Guild Wars 2

I’m sorry but that chart is….just…. ridiculous

just to pick one – CSGO 4th and dota2 6th?

http://store.steampowered.com/stats/
Lets check some games that can only be played on steam, starting with 2 valve games (to remove the OMG VALVE HAX THE CHARTS sillyness)

Daily peaks:
csgo: 184,817
Dota 2: 735,456

or (dayz not by valve, still can only be played on steam)

TF2 74,081 ranked #15
DayZ 24,729 ranked #8

There are many , many other examples you can check by yourself just by doing some googling on official numbers.

Charts based on third party software are useless. Maybe 10 years ago, with Xfire and gamespy being basically a must have, they made some sense, but now….

Can’t wait to see which skill tooltips will be fixed

Usually AP are considered the reward for exploration, which is fine in a game where AP is the only thing to distinguish a newcomer and a veteran (all the “prestige” items , like legendaries, can be bought on day1 of a new account, given enough RL cash).

More then lacking rewards, the problem is how ANY reward end up in these 3 tiers:
-Salvage fodder
-Mystic toilet Fodder
-TP

All of them, except the luck part, are equivalent to dropping pure cash. Which is fine if all you want is enough money to get the skin you want, VERY bad immersion-wise… Because, after you do you get enough wealth to buy what you want, that item will have no “deeper” meaning attached to it.
Just a skin that you bought for gold.

Thats a BIG problem imho, not with the rewards per se but with the perception of them.

Megaservers would work well IF we also have:
-A queue system, to join a friend or party member, so that we can do something else while waiting, instead of having to spam right clicks for 30 mins.
AND
-Soft and hard caps on servers. If the soft cap is reached, no more random people are admitted in, unless they’re joining directly a party member/friend/guildmate.

Precursor first and foremost.
After you have it, the rest is easy and you can take your time for karma/tokens/completion/mats
Or you’ll end up like me, with 5mil karma, gifts ready in my bank, watching the pre i need jump up in price everytime i have nearly enough to buy it, thanks to TP flippers.

Just don’t have enough time to farm the daily gold needed to keep up with artificial inflation :\

I REALLY regret not buying the pre 1 year ago, hoping to get a drop or an update that introduced precursor crafting.

Kurrilino.2706:

have you ever thought about why it’s called a legendary weapon ??
Because it shouldn’t be available for everyone without luck.

implicates——->

Every precursor is available at the trade post.
Just go there and buy it.

Missing something here….unless the luck you refer to is for mystic clovers, which are pointless because… really no one who is trying to craft a legendary complains about karma

TheGrimm.5624:

Steam is typically employed by companies that can not or choose to not distribute their software on their own.

right, like activision, EA, rockstar, 2k, capcom, WB, sony, ubisoft, square/enix, bathesda etc
http://store.steampowered.com/browse/publishers.

They all have their own distribution chains, digital platforms ( ubi/ea) and deals with physical retailers.
Being on steam makes them lose about 30-40% of income, but the exposure and copies sold, especially for tripleA with alot of advertising, is many times higher to make up for it.

Also, that loss of income is not “real” as offloading brandwidht costs to valve, cutting out the stores and third-party local distributors as well as not having to bother with printing and shipping physical copies is a HUGE deal

Steam takes a cut of every microtransaction made with real cash . Right now gw2 has enough players to probably make it counter-beneficial for a steam release.

A few years in the future, with the big “next-gen” mmos being released ( archage, everquest next etc ) and the population going down, that might probably change, in the same way as gw1 was released on steam near the end of its life cycle, to inject some fresh blood in it.

Also keep in mind that steam also takes a while to upload patches after a dev released them, so hot-fixing would be harder.

