draxynnic.3719

> @"Sir Vincent III.1286" said:

> > Again, something drax has already covered. The norn had no issue with the charr moving forces through their land as long as there was an understanding that they were moving _through_, and yes, they stood aside and let it happen so the charr could get to Kryta. It's when the charr try to seize norn lands, or attack the norn directly, that the norn take issue.

>

> My point was, there was a conflict between the Norn and the Charr, yet the Charr never has such hate towards the Norn that they have against the humans. So I'm curious to know if they are preventing the human from something -- Ascension? fulfillment of the Prophesy? the Scepter of Orr? I have no clue. What do you think they want in Kryta? There are some pieces I might have missed or simply doesn't make sense.

Hatreds are, almost by definition, not rational.

However, charr-norn conflict has always been pretty low-key and a low priority for the charr hierarchy, and it's also one where the charr are the clear aggressors and haven't lost anything bar a few soldiers.

Meanwhile, from the charr perspective at least (I do think there may be more to it that we haven't been told) the humans were the aggressors, whose invasion seized a large portion of what the charr viewed as their territory and ended a charr golden age. To our knowledge, unless you count Kralkatorrik (and perhaps not even then), _nobody_ in the recorded history of the charr has delivered such a defeat to the charr. Ergo, it makes sense for them to have a special hatred for humans that they don't have for other enemies.

There may even be a certain degree of embarrassment to it. Losing skirmishes to ten-foot giants who can turn into giant bears and wolves is one thing. Losing to a bunch of soft-skinned 'mice' half their size is something entirely different.

In this context... their hatred may be so strong that 'kill all humans' was sufficient motivation to attack Kryta. And if they'd won in Kryta then that represents that much more territory for the charr.

Like I've said, though, Kryta going to the aid of Orr or even Ascalon was a possibility that the titans, if not the charr themselves, would likely consider. A (relatively) small force attacking Kryta might not be seriously expected to win there and then, but might be enough to tie up the Krytan military from going somewhere else where they might cause more trouble than tying up a single charr army.

> @Redfeather.6401 said:

> I still think lyssa could be two entities and something significant happened between lyssa and balthazar (such as possibly becoming a retainer for his power?).

> Kind of suspicious that balthazar didn't curse lyssa, when cursing the gods by name, and that he had the mirror.

> Also suspicious that wintersday is right around the corner, and that means the beginning of the season of zephyr. Which means, the festival of lyss being celebrated in.... Vabbi! Possible Living Story episode? :astonished:

Joko seems to have banned worship of the gods (in favour of himself), so it's likely that the old traditions like the Festival of Lyss are no more.

> @Chaith.8256 said:

> I would be in favor of undoing a few specific Scrapper nerfs. The hammer nerfs were fair, it makes it a more balanced option... **also the Gyro nerfs to not have dazes when killed, while it was good to have less random AoE CC automatically punish you, removing it broke the traitline - there are multiple traits that affect dazes/stuns and now there aren't any besides leaping in a lightning field, lul.**

Yeah, this was pretty much my thought. The random dazes from gyros could be annoying, to be sure, but without them scrappers just don't have many stuns and dazes for Impact Savant to key off.

Major flaws:

1) Lack of customisation/adaptability. Other professions can respond to an increased chance of being hit by a certain kind of attack (conditions, CC, projectiles, etc) by slotting in skills that are effective against those attacks (resistance/clears, stability/stunbreaks, projectile hate, and so on) without otherwise changing their builds. Revenants, by and large, can't do this: there are a few traits, but adjusting to a greater presence of a particular threat generally means switching legend, which generally results in changing around the build entirely to something that is probably no longer doing what you wanted to do in the first place. The meditrapper dragonhunter, for instance, could take Procession of Blades instead of Smite Conditions if they just want more damage, or Contemplation of Purity if they expect to need to clear condi spikes, and can even trade Renewed Focus for Dragon's Maw for more damage and CC, and still essentially be a meditrapper with all these tweaks. Revenant simply doesn't have the ability to make these sorts of tweaks, and it shows: unless the legend skills are exactly what they need for the meta, they suffer.

There are a number of ways this could be solved. Giving the ability to swap some utility skills around would be one. Another could be reworking their traits so that you can actually use the trait system to make these tweaks.

2) Needs a ranged condi weapon - core.

As I've said elsewhere, the original draft of the revenant was essentially a no-weaponswap profession - but they failed to give revenant the tools that engineers and elementalists have to offset that. The two Es get away with it because they can use utility slots to bring additional sets of weapon skills, and their primary core weapons are versatile enough that playing just with those works. Revenants had neither offsetting factor: they have no additional weapons they can take as utility slots, and their weapons show a similar degree of specialisation as weaponswapping professions.

