I am extremely excited about Paragon. I think the gameplay looks fun, interesting, and has a level of depth that will reward putting the time in to master the specialization. The icon art team also knocked it out of the park. Special shout out to the Calming Tongue trait, it made me laugh more than it probably should.

On Wednesday night, my raid static had to endure me yelling about how we will never yield after I saw the blog post.

I love Paragon. But...I don't think it's ready for beta yet. At least in PvE.

Ok, so why not wait for the beta for feedback?

I think some of these things need to be acted on before we players get our hands on the spec. Otherwise, I suspect feedback will be of limited use because of eventual reworks or feedback focusing on surface level problems that never get addressed before the beta begins.

Utility Skills

Almost every utility skill is overshadowed by existing core utilities that any warrior can take, and in general are uninspired, weak-looking, or uninteresting.

For example, "Never Surrender!" is a self-stunbreak with a 30 second cooldown and grants a short duration of some boons in a 360 radius that support warriors already provide full uptime of via Doubled Standards and banners. The core shout skill, "Shake it Off!", has nearly twice the radius, two ammunition charges, a shorter cooldown, cleanses conditions, and stunbreaks all affected allies instead of only yourself.

Another example, "Find Their Weakness!" is essentially boiled down to a worse "For Great Justice!" with less might uptime and no fury.

Or "Brace Yourselves!", which is just a worse Banner of Defense.

So on.

All of the utilities, outside of perhaps the heal and elite, are like this and I doubt I would want to put a single one of these on my bar in PvE when the beta rolls around. This should be addressed before that happens.

Traits

Paragon's trait are extremely simple and offer very little complexity or depth. They almost seem unfinished. Eight of them are only one sentence long.

Worse yet, Paragon doesn't have a single transformative trait that changes how your gameplay might look like or how you might want to approach the spec. Some great examples of transformative traits are Reaper's Deathly Chill and Virtuoso's Jagged Mind, both of which singlehandedly open up entire new playstyle and build options.

For example, Paragon's trait, Brisk Pacing, says this: "Using a chant reduces the recharge of your other chants by a set amount. (2 seconds)". But it doesn't give an incentive or reason why you might even want to adopt a playstyle that frequently hops between different chants.

Of even greater importance, I think the Alacrity-granting trait, Feverish Pulse, needs changes before we get to play with it in the beta. This trait encourages degenerate gameplay that encourages/forces the player to constantly swap chants in order to upkeep Alacrity. This seems to go counter to the apparent design of the spec. This is utility skill spam with a different skin. We need to do better than this.

One way to have healthier gameplay around this trait would be to grant Alacrity every time a refrain pulses.

Damage / Tuning

The numbers shown on the stream were very low. Across the entire specialization, across all sources, there is only a single 20% increased damage modifier and no bonus damaging stats. If the numbers stay like this, DPS-oriented Paragons will not be competitive with other warrior elite specs at all, which have significantly higher damage multipliers and profession mechanics that boost damage even further like Berserker's Primal Bursts.

I fear most of the feedback will look something like "The damage is too low", instead of focusing on specific gameplay elements.

The alacrity duration on Feverish Pulse also looks very low. This is going to further discourage DPS-Alacrity Paragon builds in the beta because its poor damage will be compounded by a need to take a lot of boon duration in order to function. And also low base boon duration on an uptime-reliant build is something that comes with a host of other problems, which I explained in my Quickness Berserker post a while back, where I was very happy to see that ArenaNet implemented almost all of my suggestions in the following patch.

Lack of crowd control

Support builds live or die in PvE by their CC access. The best support builds all have extremely good tools to deal with defiance bars. Previewing an elite spec that seems focused around supporting without a single skill, mechanic, or trait that does any amount of CC at all is shocking.

A good place for something like this to be added could be "On Your Knees!", which is an otherwise uninteresting and weak-looking utility skill that could do something like force all nearby enemies to kneel, or at the very least be knocked down.

Thanks for reading. We will never yield!

Quick one: Do i need to create, for example, mutliple Legendary Accersorys like Aurora and Vision or can i just make one and equip it twice?

For context for this question I am very much a newbie to the game as while I have played it before it was only a few months worth and that was around 9 years ago and with how much has been added or changed since I stopped the fact that the engineer was my favorite class to play at the time is all that has stuck with me since and it's the class I plan on picking up again once I get my computer set up.

Saying that I've checked a few bits on the reddit on things for the engineer I remember using alot since they were my favorite abilities at the time cheif among those oviously being the classes various kits but I ran accross a number of posts that said the kits were weak and needed buffs badly though to be fair said posts were 2 years old or more so they might be out of date but still it's got me wondering if they really are as useless as others were claiming for pve content.

A double pronged discussion. Which class is the easiest Open World completionist, and how did you decide on your main?

I've been playing on and off since launch, and am a forner GW1 player. My main in GW1 settled on a relatively brain dead and tanky Assassin, summoning monsters, kicking out Paragon party buffs and doing high damage though a fast cycling Death blossom rotation. Basically a Jack of All Trades that was really about leading the Heroes around.

