Guild Wars 2

Hello. I’ve been playing since launch, and most of my 5000+ hours in GW2 have been in WvW. I love this game, and I’m not leaving it for a long time, but there are some things that consistently irk not just me, but many veteran players I talk to. I realize that some of what I have to say has been discussed many times, but since there has been no change for the better, I figure this won’t hurt.

1. Conditions. I’m not complaining about conditions. They’re great for killing other players, and I’ll sure as hell run conditions if it means my group will have a greater chance of success. Just give me an option of what conditions take priority when I cleanse. Or at least make the system make sense. Right now it’s, “Ten stacks of confusion and one stack of vulnerability? Take away the vulnerability, obviously”!

2. Immobilize. Why does this stack? I say this as someone who does spec for maximum immobilize in one of my builds. I’m not saying it should be removed entirely, but at least make players use timing and skill to inflict constant immobilize on another player.

3. Stealth. I don’t care that it’s spammable, an easy get-out-of-jail-free card, or that it promotes trolling. But my problem with stealth in this game: Say I’m fighting a thief. He goes into stealth, so I time it right and dodge just in the right time before he tries to back stab me, evading his spike damage. I outplayed him, at least in that instance. Why does he then get a second, third or fourth chance at landing his big attack? Even if I’m playing guardian and have aegis, why are they not punished for paying little attention to their target?

Any attack while in stealth, whether it lands or not, should bring a player out of stealth and inflict the Revealed debuff.

4. Siege disablers. Okay, they’re here to stay. Fine. Everyone can use them, so I guess all’s fair. But make them cost many times more. Five silver and 15 BoH? Try five gold and 150 BoH.

5. Rangers. Aaaah rangers. The redheaded stepchild turned ugly obnoxious teenager. I’m only mentioning rangers because there are so many rangers out there now.

I’m not asking for a nerf, because, frankly, they’re still pretty easy to fight. Here’s my one gripe, as someone with 1500+ hours on a ranger and also targets them first: The longbow damage is directly proportional to the distance from their target. I mean, I get that this is a fantasy game, but that makes absolutely no sense. Feel free to correct me, but I believe in real life, the velocity of an arrow is at its maximum before it even completely leaves the bow.

Now, let’s mix RL with fantasy here and find a happy medium: 600 (or whatever) range for maximum damage. As it is, all a ranger has to do to be effective is stand at 1500 range (if spec’d), not move, and snooze on the 1 key (while occasionally rolling their face onto the 2 key). If it were at mid-range, then they would, you know, be forced to use the WASD keys to maximize their damage. This would also help them stay close to the stack to grant/receive boons.

6. Here’s a crazy one. Get rid of a public commander tags in WvW (leave PvEmanders alone). Want a zerg to follow? Join a guild. This will A) reduce the amount of unorganized blobs, B) give guilds a meaning in WvW other than upgrades, and C) those of us who do guild-only runs will not be forced to use the ghetto tag (target the commander).

I like most of what you said can I subscribe to your newsletter? My opinions on what’s been said…

1. Conditions. Personally I don’t like conditions, I run mostly power builds, they are harder to build for maximum damage, more challenging to use and don’t seem as “cheap”. Conditions are fine in bigger groups situations because there’s enough condition cleanses going on to keep them in check.

Unfortunately in most roaming situations they become too strong, some cases when you can restack conditions faster than they can be cleared it becomes overpowered (engineers). Certain classes need help on condition cleanses to keep up, like mesmer arcane thievery is one of those skills that misfires more often than not, I can no longer reliably use it. Mantra? too clunky, null field? need to wait on pulses (what I’m using right now plus torch trait).

2. Immobilize. Conditions on a whole are still somewhat manageable, but when immobilize kicks in, it takes it into the level of ridiculous. There are a lot of builds now working to maximize immobilization in order to bomb a target especially with conditions.

In my opinion immobilize should be placed in the same category of control effects such as daze, fear, knockdown, stun etc. all of which can be cured with stability or stun breakers, except immobilization. Heck even fear is a condition which can be cured with stability or stun breakers, why is immobilize excluded from this list?

3. Stealth. Stealth implementation in this game is broken, there is no other way to put it. Worse yet an entire class was built fully around it’s usage which was a terrible mistake, a mistake which is now hard for them to make changes to because of this. Stealth will never be fixed as it will be seen as a big nerf to thieves, but the game would be better off and a lot more fun without stealth.

/rant on
Thieves are still allowed to stealth off targetable walls. Why should this class be able to stealth, boon itself up like a guardian, gain excellent regen, and still hit like a truck or whittle you down with bleeds while also having the best gap closer/making skills. Do players know that a thief can solo a tower lords room because of stealth?

