Crystal Black.8190

Relic of the warrior which reduces weapon swap CD doesnt trigger for class effects like the elementalist attunements or revenant legends while they normally do count as weapon swap for all other effects.

How is this change a buff for mesmers in any way? Everyone who is not blind will interrupt your 2,5s mantra preparations. You want to heal, interrupt! You want to get aegis for a block, just wait 2,5sec until you get it. Want to remove condis? What can happen in the 2,5sec until you got them removed? It's so easy to interrupt preparations and so clunky to use the on preparation effects they could as well not exist. I would rather take the firebrand mantras with their enhanced final charge. Those are at least useable.

Can Mesmers get the firebrand mantras with s stronger effect on final charge and auto-preperation out of combat? For Firebrand you have a instant potentially stronger effect in exchange to preparing them again. Mesmers on the other hand have a effect after a huge cast time, that isnt even accessible until all charges are consumed. Its also an annoyance to manually prepare mantras. No one used mesmer mantras because of their preperation effect. What will most likely happen is that you will keep sitting at one charge and wait for the second charge. I dont see the mesmer mantras in a space that would encourage you to use up all charges.

If you give cc skills therir damage back please consider reaper shrouds skill 5 Executioner's Scythe. It is this super slow and very obvious telegraphed skill and its core idea was to be this skill to finish off targets with low health. Yet it deals no damage and doesnt get any bonus damage anymore if your target is below the 50%/25% health treshhold. It feels like the skill lost its whole identity.

Just discovered there is no stelath attack for shroud, which is disappointing. I would like to see one added, having a special attack while stelathed is one of the fun parts of thief, shroud shouldnt be excluded here.

Willbender has an identity crisis. Lore wise they are the bodyguards of the emperor but there is nothing in their skill kit that helps them protect another player. The class is supposed to be more selfish but in no skill is even a hint of being a protector while I would have expected an entire trait line dedicated to being a bodyguard. Another theme seems to be being an assassin, but willbender is worse fighting a lone isolated target or hunting one down. Instead Willbender favors hitting as many targets as possible to trigger virtues. Virtues: I like the idea of making them more active to use, but guardians rely on their passives to a large degree, be it to survive by healing and blocking or dealing damage by applying and triggering the on burn traits. Furthermore all the passive enhancing traits, which there are a lot of, suddenly do nearly nothing. This needs to change. An elite spec shouldnt invalidate most of the core classes traits. A possible solution would be to grant a stronger effect of the currents passive on each strike, while maintaining the even larger effect on every fifth. Eg purity of body could no longer grant passive endurance regeneration, but restores a flat amount of endurance every strike and an even larger amount every fifth. There are also things like absolute resolve increasing the healing of virtue 2, but willbenders phoenix protocol grandmaster takes away all healing of virtue 2. No matter how bad and anti-synergistic the traits you chose there should never be a case in which one trait completely nullifies the effect of another. While some passive virtue enhancing effects don't do much because they are just active for a few seconds there are also trait effects like reduced passive interval for aegis on indomitable courage that do nothing at all. While the rest of the trait has an effect, it feels quite bad if half of its usual effect just gets axed. I doesn't translate in a shorter cd for virtue 3 or reduced number of strikes to gain the boons. It just does nothing. Virtues just proc every fifth hit, that means you are encouraged to hit as many targets as possible. That's not what assassins usually do that focus on one target to hunt down and kill. A possible solution to make willbender a better assassin in a 1vs1 scenario could be to apply to the first target struck after using a virtue some kind of mark. If you strike the marked target it counts as several hits for triggering virtue effects. Rushing Justice and Advancing Strike have very similar effects. It is hard to tell them apart. Please change the effects of one of them. Traits: The general design idea seems to be that willbenders traits are not allowed to be positive. You need to give up something to gain something else. That is a nice ideas for one trait in each category, but you should not be forced to take them at all. So there should always be two alternatives that are purely beneficial. If there is a trait that takes something away from you the thing you gain needs to be a lot better than usual. You not only have to use a trait slot that you could spend on something else, but also give up even more things. The traits also lack any synergy with the core class traits. For example conceited curate that reduces outgoing healing, but other trade lines like honor are built around increasing outgoing healing. A much better design approach would be to convert outgoing healing into something else. Like gain a fraction of outgoing healing as barrier or something similar. Something that synergises with higher outgoing healing and core traits. The higher your outgoing healing modifier the higher the selfish benefit. Even for a selfish build the core heal traits become now potentially useful and worth considering. Other examples of the lack of synergy between willbender and the core class are the lack of boons willbender hands out. Willbender should be no boon support, but it could still hand out boons that benefit core class traits like altruistic healing. Like activating virtues could grant swiftness to allies too. Or the trait that hands out resistance on shadowstep could benefit allies or some vigor. Boons that arent overly powerful but are nice to have. A big one is the lack of passive aegis. A lot of traits trigger on aegis blocking something. Heal on aegis shatter, damage on aegis shatter, gain boons on aegis shatter, deal more damage under aegis and other effects. Having regular access to aegis is a core aspect to guardians design and willbender lacks this. There should be alternative ways for willbender to gain aegis regularly now that there is no passive virtue like make the heal no channeled block, but an aegis buff to trigger that or a trait that grants aegis on virtue use or on use of a mobility skill. Something that weaves back in aegis to the elite spec. Mobility skills. Giving willbender always access to mobility in the form of its virtues is good but we don't need more mobility in the utilities. Core guard has two teleports and a mobility skill on its melee weapons. Willbender brings more mobility with virtues, there doesn't need to be even more mobility. Use the utility skills to do something else than mobility, like giving them the bodyguard feel. Instead give willbender traits that enhance the already abundant mobility skills of core guards. Bodyguards, that's what you told us willbenders are, but they are not good at protecting anything. Willbender should not be the usual support guard, but there are other ways to support. Like give them a taunt skill to safe allies. Enhance their ability to blind opponents. Blind is one of the guards' themes. Create a trait that blinds opponents if they hit you while having light aure+ make the virtues leap finisher. Or other ways to blind them. Apply weakness/cripple/slow/chill to take away their ability to hurt your allies. Grant swiftness/superspeed/vigor/resistance to allies to help them escape. That is also support but a different kind of support guard does so far, while also helping to sell that mobility and bodyguard theme.

