Guild Wars 2

Probably the weakest of all necro weapon options is the focus. It’s not good for PvE and it’s lackluster in PvP. One may only use it in PvP if they are going with both axe and dagger main hands on a power build which is not very popular either.

The way I understand it, this weapon is the long range off hand solution for necro. Even though spinal shivers works well at slowing down escaping enemies from 1200 range, the cast time of this skill, makes it very difficult to effectively achieve this goal. Also, Reaper’s Touch is not very effective at long range.

This weapon is in need of being looked at.
Some suggestions can include:
Spinal Shivers:

• Lower cast time
• Add secondary mechanic similar to that of unholy feast. If a boons is removed, send out an explosion that would damage and chill nearby enemies.

Reaper’s Touch

• Even though this skill has a range of 1200, it works poorly at long range because it has a hard time hitting the intended enemy. One solution would be to increase the projectile speed or improve its tracking.

Regon Phoenix.8215:

to put unbalanced new elites into pvp right now?

Lets ignore that some classes are still brokenly OP, why the hell would someone think it is a good idea to allow even more broken specs play in pvp games and ruin every single game?
From new warrior 2-hitting everyone to death, to EVEN MORE BROKEN NEW POWER MESMER 0.kittenting everyone to death.

I get that devs need testing and figure out how to change these elites to make them balanced, but why everyone else have to suffer for it?

Shouldn’t demo characters play in their own separate games?

I understand your frustration, but putting the new elites within the context of the current meta is the best way to detect balance issues. It would be harder to do so in an isolated environment. I would pretty much rather play against the new broken specs for 2 days and instead hope to see a slightly better balance at release, than to just play in this broken environment for months after release.

The problem with the original set of icons was that they were hardly distinguishable. They revamped them and the result was much better. Easily recognizable and artistically good too. The new ones, while easily recognizable, they were bland and boring and not even a good representative of their respective division title (platinum being purple hardly works).
Although the good news is that they have already reverted them today.

jessiejay.3625:

There are classes. Then there is cancer. Not even chemo can vs this cancer. I am happy that I finished The Ascension and obtained the Ardent skins I wanted. Got the titles and rank desired. Other than that, I cannot stand burst dmg variation as such. This is NOT a common occurrence.

As much as the damage appeared in this screenshot looks ridiculous, but I’m afraid generally there’s just as much healing or damage mitigation cancer in this game as there is burst cancer!
When you see that in some situations 2 people have to spend an entire 2 minutes to kill one supposedly tanky opponent, at times I can’t help but accept that some builds should exist that can deal this much damage in a 2 second burst.
The huge difference between mins and maxes in gw2 is probably one of the reasons this game is so hard to balance. Lower the overall damage and you give rise to sluggish and boring fights of attrition. Increase it, and encounters get resolved more with luck than actual fighting skills.

Of all the professions, I didn’t expect to see someone complaining about the warrior. Maybe necromancers aren’t that good to 1v1 a warrior (although that’s not been my observation so far and I’ve only played unorthodox necro builds this entire season), but generally, no build can 1v1 everything right now. They all have strengths and weaknesses.
Necros can bring a wide variety of builds to the table in this season although they all share the same inherent problem of being the primary focus of the enemy team and having to carrty out their job under very high pressure.
Necro has been the primary target in PvP for a while, not because they are weak, but because they are devastating if left unchecked. Don’t dwell on 1v1s that you may or may not win with a necro (although different necro builds can handle different classes in 1v1 situations), but play to your strengths and certainly the strengths of your team.

Sigmoid.7082:

Stand The Wall.6987:

blood magic is possibly the worst traitline out of all professions.

Its actually not that bad.

It’s actually pretty good for the right build (I use it myself). It all comes back to your play style and how you can synergize it with the rest of your build.

Our mission in ESP is to create a fun, friendly, and helpful environment in which players of all skill levels can enjoy their time in the game along side their guild, regardless of the content they are interested in. Probably the most important factor in our longevity has been our dedication to this goal.
We are a PvX guild and we dabble in a diverse set of contents. Players who want to try out different sorts of contents in a laid back environment or want to find guild mates who can help them deal with a specific challenge without the fear of being called a noob and such, will find ESP an ideal home. That said, we offer many options for players who want to take on the more challenging contents the game has to offer, including Raids, high level Fractals, PvP and WvW.

