Guild Wars 2

What in the world am I reading? How can guilds that only run 40+, double up with other guilds, or only play on reset be considered top 10? Some of you guys are crazy lol.

Give back about 25% of the range and reduce the cone by 10 degrees (and its animation/sprite) and its fine. With the other changes, its a huge DPS loss to even put staff on for those 8 seconds. Almost not worth taking anymore but it still has its place for empowers and lines.

The problem I see is that a lot of players and guilds just use it to run instead of staying and fighting. 20vs30, nope, glide away. Its not fun. People are giving up before fights even start and that’s not fun. It usually just ends up with them running off to find a smaller group so they can stomp them or PPT on a different side of the map.

Gliding itself has been a very welcomed change but gliding in combat is a bit lame when you can take 20+ people and just avoid any situation not heavily in your favor. This is why I don’t compare it to stealth. You can’t just stealth a zerg and run away. It doesn’t work like that. Maybe for roaming or small groups with mass invis but not big groups. There needs to be some kind of middle ground to keep WvW engaging and not about running when the odds are even slightly against you.

The other staff changes were good but wave of wrath is too big of a nerf. -20% distance would make more sense but cutting it in half is way too much. I do feel the angle change is nice and makes it line up better with the animation but just because it was adjusted doesn’t mean the rest of the skill should be gutted.

Epi needs a nerf. Its that simple. Unblockable, 1200 range, all conditions, 13s cooldown or whatever when traited. Add this to trailblazer’s gear and one person can control a fight versus 20+.

Most likely just a bug that’ll be fixed….at least it better be. We don’t need more conditions in WvW.

BlazeQ.1095:

Blackarps.1974:

Bhima.9518:

I disagree completely. They were quite effective as an anti-zerg dumb blob defense. If the blob was dumb, they could get pushed back by much smaller numbers that also used canons. If they got smart and sieged out the canons, or sent in a few thieves to disrupt the canons and then push, the blob zerg would win. It was just another tool to help deal with heavily skewed fights.

It did help in some cases but they made defending way too easy. The range, damage, and knock-back made it nearly impossible for a blob to even take a structure held by 3 people on cannons. That’s just silly and horribly out of balance.

Your blob must have been terrible at this game if 3 cannons made it impossible for you to take a structure.

Pretty much but that doesn’t mean it was balanced either. We had about 20 guildies and maybe 20 pugs where only 5 of them would build the siege. 3 cannons were enough to knock us back, destroy our siege, and make us come back with more supply to try again. It was pretty sad and hilarious all at the same time. We eventually left the map and let it be someone else’s problem because trying to take the same structure for 2-3 hours is tiresome and not fun for anyone.

Bhima.9518:

I disagree completely. They were quite effective as an anti-zerg dumb blob defense. If the blob was dumb, they could get pushed back by much smaller numbers that also used canons. If they got smart and sieged out the canons, or sent in a few thieves to disrupt the canons and then push, the blob zerg would win. It was just another tool to help deal with heavily skewed fights.

It did help in some cases but they made defending way too easy. The range, damage, and knock-back made it nearly impossible for a blob to even take a structure held by 3 people on cannons. That’s just silly and horribly out of balance.

More elite specs with weapons not tied to the trait line.
New profession.
New race.
New guild hall.
WvW and PvP improvements/fixes.
New weapon type (two handed axe!)
More legendary weapons and armor and better/more ways to acquire the armor.
Ways to make a profit on excessive essences of luck.
Key ring.
More alternatives to dispose or profit off excess ascended items. Salvaging is kinda pointless.

Another big problem with people moving to free worlds is that it will cause leadership issues. Guilds will move there in hoping for a new change but what if other guilds only want to PPT? What if some only want fights? Who steps up to be the leader(s) to make sure the server has coverage around the clock? That’s a lot of work and frustration for no reward other than “balance”. I just sense there would be a lot of hostility.

Name changes? Is this serious? Why does it matter what we call ourselves? I want WvW issues fixed not all these silly things you guys keep coming up with. Siege cannons, repair hammers, name changes? Let’s get some fixes to WvW that are more meaningful like the nameplate change, adjusting commander icons, siege camping, coverage issues, etc. Those are the things that should be WAY ahead of what we call ourselves.

