Guild Wars 2

I was wondering what the WvWvWers think about it. I don’t WvW too much, but I occasionally try to go into the puzzle to get some badges. Here are just few of the problems i find with the current BoH system.

The main source of BoH is to do puzzles. These puzzles are often camped by a 10+ players. If I try to do any puzzle during peak hours, it is just impossible. They all just sit in the same spot, arena, and camp for hours on end. Sure it’s part of the game, but I feel it is a design flaw to have the amount of camping it does and for it to be the main source of badges. They need to put at least 2 ways up. The camping makes this puzzle very frustrating and dreaded by my guild’s players. Also I love do the puzzle for 10+ mins only to be jumped by 6 people just waiting at arena and having a mesmer port them back up.

BoH don’t drop frequently enough. BoH should be awarded for doing actions in the game. Killing doyaks, taking supply camps, etc. These should all awarded you a BoH, it seems like it would be logical for this game to do so.

But what do you guys think? What ways would you improve the current system, or why do you think it is perfect where it is at?

Up drop rate from kills
Remove JP from WvW

That way you haven’t got a bunch of people jumping around wasting WvW spaces. Just put the JP somewhere else. I like them, not in PvP area’s though.

Nah.

Make the orbs of power give a +% to getting BoH from kills and -% repair bill instead of getting stats.

I heavily agree with both your points. The way ques are, taking out the JP would probably free up all the spaces taken up by campers who aren’t contributing to the war effort and what Daecollo said is a great solution to the orb of power snowballing.

Well yeah, your still getting good stuff from orbs, your getting more badges and you don’t have to repair much, WHICH helps your side a lot, almost as much as 150 extra stats, but it doesn’t give you such an overwhelmingly STUPID advantage.

Stats are what balances the game, you give a guy in full berserker gear 150 extra vitality/150 extra toughness/15% more health it completely destroys balance. (the extra 5k health completely ruins people who use condition damage…)

Don’t really care about the badges tbh, got the legendary gift pretty easily and now I just have badges stacking up for no particular reason (650 total right now, never done JP).

Switching orbs to something as useless as that would mean nobody serious would ever contest, defend, or focus on getting orbs.

-% repair cost per orb is huge, if you don’t understand how good that is….well.. lol.

Daecollo.9578:

-% repair cost per orb is huge, if you don’t understand how good that is….well.. lol.

No, it is not. Saving 50 copper per orb per death is worthless.

yertle.5837:

Daecollo.9578:

-% repair cost per orb is huge, if you don’t understand how good that is….well.. lol.

No, it is not. Saving 50 copper per orb per death is worthless.

Not really, its actually pretty nice.

I would happily not have any changes done to the orbs, if it weren’t for a few things.

People who exploit and fly their orbs to their base
The fact that it snowballs. One team starts to win, gets all orbs, starts to win even more with the amazing stat bonus, friendly team members start to quit and switch servers to join the winning side, both sides eventually do this, now you have outmanned buff for the rest of the week except for a small window of about 3-4 hours.

Yeah yeah, the excuse “the two losing servers team up against the winner” is a load of BS. Any smart developer who is aware of how communities work in game should be fully aware that trying to get two entire servers to cooperate is a load, especially when there is no method of communication except for forums and non ingame resources/third party.

I think the system is pretty good where it is at right now. The drop rate is fine. Dolyaks and the champion/veteran npc’s have a chance of dropping badges as well. Helps if you’re in a party of 4-5 and are all hitting the same targets. Also, if your opponent(s) fight back, pretty good chance of badge dropping.

Removing any PvE content from a PvP zone would only be a good step.

As someone who PvE’s and PvP’s, and enjoys both, forcing the 2 styles to mix as a design choice seems…bad. It ONLY frustrates both PvEers who are “forced” to go into PvP for an achievement/objective/etc, and it frustrates PvPers who have those not at all interested in PvP show up and to a degree ruin the PvP.

I’m someone who has Children’s Week in WoW done on 6 or 7 characters (even characters that have nearly nothing else done). For those that don’t know what Children’s Week is – it’s an event that has a lot of achievements only achievable in Battlegrounds (think sPvP) that a lot of PvEers feel obligated to do (because it leads, or at least lead to, the protodrake), but complain about constantly, and rightly so.

