Guild Wars 2

Excelvior.8520:

I came to the forum to post a thread about “how can you allow such kitten” without even knowing what it is, only thing I knew for sure was that its a rev.
I just lost a game where 3 ppl were trying, not just to kill, BUT TO FREAKING CAPTURE our close and a single rev was just standing there pushing us away. I have never been knocked off so many times in one single match. How can such cancer can be allowed?

Or lets see that from another view, cause I’ve stayed off pvp for a season… Is there any way around that? I mean, is it legit play? How do you counter it? The knockbacks were endless.

And if that is 100% legit, gg Anet, please don’t fix anything, great season, such fun, wow

If you can’t kill a ventari with 3 people, I am sorry, but this is really a L2P issue. Unless you try to kill a bunker with 3 other bunkers which might be a waste of time in the first place (so still L2P – in a strategy sense – go focus on other two points). Please, play this build for a week or so and see how often you will be able to hold vs 3 players. Every time you will manage that, you will see how glaring mistakes they made while trying to kill you.

While I agree that ventari rev is a bit OP in certain situations, I dont think it is OP in the general sense. The support is mediocre at best and there is virtually no damage output. So yes, you can hold a point vs two or even three enemies (although it depends from quality of your oponents – two good enemies will bring you down regardless from what you do, really bad three enemies may struggle but it will just mean they are not built for burst AND they dont know how ventari works). So they just leave you there and focus on 4v5 on other two points. And if you run after to join the teamfight, you will not contribute that much.

I really dont know what happened this season (as of august 2017), but burn guardians (whetever their variation is, I just identify them by having 16 stacks of burn out of nowhere) are out of control. Since couple of days I didnt played a single match without a burn guardian on the map. There is always 1 or 2 guardians per team in every match and more often than not they sport the burn build (I notice less and less trappers). This is a particular pita for me since I play a melee build atm. If I don’t hold on to my cleanse and use it very carefuly in combination with dodges, I am instantly deleted from the map. As the OP mentioned, not fun to play against. At all.

OnyX.9027:

Awe.1096:

There are so many things wrong with the current state of PvP. Meta or on-meta. It feels mostly like a battle of cheeses. Bring one cheesy build to the table. Then bring one another to supposedly counter it and on and on. At the end of the day all we have left is a bunch of annoying and broken cheese.

it is quotes like this that make me laugh tbh

use 1 cheesy build to counter another etc… you mean like in nearly EVERY pvp game, it is called counter and if there are certain meta builds then ofc people are going to either use them or use the counter

basically people call cheese on any build that kills them usually, condi thief pops and tries to burst you, guess what you can counter or heal through it and he runs away until cd’s are off, even non-bunkers never really die to single burst of a condi thief as long as they react in reasonable time in a 1v1, however a good condi thief will wait until you are engaged and THEN burst you, this isn’t cheese this is someone using the build the right way as a +1

pvp happens in pvp {o.O] oh noes !

You miss the point completly. A cheesy build is a cheesy build no matter how you try to reason it out. You know why condi thief is cheesy? Not because it brings a lot of cover condis and is tough to counter for several builds. It’s because it often comes down to running to your target and spam 3 until your finger falls off (which provides condition spam and evasion frames). Same deal with burst pistol build though the latter is easier to counter for wider spectrum of players. You know why bunker rev is cheesy? Not because it is tough to kill in many situations but because of the knockback spam. You know why trapper guardian is cheesy? Because you can run to a point, place all your traps on it and things just start to die. I mean, there is a reason why I had my biggest PvP success on aforementioned specs (at least during last 2-3 seasons). Sure, for overlords living in Legendary division some things are easier to counter. But the majority of players have to deal with kitten that is far harder to handle than just by reading an on-line guide. L2P shouts wont help a bit. I actually have quite a bit of respect for good mesmers or warriors, because they need to handle a bit more complex combos to bring someone down (even if that someone in the end did feel helpless). But if a thief runs down to me and presses 3 all day and I cant handle that because I did not bring build that targets his specific vulnerabilities, THAT is a cheese that I am going to be angry about.

There are so many things wrong with the current state of PvP. Meta or on-meta. It feels mostly like a battle of cheeses. Bring one cheesy build to the table. Then bring one another to supposedly counter it and on and on. At the end of the day all we have left is a bunch of annoying and broken cheese.

Thieves or mesmers bursting down people (wearing defensive amulets) from to 100 to 0 within the duration of Basilisk Venom. Guardian trappers and their synergy with tiny circles on every competetive map (why is conquest still the only mode in ranked? is this 2012?). Guardians stacking 16 burns on you in a couple of seconds, get cleansed and then promptly reapplying another 12 stacks after few more seconds. Then we have builds which are immune to damage for extended periods of time. So this brings the whole system to an absurd binary status where you either evade everything or you explode in 2 seconds. The average TTL if you are not protected by some sort of evade/block mechanic is insultingly low. One knockback/stun is very often an instant death sentence. I feel like we are back to 2005 when people 1 or 2-shotted each other in WoW. I though that this design is a thing of a (flawed) past.