The current system isn’t working but I don’t see how this would change anything. Why would anyone want to give up their server or position for an empty server? For example, why would a guild on Mag, BG, or JQ move to some new server when they already have good things going for them. If they did left, its going to cause issues with balance from the get-go. My guild could contact all the other fight guilds and just stomp everyone when we move to our new server. We only care about fights so PPT wouldn’t mean anything so coverage wouldn’t matter either. We would just mow down everything during NA prime to the point it wouldn’t be fun for anyone. Then we are in the exact same situation we are in now.

Linking servers to raise population then adding more servers to shrink it down/even it out. It just doesn’t make that much sense.

Maguuma getting a link makes it feel like this is some kind of joke. The top servers should never be linked so this means in NA that JQ, BG, YB, Mag, and TC should NOT be linked. I mean top servers can get linked with the way WvW population is dropping but we are probably a few months out from that.

Malediktus.3740:

I hope it will be a collection to get the mistforged skins. I salvaged all the hero and triumphant skins after unlocking them. Would be annoying to have to do all 19+18=37 tracks again if they just reintroduce a way to earn gift of heroes again.

God, please no. Collections are one of the dumbest things they added to this game. RNG based content is not fun and just leads to grinding and frustration of menial tasks that people don’t enjoy.

New servers for WvW, please?! Less skill lag!? Can you give any details for what this is about?

Something needs to be done about Essences of Luck would be nice. A way to sell or convert them would be nice. I’m not sure if going into material storage would work though because you’ll obviously get over a stack (or however many upgrades you bought for your account). Then you’ll just be back to deleting them again.

Horrible implementation. The range and knockback on cannons makes it nearly impossible to take a structure. SMC is T3 in the JQ/NS/TC matchup. They have multiple cannons on each gate making rams almost impossible to keep going. Add that to the 3 superior arrow carts on each gate and the 40+ fighting you and its just a nightmare. All guilds on JQ called it quits after only an hour of NA prime tonight. Too many cannons, no fights, gg WvW.

Its a good thing to have but an additional chat channel for it would have been better. This way people wouldn’t need to disable team chat just for WvW. They could PvP without having to change their chat filters back and forth all the time.

Pretty much sums up how every druid encounter is going to be. Same rotations, staff 3 to run away if you start losing.

Ancient seeds with point blank + rapid fire followed by barrage and you start the fight already with a huge advantage. Most people panic and mash buttons making for an easy kill. Its a cheese setup and not surprisingly, it works on a lot of people. This build is no different than Thieves were a few years ago. Bas venom then burst you with a solid backstab and you were either dead in a second or at 25% HP. Again, no skill was involved because the build did the work for you.

So in this current meta, you don’t really go down unless you stand in the AOE. Conditions are more of a nuisance than anything. Conditions like chill and cripple aka soft CCs are just added pressure to slow you down. Conditions like confusion and bleeding don’t really do much since everyone is so tanky. Fire is the one condition you do have to watch because its rarely below 400 per tick. Damage is so centralized that if you do get caught, the added marks from necros are going to down you no matter what anyways. If you manage to rally, you’ll go down again and die. There are some times where you can get away but often, no matter how good you are, you just eat it all.

Conditions aren’t so much a problem if you run the right zerg comp. In small groups, its very deadly because there aren’t as many people around to cleanse them for you. Most small groups aren’t just spiking you down with bursts anymore, they are CC’ing you and loading you up with conditions. In zerg play though, just bring guardians and revenants and you shouldn’t have a problem with conditions.

Matchups are still pretty funky in NA. There are technically 4 servers that are T1 material so whom ever is the 4th server to drop into T2 just dominates the entire match-up. Its been this way for about a month now. Hopefully during the next re-link, BG, YB, TC, nor Maguuma get a link because none of them need it. JQ is also on the fence now about not needing one.

Lag and population imbalances are still the biggest issues in WvW. Server linking seems to have helped for the most part but some servers are just getting stacked beyond belief. Years ago it was JQ, then BG, and now its DB. I’m hoping that when the scoring changes come, servers like JQ that have huge amounts of Sea players but not many EU or NA will start to do a little better but who really cares about score? Lag well, its been horrible since the game’s launch and its only gotten worse and worse over the past year with HoT’s release. Its a shame nothing is being done about it and the only comment we got from Anet was how the lag is happening.

nottsgman.8206:

the trait does work, however, it does not reflect that in the hero panel, or in the tooltips for skills.

