Guild Wars 2

First off, thanks for the fun in the race to win the tournament! I wound up playing with my friends across the pond and had a good time hanging out with them on the new map.

Here’s my feedback after 3 straight hours of playing the various mechanics:

1. Finding fights is impossible. Obviously we found a few, but sometimes the swords would pop on the side of the map that wasn’t yours. You’d run there… and find nothing. The fights were gone, the end. It seemed like there needed to be more people on the map?

2. Middle area event was confusing. I went there to do the event when it popped but couldn’t find anything that would drop the essence? Not sure what to do there but once one team figured it out, the other two just skipped it every time.

3. Map is extremely large with no real waypoints. This felt like EOTM where you didn’t want to die/fall off because you’d have to spend 1-2 minutes running back to the pin. I understand not turning over waypoints in enemy territories, but perhaps there can be one other spot that can be taken and a waypoint spawned like in the current bls? This also contributed to why my first point was difficult.

4. Getting into/capping keeps was a maze. This will come with time as people adjust to the maps, but boy did we ever get lost trying to get into half the keeps. You’d go one way… wall. Go another… fall to your doom. The lava was perhaps the least scary of them all because everyone knows if you jump enough you take little to no damage in it. :P

5. Walls/gates seemed to be bugged at times. I heard about gates glitching and becoming unbreakable from friends on the other server. I also came across a wall that once it had an empty bar didn’t actually fall for another 10-15 seconds. You could no longer hit it with a cata, either.

Overall I think it will be a nice way to shake up WvW and encourage less zerging… I hope. It could turn into another EOTM which we do NOT want. I hope it forces groups to run as a guild or into smaller groups to complete objectives and fight one another since WvW is, technically, a pvp zone.

Some extra I thoughts I forgot earlier:

6. Buffs from shrines are a bit strong. My group didn’t bother with the shrines too much, but I got whispers from friends on opposing servers about the crit chance and movement speed. It’s nice, I suppose, to have these buffs but the buffs are why fights in the current BLs and EOTM aren’t always feasible or desired, at least not for fight guilds (be they open field or gvg). I’m not sure how to adjust this aside from making the buffs a little weaker?

7. Some skills wouldn’t work despite showing green aoe circles. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why I couldn’t meteor even on flat ground or from up top. I would have green rings so it should have been possible but it wouldn’t work. I also had the lightning flash bug that plagues the vanilla game at the moment where it tells you even on flat ground that there’s no valid path to target. :P

8. Supply was difficult to find or accumulate. Even fight guilds want supply sometimes to bust into keeps and wait on the enemy to come. It was a pain at first to find the supply, and often when we did there simply wasn’t enough at any given time to build two pieces of siege. This was made even worse when keeps auto-upgraded to have reinforced anything as you could barely build a regular ram/cata, much less a superior one. Taking out a wall took f-o-r-e-v-e-r.

9. NPCs – especially at keeps – were an absolute pain to take care of. It reminded me a lot of the early EOTM where you couldn’t effectively capture the keeps without a zerg. We all know what that led EOTM to become! I think these should be scaled so if you’re a group of 5 trying to take it, the NPC isn’t as strong. Essentially do what other bosses in PvE do – if you’re 5 manning it, it’s weaker; if you’re 80 man blobbing it, it’s stronger. I think this will help smaller roaming groups feel more useful as well as servers that happen to have a lower population than others. The mechanics of the lords were fine and added something new; it really is just how much it scales. When we zerged up, it was a somewhat easy cap. When I went to 10 man a keep… that didn’t go so hot.

I just realized that I think I may have been partied up with Tirzah for a while, so hello and thank you for the sneak peek at the map! I didn’t realize I was with a dev so apologies for saying three hours of ppt makes me tired… I prefer the fights hahaha.

Again, I think there is potential to change how WvW functions… there just needs to be a lot of adjustments to appease both the guilds who look mostly for fights while still allowing ample room to grow for ppt guilds and roamers. I’ve read some other great critiques on the forums today so hopefully Anet takes a peek and considers some changes!

Agreed on point 2 and 4! I think some smoothing will work it out. I just love the pve element in the wvw. Stoked to see it progress. Good points tho! Ty

AGENT.1563:

Agreed on point 2 and 4! I think some smoothing will work it out. I just love the pve element in the wvw. Stoked to see it progress. Good points tho! Ty

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Aerial Melodies.4938:

9. NPCs – especially at keeps – were an absolute pain to take care of. It reminded me a lot of the early EOTM where you couldn’t effectively capture the keeps without a zerg. We all know what that led EOTM to become! I think these should be scaled so if you’re a group of 5 trying to take it, the NPC isn’t as strong. Essentially do what other bosses in PvE do – if you’re 5 manning it, it’s weaker; if you’re 80 man blobbing it, it’s stronger.

This.