Perhaps things in Legendary tier are better (I wouldnt know) but plat and below is full of stupid kitten like meditrappers, pistol thieves, burn guardians and so on. And what is worse, it is super effective (they would not be there if it would not).

First of all. I do believe that there is smth very wrong with either the MM system or the game rules which tend to snowball most games into stomps. As someone already said, lots of matches are decided before the starting gates even open. So it is like a coin toss. But there are also those close games and this is where your personal performance will matter and can make a difference.

Opinions will vary. But I had best results in silver and gold by using something tanky like support ele or tanky engi. I noticed one common thing for many players in bronze-silver-gold (of course not all of them). They do not read the map. Or at least not analyze it very well during the match. So what I often do is take something tanky and go cap a point which is currently not defended. More often than not this will prompt 2-3 people from the enemy team to come to take it back. At this point my intent is to hold it as long as possible and hope that the rest of my team will put that extra time to a good use. My goal is not to kill anyone. Hence I am loaded will purely survival skills. I just dodge, heal, kite, whatever it takes to stay alive as long as possible. Lots of players in lower leagues will not understand that chasing me around the point for a long time is detrimental to their team. It’s not a very satisfying way to play but I noticed I climb most when I use it. Now I don’t know what happens above platinum tier but I don’t think that is your concern atm.

JusticeRetroHunter.7684:

Awe.1096:

They could just add a /suicide command to sPvP only. Make it not usable in downed state and slap a triple respawn timer on it to prevent abuse. It is a super easy bandaid if they can’t prevent this issue from happening (might be encoded deeper into the game engine).

…This is the worst idea I’ve ever heard. you want to make people who are stuck have to wait 60 seconds to get back into the game?

That is still miles ahead of spending rest of the match stuck in the wall. And could be implemented fast and easy while a proper and more complicated remedy (“just fix pathing” may not be as easy as it sounds) is on the way.

They could just add a /suicide command to sPvP only. Make it not usable in downed state and slap a triple respawn timer on it to prevent abuse. It is a super easy bandaid if they can’t prevent this issue from happening (might be encoded deeper into the game engine).

Oh and btw. What an excellent image to illustrate my problem (OP here). This is me playing warrior this evening. And I swear to all the gods that I tried my best to win in all of those games. Well parhaps after chain of leavers/afkers in my team (which you can see on the score) I got triggered. But I still tried. I dont remember I ever seen smth like this on my Game History window. I lost one and half tier of rating in few days. Once Im done with warrior it will take weeks of cheesing on DH or engi to get back my lost rating.

And to the guy who posted a rifle build advice. It does not seem to work. I can burst people all right. When they dont expect it. But once they realize what I am doing, they get back at me and shut me down accordingly.

The Not so Evil Overlord.6305:

So, Warrior isn’t unplayable anymore. But you need to play it differently than you used to. So, to the OP… Try to avoid being the first person to enter a teamfight, and hold onto your stuns until the fight has really started.

I feel like this defeats the purpose. With how most games currently work, you usually have DHs and necros from both teams (there is a always 1 DH per team and quite often 2 of them) enter the circle. Since there burst pretty much starts to fly left and right. You have few people on the ground within seconds no matter if focused or not. If I dont contribute to the fight since the start, we are essentially fighting a 3v4. And from there it all just goes downhill.

Seriously. Im trying everything on warrior and so far no effect. On DH I just stand at side and shoot someone and then from time to time roll into the circle, place all my traps and gtfo (this stupid tactic works great up to plat).

First things first. I only play only in platinum tops (though I dropped a lot while trying to learn warrior). I do pretty OK on most other professions. My win % on engi, ele and DH are actually pretty good. But then comes warrior.

Whatever build I try, I seem to get wrecked when playing sPvP. Perhaps that is because all builds I tried are exlusively melee (and I don’t want to humiliate myself with going rifle or bow)? The problem comes from the nature of sPvP. Enter conquest, everyone from enemy team jumps into the god-kitten circle, in the middle of spam of traps, wells and all kinds of kitten. Yes I do have three defensive stances. But in the midst of CC and random AoE damage spam that is not enough. Not even by a long shot. Unless it’s 1v1 where I guess I do OK-ish (I can improve a lot but that is up to me, I know what to work on). But in teamfighs I feel utterly useless. I either enter the fray and despite my defensive cooldowns I get absolutely destroyed in seconds (while trying to land my big telegraphed setups which get dodged/blocked/missed more often than not). Or I stay at the side and try to chase loose guys which is again counterproductive since on a DH I can do three times more damage in the very same role. In similar fashion, my lasting power in the middle of red goo is much higher on engi or ele.