Are they really squishy when they’re carrying around toughness/vitality/condition damage stats? There are thieves out there who take advantage of this class and are unkillable in roaming situations, they can reset fights unlimited times, they cannot be killed unless there’s 10 players hunting them down and even then they can lead them on a merry chase. I’ve been in solo fights with thieves that lasted 10mins in cat and mouse chasing, I’ve killed them they’ve killed me, but it’s to the point of why bother wasting my time on them anymore, it’s the greatest annoyance in the game.
/rant off

4. Siege disablers. At 5gold and 150badges? just ask to get it removed as no one will buy it at that price. Even at it’s current price a lot of players don’t carry them.

5. Rangers. Only real problem I have with rangers is it’s hard to break from their channel skill even with a dodge or stealth (you don’t see me why are you still hitting me?), evade type skills like dodge should break the channeling. I think rangers could have been given a better boost with better aoes than buffing the bow /shrug. If you ever see 2+ of these longbow rangers together, run don’t even try just run.

6. Commander tag. Join a guild in order to see tags? Most guilds don’t raid every day, and at most they may raid for 2-3 hours at a time, what’s a player to do in between that time when your guild is not raiding? join yet another guilds to get in on their raid? A lot of guilds tend to have 100% rep as well which hampers this.

The better option is to have guild only tags, and we have confirmation they are aware that we want this (Colin was anyways Mike was not…), thanks to a player interview at pax about wvw.

Xenesis.6389:

Do players know that a thief can solo a tower lords room because of stealth?

Ele https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u3J4lJKhkw
Engineer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3mbgSEDCP4
Ranger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPy5zjrFStU
Guardian https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdv1nV1UISM
But I have to admit that I don’t know whether those builds still work.

If immob was a effect rather then a pure condition, there would be only ONE counter to stability – boon removal.
However, as we all know, boon removal is very powerful, it is the sole reason why necromancers are sought after in WvW zergs, because they got easy access to AOE boon removal that is PULSING (thus can hit multiple targets more often).

As things currently stand, only 5 classes got boon removal/corruption:
Necromancer (Well of corruption, minions etc..)
Mesmer (Null Field)
Thief (steal/larcenous strike)
Engineer (mines)
Guardian (remove 1 boon upon burning a single target)

In addition to this, one CAN get boon removal through Sigil of Nullification (60% chance on crit every 10 sec, 1 boon).

Meaning only 5 classes can really be effective (guard removing 2 boons is atleast more effective then ranger, warrior or ele removing one, even though 2 boons pr 10 sec is terrible)

So in order for stability to hardcounter all CC short of chill/cripple, we must have a valid counter counter. Because if you cannot counterplay, you are being “locked”.
To explain. If you fight a ranger as a warrior, how much fun is it to fight a ranger with a million evades AND 20-49.5 seconds of stability uptime. All that CC – completely useless, and if immobilized is included, then pin down, flurry, Leg Specialist (a trait) and bolas will no longer work. In short, a already hard to lock down class becomes almost impossibly hard to lock down.

However, immob is once again, a condition, meaning that negative condition duration affects it, this means that classes such as warrior, ele and engi, which all has traits reducing immob, cripple and chill durations with 33%, can WITH EASE get up to 98% duration reduction, while the highest + duration you can get for immob is 110% using 2x giver weapons (10% each), 10% duration sigil, traveler runes (10%), trait line (30%) and food (40%), meaning that even if someone is hellbent on locking you down, since most immob durations are 3 seconds or less, you can reduce that duration from what would be 6 seconds down to 3.35 or so seconds. meaning not even a full tick longer (game only counts full seconds)
However, while counter condi builds actually is good, full on max duration condi builds is not, because they sacrifice too many secondary or tertiary stats to pull it off, not to mention possibly using a bad traitline.

