Guild Wars 2

Whenever anyone raises this issue the same tired old responses about dodging, stability and situational awareness always get wheeled out.

But it’s not as simple as that because far too many mobs in the game have knockdowns which cannot be dodged, interupted, predicted, observed or avoided.

Yes there are some mobs which do telegraph their knockdown. But there are lots which don’t. Some mobs knock you down without any obvious signal or animation. Some knock you down at the start of the animation, not at the end (try dodging that). Some knock you down even if you move behind the mob (situational awareness, pah).

Also, lots of mobs have ‘undocumented’ (i.e. not mentioned on the tooltip) knockdowns which seem to often happen instantly and without warning. Many mobs have knockdowns / knockbacks which are inappropriate for the mob type and leave you scratching your head and asking “how”.

In short, knockdown / knockback is over-used in this game and seems to be liberally thrown into the game in an artificial attempt to make the gameplay more ‘challenging’ when in reality all it does is make the gameplay more tedious. Knockdown and causing players to lose control of their characters should be something which is done for good reason, not as a constantly reoccuring game mechanic.

gadenp.7586:

So I would like to ask:
1. Who here, still come to forums but play the game much less?
2. When did you start playing less?
3. Why / What caused the decline in time spent?

1. I still visit the forums but less frequently than before. I rarely bother to post now because too many threads go ‘missing in action’, as I suspect this one probably will if what it contains doesn’t have sufficient amounts of cheerleading.

2. The moment they announced the details of the Lost Shores and the new vertical progression system. Up until then I was playing regularly and enjoying it (apart from WvW which lags too much to be enjoyable).

3. I’ve no interest in a gear treadmill in GW2. I’ve read the re-assurances but I don’t trust anything the devs now say given how they’ve already gone back on their word in such a massive way. Fool me once etc. If I want to play a vertical progression game I’ll play one of several other titles that does it better. That’s not what I wanted or expected from GW2 which originally set itself apart but now it just wants to be another clone forcing players onto a treadmill to be milked. No thanks.

I’m not going to be seeking a refund – with several hundred hours played I got my money’s worth. But I’m unlikely to do more than dabble in the future and I won’t be spending any money in the cash shop or on expansions for as long as the game contains any kind of treadmill.

GregT.4702:

IomegadriveOne.5291:

“Do you believe players should be immensely rewarded for being able to do the one time event?”.

This was not a relevant question to me. Players get rewarded for doing special things. Whether you’re in a high end guild with a regular dungeon schedule, or just looking to see the special events, excelling at an MMO means sometimes you have to show up at inconvenient times. And it’s appropriate that if you show up, there should be rewards. The two definining characteristics of an MMO are that it’s persistent and it’s social; both persistence and social imply that it doesn’t run to what might happen to be your ideal schedule. You deliberately asked for that when you chose to play an MMO instead of some other style of game.

Many single player games have great save-state editors where you can dispense yourself whatever rewards you feel you deserve at a time convenient to you. This may be the experience you’re looking for – have you tried them?

In your rush for a smug, self-satisfied response you seem to have totally misunderstood the term persistent when it comes to gaming. If the event were persistent then we would all be able to enjoy it at a later date, not just those who were lucky enough to be available at the time. I think the word you are after in this context is transient.

Giving away items of huge worth for one-time events is seriously bad game administration that can only drive a wedge between players. All the time limited events in the game so far have seen a minoroty of lucky players getting rich, everyone else getting very little. It’s a lame way to run a game and personally I’ve little interest in playing a lottery.

Donkeys? More like Sheeple it seems.

Well, ToA definitely killed Daoc. Many blame WoW but there was a whole year of ToA before WoW came along, all WoW did was deliver the killing blow to an already mortally wounded target.

I don’t see a direct parallel with Daoc’s demise and GW2 though, at least not yet. That’s not to say I agree with Ascended gear being put into GW2, I’m not in favour. But I don’t see it quite as mortally wounding as ToA was for Daoc.

William Fairfield.1428:

There is also a new MgF/Vit/Tuf in the Fractals. It’s called Wayfarer.

Talk about missing the point of the OP entirely.

The point is, in a multiplayer setting, Magic Find is a selfish and unwelcome mechanic. It has no place in a multiplayer game where teamwork is a large part of the gameplay, be it dynamic events in the open world or dungeons.

