Guild Wars 2

Just curious – in what context do you use that? (PvE? WvW? etc.)

Is it fair to say that Sylvari have the least effective racials in the game?

Or could you provide examples where Sylvari racials provide any sort of advantage or are desirable in some fashion?

Mathematically, power is a better stat for increasing damage than crit rate or crit damage. Therefore any gear without power as a primary is inefficient, if maximum damage is your goal. Knight’s has other virtues since toughness may be desirable to you.

glaphen.5230:

Ashin.5986:

glaphen.5230:

Ashin.5986:

glaphen.5230:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vQAQFAGiAiUAAAA-zEBBYhApoFRjVdDTHjIqGA-w
49% with 20 points in Curses, going in 30 is a huge waste and the only precision runes that are worth it is 2 Lyssa for the condition duration and that gives a whole 1%.

Why do you consider it a “huge waste” to put the 10 more points into Curses on a condition build?

What else are you gonna get? Rest of the traits can’t be compared to Reaper’s Protection in WvW or Master of Terror in Spvp.

I don’t really see Reaper’s Protection as being so compelling for WvW. If I get disabled by the enemy zerg, fearing five of them is a nice disruption benefit for my team but it certainly won’t save me. I’m going down once I’m caught away from my zerg without stability.

This isn’t about zerging, power is obviously better for zerging but in anything with 10 players or less conditions are best.

So, before ranting about conditions being too strong, shouldn’t you think about the reasons why “power is obviously better” ??? Wow.

People mostly invest in those things because being CC’d in WvW is fatal.

If there’s a single commander in the entire game that recommends condition damage to his blob, please let him come here and speak. But in fact every single person will say “you must be a power build” because condition damage is hardly viable in ZvZ. That’s what makes these threads so dumb. :/

glaphen.5230:

Ashin.5986:

glaphen.5230:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vQAQFAGiAiUAAAA-zEBBYhApoFRjVdDTHjIqGA-w
49% with 20 points in Curses, going in 30 is a huge waste and the only precision runes that are worth it is 2 Lyssa for the condition duration and that gives a whole 1%.

Why do you consider it a “huge waste” to put the 10 more points into Curses on a condition build?

What else are you gonna get? Rest of the traits can’t be compared to Reaper’s Protection in WvW or Master of Terror in Spvp.

I don’t really see Reaper’s Protection as being so compelling for WvW. If I get disabled by the enemy zerg, fearing five of them is a nice disruption benefit for my team but it certainly won’t save me. I’m going down once I’m caught away from my zerg without stability.

Facet.5914:

Ashin.5986:

Imp.4792:

Not to hard to predict. The leagues are far to small to have any kind of “real tournament” feel. The Swiss style has not seemed to change the landscape your basically locking everyone down in the same way you did last tournament.

I completely agree. I don’t see the virtue in the current structure. If you start at the top of silver league, for example, there is literally nowhere you can go but down. A.net spoke at length in interviews about how they wanted to have less predictable / more dynamic matchups. I see very little dynamism in Gold league, and less in Silver.

The entire idea of the leagues, seasons, and especially the swiss tournament structure are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how WvW matches are decided.

A swiss tournament is used to sort an unseeded field according to quality, by matching competitors with similar tournament records together until only one undefeated competitor remains. That competitor is either declared the winner or is awarded the #1 seed in a bracket elimination round.

The application of this format to WvW does not make sense for several reasons.

First, the starting field was obviously not unseeded. Whereas in a normal swiss tournament, we would expect the strongest competitors to arise from different original groupings and eventually meet eachother in the final, the original groupings of this tournament were the same as the tiers formed from the glicko rating. Glicko is used for the explicit purpose of matching up servers of similar strength. So basically we are getting the matchups we would normally expect in the last round of a swiss tournament, in the first round instead.

Far more seriously, the idea of the swiss tournament fails to understand that WvW is a format in which upsets through luck, politics, or skilled play are extremely rare. WvW matches are decided through the systemic issue of coverage. So each server has certain opponents that it can expect to either win or lose against with 99% certainty.

As a consequence of both of the above, we are going to have a situation where the swiss format and the inevitable outcomes are going to constantly pull the matchups back into their original arrangement, since the servers were already sorted according to strength to begin with. This is how many players have been able to project with considerable confidence that, for example, DB will never see BG, or that and SoS-Mag-T1 matchup will never occur, etc.

Very insightful, and I agree with you.

My suggestion is a little different. The points awarded should be in some way proportional to the total number of players on the field. A simple way to do this is to have a system similar to bloodlust – make player kills worth something.

This way, everyone can play whenever they want, and the game can still be international. But to the extent you have a ghost town with a group of 10 people playing PvD, the effect will not be as great. If you have two servers with massive battles during the day, and ghost-flipping at night, MOST of their score should come from the massive battles.