Regarding ranger, this horse has been beaten to death and people keep desecrating it. Rangers are perfectly FINE, they do not need nerfs, they need buffs (just not in direct damage department).
Their mechanic is so unreliable that it is comparable to try kill a thief with killshot while sitting in a black powder field, in short, the chance that the pet will do what it is told to do, when it is told to do it, is so minute it is not even funny anymore.
Anet did upgrade pet response back in april last year, but by september, the improvement in pet response had slowly relapsed back to where it was pre “buff”. Somehow, their server performance got progressively worse and pets are as bad as ever at this point. They rarely trigger when they should unless you are in an area that is almost completely void of other players and even then they don`t always do what they are supposed to.
I get it that rangers are hard to balance. They are really strong in dueling, and the pet causes massive balance issues because if you buff pet too much (aka, give it good pathing so it can maybe even jump up a small ledge and not freeze for 0.5 seconds before trying to attack something that has long since moved out of range, then pets would be so strong that botting rangers would surely return in force. If you buff the ranger too much, then an already strong class just get exponentially stronger due to pets having their own stats (thus scaling individually from the ranger. this is why ranger are strong during leveling, the pets scale higher then the player and is exponentially stronger until around level 40-50).
So i get it that rangers are hard to fix, but having so many completely useless traits, that has no real synergy with the mid or upper tier traits of the same traitline, or any other traitline for that matter, completely destroys the ability to make solid builds. Their innate
Lack of any reasonable party buffs call for minimizing personal performance at cost of support or vice versa. And what little support they got, short of regeneration buffing and rezzing, is just abyssmal.
Rangers still need buffs, but mainly QOL stuff and support. DPS is fine, and will probably be fine for a long while (cept SB; that needs a direct damage buff or two)

Turamarth.3248:

Xenesis.6389:

Do players know that a thief can solo a tower lords room because of stealth?

Ele https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u3J4lJKhkw
Engineer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3mbgSEDCP4
Ranger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPy5zjrFStU
Guardian https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdv1nV1UISM
But I have to admit that I don’t know whether those builds still work.

I know other classes can do it, but what are the chances those classes are alive to retake a tower after you cap it? next to none since you’ll probably kill them before you leave, thief is a different issue since making out with a wall gets them in stealth.

Another note on immobilization, getting hit with one would be fine, but two or three from a group?. This is what turns it into a ridiculous condition because now a group is able to lock you down to up to 8s if they wanted to, not that they would need that long to bomb on you to death.

The thing that sucks about immobilize is it locks you out of your primary defense mechanism in dodging, with chill and cripple you still have access to it I have no problems with those conditions. Which was fine before it’s stacking change in order to strategically lock a player out of a dodge at the right time, now players just spam it as soon as they get in range, a warrior or engineer smacking one player with it is enough for them to absolutely kitten a player into a damage bomb in little to no time after.

Why is fear under a control condition and immobilize is not?

P.S don’t forget the immobilize bug of getting immobilized in mid air and basically locked out of most skills.

sadking.9625:

all a ranger has to do to be effective is stand at 1500 range (if spec’d), not move, and snooze on the 1 key (while occasionally rolling their face onto the 2 key).

I play a ranger and I love you for this. This is what I do. And when it gets boring I jump onto my shatter mesmer. =)
Ranger is alot of fun but there is no skill involved in playing it.

Also, I don’t have a lot of problems with condi’s but I often run a roaming 4-5man. But I would like to see the tower/keep portals wipe condi’s when you use them. That would be nice. I mean your safe in the tower/keep but the condi’s can still kill you. And there’s enough scummy people in wvw that won’t res you even if you’re lying at their feet.

learn to play the game , dont chage what you cant beat

sadking.9625:

6. Here’s a crazy one. Get rid of a public commander tags in WvW (leave PvEmanders alone). Want a zerg to follow? Join a guild. This will A) reduce the amount of unorganized blobs, give guilds a meaning in WvW other than upgrades, and C) those of us who do guild-only runs will not be forced to use the ghetto tag (target the commander).

That is an absolutely ridiculous idea and it would destroy WvW. A huge part of the fun in GW2 is simple accessability. Start the game, hop into WvW, see commander, oh great I’ll follow him. Hey I maybe even know the name. Get fights, have fun. Easy as pie.

Do you know why ESO failed Cyrodiil so hard even when it was technically superior than GW2 WvW? Zero organisation. No commanders, no nothing. Combine that with a huge map where you have to run for 20 minutes just to get into battle and you get something that’s the most boring thing ever.

Smartcat.2130:

sadking.9625:

all a ranger has to do to be effective is stand at 1500 range (if spec’d), not move, and snooze on the 1 key (while occasionally rolling their face onto the 2 key).

I play a ranger and I love you for this. This is what I do. And when it gets boring I jump onto my shatter mesmer. =)
Ranger is alot of fun but there is no skill involved in playing it.
.

It takes no skill to kill with LB ranger, none at all. But try kill anything 1v1 with say BM power/condi bunker or trapper. It is perfectly possible, but without skills you will get hammered fast.

Saying a class as a whole is ezmode is wrong. Builds are ezmode, classes are defined by their complexity, in which the ranger is very complex due to how you manage the borked profession mechanic

I agree with the stealth and immob points.