Harbinger uses torment as its main condition which scourge already uses. That is an unnecessary double use. The theme of harbinger is this alchemist/elixir thing. Wouldn't poison as the main condition be more fitting? Throw in confusion on some skills to represent hallucinogens and you get an identity that is quite different to the torment of scourge. Blight is a problem. While it fits in the theme of necromancer weakening themself to gain positive effects it lacks any synergy with ncros core traits that are supposed to help that playstyle. If core necro weakens themself it is by applying a condition onto themself. Other skills have more potent effects like Life Siphon that heals for more if you are bleeding or allows you to consume/transfer the condition to enemies or minions. I suggest rolling the effects of blight into vulnerability applied to the necromancer. To make group play no hindrance vulnerability can no longer be cleansed by allies instead you gain a beneficial effect like healing/barrier/protection/resolution if it would be cleansed. It would allow players to better manage their blight/vulnerability by using aspects of the core class. One of the traits could then transform this to its current incarnation that prevents cleansing/consuming/transferring of vulnerability for the necromancer too but in return enhances its beneficial effects. Adept skills offer you a choice what benefit blight should have for you. Except not all three have a beneficial effect, Vile Vials enhances blight in no way. It should grant the necromancer boon duration. So there is a choice between Power damage, boon duration and condition damage. There should be no way possible to trait in a way that blight has no beneficial effect like it currently is the case. Especially not if blight is considered a core mechanic of the specialisation. A simple blight does x effect is quite boring so they should be enhanced in some minor way like it is the case for Septic Corruption. Wicked corruption should do something similar that favors power damage in a small way besides the blight effect. Elixirs are in its current iteration very boring. Drinking an elixir and gaining boons isnt what a fun utility looks like. Harbingers theme is weakening themself for beneficial effects. So why not grant a nice chunk of boons while also applying non damaging conditions that you could consume or transfer. Yes you self apply blight but like mentioned above it lacks any interaction with the core classes self harm mechanics because it is no condition. Elixir traits make no logical sense. The necro drinks something and allies and enemies around him gain effects. While gameplay beats realism a simple change would be to make elixirs ground targeted like engineers toolbelt elixirs if you equip that trait. It would also make the new utilities a lot more fun to use because they are now ground targeted. Grandmaster traits are all quite boring to use because they are all passives. I see a similarity to thiefs grandmasters in that in a similar way all enhance dodges, but dodges are active, being in shroud is passive. One of the traits being passive is okay but I would look for other ways to enhance the shroud in a more active way, like decreased cooldowns for each stack of blight in conjunction with faster blight accumulation while in shroud. Shroud skills are in the wrong order. Shroud skills have a theme that makes it easier to know what your skills are doing even if you haven't played that elite before. Shroud skill placement looks like this. Slot 2 mobility skill, Slot 3 fear/cc, Slot 4 high damage, Slot 5 some form of control. If we look at harbinger the skills are like this slot 2 has the high damage, slot 3 mobility, slot 4 cc and slot 5 control. To be in line with the other versions of shroud I suggest reordering the following Slot 2 Devouring Cut, Slot 3 Voracious Arc, Slot 4 Dark Barrage, Slot 5 Vital Draw. Another thing to note is that harbinger has no access to fear in shroud unlike any other necro spec. I suggest changing the daze on Voracious Arc to a short fear in conjunction with cripple. This allows to trigger the on fear effects for harbinger of other trait lines. There exists the dark aura in the game and you would think that is a thing necros can get,but they cant. Neither is there a skill that directly grants dark aura nor are there leap or blast finishers a necro can use in conjunction with their many dark fields to gain dark aura. None of the harbingers' movement skills are leap finishers or can be traited to be one. Consider either making them leaps or giving one of the elixirs a dark aura.

