Guild Chat - Episode 108

The following is an unofficial, player-written transcript of the episode. The accuracy of this transcription has not been verified by ArenaNet.

The 108th episode of Guild Chat aired on August 13, 2021.

Transcription[edit]

Note: The text below was auto-transcribed and not reviewed. It could be that text appears for the wrong speaker.

Voice Over: Look around us. Your children would be trapped in the past if. Not for me. Their worlds are carved from the jade that I gave purpose. I promised them a future. A century of progress cannot end this way. I'll find a way to save us all.

Rubi Bayer: Happy Friday. Welcome to Guild chat. I'm your host Ruby, and today we're going to be giving you a look at the three ended Dragons elite specializations that we showed you earlier this week. Then next week you'll be able to try them out for yourself in our first and Dragons elite specialization beta event. One quick note before we get started, I wanted to let those of you know who are playing that. We have a balance patch coming next Tuesday and after the show is over, we're going to have some preview notes for you. So as soon as we're done here, head over to. Right. Forums right now I know you are eager to get a better look at those. Elite specs so. Let's get right into it and start with our.

Indigo Linde: Deaf guests. Hi, indigo. Hi. I'm indigo. I'm a narrative designer and writer on end of Dragons and Guild Wars five. I've been helping with the golden path. I'm a content owner from one of our open world maps that we'll talk about at a later date. And I've been helping. Ground the elite specializations with some really rich. Which is why.

Rubi: I'm here today. Yeah. Thank you for joining. Us and Cal hey.

Cal Cohen: Hi. Happy to be here. I'm Cal Cohen, game designer. I worked a lot on PvP and world and of Dragons. I did a lot of work on loot specializations, so I'm here to show some of those off. And I'm really excited to do.

Rubi: So, well, thank you both. Let's get right into it and start with the harbinger.

Cal: Yeah, let's talk about.

Rubi: The harbinger. Right. Indigo. Why don't you give us some background on what the Harbingers are all about? Cause we saw the video earlier.

Indigo: This week, yeah, absolutely. So the Harbinger is a really, really fun class, and it's a little bit of a total break away from what we're used to with the Necromancer, which are traditional summoners in a fantasy realm. They're summoning the dead, but the Harbinger specifically is our mixture. Between a snake oil salesman meets an Old West gun. There. So it's it's very fun and it's a little nefarious and really unpredictable, but in kampa people have discovered that you can extract ancient magic from the jade. As a result. Of the jade wind and the Harbingers, who are also very adept alchemist, have realized that they can take. That energy and then view it into their elixirs as well as their bullet for their main hand pistol, and the result is incredibly deadly and noxious. And I think players are gonna have.

Rubi: A lot of fun with that. I hope so. Well, let's take a look and have Cal run us through how it works.