Im trying to figure out every single profession and how can I use it in sPvP. So far I got almost everything figured out. I do OK-ish on everything except thief (I dont feel like I win enough 1v1 vs other thieves which is crucial in its roaming mindset) and warrior. But while I understand what I need to do on a thief and I just didnt train my mechanics good enough, on warrior I am still at the level of question “What the kitten I do to actually help my team?”.

Anyone care to drop some warrior-pvp-noob-friendly advice? sPvP only, WvW is a different thing.

Tbh after playing GW2 pretty hard-core I decided to quit at some point when they kept adding more and more dailies. It was too much for me. Yes, I was one of those people who felt compelled to do them all every day. I felt that if I dont do them in those 24 hours window, they are gone forever (which in fact was the case). Call it OCD or whatever. Going for a one week vacation? Poof! 100+ AP (in the old daily system) gone forever.

I only came back when Arena decided to prune dailies and introduce the 15,000 cap. This change was something that actually brought me back to play this game. So I am very happy that this cap is here (even though I reached it long time ago) and I would like it to stay. Just offering my perspective.

Adrenalin.5719:

There is no elo hell. If you can’t get into Platinum you are simply bad.

And here we go. Random quote of the day. Aside from that, cant you tell me what is the problem with being “bad”. Game should be equally enjoyable for poeople playing in all divisions.

If you are in top 100 or so, you may as well call everyone in platinum as trash or bad or whatever. The point is, diamond players should not play vs. silver players. It doesnt matter what skill level the bronze player posses. He should play vs. other players of skill similar to his and be completly irrelevant to people in platinum (and vice-versa).

I see prevalence among some elitist players, that people with lower skill level (where lower skill level is mostly defined as “lower from mine”) should not have anything to say about this (or any other) game and they may as well uninstall or whatever. Which is an absolute hogwash. A good PvP game should incorporate players of all skill levels. Have fun in a world of GW2 where everyone below plat are being told to GTFO.

There are better/faster ways to farm gold without the need to step into PvP with all its toxicity. And if you nerf rewards like ascension backpack it will just make those farmers stay in PvP longer which I dont think is your intention.

Just at the start I wanted to say that I speak from a perspective of a player who don’t venture above gold tier and mailnly plays from solo queue.

I used to have fun while playing sPvP in GW2. And I am playing it quire regularly since beta. But I really don’t like the direction in which this game mode is heading. I think that PvE is fine and WvW suffers mostly from population issues which is a completly different matter.

My main problem (and what I mean by “one-sided”) is that I feel that modern GW2 sPvP evolve around “dodge or explode” philosophy. This creates situation where most people run builds capable of absolutly destroying anyone within seconds while also loaded with some form of invulnerable mechanics to avoid such spikes. This is coupled with exclusive use of conquest mode which forces everyone into a tiny box and further destroys build diversity. Most of the time when I fight someone, I either nuke him down fast because he was stunned and/or didnt had his defensive cooldown ready. Or this happens to me. Either way most fights ends with a feeling that I either completly destroyed someone or that he completly destroyed me. I can 100->0 some guy who I encounter in the field and in the next fight he can 100->0 me just as easily. All that was needed is that I had my crucial defensive ability on cooldown.

And dont even start with team fights where you have 6 people running in the 10 square meter box among all the wells, traps and CC effects. Each of them more than capable to insta-gib a person. Trying to dodge/block/whatever something in such environment feels like a dice roll and I think it feels like that for most players below Legendary tier.

From what I can observe on the MMO market (current and former) this is a philosophy that gameplay designers try to avoid. And GW2 team seems to be deliberately drifting into this direction.

Few years ago I had my fair share of fun with sPvP. Right now I feel I play mostly the “stomp or get stomped” slot machine and this is just not fun. This makes collecting some exclusive items/tracks my ONLY motivation to keep playing this mode. But as soon as that is done I will quickly abandon it and dont look back until something changes. This is in contrast with older sPvP where I often joined sPvP just for fun. People toyed with more builds and fights had more linear outcomes. Right now it’s mostly same overused set of copy-pasta from meta websites and same trap cards (pun to DH semi-intended) activated over and over again.

Ensign.2189:

Right, that is how it seems to work. That means that A.Net’s implementation of Glicko is mis-specified. It’s simply wrong – everyone on team B’s rating should move up or downward the same amount (with allowances for differences from rating volatility).

What they are doing, with the higher rated player losing more on losses than the lower rated player on the same team, is not Glicko or Glicko-2. It’s mis-specified. It makes everything about matchmaking and ratings inconsistent (matchmaking and match prediction is based upon rating numbers representing something specific, but they don’t actually represent what they are supposed to – because they are computed wrong).

It means players are rated incorrectly, which means matchmaking isn’t building teams appropriately, creating blowouts that it doesn’t think are blowouts – garbage in, garbage out.

Updating their MMR algorithm to actually be a correct implementation of Glicko-2, or some consistent derivative, should be really high priority. This should have been fixed years ago – there’s really no excuse for a high budget studio like A.Net not to run their MMR and matchmaking code past a statistician at some point.