Magic Find should be restricted to food and guild buffs only and totally removed from gear. How anyone ever thought MF on gear was a good design decision completely baffles me.

Yet another patch full of Engineer nerfs and no substantial fixes to the many problems this class has. Unbelievable really to keep hammering an underplayed and difficult to master class like Engineer while constantly buffing an easymode class like Warrior. Just makes me shake my head in disbelief really.

Then there’s the lack of any WvW fixes, have you given up on this aspect of the game? Seems so.

And of course there’s the wonderful shiny new gear treadmill. The less said about that the better, so I’ll just say “no thanks”.

Artorous.8573:

I love how people think.

People complain about Bots > ANet bans bots > prices of items on the TP increase in price > Players assume price increase is due to nerfed drop rate.

I think you’ve partly missed the point. The OP and others have observed that the drop rate itself seems to be lower, from personal experience, which is of course only subjective.

There’s two factors at work here. Yes, the war on bots is having a knock-on effect on TP prices across a whole range of items. But the drop rate of unidentified dyes also seems to have fallen as many are reporting from their daily playing sessions.

The drop rate defnitely seems like it is down on what is was before the changes. I don’t think the chance to obtain a rare dye from an unidentified dye has changed, but the drop rate of undentified dyes seems to have gone down.

Of course, this is just a subjective observation, RNG makes it hard to be sure. I can only go by the average drop rate per session that I used to get and what I see now. I play in a variety of zones and at different level ranges on various alts and across the board I’m seeing less dyes drop.

Razamis.1062:

If you are dropping $50/month into this game when it isn’t needed, perhaps you should give some of that wasted money to charity.

Well indrectly there are. The players who are dropping $50+ a month into the gem store are helping the rest of us to play subscription free, so it’s a form of charity. As long as it’s just ‘pay for fluff’ rather than ‘pay to win’ we should all be pleased they are.

Personally I will never spend real money on gems. I have bought some gems with gold, when the exchange rate was more favourable than it is now, to buy an extra bank and character slot, but won’t again unless the exhange rate improves.

The worst thing you can hear during a personal story quest is Traherane telling you “Whatever you decide, I’m going with you.”. Arghhh, go away!

Trahearne is totally lifeless and devoid of personality. It sounds like the actor is just reading the lines out and not engaging fully with them, probably because the script was so poor he felt embarassed saying the lines. Pretty much every other character in the game has better voice acting. For such a central character this just isn’t good enough and I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t bring myself to complete the personal story on my alts because of it.

Can sum my reaction up in one word – betrayal.

I don’t want to be content gated by treadmills. Been there, done that in other games and got the t-shirt. Had enough of it. GW2 sold itself as being different, the devs made very loud noises at launch about how there were no treadmills and how progression was horizontal. This felt like a breath of fresh air, it meant I could work towards the gear I wanted at my own pace and not need to worry about feeling left behind or things I have achieved being rapidly outmoded. And yet we’re barely 3 months in and the goalposts have already moved.

If this was just a dungeon thing I wouldn’t care so much. But it is going to have an impact on WvW and soon as you mix a gear treadmill with WvW, well it should be obvious where that leads and the devs should be ashamed to have let it happen.

Well I won’t be joining all the hamsters on the treadmill, good luck to those who think this will be fun, you’re going to need it.

Calae.1738

The last thing anyone wants is for this game to be so easy that you’ll fall asleep playing after 2 minutes.

The last thing anyone wants is for the game to be so annoying you’d rather log out and do something else. Which is how Orr makes me feel.

Orr is not particularly difficult, but it is tedious because the difficulty is achieved through artificially pumping everything up and overtuning the zone, rather than any genuinely challenging game mechanics.

Agemnon.4608:

Some mobs do (for example, when you see a purple light at the end of the risen farmer’s shovel you better dodge) though in many cases they don’t.

Yeah I forgot to include the word “some”. Many don’t though. I’ve been trying to bugrep all the mobs that don’t telegraph knockdowns/knockbacks properly, or do the knockdown at the start of the animation not the end, or do it without any animation or visual / audible clue whatsoever. I was surprised to find there were so many, especially for a game whose devs trumpet how important “situational awareness” is.