Interested? Give us a message or visit us at www.espguild.com

So if you are wondering if ESP is the right guild for you, then here are some of the factors that can help you decide:

• You want a stable guild with a great past and a great future. Yes we’ve been going strong for over a decade and counting!
• You are a laid-back gamer who sees the game as a means of having fun.
• You are a competitive gamer who takes the game seriously and is looking for serious partners to share their gaming experience with, but understands and respects the fact that not all players are hardcore gamers!
• You like to socialize with people and get to know them.
• You like to stick with your guild through most types of content the game offers (PvE, PvP, WvW, Raids, etc.)
• You want to enjoy the perks of being in an organized guild that delves into many contents and have numerous methods of interaction at its disposal (active guild chat, forums, voice, social media groups, etc.)
• You like platypi, crumpets, and missing pants!

If any of the above statements applies to you, then congratulations! I believe you will like it in ESP.
To know more about us, or about how to apply, simply visit http://www.espguild.com

I zisagree wiv the OP. I for eczample is so good. Very good. VEry better than this game. I can 1v6 every game and win all my fightz, but my team is alway sooooooo bad I am stuk in bronze! But I shud be in legendery.

PvP is *dying!!

This reminds me of the times when I get immobilized in the air and my character gets stuck in a falling down animation while he’s on the ground.
These issues while very rare, they can sometimes be annoying and at the same time, funny.
I’ve had several instances when I was bounced up in the air by pulls and knock backs, but that altitude you got there, that was something quite unique! lol

I have over 6000 sPvP matches under my belt, have reached the dragon rank around 200 times. Despite my dedication to PvP, I’ve considered myself a laid back player.

I’m moving up and down the gold division this season and I really don’t understand why the ladder works the way it does right now.
But that’s not my problem with the current season. I always liked PvP as a team effort and it was always more fun when you were playing with friends. Unfortunately, this season has been really terrible for that.
People might argue that the quality of PvP has gotten better this season, but I really haven’t been able to feel something like that. I always had a win rate of a little over 50%, I still have the same. I always had good matches, close matches, and terrible matches, and I still have them this season. I always had great random team mates and terrible ones, and I still get them this season.
All in all, I don’t really get how is the “higher quality” being measured, but even if there is any increase in quality, it has come with an incomparably big sacrifice.

By what measure do people say that the overall quality of pvp have increased, I don’t know. There’s still the same level of whining about match making. Although I do believe the match making has gotten better, but the cost of making it happen has been too great. Anet has always advertised this game as a social community with guilds in mind, but what they’ve done to introduce a small measure of eSports into PvP, has gone in the exact opposite direction of their own philosophy.
They did specifically two things to ruin it:
1. Removed the ability to queue as teams.
2. In team queues (in this case 2) with people who are placed in different divisions, the person in the higher division is hurt because of the current ladder system.

I have over 150 ranked matches this season and my points gained and lost have been very inconsistent.
Just today, I lost a total of 44 points in two games that I lost and just 4 points for a game that I won! Maybe after this many games in the gold division, maintaining more wins than losses, just now the game figured out that maybe I should be playing in bronze, not gold!
If after this many matches, the game still is “unsure” about where I should be, then kudos to Anet!

As I have been slowly crawling my way up in the gold division by maintaining a higher than 55% win rate, my experience has been very random, inconsistent, and very frustrating. I have gotten lots of points in matches that I had my dead corpse carried by team players, and have lost lots of points in matches that we’ve lost despite my exceptional performance. A player’s climb or descend in the ladder doesn’t seem to be based on your performance. One’s placement in the league doesn’t seem to make much sense either as there doesn’t seem to be a stark skill level difference between bronze and gold players. You can see equally bad and good players in every division.

For the more laid back pvp groups like ours with diverse skill levels, the problem started a couple of leagues ago, when we could no longer play with a full group of our guild-mates and buddies because if we did, we would have forced ruby/diamond players down their throats, which killed the incentive for players of different skill levels to group up together. Yeah, we could play unranked, but most league players think of it as a waste of time.
This season, they went outright mad with this restriction.
However, I don’t blame Anet. They did put up a poll after all, and the only people to blame is the pvp community itself who voted for a duo queue restriction and who kept complaining about losing against a full group once in a while.