Making revenant work as a no-weaponswap profession would have required a complete rework of the weapons, I think: certainly of hammer and staff, mace and sword might have gotten away with it. So giving it a weaponswap was probably the better choice in the timeframe given...

However, as a weaponswapping profession, the revenant's choices are... lacking. Having the hammer as its only ranged option leaves the revenant overly sensitive to the balance state of that weapon, and the slow attack rate of hammer means that for condi builds, it isn't even particularly useful for triggering Rampant Vex. Having mace/axe being the only weaponset that inflicts damaging conditions also means there's no real good option for condi revs to take as their alternate set: sword apparently being popular for defensive purposes, chills to trigger Abyssal Chill, and a high attack rate to trigger Rampant Vex. Shortbow is a clear attempt to cover this, but being fixed to renegade, it does nothing to address the problem for heralds, core revenants, and any future elite specialisation that doesn't have a condi weapon.

Moderate issues:

3) Underwater combat. I probably don't need to go into detail here. The main reason I put it at 'moderate' is because ArenaNet seems to be increasingly regarding it as a mistake to be papered over, so the only times it really matters are jellyfish fractal and alpine borderlands.

Assuming that Darek is a guardian main because of avatar there?

There is a certain irony in comparing guardian to ele because as strong as dragonhunters were in soloqueue, they were almost unheard of in ESL, after HoT anyway. They're actually one of the prime examples of how not being in full-team tournaments does not mean 'weak'. It just means that, when you're looking to achieve maximum synergy in a full team, it's not currently optimal.

In fact, the ESL teambuilds tended to continue to use builds that were becoming scarce in general PvP because the nerfs that were applied to them (because they were dominant in ESL) rendered them increasingly suboptimal outside of organised team environments that did not have that support - this is essentially what happened to revenants and reapers.

So eles not being in the full-team competitive tournaments right now does not mean that they're weak in general. It just means they don't synergise as well with the other professions that are used.

Incidentally, targeting the ele is as much due to the impact they can have. Like necros, they're targeted in part because they're relatively easy to bring down compared to bruisers, but also in part because of the impact they can have if left alone.

I'm a little unsure why the reference to GW1 vets is there - GW2 elementalists in PvP generally don't play much like GW1 elementalists, although Fresh Air comes close to a GW1 lightning spike ele.

> @sniperman.1738 said:

> actually if you pay attention when someone becomes at new god it seems they take the opposite role of the previous one that died before them, so if Kasmeer would become a god, she would become a god of peace.

Not from my observation. Grenth is still the god of Death like Dhuum was. Kormir is still the goddess of Knowledge like Abaddon - she is even called a goddess of secrets a few times.

Replacements can approach the domain from a different angle and have different policies regarding their domain, but they still have the same domain as their predecessor. Balthazar's successor, if there is one, would still be a deity of conflict, strength, and competition. They might still be able to take it in a less violent direction - a deity of sports and athleticism, say - but they wouldn't be an opposite.

There's a part of me wondering if they might have planned for it to be Livia... or "I wonder if you're truly as young as-" Anise.

Unclear, but my guess is probably not. The orphan PC's parents' death happened a long time ago, and Caudecus seems to have been a fairly recent recruit. Keep in mind that Caudecus _had_ de facto control over Kryta at one point, during the regency before Jennah came of age - it was in this period that he decided he liked being the man in charge and started looking for ways to make that happen permanently. So it's likely that he didn't join the White Mantle until after the death of Jennah's father, and probably not until after the regency ended.

There are complicating factors in there.

The biggest one, though, is that PvE opponents tend to be pumped up with extra health and damage to make up for the fact that the AI (usually) can't use skills and dodges to the efficiency that a player can. So instead, it gets extra health and damage to compensate, even if lorewise the entity might be equal to or even inferior to the PC.

Secondly, it's questionable how much we're actually playing the Dragonslayer when in the open world - obviously, not every PC you see running around can be the Dragonslayer. When in the open world (and possibly for raids as well), it's possibly best to think of yourself as just another adventurer or possible an agent of your Order rather than the Dragonslayer. Which is why things that are reasonably easy to fight in instances often require groups in the open world - when in an instance you _are_ the Dragonslayer with all the strength you'd expect of a person who has killed an Elder Dragon and a fallen god (I don't count Zhaitan. The airship killed Zhaitan, not us), while in open world events you're basically just another adventurer and can't solo the same threats the Dragonslayer can.