It does not matter what sort of rating system you use. In 5v5 you will always have many matches which will be out-sided stomps not fair to some of the people in the loosing team. Why when I play 1v1 games after being properly rated, I don’t get such one sided matches unless I get successfuly cheesed (which is my fault because knowing how to deal with cheese is part of being skilled)? Why I happen to see one-sided stomps every day when I play GW2, LoL, Overwatch, HotS, WoW etc. etc.?

This whole discussion about bad MM is irrelevant. The MMR system is simply not a good way to do a matchmaking in a team based game. The more people you have in your group, the more prone to errors MMR is. This system is generally great in 1v1. I never had any bigger issues with matchmaking in games like Starcraft II, Street Fighter IV etc. But in games like GW2, WoW, Overwatch, LoL etc. it’s always a series of dissapointments.

I never played a single team based game with competetive mode where I would not get infuriated by the matchmaking. When you 1v1, the MMR is stricly and entirely tied to your own performance. You NEED to carry yourself or you loose. In team based games, even if you are better than everyone else on the map, you can still loose and in fact you have a pretty decent chance to loose. Your personal skill increases your chances to win somewhat but nothing more. If you play A LOT of matches, by principles of statistics you will be placed more or less where you belong. But you need to play a lot or you need some luck. In 1v1 games I was placed where I felt I belong pretty fast, after 20 games maybe. After that, as I gained or lost MMR, I felt my oponents getting better or worse. In team based games I often gain some MMR and then I get kitten on by the matchmaker and I tank. I had games in GW2 where I bunkered a point, oftentimes held it against 2 people and was generally busy but we still lost because rest of my team was running around without idea. I also had games where I was trying some new class and was playing really bad but I still won because I was carried by my decent team. This does not generally happen in 1v1 games. But will keep happening in 5v5 and similar formats and there is nothing that A.net or anyone else can do about it.

TLDR: I dont think we can blame A.net for such state of matchamaking as it is in atm. Because thats the state of every single matchamaking system in every single game based on team combat.

It always amazes me how people are ready to dismiss balance issues with a simple L2P statement. Balance does not exists on a singular skill level but is a far more complex term. Otherwise we come to a situation where anything below MLG level is irrelevant (and not just “below my own level”). This a computer game. Aimed at both casual gamers and people who play it 10 hours per day all year long. It is played by people of various skill levels and it should be a goal for a designer to balance it as best as possible for all skill ranges.

If there is a class that clearly dominates lower brackets it is NOT fine from a balance standpoint. L2P is only valid to a certain extent. Every gamer has his own skill cap. Some people won’t be out from gold or silver even if they spend 5000 hours playing PvP. It is not their error that they can’t go beyond that. It is just their natural skill ceiling, from whatever reason. Those players should also be considered when trying to balance the entire game.

I understand that it is hard to balance GW2 for several skill levels. Perhaps even impossible. But that should not be preventing people from going out with certain concerns. Concerns which are valid no matter if we talk about top 100 or a bronze rating. If a certain class gives MUCH better results when placed in a map filled with people of low skill level, this is NOT a sign of good balance.

Temporary maps, temporary achievements, temporary events. For me that is a horrible game design. In fact I decided to quit GW2 after I got tired with trying to keep up with LS Season 1 and grinding daily achievements. I came back one year later when Arena redesigned their daily system and they admitted that temporary nature of LS1 was a mistake.

And now we start getting that temporary kitten back again? I despise this design same as korean P2W or WoW endless gear treadmill. I hope they will not drive me away again.

Obindo.6802:

Coz ppl r bad

That is not even an argument of any sort and one of the most common fallacies used in discussions regarding PvP. The common thing is that in all skill based games, players with top skill cap are a very small % of entire population. So let’s assume that 80% of players are so called “bad”, 15% decent and 5% good. If a particular class design creates significant problem for those “bads”, it directly affects 80% of your game population. There is a reason that “pub stompers” are so popular in most PvP based games. This is the same reason why nowadays I see 2-3 DH in most conquest teams in GW2. Perhaps they loose their viability in top tiers of play, I don’t know. But this does not change the fact that they are an issue for all “bads” and thus for the majority of game population.

Also make an experiment will you? Whenever you play a conquest match (lower half of tiers in ranked at least or any unranked game if you are higher) at start count which team got more DH in squad. Then check the correlation between this and which team actually won the match at the end. The results are, at least in my case, interesting albeit predictable.

