How cute is this?

This Friday May 24 through Sunday May 26, Evon Gnashblade is hacking 20% off the price of Black Lion Chest Keys and restocking the shelves with Spring minis – including the Mini Hippo Calf, Mini Moa Chick, and Mini Lion Cub!

Remember a long time ago when we heard we would be able to see guild chat when not in the game? Well, it seems the APIs they released are the first step down that road with more cool stuff to come!

There’s also going to be a GW2 Developer Livestream Friday at 11:00 am Pacific (6:00 pm UTC) on GW2 TwitchTV. Isaiah Cartwright will be giving tips for gear, builds, and playstyle for warriors in Guild Wars 2 PvE.

COMBOS COMBOS COMBOS! And I’m not talking about a fast food menu! Check out Nemeon’s forum post on Combos in GW2!

And Gorani also posted a great piece on Conjures, read it here and then come to the forum to discuss.

First APIs are for Dynamic Events, WvW, and Item & Recipe Database.

You have my Sword!

Click the link above for the full text and pretty pictures, or read the text in our forums. Either way, check it out and then come let us know what you think in our forums!

As a preview of…the preview… here are the headings from the piece:

Hunt Down Canach
A Monstrous Threat
New Improved World XP
Greater Variety and More Rewards in WvW
Dangerous New WvW Abilities
Introducing Infusions and Ascended Gear in WvW
WvW Matchup Changes!
Update: Custom PvP Arenas and Spectator Mode Beta
New Southsun Cove Rewards
Exclusive Southsun Items: Fervid Censer and Sclerite Karka Shell

GWOnline Forum member Nemeon Lion has just started a great series of forum posts covering “bonues” in game. Check it out because a lot of us are probably doing it wrong. First one is on Combo Fields.

And late last week, GWOnline’s Gorani posted an interesting piece on Elementalist Conjures. Check it out and the come tell us what you think about it in the forums.

The Elementalist is the only Guild Wars 2 profession that has access to the skill types Conjures and Glyphs. And while the Glyphs include a range of skills both great (e.g. Glyph of Storms) and bad (e.g. Glyph of Renewal), the Conjure skills are generally seen as inferior and not worth equipping on your skill bar. The elite conjure Fiery Greatsword is, today, the only exception to this rule.

How Do the Conjure Skills Work?

The conjure skills Conjure Flame Axe, Conjure Frost Bow, Conjure Lightning Hammer & Conjure Earth Shield are all utility skills, which are slotted to the  utility section of your skill bar. Unlike Signets conjure skills have no passive effects.

Once an Elemenalist casts a conjure skill a conjured weapon manifests in her hands, replacing her weapon skills with the five skills of the conjure. A second conjured weapon is spawned at the same time, to be placed on the battlefield for any ally to pick up. Once someone picks up a conjured weapon, it will remain in their hands until they drop it, or its 15 charges are used. The trait “Conjurer” adds 10 additional charges to the weapon.

Each weapon also adds a bonus to two attributes, depending on the level of the user:

Conjure Flame Attributes: 180 Power, 180 Condition Damage

Conjure Frost Attributes: +20% Condition Duration, 180 Healing Power

Conjure Lightning Attributes: 5% Critical Damage, 180 Precision

Conjure Earth Attributes: 180 Vitality, 180 Toughness

You can drop the weapon any time before the duration runs out or before the charges are used. The conjure will vanish and can not be picked up again. Recharge counters will not reset, so dropping the first conjure and picking up the second one will not allow you to use a skill instantly, if it was on recharge already.

Link to the complete list of conjures on the Elementalist Forum. Please go there for details.

What’s the Upside to Using Conjures for the Elementalist?

When equipping a conjured weapon, the Elementalist gains a fair boost to his pool of attribute points, greater than a stack of Bloodlust, Corruption or Accuracy from an exotic sigil. She also gains the ability to break out of her range category with her current weapon, e.g. a D/D wielding Elementalist can gain the range of a staff by equipping the Frost Bow, while a Staff Elementalist can gain melee range skills & mobility with the Lightning Hammer.

This can be of value when facing a foe that is hard to fight at the non-altered range, like dungeon bosses with strong PbAoE damage and effects.

What’s the Downside to Using Conjures for the Elementalist?

When equipping a conjured weapon the Elementalist reduces her effective skill pool by a lot. She can no longer swap between 20 skills on her weapon skill bar, but is locked to the five skills of her conjured weapon. If you take into account that the conjure skill “is set to recharge” on the utility bar, you reduce your possible skills from 25 (not counting Glyphs on different attunements or active/passive Signets) to 9. This means you give up diversity and much of your ability to react to a changing situation in-game.

