Showing Posts For Brannoncyll.1978:
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All I want is for the ability to get decent exotics in a reasonable amount of time while playing WvW only. I really hate the idea of having to grind boring dungeons to be competitive; this is why neither of my 2 level 80 characters have anything more than exotic weapons (bought off the TP). The recent patch made a step in the right direction, but it still takes far more time to gear up in WvW than it does in PvE. I don’t see any logical reason why this should be the case.
Mine did that a few minutes ago – very annoying as I am now stuck in the queue again.
I was just about to start a post talking about this issue, but the OP beat me to it.
I play a staff elementalist, and I am constantly losing track of the pointer in all the AoE mess. What’s worse is that the pointer vanishes when you hold right-click to circle-strafe, so you are always having to hunt for it when you release right-click.
What I would like is the option to change the size and colour of the pointer, and to toggle-off the disappearance of the pointer while turning.
Last week SoR repeatedly exploited culling to defeat TC’s zerg. They would all run away until their models unloaded, then all rush back together dropping everyone before they even appeared on our screens. They would constantly drop portal bombs on us. Yes, their coordination should be applauded, but if these are the kind of pathetic ‘strategies’ needed to stay competitive then I sincerely hope that TC drops back down the league tables so that we can actually get a fair fight.
Staff elementalists already make the trade-off between single-target damage and AoE firepower by choosing that weapon, because, lets face it, the damage is not all that good. Staff’s power lies in its versatility and in the ability to play off combo fields.
The only real problem with AoE is the ability for groups to stack so many effects in one place that anything entering is instagibbed. This is only a “problem” in 2 places: dynamic events with large numbers of participants, where stacked AoEs destroy most normal monsters before they even render; and at choke-points in WvW like keep walls, where stackings AoE attacks on the walls makes it very difficult to defend. The second problem can easily be solved by giving a defence buff to wall defenders. The first might be solved by preventing mobs from spawning in big, tight groups. I’m sure there are many other solutions, but it seems to me that nerfing AoEs in general should be the last thing considered.
Wow, I leveled my elementalist to 80 doing mostly WvW and only have 20 or 30 badges to show for it. I expect this is because I spend too much time concentrating on fighting and miss all the loot bags, and also because the tagging system needs some serious work.
I hate that the WvW setup encourages people to waste so much time in the jumping puzzle rather than fighting, while using up valuable BG slots. It also seriously sucks for people like myself who enjoy WvW but cannot stand jumping puzzles – seriously, I had to stop trying those things because I almost put my fist through my monitor!
I can only hope that the promised WvW changes over the next few months will improve the drop rates of badges of honor from kills (and move them straight into the inventory rather than leaving them scattered about the front lines) such that those of us who prefer Tekken to Super Mario are still able to get siege blueprints to help our realms!
So basically, as with many things in this game it seems, you have to be a mesmer or a guardian. Sucks for the rest of us.
Do something to make defending from the walls of a tower or keep more viable. As it stands the wall is a terrible place to defend from as the attacking force can easily cover its entire length with AoE attacks, nuking any defensive siege in seconds and quickly downing defending players. The only viable defense strategy at the moment is a combination of sorties and dropping AoE attacks on the back of the gate (this is ridiculous and needs to be fixed, but only after something else is done to aid defenders).
Unfortunately those of us who dislike dungeons and instead spend most of our time in WvW, you know…. actually fighting the enemy rather than just wasting a BG slot playing Super Mario 2012, have no chance of getting exotics.
In WvW a small group of thieves can completely cut off supplies. Even large groups of defenders are no counter to this strategy – they simply burst down the yak and vanish again. This needs to be fixed. Soon.
Well to be fair, they need to be capable of something constructive for their server, and they’re rather lack luster at sieges.
True. The issue though is that there is no counter to this strategy. Even with a zerg it is impossible to prevent a determined small group of thieves from bursting down a yak. The only preventative strategy is to surround the yak with friendly thieves and keep the yak under shadow refuge.
You can also totally lock down a supply route with a small group of thieves. Stealth in, burst down yak, vanish. Simple. Gamechanging.
In WvW a small group of thieves can completely cut off supplies. Even large groups of defenders are no counter to this strategy – they simply burst down the yak and vanish again. This needs to be fixed. Soon.
I agree with FourthVariety; I find most utility cooldowns to be too long, so apart from every so often using using an ‘oh ****’ button for getting out of tight spots I rarely, if ever, activate them. I don’t think I have ever used an elite skill, apart from for testing, in the 4 months I have been playing. I also run with 2 signets for their passive bonuses, but for the most part their active effects are too weak to be worth losing the passive for half a minute.
