18 replies to this topic

[LiveSpartan235]

https://www.guildwar...cember-10-2013/

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Starting December 10, 2013

The nights may be growing longer and colder, but Lion’s Arch is merrier than ever before! Wintersday is returning to Tyria, along with everyone’s favorite toymaking inventor – Tixx! Celebrate the end of one year and the beginning of the next in this six-week winter festival!

• The Wondrous Workshop
  
  Enter Toymaker Tixx’s workshop inside his golem-shaped airship, the Infinirarium, to corral mischievous toys and set things to rights!
  
• Winter Wonderland
  
  The multi-path Winter Wonderland jumping puzzle is full of beautiful delights and death-defying challenges! Leap from snowflake to snowflake, prance up a stack of gifts, and race giant snowballs on your way to the prize!
  
• Bell Choir
  
  Make sweet music ring through the air with Tyria’s favorite musical challenge, the Bell Choir! Group up with other players to make sweet harmonies and ring in the season.
  
• Toypocalypse
  
  Toys are running amok and threatening everyone’s Wintersday! Enter Toypocalypse to defend noble, gift-bearing dolyaks and Tixx’s toymaking machine from the predations of haywire toys!
  
• Snowball Mayhem
  
  What good is Wintersday without the opportunity to pelt friends, foes, and total strangers in the face with snowballs? The Snowball Mayhem fight will pitch you against other players in a mission to store up as many presents as possible while laying waste to the opposing team!
  
• Lingering Poison
  
  You may have found a way into the Toxic Alliance’s inner sanctum, but this has by no means curtailed their nefarious activities! Kessex Hills and the surrounding countryside are still befouled by the alliance’s evil presence!
  
• Developer Livestream—December 9
  
  Sneak a peek at the Wintersday wonders that await you – join ArenaNet devs for a livestream on our Twitch channel on Monday, December 9, at 12PM PST!

Rewards


Tixx’s Toybox

Tixx’s marvelous miniature toys are available once again! Complete the Wintersday meta achievement to receive Tixx’s Toybox, which will grant you one of Tixx’s toys: a Mini Ventari, Mini Plush Griffon, Mini Princess Doll, Mini Toy Golem, or Mini Toy Soldier.

Features

Craft Ascended Armor


The Armorsmith, Leatherworker, and Tailor crafting disciplines have a new skill cap of 500, which means that you can now craft your own Ascended armor! Refine, stitch, and hammer your way to 500 to become a Grandmaster Crafter and unlock the ability to craft Ascended armor!


New Healing Skills

Still trying to find just the right healing skill for your build?
Perhaps this will help – we’re introducing a new healing skill
for every profession!


December 10 Balance Update

Are you looking to fine-tune your build, or maybe hoping to try out something new entirely? Our next balance update is coming, and its focus is on improving traits and trait lines. You can read about incoming changes here.

Not mentioned in the features part is the rewarding of gold in sPvP and the using gold and glory to buy Tomes of Knowledges to raise your characters level.

[Heylo]

well i know what i'm doing after i finish these wvw cheeves. Ori farming all day erry day. Now I have 7 chars to ori farm with.

[Heylo]

someone datamined the new healing skills: http://www.reddit.co...ills_datamined/
some of them look pretty cool.

[CriticKitten]

The Warrior one sounds broken as hell, but what else is new?

The Guardian heal skill is solid for offensively-oriented meditation builds, too, which I've been debating running as a secondary set-up for WvW roaming.

However, honestly this is the wrong direction to go with that promise of "new skills".  We could use updates to the existing utilities and/or new utilities and elites far more than we need new heal skills.

[Necros Stalker]

Signet of vamperism. It better be on par with the warriors healing signet or close to otherwise there's gonna be a lot of disappointed people. Our bloodline outside of wells/transfusion is already putiful and hopefully this can fix it.

Otherwise the update looks good. Ascended armour and better PvP rewards will make my friends happy and the balance changes are something I look forward to. This will be my first wintersday as well

[Reisa]

It depends on what the cooldowns look like.

Personally, I think the Mesmer one looks the most broken-able.

It's a decent direction to go for skills--smooth out some of the holes and allow people to make all -type builds (such as all meditations, etc).  Also, a lot of regening heal skills in the mix, maybe as a counter to the massive amounts of conditions out there.

Also, ugh, ascended armor.

[matthen]

I checked the balance changes thread, and it looks like the one that's 28-days old. Am I missing something, or is they still the latest info?

[ChapDev]

Heylo, on 04 December 2013 - 06:33 PM, said:

someone datamined the new healing skills: http://www.reddit.co...ills_datamined/
some of them look pretty cool.

Thief one is bad.

If they want it to work they need to change the way than Venom works, If they allow it so that Venom's act like a Mesmer's Mantra ability (You activate the Venom then recieve "X" charges to use that venom when you choose) then the heal could be viable in some circumstances I guess and Venom builds might actually be useful for more than Zerg Venomshare.

However the way Venom's work at the moment is that you will apply them and then all your stacks of that venom are automatically used on the next set number of attacks if you want them to or not. (Spider venom next 5 attacks will stack poison for example) This being one of the main problems preventing a decent Venom build as yes you can stack it all in a burst for incredibly long duration but it is also incredibly easy to remove all the conditions your Venom applies because of this.

[QueenEtna]

asssssscccccceeeeeeeenddddddddddddeeeeeeeddddddddd arrrrrrrrmoooooorrrrrrccrrrrraffffftiiiiiingggggg eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!! im looking forward to this!!