Sheesh, even with the bug I never saw scourges win 1v4s in sPvP. 1v2s, yes. 1v3s, depending on the circumstances. But 1v4s?

And in sPvP, you're limited by fighting on points that are mostly about the size of a greater shade. WvW usually grants you much more mobility. A single scourge shouldn't be able to bomb a 4-man team unless there's a big skill gap.

(Which... there could be. Just because the scourge was bronze in WvW doesn't mean that (s)he can't be a skilled PvPer.)

As long as switching remains a thing, I'm inclined to think you should be able to see what your allies are running, but not your enemies. This would mean that you can see if your own team is going to be unbalanced in some way and adjust accordingly, but it keeps the enemy team a mystery to avoid the situation of half the game being a matter of who can manage to rotate in a counterpick late enough that the other team can't counter-counterpick, but not so late that the counterpicking player(s) are absent at the start of the game.

While I recognise that this means that former allies that are now enemies may recognise your name and thus your build, this sort of thing happens anyway - if you have a significant impact on the game, both teams will probably have a decent idea of at least which elite spec (if any) you're running, and sometimes people do remember and warn their team if they see you again. However, there are ways to avoid this, such as switching builds (or even characters) between games. Showing the enemy team's elite specs, however, makes it fairly immediately obvious.

> @Miko.4158 said:

> engineer, I cant remember the last time I saw one in WvW, fair play to the few pvp scrappers who still carry the profession but they are unicorns after the the various patches.

> The irony of wvw having siege and not engineers still grates. I rolled one, got help from my guild... "where are the fbutton skills" & "why are the utilites all 'or'" ?

> "where are all the weapons" the anet dev who put together pistol shield should be sitting in the corner with a lampshade over their head, it's level pegging with an npc.

> they need love. Shame I reckon scrapper hammer is probably the best 2h weapons skill set in the game.

>

To be fair, I've been seeing a few holosmiths in WvW. Tempted to try it myself - looks like it might have much of the mobility I look for in a WvW roamer while being a better fit for my playstyle than the daredevil I've been using.

> @Zoltreez.6435 said:

> anyone that does not vote Necromancer has not played this game long enough.....

Eh, not really. Necromancer is actually fairly well put together, and it isn't saddled with minor traits that are only useful in specific builds and/or circumstances (Last Rites is the worst offender on the necromancer in that regard, but it's a lot more generally applicable than the Scrapper minors, for instance). The issues necromancers have had have generally been based on numbers (_somebody_ has to be best at DPS when the PvE meta is 90% about getting max DPS) and ArenaNet possibly overestimating how strong shroud is.

There's nothing wrong with necromancer that proper balancing can't fix. Problem is, ArenaNet tends to balance with a slegehammer and then take months (or years) to compensate for their overnerfs. This is a problem all professions suffer from, though. However, I don't see any structural problems in the necromancer as I do in the revenant and engineer.

> @musu.9205 said:

> tempest was strong , it was no where near ground before pof . and only 3 new broken elite made it seems weak.

It doesn't help that tempest relies a lot on boons to do its thing, while the thing of spellbreakers and scourges is stripping your boons (and possibly making you wish you didn't have them in the first place in the case of scourges), and it's hard to do your job as a tempest while also effectively avoiding the special mechanics of scourge and spellbreaker. The two specs would probably be tempest counters even if they weren't so strong generally - when they are strong (and are used a lot as a result) it does make things painful for the tempests.

In my experience in the off season, tempest still feels pretty impactful as long as you're not regularly facing up against spellbreakers or scourges.

> @starlinvf.1358 said:

>

> Both Photon forge and Sword pair extremely well with Shield in high pressure scenarios, as it can be used before entering PF to counter opening attacks, after dropping out of PF to cover for its lack of defenses, and supplementing the sword's lack of defense options. Pistol doesn't make sense with sword, since off-hand its a condi weapon, and you'd be better off running P/P for condi builds.

Eh... a close-range Blowtorch is still a significant chunk of damage even with Berserker gear, I think. Obviously it rewards condition stats more, but if what you're looking for is pure damage, I think a blowtorch to the enemy's face every so often is a DPS boost even for power builds.

I don't feel that rev has 'good standing' in sPvP. Power rev did well in teams that can cover for its weaknesses to conditions, and condi rev became a _little_ less vulnerable to CC when Pain Absorption was made into a stunbreak, but it still tends to suffer in soloqueue.

