Guild Wars 2

I want to love this game, but I really hate it sometimes.

I do not feel that this game will ever be a relevant measure of player skill unless some serious changes are made.

This is not a cry post, just read before you judge.

Section One: PVP

As it currently stands, there are severe issues across the board that really need to be addressed. I will outline those below.

1) Quickness.

This ability/mechanic/whatever you want to call it, is utterly the definition of anti-talent. Every 60 seconds you press a button that means rolling your face across your keyboard for the next few seconds will actually generate favorable results.

I usually hear “learn to dodge” every time someone mentions how broken this ability is in combination with abilities like Pistol Whip, Hundred Blades, etc. The fact of the matter is that this is a very poor recommendation for dealing with such things. I don’t care if you have 500 stun breaks, I have utterly destroyed (and been utterly destroyed by) players using Quickness.

This ability single-handedly destroys any hope of skillful combat in the sense that you have to blow every single cooldown you have to deal with this ONE MECHANIC. This is just ridiculous.

Don’t get me wrong. I play a Thief in s/tpvp as my main, and I am SO bored of only having 1-2 viable specs because not running Quickness puts you at an immense disadvantage.

I would love to see any Thief not running Quickness to go up against a Mesmer, any Necro worth a kitten, any Guardian worth a kitten, and come out of it alive. It’s just a chore of a game mechanic that kills balance.

If Quickness were eliminated from the game across the board, it is my opinion that the classes would be in a greater state of balance.

2) Pets.

When I’m playing even a 5v5 tournament, I almost feel like I’m playing PVE more so than PVP. This is due to the sheer fact that 3 classes in the game are essentially not even personally responsible for the majority of the damage they do, they instead rely on AI.

Some pets die relatively easily, others don’t. It is simply my opinion that for a limited set of classes, too much benefit is had for something that is not directly under your control.

I thought PVP meant player versus player, not player versus player + overpowered AI.

3) 8v8

Other topics here have made this point pretty clear. The hot-join 8v8 PVP format is a bloody zergfest and makes it pretty much unbearable to play even for spec testing. I would honestly stand to see all forms of sPVP changed to 5v5 instead of 8v8, it would be a lot more appealing to people who don’t feel like waiting on or playing in a tournament.

4) PVE in PVP

Nuff said. RotC it widely considered to be the most disgusting abomination of a PVP map ever made in a game pretty much. The PVE aspect plays way too much into the winning/losing element of this map. Whoever caps Ruins first is at such an advantage that the other team essentially has to zerg down the defenders and risk getting their other points taken just for the one point. I do not consider that to be a healthy compromise. RotC sucks.

The Chieftain/Svanir mechanic in FoH is honestly tolerable, but I still think it’s pretty dumb, and that there could be better ‘twists’ you could use to make the individual maps more interesting. I don’t consider having both teams rushing to the OPPOSITE side of the map for a completely luck based chance of stealing the other team’s mob to be an interesting mechanic. It’s a gamble that is entirely separate from what should be purely PVP based gameplay.

The way LotF is set up is great, I would change only one thing about this map. The PVE aspect of this map is actually relatively exhilarating, and can easily turn the tides of a match. Killing the opposite team’s lord is really only a viable strategy if you’re well enough off in the game already to spare the resources, and I believe the tactical decision making element here is perfect. The change that I would make is to lower the points granted to merely 100. If the entire team zergs a base, the keep lord is pretty squishy, so I feel that the number of points awarded is a little overboard. It is almost impossible to rally your team to your base in time to defend the lord if you’re not there already, because it just dies too fast.

5) Downed State

DOWNED STATE SUCKS.

We need an option to bleed ourselves out at an accelerated rate, or an option to just instantly kill ourselves when downed.

Especially considering the lack of balance between the classes when downed, it adds absolutely nothing but an added layer of frustration that feels very out of place in gameplay.

When I kill enemies, I am of the belief that they should DIE. Not fall over on their backs and warp around trolling me for the next 20 seconds.

Section Two: General Complaints

1) Camera.