The question then becomes; Are those conjure skills so much better as to make it worth it to give up your attunements? Lets take a look at a Dagger/Dagger Ele using Conjure Flame Axe:

The #1 skill auto attack skill lets the Elementalist throw the axe at the range of 900, which gets her some range benefit and the damage done by the burning condition. On the other hand the damage output is not a lot bigger than the fire attunement auto attack and it uses up a charge of the weapon.

The #2 skill is the small AoE version of the #1 skill, but without any combo field or finisher buff. A dagger’s Drake’s Breath skill, the Cone of Cold and Ring of Earth skills (all on slot #2) offer a similar damage potential with a variety of uses (burn, bleed, heal) and roughly the same recharge time with only the range as a pure negative aspect.

The skills #3 & #4 mimic skills that are already at the disposal of the D/D Elementalist: Burning Retreat can be achieved by using Burning Speed after a quick turn and Ring of Fire is on the off hand dagger anyway.

Skill #5, Flame Leap offers a Leap finisher, but that can be achieved by the Earth’s dagger #3 skill too, which also allows you to delay the leap a few seconds for better timing. The high burning damage is on par with the immobilize of the Earth skill.

Comparison with other conjures comes to similar, but not as drastic, results (Lightning Hammer offering a very fast recharging blast finisher and Blind and the Frost Bow a decent Chill effect and good structural damage you otherwise can not get too easily).

The objective verdict for those skills still remains: you lose much more by using them compared to keeping your normal weapon set, especially when you keep in mind you will wait a lot for recharging skills on your conjure, compared to your regular weapons where you just swap to a different attunement!

Pros and Cons for Other Professions

Other professions have the same pros as described for the Elementalist: the attribute gain and access to a new skill set with different skill options. They are also less reluctant to pick up, use one or two skills and then drop the weapon again, e.g. to cast a Lightning Storm on an area or deal structural damage with the Frost Bow on some graveling borrows in Ascalon Catacombs.

On the con side the conjure weapon does break up their usual skill combos, which makes execution of skills a lot more clumsy than what they are used to.

So What Can Be Done?

One option for improvement of the conjure skills could be to take away the cost of a charge from the auto-attack skill, which would also make Fiery Greatsword not too overpowered (as it is a conjure too).

A second option would be to give conjures back the stun breaker ability they once had. Right now those are exclusively tied to the Cantrips, which is what make bunker builds so good compared to other skill types like Glyphs & Arcane skills.

Buffing the conjurer trait (which is a master trait in the Fire Magic line) could also be an option. Either by giving it the stun break ability described above or the ability to gain something else upon picking up the weapon, like an Aura or a short stability boon. Another way to strengthen the trait would be to use it for a “Cantrip nerf” which is still lingering at the moment. Swap the position on the list with Spell Slinger, making it an Adept trait, while “upgrading” Spell Slinger to master status.

Discussed on the official forums is also the variant of making conjures act like Engineer kits, with an instant swap ability in and out of the conjured weapon – which is an option I do not like and consider way too strong, because it adds even more skills to the variety of weapon skills (which is something the Engineer does not have in the first place).

What do you think? Are conjures hoplessly underpowered, or maybe fine as is?

It was supposed to go live today but has been delayed. They should be back in the game soon.

Hey, is that a new Asura Gate I see?

The May Upate is now live, bringing us the new Southsun Cove content. Jump in and enjoy the sun and surf as it will only be available through June 4th. Don’t get too close to the animals though…

A few highlights from the notes:

• New weapons skins and minis added
• New Guild Treks for Southsun Cove area
• WvW EB Jumping Puzzle now a separate map
• WvW now has traps
• New Gem Store item How to Dance 400 gems
• First Skill Lag fix is in (more to come)

FYI, Cragstead not being accessible is a bug and they hope to have it fixed today.

Reginal also posted a short “things to do list” for the new Southsun Cove content here.

Finally, GWOnline’s Alaris created an interesting article about Rangers’ (generally bad) Dungeon reputation vs their actual performance in a more casual or medium level ability group, which has sparked a very lively forum debate. Come on in and join the fun. And check our RD’s piece on the problems with Town Clothes and then let us know what you think in the forum!

http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/c/2265971

It got crowded in the elevator

Now I know from my psychology/statistics work that people can develop incorrect beliefs. I noticed in forums that many of the complaints came from rangers who don’t play their rangers in difficult places (because they’re so underpowered, why bother). And there is the common assumption that rangers are underpowered because their pets die, and they are weak without their pets. And then, as supporting evidence, I’ve heard of people turning down rangers when making groups.

But here’s a different theory: rangers are just as good as any other profession, and the only thing they need is someone to undo the bad rep they’ve been getting.

Two competing hypotheses… It’s time for some science!