Cal: All right, let's do it. So, Harbinger, right? Pistol, necro elixirs, cool stuff. Important note for the balance update. Harbinger Shroud is actually something that Scourge does right now, but not anymore. We're renaming that the Sandstorm Shroud a lot more thematic. And since we now have a character called the Harbinger, it probably makes sense that Harbinger Shroud belongs to the Harbinger. So let's dive in here. There's. Actually, a lot of stuff going on with the shroud mechanic on the harbinger. So let's just start going over them. First off, let's see if as long as you are in combat and you have life force, you're going to see that life force is going to be drained over time to heal the Necromancer. So this is going to create kind of like an interesting dynamic in how you're going to play the game. Being able to build up enough life force. You enter shroud but at the same time you need to make sure that you're avoiding enough damage so that doesn't actually drain too much of that life force. And I mean, you still get the upside of the heel, but a lot of time you're going to want to go into that shroud and get access to those damaging abilities. So it's kind of right off the bat, kind of an interesting change of pace for this character. And there's a lot more to come, and let's just give myself some more life force here. And the first thing we going to see when we hop in the shroud, we're starting to accumulate this, this mechanic called blight. And we'll see a little bit more of this on the rest of the spec as well. But building up light, you can see on the health or we're gaining negative health, this is temporary. Both 2% per stack. This stacks up to 25 times, so you can lose up to 50% of your maximum health if you are capped. Light and the the trade off there is that some of the traits on this character are going to reward you for accumulating a lot of blight. And that's going. To create kind of this high risk, high reward dynamic for this character, which is more of more of this what a glassy DPS character, even more so than Reaper, we're going to see a couple other mechanics with the shroud that really reinforce that. Looking to make this more of a high. DPS a little. More mobility than Necromancer is used to. We'll get to that as we get into the shroud skills. So blight key mechanic will see that on Elixir as well. The other thing to note about Harbinger Shroud is that life force will not actually protect you. It will not absorb damage while you're in shroud, you are just going to take full damage from abilities against your health total. So this again makes the character a little bit more squishy, but at the same time it also gives you more. Access to life force because you can't actually be pushed out through damage eating through all your life force, you're going. Have access to shroud as long as you have life force. Obviously you'll be accumulating blight as that goes on and you're going to be susceptible to damage. So really big moment of high risk, high reward again. And since you're able to take damage, you're also allowed to be healed. So it's a pretty big disconnect from the typical shroud we see on corn echo we see on Reaper. Kind of similar to scourge in that sense, where you always kind of have access to incoming healing and. At the same time, don't have that massive protection from life force Scourge makes up for some barrier. Harbinger just has to deal with it. Get some allies to heal you get some supports, make some support friends and really be able to capitalize on the upside of Harbingers route. So that kind of creates a few different ways that you can interact with shroud here, because the longer obviously the longer you stay in shroud, you're going to be accumulating. Sites you're even more and more susceptible to damage. So sometimes you might want to just pop in, use all your abilities, which we will cover very shortly. If we just show off super high level. Here's some buttons to press. So you might pop in, use all your abilities, pop out, and really minimize the blight. Then you're giving up some of the sustained pressure from the damaging abilities in Harbors route, but at the same time, you're kind of maximizing your survivability by accumulating less blight. Or you can have that kind of trade off, where going in with maximum health. Or maximum life force is going to give you access to 20 potentially 20 seconds of shroud. The strains at 5% per second. So up to 20 seconds of trial, we're gonna really have access to. A lot of these powerful abilities. And just going to throw something out for all of the theory crafters in the chat real quick, everyone who has spreadsheets which probably compare notes sometime because I'm a big fan of spreadsheets. But for anyone who wants to do some calculations and maybe figure out the power coefficients of all these abilities before getting your hands on the next Tuesday, the character I'm currently on has 2023 power. As well as about 37% boon duration, so keep that in mind. Legendary debt or legendary pistol? Sorry, getting ahead of myself, so keep that in mind. There's your weapon strength, there's your power. Figure out the power coefficient. Everyone out there with spreadsheets. Big thumbs up. And so we'll be hover over tooltips as we go in there. So let's take a look at the actual. Shroud skills now. Starting off, we have tainted bolts. This is just. Auto attack it's. A little bit cooler than life blast. It's a little bit faster. Typical. I guess maybe a little closer to Reaper, which has the Nice auto attack chain compared to the very deliberate life blast that core Necro has access to, so this actually fires two different projectiles, so a little bit of extra value from doom fire for example, which we've already kind of preemptively reduced the burning duration of doom fire for this for the Harbinger specialization. Because of this kind of dual hit on the auto attack. So a little bit of power damage, a little bit of torment in there, and all the lovely procs of shrouds go one that everyone knows and loves. Moving on to Dark Barrage is kind of the primary damage I'm going to have to keep resetting my shroud over and over and over, but that's fine. This is kind of the primary damage payoff for the kids. Is the high power coefficient. A lot of torment. This is more of that shotgun style, point blank projectile. That we see on stuff like split play we see on Phantom fire, a lot of skills have this kind of value for being closer in range. Can you see moving back, you're not going to get full all six hits on these projectiles, but you still get a little bit of damage. It's going to be optimal to be in melee range. We're going to see the opportunity to get in melee range. With some of the other skills on this. Moving on to both devouring cut and voracious arc, these are both movement abilities, so Reaper gets the one dash on skill two Harbinger gets a little bit more and got two movements going here that that is actually really long. That's great. So developing cut, it's where that burning speed no evade. Here we put the evade on voracious arc not want it. We don't want to overload that too much, Necro still trying to be a little bit of this squishier character. Don't want to put too many of AIDS in there, but giving access to a little bit more movement is going to allow you to both get in and set up your dark barrage or kind of disengage and get back into range for your pistol abilities. So development, cut, damage, and torment. Pretty straightforward, voracious arc. This one has the evade. This is the vault animation that we've seen before. On Daredevil, this is also going to have a very, very short days. So this is kind of your main engage tool of this is going to set you up in a short days, maybe interrupt something, give you a very short window of opportunity to kind of capitalize on. What you're trying to do really far off the dark barrage. And then finally we're going to see the big CC vital draw on skill 5. Not uncommon for Necco to have a CC skill on skill 5. We've seen it with the executioner, Cython, Reaper and tainted shackles on Necro or Core Necro. Viral draw. Probably the most powerful. We have like 3 second float. This also gives you a little bit of life force as well. So that kind of gives you a little bit more time in here if you're hitting maximum number of targets, this is an AOE 3 second float. So really big potential to set up dark barrage setup pistol scale you know hit this. Start garage. Get out. Press 2, spill 2 weeping shots. We'll get to that real quick. You have a lot of opportunity to set up both yourself and your teammate with that, with that ability. So there's never a lot of power in the Harbinger kit we're trying to really balance the risk reward aspect of no no health coverage with life force and also the just increasing blight mechanic and trying to make sure that the Harbinger Trout kit is strong enough to really warrant that. And we'll see how that actually ends up playing out once you guys get your hands on this in the beta. So next let's hop into the pistol kit. This is kind of a ranged it's kind of like a hybrid DPS weapon. You can play it with either power condition or potentially both. Maybe grieving is a solid stack combination there or carrying rabbit these. Maybe not as much rabbit, but carrying is a solid stack combination there, but looking at vicious shot, pretty standard auto Attack 2 bounce. So line up two targets, you're going to get a little bit extra value there. Damaged torment. Nothing too crazy, but it's an auto attack. We want to make sure it's kind of pretty, pretty basic. And moving on to weeping shots, the two skills showed this a little bit off of the viral draw. This is kind of the. This is probably the strongest or maybe not the strongest of the trees. Also pretty good, but this this weeping shots does a lot of things it's going to do damage, vulnerability, torment, life force. This also pierces so if you line up a good number of targets you can get a pretty significant amount of AOE damage. This is obviously a little bit harder to do in a competitive setting where the enemies aren't going to stack as cleanly. On top of each other for a line projectile, but if you get that perfect line. And then you're looking at potentially a lot of life force, a lot of damage and this is? The life force is only gonna be once per bullet. We didn't wanna over bullet too much on one skill, so this is only gonna be up to 9% if you land all six of those shots on any target pure saying not going to give you any additional value. It's only the 1st target truck because you like force. But we'll see a bit more life force generation on the rest of the kit as well. Moving on to Vial Blast skill 3, this is another pretty strong shell, though the whole kit here on the pistol is quite good, gives you a little bit more AOE than some. Of the other. Necromancer weapons looking at acts and scepter, for example. They each have like a singular AOE skill, but pistol has the opportunity to kind of get AOE value out of both two and three and a little bit on the bouncing projectile with skill one. So just looking over vital, vital blast here. This is an Allie stone. Short duration is done one second. This is more intended to be like that. Interrupt disruptive value as opposed to the major crowd control setup. That's more what vital draw is trying to do out of the shroud kit. But this is also going to do weakness and poison and some life force. Life