I play a staff build, which is usually very fun, but it is often very frustrating because the auto-attack is so agonizingly slow. In WvW or dynamic events my target is often already dead by the time I actually get a shot off. Even if the target is still alive at the time, quite often the attacks get obstructed by scenery or the target has ran out of range; due to the low attack frequency this seriously hurts our dps against moving targets. If ANet are reading this, please please consider decreasing the time between attacks for the sake of our (or at least my) sanity!
I play a staff elementalist, currently lvl ~40. I also had some initial difficulty getting used to the squishy-ness of the class at lower levels, but bear with it.
I stack toughness and power on my gear, and somewhat less in vitality, and I can quite easily destroy groups of 4 or 5 melee NPCs without too much difficulty. Ranged NPCs are more difficult, but good use of terrain, the projectile reflect skill, and the elementalist’s ridiculous number of heals help here.
Most of my trait points are in arcane, which allows me to dance between the various attunements to maximise my damage and jump into water for a few quick heals.
The class is certainly more difficult to play than many others, but in my opinion it is more than worth the effort for its versatility. Also it is a wonderful feeling when you begin to master attunement dancing and all of your self-combos.
W,A,S,D – movement
Q,E,R,T – attunements (easy to reach while moving)
default skill keys (7,8,9 are awkward, I think I might change to shift-1,2,3 for these)
V – target nearest
dodge bound to one of the extra buttons on my mouse.
I find this setup to be pretty good for attunement dancing.
Thank you for the update Jonathan, it is very much appreciated. However I echo the sentiment of other posters in this thread in asking whether the resources allocated to class balance and bug fixing are really enough considering the glacial pace at which fixes are being made and the lack of QA on those that are?
I am glad that ANet are working on this issue. I would like to emphasize that it is not only in WvW that culling becomes a major issue, but also in large scale PvE events. In the recent Lost Shores one-time events, most, if not all of the mobs that I faced in the phase 3 event only appeared on my screen at half health – due to the large number of players participating in the event they had been culled. This, coupled to the setup where experience and rewards are only earned if a player/party is responsible for a certain percentage of the total damage meant that I only received experience for perhaps 1/5 kills, even though I was in a full party. This needs to be fixed pronto.
I could only attend 45 mins of the event due to RL commitments, but it became clear very quickly that something needs to be done differently in the future. Even if you are able to do the event you just get an experience of all the worst aspects of the game:
- the huge zerg spewing so many spell effects that your screen looks like a 70s disco while on LSD, coupled with a complete inability to actually see your target
- evaded evaded evaded obstructed evaded
- culling of mobs due to the number of players in the area, so you end up constantly getting mashed by invisible champions and all your targets appear at half health
- zero experience or loot from any kill, even if you are in a party, unless you are extremely lucky
IMO future events should be instanced to groups of 20 max, and should repeat over several days so that everyone can do them.
Hi all,
Perhaps this has been answered elsewhere, but when are we supposed to get the rewards for phase 1 and 2?
I completed phase 1 up to Noll, and got the map fragment, and I turned out for the start of phase 2 (our catapult mysteriously fell apart without a Karka even showing its face in LA). I then went through to Southsun Cove and did all the DEs I could find (take the beach, make the bridge, clear the hive, etc). However I have not yet received the completion award for either phase.
The problem with the ranger is that, as it currently stands, the gameplay is so one-dimensional. Pets are utterly useless in anything other than solo pve, most of our utility skills are boring and our weapon skills are boring.
I don’t have any experience with melee, but with our ranged weapons:
- 3/5 skills on the shortbow are highly situational (a short stun, a cripple and an evasion skill that grants a short haste).
- 3/5 skills on the longbow are highly situational (a knockback, a vulnerability debuff and an aoe on a long timer).
So if you run with these weapons you really have to enjoy auto-attack spamming as this is what you will spend most of your time doing.
MH Axe is far more interesting but its range is pretty short, and its auto-attack hits multiple targets so you inevitably end up fighting against 5 mobs (kittening golden moas!).
I recently re-rolled an elementalist. These guys have so many skills. Now I never get bored in combat – I am too busy dancing between my attunements playing off combo fields and the various aoe skills with buffs and debuffs. Way more fun.
The content looks good, although I am not a hugely into PvE. Fractals looks very interesting (personally I am not getting my knickers in a twist about Ascendant gear as I do not care for min/maxing) and I think that allowing lvl 80 players to get on-level drops in lower level zones is a great idea and will hopefully spread the population out a bit.