I couldn’t get it to work at all. I tried both in and out of combat with a variety of boons and it didn’t appear to change anything. Boons were still the same amount of time and the hero panel with the attributes was obviously wrong.

I made a build online then transferred it in game and honorable staff doesn’t seem to add boon duration at all. The reduced cool-down on skills works though.

The attributes in the hero panel was how I noticed it not adding up.

I also submitted an in-game bug report via /bug.

All the bandwaggoners will make their server go to T1. The way to counter? Don’t be on a T1 server. Join one that has been T3 or T2 at the most. Blobbing isn’t fun and neither is the lag or lame comments coming from people hiding in 50+ man zergs.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Hey everyone,

I wanted to answer and clarify some of the questions and concerns I’ve seen in the thread so far.

1. What is meant by “standard majority” and “super majority”? When we say something is decided by a “standard majority”, we are saying that the winning choice is decided by a majority vote. When we say something is decided by a “super majority”, we are saying that the winning choice must have at least 75% of the votes.

2. Why is this vote using “standard majority”? This is because you are voting to add the hammers into the game as a trial to test and play with them. Then after folks have had time to play with and experience the hammers, and decide if they like or dislike them – we will hold a second poll for the hammers requesting a “super majority” vote to keep the hammers as a permanent aspect of WvW.

3. How will repair hammers work? The current design is that you will be able to purchase the repair hammer from the tricks and traps vendor. When you consume the hammer it will replace your weapon skills with 1 skill that allows you to repair any siege. If you drop the hammer or die you will need to consume another repair hammer to use the repair hammer skill.

4. Why aren’t repair hammers part of the repair master ability line? If this item is voted to be a permanent feature of the game it will be added to the repair master ability line as a final pip. However, for the trial (the current poll) it will not be part of the ability line because it becomes harder for us to disable the item if it is attached to an ability line, and we need to be able to disable anything easily that is in beta. Also, repair hammers will work with the current repair master ability line; so for example if you are maxed out on the ability line you can spend 10 supply at once repairing siege with the repair hammer.

5. How much development time is spent on repair hammers? I’ll start with some backstory on repair hammers; they have been nearly complete for a couple years now but we had decided to never add them in game due to not having a way to properly test their impact on live. Now that we can beta this change on live and can disable them if players are unhappy, we have decided to see if players would want to test them on a trial basis. For those concerned about how this impacts the development of content already voted upon, it is also important to understand that different people work on different aspects of the game. Currently it is mostly programmer work that is left for scoring and QoL, but repair hammer work is design work.

6. Will repair hammers work on golems? Repair Hammers do work on golems, but only when no one is inside of them.

Pretty much what I expected. Hopefully QoL changes will be more impressive and interesting than this because repair hammers just sound like more siege which doesn’t sound fun at all.

This would just lead to huge stalemates where nothing gets taken because siege gets repaired constantly. Please no.

I see a lot of chornomancers, druids, scrappers, thieves, and some tempest when with other people. You’ll see reapers, a few warriors, and maybe a rev now and then.

Its too easy (and cheap) to switch to a lower tier server just to be with the higher ones. You can pay what? 100g to move every few months just to stack with the winning server? Yeah that probably needs to be addressed. However, I think if it was a huge problem, it would have been adjusted already. Internally, they might not be seeing that many people constantly making the switch so they haven’t acted on it….yet.

Had to laugh at the guy spazzing out at :57 on the cata to the right.

Walls do need to be fixed but also not to the point where 20 AC’s deters a zerg from even bothering to try and capture it. Trying to capture a tower or keep is already a pain in the kitten with siege. Not being able to kill it would just make things even worse.

Swamurabi.7890:

Balance in one tier just means stagnation and the eventual attrition of players. Eventually you’ll get a group that wants to change things up and there will be a mass exodus which will throw T1 and T2 out of balance and ruin the WvW experience for four servers until a new T1 balance happens.

Anet should try to make NA a six server rotation and limit the linkings and transfers until 1-6 are balanced.

