SoftFootpaws.9134

i think the issue is, for nearly a decade thief was effectively the king of roaming, skirmishes, and small-scale pvp (especially conquest). it's not that arenanet hates the class or anything, but just like with the druid + chronomancer duopoly in raids around heart of thorns, and the healbrand monopoly in most of pve from path of fire onward, they need players to log into something other than thief when they are playing the competitive modes outside of a zerg, because lack of diversity makes for bad gameplay and lack of player retention in the long-term. even after all the nerfs, the majority of roamers i encounter are still thieves, and i still see one in nearly every team in pvp. i feel this is because despite being harder to play than most classes, thief still gives you the best of everything in a small-scale competitive setting. i think mesmer had the same problem, for a long time. not quite as long as thief, but enough that it really hurt every the uptake of any other class.

if you can stick with thief long enough to level up the spectre subclass, then it plays very similar to necromancer with a shroud and everything. its also an effective support class so you can go full heal and tank in instanced content (alacheal spectre) without anyone complaining. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Specter furthermore, the daredevil subclass is far less squishy than the basic thief and excels at being a melee bruiser. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Daredevil if you don't want to mess around with thief in pve that much to get enough hero points to level a subclass, you can simply buy them from wvw from the heroics notary after playing there for a while with any character, though it takes several days to afford all 250 points. additionally hero point trains will often run through the heart of thorns maps and usually only require the basic raptor and basic gliding (automatically unlocked in hot, eod or soto). you can also directly buy hero points from the gemstore if your wallet is not a concern. as for gearing up, i think for open-world you don't want to play with berserker, dire or similar stats, you likely want to play with celestial stats. you can obtain this gear easily again from wvw from the unified golem merchant, and will cost like 2g for a full set (again, after some playtime there for badges of honor) or from pve from verdant brink in hot, as it can be obtained from stat-select bladed armor, with ascended trinkets being available from laurel merchants and living world maps. there's also crafting, but you need level 400 in the relevant diciplines and creating charged quartz crystals has a time gate of once per day. you can search on youtube for thief celestial builds that will greatly reduce your stress of playing it and will work for anything but raids.

in my experience you'll get the log in loop if you use guildwars2.com, instead try using arena.net and disabling tracking protection (shield icon in the location bar). unfortunately if someone else has access to the old e-mail address they may have already used the code.

fear not, the game will put you against the same platinum duo again and again for multiple games in a row even if you're silver or gold ranked, just to make sure that you get thoroughly stomped into the ground and quit pvp, then you will finally be free. i think its trying to do us all a favor here.

i think the biggest issue is that the balance team seems sometimes disconnected from the game. for example, for many years they were afraid to give reaper any real damage because the saw reaper as a tank that would be best in slot if it could both take damage and deal it, even though in reality the mechanics of reaper shroud mean you have to avoid almost every enemy attack or lose all your damage unlike other classes. another example is that they seem to see elementalist as this unstoppable power house when properly played even though one mistake is always downstate. i feel like the balance for the classes for everything from health to damage to crowd control to even just how much range it has (this is very important in some fights!) is done completely in a vacuum without taking any other data into account like how often the class goes down, or fails a breakbar and so on. this is strange because they should have a mountain of data from metrics to tell them all this, and to find the coorelations, but they don't?

the combat system in this game is literally just quake but with role-playing mechanics. i mean, this is pretty obvious from any pvp match, especially since the original set of maps were directly modelled after quake iii team arena, including the announcer which was removed . furthermore wvw is just a real-time strategy game where you're the actual units instead of the commander managing the user interface. i think this game has alot more in common with fps and rts than it does with most mmorpgs, many of which are click-to-move at that.

i think there's been many insanely popular games that counter this line of thinking, especially in the fps and rts genres. i feel like if this was really true then those games wouldn't sell millions of copies, when their matchups can be as difficult as something like the soo-won meta. it seems to me like being a casual player (which means not having alot of time to play) gets confused with sheer laziness alot. the game attracts players who don't want to do anything simply because the game design has made it viable to do nothing, in the bulk of the content available. if you tried to do that in almost any other game, you would probably be dead in the first five minutes of gameplay. this game was actually much harder at release, with far less powercreep and a significantly more advanced ai and mob density, and again in heart of thorns. while there were some player complaints, the best known reason we have for it being changed is server performance.