On the other hand I am most disappointed about how we were promised sweeping class balance changes in this patch, promises that have clearly not been delivered on.
My biggest disappointment is concerning the ranger class, which ANet have acknowledged as being one of the classes most in need of some love. Jon Peters promised us “quality of life” changes and “significant ranger improvements” in this patch but instead we receive some tooltip/icon fixes and buffs to some of our underwater skills, while the major issues with our pets not being able to hit non-stationary targets, our lackluster traits and utility skills, etc, go unfixed – once again we are asked to have patience, but there is a limit to the number of times that this can be said before people just give up.
Wow, what a kick in the stomach!
The 16 items of ‘quality of life’ changes and ‘significant ranger improvements’ we were promised turned out to be a bunch of tooltip and icon updates and minor buffs to some skills and traits that hardly anyone uses (3 buffs wasted on underwater skills??). Very disappointed.
We all understand that you are working very hard Jon, but we do not appreciate being lied to.
Back to levelling my elementalist I guess.
I expect the infusions will only be able to be used in the dungeon, and will allow players to get slightly further in than they would do otherwise for their level of skill. Personally this does not bother me, and it gives people who want a treadmill something to keep them going.
I find the male humanoid characters to be far too androgynous for my liking – if I am going to have to choose an effeminate avatar I may as well go all the wall.
Norns are the exception of course, but I gave up on my Norn necro because his large height coupled with having the same run speed as other races always makes getting anywhere feel soooo slooow, and also makes the environment feel unrealistic and somehow cartoony in its scale.
When I get round to creating a Charr or Asura character I will almost certainly choose male characters as they just seem to fit better with their race’s styles.
I would like to see something done with the shortbow skills. Anet have stated that they are trying to discourage auto-attack spam with this weapon, but all the other attacks bar the number-2 poison attack (which seems a bit weak to me) are extremely situational:
- the number 3 ‘jump-back and gain vigour’ skill I never use because the boon duration is too short and always ends up flinging me either back into the enemy when running away.
- the number 4 cripple is only useful if getting chased by mobs or for slowing down enemies in pvp.
- the number 5 stun is ridiculously short so again is not worth bothering with apart from as an interrupt on particularly damaging attack if I manage to time it extremely well (has not happened yet).
So for this weapon we have really only 1 attack that can be included in a meaningful rotation. Typically I swap to axe/warhorn for which all of the skills are useful in pretty much all situations.
I never had a problem with flanking in PvE because my pet was always able to hold aggro, at least with single targets. That was, until I got to Orr, where mobs completely ignore my pets and run at light speed towards me- now i’m lucky if I can keep 2 stacks of bleed up.
In WvW I very rarely get to apply any bleeds as flanking the zerg is suicide. The only exceptions are those rare occasions when fighting a small group, or when my enemy is running away.
Due to the above I have to agree that the positional requirement should be removed.
Thanks very much for the update – I am greatly relieved that Anet recognise that there are areas for the ranger that need to be improved and that they do not hate us!
I too would appreciate something from the devs regarding the state of the ranger.
In my opinion the main problem is the instagib aoe move the boss randomly drops on you. One second I’m at full health fighting and the next splat dead without even a res timer. It has totally put me off repeating this event.
I’m not sure what reason there is for doing dungeons more than once; grinding for months for a cosmetic upgrade does not seem interesting to me.
The problem I see is that the kind of goad that other games provide to make people want to keep doing dungeons, that of slowly but surely increasing the power of your character, is in direct opposition to Anet’s stated game design goals of having all content accessible to players with enough skill.
Anet have said they have something in the works to make dungeons more worthwhile, but due to the above I doubt this will be more than making more exotic weapons with only cosmetic differences, or perhaps giving people titles.
Good stuff – a well formatted and thorough summary of the major faults of our class. I hope that the developers see this post.
I just had it happen in WvW enemy borderlands. Twice. Very annoying considering the queues.
When playing in Blackgate Borderlands (I’m on Tarnished Coast), when I leave our spawn I encounter a loading screen that once completed teleports me outside the spawn. If I later go back to spawn and try to leave I get stuck on the loading screen and have to Alt+F4. This has happened twice now.
I think the ranger needs work because none of its highly situational weapons are good at their assigned roles.
Take for example the longbow – this is supposed to be a long range weapon, yet when used at long range in PvP 90% of the arrows miss a non-stationary target, many more are obstructed, the fire rate is so slow that one can only get off a few shots before either they go out of range or come so close as to reduce the damage to effectively zero.
