End of Dragons elite spec preview

[Grand Marshal.4098]

1 hour ago, Kodama.6453 said:

I doubted it since I didn't expect from Anet to use the colour theme of thief on a guardian teaser. Turns out they did it, most likely to create discussion and confusion, just like what happened with people arguing on both sides if it is thief or guardian.

ofc. Could be either tbh. But I didn't rule either possibility off. Felt too convoluted to be just a straightforward reply. With the 2 other especs getting revealed, (I imagine vids too) we will finally see if the bullet like icon goes to necro and if the dual sword are detined for guard (which imo make sense) but let's wait and see.Here's me hoping they don't kitten up warrior!

[draxynnic.3719]

2 hours ago, Kodama.6453 said:

I doubted it since I didn't expect from Anet to use the colour theme of thief on a guardian teaser. Turns out they did it, most likely to create discussion and confusion, just like what happened with people arguing on both sides if it is thief or guardian.

Eh, I don't think they were being intentionally misleading here. It seems to have been an artifact of them having darkened the image to remove almost all colour.

 

The parts that people were initially interpreting as reddish actually worked out to be a desaturated orange. While that is a colour associated with thief (particularly in the PvP screen), when the image had the saturation turned back up, they ended up as more of a gold colour. While it hasn't been used before in guardian artworks, I wouldn't say that having gold highlights on their armour is going against the theme of guardian. Particularly since the colour scheme that was revealed a few hours ago isn't just straight blue but blue and yellow, which suggests that the elite specialisation might have more yellow to its palette than base guardian (similar to scourge adding a lot of yellowish effects to the normal necromancer green, and druid adding a lot of blue-white to the ranger).

 

It's just an unfortunate coincidence that deep orange and dark blue-indigo are both colours that are associated with thief, so when bright blue and gold get darkened to make the silhouette, they end up looking like thief colours.

[Acyk.9671]

deleted

Edited April 3, 2022 by Acyk.9671

[Kodama.6453]

4 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Eh, I don't think they were being intentionally misleading here. It seems to have been an artifact of them having darkened the image to remove almost all colour.

 

The parts that people were initially interpreting as reddish actually worked out to be a desaturated orange. While that is a colour associated with thief (particularly in the PvP screen), when the image had the saturation turned back up, they ended up as more of a gold colour. While it hasn't been used before in guardian artworks, I wouldn't say that having gold highlights on their armour is going against the theme of guardian. Particularly since the colour scheme that was revealed a few hours ago isn't just straight blue but blue and yellow, which suggests that the elite specialisation might have more yellow to its palette than base guardian (similar to scourge adding a lot of yellowish effects to the normal necromancer green, and druid adding a lot of blue-white to the ranger).

 

It's just an unfortunate coincidence that deep orange and dark blue-indigo are both colours that are associated with thief, so when bright blue and gold get darkened to make the silhouette, they end up looking like thief colours.

I would believe this if it had been the case for the other 2 teaser images, but It wasn't.

 

The details on the necromancer teaser picture were all just the regular necromancer green, not extremely desaturated to appear way darker than they are supposed to be. Same with the details for virtuoso and their pink colour.

 

Additionally, we got the altered teaser image with all 3 specs now, which shows the guardian with more obvious blue colours and this artefact is nowhere to be found there.

 

There are 2 interpretations for this here for me.

Either Anet was putting in the work to ensure that the actual class colours appear on necro and mesmer, but didn't put in the same work for guardian because of laziness.

Or they were deliberately using this red colour to make the image ambiguous to create discussion since they still had to bridge some time to the actual reveals.

[draxynnic.3719]

34 minutes ago, Kodama.6453 said:

I would believe this if it had been the case for the other 2 teaser images, but It wasn't.

 

The details on the necromancer teaser picture were all just the regular necromancer green, not extremely desaturated to appear way darker than they are supposed to be. Same with the details for virtuoso and their pink colour.

 

Additionally, we got the altered teaser image with all 3 specs now, which shows the guardian with more obvious blue colours and this artefact is nowhere to be found there.

 

There are 2 interpretations for this here for me.

Either Anet was putting in the work to ensure that the actual class colours appear on necro and mesmer, but didn't put in the same work for guardian because of laziness.

Or they were deliberately using this red colour to make the image ambiguous to create discussion since they still had to bridge some time to the actual reveals.

To me, they're clearly different scenarios.

 

The equivalent of the original necromancer and mesmer teasers is the one we just received in the recent invitation, blue and yellow-brown, distinguishable from background flourishes due to having a darker shade of the same colours, and with the geometric symbol (which, interestingly, doesn't seem to match any of the elite specialisation symbols) behind the character's head.