The camera in this game is absolutely terrible. It’s not snappy enough, and I find myself fighting with the camera way too much because it simply lags behind what it should be. This is due to the camera inertia, and “acceleration” which gives the illusion of smoothness, at the cost of having it feel very sluggish.

This really murders PVP for me when I have to fight with the controls just to play the game.

2) GTAOE (Ground Target Area Of Effect)

This game essentially requires you to be right-clicked (mouselooked) into your screen 100% of the time. Turning with a keyboard is not viable under any circumstances.

I can not tell you how many times my GTAOEs go directly to the ground because it’s impossible to tell where your mouse is actually at on the screen when you’re mouselooking. It would be interesting to have some sort of way to be able to tell where your GTAOE is going to go when you’re mouse turning. This is particularly annoying when you’re trying to Cluster Bomb kite people at short range, for instance.

3) Particle Effects

We really, really, really, really, really, really, really need a particle effect slider. It is nearly impossible to see important combat cues and/or what’s going on AT ALL when your screen is swamped by pretty lights. Please make this type of thing intelligent too. I would like to be able to filter out anything but my own abilities and AOE ring, or at the very least, limit the amount of active particle effects per player to 1, disregarding GTAOE rings. Particle density would also be a nice thing to have.

i agree with a lot of that apart from the Area of effects thing, i really dont have a problem letting go of my right mouse dropping and aoe and holding right click again. And i dont think keyboard turning should ever be viable, or just letting your skills auto home in on people heartseeker im looking at you.

Nothing more annoying than a warrior or thief blipping in while you are in the middle of a fight with someone while stunbreakers are down and instantly killing you from 60% health.

I would like to see them increase the range on camera i usually like to zoom out quite far , makes it hard to see people coming up behind you. Also camera on range while downed seems even worse for me most of the time.

mickers.2715:

i agree with a lot of that apart from the Area of effects thing, i really dont have a problem letting go of my right mouse dropping and aoe and holding right click again. And i dont think keyboard turning should ever be viable, or just letting your skills auto home in on people heartseeker im looking at you.

Nothing more annoying than a warrior or thief blipping in while you are in the middle of a fight with someone while stunbreakers are down and instantly killing you from 60% health.

I would like to see them increase the range on camera i usually like to zoom out quite far , makes it hard to see people coming up behind you. Also camera on range while downed seems even worse for me most of the time.

Well, I wasn’t implying that it should auto-home in or anything. I just wish that aiming GTAOE’s was a little more intuitive when you’re mouse turning, and in addition to that, I would like to see a mouselook toggle to warrant such a change.

I would definitely like to see a FOV slider, I can agree with that, and yes, when you get downed, your camera zooms in so ridiculously close (and gets stuck on terrain) that you’re next to useless. Even more useless than I already implied while downed.

As a Necro, I take offense when you say that I’m not responsible for the majority of my damage due to having pets. Tell you what…go make a Necro…make a minion build…and then face me and my minion build. Guarantee you that you and your pets will fall before I reach 75% life.

Reason being = PETS ARE SUPPORT. Same with an Engineer’s turrets. They cannot be relied on to do everything for you, but instead, you need to know when to use your pets as they are there to suppliment your playstyle/build. Sure they do their own thing at first, but every player has the ability to influence their behavior/effectiveness via secondary skills and even certain utility skills.

I’m going to guess you don’t play a pet class. If that is true, then don’t complain about my pets. I like them just the way they are.

Good day.

I agree with most, but I’m confused about GTAOE. Do you have the option enabled to instantly cast at your mouse, or do you hit the button, target, then cast? I’ve done all my PvP mouse-turning with necro with GTAOE marks and wells and engineer throwing elixirs and I have never had an issue, and I play without the insta-cast-at-mouse feature.

ALso needs:
1. option to disable combat text/notifications. I don’ tneed “new event nearby” poppign in the screen while i am trying to watch my enemy.

2. option to disable UI elements. Screen is too cluttered as it is. Party health bars should be hideable.

