Guild Chat - Episode 115
Guild Chat - Episode 115
- Title
- Siege Turtle Preview
- Host
- Rubi Bayer
- Guests
- Nick Hernandez
Cal Cohen - Date
- November 24, 2021
- Official video
- YouTube
The 115th episode of Guild Chat aired on November 24, 2021.
"Join us for this episode of Guild Chat and learn more about the newest addition to your stable of best friends, the Siege Turtle."
Transcription[edit]
Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons - Siege Turtle [12:25][edit]
Narrator: Hundreds of years ago, the nomadic Luxon armada trained massive turtles to bear weapons of war across the Jade Sea. Now you can raise your own turtle from an adorable hatchling to a cannon carrying mount. Modern siege turtles are equipped with the latest jade tech advancements including powerful jump jets and health boosters. Use these tools to lift your turtles across rough terrain and slam your enemies for massive damage. Best of all, there's plenty of room for a friend. Take you favorite siege engineer on for a ride and make the most of the turtle's cannons.
Introductions [13:31][edit]
Rubi Bayer: Hi Tyria, welcome to Guild Chat and thank you all for joining us on a Wednesday. I'm your host Rubi and yeah we're doing it kind of on a weird day because here in America we have the Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow so we're going to be on break tomorrow and Friday. But we still wanted to give you this show and give you some more information on what's coming up next week. The fourth open beta event for End of Dragons is next Tuesday, starting on November 30. You're going to get to come in and play all nine End of Dragons' elite specializations and you're going to get to try the siege turtle. So we're going to give you a little preview of some of siege turtle gameplay today with our first dev guests. But stick around after we show you the siege turtle gameplay because Cal is with us too and he's going to give you all a preview of some of- (camera cuts to a shot of Cal drinking water and Rubi laughs) That was so good. Perfect. So Cal is going to give you a preview of the changes that we've made to the elite specializations for End of Dragons. After that, we have a couple more things that I'm going to leave for the end. So let's go ahead and get started because we have a lot to get through. Let's meet what was our first dev guest, but Cal kind of- Cal and his water kind of got in front of you. So, hi Nick.
Nick Hernandez: It's... it's all good. So I'm not Cal, I'm Nick. Hi. I'm a game designer here at ArenaNet, working on End of Dragons, worked on Shing Jea and some other stuff and I'm here to, as Rubi said, talk about the turtle baby.
Rubi: Alright.
Nick: Not the baby, but like, you know, our good boy. The very large lad.
Rubi: Turtle babies are later. Alright.
Nick: Yes, turtle babies are later.
Siege Turtle [15:02][edit]
Rubi: So let's start. Let's take a look at this guy. Alright, so this is our siege turtle, our first two player mount. This focuses on cooperation and working together. There's a driver's seat and a gunner seat. Everybody has their own roles to play. However, if you are more of a solo player, you can still use the turtle because there's a driver skill that we'll talk about later. A couple things about the siege turtle that you can look for, once you've got your hands on this guy yourself, when you get closer to the turtle, whether you're in the other person's party or not, he gets kind of transparent and there is not collision. So you can't park your turtles on top of things and block them. We're not going to have turtle road blocks and traffic jams. You also need to be in the person's party to board the turtle, so if I were not Nick's party- Don't kick me.
Nick: I won't.
Rubi: If I were not in Nick's party, I would not have this "Board Turtle" option. And if I left the party, I would get booted off the turtle. So we've got a couple things in there just to make this as smooth as humanly possible. If you're not familiar with siege turtles from Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2, back in Guild Wars Factions, this was a thing with the Luxon faction. They raised and trained siege turtles for battle with their big cannons. They had turtle hatcheries all over the world. Gyala Hatchery was one of the most familiar ones, that was some gameplay in Guild Wars Factions, and a little fun fact: siege turtles like to eat carrots and fish. That's their favorite food. Thank you for that, Indigo. Alright, that said, let's get started! Let's do some turtle gameplay.
Nick: Yeah. So first off I'm gonna talk about movement which, as you can see, this is as fast as the turtle goes. Big boy, but slow... is what would actually be the truth if I wasn't lying. No, this is just the walking animation which you wanted to demonstrate because, you know, every mount has a walking animation. I think that this one was actually really well done, props to the animation team, but it does move faster than that. In reality, because this is the only mount, like the only creature amount that we're developing for this expansion, we and the team tried to make sure that the movement of the mount felt like a strong utility and like you wanted to use this mount over other mounts depending on what your situations were. So it has a horizontal jump, but it's like a slower horizontal jump than the raptor. It's got a higher vertical jump compared to the raptor and the jackal, but it's lower than the springer. It increases its speed and ramps up, which you're seeing me do somewhat right now, very similar to the roller beetle, but has a lower maxed out speed, of course, which you- Actually this bar right here you'll be able to see is the momentum speedometer which basically shows how fast your turtle is going and when you have hit its max speed because it will be fully filled out. Along with that, as I mentioned, there is a vertical jump and that is a new unique thing to the turtle. So as you can see, we have these little like jets here and all this tech strapped on to the turtle and the reason for that is because the turtle actually has the ability to use these as sort of like rocket jets and what those jets allow the turtle to do is basically jump. So like if you need to get to higher areas or if you like, you know, need to glide for a little bit, you can utilize those jets to gain some height and or stabilize and keep at your current height as long as the endurance bar has endurance. Once it's out, that's basically the fuel meter, so you will run out and it will dissipate. Besides that, yeah, you know, you're just a big tanky boy and that's pretty much everything for the movement right now, I think.