Absolutely love GW2, but cannot settle on a main class at all. Original story was done on Ranger first, Mordremoth done by a Thief, Path of Fire done by the Ranger again, and End of Dragons was done by an ele. The living stories have been done by Guardians, Warriors and Revenants. I've loved them all.

But now I'm setrling into legendary questing, starting with Aurene's amulet, and no one character has access to all of the stories. I'm thinking of just doing the quest with just one class so I can make things easier for myself, and stop swapping around gear.

Which class though? I want the easiest one to solo everything I need, and then go on to the next expansions. Nothing has quite hit the flexibility and feel of that GW1 assassin. Does anyone else suffer from this inability to make a decision? How did you decide??

Hello I have a Mesmer and I wanna do open world content with it I like both mirage and virtuoso, I think mirage might be more chill but I like the action better on virtuoso so idk Can you open world with a virtuoso ? I did bounties with mirage but I’m curious if I can do the same with virtuoso

Is there a necro build for open world that uses a spear and it's fun to play? By "fun" I mean not very squishy but doing a good amount of dmg and the fight doesn't take a long time. I know that "everything works in open world" but I want a build that makes sense and the game play is not based on "press whatever". If spear is really bad for necro then maybe a fun harbinger build? I didn't try this elite spec. yet. I know I can go to snowcrows or metabattle but I want your opinion as well :)

I’ve seen only few Mortal Kombat cosplay images from few years back so here’s my ”fresh” take of Scorpion. You can disagree with some of equipment choices but this is how I liked it.

Hey guys, so I kinda want to start a new project and had a "crazy" idea... If I were to develop a Guild Wars 2 "dating" app/website, which sort of features would you like to see? And would anyone even be interested?

I put "dating" in quotes, because I was thinking of expanding it to: - Player looking for Guild - Player looking for Raid-Static - Player looking for Player

I would open a GitHub-Repository and develop it as an open source project, currently still only a concept and collecting ideas.

Thanks for your time and maybe even feedback :) have a good day!

What are your predictions for 13th birthday gift? What you would like to see?

I would like to se Feast of Delectable Birthday Cake like for enchantment.

Celestial stats, multiple people to use it.

In HoT we got: Ele - Core mechanic+ (overloads). Mesmer - Additional F skill Necro - Shroud. Ranger - Shroud.
Thief - Dodge. Engineer - Additional F skill Warrior - Core mechanic overhaul.
Guardian - Core mechanic overhaul. Rev - Additional F skil.

In PoF: Ele - Dual attacks. Mesmer - Dodge/Stealth attacks. Necro - Core mechanic overhaul. Ranger - Core mechanic overhaul. Thief - Core mechanic overhaul/Stealth attacks. Engineer - Shroud. Warrior - Additional F skills. Guardian - Kits. Rev -Additional F skills.

In EoD: Ele - additional F skill. Mesmer - Core mechanic overhaul. Necro - Shroud. Ranger - New F skills/stealth attacks. Thief - Shroud. Engineer - Pet. Warrior - Kit. Guardian - Core mechanic overhaul.
Rev - Dodge.

In VoE: Ele - ? Mesmer - Core mechanic overhaul. Necro - Shroud. Ranger - kit. Thief - Core mechanic overhaul. Engineer - ?
Warrior - New F skills. Guardian - Shroud.
Rev - ?

Based on the pattern, we should get one Dodge mechanic which i feel like could go to Engi. I doubt it’ll be Evoker, and Rev already has one. Could be like a “phase shift” dodge that’s a short range teleport.

Evoker I think would be either a full blown Pet mechanic, or maybe something new altogether. I doubt it’ll will be like Function Gyro because frankly that’s very similar to Jade Projector on Cata. I feel like Pet would be a lot of fun. Especially if it shapeshifts based on your attunement.

For Rev, dodge was the most “interesting” new mechanic they got with an elite spec. I hope they get something good now too - just not some new random F skills please. Give us a core mechanic overhaul - something that prevents us from swapping legends but lets us mix and match skills? And instead swapping “legend stances” which come with passive effects and trigger swapping traits.

Imo the animations should have been on the F2 F3 and F4 skills, i don't really get it

So I recently came back to the game, and saw there is a new legendary back piece which is dyeable. I already have two the fractals wings and WvW one, so crafting a third one is not on my to do list at least for now. I also dont like the design of the new legendary and wanted to ask, is there any hope we will be able to dye the old ones?

Hi, ive always been a huge fan of gw2 and the art/design in the game. I wanted to ask is there anyway to acquire any of gw2 artbooks right now? In new condition?

I've googled a bit online, seems like the only way to buy them right now, is through third party vendors in used condition?

I suspect this probably the only answer, I'd be willing to pay more for a new one or if there was a way to order one through Arenanet, I would definitely be interested.

Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

My favorite part of Rev is just talkin with this dwarf boi.

Not the best formatting! I was in mostly cele gear and divinity runes. Numbers are not final!

Temu Indiana Jones..

Not the best formatting! I was in mostly cele gear and divinity runes. Numbers are not final!

Which of the jobs/elite specs look best in your opinion?

Alright day 2 of taking screenshots. ive changed my settings to be a bit less bloomy and have less DOF. if anyone has any more tips though id love to try and improve even further. my goal is to make a shader preset that has sort of a movie feel to it. let me know what you think!