Dusty Moon.4382:

Steam is owned by another game publisher not NCSoft. Why would that other publisher allow GW2 onto steam? It might make GW2 more popular than any of Valve’s games……

Thats also true for 99.9% of the games on steam. They all have their own publisher, being on steam has nothing to do with it. Also, valve doesn’t care about popularity, the more a game is played, the more people have to open steam and get exposed to the storefront in order to play it (keep in mind steam usually has 7-7.5 MILLIONS people logged in, getting daily exposure to the sales/new releases)

But even if it was the case, i really doubt ANYONE can beat dota2 and its 750.000 concurrent players at non-peak hours ( for comparison, call of duty series, which is probably far more popular then gw2, hardly hits 10k players with its most played titles)

I play mostly 1-2 games, yet i have a library of 640 games on steam, 90% of which i never even installed (basically free cash for the devs/valve). That’s the power of steam sales

make a warrior. Everyone has one, everyone needs one. Does good at everything, and will probably never be nerfed. Also the easiest to level AND play

Guard and ele are also solid choices

ranger pve is still zerker frostspotter GS/S+WH of gtfo unfortunatly

That one build works pretty well, due to the unique buffs and good single target dps ( as long as the pet lives)….other the that, not much choice really, unless you’re okay with feeling like the underdog who gets carried by the party :\

Bowbears still plague half of the pugs in dungeons, and are the reason why, even if we have a good meta build, many pugs don’t want us ( it’s a coin flip on getting a good ranger, like many professions, but a bad war is still useful, a bad ranger can go afk and contribute just as much as playing )

OP, legendaries had the opposite effect on me.

for months, every time i got nearly enough gold to buy the precursor i needed, it jumped up in price., as i didn’t have enough time to farm 20+gold a day like many people around here.

Then i decided, to try my luck in the Mystic forge, as a guy in my guild was boosting on how he got 4 precursors drops from there (and 2 more from drops….and i’m sure he’s not lying :\ )

600 gold later, still empy handed.

Now i decided to NOT CARE ABOUT LEGENDARIES ANYMORE and got back to enjoying the game…….. play a little bit of pvp, wvw, a dungeon here and there, rolling a new char without having the oppressive feeling of wasting my time if i’m not maximizing the gold/hour ratio.

One of these days, when i get enough courage (or get home drunk enough), i swear i’m gonna trash the gifts sitting in my bank for almost a yer, just to get the grind out of my mind and soul

IMHO stacking is a direct conseguence of removal of back/frontline positioning in trinity mmos AND the lackluster ranged combat.

If the best approach is all-melee, all-dps, isn’t it just natural to stack on the best possible place to abuse the AI?

The “problem” has deeper roots then most realize, to the point where trying to “fix” without reworing the base gw2 mechanics (not gonna happen) would only end up making everything more tedious, not harder.

for some reason, instead of cheering me up, reading about our stigma being defeated due to our ability to do cof 1 gate……….. has the opposite effect

After crafting ascended zerker greatsword for my ranger, i came to this dilemma – i would really like to use it in both pve ( dungeons mostly) and wvw.

But what sigils? Can’t really make my mind beetween air/fire or something more generic like force/accuracy/blood etc

Did someone make the math on comparing procs to the flat damage/crit chance increase? Is bloodlust still viable after the nerf, or even worth it while pugging dungeons? (downed CAN happen while playing a melee glass cannon in a pug, and power rangers in wvw don’t really have an easy time in my experience)
Or maybe you find energy/hydromancy just too useful for survivability in wvw to be sacrificed for a slight dmg increase?

I know the better choice would be to have different weapons for different content, but what do you think is a good middle ground? Or there isn’t one and i should stick to exotics for wvw?

That’s of course assuming power builds, i won’t really care about the ascended dmg increase if i go condition or bunker and use GS just for mobility, exos will do just fine for that.

blame anet class design, not the players

I have lv80 guard, war, and ranger, but main ranger in dugeons ( masochism maybe, but i just enjoy the class dynamics more ) and i almost never like having a ranger in party that’s not me.

Why?
Assuming equal skill and knowledge across players/classes:
Ele: spam conjured sword/bow, press 5 and you’re already credit to team. You can go afk now.
War: just faceroll the keyboard with a GS equipped and you’ll serve fine your role
Guard: a little more tricky, but they’ll be spamming boons like xmas even if they don’t want to
Ranger: Use GS/S+WH, run the ONE and ONLY meta build (frostspotter), use the right pets for the situation, do a correct weapon/pet rotation, time your dodges and weapon evades or get 1-shotted etc….if you dont, one of the above ^ classes will be much more useful to the team. Guess how many players play the ranger like that? i’d say 10-20% of the population max

just do what i do:
Join, don’t pay them, and instead add whatever was their asking price to your next donation to hobotron

And when you’re in, just open your own free taxi

thing is, the so advertised “new trinity” doesn’t make much sense in gw2.