The next thing to talk about is actually going to be the combat skills. So as you can see here, we have the normal engage skill and of course, as of a little while ago, we've added to the "5" slots all of the endurance skills for each of the mounts and this mount is no different. This one will allow you, when you click on it or utilize it, to use its jump jets, but with this what you have the ability to do is you slam onto the ground like that and it will do a brief point-blank AoE in front of the player like a little pizza cone that will- There we go. Yeah. That will do defiance damage as well as just a standard amount of damage. And what's cool about that as well is that you can actually utilize the jump jets to slam down and the higher you are when you slam down, the more base damage you will do. So besides that what you'll also be able to see is that we actually have all of the mastery skills from seasons four and five that you can utilize within the the mount's kit as well. There are some additions and integrations of them that you will be able to see that help make the turtle more effective for players and we'll go over that in a little bit, but for right now that's pretty much everything for the driver's side of things. Rubi, since you're the gunner on this, do you want to talk a little bit about the gunners?
Rubi: Yeah! Can you give me- I want to cause a little bit of trouble. Can you give me something to cause trouble with?
Nick: Yeah!
Rubi: Alright. Let's get in a fight, shall we?
Nick: Ask and you shall receive.
Rubi: Alright! So we're waiting on some enemies now.
Nick: I can spell.
Rubi: Nick is making trouble happen.
Nick: I'm trying to.
Rubi: The problem is like-
Nick: There we go!
Rubi: When someone's watching or when you're in a hurry, that's when the typos happen. So, yeah. Okay, but- Oh! You did it!
Nick: Yeah, we got some baddies.
Rubi: So we got... I got turtle siege, which is my turtle cannons, and this is a ground targeted skill you can see down here that right now I have two stacks of ammo. Stacks of ammo: it does not mean 500 ammo. Don't get excited. I have two left.
Nick: We are currently...
Rubi: Yeah, it's just running in circles and dropping... dropping cannon siege on these guys.
Nick: Yeah.
Rubi: So this is. It's not, um. Okay, I-I can't do this anymore because now I'm distracted.
Nick: That's okay.
Rubi: I'm like, wait we have to kill them all. It's super important.
Nick: We do, yeah, and like-I'm also trying to keep them alive because something that people will probably notice right now that you don't notice with other mounts is that the slam that we're utilizing actually doesn't dismount you, which is something that's a bit different. We want-we wanted this mount to be able to be utilized in combat. So what we did was we removed the disengage on the engage skill which I know doesn't really make much sense. I'm also, yes, I am going to cheat and heal to keep us on the mount.
Rubi: Thank you for that. Appreciate it.
Nick: Because we're fighting a lot of people
Rubi: It is but that's okay.
Nick: Yeah, what you're seeing is that there's a lot of-you know-damage that we can provide either with the gunner or with the mount itself. And yeah, the mount-we gave it enough health where we could actually allow it to be tanky as well as an actual defiance bar in and of itself so that way it can withstand some damage of its own.
Rubi: Yeah, so I do want to-I want to point to my ammo now that you've been running around a little bit. Ammo you have-you start with five. You run out. It's not just gone forever. Movement regens that. There are other skills that also regen. There are other ways to regen that we will talk about later but the faster Nick moves, the more ammo that I get back. So if you're running around. you're kiting-hey, hammer master, all right. I'm just randomly-I'm just randomly getting achievements over here. But yeah, the faster Nick zooms around, the more ammo that we have. So you can work together-this is part of that cooperation that we were talking about before. You can work together to keep that ammo going, keep out of the enemy's way and, also, one note: the numbers are not final.
Nick: Yeah, so the numbers are not final here. What you're going to be seeing in the beta is that the numbers that you're going to be seeing within the beta and fighting against the Core Tyria and expansion enemies are going to be different than the ones that you're seeing right now from us. Our number is probably a little bit lower; it looks a little bit less damaging. That's because of balances that we're currently doing to the expansion armies and things like that. Besides that...
Rubi: Actually, I wanna-I wanna note real quick too that, I don't know if you guys could tell while Nick was running around, we're running through the enemies that I've killed and I was just kind of looting as you go. You can loot from the mount-you don't have to dismount to take care of that.
Nick: Yeah, which-that's-that's both for the gunner and for the driver. Like, as you can see right now, I'm going to be able to just take all the stuff.
Rubi: Everybody gets their loot. Get all the loot. Vacuum it up, Nick.
Nick: <laughs>
Rubi: Do you want to talk about the speedometer a little bit?
Nick: Uh yeah, sure. So going back to what ruby was talking about earlier with the ammo generation and regeneration, the players-like, this speedometer doesn't only just show how fast you're going, it also shows how much additional recharge you're getting. So, as you can see, it's broken out between green and red. The way that this works out is that while it's in green, the recharge is at a certain threshold. Once it hits red, it will be even faster and that kind of maxes out what the base regeneration addition is or regeneration reduction. Cal, what's the appropriate terminology for that?
Cal: What? Endurance regeneration?
Nick: Endurance Regeneration, yeah.
Cal: Sure. Lock it in.
Nick: Lock it in. Ship it. But the long and short of it is basically just that the faster you run, the more ammo that you'll get or the faster the engine will regenerate, and the speedometer is just there as a way to kind of visually show and indicate what that looks like.
Rubi: So, speaking of speed, do we want to go super zoomy?
Nick: We should definitely go super zoom.
Rubi: Alright so I have this cool 5 skill here. This is my Overdrive skill.
Nick: What does this overdrive skill do, Rubi?
Rubi: So Overdrive...
Nick: I'm curious.
Rubi: This boosts accelerate-pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It boosts your acceleration, max speed is more, boosts your turning ability and I'm going to let the driver show that. Because the faster you go, also you drift it-you're going to drift a little bit-this is kind of like roller beetle.
Nick: Yeah, it's got that roller beetle drift. You know, it's a big-it's very big, a very heavy creature, so we wanted to kind of help demonstrate that so it does slide a little bit depending on the speed that you're going and the turn radius that you give it when-when you do decide to turn.
Rubi: And do it again.
Nick: Yeah, also something to note is that that does also help the siege ammo regeneration.
Rubi: Yeah, I'm gonna give Mark a quick note not to show my monitor because we need to keep our secrets, so we'll just stay on Nick while I do a thing.
Nick: Yeah and...
Rubi: We're underwater now.
Nick: We are underwater now. Actually, I don't know if anybody noticed that animation. Let me..