This is a problem we are seeing again already. For whatever reason, there are people pushing PPT really hard on JQ and I’m afraid it will push us to T1 again. We don’t have the numbers to even try and compete with TC or BG.

Personally a lot of us have been having fun fighting different servers for a change. DB and FA did 2v1 us every time but fighting against Mag, SoS, and SBI have been fun. FA too when DB isn’t around.

The trick to beating SoS and SBI is to constantly flip their towers so they can never build up the siege. When they have a T3 tower that is well defended by 3-4 people, just hit the other tower on the opposite side and come back. Pretty simple stuff.

If for some reason you can’t take a tower, don’t waste more than 15-20 minutes on it. Its not that important. Just go back and hour or so later when people aren’t paying attention and drop plenty of rams/catas.

There are a lot of really bad servers. I noticed the more you go down the tiers, the worse it gets. I’m on JQ and as we moved from T1 all the way down to T3, I saw a huge difference in skill. T1 you have to be on your game, T2 you still have to be pretty prepared and by the time you get to T3, you can just 1 push the other servers.

While this doesn’t reflect skill entirely, it did show that at least JQ knows how to zerg/blob.

I would say the best pugs are on BG and Mag. SoS has probably been the worst.

briggah.7910:

morrolan.9608:

Very interesting, an indicator that the population has continued to decline or anet manually making a change?

I’d say its declining still. I moved back to my old server which is currently in T3 and to me it looks like the population of T4-T5 Pre-HoT yet it is 2 servers linked now. I left it a few days after HoT came out, didn’t play much after I left and now that I’m back I still don’t feel like playing.

I would say its probably a bit of both. Its obvious on one side that servers like BG and TC don’t need a single person or guild more. However, servers like Maguuma could definitely use more despite them previously being “full”.

As for declining numbers, its true as well. If you played right when server linking went live, the numbers were far bigger. It was a surge of players wanting to come back and play or test the new system. Now that they’ve seen there is no real new content other than their ABL back, they have moved on again. I do think we are in a better spot with linking as a whole though because numbers are definitely up compared to pre-linking days but we are still in need of actual content instead of just upgrades. Hopefully the issues around the desert borderlands can be addressed so it can be put back into the game in some fashion.

As for the person asking about NA queues. They are pretty bad on kitten. I’ve heard them as high as 240 for reset night and about 50+ during the week. As far as on average though, reset night on JQ is about 30-50 on two maps while the other two are maybe 10-15. After about an hour only two of the maps will be queued and the others won’t have commanders or the zergs will be quite small.

smashie.3074:

Teon.5168:

I’m curious, smashie……specifically how could Anet possibly figure out server pairings based on server attitudes and the people that play on those servers?

What, they would have a bi weekly psychological profile survey of server players to determine what servers might match up best based on their profiles???

I don’t see how Anet can possibly do anything about determining pairings other than it being based on some sort of points/population sort of numbers.

This is an mmorpg, and unfortunately, no matter what is done, one will encounter toxic players. That is not the game makers fault…..that one lies solely on the playerbase.
Whenever one encounters toxic players, all you can do is to ignore/block/report them.

But if you have a solid, workable idea on how they could accomplish server pairings based on mutual likeability of those servers…..I would love to read that idea.

And to me, is one of the key flaws of the server link.

It has opened up a whole can of problems that I feel Anet didn’t have to solve. In the previous state of WvW it was the communities themselves, the people, who decided whether or not they wanted to stay in the server with such a “toxic community”.

You’ve read my first post on the world linking thread. We chose to farm the gold, convert the gems, and move from our previous server that didn’t fit us.

Instead, with this server link and it’s continuous rotation, we don’t have that choice or stability to move to another server if we wished to. Instead, we can now only…hope!

(Can we be paired with TC? I’m kind of jealous with their relationship with Kain)

This is kind of what happened with us on JQ. We specifically asked Anet if we should move because we didn’t want to waste the gold for transferring if things were going to significantly improve. We were told to wait and so we did. After linking went live, guess what? All the main WvW servers were now full. It might not seem like a huge deal but we lost a bunch of guilds right before the linking because they saw the “leaked” news on reddit and jumped ship before it would be too late. Well it turns out, they were right and lucky. Now we are stuck on JQ with nobody on our maps to help us out except maybe a dozen pugs. Its quite frustrating.