Caedmon.6798:

That’s your opinion,i already stated a number of times..that i do find this appealing and imo the areas that were grey,should have been black in the first place.Thats what i was aiming for btw..white = true white , black = true black .

Real shadows are not “true black” and real highlights are not “true white”. Nothing we look at in the world around us is like this, everything around us has some form of colour / tone value unless we’re in a cave deep underground with no light source. But if 100% black and white and high saturation is what you are after then fine, this mod certainly achieves that.

Caedmon.6798

@Cernow,actually i find this to be quite the opposite,i find the shadows to be more appealing and alot darker,like shadows should look like.My monitor is properly calibrated btw.

If you find the shadows more appealing to your eyes, that’s fine. I don’t share that taste. But I’m just pointing out you’ve actually lost shadow detail, areas of the image that were previously a shade of grey (or some other colour) are now 100% black. And highlights have suffered in a similar way, going to 100% white.

As for your monitor, is it calibrated with an external device (eg a colorimter)?

In the screen shots you’ve been posting, leaving aside the issue of colour saturation you are losing a lot of dynamic range in the adjusted images. Highlights are blowing and shadow detail has been removed. There’s a big loss of colour information in the mid range . You can tell all of this visually with a properly calibrated monitor. But if you need hard proof, just take your before and after screenshots into Photoshop and compare the Levels histograms.

Caedmon.6798:

Infact they are not oversaturated i toned it down quite a bit,something like this depends from monitor to monitor and what your windows calibration is,or your nvidia settings,vibration,gamma,contrast etc etc.Btw,Guild wars 2 does not use your nvidia video settings when playing fullscreen,so you have to disable this when looking at screenshots or use the windows calibration video settings.

But they are oversaturated. My monitor is calibrated using an external hardware device and the saturation and contrast of your screenshots are very high indeed. Too high for my tastes, and I like saturated colours. But it is a preference thing, each to their own. Something like this is totally subjective and you can’t really use the word “better”, it’s just a case of what you personally prefer.

If you want longer fights, play a Greatsword Mesmer and fight at melee range.

Seriously though, I do agree that fights in MMOs these days are generally over too quickly and I’d like to see a bit more depth, though not necessarily realism.

That said, in GW2 the fast paced combat is just as well. We only have 5 attacks per weapon and often several of those are situational so we end up spamming 2 or 3 attacks per fight. Even with short fights this becomes dull quite quickly, spamming them for a longer fight, urgh no thanks.

I would like to see more interaction, thrust and counterthrust in GW2’s combat. The devs have tried to do this with the dodge mechanic and knockdowns/knockbacks etc. Trouble is, these mechanics are for the most part flaky / buggy – mobs knock you down at the start of the animation, not the end, mobs don’t telegraph their knockdowns so you can’t dodge them, that sort of thing.

As for realistic combat, you compare to films. But films are a total abstraction from reality in the name of entertainment. Real melee combat is rarely glamourous, frequently brutal and desperate and often sickening. Not exactly what most people want from a game.

I play a lot of alts. None are human, most are Asura plus one Norn and one Charr, but he’s been mothballed. I’ve tried to like the Charr but for some reason they just don’t grab me. I deleted my Charr Ranger (due to the armour and animations) and re-rolled him as an Asura. I created a Charr Warrior, but mothballed him and created an Asura Warrior instead who has now superceded the Charr. I’d like a Charr on my character selection screen but I’m running out of classes which I feel they suit.

Character generation – there’s lots of options but it’s hard to get a Charr to look just as you want, they all seem to end up looking similar. I think it’s because the sliders don’t actually do very much and fur colourings and markings aren’t that distinctive.

Armour – medium armour doesn’t look good on a Charr. Light armour is so-so. Even much of the heavy armour doesn’t seem to suit either. The heavy cultural armour does however look awesome, because it was designed specifically for Charr rather than shoehorned on like all the other types.

Animations – this is a matter of taste, but I just don’t like the way they run and fight. Also, jumping puzzles as a Charr is a nightmare compared to smaller races (Norn share this problem).

On the plus side, I think the Charr zones and lore are great and I love the voice acting which is some of the best in the game, second only to the Asura. But is this enough to keep playing a Charr? For me, sadly no because the visual issues outweigh all this.

Actually I’m sick of apologists.

