doesnt NEED alacrity. If support scourge is seeing a drop in use because it doesn't stack well against other support options, then it should be buffed up, not gutted and reworked into a pale echo of other support classes. Roll this one back, leave it out, and come back later with changes that dont run necromancer through the blender.

Same thing here, except instead of dyes I've tried to keep my wife's masteries up to date. 🙂

yep, this update killed my client too until I went back and used the "-usecoherent" command line argument too.

As I've said elsewhere, I would certainly make legendary aquatic breathers, and frankly if they put them in the game it will almost certainly follow the same light/medium/heavy pattern that all the rest of the armor follows. Personally I think that is ok since Legendaries are long term investment goals, and with the wardrobe, now even more valuable.