Overall feels like the most refined elite spec. Daggers range should be in the mid range band between 600-900. Mesmer has two great long range weapons. While lacking a power mid range weapon besides scepter. Psychic Force utility feels overloaded and tries to do two different things. It is a stunbreak and wants to be used reactionary as a defensive skill. It also is a cc and hands out offensive buffs to be used aggressively. I would remove the stunbreak and hand it to Blade Renewal. Blade Renewal feels clunky. It is a 3 seconds distortion on a long cooldown. You rarely ever need to distort for that long. I would like to see its cd be reduced alongside its distort duration and its blade gain reduced to 3. Should in my opinion be the stunbreak of the utility kit. Sword of Decimations animation looks like at some point it was a cc/knockdown or high damage skill. This huge blade drops down on the target and all that happens is some immob and a small amount of damage? It should be a knockdown in itself and if the target is already controlled it applies no cc but instead gains a 500% damage buff. It would be a cc but against already cc’d targets it becomes a nuke. Thousand Cuts is a fire and forget elite. To spice things up a bit it should get the bounce from walls effect like the dagger 2 skill. Also consider making it a channeled skill with stability that fires in front of the meser like a gatling gun. Enhance rotation speed during the channel and decrease forward movement. Infinite Forge should grant the blades out of combat too. You keep the blades you gained during combat and carry them into the next fight. It should allow you to always restock to 3 blades for the next fight even if you didn't draw it out for 9sec just to restock with infinite forge.

Not just the ones of other players, mine too. Aura infusions are cheaper than auraless stat infusions. The effects from the legendary trinkets are always visible, which is a pain too.

I am wondering why don't the raceway, and the mini games have their own door in lionsarch? Instead they are hidden behind NPC dialogue. At first I didn't realise this content even exists and thought all race achievement had something do to with the one in the labyrinth.I encountered a similar problem with the festival collection achievements, that are located under collection instead of the festival tab. I learned about them by reading a third party Halloween guide. Why aren't they for example in the lunatic wardrobe part of the festival achievement section? I would encourage the devs to change that for next year, because I feel I might not be the only one unintentionally missing some of the Halloween content.

Reward track bags are affected by magic find. So call of the mists gives you better rewards from PvP while it is active.

Why should fractals raids pvp wvw or crafting provide guaranteed ascended weapons?

As far as I know Evon and his company are still an ash legion operation and ultimately controlled by Malice, although I guess Evon is allowed to act mostly independent.Has there been any involvement of Evon/BLTC in the icebrood saga so far?

At least this is true for me. Building legendaries etc is a nice long term goal at one point you can get them. With super low drop rates of bosses it is highly unlikely to ever get what you desire. I rather spent my time working on something i can obtain instead on trying to get a rng reward.Rewards should either be rare but tradeable or accountbound, but guaranteed after x amount of time/things done.

There are some skills in gw that allow you to grant a life steal effect to allies, but they dont behave all the same. Necromancers Vampiric Aura, Signet of Vampirism and Renegades Soulcleave's Summit use the players own stats to calculate the damage and healing of the life steal effect. Heralds Facet of Nature grants a life steal aura while in assassin form, but this one uses the affected players stats instead of the heralds. Thiefs Leeching Venoms lets shared venoms steal life. This one uses the thiefs power for the damage calculation, but the affected allies healing power for the healing part. The current system is very confusing and all life steal shares should work the same. I prefer if all skills would use the players own stats for the effect calculation, so the numbers shown in the skill description are correct, but please unify the system to make it less confusing.