Rubi: Cuz it was great.
Nick: I'm going to be a dirty cheater.
Rubi: <gasps> How dare you.
Nick: But what we'll actually see in a second is that the turtle actually also has a very unique landing animation and transition animation where it's like, you will actually hit-you hit the water, everything slows down, and then you sink. And this is something that's really interesting about the turtle is that it doesn't swim, it just sinks to the bottom of the water. And what's also really interesting about it-and a bit novel, actually-is that the turtle walks around on the ground surfaces of every single water area within the game. So like, as I mentioned earlier, it doesn't swim, and going back to what you're talking about earlier where it's more of a utility mount and it has a little bit of everything similar to the upgraded skimmer, this is another amount that you can utilize underwater. And, uh yeah, what I actually really like about it is that-with mounts in the game, right, with gliding-those additions kind of reshape the way that you think about those specific areas and the traversals. What I found with the turtle as well, at least for myself, is that it kind of changes the way you look at all of the underwater areas. So, like, whether it's in Core Tyria or Path of Fire or even in End of Dragons, just being able to walk around at the base level of-of a map kind of changes the game-at least for me. That's the way I see it, so I'm excited to see that.
Rubi: Oh, absolutely.
Nick: And hopefully, you know, experience it and maybe hopefully have the same-same thoughts.
Rubi: Yeah so I-it-I do love that turtle can walk around underwater. I love how-I love the animations but I also love that it. Okay, hello-my screen is full of turtle.
Nick: Sorry.
Rubi: Suddenly, it's just turtles everywhere. I also want to talk a little bit about the combat underneath water, because you can still do that. Uh, I need you to take me a little bit closer to that hermit crab that i have targeted over there, please.
Nick: You got it.
Rubi: Please, oh wait, no okay, well.
Nick: There's another one right there.
Rubi: I guess we could do, we could get that one.
Nick: Actually, i think we both heard it.
Rubi: Oh my gosh. Yeah, so underwater is not ground targeted; it is enemy targeted. I don't want to kill that Koi. That's just kind of like stomping a fly.
Nick: Hah.
Rubi: Um, can you give me? I need another hermit crab. There was just one.
Nick: I'm looking. I'm trying.
Rubi: We're trying to find enemies so hard, you all.
Nick: That's not.
Rubi: Um, while you're trying to find me an enemy, I also want to note that you're going to be able to mount and dismount the sea turtle, while you're underwater. That's not just, oh you have to be on dry land or it doesn't work.
Nick: Yeah, but like also the gunner, uh, can hop into, the gunner can hop into and out of the other, another person's siege turtle as well. So it's like, it's not just that the main person can mount and dismount, but also the gunner can hop in and out.
Rubi: I'm doing like mass damage to these creatures, because they're the only ones i could find.
Nick: Yeah. Poor Koi, like I'm sorry Koi. Got it right on the stream.
Rubi: I'm so sorry. It's fine. He'll respawn.
Nick: Yeah.
Rubi: Yeah.
Nick: Uh, something else to know, I think there's like as you mentioned there's a difference between the, the ground version, which has actual ground targeting, very similar to our other skills versus the click target and the reason for that is just that we wanted to make sure that, um, it's a bit more like accessible and like the ease of access is of use for everybody, while they're using these things within, the, uh, within the water, because it is a bit harder to use ground targeting skills in the water.
Rubi: I also wanted to. It really is. Um, I also want to note that you're getting XP for my hard work siege cannoning Koi.
Nick: Yeah, that is, that is definitely. Something else to note is that, um ,i think, because we're in the same, we're in the same party. Anything that you do, I will get credit for to a certain extent and vice versa.
Rubi: Oh.
Nick: Um, so yeah i think that actually also might be beneficial to get out of this water, which please.
Rubi: Please
Nick: Yeah, the, the best way for us to be able to do that, is by utilizing the jump jets. That's how the turtle moves up and down and actually before I go out of the water, what I will note is that, I don't know if another people will notice it, but within the water, while you're, while you're swimming around, while you're using the jump jets, they will actually move faster, so you will gain more elevation faster, while you're using the turtle in the water.
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Note: The text below was auto-transcribed and not reviewed. It could be that text appears for the wrong speaker. |
Nick: Around or using the jump jets, they'll actually move faster. So you will gain more elevation faster while you're using the turtle in the.
Rubi: Water this person. My skiff, please.
Nick: Yeah, like my my skin. My skin's OK. It's very. Durable. Yeah, it's. Yeah, but so that's pretty much it for. For underwater, yeah.
Rubi: Let's see. What else have we got? I think we've covered.
Nick: We have some some nasty things.
Rubi: Most of it you all are gonna get to try this. Yeah. You all are gonna get to try this next week. In the end of Dragons beta event starting on Tuesday the 30th. You're going to start with siege turtle. History one, we are going to give you a little sneak peek at the siege Turtle Masteries, just so you can see the whole line and see what's going to be happening in end of Dragons once it's live. Once again, Mark, I'm keeping our secrets, so please don't. Show my screen. All right, let's go ahead and go through them, starting with the siege turtle level 1. The first one is turtle health boost, and that will. Increase your turtles health. Yeah, second one is slam mastery. This is what Nick was talking about earlier. Your Turtle Slam will now also generate 25% of an artillery shot. And this is the thing that we were talking about earlier. Where you regen your artillery in the gunner seat by running around. The faster you run, the more regens. But also when you use that SLAM mastery skill, you get a little bit of an artillery shot back too, so that helps regenerate it faster. Improved jump jets, which would have been awesome when you're getting out of the water, but it still it still does its thing. Your turtle can now jump further and higher using his jump jets. At PowerShell, is a protective skill. This allows you to convert incoming damage into ammo from the passenger seat, and you have little protective shell. Beyond your actual turtle shell and finally sharing is caring. This gives your turtles health boost to all of your other mounts too, so this one is useful for all of your mounts. All right.
Nick: Agreed. Yeah, sorry. One second, yeah.