One might say that we could move to a linked server for one that’s open but people in our guild don’t necessarily have the time or money to constantly change servers because of linking. Pay 100g now to move and then in say a month, its another 100g because your new link is a semi-dead server and you repeat this process over and over until just so you can get even fights? Eh, no thanks. I’d rather spend my gold on things I need or want instead of constantly having to transfer.

X T D.6458:

Teon.5168:

X T D.6458:

Speaking of ping Tyler, can you guys please look into the lag lately in wvw, its been terrible.

I still have yet to experience this lag that I have heard about, and I am on the TC pairing, in the same wvw world you’re in.

It has to be my fast fiber optics connection. I don’t see any other non-cause for the lag besides my isp, as both my wife and my computers and vid cards are not top notch.

Normally I would blame my ISP, but when my internet is normally running fine and its just the game, and other people are having the same issues like having the game randomly freeze up, getting lagspikes, etc.

Getting a bunch of people in my guild and on JQ saying the same thing. Bad lag this week. I’ve been trying to work it out with support and they are pointing at my ISP instead.

LetoII.3782:

I think this idea has merit, but for different reasons. Or, more specifically target populations. If ocx and sea populations were offered their own servers permanently matched against one another a ton of birds might be killed with one stone. They could become a permanent fixture of one tier, paired with whichever NA population best suits it for balanced score

All I can think of after reading this post is to just throw a server up in China (or any eastern Asian country really) for the OCX and Sea to play instead of having them connect to NA or EU servers or buy the Chinese edition. Nightcapping fixed! haha

If its sarcasm, I lol’d.

If not, don’t worry. Anet live accounts have no more power than you do. Its when they get on their employee accounts is when you need to worry! All Anet tags you see are just employees who have nothing more added to their account than a fancy tag. All items they have, they’ve earned.

The thing some people still don’t seem to realize is that BG pugs are pretty good. They are better than average and when WvW gets boring, they hibernate. When things get interesting, the beast is woken up and BG will just smash everyone. Its been this way for over a year now. JQ was the same way when the game launched and for 2 years, they were unstoppable but around the time SoR fell, BG really started gaining ground over JQ and now there is just no contest between the two.

The reason I mention that is because it should have been obvious to Anet. YB was stacked at one point with all the WvW guilds and they pushed it to T1 like EU did to help create a rotating T1. Then they all left for TC. JQ guilds went to DB to fight them and help gain more interesting fights. YB started crashing and wasn’t even fighting anymore so it was basically the same 4 guilds on JQ and BG fighting while YB would just spam airship and chilling fog in their keeps/SMC. This led to further people leaving JQ and a few from BG in hopes for better fights and action.

Now we get to present day. All the servers mentioned above are locked however most of their linked servers are not. Nobody in their right mind should want to move to somewhere like TC or BG’s linked servers because it means you’ll be stuck in a two hour queue. Then you get servers like YB and JQ who are stuck fighting against larger guild groups because people left them high and dry. The only way to keep up is to constantly transfer which costs quite a bit of gold to do regularly and those who like to just come on for a few hours a night can’t afford that. In addition to possibly moving to a server like IoJ to play with JQ, who is to say they aren’t linked later and now JQ is un-linked because of their previous size? Now all the people who moved to IoJ to help JQ or to have better action/fights have to move again.

IMO, the linking is a good solution overall to help population issues however, I don’t think kitten NA need it. It leads to long queues and poor fights. Even after all this typing, I still didn’t get to some of the silly upgrades and things that don’t have counters like watch towers.

If all this is too negative of a post for Anet, I’d like to say that I’m happy that they are working on WvW and are trying to fix the issues at hand. It means a lot more than just being silent for a few years.

Roamers in WvW mostly use bursting builds because they want to sneak up on you, burst you down, and move to the next person. You just need to work on panning your camera around and be ready for the burst. Most people that miss the first burst can’t do much else for about 5 seconds and will always be squishy.