i think the only real dps check in the game with current levels of powercreep is cosmic observatory challenge mote. everything else is more than doable if only half your squad is doing decent damage, including fractal and raid cm's, and bosses like dhuum have even been done with as few as four players. sunqua peak, silent surf and cosmic observatory are just fake dps checks as well because they favor range and condition damage. if you go in there with a ranged condi build like condition virtuoso, you will find that your damage doubles or triples and gives you plenty of room to avoid mechanics. this has been called out as being bad design since the rest of the game favors melee power and support builds, but for some reason arenanet continues to make new encounters work like this. i feel like the only new encounter we've had in years that doesn't favor this style of gameplay is temple of febe, but we have yet to see the challenge mote. if you have to spread every five seconds again then we'll be back to the same situation no doubt. i think when players ask for the game to go back to focusing on mechanics and not damage (i'm one of them), what they're actually asking is for it to go back to the old encounter design that wasn't playing out like an episode of road runner and coyote. to put it simply, damage was always important, its just that you could always do damage before without relying on specific builds and class mechanics that not everyone has access to, or trained up.

i think you need to have the story mode done on that character, in order to enter them at any time. did you play through icebrood saga?

this game is a bit strange in that pve is supposedly its focus point and yet it makes most single player games look like dark souls in comparison. its the only game i know of where line of sight tactics (and other general tactics against ai) aren't even understood by the majority of the playerbase. i feel like arenanet really missed the mark with the difficulty, when you can mow down enemies in queensdale with your autoattatck while still leveling. i think outside of instanced content, the majority of your skill bar doesn't even have realistic use cases, either. the enemies did originally have a more advanced behavior, but i recall it being removed pretty early on for server performance reasons.

i think that lunar new year should be in a canthan map that is accessible to all players, but with part of it left behind in divinity's reach. we also need a festival for the black citadel and the grove. for the grove, easter would work (the bunny variant, not the religious one), possibly moving super adventure box into summer to fill the huge gap there, but for the black citadel i honestly have no idea. presumably it would be something autumn-based.

please see my original post though, i edited it to add that you can't use keys on steam accounts, as they go through valve and not arenanet!

yes, it has nothing to do with your ability to buy the expansion as its sold as a product and not applied to your account in any way.

if you log into the website and buy the expansion, you receive a key in your email that you can give away. just keep in mind the person you send it to has to keep the key in a safe place as it will be required for any customer support inqueries in the future as proof of ownership! if you buy the expansion from the gemstore, its automatically applied to your account, so don't do that. beware that any kind of key or gemcard or gift code doesn't work on steam accounts.

i usually pug the challenge modes with no-requirements (except food and pots) due to all the powercreep, so it seriously doesn't matter anymore. almost every healer has access to both a source of aegis and a source of stability, which is enough for most fights. if you need more, then try dodging i guess? i honestly haven't seen "lf hb" be the standard for fractal groups in a long time.

i'm confused at why hey chose a web-based ui to begin with instead of writing a better abstraction layer over the game's existing user interface. it kind of makes sense for the launcher and trading post due to all the network communication going on, but for the vault its just a waste of resources.

i feel like magic find works alot better than it seems, but 300% is only something like a 30% increase in the quality of loot rolls. even so, this is enough to push me from exotic to ascended quite often, and i have an entire mule full of nothing but ascended gear because of it. i think veterans also don't realise how much better loot then get than newbies. an established account drops hundreds of more rares per week than a fresh one.

i don't think its hard to understand that the movement mechanics are ping-dependant, and if it works good for you then your ping is probably below 100ms? unfortunately that doesn't include the majority of the playerbase, especially from other countries. its different for stuff like jumping mushrooms because that's open-world stuff; this is instanced content where you can kill your team by failing a jump. the ziplines are also still ping-dependant, but not nearly as severe as the bundle and would work better in most situattions. try fighting an enemy with the warrior's greatsword skills on a ping of 100ms+ in pvp or wvw then you will see the problem.

i just wish it would stop putting us in teams of the same players over and over, i'm pretty sure this is responsible for alot of losses (and wins for the other team). i bet if you record the data of the players that end up on your team, over half of them will be the same through the entire run, especially at night! i've found that all you can do when you keep getting similar teams is to log off, because it won't change.

i'm going to be honest, there's alot to unpack in this post; like why you have 60 characters with marauder's gear and scholar's rune.

its been a long ttme, but i believe all the upgrades you had before will transfer over, including bank capacity. however, you won't have a guild hall and will have to go lion's arch to access many guild services, with the only service accessible from other cities being the guild bank itself.

i think they just have to keep putting instanced content in the vault, it will continue to draw newer players and the community will change!

i went back to each location on another, newer character and was able to charm the brown bear at every spot without problems, which is bizarre.

i just went to these locations in-game with a ranger to test, and they are broken. there's simply no interaction prompt even if you don't have the pet. i was able to tame other pets just fine however, so it seems to be the brown bear only?

i don't want to be mean, but some players do more damage with the fireball on the skyscale than with their entire rotations on the ground. its easy to use leaching as your reasoning for something being nerfed or removed, but there's many different forms of leaching in this game!