Rubi: I'm going to hide that we have to, like, take little pauses and make sure that we're not showing anything off like we've talked about before. The game is a work in progress. We want to leave tons for you to discover, so we're trying not to give away all of our secrets.
Nick: Yeah, just want to make sure that we could actually like also visually demonstrate some of the differences. So like if you were to look at my. Client as an example. What you'll see is what you'll see now is that like the the turtle hover is a little bit higher now that I've done that, I let's see. I think it also mentions in the tooltip.
Rubi: Thank you, Sir.
Nick: Yeah. So now you'll see that also within the tool tip, ammo per hit is increased and also the health has also been increased as well. So just things like that, you know, wanted to kind of give a little bit of visuals to that. I think also as well if you would be wants to show off the shield skill.
Rubi: Wait, let me come back. Wait.
Nick: Yeah, right behind you there, we.
Rubi: Go. Alright, so that shield skill is my three skill.
Nick: And then yeah, just puts a giant bubble around us.
Rubi: And we are. We will die much less.
Nick: Quick. Yeah, something else, actually? No, I don't know if I mentioned this earlier, but just in case, we're talking about amber generation and we're talking about this season 4. And five skills. The bond of life once again heals and increases the boss, the Turtles health, and that also increases dependent on whether you have the mastery. Or not. As well as the bond of vigor not only increases your endurance for your jet fuel, but it also increases the rate of. Of ammo reacquisition. So when you use that plus the boost plus Max speed, it's you're just going to be constantly firing them out. It's really exciting. And of course we've got standard mouth stealth and the bond of faith. So those are just the kind of things I also wanted to mention that you know the team wanted to make sure that we could better integrate and give additional value to both those who get the turtle and go back into those old expansions and content and get that as well as additional value for those who already have those things and get the turtle. So definitely want to make sure that we can take some time to integrate those things and. Make them work.
Rubi: Absolutely. Do you want to talk about? World versus world. A little bit.
Nick: Yeah, sure. I'm sure that's something that everybody on everybody's mind, right? It's called the siege turtle. So I know a lot of people out there. They will probably thinking like siege siege turtle. Hey, like, does turtle do siege damage in world of worlds and the. Unfortunate answer right now is no what we did. Bid for the expansion is that we will not be shipping the turtle within world world and will not be allowing it to be usable in worldly world. And the reason for that is mostly just that with the expansion coming out with all these additions of things like the elite specs as well as the alliances or we're restructuring and things like that, we wanted to make sure that we didn't introduce. Introduce too many variables of disruption for the. For the expansion and when everything drops to help, make sure that people like Cal aren't like forced to change as much. A lot of stuff at the exact same time, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's off the table. What what the team decided on is that like if we do add it, it's going to be because people like yourselves and all the players have decided that they really, really want it. Right. So through kind of community. Community desire and with community info. We will make the decision on whether we should or should not add it, but something to also note there, I think actually our current design director said it best. We're only going to do it if it. Makes world the. World better. So something to note is that if we were to add it to world view world at a later time, we would make sure that it. It doesn't break the game mode and that it fits, so it would be different, right? It would be a highly modified version of the CGE turtle, very similar to what you see with the work claw in Pve versus Worldview worlds. But yeah, I think that's everything for world world. Yeah, something else I think that is worth mentioning is that. I think some people might have actually noticed this with the current the T set chairs, because I think it's similar functionality there. But you actually while you have a passenger. You have the ability. To teleport around with them. So as an example, I'm going to cheat real quick and I think.
Rubi: We can we can show one of our. Screens it's. Yeah, I'm good. I'm safe. Yeah. So Nick is teleporting.
Nick: Or trying to anyways, that's why I'm not. I'm not used to this keyboard, but yeah, so as you can see I just teleported to.
Rubi: The typos are happening again.
Nick: Back over to to the starting area that we were at earlier and Ruby was pulled with me. So that means that you're not just taking your friends like on a run, right? Like you can take them to different parts of the map as well, utilizing teleports and waypoints. I think something else that is worth mentioning because I'm sure that a lot of people are also curious about this is that. For the acquisition method, yeah, we can't really talk about what it is or like how it's built out, but what we can say is that it is going to. To be faster for players in acquisition than the SKYSCALE was as an example. So for those people who are like, is it going to be comparable to skyscale and duration and investment, the answer is it's going to be a it's going to be a lot simpler to get a lot faster. And and I think that's pretty much everything.
Rubi: I did, I dismounted while you were talking and. Hopped out over here. Just to show off that my turtle looks a little bit different. From yours it. Does. Yeah, so just.
Nick: Look a little bit different than mine.
Rubi: Like with the other mounts, even on the base mount, you can dye yours to kind of make it your own. We have a few dye colors available in the game, so I just went with a I went with a harvest gold I went with like the most offensive pink I could find. The first time it was a lot. But yeah, I went with something a little more subdued this time. And Nick is changing his now. Oh, I like that one.
Nick: Yeah, I'm. I'm just. I'm like, cycling through. That's brick. If you're talking about the one that I'm. Using right now. That's great. Yeah, that looks. Good. And then also something to mention is that very similar to the other base level mounts. The each of them was only a singular. Die Channel on launch. And that's going to be the same with the turtle. So you will have one die channel for when the turtle is released and it dyes the shell specifically just for those who are curious about what parts it's dying specific. Particularly, it's just it's just a shelf right now. And from the 2nd, that's. Literally, literally all of.
Rubi: It and. You wanna call it one more thing, just this is just like a fun little animation thing because we've talked before about how much work and the care and the details that everybody puts into these mounts. And if you look at my turtle, I'm just going to move away from you, Nick, as he is. No, you're fine as he spins around as I'm moving around the cannons. Are following me my siege cannons. Are following the way to point in the direction that they are. Going to go.
Nick: Didn't even notice that right now.
Rubi: Yeah, it's it's a fun touch, but it's also a helpful visual indicator, like which way is this going? How weird is this going to be? Depending on what I do with ground targeting. So yeah, kudos to everybody who worked on this because like we said, it's still a work in progress. We're still improving things. And putting those final touches on, but it already.