Why? Because everyone can support and control, regardless of equip. Sure, you might get a few more seconds on boon duration, or slightly better heals, but that doesnt really matter that much if the boss stays alive longer due to lack of dps.

One of the biggest loopholes in gw2 design is that, due to lack of restriction on team composition, attrition fights were removed. Bosses are challenging due to one-two shots, dodge-or-die moments and big hp pools, to increase the chance of someone losing focusand screwing up.
To decrease focus on team composition, and required classes, they made difficult encounters gimmicky. Which means the “best” classes are those that can output high damage while still providing buffs and utility like reflects, might, quickness. And on those classes, the “best equip” is now zerker.

Fixing it now is close to impossible, because it’s deeply rooted in gw2 design…

the change doesnt matter, she burns so quickly that even if she pulls the aoe the only result is half the team dieing with her…

Thats with lv80s thou, didnt try with underlevels, but i’m not masochist enough to pug dungeons in non-lv 80 only groups

ran 2 AC paths half an hour ago, noone knew about the change, my pet got blamed (who was stacking like everyone else btw….ranger life)

It didnt matter anyway, she burns so quick she only had time to pull the poison aoe on the stack right before dieing. Only change is now the dungeons is 20 seconds longer, the time to walk from the waypoint or res the dead

Still, ANET, HIRE SOMEONE TO WRITE THE PATCH NOTES. Seriously, this is the only mmo i’ve ever played where at every update half of the changes are treated like easter eggs

-Bloodstone dust can no longer be deleted or transfered
-Inventory bag slots 20% discount!
-Ranger pets now have a 20% chance to die to heart attack when swapped in
-Pet Peacemaker available from the gem store. Never worry again about your pet’s cardiac problems for just 1500 gems.
-Warriors now get 25 stacks of might when looked by an enemy
-Megaservers fix: removed the ability to right click on your party members
-Precursor scavenge hunt! find the tickets to partecipate in it in the black lion chests.
-LS removed. Instead, now every month will have a festival, with minigames and unique seasonal skins . Enjoy 12 months of celebrations every year!

Been farming for many many hours, and i realized something about the pavillion.
It’s the same feeling as playing a MOBA. As long as everyone works together, it’s a wonderful experience. At every gold you feel like a part of a bigger team, people joke in map chat, it’s “gg we’re awesome!” and patting on the back all over the place.

But you know that it’s just a castle of cards waiting to crumble – all that is needed is a slight gust of wind, a couple players not listening chat and killing the boss early joining late a group while bringing adds, or people upscaling a team that was only asking for 1 or 2 players mid-fight.

And then the blame game starts. Even if, by logic, such a minor event could be compensated by minor changes in tactics on the next run, a couple players getting vocal on chat is all that is needed to kill a full server.
People start blaming their own group and the “worthless” upscaled players, groups blame other groups, donations that flowed effortlessly suddenly hit a wall, and then it’s just a domino effect of impropers and “dead server”, “you guys are useless”, “relog if all you want are achievements”.

99%, or even 100% of those players were the same doing group hugs just a few minutes ago, yet now they draw knives at each other throat.
There is no change in skill, number, or equipment, yet it’s like playing another game, where everyone around you acts like an angry 12 year old.

Many people say it’s the player’s fault, not anet, the design is fine. But WHICH of those players are to blame then ? (excluding the insults of course, which are often not even present in chat, only bitterness).

MOBAs tried for years to solve the problem of implementing strict teamwork beetween strangers while limiting the resulting toxicity of failure, and never really succeeded. Can anet, or anyone really, solve this deisgn dilemma without turning any event in a “zerg at tag and spam f to loot” fest?

but wouldn’t they appear in the total when hovering over the map name?

I also tried looking throu the patch notes of the last 2 years for all the stuff added in the map, but already have all of them i think…

So, i got the completion shortly after release, then a few weeks ago decided to go for all the new wp an poi added in the patches.

Right now i have 100% completion ( 301 hearts, 512 wp, 727 poi, 202 skills, 266 vistas )
BUT:
173/175 shiverpeak explorer
164/167 maguma explorer

Hovering on the map names in those areas, i have everything …

Itìs not a big deal, but those achieves clog up the “nearly completed” achievement screen, bugging me everytime i open it….