Based on your argument, I wouldn’t like to slot in a healing skill just to be rendered pointless because of the direct damage that may follow!

First, the ladder section described in the link you provided has inaccurate information. It mentions “Even if a comeback may not seem possible, you can still be rewarded for continuing to try your very best” where we all know the current system doesn’t do that. It doesn’t care about the point difference of your loss or win. It sounds more like the system in place in the very first pvp league.

Second, I’m not basing what I said on one match, but a whole trend, many people and I have witnessed in this league. It’s not “sometimes”, but every time I duo with someone lower than myself or someone higher than myself, I see the results I described above.

I’m not gonna argue about this league’s match making, nor am I gonna argue about the Glicko system, but this system has supposedly been in place for over two years in GW2 but we all know that they have messed around with both the match making and the ladder almost every season. It’s easy to conclude that the exact implementation of the system isn’t the same as what you may deduce from reading a bunch of mathematical formulas in the Glicko system (I’m assuming you really have read those).
But what I’m specifically pointing out in this thread, if you haven’t figured it out yet, is the points you gain or lose when you’re fighting matches where there are people with uneven ratings involved. I’m specifically asking why the hell did I lose 44 points in two matches and got only 4 with a win, when playing with my bronze buddy as a gold division player who has a win rate of above 55%? And why did he gain 20 points the same match that I got only 4? And it has been the same trend (or opposite) for me every time I play along with someone of a different division.

[rage]
The formula for advancing and dropping in the league is ridiculous.
Either that, or the placement of the players in divisions is ridiculous.
Or maybe both
[/rage]

The way it seems to me, the game computes the average or total ranking points of each team and compares it to your personal score, rather than the average of your team vs that of the enemy.
Say, when two people of different divisions (say gold and bronze) fight on the same team, if they win, the person with the higher rank gains less rank points than that of the bronze rank.
This might seem fair at first (and it seems so to Anet devs), but PvP is a 5v5 game not 1v1.

Example 1: If you are a gold who has happened to get in the same team as a bunch of bronze players, and the enemy team also has one gold player and the rest are bronze, does it make sense that the gold person should lose 20 points because the game reasons that the enemy team sucked? Why? Because the game forgets that your team also sucked just as much. The game doesn’t understand that it should distribute points based on the skill difference of the team not the individual players.

Example 2: If you are gold and group up with a legendary, and happen to enter into a match where the rest of your team is all legendary, and happen to fight a team of platinums (and don’t tell me this doesn’t happen in this match making system), when you win, the game, as stupid as it seems to be, gives you a ton of points, because you are gold against plats. But hello! You are fighting with legendaries against platinums!

That 70% was just an estimated figure. Although 2 out of 3 game is 66% anyway and not very different.
I was still not moving upward when my win rating was close to 60%. Besides, I should expect to be fighting easier matches if I go down the ladder, or harder enemies when I team up with a person in platinum. That so far hasn’t been the case.

So far, I haven’t figured out the logic that the game uses to determine how much rating points should it deduce from players when they lose or give them when they win.
My assumption has always been that it compares the average or total rating of my team against the enemy’s and it calculates the final points subtracted from, or added to each team based on the difference of the initial total/average ratings.

However it seems to me that I usually lose more points when I lose than gain them when I win (I’m at the bottom tier of the gold division). Asking some other players, most of them seem to report something similar.
It seems to me, that advancing up the ladder is almost impossible for me unless I have a win rate of above 70% based on the amount of points I lose and gain.

Any ideas.

Skyhammer is bad because I say so.
It’s also bad because assassin’s signet used to be overpowered.
It’s also bad because I think jump pads are PvE crap.

Maybe I’m really bad at English, but to me, that pretty much sums up the logic in the OP.

I have a similar problem. When I win, it’s around 9-12 MMR points, but when I lose, it’s between 13 up to 20 points reduction! And as a result, with win rate of above 50%, I haven’t been progressing in the ladder at all, and yet I see people above me in the ladder that have a much lower game count and win rate than myself.
In normal situations, I should be advancing up the ladder with an almost 60% win rate, not staying put!

