Jheuloh.4109

The August 23rd update giving feline auto-attacks the benefit of quickness and finally fixing the EoD pets is great news! Will other pets be updated overtime to have their auto-attacks benefit from quickness? Without any other information to go off of I assume cats are being used as a test-drive so that any weird glitches or design consequences are isolated to just them, rather than having to deal with every single non-benefitting ranger pet at once.

UHHHHHHHHHHHHHH Full disclosure, r/woosh is in effect right now. The joke has sailed over my head.

It reads like ArenaNet wants to homogenize classes so that each of them provide the same buffs, leading into some variant of "Take the player, not the class." Sound idea on its own and the list of changes is impressive when taken as a collective whole, though it seems like not much has substantially changed on a per-class basis.

The hopium I have is that future Living Story seasons can have the initial quality of Ankka & Mai Trinn maintained all the way to the end. I would assume the rushed endings are because the problems of Ice Brood Saga reached critical mass and End of Dragons had to be released prematurely. I will also add that it felt like anytime focus was put on the dragons, there was a dip in the quality of dialogue. They were written to say exactly what they had to, nothing more and nothing less. The impression I have is that ArenaNet is tired of these stupid dragons who barely even work in the game engine, let alone as writeable characters.

Disable the white flash upon viewing a vista. The light, it burnses us!

A Reef Drake with the poison breath would be ace. A raptor as a variant type of a drake would also be spectacular. I wouldn't be surprised if ArenaNet speculated on similar ideas themselves since pets and mounts are closely related concepts.

Once upon a time I modded ARK: Survival Evolved. Then I moved onto mainline Unreal Engine because I kept doing stuff way out of bounds for what ARK was designed to support. I've sometimes considered making a business name so that I can be an uneducated moron as this name and keep it classy on the business persona.

Seeing Living Story Season 1 be made playable again has me ready to give ArenaNet the benefit of the doubt. SOON, I shall suffer as ye have suffered. Not for writing or programming specifically (I'm training my art skills), but for having to negotiate team dynamics? Yes.

Disclaimer: After about level 16 I PUG'd through the story missions lol. My perspective is driven by the unpredictability of rando's. Stat-wise, yeah, unless you were going for a 55 monk or some other really artificial play the range of stat variance between characters (after factoring in gear, runes, and +Damage abilities) was something like... 2x? 3x? Whereas ArenaNet is on record as stating the gap between high and low performing players is something to the tune of 6x. If someone said 10x I'd believe them.

Validating your statement: I'm a salty old veteran hailing from Guild Wars 1 days, I got the game as a Christmas present in 2005 when I was 12 and kept it close ever since. You mention that Guild Wars 2 gives players little to no guidance on how to perform; I would accuse Guild Wars 1 of having the same problem. While the numbers are smaller in Gw1, the potential for crushingly bad builds is a lot higher. Guild Wars 2 indirectly addressed this by limiting the range of options from "Literally any 2 class combinations" to "A handful of weapon and utility skills." In both games (up until the past couple years) ArenaNet just assumed most people would figure things out through their own curiosity, rather than needing to be explicitly taught these things.

It's unfortunate as I was wanting to have the Wallow active alongside my Reef Drake. But waiting 2-3 seconds for the creature to wake up is an eternity in a pitched fight and the grave-like silence of ArenaNet is disheartening. It would be nice to have official statements letting people know a bit more about what's going on with things like that. Even if it's basically saying they're unsure of where these issues stem from.

Understanding it is the easy part, recreating is trickier than I expected - but that might be because on my first attempt I was trying to modify existing movement classes to do that, rather than just start from scratch with those assumptions in mind. So I might have made it a lot harder for myself that way. EDIT: To illustrate, I got it partially working on the forward movement, like so: But left/right? Well...

Oh I didn't even know there was anything from ArenaNet about it, let alone the existence of Guild Chats. I'll have to check it out!

