Patch Notes:
https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-February-26-2013
Discuss things here. A bunch of stuff happened in this update with Catacombs, and your feedback is desired.
What is the new internal cooldown to life stealing foods? This change affects many builds that rely on it and it would be nice to know a # instead of just a mystery number you guys like to give out, thanks.
There are builds that rely on food?
Yes, there are. Many of the glass cannon builds rely on the food buffs for lifesteal that is greater than healing. I added a 1 second cooldown after each proc to stop abuse using certain skills that could heal a character from near death to full health due purely to critting with a food item.
Was sad to see no mention of any spy kit nerfs in the patch notes, I suppose the stealth changes mentioned could be there to address this…would be a bit silly to break the crystals from caledon forest but leave spy kits.
Great catch – I did in fact do something to spy kits (both OOW and Ash Legion) that got dropped out of the patch notes by accident (Stealth stealth nerf!). I’ll go make sure they are properly put into the patch notes.
It basically means you can’t abuse them by doing something like 100b or BF and get all your health back via Omnomghost or what have you. I agree completely with 1 second being just right.
Yeah pretty much. Stacking 3 mobs and 100B pretty much meant you were invincible. The same could be said for any class that could stack and AOE a spot rapidly over a short period.
My ranger’s penetrating arrows while using a shortbow was incredibly OP, considering I could heal 1k a second on average just by hitting multiple dudes. Running that and troll unguent for a heal meant I could just stand still and not die.
I can’t do anything about ranger pets since that is not my area of expertise, and I doubt we will ever make ranger pets perma stowed.
For those upset about the changes I made to Food items that life steal on crit, and the spy kit, here’s some words:
Spy Kits: permanent stealth at the cost of karma isn’t good. It’s practically exploitative since it’s a pay-karma-to-win scenario, and it needed to change. We test all of our dungeon content without the use of external items to make sure it is all capable of being completed. This has led though, to a recent surge in players using items from the open world in dungeons to trivialize content or outright break bosses designed to present a specific challenge to a five man group.
Food item life steal on crit Cooldown: The best heal in the game can’t be 100 blades or other similar attacks. If you want to play a glass cannon, there should be danger involved, and the food buff mitigated the danger and allowed glass cannons to stand and trade blows without having to utilize their own heals or dodge rolls. They could just stand still and win – and that’s not the type of dynamic combat we want for our game. We test our content without the food buffs to ensure they are capable to players without access to them, and make sure the balance is good enough for players who don’t have those buffs. There are a lot of other viable food buffs in the game, and this one food buff meant a core few items were dominating all the others.
For those also thinking I went rogue and did this, I went through all the checks and balances, and discussed the changes with leads. While I do have the power to change dungeons, things that affect the world outside of dungeons is handled through meetings to make sure everyone is on board with a proposed solution.
Yeah, there’s a few bugs I was grappling with that we thought got fixed – there something weird with the FPS that seems to have to do with shaders (investigating), but aside from that the only issues I’m seeing are with Detha and the Ghost Eater. We were seeing some of the same problems with the traps, and I was fixing them as much as I could – but it seems I didn’t fix them up good enough. her getting stuck and the traps sometimes not firing are known things – try leading GE out of the trap and then back into it – that might help for the time being.
And… well… Detha is Detha, lol. I’ve been at it trying to fix her, but the issue where she doesn’t start rebuilding the traps isn’t 100%, and we’ve not been able to get a solid repro.
As for things players feel the spy kits were necessarily to get through, we’re watching the feedback and will make sure to give them some extra QA attention to ensure they are in line with what we want players to experience.
@Kuishen
Thanks for the feedback. I noticed however you mention that your necro minions were causing ectoplasms. I built it specifically so that only players can draw ectoplasms off – that way rangers, mesmers, and necros wouldn’t enrage their party just by playing. I think someone in your party may have been attacking when they shouldn’t have been.
It’s bad when even the staff can’t stick to the topic.
I think its worse when staff doesn’t say anything at all, but I can see where you are coming from. Figured I’d post it here since there have been a few threads and posts about it throughout the dungeon forum.
We are aware of the increase in FPS issues with catacombs and other areas of the game, and are actively working on a solution.
Also working on solutions to the following problems presented by the Ghost Eater in Detha’s chain:
1. Ghost Eater can get stuck in the traps
2. Sometimes after fulling charging the trap, the trap won’t go off if it becomes active with GE already inside of it. A temporary solution is to kite it out and then draw it back in, or get the trap fully charged without it being inside the trap when it happens.
3. Interrupting Rumblus does not stop his yell that brings down the ceiling collapse.
I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: Our QA teams test the dungeons at the dungeon level, and at 80. They test it with different ranges of gear, and different people. I’ve watched non-QA groups do similar things, under various conditions. We have a review process.
Will 80’s have an easier time? Sure. They have more tools to use and more experience with the class. Our side-kicking system is something we are working on too, to ensure that things remain challenging for those folks and that their gear doesn’t make all the difference.