The underwater treatment was one area of neglect that I did forget to mention. Splitting the underwater weapons would be better than leaving spear to be jack-of-all-trades (although I would note that there probably is benefit to having two spears to swap between, one condi-oriented for ranged, and one power-oriented for melee). And when it comes to the stances... Glint should be easy to convert to being suitable for use underwater (the main issue seems to be Elemental Blast being ground-targeted, but they could easily make that a cylinder centered on your target like a guardian's Pillar of Light), and Jalis would just need an underwater version of Inspiring Reinforcement. Neither of these seem like they'd be exceptionally hard to do, but no, underwater revenants get stuck with Shiro and Mallyx as their only options.

So, first, because I've been annoyed by this even though I didn't respond previously:

Claiming that Adelbern wasn't offered Krytan assistance against the charr because he refused to listen to the offer is splitting a pretty fine hair. Refusing to listen to an offer that the other side made every reasonable effort to deliver is a decision on the refuser's part to reject the offer before they even know what the offer is, it does not change the fact that the offer was made. If I receive an offer from a bank for a pre-approved credit card and I burn the envelope without reading it, the bank still made the offer.

Second, as for what purpose the destruction of Orr serves Abaddon:

Revenge, primarily. Arah was the holy city of the gods - drowning Orr allowed Abaddon to cast down their cathedrals and followers into the depths, just like the gods cast down his cathedral. There's also the likelihood that, if the gods had set up some contingency to help humans fight against Abaddon should he return, any such contingency would be in Orr: destroying Orr, therefor, removes that possibility.

The attack on Kryta, to me, always felt like a side theater for the titans and the charr. They'd have taken it if they could, for sure, but I think the objective there was simply to keep Kryta from interfering in Ascalon or Orr. It's possible that Abaddon also wanted to entice the mursaat to commit to Kryta, in order to set up the chain of dominoes that would bring the Vizier to the Door of Komali.

Varra Skylark also says that the stars aren't affected by events on Tyria. She may be wrong about that - the Guild Wars universe clearly doesn't work on the same rules that ours does, so it's possible that some mechanism for the dragons to affect the stars does exist (in fact, Guild Wars Factions gives us evidence that events on Tyria _can_ change the stars). Once the 'unreliable narrator' principle is applied on one thing, though, she could also be wrong about others. Therefore, her saying something does not necessarily override evidence found to the contrary elsewhere.

Now, the dwarves and jotun do appear as if they were civilised in 10000BE. I do not contest this. The impression I get from the previous dragonrise is that the Elder Dragons basically trashed _everything_, with the survivors of the Elder Races huddling under Glint's protection in the end. Only afterwards were they able to go out and rebuild.

And we're seeing a lot of evidence that said last rebuilding phase happened around 3000 years ago. Now, that could be because the dragons last went to sleep around then. Or it could be that something else was preventing the races from rebuilding before then.

> @Ardid.7203 said:

> What are WE for the NPCs? Veteran? Legendary? Plot armored? Norris level?

An ordinary mob, according to all the minor criminals who seem to think we'll be easy pickings.

Realistically speaking, the NPCs don't have our interface, which means they don't see the veteran/elite/champion/legendary marker. However, we're considered to be on the same level (or higher) to the Destiny's Edge members, and the doppelganger from the Augury Rock meta-event is a Legendary.

Yeah, there is the contradiction there. One thing worth noting is that we don't know HOW long the dragons stay awake - the last cycle might have been from ten thousand years ago to three thousand years ago.

Another consideration is that the Jotun path has been contradicted fairly heavily already. It implied that the dragons simply rose at preset times, but we've now had Kormir tell us that the dragons rose as a result of the events around Guild Wars 1.

Certainly, there seems to be _something_ significant about three thousand years ago, in any sense.

> @Rognik.2579 said:

> > @Slowpokeking.8720 said:

> > I mean sure, their own power might have a huge clash with the dragons to cause some big disasters. But they could have come and use their knowledge/servants to help the mortal races.

> > With their knowledge and technology, the fight could have been much easier. Had Lyssa been there, many of Zhaitan's mesmer minions would not have worked at all.

> We don't know how much the Six actually know, or how helpful they could've been in any one situation without directly interfering.

They probably know enough to have been a big help without directly intervening, actually. Most of the Durmand Priory's knowledge of the Elder Dragons comes from the Scroll of the Five True Gods (which is incomplete), they knew that killing the dragons risked destabilising the world's magic, and they _probably_ knew about Glint's legacy. It probably would not have required much of a nudge from them to be able to stop Scarlet from awakening Mordremoth and to push suitable heroes of Tyria towards the Legacy earlier than in the canonical timeline, giving Aurene (or Vlast!) the opportunity to absorb the magic from Zhaitan's death before it became necessarily to kill a second Elder Dragon.