And once again, WAY TOO many pets for too many classes. One pet max one turret max is all we need. Take away gaurdian weapons or make them untargettable. Take away gang of thieves. My suggestions may not be best, but I hope this gets improved because targetting is a mess right now.

Olkyr.4821:

I agree with most, but I’m confused about GTAOE. Do you have the option enabled to instantly cast at your mouse, or do you hit the button, target, then cast? I’ve done all my PvP mouse-turning with necro with GTAOE marks and wells and engineer throwing elixirs and I have never had an issue, and I play without the insta-cast-at-mouse feature.

It is very clunky, to be fair. If you’re holding RMB to turn your mouse pointer disappears. Mouse movement is the most efficient way to move and having to use the same input to aim GTAOE spells doesn’t work well.

There is a mod out there that makes RMB always held down, adds a crosshair, and makes your GTAOE spells aim at the crosshair. This solves the issues and apparently, Anet says it’s legit to use because it just alters your inputs and adds an overlay to the game screen, but I’m still wary to use it. Something like this should be part of the game by default.

i came here expecting constructive, but got caught in a rant.

sounds like an anthrax song.

caught in a rant!

While we’re at it, let us zoom in/out using the mouse wheel while turning (holding down RMB). Not being able to do this is extremely annoying.

I agree with nearly everything.

1.) Quickness
The quickness mechanic, it just blows my mind when you see just how much dmg there is in this game and then you can just cut someone’s TTK from 2-3seconds to 1-1.5 seconds. Just like Aion with the stupid sorcerers popping their Quickness and getting off their overkill megaburst within 1 second.

I try to avoid using this stupid skill as much as I can, I don’t think I’ve ever made a thief build that uses it as it just isn’t my playstyle of “blow my load” and run. And I look for sustainable burst. I’ve tried it a few times and it just feels absolutely unfair, just chain cc’ing people and sticking to people hasting pistol whip and dropping even moderately tanky people in 1-2 seconds. You have to have good defensive cooldowns and be FAST to counter it. (It feels so good outplaying haste/burster and killing them w/o it, although I had to work harder just to avoid it than they did to use it.)

Eventually I just get so sick of Spvp with everyone running around herpderping people to death with haste, and makes me wish they’d just dump thekittenskill so people will have to learn how to kill people w/o it.

2.) Pets
Yeah definately, I think they went a little to pet-happy with all the classes. I mean it’s neat and all, especially those that usually enjoy pets (I usually do) having pet options for every class is nice, but it definately becomes too much especially with 8v8.

3.) 8v8
God yes, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten frustrated when trying to test out builds and end up being zerged down CONSTANTLY. Even the opposite is true, I run out to cap a point and find myself in a good evenly matched 1v1. Then out of NOWHERE 5 people from my team come and zerg the poor guy down. And I immediately run off to cap somewhere else grumbling to myself.

4.) Pve in spvp
I’m not even going to get started on Capricorn, everything about that level drives me nuts, the underwater combat, sharks, cannon dmg, the layout. Svanir/Chieftan are kind of neat, I like that they tried for something different, especially since Conquest get’s so boring after awhile.

5.) Downed state
I used to despise downstate in spvp in beta, just because for those games where you do just want to kill people (I mean conquest get’s boring eventually and I just want to fight sometimes). But then I got over it, however the more and more I played I start to realize how the downed state is just an excuse to have stupid amounts of burst dmg in the game, and even mechanics like Quickness.

This goes for pve as well. That’s when I start to dislike it again. I’d much rather have downed state and the insane burst dmg removed or lowered to have a bit slower paced fights. Too many pvp games, especially MMO’s go the way of Mega burst twitch play. I was hoping this game would’ve been different.

Camera.) Yes the camera definately needs work with this game, I’m sure they’ll get to it though.

GTAOE.) As someone that used shortbow thief ALOT, I can definately agree with this, it would be VERY nice to have an option that showed your cursor slightly altered while camera grabbing.

