knitdan wrote: »

According to the credits,

Spoiler:

Pachelbel's Canon

is in the game, but I'll be damned if I can remember where. I don't recall hearing it anywhere.

I got the Tunnel Vision gear early in the game and then didn't find another pair of pants for about the next two-thirds of the game. Suffice it to say I got used to using iron-sights to fight everything, and when that's your main option the powerful single-shot weapons like the Carbine and the Sniper Rifle become your best friends. Combined with Head Master, most things still died in one shot on Hard. Which was why I tended to focus on my Shield through the infusions; I used my shield to let the enemy fire a few shots at me to establish their location, ducked back under cover to get the shield back, pop out and fire, then repeat. Served me well for everything that wasn't, say, a Handyman.

"Oh hey, my scope suddenly seems to be full of large mechanical man, and also I am dead. Interesting."

Dispatch from the Department of Bad Ideas:

A way to placate the people who hate stealth

A new caveat is added to the "Revealed" status: taking damage adds one second to the "Revealed" state, to a maximum of (2/3) seconds.

That is, if you continually damage a Thief (or any character) who has the Revealed state on them, you can keep them out of stealth. If they successfully avoid damage for the duration of the Revealed state (which, in most combat, would require a double-tapped dodge and/or a skillful application of a deflection skill), they can reenter Stealth.

It's worth pointing out, as it usually is, that except for a few clearly-delineated blind spots (for instance, the devs are on record as saying that Mesmers have trouble with condition management, and that's intentional), most classes have a lot of different styles, and it's really easy to say "Man, it feels like my class can't do X very well when it just turns out you aren't traited for it. If I ignored Decoy, Blink, and Mirror Images and used Scepter/Torch:Greatsword as my weapons, I'd feel like my Mesmer was nailed to the floor, but that doesn't mean it's a low-mobility class.

On that note, a word to whomever it was I was advising about PvE builds, and said that Confusion was generally considered ass: I would like to very gently revise my statement on that matter. If you kit out for it, you can get a lot of Confusion sources, and between Domination points, Master of Misdirection, and Condition Duration runes, you can get a pretty massive duration boost to the condition such that you can maintain two or three stacks at all times, with bursts up to eight or so stacks. That can add up to a lot of damage, but it's shackled by the caveat that the enemy has to be attacking for it to work. In a group, that's no problem; generally you'll have a Warrior or Guardian drawing consistent fire. Solo, though, you run into the fact that Mesmers get a significant portion of their defense from kiting, so unless you can manage some really unintuitive gestures to provoke attacks and avoid them, you're not going to be nearly as effective at it as with a more proactive attack style (e.g. shattering or phantasms). (Illusions do not make great tanks in this regard, as the AI's aggro priorities are unpredictable.) So, to sum up: a Confusion build could be viable, but if you lean on Confusion, you rely on having burly men around who are happy to get punched in the face to set the Confusion off. I personally don't have that many reliable masochists, hence my (slanted) judgment that Confusion is ass for PvE.

Now all I need to do is get hold of those textures and I can finally realize my dream of producing Dustbowel.