Yasha.5963:

Btw the DH you mentioned was most annoying? That has actually been nerfed a couple of times! Here is a great video showing how much skill it takes to play spvp with a HoT build:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0JWZ8t08TY

I mentioned DH because I can’t really figure out yet how to try and counter them. They deal decent ranged damage and going in to melee ends up with a trap disaster. Also cant be bursted due to all the immunity skills they tend to pop. It kind of feels like dueling a good mesmer in the old meta. But mesmer was a dueling one trick pony. My issue as of now is that I find a guy guarding a node and I can’t really figure out what the kitten am I facing. Is it a bunker? A zerker? A dueler? Because it kind of feels like it is all at the same time. I am not used to such state of the meta hence my questions. Thanks for some useful info which already came above.

OK, I admit that I took a break from PvP since more or less HoT release. But I have a fair share of PvP experience since 2012 with overall around 2k or 3k matches played. I decided to try some PvP again starting next season in October so I jumped in a week ago to figure out current meta and all that. And tbh from what I’ve seen so far, I dont recognize this game.

It seems to me that 80% of people (yeah, a made up number) run a couple of same builds and when facing against them with something even remotely custom, I feel like facing a classic bunker fused together with burst warrior where I get nuked to death while stunned or immobilized and my enemy has some sort of shield or immunity whenever I try to do some damage. Was there some sort of large power creep post-HoT (which should be against GW2 design)? Am I not getting something? I mean, its surely a L2P issue in large amount as I didnt PvP since a year but is it normal that I go to a point a find a bunker there who tanks me same as old bunkers did except now he also kills me switfly instead of forcing to back up? Any tips for a returning PvPer? Is there any other way to get back in other than copy something from one of the meta websites (I find DH most annoying from what I see so far) and try to learn it? In old times I felt that there was more variety in class/build choices and in lower level matches pretty much anything was viable as long as a player was decent. Right now even if I queue to non-ranked, I mostly find enemies which I simply can’t kill solo and they nuke me down in one swift combo. That is not even close to being viable and we dont even talk about higher leagues. We talk about backpeddlers who place a trap on the ground, pull me in and I am dead despite not even playing as glass cannon. Any advice on what to do if I would like to play a bit more next season? Or maybe I should just slowly back away?

LUST.7241:

Let me tell you something about most solo players:

1) They have post-it notes covering their maps.
2) They can’t read fights
3) They don’t know who to focus despite having a target over their heads
4) They don’t know when to leave a fight that is won
5) They don’t know when to leave a fight that will end up as a loss
6) They don’t know how to read chat
7) They don’t know how to stomp
8) They don’t know how to effectively res
9) They don’t rotate well at all
10) They don’t know how to capture beasts (Forest map)
11) They don’t know what Stillness/Tranquilty is (Temple)
12) They don’t know that rushing Lord at start is a poor choice compared to 2/3 point holds (Foefire)

Anything else to clarify how the majority of solo players are downright kittens?
Amber, Emerald, Sapphire, Ruby, Diamond, Legendary…most solo players in any division are absolutely worse than versing full premades.

If you think you are a good solo player and fall short on any of those points even in the tinest bit, you aren’t a good solo player. No matter what class you play, you have to have a good grasp on all those concepts…zero excuses.

Also, Anet, your 50% system blows…and why it really starts taking effect in Diamond/Legendary is beyond me. I’m probably never going to play PvP after this season. Good players shouldn’t have to carry the absolute worst. Good players should be with good players versing good players (rather lose against good players with the company of good players, this is talking about solo queue’s matchmaking). Bad players should be with bad players until they figure out that each one of them are bad for a reason. There should be no hand holding for people who don’t want to improve themselves or refuse to realize they are the issue.

And what exactly are you trying to imply? You basically just support the OP’s claim. In fact, I don’t give that much care if I am Amber or Legendary. I just want to have a good time while PvP-ing. Facing a premade as a bunch of solos is not fun. If you want to call me a bad, so be it. I am a bad. I want to play vs. other bads and not skilled premades. How is it that asking for a hand holding?

Dear devs at ArenaNet, you really need to rethink your system considering how your meta-events and LFG work. I have frequent issues with that and here is a typical example I just experienced.

So I wanted to do a DS attempt. I go to DS and of course I land in a barren map. So LFG it goes. I find a taxi, join the party and try to change instances. Of course the map is full. After spamming join attempts for 2 minutes I decide to leave the party and search again. After few minutes I find another different taxi, which may be to the same map I tried before or not, there is no way to tell. I join and try to port. Map full. Oh well, 2 more minutes of trying and no luck. I leave the party and want to try again. But what is that? “You have joined to many parties recently…”. Ooooh I see. So I am not joining any parties for several minutes now. Might as well go chop some wood? Or just logout for 20 minutes and then maybe get back and retry the LFG lotto? Fun times.

I am sorry ArenaNet but this simply does not work. Many people don’t have time to play your game for 8 hours per day and trying to do anything while struggling with situations like the one described above is just a royal PITA. If you really want to keep changing everything in your game into a giant meta event spam, at least redesign your grouping and server systems to facilitate that design.

Samnang.1879:

ME TOO!

I’m so happy, after 4 days of constant raiding, I finally finished it today!!!

It feels amazing.