Particles.) Most definately, the main reason I want a particle option is because Particles kill my fps so much in pve/wvw to the point that WvW is pretty much unplayable for me. And I’ve seen so many times in pve where I’m getting 30 fps with like 5 people around me, then all of a sudden 2 people use aoe’s and I drop to 10 fps, the fps drops are so inconsistent because of that.

And this is also another issue, being blinded by particles. The fact that they tried to have visual cues with animations instead of having cast bar’s. IMO it just does not work very well, pve and pvp. There are so many abilities that don’t have obvious animations or even have one at all. Warrior Bolas’ is one example, I could never tell when a warrior was tagging me with it til it was too late. Bull’s charge is on the completely opposite end, very easy to anticipate.

This also goes into an issue with the races, telling what a norn is doing compared to an asura is like night and day. In the end I’m starting to think they should just add cast bars, atleast very subtle ones. The game is too reactive and not pro-active enough, which makes defensive cooldowns mandatory, but that’s just my opinion.

I didn’t mean to make a giant wall of text, but those all are issues that have been bothering me as well lol.

I’d agree with most of what you said, especially about the pets. Now, I understand that, like the Necromancer poster said, pets for him are support, but that doesn’t change things. The point is that, in the end, all of these Engineer, Mesmer, and Necromancer builds which use pets/turrets involve the introduction of computer AI into what is supposed to be player versus player – regardless of how great or small its contribution may be – and that really hurts the integrity of the PvP experience.

Moreover, completely apart from that issue is the fact that the battlefield just turns into a giant mess with everyone and his brother having 2 – 3 pets out at the same time. and it really kills the experience.

I would really only largely disagree with you on quickness. I think quickness gets a bad rap for what is a much larger problem with the combat system in this game. The truth is that even outside of quickness, the strengths of many of the attacks in this game are enormous, and when you pair this with stuns, immobilizes, focus targeting, and a lack of dedicated healing, it just turns into a giant zerg with people dieing far too quickly. Take quickness out of the game and you really wouldn’t see any of the things you hate and attribute to it changing. There needs to be a much larger adjustment.

I do agree with immobilize being too strong of a condition. I think it’s actually better than stuns/KD for burst cc since alot of stunbreakers won’t do akittenthing to immobilize, and there’s not many reliable immobilize removers. Alot of the “remove 1 condition” abilities will be wasted by a newly applied condition being spammed after said immobilize. Only abilities that state they remove immo or big condition dumps are reliable. =/

From my experience ranger’s are the one’s most boned by immobilize lol.

2) Please change the maximum range the pet can move away from its owner.
The pets following you to the other end of the map, jeeez, so broken.

6) Stealth.
Too easy to get, too easy to use, not enough limitations.

I remember in Beta, you did anything in stealth, it got you out. You miss your backstab, well you’re screwed, you’re out of stealth and are Revealed. Learn to play.
Now it’s like: you missed your attack? no biggie, try again, you still have some stealth time. Here, have a cookie.

And when I look at the wiki definition of Stealth:“Stealth is broken when the user attacks…”
Well, no, the correct statement is when the user damages an enemy. Yep, you actually get out of stealth at the moment (well, not quite) the big fat white number shows up.
Basically you can do anything in stealth as long as you don’t do damage. Which includes indirect damage abilities:
Pop your Thieve’s Guild, your phantasms, swing your daggers into the air to look cool, whatever, doesn’t break.

GW2 introduced the Easy Stealth Mode. Grats.

And fix that kitten reveal delay: A thief being able to hit 3 times in stealth before I can actually see him—> B-R-O-K-E-N.

Liav.7598:

2) GTAOE (Ground Target Area Of Effect)

This game essentially requires you to be right-clicked (mouselooked) into your screen 100% of the time. Turning with a keyboard is not viable under any circumstances.

I can not tell you how many times my GTAOEs go directly to the ground because it’s impossible to tell where your mouse is actually at on the screen when you’re mouselooking. It would be interesting to have some sort of way to be able to tell where your GTAOE is going to go when you’re mouse turning. This is particularly annoying when you’re trying to Cluster Bomb kite people at short range, for instance.

qft

customizable cursor

I agree with the first sections point 3 and point 4. I agree with all points of the second section.