Any tips? Missing something?

It’s useful in pve when you wanna go afk and still get reward for an event, like the 5 min fire elemental pre.
Funny in eotm with the wolf, use it to camp a bridge while invisible, and f2 while people walk past it. Unlikely to work due to the long cast animation and the RNG of fear, but awesome when it does (still useless, just worth it for comedic value)
Also…umhhh….used it in guild rush to keep clear from enemies 2 spots at the same time.
Never used with nature voice, a major trait just for swiftness and regen is kinda wasteful imho.

But yeah, its one of those skills you have to try hard to get uses for, but feel so smart and edgy when you find one :>

3 reasons:
- It’s an MMO. In other games people who get bored/don’t like where the game is going they just leave. In MMOs, after people invested thousands of hours in their account, leaving silently is not gonna happen.
People WILL hit forums and start complaining, not because they are trolls, but because they care TOO MUCH about the game. It’s just natural

-The game promised a lot at launch, maybe too much, with all the fuss regarding the manifesto, “play like you want” etc. advertised itself like a groundbreaking mmo, yet it’s a game of half steps, where it’s biggest strenghts suffer from poor execution. Seems like the devs have alot of great idea, but never realized how to support them ina long-term scenario.
Thats not an issue in a standard cookie-cutter mmo, where really, it’s all about content and balance

-Has the name Guild Wars in it, while having nothing to do with its prequel. Many of the features that people played gw1 for years are not here, and will never be.
It’s not a worse or better game, it’s just uncomparable, yet the name and the lore force that comparison. Should’ve been called something completely different, really.
Most of the people i know that love gw2 never played gw1, and ALL of my gw1 guildies that started playing at launch left an year ago.

It’s like, naming your new dog the same as your old, dead beagle . You want to love it the same, except it’s not a quiet and clean beagle, but a mastiff that slurs everywhere

Do control builds even exist in the first place in gw2 pve?

rabidsmiles.5926:

Because they have already stated in the past that that rangers profession mechanic is the pet…and stowing it just negates the core profession’s mechanic. Why play a ranger if you don’t want the pet?

Well, to be fair other classes have feats that benefit them from NOT using the class mechanic. Like the warrior trait boosting damage at full adrenaline.

Unfortunately this has been suggested since launch on countless threads, i doubt it’s gonna happen anytime soon

The problem is, that even if there is a good group of players, trying to organize with a ts and everything, failure can be dictated by a dozen of others who either join late, don’t read map chat, can’t read it because language filters, are trolls or just don’t care.

There will always be BAD players, in every game ever. Nothing will change it. Problems arise when a minority of them can disrupt the efforts and goodwill of everyone else.

And that’s a DESIGN problem, shared by many “open world raids” this game has. tequatl for example, exellent fight, but 3-4 trolls on the turrets can counterweight the efforts of 145 other good players who wasted an hour to organize groups, give direction, joined ts.
Sure, it usually doesn’t happen, but it CAN happen. In the pavillon it’s just much more likely to happen because it’s LS, not a random boss on a forsaken shore that you need to join 1 hour earlier.

i call this fair and square competition, beating gold sellers with their own tools.
Next up: plush quaggans advertisement on the walls of WvW keeps and 15% discount coupons for gem purchases as rewards for the Living story.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

I read your complaint that they havent “added” to professions and stopped reading. One of the chief problems with GW1 was that they continually added skills, it was a balancing nightmare and they were doing MASSIVE balance patches 5 years into the game. They aren’t going wild with additions to professions because their focus is on getting them into a good place where they don’t have huge problems.

Also, bye bye to your thread – there’s no way a mod isn’t going to lock/delete this.

TBH, while that was alot of work for the devs and balance team, it was also the main reason that made me, and probably 80% of my guild stick to gw1 pvp for 5 years.

Every time new skills were added, or nerfed/buffed the whole meta shifted, cookie-cutter builds fell out of favor and new builds started to shine. Sure, there were moments of total imbalance, but those didnt last too long due to how dynamic and frequent the balancing was.

I still remember how after each patch it was like a gold rush, everyone in my guild gathering in TS to discuss how the meta would change in each of the pvp modes, and what we could do to stay one step ahead. Creativity and theorycrafting were king.