Will we ever release a video of our internal testing process? Highly doubtful. Just as I doubt we will ever post the builds, classes, and gear our testers test with.
One thing we see frequently with at-level people going into dungeons, is that while their character is the right level, their gear is often 10+ levels behind them. When you combine a low average gear level, not having all your skills/tools available, and not being as experienced with the class, it’s going to be significantly more difficult than what an 80 makes it look like.
We build dungeons for at-level players, and then reduce the strength of higher level players to bring them more in line with the players at that level. We do not balance for 80’s sidekicked down to at-level.
Update with recent patch:
Dungeon
Ascalonian Catacombs
- Colossus Rumblus’s Cave In Shout can now be interrupted.
Detha’s Path: Fixed an issue with the Ghost Eater encounter where the Ghost Eater would sometimes get stuck in the trap. We also fixed an issue causing the traps to sometimes not fire and break, blocking the fight.
Dear Robert Hrouda,
since you’re seemingly the man in charge when it comes to dungeons, would you kindly stop abusing broken mechanics that punishes certain classes, until the class devs have been able to actually fix these broken class mechanics?
Yes, I’m primarily talking about rangers, or rather, their pets.
By designing your dungeon encounters in such manner that one class in particular gets punished for a, in many ways, broken class mechanic, thereby abusing this weakness and making these encounters harder, is imho kinda cheap.
I think you’re fully aware of the issues I’m talking about here, right?
Until a fix for all the issues that involves pets has been pushed out to live servers, I strongly suggest you design your dungeons in such a way that no encounter abuses this broken mechanic.
You do realise that many rangers gets kicked out of groups just because of their class, or more so, because of the core mechanic that comes with this class?
So, in all fairness, if an encounter becomes a lot harder to deal with because of pets, or due to the fact that there’s simply no way to keep a pet alive during some encounters (and please remember, the ranger class is balanced around having their pet alive and working), then please stop designing your encounters in such a manner that they constantly put the ranger class at a major disadvantage!
Having issues with this? Then please go ahead and talk to the guys responsible for designing/balancing the classes about this. Just letting things go on in a broken state month after month is indeed very tiresome.
Thanks for reading.
I personally play Ranger as my main, so I’m fairly aware of how to manage the pet, and do my testing as a ranger primarily. What mechanic do you feel is expressly punishing to a ranger pet?
I’m more than aware of how squishy pets can be in dungeons, but if you could list out all the issues you are speaking of, I can try and address them.
Inquiry for you then (regarding Rangers in dungeons). My first level 80 was a Ranger and I loved the skills and gameplay, A LOT. At first I had a mix between damage and survivability and thought I was doing fine damage-wise; I mean, I survived, I was constantly doing damage, had a intuitive and on-demand rotation that kept max damage up, and contributed to the party in a lot of ways in lieu of support as well, or so I thought.
I began to question how I compared to other players to improve my playstyle and found that my damage was incredibly paltry, that other players (not even spec’d for damage) could down mobs and do more damage in general. So I conversed with a guildie on his damage Ranger spec, came up with my own to maximize damage output and noticed the difference in DPS quite obviously yet I was still far behind other classes and non-DPS builds.
Now this same guildie (who has spent 1500 hours on this main Ranger of his and played every facet of the game) came to the same consensus a long time ago. The fact that Rangers simply do less damage in a damage spec than pretty much any other class (maybe Condition Necro if you argue bleedcaps).
That being said and moving onto the dungeon part, once you get to a point in this game where you have accomplished most everything as far as the main content goes you aim for the vanity (e.g. skins) which are accomplished by repeating content (farming dungeon tokens). Grouping up with people as a Ranger is a risky process, not just because of how the group will tolerate you, but because the composition of a group may require that someone with more skill help carry them to a degree, and that simply cannot be done with a Ranger. Every Ranger build I have experimented with has a ‘better’-version in some other class/build. Rangers were promised attention months ago, and as a result received buffs to their Underwater skills
.
As a player of a Ranger in dungeons, do you not agree with this assessment? If not, is there something that we are doing wrong as players that make Rangers more viable? Is this concern still being looked into by the designers? And as a fellow Ranger player, do you ever speak on our behalf?
Rangers have their highs and lows like every other class. They have really good DPS, but they have to work at it a bit more than other classes like warrior or mesmer. It’s possible just not as easy.
As for ranger balance, we have frequent meetings about balance where we discuss that sort of stuff – I go to those meetings on behalf of dungeon content and to lend my experience with ranger knowledge.
I personally accept the tradeoff of damage for survivability (Can’t do damage if you’re dead). I tend to run a condition build using shortbow and sword\dagger, and focus on being supportive and holding aggro while keeping a steady output of DPS through conditions. Rangers have an incredible amount of evasion and damage mitigation if you are very focused and know when to use your skills and heals (prot on dodge roll, vigor on heals) means you can keep prot for when you mess up, and always have evasions ready. There are some very successful dungeon builds, but most of them aren’t DPS focused.