force generation so. Not quite enough to set up the entire combo from weeping shots, but if you have quickness you should be able to get all those shots in there. And we'll actually see a little bit of quickness and a non trivial amount of quickness as we move into the elixirs and some of the traits. So maybe that's something you can pull off more. Often that's. That's pistol good. You know, it's 900 range. Pretty standard for these necromancer necromancer range weapons. Let's hop into the elixir skills next. So elixirs, we've still type, we've seen before in engineer. This is, I mean going to see a lot of boons we're going to see a lot of light. And so by putting blight onto all of these elixirs, it kind of gives us the ability to push them a bit more above rate in terms of what amount of boons they're going to give because they're also going to have that downside. Negative negative overall health. So it looks promised pretty straightforward as to heal skills just gives you bigger and healing and life force and a little bit of light and then we'll get to a few more exciting skills here. Looks are at risk 10 might stacks and fury more of that offensive option and then combine that with elixir of Anguish is going to be. First, source of quickness that we see here. Getting some notes on the it's a good call. Take a drink. Anyone who knows me knows that I can ramble about this game for a very, very long time, so we're definitely going to have a bit of that. Thank you. Anyway, elixir of anguish, this is first source of quickness we're seeing in this kit also gives you a little bit of swiftness. Who cares about that quickness, is the awesome thing here. Well, you know, you run a little bit faster. That's fine. That's fine. Everyone sees quickness and that's that's what you want to see here. So you know, you could look for vanish looks for this. That's a lot quickness. Might feel your big damage potential. We'll see a little bit more coming in from the elite scale once we get there as well, which is going to. Be very exciting. Moving on to elixir of Bliss, this is another life force source, so this is going to convert conditions into life. Force removes 5 condies a little bit of resolution on top in case you have more condies on you, then it's going to reduce some of that. Damn. The primary value here is the Condi cleanse and the life force generation, but it's an elixir, so it's probably apply blue. Let's put resolution. Why not one more utility skill to get to before we get to that elite? And this is the stun brake of the kit elixir of ignorance, stun, break resistance. Nothing too crazy, but 25 seconds we'll see the Cdr trade in cooldown reduction. Trade in the trade line. Once we get there, so. This is potentially a pretty low. Cooldown, so at the cost of a little bit of lights you have access to a pretty reasonable stem brake option here. And finally, we are going to see what is the name of the skill. Again, elixir of ambition, super long tool tip. This applies every boom in the game 25 might this skill is super powerful, but at the same time we're looking at 10 stacks of blight, so this is -20% maximum health and you know the durations are things that we're going to be looking to tune. Some of these have been adjusted for competitive modes already. We've seen the strength of abilities that apply. Large quantity of boons and we want to make sure that the skill feels very powerful, but at the same time. Time just and to justify the trade off of blight. So maybe going a little bit crazy to start it out, but you know, that's what betas are for. We want to see, really, how some of these things play out. Some of the mechanics that are a little bit less known like Harbinger Trout is very unique. Take on how Necromancer plays. So it'll be really exciting to see how that actually plays out once everyone gets their hands on it. So let's hop into the traits. Next, we're going to see a few different potential build lines. I guess more incentives to build toward more power damage or more condition damage because the pistol can kind of support both harbor neutral can kind of support. Both. We're also going to see a little bit of a potential wound support option for the HARBINGER, which is something that Necro hasn't really had access to before. Scourge dipped its toe a little bit into that support role more than the barrier side and a little bit of my a little bit Connie cleansing there, harbinger is really leaning into the boon aspect with their elixirs. And so maybe some of. And deduce what one of the traits is going to be based off, you know, Boon support elixirs, give boons. I wonder what's going to be. There, we'll get to that pretty soon. And let's start out with the minor traits. Alchemic vigor, increased vitality. Why not? This is a great neck allows vitality, more life force, more health. It's going to give you more access to Harbingers route and a little bit, a little bit more upfront bulk. So, nothing too crazy, but minor trade. Want to make sure it it feels solid without being kind of overbearing. And then on the on the ground outside, we have corrupted talent game life force when entering Carbonite route, this is going to guarantee that you have a little bit more as we saw earlier with the life force draining to heal you while you're in combat, you're going to have a little bit. A little bit of that push pull of trying to build up enough life force to actually get a solid shroud off, so credit talent is going to give you a little bit more upfront. And what this also allows is. You're going to see that you can enter Harbinger Shroud with no life force because this trade is going to give you a little bit up front. So it's going to be a very, very short duration there. But if you do the emergency to access your vital draw or any of the mobility skills, that is always going to be available with corrupted talent. So then hopping into the adapt traits starting on the top, we're gonna see a lot of power damage on the top top row of traits, a little condition damage on the bottom line and a lot of boom related things or elixir related things in the center line. So look at corruption and septic corruption. These both are the blight pay offs. Looking at 1% believe this is half a percent in PDP and worldly world because this goes up to 2525% very very large number to see in the add up trade soft for a damage multiplier but this is that damage will pay off for. Extending your harbinger shroud and putting as much blood in yourself as possible, you get a really big payoff here. Septic corruption, with the slight addition of also making shroud skill to apply poison. So that's up to six poison stacks. If you hit all six of those projectiles. And then the middle. Here we have vial vials, and I pronounce it perfectly on the. First time this time and. This is the. It looks so cool down reduction. This one doesn't do anything particular with Boones, but this is going to be a little bit more disruptive get that slow and vulnerability on nearby enemies when you use an elixir. Moving into the master tier of traits, we have implacable foe. Stability on Harbinger Shroud. So this foot in the grade used to do this for all Necros doesn't exist anymore. Harbinger seems like a solid solid spot to give a little bit of stability back on Shroud Reaper has it on their skill three so giving harbinger access on a trait really kind of enables that more diving deep melee play style of get into harbor. Now get some stability. Dive in. Use my abilities and then potentially get out. Or just try to survive outside of that. This also gives you a little bit more velocity based off vitality. For that just a little bit of extra power damage. Down at the bottom, we're going to see pistol cool down reduction. So this is actually something you could take regardless of build, but there's also the expertise. Vitality conversion to kind of push incentivized condition builds a little bit more, but obviously anyone who's going to be using the pistol might see this as a viable trait, get more life force generation from two and three more stuns, just more access to those pistol skills. This could definitely slot into any kind of build. Then in here in the middle, here is kind of the the boom support payoff of the elixirs is elixirs. Now AOE. And a little bit of concentration on top. So this is something we've seen before, like Solbes stance share and. Stuff like that so. Looking at, I mean obviously elixir of ambition is the huge payoff here. If I come over to these goals that are my good friends, I can give them every book in the game and the flight is not shared. So this is me taking on a little bit of blight and giving a giant pile of boons to all of my allies. This is like this is super powerful trait like we see with the. This lobby stands for we see some duration reductions. This is just 100%. Everyone gets the full amount. This is definitely something that could come down in the future if it turns out to be too powerful. We want really want to see how this plays as we're trying to really enable Necromancer to be kind of this boon support character with Harbinger as something that it hasn't really done a whole lot of before. And it'll take quick, quick water break before hopping to the Grand Master trades. All right, so. Grand Master traits we're going to see kind of a common theme mechanical theme between the three of them, but they're all going to be again more in those power condition or boon duration type boon support type of builds rather starting with cascading corruption. This just gives you a little little power up front and also it's going to create this area effect around you. Well in Harbingers route that deal with power damage and a little bit of. So this is really another reward for staying in shroud for a long amount of time. You're going to get this continual damage pulses. Excuse me. Continual damage pulses to just get a little bit of extra pressure reward you for building up this flight. Staying in this route for a long time. And we're going to see similar mechanic on the condition damage side of things. A little bit condition damage up front and this is going to pulse torment and weakness. Instead of and I am combat. I'm lucky. Yeah, so tone and weakness as opposed to a little bit of power damage and cripple hop back in here and show the torment and weakness very exciting. And finally we're going to have the boom support grandmaster trade is going to be a pulsing AOE. Yes. So this is for yourself and nearby allies. We've seen a little bit of this on Reaper where they have that pulsing, pulsing quickness for themselves. This one's a little bit less up time overall, but it's going to be a hoe and obviously you can spec a lot more into boot duration on this character if this is the type of game play that you're looking for. So very, very powerful option. All of these grandmaster traits. Just really reward you for being in shroud for a long time and really pushing that risk reward side of the Harbinger kit. So that's all we've got to show off for the harbinger here. Obviously, there's a lot more to dive into in terms of like game play and rotations and all that good stuff. But we don't want to spoil everything here. We show off all the skills, show up with trades. Once you guys get your hands on it on Tuesday, we will deep dive deep, dive into all that stuff and really start figuring things out. So I believe next we're going to hop over and talk a little bit about the virtuoso.