Oh yes please, put capricorn to another queue!
Because I don’t want to play that stupid map again! I want to play unranked arena, not “test my poorly designed stupid map for me” arena!

Spectral Walk should have become 40 seconds, not 50!

I have an issue when I play the game on my laptop which has a 4x display with a native resolution of 3840×2160. My desktop resolution is set to its maximum.
If I play the game on full screen mode (mainly 1920×1080), my game gets stuck on loading screens and stays that way unless I ctrl+alt+delete out of the game and alt tab back, in which case some of the graphics (such as water surfaces) are distorted.
When I play GW2 on windowed full screen, I no longer have the above issue, but every interface item looks so small and quite unreadable (including the minimap and chat) even when I set the interface size to the largest available option.

My graphics card is GeForce GTX 960M with the latest driver. Windows 10 x64.
The way I see it, either having a way to fixing the graphics issue, or a way to increase the interface size past the game’s available options could fix my problem.

Any help would be appreciated.

Guild Wars 1 PvP had no answer. I don’t know why some people consider GW1 monk arena and cheese arena… errm, I mean random arena and team arena to have had superior mechanics compared to GW2 PvP. Maybe it’s nostalgia, or maybe they were at the more fortunate end of things, or maybe they just don’t remember very well.

First, there were no way for a team of 2 or 3 to participate in any structured PvP worth mentioning unless they looked for pugs, played one match, disbanded, looked for more pugs, played another, disbanded, and rinse and repeat. Random Arena, you sometimes had to lose several matches in a row until you either quit out of frustration, or ended up in a team worthy of getting 10 win streaks!

Second, PvP is not just for the “gud”! The self-proclaimed pros and the like. GW1’s PvP certainly offered very little for the more laid back and not-so-gud. FA and JQ? They were jokes. GW2 match making, as flawed as it is, offers much more for that category of players.

The only PvP in GW1 that I miss, was GvG.

In GW2, Anet did separate solo and team PvP at some point. It certainly didn’t work very well.

I kinda like the idea of a daily mission activation with the guild having to complete a certain goal within 24 hours since activation.
OR… don’t count the stupid wait times.

@BurrTheKing
Thanks, that really improved my damage output without relying on might from allies.
This build is, as people mentioned, really not 1v1 material though as you will die if people just so much as sneeze at you and a 4 second invulnerability on a 60 seconds cooldown isn’t gonna help in that regard.

And yes, testing this build, I managed to get some nasty damage and 1 shots, but then I lost every 1v1 I encountered.

I was playing on my dragonhunter trapper in ranked arena the other day, and the enemy team had a gun flame warrior that could crit me for 11k-15k each time it hit me with gun flame. I used the marauder amulet.
But when I play my own gun flame warrior, I can never crit anyone above 8k (9k at most). Usually I crit for around 5k (lower than the amount of damage I can dish out with Volley). I keep wondering what I’m missing here. I use a berserker amulet on this guy.

I’m sure the team with the scrapper won!

The biggest problem I have been facing this season (and the end of last season) was the change they made to how matchmaking works for groups across different divisions. I understand Anet probably did what they did to prevent abuse, but what has happened in non-hardcore guilds that PvP together regardless of skill level is that the result is always a loss. If one ruby player is in the team, all of our ambers also have to face rubies! This gives groups like us a clear disadvantage against 5 rubies solo queuing (yeah you heard that right). It’s sad that I get most of my wins when I play solo. This new matchmaking has killed our incentive to play for fun and play as a group.

Oh and don’t freaking tell me to go play unranked! If the legendary achievements didn’t require Ranked play, I would kiss it good night in a blink.

Is this an upcoming change? Where can I read about it?

kitten , I think I found it, There’s a cave near the crossroad to the north with bouncing mushrooms.

I’ve reached a point in the story that requires me to get to an area east of Auric Basin. The quest log says (POSSIBLE SPOILER AHEAD):
The Predator’s Path:
Find a way to reunite with your team.
Find Taimi’s first message.

But I have no idea how to get to that area (shown in the picture).
BTW, I already have glider updraft mastered.

Is there a way to increase the number of guild PvP teams that a guild can have at the same time?
The initial number of guild teams is 10.