Nick: Looks fantastic. Yeah, and, you know, shout out to people like Ben Kirsch, who is the main designer for this and everybody on the animation team worked on it. Programmers as well, trying to make sure that. It felt solid, you know, like, this is a staple piece and kind of like one of the key features that we're shipping for this expansion. It's like one of the back of the box features. So the team wanted to take some time to make sure that it was that it felt good, that it felt. Sort of looking for. Like worth worth the investment worth the time and things like that. So we just hope that.
Rubi: You all feel the same way. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you very much for that time, Nick. Of course. So I promise to you all some more things we're going to take a very short break and then we will come back and call's got some updates about the elite specializations for end of Dragons. So stick around, we'll be back in just a minute.
Rubi: 'Off Camera' Everybody panicked. You know what? I'm gonna stick around. I'm gonna. I'm.
Nick: 'Off Camera' Run away. Going to be.
Rubi: Thanks again for hanging out with us here on Guild Chat today. So like we've been talking about betas next Tuesday, how have the elite specs changed? Cal is here to tell us that, so take it away, Cal. Right.
Cal: Thanks. Yeah. So therefore we just got a lot of feedback throughout the 1st 3 betas and all the specializations. So a lot of things have changed and for today we're just going to do like at least for the stream we're going to do a very high level kind of more organized. Overview of a handful of the like key feedback items that were actioned, but right after the stream. We'll also be posting the full list of update notes on the forums, so look forward to that. We did want to go over every single specific thing here on the stream because we'd be here for you know, very, very long time given. I mean you guys don't know my history of talking about elite specs, so we wanted to keep it really nice and contained. Talk about the main important things and leave the rest for all of you to see on the form.
Rubi: I'm literally over here setting that up right now.
Cal explains Changes in Elite Specifications [42:08][edit]
Cal: Awesome. All right, so let's just hop into it. We run through these in the same order that we initially revealed them. So we're kicking things off with the virtuoso. So the first thing we see here, kind of the one of the big feedback points is well, what about void generation clone generation? And you know, we increased the clone cap to five for this character, obviously new. Songs, really. And then of course, being able to maintain blades across combat. It really felt like we wanted to get a little bit more blade generation than something cell. Our feedback around as well. I end the fight with the shatter and then I have nothing left and it feels a little bit weird to have this functionality that doesn't really do anything because by the time I get my next fight, I don't have any more clones. And so one of the things that we've added here is that a piece of one of the minor traits for the virtuoso is now just going to generate a clone every 10 seconds, whether you're in combat, whether or not in combat, you'll just be constantly generating clones or blades. Confused myself already. But, you know, get some more natural blade generation there. So you'll pretty much always have something ready to go to start. Right. In addition to that, we fixed up some interactions with stuff like mirror images decoy these skills that for base mesmer for other member specializations you need a target because you're spawning a clone to go attack something, the virtuous will no longer need a target to activate those skills, so you can still just stock blades while you're out of combat, moving around, getting ready for the next fight. So with additional blade generation that's going to play into kind of you know it's going to enable shatters a bit more. So this character comes a lot more shatter focused. And one thing we've added there to kind of play into that identity is the minor master tier trade is now going to give you a damage bonus every time you shatter. This is going to be a duration based things. So it's like I think it's 5% for both power and Condi. Every time you shatter for some duration, so it's going to create this really nice flow of combat where you going to be, you know, building up blades shattering, get the damage bonus, press more buttons, get the more, get more blades, shatter again, keep that damage bonus going, and so on. So importantly, that does increase condition damage because another feedback point that we saw a lot about is. Condition builds and they're not just, they're just not as exciting as, say, the power builds are. And so we've added, you know, the damage bonus there. I've tuned up some of the numbers on some of the bleeding and some of the other condition applications for this character, just to make sure that condition build feels a little bit more, a little bit more relevant than. It did during the first beta. So next we're going to talk about Harbinger. We've got some pretty exciting stuff going on here. So First things first, first full point here is the life force drain. This is the thing that Harvinder did when you were in combat and you were not a full health. It would constantly drain your life force to heal. You convert that into healing. And this was kind of an interesting design decision originally that we wanted to create kind of this, you know, a little bit more sustained, but also create kind of this push pull between building up life force. Managing your life force and your defensive play that you would be able to have enough life force to get a good crowd, but we saw a lot of feedback around just, you know, playing with it more and more. It didn't. Feel particularly good? It wasn't particularly fun to play with just fighting against your own life force generation, so we just kind of pulled out entirely. So it's also going to be, you know, a bit less sustained for the character, which is. Probably reasonable as well, and it's just going to make sure that you always have that life force available for shroud when you want it. Another thing we've looked at is updating the bite mechanical a little bit. So first thing off, it's going to be a little bit less punishing. It's kind of like 1 1/2% Max health per stack instead of 2%, but we've also added some more interactions. We're calling blight threshold, which you're going to see on some of the shroud skills. And then on all of the elixir skills and what flight threshold says is. Now if you use this skill with a certain amount of on you, there's going to be a bonus effect, and it's going to consume some blight from you, so it's going to create this really interesting management of generating enough blight through elixirs and shroud to then get these playoffs from. Also, elixirs and shrouds it's going to really create some particular decision making points. And how you want to use those abilities. And so that's one update to the elixirs. We also wanted to do some further updates because the elixir skills in beta one, not the most interesting, you know, press a button, get some boons, obviously, do that the boom share trait, but it's still pretty simplistic game play. So now all of the elixers are going to be ground targeted and you can throw the elixer. The area effect is going to be some damage is going to be some condition application. You're still gonna get the boot on yourself for Carlos before you throw the elixir. And it's also going to allow the boon sharing to be in that ground target area. So a little bit more flexibility. And when you go into that boon share build the positioning that you'll be able to, you'll need to have to enable that playstyle. So Next up, we're going to move into