And PvPers there complain about this sudden influx of people not at all interested in PvPing, but just getting this achievement “done”, and the worst part of it is that the things you have to achieve are often detrimental to your side winning the BG.

Jumping puzzles in Borderlands and EB are bad. All 4 zones needing to be done for world completion are bad. And I’m someone who’s done all 4 zones on 2 chars, and working on a 3rd (I like WvW).

All combining PvP and PvE does is make players rage at other players for playing the game that was put in front of them.

The badges should be removed from the jumping puzzles completely (as well as the WvW zones contributing to 100% completion) and the drop rate should be dramatically increased.

They should also just become a currency like karma, instead of a physical item. Having them as physical drops on the ground, in a combat style that you move around in a LOT isn’t good design.

Yeah, it would seem a lot of people have the same views on Orbs, PvE and PvP mixed in, and the puzzles/ BoH setup. I’m glad to see I’m not the only one. I hope they fix it within the next month.

They just need to up the drop rate on Badges.

Orbs need to be completely revamped by that’s a totally different topic…jumping puzzles and PvE are awesome, nothing wrong with ti.

the drop rate on badges is very very low.

I would love to see the puzzles and any other PvE content removed from WvW – Removing bots and people there for exploring/puzzles/farming etc is great in my book. I don’t really care about the drop rate for badges, I get enough as it is.

Badges dropping on the ground is a terrible, terrible design choice. The badges should show up in your inventory. Rest of the loot can remain on the ground.

The ground drop method steeply penalizes melee classes that always have to be moving around or risk death.

My problem with the PvE mobs is that sometimes in a 1v1 fight, the enemy may have hit a pve mob once while im dishing out a heavy AoE damage with my flamethrower. It just so happens that right when I down him, the pve mob that he hit once dies too and boom, insta rez. The jumping puzzles are fun, but take up too much room. Having 5+ people camping a JP is kinda stupid in regard to que times since they’re not really helping the war effort.

I can understand why the devs set the drop rates so low with exotics and whatnot, but if they’re going to have such low drop rates they need to give us better rewards in WvW. Being level 80 and having all my karma set, i really don’t need the rewards doing objectives gives. Anything except taking a tower/castle/keep is so minimal that I don’t even notice that I got anything.

Vorpal.4683:

Badges dropping on the ground is a terrible, terrible design choice. The badges should show up in your inventory. Rest of the loot can remain on the ground.

The ground drop method steeply penalizes melee classes that always have to be moving around or risk death.

+1

I dont even want to know how many badges I’ve left behind because I was running for my life.

I think badges AND loot should go straight into your bags. My Guild leader got dusk in WvW 2 days ago. Makes me wonder what else I’ve left behind on the field…

Jump quests in WvW are king of the hill mini-games with a reward at the top, not just a daily quest you get to do for free badges/siege. Why do you think there are so many player activated traps and all the rocks to pick up in the EB puzzle?

Stomping people at the top of the EB jump quest right before the chest just activates all the awesome, evil pleasure centers of my brain. I imagine each one is like the OP and it just makes it all that much better!

Well WvW is supposed to be a PvP zone, not a jump puzzle zone. I’m all for having rewards at the end, but make them just items and blueprints instead of them being the best way to get badges of honor. I’m also all for player controlled traps, but they designed the puzzle in such a way that it promotes frustration, anger, trolling, and quitting rather than fun and challenging. There should be 2 ways up or hell 3. Not just one way up with a massive unbalanced choke point that is the Arena. If there was a way that the people on the ground would be balanced with the people up on the top of the arena, i wouldn’t be complaining. But they just shoot people from up there, spawn the PvE monsters, jump down and fight, and then tele back up with a mesmer portal.

If the developers made this thing to promote camping in trolling in a pvp type that regularly has que times and people waiting to actually play, then they really didn’t think it through or make a smart decision.

Deified.7520:

But what do you guys think? What ways would you improve the current system, or why do you think it is perfect where it is at?

Looking from the perspective that someone wanted to ignore PvE totally. Badges and Karma gains are not quite up to parity.

for I’d prefer the Jumping Puzzles not be in the PvP area. It’s distracting, and takes up slots for players that would otherwise actually be doing PvP.