 

The initial teaser we got for what we now know (well, maybe not technically know, but I certainly don't think there's any reasonable doubt remaining) was guardian is a very different beast: they've taken the fully-detailed image (which thus far we only have for Virtuoso in an undoctored form), trimmed out the background, and darkened it in order to hide most of the detail and colour information.

 

I don't think there was any intent to deceive here. I think the actual idea was that they figured that since the artwork is wearing a known armour style, that we'd be able to figure out that it was a heavy profession from the armour style, and so on to identify it as guardian from there. Which we did. It's just an unfortunate coincidence that the brightest parts of the original image, those that retained some colour after everything else was darkened to black, ended up appearing similar to thief colours on being darkened from what is probably light shining off blued armour and bronze-gold highlights.

 

Makes me wonder what would happen if someone ran the same filter on the Virtuoso image, in fact. The main colour would probably be the exposed skin and the gold decoration just below the shoulders, which would probably end up darkened to a ruddy orange. People would probably have thought it was elementalist.

[Kodama.6453]

3 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

To me, they're clearly different scenarios.

 

The equivalent of the original necromancer and mesmer teasers is the one we just received in the recent invitation, blue and yellow-brown, distinguishable from background flourishes due to having a darker shade of the same colours, and with the geometric symbol (which, interestingly, doesn't seem to match any of the elite specialisation symbols) behind the character's head.

 

The initial teaser we got for what we now know (well, maybe not technically know, but I certainly don't think there's any reasonable doubt remaining) was guardian is a very different beast: they've taken the fully-detailed image (which thus far we only have for Virtuoso in an undoctored form), trimmed out the background, and darkened it in order to hide most of the detail and colour information.

 

I don't think there was any intent to deceive here. I think the actual idea was that they figured that since the artwork is wearing a known armour style, that we'd be able to figure out that it was a heavy profession from the armour style, and so on to identify it as guardian from there. Which we did. It's just an unfortunate coincidence that the brightest parts of the original image, those that retained some colour after everything else was darkened to black, ended up appearing similar to thief colours on being darkened from what is probably light shining off blued armour and bronze-gold highlights.

 

Makes me wonder what would happen if someone ran the same filter on the Virtuoso image, in fact. The main colour would probably be the exposed skin and the gold decoration just below the shoulders, which would probably end up darkened to a ruddy orange. People would probably have thought it was elementalist.

Why didn't they just darken it more to fully erase the red parts then?

It makes no sense for me. They could have just go all the way and erase the entire colour instead of just most of it and leave red marks on it, which is a colour associated with thieves.

 

In the end, we don't know the exact intrention behind this. All I know is that I won't fully trust artworks to have sincere information anymore, like trusting in colour coding.

Edited August 11, 2021 by Kodama.6453

[draxynnic.3719]

1 hour ago, Kodama.6453 said:

Why didn't they just darken it more to fully erase the red parts then?

It makes no sense for me. They could have just go all the way and erase the entire colour instead of just most of it and leave red marks on it, which is a colour associated with thieves.

 

In the end, we don't know the exact intrention behind this. All I know is that I won't fully trust artworks to have sincere information anymore, like trusting in colour coding.

They probably didn't realise it was potentially misleading. It's a bit of a Hanlon's razor situation.

 

I think colour coding generally is still trustworthy, but in this case they'd gone to some effort to make us figure it out from something other than colour coding. (Mind you, on the other hand, mesmer, guardian, and necromancer are probably the three professions with the clearest colour coding normally, so it may or may not be useful as a data point with future teases. We'll see. In the end, in this case, there was a pretty clear alternative means of identifying the profession - namely, that it was wearing a recognisable armour set.)

[ChronoPinoyX.7923]

2 hours ago, Kodama.6453 said:

In the end, we don't know the exact intrention behind this. All I know is that I won't fully trust artworks to have sincere information anymore, like trusting in colour coding.

No one should be doing that to begin with. Taking too much info based on artwork leads to... well this 

[Kodama.6453]

18 minutes ago, ChronoPinoyX.7923 said:

No one should be doing that to begin with. Taking too much info based on artwork leads to... well this 

That's literally the point of colour coding, tho. Communicating an information by associating things with specific colours.

 

Anet uses this all the time, like how they also used the pink colour of mesmer for their teaser or the green for necromancer. Now they have broken their own colour coding with this red part on the guardian teaser, tho.

 

Before, we could trust these colours to give clear and sincere information about the elite spec, every elite spec was associated with specific colour palettes. But now, we can't trust it anymore, they have broken their own colour coding, intentionally or unintentionally.