While i don’t hate gw2 skill system, i do feel it sacrificed alot of that excitement just to be more accessibile and easy to manage, for both players and devs.
The result is a more stable but stale and grey meta, where most classes have the same couple viable builds (that everyone runs) for a MUCH longer time.

IMHO the biggest problem of the bows is that features that should have been bundled in the weapon for free are traits instead, like piercing arrows or read the wind.

Having to invest 6 points just to make a weapon viable while other classes get much more consistent buffs for similar investment is kinda jarring.

Also, the trais are boring and skill-less. instead of “you can now cleave like everyone else” “20% less cd” or “you can now hit moving stuff” we should have more fun stuff like:

-Splinter arrows: On crits arrows explode in splinters, homing in nearby targets and bleeding them
-Intercepting arrow: Arrows now have a chance to destroy enemy projectiles mid-flight if timed right. The closer you are to the enemy, the higher the chance.
-Piercing arrows: after each cleave the arrow gains 10% damage and a bleed on the next pierced target
-Spotter: No longer an aura, but applies the effect to all nearby teammates to the target hit (also makes more sense for its name)
-Broad head arrows: Allows to “charge” #1 by keeping it pressed, firing an arrow with a much higher arc on release, easier to dodge but with more damage – max charge gets a blast finisher.

Honestly, it’s worse in every way since last year.
Would be fine IF the rewards OR the gameplay were better.
No one likes investing 20-30 minutes in a payed event to get a few greens, and no one will bother setting up an organized group to slay the bosses at the same time and get the gold rewards – too much effort for too little reward.

And from the "fun"side…well, thats subjective. Personally, i don’t like to be chain-cc’ed while chasing a big HP-bag on 4 legs that runs away from me . It’s not fun, or challenging, just annoying.
Nor i like bullet hells with exploding kegs, again with chain-cc and big hp pools, or being 1-shotted by someone who teleports around and whose telegraph can’t be noticed due to the particle effect bonanza and fps.

There is no challenge, they’re just designed to waste your time…

Meh. QD train was never that great for karma or gold, still was a good way to do events for dailies/monthly while chilling out in the best map of gw2 (most starter zones are more beatiful and well designed then endgame ones ). Sure, sometimes there was some cursing and badmouthing in map, but that in my experience was pretty rare and is a common thing on all open world MMOs, easily solved by reporting, or the threat of doing so…

I can understand anet not wanting new players to perceive the game as a mindless zerg train, but the nerf only delays that realization by a few levels really.

GW2 is DESIGNED from the ground to favor zerg mechanics, due to how dynamic events work. Putting counter-mechanics in it, like requiring organization, massive scaling, no loot/xp will always end frustrating everyone.

Even zerg events that require coordination and that i consider fun and well implemented fall in this trap, like tequatl – Very well designed IF you have good commanders/ people who know what they’re doing, which means parking in the map 1 hour before the spawn, horrible and hopeless fight if you dont….which goes against the very philosophy of gw2.

Honestly, the only people i know who seem to be enjoyin the pavillion are on this forum. Everyone in my 2 guilds, all my friends and everyone in map chat HATES it.

-Lack of pve endgame, other than farming dungeons
-Bad , unexctiting loot, where 99.9% of the drops are salvage/merchant fodder
-Stale pvp with just 1 gamemode
-Living story is bad and it killed my hopes for an expansion. Also temporary content is bad.
-Removal of trinity and roles means all the dungeons revolve around one-shots and big hp pools ( to increase the chance of messing up and get oneshotted ). There is no real teamplay, unless you consider STACK AND SPAM MIGHT BEHIND THE CORNER teamplay
-No build diversity in endgame pve. in most cases, you’re either a zerker, or playing a subpar build…. removal of trinity was supposed to give more choice and freedom, had the opposite effect.
-Lack of rewards for about everything, assuming achieves are not considered one (pavillon the most recent example)
-Lack of class identity and role makes me feel unattached to my chars compared to classic mmos
-Too much waiting to have fun
-In an mmo that bases everything on skins where the endgame is “grind to look cool” , no new armors added in 2 years outside the gemstore .. i can farm cof1 for a couple weeks and buy them for gold, but where is the sense of achievement?

better get those ’chieves in a few days, before the place becomes a wasteland .

in about 40-50 mins all i got were 3 greens , which didnt even pay for the waypoint costs… On the plus side, map chat was VERY amusing, totally worth my time.

did it everyday for10 days, always with randoms, always on megaservers, Never failed. even got a run with a kill @ 8.35

The key is getting there about 50-40 minutes earlier, this way you’re sure to get a full server with people who are actually motivated in killing him and willing to listen orders and organize.