Voice Over: The virtuoso sharpens the power of their mind into deadly zionic blades. Unlike traditional mesmer, illusions, they wield these directly as magic projectiles. They deftly manipulate, deploy. And restore their summoned blades throughout a battle, staggering their enemies with conditions and control while inflicting very real cuts. If a virtuoso ever finds their stock of magic blades running low. They can always. Count on the solid forged dagger in their hand.

Rubi: Alright, so indigo, why don't you start us off with the virtuosos lore?

Indigo: Yeah, absolutely. So as a mermaid, the virtuoso is very near and. Dear in my. Heart, I will say that as many times as I have to, I love how I love how punishing and really unique the game play. Goes for it. And the virtuoso was a really what fun take on the class, and I'm really excited to go into it a little bit more today. Cantha is an ancient nation filled with culture. And what you get with that kind of age is tradition and heritage and they're combat. And warfare is really no different. And the mesmer is kind of the embodiment of those themes. At the monasteries in Shanghai, they've learned to channel all of their telekinetic powers into their main hand dagger, their new weapon. And instead of producing clones, they now use all of that energy to create blades to aid them in battle, and the the effect is very cool and really mysterious and very, very deadly. And Carl did a really great first introduction, but I know Ruby. We were going to go.

Rubi: Into that again more. Yeah. So you all first saw the virtuoso? Back on July 27th, during our end of Dragon's first look event, Carl did that walk through and showed some of what the virtuoso is all about. So before Cal expands on that, we're going to give you a refresher with Carl's walk through.