That’s the problem I see with the current system.

Imp.4792:

Not to hard to predict. The leagues are far to small to have any kind of “real tournament” feel. The Swiss style has not seemed to change the landscape your basically locking everyone down in the same way you did last tournament.

I completely agree. I don’t see the virtue in the current structure. If you start at the top of silver league, for example, there is literally nowhere you can go but down. A.net spoke at length in interviews about how they wanted to have less predictable / more dynamic matchups. I see very little dynamism in Gold league, and less in Silver.

glaphen.5230:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vQAQFAGiAiUAAAA-zEBBYhApoFRjVdDTHjIqGA-w
49% with 20 points in Curses, going in 30 is a huge waste and the only precision runes that are worth it is 2 Lyssa for the condition duration and that gives a whole 1%.

Why do you consider it a “huge waste” to put the 10 more points into Curses on a condition build?

We encounter skill lag frequently on Dragonbrand. I would say any time the total number of players in the battle exceeds 80 or so.

The skill lag is shared across nearly everyone in our guild, altho some seem more sensitive to getting it than others. It lasts for a few moments after the battle is done.

The 25 point trait in Death magic is probably one of the strongest in our whole kit. Assuming there is any toughness in your equipment at all, it allows you to get a similar amount of power from Death magic as you would have from Spite, while also gaining all that precious toughness.

The only instance I’ve seen in which conditions seemed overpowered was 1v1 mesmer.

They are so weak in moderate to large scale WvW as to border on irrelevant.

Newbkakes.4971:

This stream… This whole game is just going over to condi.

In what world?

I agree with this.

Is Necro the only class in the game that is not allowed to have a blast finisher? What is the rationale for this decision?

Bona fide brand new player here, chiming in.

From my point of view as a new player, the living world events added nothing to my game experience. On the contrary, it was confusing to see these random toxic things that had no relationship to my personal story or anything the game was describing to me via lore, etc. Not only did they make no sense, but those toxic spawns are extremely difficult and frustrating to a lone newbie who is making his way through mostly uninhabited maps.

From my point of view as someone who has been playing MMO’s since EQ1, small biweekly content patches are NOT a substitute for expansions. I worry that this is the kind of mistake that arena.net will only realize “too late”.

I think this system has the opposite of its intended effect. It’s resulted in people feeling that the game has peaked / is stagnating or in a state of decline. A better formula was established by GW1, and by the real storyline of GW2 (which is perfectly fine). You have only to release a new box with a new dragon each year – the whole arc is right there.

In closing, to arena.net I would just put it this way: why do you think 3.5 million people bought GW2? Was it because of an entire new world, new classes, new skills, new game systems and an epic adventure against an evil dragon? Or was it so that they could farm a pet from a meta and learn about toxic spores?

Hi Gaile,

Just posting to let you know that my tickets have been resolved in a fair manner.

Thanks so much for helping to get this to the right people. You’re still awesome.

This is the first thing I noticed as a new player to the game. I don’t understand / don’t appreciate this aesthetic. I love the idea that the gender distinction is softened, but that’s not reason to outlaw normal-fitting pants or shirts.

The good news is that I can now post my very own updates on ticket #100959!

Support was able to get my account registered last Friday, 11/29. I played over the weekend and enjoy the game a lot. But this customer service experience has been discouraging. (Although, I’m happy you are still with a.net to work your magic, Gaile. I remember you from my ancient GW1 days.)

During the six-day registration process, I said that I planned to seek a refund for the game since I could not get it registered. Then I noticed the game went on sale, so I really felt I had nothing to lose by hitting the reset switch and getting a refund. But the tech support agent told me I could open a separate ticket with billing support to get a refund for the 40%. So I waited.

We fixed the registration problem on Friday. So I opened a separate ticket as advised. Fortunately, billing support responds quickly. Unfortunately, they have told me it is their policy not to honor sale prices.

In my situation in particular this policy seems unfair. If I’d gotten sufficiently fed up or dispirited on Tuesday (for example, already four days after you’d gotten my money, with me still unable to play), and insisted on a refund, I could have gotten one. I could have later repurchased the game at the discount price. But because I was patient, and trusted the suggestion of the support agent that I could get a refund for the 40% after my registration problem was resolved, I’m now told by the billing department that I may not seek a refund.

Gaile, this new ticket related to billing is #130412. Thank you for getting involved w/ my previous ticket. If you see where I’m coming from, I hope you can communicate with someone in billing that has the authority to make exceptions to the ordinary policy, since my situation was not an ordinary one.

Thank you.

/edit: I just want to clarify – I don’t think the tech support agent was trying to mislead. I just think he was not aware of a.net’s billing/refund policies and assumed (like I did) that they would look at this situation and be reasonable. I don’t mean to try to get him in trouble.