Guild Wars 2

I beta tested this game to all heck. I watched wvw go from fun to kitten . A month after release the majority of the vet pvp community dumped the game on its face after grinding mindless talentless zergs of hammer wars/guardians/necros over and over for a month. I figured there is not much going on game wise so its time to check it out.

Am I crazy or has nothing changed? 7 hours of prime time WvW and its the exact same groups doing the exact same grindy talentless pvp as before?

Even though this is a bait post, nothing new is coming til EOTM, which is around Feb or March

its not Guildwars2 but CoverageWars2…..

The worst servers out there have the best coverage so the only thing they do whole night is paint the maps their colors. They fight like kitten in open field but they are very good at Player vs Door (Vizunah, Augory Rock etc)

Anet should be ashamed to have such servers in their so called Gold league…

someone on our guild forums asked a few weeks back if anything had changed to improve the game, so I have this response which I can just cut and paste. note that this was written before the variance reduction for random matchups went into place, so the “plus or minus two tiers” statement needs adjustment (which I am not going to bother to actually do right this instant).

you will, of course, have to judge for yourself how much of an improvement any of these items are, and whether they would really make any difference to you.

• rewards in wvw are now significantly improved; it is no longer necessary to do some pve in order to have enough cash to buy gear or consumables. in many cases pve remains the fastest way to acquire certain gear, but it is now practical to advance via wvw only. I no longer do any pve at all and I am actually making money. also, wvw tokens can now be used to buy all kinds of gear, not just Soldier. you no longer need to farm karma or go to Orr to buy Cleric’s gear, Berserker’s, Knight’s, or whatever.

• magic find on gear is gone — you no longer need to have a ‘magic find’ gear set. instead, magic find is now raised via consumables which you can get by salvaging gear, and it is now account-wide (applied to all characters on your account). karma, gold and dungeon tokens are also now account-wide, making it a lot easier to gear up alts.

• culling is gone. this is a huge improvement in large fights, and it has made it practical for a smaller better-coordinated group to wipe a larger zerg.

• wvw rank points allow wvw-specific character customization — on my guardian I’ve focused on flame ram and burning oil bonuses (in particular, bonuses that reduce incoming damage while using them) while on my engineer I’ve focused instead on bonuses with cannon, trebuchets and catapults (generally bonuses to increase damage, range or aoe radius).

• more variety in match-ups — servers no longer end up playing the same opponents week after week. our own strategy needs to change from week to week based on the strengths and weaknesses of our opponents. during league play, the season schedule is posted so all matchups are known in advance, giving you some opportunity to plan. outside of league play, matchups can’t be predicted with any accuracy due to a randomization factor that can pit you against opponents plus or minus two tiers away — you will not know who your opponents are (or what color you will be playing as) until the new match begins.

• siege matters more, and upgrades do too. arrow carts in particular have been buffed so that a half-dozen defenders with well-placed siege can hold off a large zerg long enough for reinforcements to arrive. some interesting spots have been found (especially in hills) that allow for defensive trebuchets.

• “borderlands bloodlust” has been added. these are 5 objectives in the middle of each borderland map (replacing the central lake) with very tactical terrain. holding 3 out of 5 objectives for two minutes gives your team a buff similar to the original orb buff, until another team is able to hold 3 out of 5 for two minutes. this area is best-suited to small groups of 1-3 people and you’ll find many small fights here although there are no rewards besides the buff and whatever you get from killing enemy players.

• the presence of bots in wvw has been dramatically reduced. you will still find players running cheats/hacks from time to time, but it is now much less of a disruption. also, the eternal battlegrounds jumping puzzle has been moved to a separate map — when a player zones into the EB JP, they free up a slot in EB for an actual wvw player to enter. the only exit from the EB JP is back to Lion’s Arch.

-ken

In addition to some of the above:

• It is easier to gear up WvW characters in exotic since badges can be used in some purchases. ANet countered this change with ascended weapons and armor which requires grinding for better or worse

• Lots of balancing has happened which has created a greater diversity of effective classes and builds. Those who remember the early days remember the truly OP classes that were running then

• Tons of bug fixes making it much more difficult to snake keeps and such. No more jumping up outer walls for easy access to keeps

• Orbs were removed because of all the cheating that was centered around them.

• Dailies can now be done inside of WvW so more rewards can be earned inside of WvW now.

I am sure there were some others we haven’t listed but that is all that comes to my mind.