Karl McLain: Hi everyone. I'm Carl McLean, a senior combat. Designer working on the leak specializations for end of Dragons. We're here today to preview some of the abilities for the upcoming Mesmer Elite specialization, the Virtuoso. Let's jump right into it. To begin, let's briefly cover the profession mechanic changes. From the start. You will no longer have access to clones. Instead of creating clones, the virtuoso will stock a blade on themselves for use with their blade, song, profession abilities. Phantasms will still initialize, but will stock a blade instead of creating a clone when they finish with their action. We'll have some brief demonstrations of different ways to gain blades during this preview. Now let's go look at the virtuoso's. Weapon the dagger. The first skill for the Virtuoso's dagger is a consistent projectile attack called Flying Cutter. Instead of a payout of a three auto attack chain, any target struck by three of the projectiles that launches will receive multiple additional attacks on the third impact. The second skill of this weapon is Blade Call. This ability spreads daggers, which pause at their ending point, or where where they collide with terrain and then return to the virtuoso for a second attack. If the blade strike an enemy during this ability, you'll stock a blade for your professional abilities. Here you can see a blade stacked above my character's left shoulder. Then stocking a second blade shows another above my right shoulder. Unstable Blade Storm is the third ability dealing pulsing damage along its path and hurling blaze at enemies. Within its reach. OK, let's use some of these stocked blades we've accumulated. Blade Song Harmony is the Virtuoso's most accessible blade song. Expending each stock blade separately over a period of time that deals damage. To your target enemy. Blade song sorrow. Each of your. Stock blades readies itself, then launches toward your targeted enemy to strike them simultaneously while inflicting confusion. We'll rebuild a few of our blades after this by switching to a greatsword, then using mirror Blade and Phantasmal Berserker. Blade song dissonance combine all your blades into a single strike that dazes enemies. We'll regain a full set of blades by using the utility scale blade renewal. Blade Turn Requiem will block for a short time and deal damage to nearby enemies based on the number of blades stuck. Your heel skill is called Twin Blade restoration, which throws daggers at enemies and grants bonus effects if you hit foes with them. As covered before, Blade Renewal will grant distortion and fully stock all blades that can be used differently for each of the Blades songs. Rain of blades drops daggers on foes for its duration, punishing enemies that remain in its area. Sword of Decimation is a single impact in an area to strategically immobilize enemies. Psychic Force is an area attack around the virtuoso that pushes enemies away. And finally thousand cuts as your elite skill is a fire and forget line based damaging ability that requires foes to stay in its narrow path for full effectiveness. So there you have each of the abilities that the virtuoso can harness for the expansion. We'll cover the traits another time. We're excited to see how the daggers fly when you get your hands on this burly, elite specialization. I've been Carl McLean, and on behalf of Arena net and the Skills Team, thank you and we'll see you again soon.

Rubi: All right. So thank you for that, Carl. And let's go back to Cal and expand on what the virtuoso is all about.

Cal: Yeah. So Carl gave a great preview. There's a few few more things we want to touch on. Obviously, you have tricks to go over a little bit to touch on the freshman mechanic, a little bit talk about in the dagger skills. So let's just hop into it for three crafters out here. This character has 2120 power, so keeping you guys on your feet, it's a little bit different. So keep that in mind when looking at skill facts. So the one kind of important note here that I don't believe Carl mentioned in the video is that we're going to see. The blade mechanic is again very different from clones. Clones are kind of tied to a target. They kind of display when you leave. Blades are not going to have that same problem. You're going to be able to carry them with you as you move between flights. So I'm just going to run all the way out here and eventually get out of combat, and we're going to see that I still maintain 5 blades. So. This is kind of really. Going to shift the possibilities for Mesmer. Who is typically used to, you know, you get into combat and you need to build up some clones, get that maximum shatter damage. But here's an opportunity to have those already in place from a maybe a different fighter. Just build them up while you're running around, and then you can just hop into a fight. Already, fibroids stocked and fire off maximum damage. Shatter. So that's a pretty interesting thing. I'm just going to cover some tool tips real quick. Call one of all these, but again, we actually have the power number here, so get out, get out your spreadsheets and calculate these power coefficients. I won't stay too long. You guys can catch it in the VOD because we've already talked about these skills. I do have one more trick to show on blade. Call Carl talked about how Blade call. You know it. It's kind of a boomerang projectile. It comes back when it hits a wall. So if you're right next to a wall, then you have that much quicker return time. It's a little bit more difficult to avoid or more. Easy to confirm all of your damage if you don't have a wall handy. You know the ground is also pretty close to a wall, so you can just detergent flow these into the ground and that's going to really speed up the return time of this ability. Much more realistic to confirm that off of a crowd control there from yourself or a teammate. This is going to. Thank you. Just that much more likely to maximize your blade call damage if you feel. The need to. So I think I got all these tool tips. If not there you go real half. Second durations get to that print screen APM going and. Hover some more tool tips over here. I believe we missed the tool tip for the stump break here. Psychic force as well. This is that powerful knockback cooler that Carl showed. Might fury. This is also the thumb breaks a little bit higher cooldown, but this is a pretty powerful kind of. Potentially fight shifting breakdown and set up myself with the CC as well. Pretty powerful skill. As these thumb break of the kit and I believe we have one more utility in here so you get a power coefficient on there. It is sort of decimation. And thousand cuts, of course. So after that, let's hop into the traits. These were totally totally done before the video. Some people speculated the traits weren't done yet, that's why we didn't show them. That's not true. We just. I don't even know what the reason is, why we didn't show these before, but the traits were totally. Already prepared. So let's just run through the minors real quick. We're going to see deadly blades. Blade skills inflict vulnerability on critical hit. So. Similar to the Harbinger, we're going to see a few different possible place cells for the virtuoso that are kind of outlined through in the. In the. Traits we're going to see the possibility to see power damage or condition damage and alternatively a little bit of more utility focused traits, deadly blades kicks it off as it's kind of this trait that can slot into any build blades and foot vulnerabilities, so this is referring to any skill that has the. Lead skill fact flying Cutter, blade call unstable brainstorm. There's a lot of them, but any of these skills as they fire blades they are going to trigger. Trigger that trade as long as you quickly hit, we'll see a little bit more of that on one. Of the adept trades as well. And moving into quiet intensity in the Grand Master slot. This is kind of that super fury that we've seen in a few places, a few different variations across different fresh we see a rolling miss on Revenant, Vicious, Quirion Ranger kind of this enhanced fury. So Mesmer is getting the 30% critical hit Fury as well as a little bit of extra ferocity. To really push that power damage. And we'll see a bit more. Sorry, I'm way ahead of you. We've stopped back up on water, so.

Indigo: I don't know if you have enough water.

Cal: We'll see how many of these I can get through during the stream.

Rubi: Ohh no.