I don't think there's any profession that is being kept down because people at ArenaNet don't like it...

But when it comes to professions that have structural problems that ArenaNet appears to be neglecting, I'd have to go with Revenant.

One of these pretty much stems from the original design of rev being a failed experiment - they wanted to make it the third no-weaponswap profession, but did not give it the tools that elementalists and engineers have to make that work. It was then rebalanced as a weaponswapping profession (trying to make it work as a no-swap profession, at that stage, would probably have required complete redesigns of the weapons), but this has left it as a weaponswapping profession with only one condi set. Renegade fills the gap here, but unless every future elite specialisation brings a condi weapon, the problem is going to persist. They really need to bite the bullet and give revenant a second condi set, core. Ideally ranged, because having only one core ranged weapon makes revenant very sensitive to changes in that weapon's balancing.

The other issue is that revenant lacks the build flexibility to adjust to the meta. Other professions can react to the expectation of facing condis by bringing more cleanses or resistance, or bringing more stunbreaks or stability against CC. Revenants find it hard to bring 'just a little more CC' or 'just a little more cleanse' - this usually ends up requiring completely changing the build around, since utility skills come in a package of 5 and there are relatively few traits that help here. You can cover for these weaknesses in a team queue, but in solo you just can't rely on having the support you need.

Engineers, I think, come in second place. Engineer is also suffering a bit from a lack of core weapon diversity, although not as much as revenant is. More significantly, the engineer is saddled with skills and traits that are balanced with the assumption that they'll synergise together when they don't (or no longer do), including some minors that assume that you've taken other build options. For example, you have Steel-Packed Powder (a minor trait that's almost useless if you don't take other build options to support it), Static Discharge flying off into space or into the ground half the time unless you combine it with the right skills (noting, however, that I haven't thoroughly tested if this has changed), Impact Savant when core engineer doesn't have many dazes and stuns while those that came with scrapper have been nerfed or removed altogether, and Exceeds that are defensive in nature but rely on having high heat to be effective, where gaining heat requires going into a Reaper-like melee-oriented form with no second health bar and fairly weak defences. Now, I think every profession has a few of these things, but the engineer seems to be riddled with them.

Necromancers seem to be coming up a lot, but I think the problem with necromancers is different. ArenaNet does seem to have trouble balancing them, but they've obviously been trying to give necromancers nice stuff, and then it turns out to be TOO good. After the inevitable nerf comes, it often ends up in the second rank because ArenaNet has a glacial balance pace and a profession that's a little undertuned doesn't have as much impact on the game as one that's overtuned. However, I don't think there are any fundamental problems with the way necromancer is set up like there are with revenants and engineers, except perhaps for how much boonstrip necromancer has compared to how rarely it is actually useful in PvE.

> @Jugglemonkey.8741 said:

> I'd say revenant. That said, these sort of polls tend to reflect the user's favoured class more than anything else.

There is often a degree of that...

So to qualify: Guardian and Mesmer primaries, here.

Actually, the charr/norn respect was present in EOTN, although they weren't nearly as chummy as they are in GW2 (obviously). There were some warbands who, on their own initiative or under orders from the shamans, did try to take pieces of norn territory. The norn generally responded by driving them out... but because of the norn philosophy of only blaming individuals and not the cultures that the individuals came from, the norn generally didn't engage in reprisals against the charr and generally let charr pass through their territories unopposed as long as the charr in question weren't attacking norn. Olfun Longeye (of Longeye's Ledge), for instance, allowed both the Ebon Vanguard and the charr to use his stead as a stopping point, as long as they didn't fight there.

Generally speaking, I think the norn did prefer humans over charr in EOTN, a state of affairs that changed since.

The third point is a misunderstanding, I'm pretty sure. When they refer to two dragons being killed, they're referring to Zhaitan and Mordy. The way the instance is set up makes it easy to come away with the impression that it was ancient history, however.

Regarding the Dragonrise... there is evidence to suggest that there are at least two separate Dragonrises. One happened ten thousand years ago, and wiped out the Giganticus Lupicus. The other ended about three thousand years ago. There are a few hints floating around that the last time civilisation was rebuilt was about three thousand years ago - for instance, the oldest Dwarven ruins (and, I think, the Tome of the Rubicon itself) are all said to be about that old.