I don’t know if focus really needs this much improvement, but if #4 really doesn’t bounce at max range, then it’s a problem that has to be fixed. I hardly ever use #4 if the enemy is too far. I just cast #5 to slow them down and close the gap, then #4 works perfectly, so I haven’t really noticed the bug.

I didn’t say that it should finish the guy with 1 executioner’s scythe hit. I said that if you kill (not hit) a downed guy with executioner’s scythe, some special animation play to make it look more awesome!
Also, I don’t agree that Executioner’s Scythe should automatically stomp in any situation. The skill is powerful enough already. It doesn’t need added functionality.

It’s already powerful enough. If it plays a special finishing animation when you kill a downed guy with it though, it would be aesthetically pleasing.

Doesn’t this happen when you weapon swap too?

• Well of Blood: This is already a good enough skill. I don’t know what more should be done for it. The field could be looked at though.

• Corrosive Poison Cloud: This has already been improved and master of corruption makes it a very good skill. But for some reason, it’s underused. Blocking projectiles as some people have suggested doesn’t fit with either the skill or necro in general. If they want to boost that, they could add some vulnerability on top of it, add life force for the necro, or immunity to poison for allies. Each of these can make this skill OP in the right build though. Or maybe corruption builds need improvement?

• Spectral Grasp: This skill only needs to be more reliable. It already gives a lot of life force and a very long chill on top of its main functionality. The pull gets bugged out quite often for me though.

First of all, Reaper is not fully balanced yet. The BWE2 version of the Reaper might not make it into the final release. There would be improvements, but I expect there to also be some changes to the damage outputs too.
There is however the fact that when you go reaper, all you lose from the base necro is its death shroud and the inability to combine 3 core traits in the same build. Even if they improve core trait lines or skills, the reaper still has access to all of them. So the only way they can boost the base necro without making the reaper even more powerful is by either improving base death shroud or emphasizing on the inherent reaper weakness, that is ranged damage.
To be fair though, as someone who usually plays a variety of necro builds in PvP, I’m sure I’m going to play both base and reaper. There are simply builds that I like running that would not have good synergy with the reaper trait line or the reaper shroud.
So while the reaper provides the necro a lot of the things that it was lacking, it simply can’t cover all the roles of the base necro.

messiah.1908:

i think necro in general are not build for 1v1. sure you can build it but the build wont be good in group play

Oh you have no idea!
There are some high survivability + average damage + debilitating conditions necro builds out there that are both good in team fights and 1v1. Of course, they are not as good as DD eles

To be honest, the Reaper is really powerful in reaper’s shroud right now specially if you combine it with dhuumfire on a celestial build, now that it has better life force management, a more reliable death’s charge and a better greatsword to back it up.
I’m not going to judge it as OP, cause I haven’t had much time to try it out extensively in the recent BWE, but Robert Gee has certainly improved the Reaper quite a lot.

Generally though, as others have mentioned, I would expect reaper’s best counter to be ranged attacks because Reaper has been specifically designed for melee.

I can’t say I’m unhappy to hear that even though I have close to two stacks of tomes.
But I didn’t expect experience boosters to not affect mastery leveling either.

Will it be possible to level up masteries (not unlocking them) using Tomes of Knowledge?
If so, will it fully level up one tier?

Xillllix.3485:

Burjis.3087:

Yeah DD ele with cantrips are absolutely balanced.

Yes it is, thank you for your feedback, but elementalists already knew that.

Yes, you’d want to think that way.

Yeah DD ele with cantrips are absolutely balanced. Even underpowered I would say!
Just buff them already. They don’t have enough mobility, survivability or damage. They don’t have enough CCs. They have limited access to boons and condition removals and can barely ever heal themselves during a fight.
Just buff them already!

Reaper’s Shroud is awesome, but greatsword is really terrible. In PvP, Dagger+Warhorn blows away the greatsword.
You are all Weaklings should NOT have a cast time! It’s terrible for a stun breaker.

Some builds work good until you face a DD ele! You can pretty much guess the rest of the story.

I won’t call that a design flaw. It would be a design flaw if the specialization doesn’t come with some sort of disadvantage to compensate what you’re getting.

Every class is wanted in GW2’s PvP as well. Sometimes, some builds take the helm though.