Cal: So moving back to the add up traits, you're going to start in the middle cause, middle middle trait lines a little bit more power focused bottom trailer is going to be a little more condition focused and we'll see a bit more utility on the top. So let's just start with the power, mental focus, strike damage increasing I suppose. Within the range threshold. So a little bit of a difference. The aggregate is obviously 1200 range and this gives you a damage bonus for being within 600 range, so slight disconnect, but it's more pushing that more you get more value out of the dagger skills by being closer, right, like blade call, you get the full shotgun effect of that. Trouble projectile unstable blade storm. A little bit slower of that moving projectile, so being closer is already a little bit more valuable for this character and we're just going to reward that with mental focus being that close range damage multiplier. And near on the bottom we see a bit more condition focused jagged mind blade attacks increase. Blade attacks inflicted bleeding on critical hits, so similar Volon crate on the master tier minor bleed on crit here in Jagged mind. This is any blade skill, so this really opens the door for a condition damage build because we saw all those blades go facts across different across different skills is going to be potentially a lot of bleeding application and finally up top we have. Blade term refrain blade songs grant ages so really powerful. Ages on. Profession mechanic like this would be very, very good on core mesmer with the instant shutters a little bit less powerful on virtuoso as you do have the cast time, it's going to be a little bit harder to react, maybe to something like arching slice or mall or these big incoming damage skills. But if you time it really well, you could still get that Aegis or it's going to just enable you to kind of keep going mitigate the next attack after you fire off one of those blade songs and the IT is also going to be a little bit more valuable as we look at some of the traits further down the line as we'll care about blocking attacks. So pretty valuable trade there. If not as powerful as it could have been on core. Hopping into the master tier, I'm going to start with the power damage again. Phantasmal blades. We're going to common theme among these traits. You're going to see fury. All three of them are going to grant you access to Fury, which plays into that Grandmaster Minor, giving you the kind of Super Fury enhancement enhancement so phantasmal blades, phantasmal fury, and also launch a blade. This one is a little bit tricky for all your theory crafters because I believe it uses the phantasm. Weapon strength for this skill fact. So have fun finding that one, because I believe all the phantasms actually have different weapons strengths. I was testing this a long time ago. And noticed some different weapon strengths among different phantasms. So that's that's a fun one. On the bottom here for our condition damage, players sharpening sorrow, fury on bladesong sorrow that is the cry of frustration replacement. So a little bit of fury off of that, a little bit expertise, conditioned image, rejoice and then back up top, we have duess reversal. So pretty powerful, pretty powerful option here, giving you quickness and fury. Again fury but quickness. Big, big neon sign around quickness, probably blocking or dodging attacks. This plays really well with turning frame. Getting that Aegis obviously anytime you dodge, get access to quickness potentially a lot of quickness up time because you have access to a lot of blocks, a lot of ages, a lot of Dodges, 2 dodges on this character. That's crazy. Why do we ever give Mesmer 2 dodges? So through this reversal, you know, playing against this character, if you know they have that they have that trade equip, maybe you want to front load your abilities a little bit more, push through that, cool down and force them to dodge multiple times within that 3 seconds rolling and get the single quickness application there, but quite, quite powerful. Then we're almost done. Yeah, I covered all those. So we'll move into the Grand Master trades. Here in a second. So we're going to see another common theme amongst all three Grand Master traits that are all. Going to be pushing that blade generation or clone generation that mesmer really wants to see, and especially virtuoso as we've increased the cap up to five, really looking for even more. Access to clones or blades in order to push those kind of full power shatters. Starting off up top, we're seeing psychic repost block or Dodge is going to stock a blade, so this and something we're going to see here is that these are probably a little bit above rate again to some of the other clone generation trace that you see on core mesmer compared to something like deceptive evasion where on dodge you get a clone. Obviously that one doesn't need to actually. Successfully Dodge an attack, but every dodge gives you a clone with subdivision cyclical pal. You get dodging an attack or blocking an attack, so quite a bit of clone generation is possible with cyber. Plus you also get a little extra blade throw in there, get some trade triggers. Why not? But I think the big value of this trade is going to be the amount of blades that you can potentially generate, especially looking at trades like blade turn refrain looking at the block coming out from Blade Turn Requiem. And obviously, just dodging dodging. Well, as long as you're dodging attacks, you'll be able to generate a lot of. And you can also just run deceptive invasion with this as well and generate multiple blades per dodge. Really powerful option. This is going to potentially create a lot of shatter potential for this character or blade song potential. Why not interchangeable? I'm going to say clone every time. I'm going to say shatter every time blade turns clones, blade songs it's. It's all very confusing, but it's all mechanically. We all know what we're talking about here. Then moving it in the middle, we have infinite forge, so this one is a little bit. Less bursty is more of like a more sustained clone generation trait over time. Just being in combat, you're going to be able to build up some amount of blades. This is every three seconds up to a threshold, so there's a. Little bit of play here where you're not going to be able to immediately burst up to five not being burst up to three or if you are doing that with other sources, you're going to lose some of the value from infinite Forge. But if you're looking for more of that deliberate a little bit slower paced, we're just maximizing your clone generation as you sit here with infinite forge building up clones. You're going to have access to the ability to shatter pretty frequently for a solid amount, and you can also stack like bringing your decoy your mirror images once you get up to that three threshold, burst up to five, fire off your blades on, and get a lot of. Value off of that. Then finally leaning more into the condition. Damage builds blood song here. Increased bleed damage. Just a nice little bonus on top. This is also going to give you a blade whenever you stack 5 bleeding on a single target. Is all sourced from the mesmer applying a bleed to a target with four bleed stacks from someone else not going to do anything for you. Probably a little bit more balanced that way. And but this is again, this is something that's going to be able to generate potentially a lot of clones in a short amount of time, because if you're hitting a bunch of targets and applying a lot of bleeds potentially with, you know, jagged. Signed or some of the other sources that Mesmer has access. You could potentially be hitting like 5 targets, applying 5 bleeding and getting a pile of blades to then shatter with. So again, all these all these grandmaster traits are pretty, pretty powerful. I feel like in terms of the amount of clones that you can build up compared to some of the more standard mobile gameplay, we'll definitely be keeping an eye on how strong all of them are as people play with them a lot more. But we really wanted to push virtuoso a lot toward that ability to really push that. Push those shadows with the five cap. And the kind. Of unique differences of the characters already pointing. Pointing your eyes toward the shadow mechanics. So let's give a lot of access to blades. To this character. And so that's all we got to cover for the virtuoso here. And we got one more specialization to talk about, which is the wheel Bender.

Voice Over: Will benders protect the Canthan throne with unflinching loyalty? They have no time to play at war. If a threat. Emerges. They'll strike it down before it has time to react. They take the fight to their targets using rapid movement skills to navigate the battlefield. The Benders blade work is unmatched and wielding a sword in their off hand gives them extra opportunities. For ruthless cuts.

Rubi: All right. So those of you who guessed at Guardian Elite specialization during our teaser last week, congratulations and one note, something that I'm really enjoying is how closely to can't the the lore is all tied, so why don't you run us through the last elite specialization today in that?

Indigo: Lore. Yeah, absolutely. So the the will. And there is actually really exciting on that note specifically because it gave us an opportunity to not just dive into the lore, but to dive into the lore of ancient cantha even predating what we knew from factions. So little vendors are traditionally protectors of the emperor of Cantha or the the throne of Cantha more specifically empresses, too. And more specifically to that, they were protectors of the way no sue or to be closer to the stars, which were certain emperors and emperors and empresses that had achieved ascension through celestial trials. So they're they're mildly. Important and probably shouldn't be killed so their vendors are really, really potent. Detectors and which goes along with the Guardian class as a whole. But like the Harbinger, they're kind of a tonal break away from what we're used to. They're definitely still protectors, but in their gameplay, they're a little bit more brutal. And with their new offhand sword, their whole thing, they're kind of like more of like an. Lassen like a right hand of the throne or the swords or the throne sword hand more specifically, and their whole MO is that they get in there quickly. They're the first one to strike, and I'm really excited for everybody to dig into that a little bit more with Cal because it's it's one of the more unique takes on a class that we're very familiar with.

Cal: Thanks indigo.

Rubi: Let's do that now. We can do that. We.