the. Wheel Bender. Most importantly, so this first goal point looking at some animation clean up. This is something actually done across a lot of specializations. Looking at like things like after cast and movement locks and. Stuff like that. Which makes things feel a little bit more clunky. It's a really important thing to call out for wild Bender specifically because it is. You know this character that is supposed to be fluid in movement, and really I mean that high mobility, assassinate character. So we want to make sure that these things feel pretty good. So importantly we're going to see something like justice is going to come out a lot faster. The Upcut is going to be a lot faster the. After cast is going to be a lot less impactful there and also stuff like, you know, will and light flash combo, these skills that previously would walk you into an animation, they're going to allow you to move freely instead. So you'll have a lot more control over where you're positioning your character in the fights. Another thing we're going to have is some similar to virtuoso some improvements to condition builds we'll bundle was obviously pretty well, pretty intentionally designed to be a power character, sword off hand and a lot of you know. Body and combat trait like that, but it is still an extension of the Guardian, so we have not just natural burning application. There's a lot of traits that care about burning. So it felt like there needed to be a condition build. That's something we saw a. Lot of feedback of around as well. So we have a couple more tools for that build to exist. There's a new trait that's going to cause will Bender flames to apply burning on hit and also the damage bonus from lethal tempo is going to give both strike and condition damage bonus just a few more tools for that. Condo build to work. And finally, we're going to have actually access to AOE alacrity for this character, so Phoenix protocol, the Grand Master. Right. Obviously gave a likely to the Guardian themselves of Will Bender themselves that is now shareable through battle presence, which is, you know, the virtues trait that says virtue or virtual resolve now affects an area around you. It really only makes sense that that would allow you to give a reality through Phoenix Protocol. So now it does. We'll see if any, like, super alacrity. Should show up. I'm not sure if it's actually going to be, you know, a absolute alacrity source that we see something like Spectra or the other electric sources in the game, but the option is there for all of you guys to try it out in beta 4. Next up, we're going to talk about the Vindicator. So we have some updates to the dodges and then the lion stance. So we'll talk about the dodges first. Big Feedback point is, again, you know, just clunkiness of movement. And when you come crashing down in any of the dodge animations, I guess they have the same animation come crashing down to any of the Dodge. So you just, you know, you were stuck in place for a little bit amount of time and that just created a lot of. Not the best gameplay for not the best gameplay experience, and it was there to, you know, really sell the impact. But we do really care about how this character actually plays in the world, so it's going to just have a lot less end lag there you'll be able. To move much more quickly out of the Dodge. Another minor update, I guess not a minor update, but another update the dodges that we've kind of rebalanced all of them around 100 endurance, so previously they were had. We had three different dogs that had three different costs, one 5100 or 50. They're all now going to cost 100 in earn, so we've rebalanced the effects to kind of as needed to be pretty on rate outside of any Busters that we wanted to do. And the important note here is that it just makes it a lot. More, it's a lot more. Convenient, I guess I don't know the word I'm looking for is. So there we go. Great. Great live show here but. It's just a lot easier to balance endurance generation and making sure it feels good for all of the dodges, because something that gives 50 endurance previously was a lot better for the 50 endurance dodge than it was for the 150 endurance Dodge. You just get the full dodge, but now it's going to be a lot more consistent across all dodges, so that should help make sure that all three of these things are potent. And then Next up, we'll hop into Alliance stance and talk about we'll just run through this real quick. Most importantly the skills will not automatically flip anymore and there's. Some, I mean people probably be pretty excited by that. You can now much better define the play style that you want if you want to just focus on cursor side or focus on the luxury side you can. We've added the ability to flip that manually through a new F3 skill. We split out the flip, the skill flip mechanic from energy meld and just put it on its own. For scale, the tensor can cool down, so you can now manually control when you flip between kurzick and luxon. If you feel the need to. So pretty big usability update for the what is this character called Vindicator? There are many. There are a lot of words to remember here. The next step we have the blade sworn so. There's one thing I've got to mention to start here is that there's a lot. More changes to these than are just shown on these bullet points here. These just kind of general categories that feel natural to talk about in this kind of super speed run version. So the big point here is talking about drag and trigger. There are other changes that you'll see in. The patch notes when we once we get there. But some of these to drag and trigger and drag and slash. So one of the main feedback points around this mechanic is that it is just. Overly slow. I mean it's a 5 second channel for the maximum value dragon slash and it's not super realistic and competitive even in like PvP modes, it's a lot more difficult to use effectively, and we agree that again, that's something that makes the character just feel a lot more. OK. So the flow cost per charge is going to be down to 5 instead of 10. So it's only going to cost you half of your bar to get a full charge dragon slash. And it's also going to charge twice as fast. So instead of half a second per charge, it's now quarter of a second, so will be 2 1/2 seconds for a full charge, versus 5 just some opportunity to make that a lot more accessible. A lot more usable in regular game. We got a couple of minor trade interaction updates as well. The immoral dragon trade, the yield one is also going to give protection based on the number of charges, and unyielding Dragon will give you some number of mites stacks based off how many. The last Grand Master trade is, of course, Daring Dragon I believe, which is now going to be, you know, even more exciting with the reduced energy cost. Now it's maxing at 5 charges, which is 25 adrenaline, 25 flow, which means you can fire off, you know, four or five or even 6 depending on what other external adrenaline sources you have back-to-back to back with that during Dragon trade. Next up, we have the catalyst, so saw some of these on the equal stream a little bit. The jade sphere. We kind of joked for that. These bullet points we just put Jade sphere, jade sphere, jade sphere, jade sphere because that is very much the most. I mean problematic. It definitely was problematic in its implementation how the J sphere was incredibly clunky to use in terms of gameplay. The 15 second duration in a single point. It was not super realistic to any real game play situations and then also like you know. The transitioning field as you switch attunements made it very difficult to get the combos you want. Get the matches you want on your augments, get the boons that you want. I mean everyone just wants quickness. And so we, we went back and we tweaked this jade, Jade sphere mechanic, such that