I do feel that quickness is balanced and opens up burst options that are not present in the game if there was no quickness. Without quickness condition damage would dominate everything. I also think that pets are fine as they are, maybe a little too strong but a little reduction in power would fix that without damaging the settup of pets. I disagree with the downed state bashing, the downed state is amazing. Elementalist needs improvement for sure in the downed state, but the concept is good and adds more strategy to the game.

Prelude.3817:

GW2 introduced the Easy Stealth Mode. Grats.

And fix that kitten reveal delay: A thief being able to hit 3 times in stealth before I can actually see him—> B-R-O-K-E-N.

Just mindlessly spam 1 when they stealth, chances are you are pounding away at their health, stealthing alone doesn’t remove immob stun or knockdown. Yes stealthing can do indirect damage or make for escapes from hairy situations but that is what it was made for. When you see that first number pop up after you get hit, press your tab key, it puts the ring of targeting on the ground and arrow over where they are, yes it would be nice if they re-rendered when they came out of stealth (I have had it happen numerous times to me where i get into a fight against another thief and i never seen them rendered until either myself or them are downed, amusing at times but annoying usually).

I commend you Liav and +1 for taking the time to make a well built post on what can make this game great with many valid concerns.

But on the subject of quickness I have to disagree with you.

First off I do not have to blow every deffensive CD to escape hundi blades or pistol whip, as a mesmer all I need to do is keep my staff 2 skill (phase retreat) off CD when fighting them and I can kite the quickness duration easily.

Secondly I’m surprised to hear you say that quickness is required on a thief, because what is arguably there best build doesn’t use it at all.

This build is a backstab variant with a 10/30/30/0/0 trait split and soldier amulet, tons of condi removal, tons of hp regen, high effective hp, and no penalty from lack of precision because backstab always crits.

There is always a meta advantage to this build because the fact that you are always in stealth where you cannot be attacked by phantasms means you should always win 1v1 against a phantasm mesmer which is what you will find on the enemy back point or treb 80% of the time. (you also get free cloak and dagger off phantasms for easy stealth)

The power rifle engi is another example of an very powerful build that doesn’t utilize quickness but still offers insane burst, the greatsword / mindwrack mesmer build is yet another example of extreme burst without quickness and elementalist is capable of the same thing (much more difficult to land though).

TLDR
My point here is that quickness builds are not outright better than non quickness builds. If anything quickness builds are weaker because if they miss there 4 second window (damage is avoid for the duration) they fall off.

I’m glad this thread managed to cultivate a few responses.

To the Necro guy that was somewhere towards the top of the thread, I wasn’t trying to insinuate that your class is overpowered, or that you weren’t responsible for most of your damage. I would honestly say that Mesmers are really the only class where their pets do absurd damage. The majority of my complaint comes from the fact that “PVP” combat in this game feels to me like it is too reliant on factors that are outside of the actual player’s control.

Needless to say, having a ridiculous amount of NPCs running around in a PVP game is just dumb imo.

This game has done an actual decent job of programming pet AI, but with that said, it also takes away from what I feel the entire point of PVP is. The competitive aspect, and the skill required to play. I feel that the vast majority of participation should come from the player him/herself, not the “spawn 2-3 pets and let them roflstomp people while I dodge away” aspect.

On the subject of Quickness, it honestly may not be that bad of a mechanic if the abilities it is generally used with couldn’t down most players in 1-2 seconds with it. I don’t care if you have stun breaks, if I land Pistol Whip on you twice with Haste up, you’re either downed or will be soon.

The penalties set in place by Quickness just aren’t enough.

It may not be a bad mechanic if perhaps the most popular abilities it is generally accompanied with were toned down, but then they would be weak as kitten without Quickness.

All in all, this wasn’t intended to be a rant, it’s just my honest views and complaints.

About that camera thing with the crosshairs, I’m going to have to look into that, sounds awesome. I still think that there should be an in-game option to show your cursor position on your screen (a la TERA) when you’re clicked into your screen (mouselooking).