Shortbow is better but the bleeds are virtually useless in anything other than 1v1 pvp or surprise attacks because of the difficulty in flanking the enemy, the number 2 poison skill is absolutely terrible, and the stun skill on 4 is so short that its only use is to interrupt channeled attacks.
Axe is ok, but rangers are too squishy to survive long at close enough range to a group enemy players, so its multi-target ability is wasted.
Melee weapons… good luck going melee in WvW as a ranger.
Can’t say I’m impressed by how this has been handled. I find it utterly unconvincing that ANet somehow overlooked the fact that reducing the fire rate on a weapon equates to a damage nerf. And then rather than apologising we get an unrepentant response basically telling us ‘tough luck’.
I am not a fanboy, and I do admit that the game has faults. That being said, the author of this article appears to be completely stuck in the mindset that the game has to hold your hand and and lead you from task to task like a child. When there are no dynamic events or quest hearts immediately visible he calls it a ‘content drought’, whereas in fact there are tons and tons of things sitting there waiting for him if he bothered to go look.
I used to feel the same way when I was running through empty lvl 25 zones complaining that there were no DEs on my map. Then I started talking to every named NPC I come across, and following every moving NPC, and lo and behold I end up finding chain after chain of quests, all of which are far far more interesting than the heart quests.
I guess it is just going to take time for people to lose the bad habits of the past.
For WvW I just equip axe/warhorn in when I need to move around in a hurry and then equip longbow when I get to where I need to be.
Please please let this be just a bug and not a stealth nerf destroying one of our best skills!
In Warhammer Online certain heavy armour classes could put up a block skill that protected people in an arc behind you and absorbed a lot of damage. This was an awesome way to break up the zerg and immensely satisfying to do. This opened up so many great tactics for dealing with zergs. I wish they would implement something like this in GW2.
I guess the Guardian’s shield does something like this but the duration is too short and the amount of allies protected too small to be really effective. Shame.
If Nietzsche is right about humanity, I think we all have bigger things to worry about than whether or not our favourite MMOs succeed or fail :P
QFT. The OP’s recounting of Nietzsche’s philosophy suggests a very cynical view of humanity. Although I agree that many people do take great satisfaction in the basic animal drive to show that they are better than someone else, many like myself find such behaviour rather pathetic. I prefer working with others to achieve goals, and while I do get satisfaction from working towards a more powerful character, I do it for personal enjoyment rather than for showing off to others. For the same reason I laugh at people who waste their money on trendy fashion items or showy cars.
Edit: I should add that I did enjoy reading the paper and I hope the OP gets a good grade!
(edited by Brannoncyll.1978)
I dabble in the trading game and enjoy it very much. It seems to me that those people complaining are taking it too personally.
So what if a smart trader is manipulating the market on a particular good? If you can recognise it happening you can take advantage of it, or if you don’t like the risk just trade in another commodity. So what if people undercut you by 1c? If this prevents your item from selling then your price was just too high in the first place. If not just wait it out – with a market this size the fluctuations happen very quickly.
I see this all the time and it is killing WvW for me. This issue deserves a response from Anet.
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Ideally you would defend the walls to keep the attackers far enough away that they cannot easily attack the gate without ranged siege equipment. Sallies from the other exits can then charge out and take out their siege.
With smaller attacking groups, ranged defenders on the wall can provide enough dps to discourage attackers from lingering too long near the gate and prevent them from moving in with rams.
With larger groups the only thing you can do is turtle up inside the keep and pray that they are dumb enough to zerg through the gate into your AOE grinder. This is rather lame in my opinion.
I play ranger.
Longbow is pretty good for attacking keeps but that is the only place it shines. The arrows fly too slowly in open-ground combat, making them easily dodged, and it fires too slowly such that you can only get one or two shots off before the opponent rolls out of range. Barrage is awesome though.
Shortbow out-performs the longbow in almost every other situation.
Unfortunately piling on siege behind a choke point is currently the only viable way of defending a keep against a large attacking force. If you defend from the walls you get hammered down in seconds by multiple stacked AOE attacks because all the defenders are packed together on the wall near the gate making them easy prey. Walls should give a defensive advantage to the defender, not an advantage to the attacker!
Easier AOE may help things slightly, but it doesn’t solve the problem of the attackers being spread out while the defenders are concentrated together on the walls near the gate.
Certainly it is possible to get around this issue using good tactics. This should be applauded. However it seems clear that it was intended that we defend a keep from the walls, and as it stands this is difficult verging on impossible. I’m not saying that we should all just throw in the towel, I was just hoping to spark a discussion as to whether we should be able to put up an adequate defence from the walls.
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