it is now 4 separate skills, one per attunement, is going to be an upfront 10 energy cost to deploy that field for five seconds. And that field will not change elements. So if I'm an Earth, I deploy the earth crop field poison. Field that will always be that pulsing poison field. Even if I switch it to it's into fire. This also means that you can fire off like up to three in a row if you have, you know, 30 drop Earth switch to fire, drop fire and so on and so forth so you can get some. Potentially more exciting stuff. Or you could just pop into air and use fresh air to always have access to quickness over and over and over. So that should help with the just the flow of the character a lot and also help with the Augments. But even though another thing with the Augments that I want to say. Is that? The matching mechanic we thought was cool. We saw some feedback. The matching mechanics is cool, but these skills are just too weak and you need the bonus effect to feel as though this isn't the same power level as like a more natural utility skill. And that's definitely pretty accurate. So for most of the Augments, not the elite. We'll talk about that one a little bit later or we'll just leave for the patch notes because that one is actually pretty crazy. We made a pretty significant mechanical change to the elite skill that you guys can take a look at later, but all of the other augments will have the previous bonus effect rolled in baseline, and then you have a new bonus effect that is either going to be cooldown reduction or duration bonus depending on which augments like the fire damage bonus is going to last longer if he's in the fire field, the Earth Shield block will ever reduce cool down. If you use it in the earth field. So those are just, you know, increase the power of the Augments also plays into a little bit of those defensive improvements that we had. On that list, more defense from the Earth block. Better stem break on the air, stun break a little bit more healing access from water four and Earth 4 is now also going to give some barrier in addition to the aura. That it does when you. We successfully block. We're still going to be keeping a close eye on like Catalyst Defense, making sure it feels tanky enough without blowing out too hard. So we made a few a few adjustments for beta four and we'll see how. How those play out? I'm going to flip my. Note sheet over to the next page real quick and we're going to talk about Specter. So spectre. We actually saw a lot of a lot of really positive feedback around the spectre, so some of these bullet points here are a lot more targeted on very specific things. The first one being consume shadows, and this is the trait that says when you exit shroud consume all of your shadow force to heal in an area. And this was really one of the primary. Ways that Spectra could create more of that area of effect support as opposed to the more single target of the. The shroud tether or the scepter skills, Specter, Specter, scepter, skills. But the game play around, consumed shadows is another case where the gameplay was just not very compelling. The optimal way to play is just pop in, immediately exit, because that's going to give you the maximum value and maximum heel. So we've tuned the mechanic a little bit where being in shroud is actually now going to give you stacks of a buff that says consume shadows is more effective. So the longer you stay in, the more you'll be building up to that maximum effectiveness. And over time you will hit that maximum effectiveness. At which point you will exit and consume all of your all of your remaining shadow force to get that heal value. This is just going to make you want to use. I mean, we want you to go into shroud and use those shroud skills. We don't want players to feel that the optimal way to play is just ignore one of the major mechanics of repression. So this should really allow you to dig in and play with all of those abilities in addition to getting value from consumed shadows. The next thing on the list was an adjustment to endless night. So this is the beam portion of Scepter, pistol dual skill. It was just getting a bit too much quickness. Access our primary goal for Spectre was to be more of that alacrity source and endless night just allow you to be alacrity source, and the solid quickness source and you know, pretty decent healer, which is just a bit over tuned for what we're looking for in a support character. So by reducing the target cap down to one, it's still going to have access to some quickness, but it's hopefully not going to be a primary quickness source while doing everything else. And just give it a little bit more of a well defined role within our group content. So next we have the untamed so big one at the top. Pet control key binds. Obviously we touted this character as like, hey, here's more direct pet control over your pets abilities. But we overwrote attack my target and return to me. So you can't actually control your pet the way you want. There have been added back here. We've adjusted the UI for the untamed and also the mechanist. We'll see that same bullet point. Or attack my target and return to me or back. You can bind them to whatever you want and that will just give you the more the full suite of pet controls that we were really looking for for this car. On top of that, we got very big feedback point about the untamed is the interaction with the unleash mechanic, and these were already coming up during the Beta 3 Live stream preview. I was sitting here and reviewers reading chat and we were asking hey, what about unleash interactions for the weapons? And it's like well, you know, we talked about this, this ambush style thing, didn't really go forward within the beta. Or beta 3. But we continuously got more and more feedback around you know, the unleash mechan just feels a little bit incomplete. And so we have gone back and we've polished up those those amber skills and they are now there will be informative 4 where not every time, but there's going to be a timer, we'll talk a little bit about this on the next bullet point, but. Every so often, when you enter the unleashed state, you will flip over your auto attack into this unleashed ambush skill, and it's going to have a different, different ability per weapon. Some of them are. I mean, I think they're pretty cool, but some of them are maybe more exciting than others. As we've seen. I mean, the same thing with Mesmer, ambush or any burst skill. But I think again, they're all pretty cool. So that just adds another layer of interaction with the unleashed mechanic. Cantrips are also going to see a bonus per depending on your state. It will give you a little it's kind of a variable buff. So for example the heel is going to use super speed if you're in unleashed state, and if you're not unleash it's gonna give you stability. And so that bonus is different per cantrip, just a little bit more flavor to play into this unleashed mechanic. Another big bullet point there was the stamp swap cooled down, so this created a lot of situations where you could get kind of stuck in a bad state or you never wanted to switch stances because you would be kind of in the wrong mode for too long. You know that 10 second cooldown didn't feel super great, especially when you're trying to. Set up the combos that you want. You want the CC and defense switching to unleash. Get the offensive combo off of that, but it just didn't play really well when you were already on offense. You had to wait. You know, a very long time, so you reduce that cooldown on the one second, and that's why the the unleashed ambush scale is going to be on a controlled by a timer as opposed to every time you. But that's going to give you a lot more control over when you have access to the unleashed pet skills. When you have access to the other side of the hammer and not be