Edited August 11, 2021 by Kodama.6453

[ChronoPinoyX.7923]

14 minutes ago, Kodama.6453 said:

That's literally the point of colour coding, tho. Communicating an information by associating things with specific colours.

 

Anet uses this all the time, like how they also used the pink colour of mesmer for their teaser or the green for necromancer. Now they have broken their own colour coding with this red part on the guardian teaser, tho.

 

Before, we could trust these colours to give clear and sincere information about the elite spec, every elite spec was associated with specific colour palettes. But now, we can't trust it anymore, they have broken their own colour coding, intentionally or unintentionally.

This is why you don't rely on getting too much info on a teaser/silhouette to begin with. They didn't break their colour coding, they already showcased the full colour coded silhouette of this E-Spec. The issue is that you relied too much on a silhouette to tell you everything. 

[TaliaKirana.9137]

Well, with the teaser video today we know the icon and name of the Necromancer spec: Harbinger. I'm guessing we'll get a teaser video tomorrow with the guardian icon and spec name.

[Sea Wolf.7368]

It will be funny if a necromancer's new elite specialization  is stronger in alchemy and engineering than an engineer. It's weird to see core engineer aspects being handed out to other classes. Can't wait to see the rest of e-specs

[MrForz.1953]

11 minutes ago, Sea Wolf.7368 said:

It will be funny if a necromancer's new elite specialization  is stronger in alchemy and engineering than an engineer. It's weird to see core engineer aspects being handed out to other classes. Can't wait to see the rest of e-specs

 

Well some classes are better at warrior than warrior. Also alchemy is strong, I shudder to think at an even stronger alchemy.

Edited August 11, 2021 by MrForz.1953

[Kodama.6453]

12 minutes ago, Sea Wolf.7368 said:

It will be funny if a necromancer's new elite specialization  is stronger in alchemy and engineering than an engineer. It's weird to see core engineer aspects being handed out to other classes. Can't wait to see the rest of e-specs

Sucks to be an engi main.

[draxynnic.3719]

34 minutes ago, Kodama.6453 said:

That's literally the point of colour coding, tho. Communicating an information by associating things with specific colours.

 

Anet uses this all the time, like how they also used the pink colour of mesmer for their teaser or the green for necromancer. Now they have broken their own colour coding with this red part on the guardian teaser, tho.

 

Before, we could trust these colours to give clear and sincere information about the elite spec, every elite spec was associated with specific colour palettes. But now, we can't trust it anymore, they have broken their own colour coding, intentionally or unintentionally.

It was pretty clear that the colours of the silhouette had been heavily modified, though. We weren't supposed to figure it out from the colour. We were supposed to figure it out from the armour.

 

Which, I think, also explains why we had some colour rather than just being straight black - because that allows some of the details of the armour beyond the silhouette alone to be visible. I guess they could have made it all shades of grey instead, but then people would probably be convinced it was revenant. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[ChronoPinoyX.7923]

5 minutes ago, MrForz.1953 said:

 

Well some classes are better at warrior than warrior.

Running around with my Reaper Necro on GS already feels more warrior than Warrior. Necros just out here stealing specializations of other classes lel

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

1 hour ago, Sea Wolf.7368 said:

It will be funny if a necromancer's new elite specialization  is stronger in alchemy and engineering than an engineer. It's weird to see core engineer aspects being handed out to other classes. Can't wait to see the rest of e-specs

Think how warrior feels with their stances and physicals getting handed out, or other classes with their utilities getting handed out (meditations, deceptions, cantrips...). About time that engineer's had their toys handed out like candy to others.

[MrForz.1953]

3 minutes ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

Think how warrior feels with their stances and physicals getting handed out, or other classes with their utilities getting handed out (meditations, deceptions, cantrips...). About time that engineer's had their toys handed out like candy to others.

 

It had to be Necro. Just think! Alchemy + Necromancer!

 

What's next? Shadow Arts to Ranger? 😆

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

2 minutes ago, MrForz.1953 said:

 

It had to be Necro. Just think! Alchemy + Necromancer!

 

What's next? Shadow Arts to Ranger? 😆

For the 'Bunny Thumper' we all want? Yeah. Go for it. I totally think that could work with a F5 that teleports you and your pet around your target while you Hard CC it and the pet uses it's F2 mid cast.