Cal: Can go. Yeah. So we'll blender. Super Super Zoomy fast guardian. We saw a little bit on the. Future at a lot of mobility will be that really diving into that, but really pushing that more assassinating rumor kind of skirmish or play style. I mean we've seen the similar silhouette with like swords or revenant heavy armor with that similar high mobility play style warrior, maybe a little bit slower with their off hand sword, but. Guardian is really going to be pushing. Again, toward that more melee brawler kind of last year. Again, high mobility, a little bit disconnected from the usual deliberate slow movements that we see with the Guardian profession. And for all of these spreadsheets out there, this character has 2189 power. So all three of them are different. That's just how the default loadouts turned out. I'm going to go complain about someone complain about that to somebody after this, but keep that in mind when we're running through skill facts. But first, before we get into this, well, let's talk about the professional mechanic a little bit. So we're going to see something pretty different from the kind of typical virtues that guardian has. We're very used to these passives that are just always there, and then you're going to activate their virtue, and it's going to have, like, a singular up front effect. But the will under virtues are quite different. There's no. There's actually no passive attached to these. There's only going to be kind of this active stance. I don't really want to call it a stance because we have a stance, skill type and these are not stance skill types, but it's more of that style of play where you kind of enter justice stance and then your outgoing strikes are going to apply burning. So if I'm just hitting this guy. Hitting these guys see no burning frocks, but once I hop and adjust. This here. We're going to then start accumulating the similar. There, the more understood justice game play, and we saw a little bit there on the ground. This is going to be something that we see across all of the different, just the different virtues here. They all kind of their own flavor of what we're calling blue. Bender flames. So here we have the kind of the triple claw project, the triple claw on the ground. This is actually target controlled, so it can only hit one target, even if you're standing on all three, the intent of the whole Bender flames is less about damage and more about. Giving you additional strikes because we're going to see similar mechanical behavior on both resolve and. That's a little bit different from what we're used to, but we're going to see that these will Bender flames really serve to provide a little bit more value to that style of game play. So we saw the claw with justice resolve, we're going to have a little straight line and courage. We'll come back to these skills again. We have the Nice circular AOE radius, so a few different flavors of lavender flames. Just to really push. Push a little bit of those extra strikes and as we were talking about, this character is super fast time mobility. All of these, all the virtues are mobility skills, so we see. Pretty decent range on justice resolve in there. Decent dash. This one's also an evade. Yeah. We just talk about courage real quick. Courage is actually shadow step. Pretty long range initial hit. It's again pretty low damage on these strikes. They're more just intended to push the virtue triggers. So the actual trigger that we're going to see for resolve is that instead of having that initial upfront heal that we see on like core resolve and window resolve is that it's going to have the similar justice mechanic of every five strikes is going to heal you a little bit. So just lose some healthier real quick and be in combat, so that matters. So see that while we're in justice, we're getting this in resolve. Sorry, we're seeing 652 pretty reasonable rock. You can actually get a lot of healing. Obviously, I'm leaving like five goals and five goals at a time. So maybe more in that level environment, more in that open world, blobs of enemies, you're going to have a lot of opportunity to get a lot of potential healing here. Or, if all your enemies stack up in PvP, maybe you can also do that. Probably a little bit harder to get as many multi hits, but still a lot of healing potential from the resolve resolve virtue. And moving into courage, we have crashing courage and the prop here is actually again pretty powerful effect. The five hit trigger here is going to be both Aegis and stability, so this. Enabling that kind of dive potential for the character, you're just going to if you dive in with courage, you're going to be able to. I didn't attack anything. Probably a mistake. I recommend attacking things after you activate your virtues because that's going to give you the extra up to 12. That's really that's insane. But again, hitting multiple targets here, that's. Per 55 strikes, you're gonna get the ages. You're gonna get stability. So really powerful. Cool down. To kind of give you a little bit. More staying power in the fight. But one thing to keep in mind is that these stances, those keep going stances, why not these virtue stances all overwrite each other. So if you do proc, if you fire off justice and fire into resolve immediately you see that I now only have resolve active. So this is going to create a little bit of decision making in terms of you want to maximize your mobility or you want to maximize your virtue. Because if you're looking to maximize virtual triggers, maybe your enemy is able to disengage after you dive in with just a space shadow. Step away, and you actually need to chase them so you can't really get full value out of your justice, and you might need to continually chase after them and you're losing access to their justice or courage or resolve. But on the upside, you have a lot of chase potential. You just go pretty far, throw in some movement from skill 5 on the sword. We'll talk about that real soon. So a lot of movement, there's even more movement on the utility skills that we will get to in a. Few moments here. So that's that's pretty much how the the summary of the virtues pretty different from standard guardian virtues. But I think it creates a really interesting kind of play style of really pushing that melee brawler character. All right. Moving into the sword kit. So we have offhand sword two skills here. I'm going to start out with advancing strike. This is the one I kind of showed off movement skill. So it's just a dash. If you don't have anything targeted, if you have something targeted, if you end up in within a certain amount of range at the end of this dash, you are then going to do a final shadow step and attack. So a little bit of that Rush warrior. It's a rush, but a little bit more controlled with the shadow step. And then a nice slow and very short immobilized one second. It's not intended to be like this major lockdown. We're going to see more of that coming out from the utility skills. We're going to see more of that on the elite skill or there's more expectation that this character is going to be set up by their allies. And as the assassin dive in and really. Secure the kill. So advancing Strike's not going to be enough to fully confirm Executioner's calling here, but if you can get a larger lockdown from either your allies or some of the utility side skills, you can land that. So taking a quick look at executioners calling here, this is the main damage payoff of the of the sword off hand. Pretty big damage multiplier. Got some vulnerability in there. Pretty straightforward skill. This is the like the multi head. You do the initial initial stab animation into the double swing so you know you swing your sword and then you swing your swords again and you get a solid amount of damage coming out from this skill. Yeah. So I mean, that's all those this work at 2 skills, but it's going to really lean into that mobility damage. Just ask me type playstyle and we'll see a little bit more from the utility side of things where you can kind of push a little bit more toward crowd control if really want to or push more on the mobility side, if you want to or just kind of push for damage if you want to. So moving on to the heel scale, reversal of Fortune Builders, one players probably recognize the name, kind of the homage to that skill. We have a fairly fairly similar mechanic. If not, it's not exactly the same in the games are very different. We're going to see exact one to. One copies there. But we're going to see what the reversal of fortune is. It kind of has this similar. Full counter type mechanic where you are doing this initial block channel and. If you fail to block anything, you'll get a little bit of a heel. Here, let me stay in combat so I don't randomly heal myself, but you're going to see if you don't block anything. You get a very small heel. Not very rewarding. That's totally by design, because the upside of this skill is if you actually block an attack. Let's just have my golden friend use some fire grab or something. See a bigger payoff. There was about a 4K here, so about double. But you're also seeing actually taking zero damage from that ability, so fully absorbing the damage from the incoming attack and getting a heal on top of that really, really high upside for the skill, because obviously if you're going to block something like mall or kill shot or these heavy damaging attacks. You're effectively gaining 10s of thousands of health in combination with the 4264 of this skill, so pretty high upside and it's definitely going to be kind of a key game playing moment playing against this character because you're going to want to make sure you don't trigger that reversal of fortune and really limit their options. And reduce their healing. All right, let's move into some of the utility skills we have the physical skill type, which is something we've seen in the past on core warrior. We've seen on Daredevil, we're going to see a lot of the same themes, a lot of crowd control, mobility, damage these. A lot of the same themes on the will. They're but kind of doing their own flavor of physical skills. Start off with flash combo, pretty powerful skill here. This is going to be using that kind of first flooring mechanic that we saw on the Daredevil where hitting all of these rapid strikes is going to unlock a secondary skill. In this case, it is a shadow. So this is a super powerful cooldown because if you jump in land, all these abilities, you then have a six second window, then fire off the rest of your kit. Just press all your buttons or not and then you can have that opportunity to then disengage and get out all in one skill very strong. And at the same time, then we have the the counterplay side of it, where if the Guardian hops in with flash combo, as long as you mitigate one of those a single attack. Then they're not going to be able to hop back out. So we see this column as ages. I'm a terrible player, so I used my skill on a target with Aegis. Don't get my flip over repose and now I'm just going to get destroyed by all these columns. Moving on, we move into whirling light. So this is basically, I mean this is just a damage scale. This is a pretty solid damage scale, a little bit of weakness in there. But primarily we're looking at power damage. We're looking at burning. This is a super cool whirlwind kick animation a we multiple strikes. So this also really plays well into the virtues. Which want those multi heads, they want you to cleave multiple targets. We're seeing rolling light is a great opportunity to do both of those things while also doing a good amount of damage. And as a side effect of this, a kind of bonus effect of the scale is it's also a little bit of movement scale, but you're primarily going to want to use it when you're already in melee range, because you're already starting these whirlwind kicks at the start of the ability. So using it to engage, you're losing access to the maximum damage potential of this skill. And if any of these golems ran away from me, you would see that there's a little bit of a chase movement component to this ability as you like. When I use it far away, I move toward my target as long as I'm not already in range, so a little bit of chase down, but primarily A melee range. A wee big damage ability. Next up, we have heel crack. This one's pretty straightforward damage and stone 0.01 NPP and worldly world. Look forward to that. This one I mean this is kind of. Your combo alpha. Of advancing strike because you get the one second of mobilize here that can guarantee he'll. Crack and then that can set up executioner. The full extent of executioners calling there so potentially if you can find room for this skill on your bar that gives you more personal opportunity to set up yourself instead of relying on allies and really unload all of your damage into a single. Final thing we might as well give this character's number. I mean, you know, glass, CSS and characters probably want to break stuns every. Once in a while, so I'll just have this super long skill fact while I. Take a drink of water. Alright, so blue and light thumb break evade this kind of that similar like backwards roll mechanic we see in a lot of skills. Same thing you have flip over skill. I was going to touch on. There's also the blind initial blind so. Get stunned. Break us down, roll away, apply blind gives you a little bit of coverage to kind of reengage on top and you just kind of give you the reengage on the same skill, quick retribution. This is a three second days single target though. I mean, you get a leap finisher in there. Maybe there's a combo feel on the ground. Get a little bit of extra value, but three second days this. Is really going to allow you to. Potentially shift the moment of the fight as you're breaking is done and making attacks applying a blind applying a daze on the comeback end and then gives you another window of opportunity to really push forward with all of your damage. And finally, we're going to see the elite skill heavens palm. This is another. Another powerful crowd control skill a lot stronger than the 2 seconds down we saw on the what was called. He'll crack. Yeah, he'll crack. He'll crack. Same thing. Heavens, Bomb 4 second knockdown. This is a single target. But it's also going to do a kind of an area attack around you. So this will knock down your target and push everyone else away. So this is kind of trying to. Isolate your primary target. Really. Enable that kind of assassinate gameplay where I isolate the primary target or isolate the priority target and then unload my damage. 4 second knockdown. Super Low I think only back breaker someone's going to Fact Check me and destroy this, but I think back breaker is the only one that has four second duration outside of any extensions. That's probably wrong, but why not? 4 segmentation very long. It's an elite skill. We were kind of talking earlier. How? This character, not necessarily supposed to set themselves up as much elite skills, are typically a spot that we tend to break or bend rules a little bit more. So this really kind of pushes that more crowd control option, maybe build a little bit tankier, you build, take heel crack, take heaven's palm a little bit more of that disruptive brawler instead of the full glass cannon, the assassin. But Evans palm, pretty strong cooldown. In the elite slot. Then we're going to hop into the traits and talk about traits. Does everyone love traits? All right. So starting out with the minor traits. Right to Sprint mobility. Super Fast guardian build. This makes sense. Let's get movement speed. Let's get some swiftness. Makes a lot of sense. Fits the character thematically. We see this a lot on the master tier. Minor trade only specializations where it is really just reinforcing kind of the character identity. Then moving in, we probably some of you probably noticed it was getting stacks of a buff as we were firing off these virtues that was lethal tempo. So this is the grandmaster minor damage bonus trait. And this is something kind of kind of new and cool that we're doing on a handful of buffs with this set of week specializations, where it's going to actually refresh the duration of itself every time you apply it. So it's a little bit different from the mechanics we see with like rooms where each type of light is going to fall off independently as those durations expire. Lethal tempo. I get a stack of this, and then there's one second left on that stack, but I get a second stack. Now I have two stacks, both at full duration. And it's really trying to push kind of this. This natural build up of this kind of building momentum aspect of this character where initially you don't quite have your maximum potential, but assuming you stay in target, you stick to your targets you do with this character trying to do, you're going to build up lethal tempo and maintain lethal tempo and keep that damage bonus going and it's pretty rewarding here. 3% per stack for five stacks, 15% really good. We'll see a little bit of a bonus there in the Grand Master slot once. We get. There. So pretty strong damage trade. Moving into the add up traits, we're going to see. Pretty similar theme. Across these traits, with our all doing this more. Natural trade off within the trade itself will maybe giving above rate for the value of this slot than we usually do, but at the same time you're going to be giving something up. So looking here at Boom Pact increased concentration, 240 concentration in the add up slot. Pretty impressive, but at the same time. Allies will get reduced boons from you, so this is again pushing that really selfish assassini play style for this character. If I want to extend my fury durations from Monk's focus. If I want more resolution duration to keep it, my quick chance from righteous instinct, maybe you go into Boone Pact? Probably not, because the next day we're going to talk about is more. Just straight up Power focus, but it's definitely an option if you're looking to just have a little bit more boom duration. Going into powerful power. Here you go. 240 power -240 toughness. So pretty big trade off there for a pretty big gain. Just pushing guardian down pretty close into that light armor range. So bottom health bottom. Bottom armor ish and it's feeling a little bit more like an elementalist so you can enjoy going into the downstate and pressing all your abilities there. As Ellie Mains are all used to. But again, as long as you're, you know, playing well, dodging your abilities, just dodge 240 power in the up slot. Pretty powerful, pretty powerful trade. And finally, we have completed curate here in the bottom trade line gives a little bit of healing power at the trade off of not healing allies. This carrier doesn't really want heal allies anyway. So it's just a bit more upside 240 healing power. Maybe not all that much. This could definitely be higher. We're definitely going to be, you know watching. The data from the beta, watching all the feedback from the beta and seeing what's over tuned what's under tuned. This is definitely something that could come up, needs a little bit more. That's selfish, sustained. If that's the option that you want to go to, this is the trade for you. So then let's move on to the master tier. Let's just I could just switch it up and go Grand Master trades and throw everybody off, but that doesn't really make sense.