If you dont wanna wait…well good luck, try a taxi with a friend / guildie but they never work nowadays

Tequatl is fine….wurm on the other hand… people just gave up on him

I’m ok with hard open world content, the problem is making that work when the event is scaled on just the number of people, not caring about who is afk, who is running around mining platinum, who is taking a nap on the floor waiting for someone to save them that 1 silver and who is actually fightining….and there is no way i can think to solve that.

Also, gl making skill-based content when most of the people are doing 5 fps and can’t even see their own character.

WHat really happens unfortunatly is, after the nuance dies, everyone stops caring, unless the rewards are exceptional and worth the hassle and (high) risk of failure.

Just see what happened to the karka queen, thats what taco will be in a couple months …and its painful to say because i LIKE the idea, its just very hard to implement it in a working way

I really CANNOT understand people who throw the term “elitist” around as in insult.

It’s basically saying that people have the RIGHT to join parties and play with anyone doing anything they want. Except the OP is in that party as well, he created it, where is HIS freedon to choose who to play with?

He’s ""elitist"" ? maybe, if that means wanting to play with people who know what they’re doing. But he paid for his game, and he’s free to CHOOSE WHO TO PLAY WITH.
Helping newbies is nice, it’s nice when you are one and is nice when you’re the one schooling them, gives a fuzzy “awww” feeling inside when they actually listen and learn.

But can you force that? Can you really say “yeah, no one cares about you, every dungeon run MUST be done with anyone who wants to join” with a straight face?

And my main is a ranger, i got kicked many times when joining parties just for my class, had to even roll a guardian to do some serious dungeon farming. And THATS FINE, people have the right to choose who to play with, that might be a dumb and unmotivated choice, but its still their own dam choice.

Agree on pretty much everything the OP said, except the rng.
RNG was always in mmos, and will always be.

Maybe i’m in the minority, but i pretty much prefer something like fractals skins to linear token progression, where it’s basically like having a % bar on top of you screen telling you how many times you have to repeat the content in order to get your belonged item.

HOWEVER i do think that the best skins should be rewards for skill AND dedication. Right now legendaries are a joke, they show nothing but countless hours of cof grinding or an oversized VISA card.

TBH i think its more of a design choice than a flaw.

GW2 is the “casual” MMO, the one designed from the ground to NOT be played like an mmo. Look at Living Story, that screams “hey guys who quit, come back to me, play me again for 3 days – Maybe buy something on the shop and then see ya next month!”

It’s babies first mmo. Or older people (those who DID play years of wow and more hardcore stuff, but are now older and with less free time) weekend waster.
Thats why the “middleground” is often ignored, suffers and leaves. Yet, keeping the game installed, checking the patches and waiting for an expansion that will probably preorder and play for 3 weeks before getting bored again.

I would if there was an inspect&preview function. As it is now, armor being cross-class and cross-race, there is no point other than passing time.

No thanks, i’m not going to pay 10 bucks (or several hours of my life to farm cof) for the privilege of dressing my character like a comicon cosplayer

I’m also ok with rng, i don’t feel entitled to have cosmetics. Cool if i get it, too bad if i don’t.

Won’t happen.
Look at how pvp evolved in gw2. WvW and spvp – both “casual” pvp, you get in, get some kills, capture a keep in a 50man zerg, or win a round, and get off, ultra casual.
Only exception are maybe the tournies, but even them are just reuse of content that was already in place.

GvG would require guild halls, and a lot of work in the mechanics ( hell, gvg in gw1 was still getting changes and development 4 years after release, with new mechanics, npc repositioning etc ) and that would appeal to a niche of hardcore pvpers that apparently gw2 has no intention to cover (judging by the trend)

Also, take a look at gw2 team combat, compared to gw1:
In the first game, was all about having a plan. Picking your guild hall, picking the build on each member, reasoning on how you want to win, and which split tactics could be used and when. Then combat was all about positioning, keeping your monks outside of your enemy midline, your interruptors on the enemy casters, using your midline to cc the wars on your monks, using your wars to push and put pressure on the enemy team while preparing a perfectly coordinated spike.