I love this challenging content where you know it’s hard but you can do it if you focus, Anet please don’t nerf.

Speaking out of my own experience it does feel awesome if you can hardly beat it but still beat it. The perspective changes a lot once you realize that you can’t :p There are players of various skill levels. There will be always somebody who can’t. And the harder it is, the more people will fall into this category. It is not possible to satisfy all ends. Only two things matter. Usage metrics and business model. ArenaNet surely got them both and in time they will draw their own conclusion.

PS. Grats for the kill. Good look on the second one.

Im fine with raids as they are as long as they remain a side activity with equal attention in development time spent for open world, fractals/dungeons, wvw and pvp. But that is very hard to achieve. There is a certain group of players who crave for night after night of wiping on raid bosses and waiting for that moment when they finally learn it, kill it and then get “that amazing feeling”. The problem with “that amazing feeling” is that it only works once or twice. It works like a drug. After you learn the boss and start to farm it, you want to feel “that amazing feeling” again and you ask for more. There will always be hardcore people who clear hard content rather fast and then what? Need more raids! There is no 100% good solution. If you REALLY want Arena to satisfy what hardcore players want, they would need to turn GW2 into yet another “raid or die” experience. At which point they would be also forced to put some easy mode into it to prevent casuals and “bads” from leaving. If I wanted that sort of meta-game, I would have never left WoW. Because quite frankly, no matter what Arena will do, I don’t believe that they can beat WoW in quality of raiding content.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Raids should only have one mode, the hardest possible mode available. If you want easier content, dungeons and fractals are still available to play. Raids are not designed to be inclusive, they are designed to push players to get better. You say you’re a casual and a good player, so if you get with a good group you should be able to beat it. You may fail many times, but when you beat it that will be an incredibly satisfying moment—Those moments are what raids are all about; the catharsis from defeating a seemingly insurmountable foe is incredible. You, too, can enjoy these bosses if you’re willing to put forth the effort and join a group to overcome it.

While I understand this concept and I know where do you come from, I kind of disagree with it. People are different. There is no one recipe. 10 years ago I was a hardcore raid player. I was a raid leader in 40-man WoW Vanilla content. When I look at it now, I was working around the clock to keep all this going. And I enjoyed it. But you know, times change. Right now I have a normal job (with decent income, thank God) and there are days when I get back home and I am already in a kittenty mood. Something went wrong, boss was not happy, deadline pressure etc. etc. At such times I want to fire up my favorite MMO and just let the steam off. I DONT want to go again through all the drama with controling a raid group, making sure proper people show up on time and remain motivated, sort out tactics, deal with loot drama and all else. As I said, there was a time when I did and I enjoyed that. But not anymore. This is also why I stopped playing WoW, I stopped playing SWTOR. I picked GW2 for a long-term commitment because its list of features was most suited for my taste. One of those features was “we don’t have raids”. At least I looked at it as a feature. Right now when Arena decided to backtrack on that I kind of accepted that (though I am unhappy about it on personal level). Hell, I picked my old spirit again and decided to help my guild as much as I can with making those raid attempts work. But I still hope it will remain as just a small side-feature. If Arena will switch their focus to raiding (something which remains bread and butter for WoW and many other games since years) it would mean an end for me. And I would be sad about it.

I know that currently engineers are considered a staple for condition builds in PvE and I know why. The build with kit juggling provides some good dps and decent condi burst with burning stacking. I heard that progressing teams are stacking engineers when filling condition spots in their raids. But one thing keeps bugging me and that is a spreadsheet dps vs real dps. So far for the most part a lot of bosses in PvE content were fairly stationary and were often stacked on and then zerked. This is where it worked.

But I am looking at the nature of first boss in new raid wing and I keep wondering. How much of the potential dps I am loosing when boss is constantly moving, I keep running to green circles all the time and also dodging of sparks is so important. Blowtorch has a close melee range requirement. Granades and napalm are ground targeted effects which are much more difficult to land continuously when everything around you is moving. Pistol auto-attack is rather weak (and you are not supposed to us it that much anyway). Considering that while dodging and running and perhaps CC-ing sparks I need to juggle between my kits and land several ground-shots on moving boss, it just make me wonder how much of the potential dps I am loosing. On a static fractal boss with condi engineer I can maintain 20-25 stacks of bleeding from shrapnel and several stacks of burning for the most part. It works there and engineer wins.

And that is great but look how many buttons I must press and also at how I need to stay almost in my target melee range. While for example with my scepter necro I can maintain constantly around 25 stacks of bleeding by… doing nothing aside from staying in 900 range. All that comes just from scepter auto-attack which means I dont even need to press any button and any other skills I may use is just a nice damage bonus.