Rubi: Tell them your plan now. So.

Cal: So the first one, the first chair going to see in the master chair slot, restorative virtues. This is actually a really interesting trait, and it's really trying to push the mobility aspect of this character. Basically what it says while version was active, activating another virtual reduces the initial virtues, cooldown reduction cooldown time by its remaining duration. That's a lot of words, but what does it? You mean? So basically what it means is if you're just kind of rapid firing your virtues, you're going to get refunded for the amount of time that you did not spend in that virtue stance. Whatever you want to call it. If I pop off just this year, 6 seconds of justice, but I immediately pop is obviously a big cooldown refund on justice there. And similarly, if we pop into courage early, we're going to be getting some refund on. Resolve and so that is really going to. Enable that kind of mobility play style if that's something you're looking for, because you will be getting lower and lower cooldown. We'll also see a little bit more of that in the Grand Master slot for. Cooldown reduction. Moving on wholly reckoning, so this Augments will Bender flames 33% damage increase? That's a really large number, but as I touched on earlier, will Bender flames are not really sending that. We're intending to be kind of this main damage source anyway. So you're looking at 33% on top of a pretty small power coefficient already. It's not going to be doing a whole lot of value there. The main upside here? Is the healing per target struck? So you can look at this trait and maybe in combination with resolve if you're hitting a lot of targets, we're going to see a lot of potential healing. I mean, the courage AOE is probably the most easy to hit the most targets with the big circle, but resolve is also going to be giving you those resolve products at the same time obviously. All three of the. All three of the virtues create will Bender flames, which all heal you so a bit more of sustained. This is going to be great in those larger fights where hitting multiple targets with these winter flames, a lot of potential healing coming up from that trade. And finally, we're going to look at Vanguard Tactics. So this is a pretty powerful trade to get all these trades seem pretty strong except for, you know, conceded curate. We'll throw that. One at the. Bus. It's a little bit on the weaker side, but a lot of good traits here and a little better kit and vendor Texas, it's kind of this, this 2 pronged. Multifaceted thing, where up front, it's going to just augment courage and courage is going to give you protection and resolution on top of what it already does. We see. I mean, we have a similar trade over in virtues that gives protection on courage. So those are going to add together. We're going to get a lot of potential protection duration. If you take both of those too. But the kind of secondary component of this skill or this trait rather, is that it gives you resistance on any shadow step. So we're looking at those like judge intervention symbol blades. Guardian has a lot of shadow steps. We have even more shadow steps on the wheel Bender kit as well. So potentially a lot of resistance uptime and this this one is actually a trait that. Came to the party pretty late. This is more after the change we made to the resistance boom in the recent balance update, where previously resistance was, you know, full condition immunity and. That's way too powerful an effect to put on such a repeatable source like on shadow step, but with the move to non damaging conditions only if something that really fits this more assassini melee character play style, because you're going to be mitigating ignoring, cripple and mold weakness. Blind like all these things that's shut down mainly. Characters so well, you're going to have access to resistance on your engage, assuming you blink in with either courage or Ji or any number of these shadows. And OK, you can just, you know, chain them together, get more and more resistance, a lot of opportunity to really unload all of your damage while ignoring those non damaging conditions. And almost done. So close. Only three more trades to go and we're done with all the specs. So we'll get to them in a short minute here. All right. So common theme amongst grandmaster traits or the will benders that they're all going to augment. One of the virtues in their particular way, they're all pretty different, but they are all pretty powerful, which is still out that word. Again, why not? Color everything powerful and then when it's not powerful, you guys can all give me Flack for it on forms or wherever you feel like doing that. Starting with Phoenix Protocol, this is going to be a resolve augmenting resolve. So instead of the upfront heel on that passive trigger, you're instead going to get a little bit of regeneration. So heel over time a little bit less valuable for this glass here character you'd rather have the upfront heel, but instead we're giving you region, and also then giving you alacrity on top of that. So this is what leans more into that cool down reduction. Type of gameplay. Where we're going to see your resolve now giving me. Alacrity. You can build up a lot of alacrity again, cleaning out a ton of targets here with a lot of multi hit skills. You can get access to a lot of alacrity, so that's going to reduce your virtue. Cool downs going to reduce your damage cooldowns, going to reduce your crowd control? Cool down. It's going to enable you to kind of press more buttons, which I love pressing buttons, and I imagine a lot of players like pressing buttons too. So alacrity really valuable component given in exchange for trading that upfront heel for that slower overtime regeneration. And the bonus note there is that resolve duration actually goes up a little bit as well. So increasing the duration and just giving you more and more resolve triggers. Next up we have tyrants momentum. This is going to be the justice augment. 2 second duration increase. This also modifies lethal tempo, which we talked about a little bit earlier, so this instead of 3% per stock, we're now looking at 5%. Stack, but also a shorter duration. So this actually reduces lethal tempo from six seconds to four. It's really going to require you to stick to those targets, keep hitting them, keep talking your justice. Keep blocking your resolve, keep rocking all your virtues, activating your virtues to make sure that lethal tempo keeps refreshing itself. Keep stacking up really maximize your damage. And it also gives a little bit more opportunity for players to disengage or land a a long CC to force the guardian force the wheel Bender out of that lethal tempo, lose all their stacks, and kind of give you that reprieve and a little bit of breathing room. Finally, we have deathless courage. Saved the craziest the last. I mean, it's not crazy, but it's a little bit a little bit crazy. Carl told me about this trade when he was building. I'm like Carl, that's crazy. But, you know, we talked about it and it's it's definitely an interesting trade. It's something we want to see how it plays. So I'll just hover this tool tip for a second. Last nice water, and then we'll talk about a little bit more. All right, so depthless courage. This augments your courage, virtue. And it says as long as courage is active, you cannot die. Your health cannot go below 1 HP. That is a pretty powerful effect. It does reduce the duration of courage here. So we're seeing. A four second current duration instead of the baseline 6. There's a little bit of a extending kind of momentum building opportunity here as well. For every player kill you get, you get a couple of extra seconds there, up to 4 seconds duration so you can get up to 8 seconds of this kind of no death metal. If you are kind of chaining kills together, otherwise it's going to be a four seconds can't die. But this doesn't have the same kind of bailout heel that we see on like a bed, which has the same mechanic. It can't die when I have ADD and it's going to heal me for a lot. If I would die instead. This is just going to keep me at one HP and oh, I better get out of range. When encourage ends or I'm just going to fall over because someone's going to touch me and I'm going to take one. Damage and go into the down state. So I mean it's something you're going to want to. This is something that's going to enable you to really dive in and again push all your buttons and then have an opportunity to get out. We saw a similar kind of similar gameplay with Flash combo. To oppose. We see a little bit more out on crashing courage that no death mechanic giving you that window of time to get your make your big damage abilities off and then get out or get brought sustained back up by your teammates. To avoid just falling over when that ends. All right, so we made it through. That's a lot of skills, a lot of traits, a lot of tool tips. And that's all we have here for the wild Bender. And that's all we have to cover for the elite specialization for this beta. So we're going to throwback to Ruby to wrap. Up history here.

Rubi: Are you? Do you have enough water? Are you good? I feel like cow is the real. Hero here. Getting through all of that. So thank you.

Cal: I got. I don't think I could finish another one.

Rubi: I have a few things to talk about, so let's see if you can get through. No, don't. Do that? That seems dangerous.

Indigo: You have to start.

Rubi: Right. So those are the 1st 3 elite specializations for end of Dragons. You're going to get to try them for yourself next week during the beta, all of the information on the beta event is on our website, but here's the quick rundown. The beta starts next Tuesday the 17th at 9:00 AM Pacific Time and runs until Saturday night the 21st until 10:00 PM. This is open to all players with an account in good standing, including play for free players when the beta event starts, you'll find 3 temporary beta character slots on your account where you can roll those characters. You can try one of each elite specialization if that's what you want. Those characters will be level 80 and fully geared up. While the end of Dragons maps are not part of this beta event, your your beta characters can go through all game modes in the current live game. All maps, all waypoints are unlocked for you. Take them out for a spin. Give them a try. Play wherever you like in the live game and let us know what you think. Saturday night when the beta event ends, your characters and those character slots will go away and gain progress earned on those characters will not be saved. If you plan on your regular characters during the beta event, that's fine. That will progress normally, so I have a couple. More things to talk about. Before we wrap up today. A few weeks ago, we partnered with DX Racer to give away a DX Racer Racing Pro gaming chair. We decided to celebrate the start of this beta event with another giveaway for a second chair that went live a few hours ago. You can look on the Guild Wars two Twitter and see where and how to enter. Good. OK, now I'm doing it and good luck to all of you who enter and I hope the winner enjoys your trip. This is also the final week to pre purchase your Orient Elder Dragon collector statue. We have pre purchase until the 20th. This statue is a mirror of how you see or rein in the game right now in the Hall of Monuments, right down to that iridescent shine, which is put on there through a process that we talked about a little bit on the website called vacuum plate. Then each of these. Individual statues goes into a vacuum chamber where the color formula is vaporized, condenses, and binds to the statue to create that iridescent color layer. So we've been looking at some behind the scenes pictures of that process. This statue also comes with a code for an in game statue an in game. Cape not an in game statue, an in game Oregon Cape that Cal is modeling right now on his character looking extremely dapper. Yeah. So you can pre purchase until August 20th. So you have one more week on that one. And Speaking of pre purchase, end of Dragons is available for pre purchase now as well and comes with some bonuses that you can use on your account right away including the Shinji title, the Shinji and Mosaic. Pipe and the Flint serpent weapon chest where you can get your choice of weapon for that. So thank you all for joining us today. Thank you both for coming and running us through this, Cal. Thank you for everything. Speaking of powerful, that would be.

Cal: Ohh I I can keep going. Like I can talk about goers too for so many hours. It's kind of unreal, but we'll we'll make sure to save a.

Rubi: Right. Well, we have.

Cal: Little bit for the future.

Rubi: More elite specs are coming. Yep, so, but for now we will see you in the beta next Tuesday. And thank you for hanging out with us.

Guild Chat - Episode 108

Transcription[edit]

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