We’re working on ideas for making pets better in dungeons. There’s a list of reasons we can’t just tweak a number and call it good (it wouldn’t actually solve the problem), but it is something we are aware of and working on.
One of the things you have to think about, is how the game is played. If we buff rangers just for dungeons, than they are too strong for the open world. Considering I can solo most content in the open world by letting my pet tank, I feel ranger is very powerful outside of dungeons. We can’t have rangers that change based on PvP, open world, and dungeons because that gets too confusing for players and puts us on a slippery slope. Whatever we do to the ranger, it has to happen in both the open world and dungeons, so it requires more than just number tweaks. You see a lot of bots as rangers for that very reason – they are really strong open world classes, and buffing them for the sake of dungeons doesn’t work out to being a good fix.
Wow this is getting long. I should go to the class balance forums some time, lol. Sorry for the text wall!
@Robert Hrouda.1327:
Did you skim past my post or do you realize that I’m right and have nothing to say? This is the most frustrating game-related issue I have ever faced. SOME feedback would be appreciated.
Yes, I read your post, the one about how we don’t listen to the players and only listen to QA, which is wrong. Just because dungeons are harder for you, and you don’t like it, doesn’t mean you speak for everyone. There’s plenty of support for our dungeon changes, even here on the forum. Choosing to ignore that people are enjoying the dungeons and cherry picking complaints that match your own isn’t something I typically respond to, because it’s just wrong. Yes some people are upset because we added mechanical difficulty to AC, but there are also many happy people who enjoy that you have to play the game at a deeper level now in AC. We listen to our Alphas, our QA, and players. I typically try not reply to posts to call people out on being incorrect on their evidence, so I didn’t reply to it.
As for why I don’t respond to every single post that gets brought up, it’s because I don’t have the time. I’m not a forum moderator or a community member – I’m a designer, and I spend my day building things. When I have spare moments I pop onto the forum to see what I can do. I can’t respond to everything – even if I wanted to, and I certainly wish I could do more. There are a lot of good points I get from our forums that I don’t respond to, and just do something about. Just because we don’t respond, doesn’t mean we don’t care.
Woah I steered this thread off track quickly with my ranger talk. I’ll see if I can squeeze in some time to go over to the class thread and make a post in there about it, but for now let’s get focused back on our dungeon talk instead.
We can’t have rangers that change based on PvP, open world, and dungeons
Someone needs to tell you this Robert: Anet will never, ever achieve balance unless you do a proper PvP/PvE split.
This is undeniable; some skills simply cannot be equally good in both.So, you could continue applying bandages over bandages and never end up with a final result thus being haunted with profession issues for the years to come… or you could sit down and split all skills properly.
I know it’s a good effort, but to be blunt we paid for a balanced vanilla game, and we expect it at some point.
It can take even 6 months, but it must happen sooner or later.Ranger is just the tip of the iceberg of that issue, look at Warriors forced to not use many adren skills as it would be a DPS loss, look at D/D Eles being terribly OP in WvW because nerfs only apply to sPvP, look at Engineers.
All classes have issues that are due to the inexistance of PvP/PvE splitting, and until said split happens (which should include WvW unless you want it to keep being an unbalanced zergfest) we will not resolve dungeon issues or PvP issues.
Where I work when there is a problem we find a definitive solution even if it takes effort because then the issue is eliminated.
Some companies ignore or give temporary solutions to issues, and those problems continue to haunt them for their entire existence.
Do what needs to be done
We do have a PvP, PvE split. That’s normal and something GW players are familiar with. What I was trying to say was that we can’t have a PvP split, a PvE split, and a Dungeon split. That’s just way too much, especially if we start having to do it for other class stuff. It makes balancing much more difficult and time consuming.
I agree with that. The part missing is the rationale that assumes Dungeons aren’t PvE. They are, Dungeons is PvE to. So why is the “E” different in Dungeons?
Ah gotcha. Sorry bout that. There are numerical differences in play for the creatures you fight in dungeons, and we build them differently. The “army” of a dungeon (things you fight) are given different skills than what you encounter in the open world. It is numerically different, and mechanically different than our open world.
@Robert Hrouda
My main gripe is that agony resistance doesn’t carry over to ANY player spawned/controlled minions which in FotM10+ hurts the player a lot, more so for ranger since x % total our of dps is our pet.
We’re aware of and working towards a solution for that problem. Agony Resistance on summoned creatures and pets is something we are trying to do.
I’m just sad that currently AC isn’t part of my guildies activities anymore, now they prefer just doing the world bosses, no risks decent rewards. If your goal was to make the dungeons deserted, then ignore my post.
Well, it wasn’t me who made the loot changes or make the decisions concerning loot, so it’s certainly not my intention to see dungeons deserted in such a way. We are aware of the reward discrepancy between dungeon and open world boss loots, and we’re trying to resolve things. As you may have noticed though, the new open world chests caused a problem with our economy that we are trying to fix, so bringing dungeon chests up to that level would only further hurt the economy.
We are looking into that issue though.