Now of course you may say that this is matter of harder vs easier and L2P is in order. But a serious question. How many of you can maintain a nearly perfect rotation on your kit swapping engi, when so many enviromental factors are in place? Lets assume that a perfect playing engi will do 100% of certain damage. Auto-attack spamming necro may do 75% of that damage but engi with the “rotation” all over the place may do 50%. Am I looking at this wrong? For me it a matter of choosing for which character I should craft my ascended condition armor and for the resons outlined above I can’t decide yet. There is of course a case of added utility aside from raw damage and engineer brings superior break-bar destruction and better team support. But at the same time necro is king of boon stripping and that is also something that is needed in new raid.

Altair.8402:

Awe.1096:

1. Add certain events that will wipe you/raid no matter what gear you have while leaving the rest of damage sources be more forgiving for more tanky players.
2. Remove enrage timers.

Uh what?

How about quoting my entire post instead of cherry picking part which does not make sense on its own?

Altair.8402:

Say the Vale Guardian didn’t have enrage timers. What prevents a group from using full nomads, stacking in a corner, and spamming heals while ignoring all the mechanics for that fight?

1. Add certain events that will wipe you/raid no matter what gear you have while leaving the rest of damage sources be more forgiving for more tanky players.
2. Remove enrage timers.
3. Introduce tiering for rewards. You kill it within 8 minutes, normal reward. You kill it within 10 minutes, lower the ascended drop chance to Tequatl levels. Your kill takes longer, drop 1 gold and some generic champion bag.
4. Slap some achievements and titles for different tiers for good measure.

So far they seem OK. I just hope that Arena will not find it to be a great idea to switch raiding into THE thing players are supposed to be doing (ie. more focus on developing new raid wings instead of various other content). There is a reason why I decided to make GW2 my MMO home and in large part that is because I wanted to escape from the “raid or die” design which is prevalent in many competing games. I looked at “no raids” as a positive feature. Now when Arena decided to backtrack on that, I am willing to accept those raids and do them from time to time but it will pose a problem if at some point I will feel forced to do them.

Mortifer.2946:

So I was raging for 3 weeks about inactivity and stupidity of players in VB who are the reason that I still didn’t get a single bladed coat box and instead of lowering the requirements or improving megaservers you actually made it even worse by turning VB into a staging area for raids? …I don’t have energy for this anymore. Good bye Verdant Brink. Never again.

I am usually all for the “developers know what they are doing” approach. But to be honest when I first entered VB zone today after patch and I looked at that entry portal with all those people in front of it, one of my first (if not THE first) thoughts was “wow, this is going to seriously mess with VB meta”. Makes me really wonder how such things get past the quality assurance.

They should just put a portal in LA, similar to the one for fractals. It does break a bit of immersion but currently more damage is done by ruining efforts of people trying to work on VB meta.

Scurrilous.7283:

UnbentMars.9126:

Raids are instanced content, Frozen Maw is a world boss. Raids are limited to 10 people while world content is only limited by the # of people in a map Hope this helps!

Oh I know I just meant I heard people talking at Maw how they brought more than 10 people into raids. Numbers like 15, 20, 30 and 40 were thrown out there. Was jsut askign if you can bring over 10.

No, you can’t.

Ezeriel.9574:

It’s the first day and speed clears are already a thing. 1 tank, 1 healer in zerker gear, and the rest is a mix of condi and zerker dps.

…and how many hours for spamming “cleric ele, or cele ele lfg” does it take for it to sink into a persons head, that they’re not wanted.

“raid looking for 1 or 2 dps” …that’s all you ever see.

It’s not about speed clears. You need high dps in order to beat the enrage timer. It remains to be seen if that is good or bad design. But as of now it is certainly not about speed clears.

Well, I guess precursors for HOPE will be crafted by huntsmans so it falls in line with that.

Hmm. Some drama incoming. But just out of curiosity. Was DnT invited and used as a benchmark of performance expected to tackle with GW2 raids or as a measure of their potential upper limits?

Nah. They should hire some hardcore guild like DnT and invite them to ArenaNet for few weeks of testing. Ask them to kill bosses several times and then record their fastest kill and set the hard-enrage timer to that value. There you go, legit challenging content for you!

Vyras.9078:

I tried druid a few days after the expansion and let me tell you, pretty fun.
I’ve never tried a healing class in any MMO before so iunno
AND this game has some issues sometimes..
BUT HEY
Them heals be fun
Structured doe

Druid is not a typical MMO healing class. No spec in GW2 is and it will never be without rebuilding game’s combat and profession philosophy. What most people mean by healer is a class that is focused on watching other people health bars and playing whack a mole with them. GW1 had such healing (actually monk from GW1 was my favorite healing class from any MMO I ever played and I played many). GW2 does not. That being said, if you stack some druids in a zerg, they can make a difference. But as a druid you wont be constantly saving people’s lives.

I have a feeling that in general HoT is a bit unfriendly to melee. I think that this was done on purpose to somehow pull players away from the stacking on mob meta. You will be able to do fine as melee if you dodge and avoid properly but ranged have it easier when playing in new jungle zones.