If there's any knowledgeable software devs floating around The Oasis, I beseech your wisdom regarding mounts. I acknowledge this is an exceedingly arcane question. Something that has fascinated me is the turning circles that the mounts have, togethee with the automated turn-in-place system to keep the mount from being unwieldy when it needs to change direction while idle. I've been attempting to recreate it in Unreal Engine 4 by modifying the built in Character movement but I'm at a loss for what terms to research or how to explain what I'm after to people. I've tried beseeching people for help within Unreal Engine communities with little luck as I've found it a massive struggle to properly explain myself to interested parties. It feels like there's some standard software engineering concepts that are eluding me. Guild Wars 2 is hardly the only game with that kind of vehicle-ish movement system for mounts, but it does seem the most refined of the lot.

This feedback is based on open world PVE and instanced gameplay. The Good - Commanding all 3 pet abilities is a most welcome feature. This does admittedly get tedious when you're dealing with creatures that have short CD abilities that are just flat damage bonuses, though I'd consider an acceptable trade for being able to command things like the drake's blast-finisher or wyvern's wing buffet. - The F1 ability for the Unleashed Pet, Venomous Outburst, is a wonderful addition to the pet tool kit. The Smokescale doesn't have such a monopoly on mobility anymore. For me personally, Venomous Outburst and full control over the pet's abilities is worth the price of admission. - I think the consistent spell list for the Unleashed pets is a good thing. While pets were initially sold on being a variety pack, that's where a lot of the historical imbalances come from. Having a consistent spell-list, especially that teleport granted by Venomous Outburst, helps level the playing field as far as mobility is concerned. The Bad - Attack My Target being replaced by an ability means that you are dependent on having an ability off cooldown to direct the pet to a target. This isn't a breaking issue as it can be worked around by using a low value ability as a functional equivalent, but it's not particularly graceful and is against the spirit of allowing the player full control over the pet. - For how heavily focused The Untamed is on disables, the Hammer only having its disables available while the pet is Unleashed feels unwieldy. Perhaps if it was the case that disables were stronger while the pet is unleashed it would be more palatable. It's clear that Unleashed Pet = CC and Unleashed Ranger = damage. The cooldown on swapping Unleashed seems just long enough to get in the way of that intended back and forth play, rather than serving as an aid to it. - The passive +/-15% damage dealt and +/- 10% damage taken modifier for Unleashed feels so small as to be functionally invisible and conceptually comes off as very arbitrary. Were it me, I'd treat Unleashed as damage resistance for the pet to give it a chance at surviving focused fire and a damage boost to the ranger. The description for Vow of the Untamed is also awkward. - The Hammer's knockdown and Daze available feel difficult to utilize due to the lengthy wind-up times and the fact that they're only available with the Unleashed Pet. The disables available on other weapons and utility skills are more reliable. The Ugly - The Unleashed pet's abilities feel like just a small splash of damage in practice and the additional effects don't sufficiently offset that. Between the low base damage, underwhelming utility (Venomous Outburst excepted), and the -15% damage output imposed on the Ranger, in PVE I found myself gravitating towards keeping Unleashed on the Ranger at all times unless I wanted to reposition the pet or damage an enemy's break-bar with the Hammer. - Natural Fortitude and Unnatural Traversal read like they were short changed on time or creativity. Unnatural Traversal is also wholly invalidated by the Greatsword and Sword. Unnatural Traversal I believe could be redeemed by either bolstering its secondary effect or lowering the baseline cooldown to 15 seconds. - This requires more investigating, but at present it seems Exploding Spores doesn't reliably knock-down targets, even when factoring in the presence of break bars or stability. Verdict When it goes live I'll almost certainly be playing the Untamed through thick and thin, but someone less sentimental about the animal companion and more interested in asking "Is it good?" has very good reason to steer clear of Untamed. It has a good core to it with Venomous Outburst and full command of the pet abilities, though tends to get in its own way with excessive modifiers, technical limitations, and under-tuned values. I had no trouble playing mainline PVE with the Untamed, but I wouldn't touch it for WvW or sPVP as it does nothing to address the issue of pets melting under focused fire in WvW, nor the brutal cooldown multiplier for swapping a dead pet, nor their difficulty with attacking a mobile target (Venomous Outburst excepted.)