Badges and loot should be added to your inventory automatically. How many times have I found myself lying dead behind enemy lines with sparkling bags right next to me…

I don’t see jumping puzzles as pve. They force players to interact (especially obsidian) and while I really hate seeing lots of people camping them I can understand why…

I mean free blueprints? That’s got to be helping the war effort. As a Mesmer I often make a point of telling my team I have completed the puzzle and am willing stick around to portal people past the enemy just so everyone can have prints.

And I must not be alone, I have come across the other servers actually building siege inside the puzzle (AC’s and balli’s) just to ascertain control of it.

While slightly off topic, so i will answer the original question: I think that badges are fine as is. The rareity means you make sure you spend them wisely.

TL;DR badges fine, jumping puzzles = prints therefore great for the war effort

Well, first off, badges from puzzles are NOT the man source of BoH. I’d even say that over half the people playing WvW don’t even do the puzzles daily. The OP even says they don’t WvW much so I don’t know why or how they are able to make that assumption.

As for everyone saying that badge drop rate is terrible, I say don’t run with a zerg. A group of 5 to 10 can get way more badges per hour by defending towers, capping camps, or just hunting for stragglers.

To people complaining about the loot system, think about how it could be worse. How about we make everyone’s body shine when they die and you have to run over them like in PvE? But because you can respawn immediately, you have to run over their bodies before they can waypoint. Loot bags don’t seem so bad when you think about that. Try running over someone that you kill in a tower when you can’t get inside. Be glad that you can ‘loot’ someone at all when you can’t reach them.

Daecollo.9578:

Nah.

Make the orbs of power give a +% to getting BoH from kills and -% repair bill instead of getting stats.

I really like this idea. A Net, check into this!

How many badges do you get for completing the puzzle?

Badges need to drop about 5x more often and preferably as a reward similar to Karma, that doesn’t have to be looted and doesn’t take up inventory.

Currently, i could run Ascalonian 3x in about 2 hours and get the same stat gear that would otherwise take 260 badges.

As for all of the PvE stuff in Battlegrounds; get rid of it.

Daecollo.9578:

Nah.

Make the orbs of power give a +% to getting BoH from kills and -% repair bill instead of getting stats.

That would be amazing even without the extra badges.
Getting rid of repairs is the single most wanted thing in WvW that I want to have happen. Over population issues, bugged guards killing altars, inflated siege and upgrade costs.

Aveneo.2068:

Badges and loot should be added to your inventory automatically. How many times have I found myself lying dead behind enemy lines with sparkling bags right next to me…

Same here, I definitely agree.

Thing is, the loot bags are the best thing they could come up with while they figure out how to get loot straight into inventory. Sounds cheesy, I know, but during beta this was a big deal (in the first beta loot was on corpses, same as regular PvE, imagine that for a moment…..). Apparently there is some major issue with the game engine which makes loot generating straight into inventory a huge mess to code. I’m sure it’s still on the menu, but if it’s the same codemonkeys who have to deal with culling/etc, I’m ok with it not being top priority at the moment.

On topic: Badge drop rate could do with an increase, there’s noting crazy overpowered that comes from them since all gear is the same at that level and siege is plenty cheap anyway.

At least the bags drop near you and it’s not like PvE where you have to chase. I don’t like combat looting in general though.

I hate jumping puzzles in all aspects of the game. I wouldn’t care if they were in WvW other than the fact that people talk about them every few minutes while the rest of the team is trying to defend a keep.

I dont really care if more badges drop or less do. There’s nothing to do with them other than buy siege equipment. Perhaps they could have broken the gear out different so you could buy a gear insignia token and a gear skin token….if you dont like the stats or look of the gear, there’s no reason to WvW for badges at all.

Emerge.9640:

How many badges do you get for completing the puzzle?

10-20 usually.

Though I have been killing players as of late and found that I was getting badges a bit quicker then when the game released. I dont know if they changed it or I was just getting lucky.

Also one thing I’d like to bring up. I kill a player, see a loot bag, open it only to find that I got 1 [Barb]. Why the kittens does a player that I just spent the past 5-10 mins killing only drop a piece of trash that is worth a couple of copper. Let alone that I had to spend the time to find the loot bag and loot it.