[Dadnir.5038]

1 hour ago, Sea Wolf.7368 said:

It will be funny if a necromancer's new elite specialization  is stronger in alchemy and engineering than an engineer. It's weird to see core engineer aspects being handed out to other classes. Can't wait to see the rest of e-specs

 

I'm still stuck wondering why a necromancer would bother using alchemy when he can already use magic since they released the necromancer's teaser... I mean, it's obvious that the skills won't be stronger than the average e-spec skill that a necromancer would have gotten with simple "magic", why bother adding a ridiculous alchemical background...

 

The picture suggest a mid range e-spec (pistol), throwing mid range elixir (for condi aoe because direct boon support is not the necromancer thing)... I don't see anything new or exciting in this suggested gameplay... I mean, scourge has already been vomiting mid range aoe and conditions for quite a few years already.

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

5 minutes ago, Dadnir.5038 said:

 

I'm still stuck wondering why a necromancer would bother using alchemy when he can already use magic since they released the necromancer's teaser... I mean, it's obvious that the skills won't be stronger than the average e-spec skill that a necromancer would have gotten with simple "magic", why bother adding a ridiculous alchemical background...

 

The picture suggest a mid range e-spec (pistol), throwing mid range elixir (for condi aoe because direct boon support is not the necromancer thing)... I don't see anything new or exciting in this suggested gameplay... I mean, scourge has already been vomiting mid range aoe and conditions for quite a few years already.

It's Anet. In the EoD prepatch they will most likely nerf Scourge condition damage heavily to enforce that Harbringer is the Condi glass cannon spec.

 

You'll have then:

Reaper: Power Bruiser

Scourge: Support with hybrid DPS and high self sustain

Harbringer: Condi DPS spec with little self sustain.

 

Which means that Harbringer will end up as effective as Berserker is in "all game modes."

[Kodama.6453]

12 minutes ago, Dadnir.5038 said:

 

I'm still stuck wondering why a necromancer would bother using alchemy when he can already use magic since they released the necromancer's teaser... I mean, it's obvious that the skills won't be stronger than the average e-spec skill that a necromancer would have gotten with simple "magic", why bother adding a ridiculous alchemical background...

 

The picture suggest a mid range e-spec (pistol), throwing mid range elixir (for condi aoe because direct boon support is not the necromancer thing)... I don't see anything new or exciting in this suggested gameplay... I mean, scourge has already been vomiting mid range aoe and conditions for quite a few years already.

Fanservice.

 

People were asking for elixir necromancer, doesn't matter if it actually makes sense from a lore point of view. They just saw that people want it, so they created it.

 

Which makes me fear that they did the same for engineer with all the people saying here they want a golemancer or exosuit spec to cosplay iron man.

[Dadnir.5038]

1 minute ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

It's Anet. In the EoD prepatch they will most likely nerf Scourge condition damage heavily to enforce that Harbringer is the Condi glass cannon spec.

 

You'll have then:

Reaper: Power Bruiser

Scourge: Support with hybrid DPS and high self sustain

Harbringer: Condi DPS spec with little self sustain.

 

Which means that Harbringer will end up as effective as Berserker is in "all game modes."

 

I doubt it, I don't think this is how GW2's devs do things.

Don't get me wrong I'm not doubting that scourge might be weakened in a way or another but it's level of damage will stay the same for the simple reason that the scourge have 3 out of it's 12 major traits focused on dps. It's basically 3 traits support, 3 traits dps and 3 traits boon conversion. (You could even argue that the boon conversion traits are "dps traits". It's just to much of a part of the scourge.

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

1 minute ago, Dadnir.5038 said:

 

I doubt it, I don't think this is how GW2's devs do things.

Don't get me wrong I'm not doubting that scourge might be weakened in a way or another but it's level of damage will stay the same for the simple reason that the scourge have 3 out of it's 12 major traits focused on dps. It's basically 3 traits support, 3 traits dps and 3 traits boon conversion. (You could even argue that the boon conversion traits are "dps traits". It's just to much of a part of the scourge.

You're not wrong, but those DPS traits can be weakened to the point were the de facto become empty slots. See Deathly Chill for my reasoning why this will happen to Scourge once Harbringer is fully released.

[Dadnir.5038]

2 minutes ago, Kodama.6453 said:

Fanservice.

 

People were asking for elixir necromancer, doesn't matter if it actually makes sense from a lore point of view. They just saw that people want it, so they created it.

 

Which makes me fear that they did the same for engineer with all the people saying here they want a golemancer or exosuit spec to cosplay iron man.

Still the idea of yet another aoe condi mid range necromancer feel boring asf... And, well no if fanservice had been a thing the devs would have made something involving sword and vampiric stuff with lot of mobility for the necromancer (and what the picture show suggest anything but that.

 

At least you'd be able to fly as iron man... 😆