Maybe i’m wrong, but it’s very hard for me to imagine that happening in gw2. There is not enough depth and class interaction, only getting boons and clearing boons, with the occasional revive. Everything would just turn a in mess, 16 ppl running around in a big brawl with the occasional coordinated spike.

Maybe i’m being pessimistic, or blind. But i gvg’ed for 3 years and half (with few peeks in top 100 here and there), bought this game at release with hopes of gvg getting implemented as soon as possible….but now, after 1 year, i can kinda see WHY it isn’t there, and we’ll probably never get it…
…And i’ve never hoped more to be proven wrong.

dozens of armors, weapons, trinket, dyes, thousand of combinations.

Yet, only 1 underwear vendor in all of tyria, stocking the same color, and selling only one pair. Or maybe underwear in tyria is like a faimily heirloom, you pass it up to your kids when they grow up

pessimism = expecting always the worse (which is nerfs in mmos)
rangers in gw2 = nerfed every patch

So the question is, WHY should people be optimistic not the other way around :P

It’s not about a single update, its a trend. Trends are used to create expectations .

I’m not sure either, it’s like half of the rangers on this forums don’t really care about balance, or feeling subpar. They’re happy with what they get, if someone doesn’t want them in their groups then they are just jerks, if someone criticizes the profession then its either “l2p” or “i just play my ranger because i have fun with her!”

Which is kinda cute. I used to think it was just being delusional, but now i’m not sure anymore, maybe its the fact that by know everyone knows the big pve issues with the ranger, so the people still playing it are those who enjoy the class and don’t care about balance, or those who are not aware of the situation ( due to being casual, or not having alts etc ).
And then we have a third category, the “defenders” aka chopps, durzilla and such, who have seemingly a good knowledge of the class, yet consider every nerf deserved, and every critique or request for buffs plain whining.

Personally, after 800 hours on my ranger, i’m beyond caring. I use her for open world stuff, care about dressing her nicely and giving her shienies. But when stuff gets real, i have a war, mes and guardian fully geared and waiting for some action ( althou i still prefer the feel of my ranger. but power>feelings for me )

i don’t know if i agree to the other points, but loot is seriously lacking

Right now, for 99% of the drops, its either:
-blue, greens → vendor junk
-rare → either salvage for ecto, or mystic toilet fodder
-exo → directly to trading post, unless it’s a pre or i like the skin ( in which case i probably already have one )

There is just no excitement to it, feels like i’m just dropping money in physical form..

the problem is stealth, not the damage.
GC thieves 3-shotting tanks with crits are fine. What is not fine is their ability to engage and disengage at will, making up for the weakness of glass cannons build, that every other class has to live with, by dodging, popping heals, invulns, and choosing carefully who to engage and when.

Stealth is one of those mechanics that NEEDS hard counters to work properly. Without them, it’s just a crutch for bad players, allowing them to get kills and live even after making big mistakes.

I think what made warrior balanced in gw1, while still having massive damage was the hex system. pve mobs used them, requiring support from your backline in order to pull out that dps.

In pvp, warriors were a threat and HAD to be shut down or controlled. Also, wars had to think VERY carefully about their positioning. You wanted to put pressure on the casters of course, but in order to do that you had to overextend in the enemy lines, leaving you alone, far from the monks and vulnerable to being shut down or spiked.

All positioning is gone now. Need for support and class interaction is gone, because anet didn’t want to force group compositions, to keep it more casual. All the variety with cross class builds is also gone, so no more w/n with plague touch (transfer conditions to melee enemy) w/e with chain knockdowns, w/r with pets and so on.

Stances and adrenaline skills are also gone, and with them a big part of the skill ceiling.

All we have left is the “core” of the profession. Huge dps, low ability to remove conditions. Turns out, thats not enough in pvp where everyone plays for himself, and more than enough in pve, where control and support are dead.

I’d happily suggest changes, but imho we’re beyond the point of nerf/buff… only a GOOD expansion (new skills, traits, mechanics, pve enemies with control skills) could give back some of the depth wars had in gw1 :\