[CriticKitten]

ChapDev, on 06 December 2013 - 01:30 AM, said:

-snip-

I understand that may be true for normal venoms which rely heavily on conditions, but this is a venom whose sole purpose is to heal you with each strike.

If you're casting it in the first place, then presumably you want the healing as soon as possible, so why wouldn't you want to dump the venom charges into your next few attacks?

I'm pretty sure the problem is with the other venoms, not with this heal skill.  It looks like it'll be just fine.

[Aggro Master X]

The one for Rangers I find to be disappointing. Another spirit which can be KO'd easily and that has no condition removal? It won't ever be seeing a use from me.

[ChapDev]

CriticKitten, on 07 December 2013 - 12:38 PM, said:

I understand that may be true for normal venoms which rely heavily on conditions, but this is a venom whose sole purpose is to heal you with each strike.

Signet of Malice doing so as a Passive ability and doesn't run out after 4 attacks I don't think you will see Skelk Venom replacing SoM in builds that use heal of strike.

CriticKitten, on 07 December 2013 - 12:38 PM, said:

If you're casting it in the first place, then presumably you want the healing as soon as possible, so why wouldn't you want to dump the venom charges into your next few attacks?

The problem there being that this is a burst heal which can be largely negated by a dodge roll or a block/aegis that is a reason I wouldn't want to dump all the venom charges into the next few attacks and would prefer it as a Mantra based system.

That with it being on a 45s Cooldown makes it the longest cool down for a thief heal outside of Cultural skills with Hide in Shadows being 30s and Signet of Malice/Withdraw on 15s if I recall that correct, Being able to pick when to use those 4 charges would help survive that cool down time.

[CriticKitten]

ChapDev, on 07 December 2013 - 05:53 PM, said:

Signet of Malice doing so as a Passive ability and doesn't run out after 4 attacks I don't think you will see Skelk Venom replacing SoM in builds that use heal of strike.

Signet of Malice also doesn't heal for nearly as much per hit, but yes, I get your meaning.  The venom's not likely to replace SoM for non-venom sharing builds.

....though I don't believe I ever suggested otherwise.

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The problem there being that this is a burst heal which can be largely negated by a dodge roll or a block/aegis that is a reason I wouldn't want to dump all the venom charges into the next few attacks and would prefer it as a Mantra based system.

Er, but that's also the case with Signet of Malice, because the heal is based on hits.  So against a small group of blocking opponents, you're literally just as vulnerable.  Moreso, in fact, because it heals for less with each hit, whereas the venom is more of a burst-style heal that could be popped and dumped when necessary.  The CD is pretty pitiful though, I agree.

I understand that you don't put any value in the heal because it's a venom, but you're projecting flaws onto the skill that are also present on the other heal-on-hit skill and pretending like it doesn't affect that one.

[Gatita]

I'm really hoping that if they're planning to "cover all the bases" so to speak with heal skills (and elites in the future) that this will mean Anet is going to give a look at the different specs out there and try to bring them more up to par, try to give us more option and variety.
Spirit weapon guards? Venom sharing thieves? Manta mesmers? Stance warrior? Signet *cough* specs? (Not sure if I'm really getting my point across here, because some of these might be viable in WvW or sPvP)

[CriticKitten]

I'd rather they improve existing utility skills and make more elites, myself.

Because if they made existing utilities better and gave us a few more elites to pick from, there'd be plenty of selection.  Heals are honestly an area we don't need a ton of additional selection in, just yet.

[Fritanga]

CriticKitten, on 08 December 2013 - 02:37 PM, said:

I'd rather they improve existing utility skills and make more elites, myself.

This is actually just the beginning of a bunch of skill-oriented expansions to the classes. If I remember correctly, they said that we would get healing skills first, elites second and then other utilities 3rd. They even mentioned adding new trait lines and skills eventually (that is clearly much further down the line). If they add new trait lines, I would think that would be related to adding a new weapon to each player class since the traits tend to synergize around specific weapons.

[Aggro Master X]

Fritanga, on 18 December 2013 - 01:37 PM, said:

This is actually just the beginning of a bunch of skill-oriented expansions to the classes. If I remember correctly, they said that we would get healing skills first, elites second and then other utilities 3rd. They even mentioned adding new trait lines and skills eventually (that is clearly much further down the line). If they add new trait lines, I would think that would be related to adding a new weapon to each player class since the traits tend to synergize around specific weapons.

I'm not sure this will work out well with the new utility skills or Elites, because for certain classes, they're not going to top what we currently have, or they're going to be worse than most of our already bad skills. Sorry to sound pessimistic, but the new Healing Skills pretty much showed me that Anet may not be 100% aware of what the classes really need.

[Fritanga]

I think that there is a lot of misconception about what they were trying to pull off with the new healing skills. The skills weren't added to be a major chance, but to fill the gaps in specific trait lines. Take Necro as an example: They never had a signet heal, so in order to run signets in the utility, they would have to split their traits elsewhere for the heal to benefit (either in wells or minions).

An even better example is Engineer. In that class, Turrets, Elixers, and Kits were all represented whereas Gadgets were not. A.E.D adds a gadget heal to the mix that makes traiting into gadgets a possibility now (not a very likely one, but its still possible now). Likewise, Elementalists lacked an Arcane heal (a line which is almost standard for most elementalist builds).

I believe that the natural next step is elites. Will we finally see a gadget-oriented elite skill for Engineers? (for that matter, what is Morter counted as?!!?) Perhaps a Signet on Necro? as an elite? If they go along these lines first, I think we can end up with some very interesting changes to come!

[Aggro Master X]

Hmm, that's a good point, I never really thought on that.