too punished to. Make that decision and look to, you know, find the different lines for game play here. Quick note quick final note here. The player material effect that you see when the player is in in that unleashed state. Got a lot of feedback around. You know, the conflict it has with fashion wars, especially as a permanent buff. It's a little bit different than like a necro shroud or hollow Smith Ford, which are all temporary things, just always having this effect on you, disrupts character, looks a bit more. So it's going to fade out after a period of time after you enter unleashed state, and you'll still have all the bonuses of being unleashed, but that material effect will fade out after a little bit of time. So we'll have one last but not least, we have the mechanism. And a couple obviously pet control keybinds, same stuff attack my target return to me those are now available to mechanist and then we have the big the big category here is the updates to the Jade Mac and like I said before, there's changes that do not fall into the same bucket that you'll see in the patch notes. But this is kind of the main thing to talk about for this preview live stream here. Is the Jade Mech and first thing we'll throw out there. Is that the mech is going to be a little bit less powerful. We saw even competitive modes are not even even outside of competitive modes. The mech was, you know, a little bit overperforming relative to where we want it to be. So we've just reduced the base stats in a lot of cases where the power was like 1370 something and now it's going to be. 1000 instead, so just a reduction of power reduction to some bulkiness from that, from the vitality of toughness. Those numbers just going to line up a lot nicer with inheriting stats from the mechanisms. On top of that, we've also reduced the cooldown on the the mech resummon, so previously it was 100 seconds. Mech dies stuck without the mic for 100 seconds. It feels really bad. The comment feedback we saw is you know, the mechanist just doesn't feel like it does a whole lot without the Mac. And I mean, the maze is cool. Signature cool, but the meta is obviously the big primary game play element. So when it goes on 102nd, cool down, it just kind of sucks and you want to, you know, everyone holds the elite skill to resummon them back rather than using the Jade Buster cannon, which is the Super cool thing. It's. Two, so the cool down is down to 50 for beta 4. We'll be keeping a close eye on that and we'll be reevaluating like does Max strength need to be adjusted even more and the cool down need to come down even more or you know, so on and so forth will be evaluating what the right numbers for those cool down and mech balance is. The last big point to talk about for the Mac is the skill responsiveness, and this is actually. Something that we saw a lot of where you try to use a skill, you command them to use a skill and it was just not use that skill. And the reason that would happen is because the Mac had a couple of other skills outside of its auto chain that it prioritized very highly. If it was going to use Jade, she's gonna use rocket punch. It's just going to ignore you when you tell to do something that has a better idea. The things a little bit smarter than you. So it's like I'm just going to use my own skills. And that obviously just made the gameplay feel really clunky. So Jade siphon actually actually, not just not going to be a skill anymore. The mech will never use that ability, and that's another kind of power level adjustment to the Mac. Give a few less things to do, and then rocket punch has been pulled out of the Mex AI package and it's instead going to be used any time the mechanist. This is maze three. You use maze three. The Mac will use rocket punch at the same time. Get that nice CC and the CC more control of the CC skill feels really good there. And as a result of this, you're going to have a lot more responsiveness when you use it to use one of your F1F2F3 command skills. The Mac will pretty much always be there and always be ready. So again, that's this super high level quick summary of all the changes to 9 elite specialization for beta 4. We'll be posting the patch notes pretty much right after the stream ends, and you'll be able to see the full list of changes. And obviously you guys are going to play with all these things. We're expecting a lot more feedback around all these things based on beta. Four, so obviously give us go on the forums. Tell us what you think. And we'll be continuing to iterate on all these things as we look ahead toward end of Dragon's launch. And so now I'll toss back to Ruby and we will wrap things.
Rubi: Up. Thanks, Cal. As always, you're a hero for going through all of that stuff. So thank you very much. We will have those live on the profession forum on on the main profession forum as soon as we are done here on the show. We do have a couple more things for you though. One of the things that we have been working on all year and you as players is the living world replay. Ongoing meta achievement as seasons of the Dragons. There is a. Legendary amulet that is that reward. We're getting close to where people can start getting that in their own legendary Armory. So we thought we'd give a little preview today of what the effect looks like once you've got it equipped. Mark, my monitor is safe now, yeah. All right. So that is the effect on the prismatic champions regalia. Just turn it around so you can see the whole thing. And that is what that's going to. Look like. But that is not the only preview we have for you. Next week, November 30th. Also, it brings the beta event, but it also is going to bring some new character customization options for your character creation that's coming on Tuesday. So we thought we would show you a few screenshots of previews, so here you go. All right, there's a little something for everybody. I hope you enjoy that preview. I cannot wait to see what everybody does with their characters next week. Once we have these new character creation and customization options, so beta event next Tuesday starting at 11:30, end of Dragons launches in February of 2022. We are getting closer and closer. It's available for pre purchase right now. If you pre purchase end of Dragons you get some cool bonuses that you can use on your account now and then. Some other cool bonuses that you'll be able to use on your account after lunch. We are also working with DX Racer for next week's beta. We're giving away another DX racer gaming chair, this one here we are going to give that away, along with some Guild Wars 2 gems to a lucky winner. The way you enter is by logging in to play the beta every day you play. The beta is 1 entry to win the sweepstakes. We also are working with DX Racer for an end of Dragons gaming chair that you can pre purchase. Is now pre purchase less until November 30th. Next Tuesday is a big day. There's a lot happening. If you are thinking about pre purchasing this, get that in before pre purchase ends next Tuesday we are almost at the end of that. We also have some Black Friday sales coming up like I mentioned here in America this is. Thanksgiving week. And with that comes Black Friday. So starting on the 26. Path fire Half price Guild Wars 2 gems 20% off you can check our website now to check guildwars2.com there's an article listing out all of the retailers with links where you can pick those up depending on where in the world you. Are also check the Gem Store daily, starting on Friday. We're going to have daily sales. For Black Friday, for the next 4 days. Next show is December 3rd. We are going to be telling you about a whole lot of end of Dragons gameplay features, so we'll follow our channel so you don't miss us and we will see you then. Now let's all go to the forums and we'll get those notes up and running. See you next time. Thanks guys.