Method:

We set out to do the latest content in Guild Wars 2: the Molting Alliance dungeon. Granted, it’s not the most difficult content out there, but it has a nice difficulty level that is between that of story and explorable dungeons. Moreover, most of the difficulty is due to stuff that rangers are supposedly bad at: avoiding AoE’s and hard-hitting mobs… especially the bosses.

Participants:

Participants were recruited via the guild chat. We were a party of 5 rangers, 4 of which were maxed level. One ranger confused the “level eighty” requirement as “level eighteen” for some reason, so we had a vastly under-levelled ranger amongst us. Scaling should fix that, right? I have no idea how maxed out their equipment was, I know mine wasn’t maxed…

We also had a metric-ton-load of pets. Everyone ended up bringing whatever they wanted, which was an uncoordinated mix of everything except a jellyfish (yes, someone wanted to bring that). There was no effort to coordinate weapons, builds, whatever… it was pure bring-your-own-build madness.

Results:

I had completed the dungeon with my guardian and a balanced party twice already, so I had a good idea of the difficulty level. Uncoordinated as we were, we wiped or near-wiped a few times, and we had to deal with deaths at the end boss because people didn’t know how to properly dodge the attacks. Overall, I’d rate the experience with a full team of uncoordinated rangers to be pretty much the same level of success (or fail) as a full team of anything-but-rangers. My impression is that the content was completed in about the same time, with about as many downed/deaths, whether we played with rangers or not.

Pets died regularly, but that didn’t seem to really bother our progress. A pet swap is 20sec refresh, and a dead pet is a 60sec refresh. So even if you let your pet die, you can get a new pet a minute after. During that time you can still do ranged damage (or whatever weapon you prefer). You can still dodge and avoid damage. And you still have other players and other pets to take the heat for you. Some of use switched to bears after the first few fights, I am not sure if that was useful.

There were not that many times where I was running for my life. Our foes aggro’ed fairly well on the pets, but not perfectly so. Even with lots of pets, I was not guaranteed safety from aggro. This honestly reminds me of every dungeon I’ve played, where the frontline sometimes has to break away from melee range so they can heal themselves, or when they are downed, or when foes simply ignore them and go for the more fragile midline/backline instead.

Killing stuff was not a problem especially once we started calling out targets. It was difficult to see what the main target was at times, because with arrows flying everywhere and pets being all over the place, it was hard to tell where all that was going towards. Having a melee frontline can make it easier to pick the same target. Calling out targets is highly recommended. But then again, if you don’t call targets as a team, you should, regardless of party composition.

Discussion:

Admittedly, this was a dirty experiment.

We had only one experimental trial, two control trials, and none of which was properly measured or controlled. So I’ll go ahead and present this instead of proper science because I’m the one writing the article and I can do whatever I want.

If rangers are underpowered, I didn’t see it. Going from no rangers to all rangers made no real difference in how fast or how well we blasted through this content. I mean, maybe we were a bit slower, I don’t know… I didn’t see it. So if rangers are underpowered, the difference is so small that it’s hard to notice even in an all-ranger team.

So what it looks like, to me, is that people just assume that because pets die, rangers are underpowered. And such preconceptions easily build momentum in populations. Some people take this as dogma, and stop inviting rangers. Then some people assume that because rangers are being turned down, it must be because they are bad. Except, there is no measure of performance that influence any of this. There was an untested theory, some prejudice, that’s about it. Rangers can easily have been discriminated against for no other reason than they have a pet.

One could just as easily have chosen to discriminate against stealth-users, clone-users, adrenaline-users, element-swap-users, or kit-users. It’s easy to imagine a bad argument gaining ground for any of these things, even if there is no hint of performance difference. I could say for example that mesmers are bad in dungeons because there is lots of AoE there, so clones die too fast. Except, having done a lot of dungeons with my mesmer, and from what I hear, the argument doesn’t work out in practice. Or I could say that necros are bad in dungeons because of a hard cap on conditions, except, I’ve also heard that necros are OP when using condition builds. So really, I keep hearing arguments like that, often conflicting, rarely supported by evidence.

If I am correct, then rangers are a bit overpowered when the pet is alive, and a bit underpowered when the pet is dead, so it evens out on average. Just like any other profession is a bit overpowered when using some skills, and a bit underpowered when those skills are on recharge. Minion-mancer are better with their minions alive. Mesmers are better when they have clones and phantasms up. Warriors are stronger with adrenaline charged and ready to use. Signets are better when they are not on recharge. Elites are strong when used, bad when on recharge. And so on. Now we can add pets to that long list of things that make a profession or build sometimes better, sometimes worse, but overall not really any different from other professions.

We didn’t test in other dungeons or content types. It could well be that rangers are bad in Fractals. Or, it could well be that the same stereotype and prejudice afflicts them there. Until I see some real evidence that they are underpowered, I’m not buying the argument.