NA WvW players voted on our server and it seems like most are in favor of getting rid of it unlekittenanges. Everyone seams to like the system overall but not the current setup or why T1 servers even got paired. Nobody likes a 2 hour queue only to lag or crash and have to wait again. Most people see queues over 30 and empty maps everywhere else and will just log off and play another game or an alt account on a different server so they can at least play the game.

The linking needs a bit of work. All they did in NA was link the servers backwards. Highest population gets the lowest. Second highest population gets the second lowest. Etc. Etc.

There wasn’t anything else taken into account. Nothing like BG or TC having a very strong WvW presence and servers like Maguuma or JQ not having many at all. I think both Maguuma and JQ have maybe 2 or 3 guilds that run regularly and the rest are just pugs, however they are also marked as full like BG or TC. Its getting pretty boring and lame. I’m in a GvG guild that is stuck having to pull in pugs because we can’t fight the numbers on other servers. Then we drop down in rank and stomp everyone because they aren’t used to the fighting. Its rather frustrating.

WvW player with “The Eternal”. I spent about 5 weeks playing raids with my secondary guild and had a blast goofing around and clearing the wings. My WvW guild laughs at me and calls me an “Elite Game Master” because I have the title. Its all in good fun.

I wouldn’t be against lore as long as its not PvE-like as you mentioned. However, I think there are bigger issues right now that need to be solved and the PvE’ers would probably enjoy the lore team working on that instead.

Condi duration is more for PvE so that you can stack more conditions to deal more damage overall. Instead of maybe 10 stacks of bleed, you can now stack say 20. This is ideal for raids because the bosses live longer and you need more sustained DPS. In WvW though, the amount of condi clear means you should still take something like Dire gear because you want the most amount of damage in a short amount of time.

As far as boon duration, its a huge thing for frontline meta right now. You can keep over half the boons on you at all times if you’re a guardian which makes you incredibly tanky on top of your other gear and traits.

While there technically is a workaround for them, it doesn’t make the issue much less annoying. I’d much rather be able to just choose something else in its place or maybe spend them for WXP consumables. Its more that they are a nuisance than anything else. Converting spirit shards is too much work so I just use the Tomes now and let my shards go up and up.

I think you can turn them off via the “game messages” filter in the chat settings. I’m not sure though as I tend to keep them on.

I remember the old days when SoR/BG/JQ would spend our last day just karma training one of the maps in a perfect circle. It was always a nice way to end the week.

Melanion.4892:

Tyler Bearce.3427:

There are very few (if any) features in the game that couldn’t be improved with additional resources invested in them. However, that then becomes a question of priorities. Do we improve Feature A, Feature B or Feature C first? Or perhaps we should prioritize building an entirely new feature instead?

So the first thing we need to ask is: “Is World Linking a positive improvement to the game and worth keeping around?”

If it is, then the next time we ask players to determine which feature work we prioritize, additional World Linking improvements can be one of the options. But it’s important to ask that question in a poll where it’s clear what the tradeoffs to that choice are. For instance: Players may want improvements to World Linking, but perhaps not at the expense of delaying improvements to Scoring.

I can’t tell whether or not I like world linking enough to vote unless I can first find out a few things: If we do away with world linking, what will be done instead? If I approve of the changes, how am I to indicate that I want improvements to scoring before I want improvements to world linking?

This is a great point, Melanion. What is our alternative to world linking? Would it get priority over scoring changes? If we do implement linking, are we stuck with what we have now until other issues like scoring are addressed?

Linking just has a lot of pros and cons and I feel it might not be the best solution for everyone but is a good one overall. It just needs some tweaking, but again, when would that happen?

Its been a decent short term resolution but long term is very frustrating looking. As I posted over on reddit, this system needs a bit of tweaking.

Servers like BG, JQ, TC, and YB are marked as full yet two of those are clearly dominating. Its not fair that you get locked in a server that doesn’t have anyone to fight with and your only option is to move to another server which could be linked later with a different one. Its just forcing you to either grit and bare it, play another game, or switch servers constantly just to get good WvW. Its doing nothing more than limiting what the players were doing on their own. However, this is a great solution for lower tier servers that had little to no activity. Its letting them finally experience WvW at its real glory without having to spend money to move around.

Just my 2 cents. The old kitten servers on NA shouldn’t be linked. Its causing for lopsided matches and high frustration.