There is one track which I can’t identify. It plays quite often in Auric Basin (not in Verdant Brink I think) as general ambient. It is not available on ArenaNet’s SoundCloud and I also can’t find it among many uploads on Youtube.

It starts playing right at the start of this video (it’s barely audible but its there):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Rp1XH_M5_U

Can anyone point me to what I am looking for? Thanks.

Lonewolf Kai.3682:

Just what the title states. Thx for the fix!

Which fix? :p

My only quarrel with snipers is that any knockback/stun/root + their charged shot and you are dead for good. Quite often I simply can’t bring enough stun breaks (on top of dodge bar which I need to use) to prevent bad RNG. And bad RNG will happen often given how many snipers are in HoT and how many CC was given to mobs. Snipers are certainly managable and for me they can stay as they are. But among all my deaths in HoT, if one mob type was responsible for biggest chunk, I am sure it was snipers. Their charged shot field ticks more than once per second for a good chunk of your HP. My tanky engineer was fine. My semi-zerker revenant was OK-ish (though HP going down fast). But I can already foresee lots of deaths on my zerker thief (I think 2 seconds of contact with their shot line field = dead, I shall see).

In general however, so far in HoT I can feel that the general concept is “screw you melee”. While in pre-HoT it was something like “why play ranged if melee can kill it faster?”. Once I am done with experimenting, I will probably play only as ranged in new HoT zones. Not sure yet which proffession. Melee still does more damage but a lot of time is wasted running away from all the anti-melee skills given to HoT mobs.

DemonNinja.1602:

I did a clean install of everything and I am still having this issue. My game was running smooth and fine before. Now every time I do a meta event in HoT the game crashes to desktop. Yo, can we kittening get a developer response for kittens sake!

Reinstalling will not help. Someone dug up a year old thread where one of AreneNet devs confirms what I was recently suspecting basing on available evidence. This is GW2 software limitation and as such can only be fixed by ArenaNet. That or you can tune your GW2 to potato-like graphic settings even if you have a 4000$ computer with state of art hardware. I will keep experimenting with various settings and configs and I will post all conclusions soon but don’t expect much at this point. There is a way of making GW2 stable or stable-ish but at a cost of significant visual quality drop.

Thanks for finding and bumping this. Post from Chad confirms what I was suspecting from the last few days. It is just sad that it’s been a year and as it is clear, no fix was yet implemented. As game grows and more assets are added (HoT is a major release), this problem will become more and more widespread. The problem is that getting better hardware wont help, ever. You can have 64 GB of RAM and double SLI GeForce 980 and it WILL still crash due to reaching memory limitation of GW2’s software architecture. So eventually we will all have to put our texture settings to lowest and make GW2 look like a potato just to stop OOM crashes? Once HoT content related bugs are found and patched this should be the top priority issue for Arena’s programmers.

Same issue as all open world crashes. Large player density causes this. Suspected memory leak in GW2 client or similar issue.

This is working as intended. You are not supposed to get this item in your inventory. It simply unlocks in your collection and then vanishes. You will get your upgrade/reward once you complete your collection track.

DarkShadow.3527:

Update with an interesting fact regarding OOM crashes:
I still crash in 1-10 minutes in every map even when i’m alone, BUT i managed (for two times) to play two hotjoin matches in a row without crashes,. The crash occurred in both cases once i got back in heart of the mists.
So..crashes in some minutes in every map being alone but you can actually play pvp using skills, passing loading screens and with people playing around.
I don’t think we need more evidence that these crashes ARE NOT related to our OS.
So..it may be that crashes are related to the Halloween part of the patch? (since well, pvp servers/arenas are not affected by it).
I still invite everyone to post in here to collect infos related just to OOM crashes, since the past discussions are full of different problems (maybe we can post on the various social networks and Reddit too).
And, of course, i’m still asking for a reply from Anet.

Crashes are often related to player density. Zergs cause memory usage to skyrocket. This most likely eventually triggers a crash. From what I can see, there might be some issue with GW2’s garbage collector. It already smelled of memory leaks, now it reeks of it.

Kylden Ar.3724:

Not just that card, seems to be NVIDA cards in general, across both 32-bit and 64-bit clients.

People with AMD cards also report same OOM crashes. I think that more NVIDIA reports are just here because currently NVIDIA cards are a more popular choice. And crashes happen indeed on both 32 and 64 bit systems. On 32 bit systems they might be more frequent due to lower memory usage tolerance of those systems. But regardless, same OOM crashes still happen even for people with 64-bit system, 16 GB RAM or more and Geforce 980 cards.

trobbi.2891:

Played this morning and every couple minutes in Dragon Stand I was crashing. Stopped went to LA and crashed just standing there. Worst time yet. I am playing on a brand new iMac.

Guys, keep posting details like that. Thanks to this we can dismiss the “upgrade your old potato PC” argument which is quite common. Thanks.