Butr0sButr0s

The above ideas cover most of what I would like, but I'm also hoping for some more attention to social features in the major cities so they feel less barren.

I'd love it if they had inns/bars/festivals take the place of social bonfires.  You hang out in these public places for a little while and get a 30-45 min buff due to boosted morale.  This would go a long way towards creating social hubs as opposed to the cities now, which just feel like a bunch of people running in all directions constantly (or piling up around the vault).  Throw in some mini games, far more emotes, and some kind of music or performing options for good measure.

I'm not expecting any large design changes until the first 'expansion' comes down the pipeline, but I'm excited for the possibilities.  The super adventure box proved how versatile the engine is; changing the UI, map transitions, checkpoints, etc.  While I don't think we will see those conventions coming to the main game per se, it does show you how much variety can be added to the game with a little creativity.

I feel like the first major expansion (as in, a new landmass to explore) has the chance to go back to some of the design principles they hoped to implement when the game first released.  No heart quests, more involved and persistent dynamic events, less timer-driven world bosses, etc.  Add on top of that some more effort towards the social aspect of the game, some fleshed out minigame/diversions, and continued dungeon diversity like the fractals, and and I think it will go a long way towards maturing the game.

I know its probably just pie in the sky brainstorming, but the super adventure box really did make me excited about the possibilities.

I'm not sure I'd risk my currently level 80 as it's the character I use when playing with friends, but I'd enjoy an option for a 'hardcore' server where all characters are wiped upon death.  It would certainly make dungeons a lot more interesting, and would make the revive mechanic all the more essential.

Vendonis, on 01 April 2013 - 06:51 PM, said:

Sure.  In the traits we had only two differences.  I used Blade Training instead of Phantasmal Fury because I'm fairly reliant on blurred frenzy as a way to avoid damage (and I enjoy having the cooldown as fast as possible).  For example, on some bosses that have ranged attacks I'll use blurred frenzy, even out of melee range, to negate the damage if my endurance is low.  I took Master of Misdirection instead of Compounding Power - since all of your shatters do confusion damage (with shatter 2 doing double stacks) I enjoyed the extra duration, which will be even more potent if you ever do WvW.

For the utility skills I rolled with blink instead of nullfield (again to avoid boss attacks when endurance is low), switching it out for feedback in certain encounters.

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I'm running a fairly standard shatter build at the moment, using sword/focus and staff.  The thing about power/prec/crit is it helps both shatters and phantasm damage, and there's no 'damage cap'.  I've been grouping with a few engineers recently and was getting frustrated that we were hitting the bleed cap so some of my damage was getting wasted with the sharper images setup.  I felt like I should just transition to either full condition or full direct damage, and since I tend to melee a fair amount it made the shatter builds more attractive.  The only thing I really miss about the rampager/bleed is that the clones were easy to keep up at all times (from rolling, decoy, and mirror images) whereas if the phantasms get wiped they take a while to bring back up.

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I think what you have already is fairly good, but I would rely more on your clones to do damage through bleeds rather than your phantasms.  You've got such a high crit rate, and can make clones so easily, put them to good use.

Ok, I have better understanding of what you are trying to do now.  With Greatsword/Staff the illusionary elasticity trait makes more sense as those are the two weapons that benefit the most (Staff attack 1, and greatsword attack 3).

Rampager/Berserker vs condition damage/staff vs shatter/phantasm aren't really separate, but the issue is you have a limited amount of points and traits to get the most out of what you want to do.  So you can certainly have a good build that uses some traits for your staff, buffs phantasms, and also has condition damage, but that means you will be more spread out than a build devoted to one particular damage type.

Your current build is very close to the Rampager Bleed build I ran until last week (all rampager armor, weapons, and trinkets).  I used the earth sigil as well on both sets of weapons, as well as a sigil of fire on my offhand focus for some AOE damage vs trash (it will go off all the time since you have such a high critical rate, although with GS I would probably still go earth).

The good part of the build is that it's very flexible.  Vs bosses I just popped 3 staff clones and let them go to work while I attacked with my staff.  They will keep 15 bleed stacks without a problem, which lets you run around reviving people while the clones continue to do damage. If you have other people in the group running conditions (such as a necro or engineer) your bleeds will be somewhat useless due to the 25 stack cap.  But with rampager it's fine, because you can now switch to GS and Staff phantams, which do respectable damage with all the power you have and the high crit chance.

Your biggest issue will be doing spike damage to kill the trash enemies quickly.  I actually found shatter #1 and 2 to work well even though its not a shatter build - you'll do ok damage off initially and good confusion damage for a few seconds afterwards (trash mobs have a somewhat faster attack rate than most bosses).

Last - your best friend for survivability (on a budget) will be mixed berry pies.  They only cost a silver or less a piece, and give you a sizeable heal on critical, which you should be doing all the time.