Why do you think they’ve now acknowledged the problem with their lottery and are looking at ways to fix it? Because people complained. Not because a bunch of apologists applauded them.

This has nothing whatsoever about getting something for nothing, most people are more than happy to pay when they feel they are getting value for money. In this case many people felt they didn’t get value for money and made their feelings known.

Holiday events are meant to be fun and inclusive. Which is why turning it into a lottery where a few win big and most get nothing much out of it was a really poor business decision which I hope Anet have learned from for the future.

And yes, we’re all well aware there’s no subscription so they need to make money to keep developing the game for us. But a lottery with very poor odds is not the answer, this can only leave a lot of people feeling sour. There’s plenty of other options which would keep smiles on everyones faces, customers and Anet alike.

The problem with knockdowns / knockbacks is that too many mobs have it (often inappropriately), it’s often poorly implemented (no telegraphing) and there’s no diminishing returns to prevent it being chained on you if you are fighting several mobs with the same knockdown.

It’s all very well for people to say use stability and dodge etc. Stability is too short duration and I’ve fought mobs that wait for it to wear off, then knock you down. As for dodging, fine in principle but too many mobs have knockdowns which are instant and not telegraphed in any way. So they can’t be anticiptated and can’t be dodged. And there’s also mobs who do attempt to telegraph it but the knockdown occurs at the start of the animation, not the end, so again you don’t get a chance to dodge.

There’s also a fair amount of mobs which seem to have an undocumented knockdown (i.e. not mentioned on their nameplate) or where knockdown seems inappropriate for their mob type). When you get knocked down by a big ogre or a bandit with a huge hammer, then you think “fair enough”. But when you get knocked down instantly by something small with no visual clue as to why you just think “ahem, lame”.

In short, it’s an overused and misused mechanic that makes melee less fun than it could be and needs toning down.

I would like to see a fix for the poor fps performance and invisible enemies in WvW. WvW is unplayable for me at the moment. The way WvW maps are designed causes players to zerg, but the game engine cannot handle such a zerg and it turns into a slideshow where all you are doing is chasing (or avoiding) red circles on the floor. Since WvW is the main thing I want to be doing at level 80 endgame it’s killing my enjoyment to the point where I’m considering where else to spend my gaming time.

As for a change, I’d like to see less mobs with knockdowns / knockbacks. When you play melee you find this is a rather overused mechanic that very quickly becomes tedious because too many mobs have knockdowns / knockbacks which cannot be anticiptated, aren’t properly telegraphed (so can’t be dodged) or just plain don’t make sense or are inappropriate for the mob type. This mechanic has been given to far too many mobs in the game, many of them in an undocumented manner (not mentioned in the mob’s description).

Trahearne: “Whatever you decide, I’m going with you.”

<groan>

I agree something needs to be done, but it doesn’t need to have a cost attached. They just make it so you can’t transfer to a server you are currently fighting and also put a lengthy cooldown on transfers, so people don’t just hop around thes servers following the weekly results.

Cinder.4865:

See, the main problem is that you are trying to shunt real world logic off onto a game that, very obviously, operates differently. It doesn’t make for a feasible argument.

If you have reasons as to how the game would be improved in changing the behaviours of these NPCs, share them and let them stand on their own. Please refrain from using your current train of reasoning to justify those changes, though.

My reasoning is no less valid than the saying “its a game, it doesn’t have to obey any rules”. Games are always a balance between fantasy and reality. A game that mirrors reality too closely will likely be dull. So games break a lot of real world rules in order to be fun. But a game world needs to be believable too if the player is to feel immersed in it.

Of course, immersion means different things to different people. I find it immersion breaking to cross the landscape getting pounced on by every wild animal that sees me. So for me the game would be improved by altering the behaviour of these mobs, because I don’t want to fight them and I get irritated by having to kite them all over the place. Personally I’d prefer to be bashing up trolls, centaur and undead than bears, bats and bugs. But I accept that most players probably just don’t care and just see them as another source of xps.

Tarkaroshe.8370:

I’m not sure I agree. I mean, if the armour sets are generally of the same materials, for example: metal with bits of leather, then is it unreasonable to expect the metal bits on both armour sets to look very similar when the same colour dye is applied to both?

Sure the leather will perhaps look different to the metal (which is where my argument differs to the OP’s), but surely the bits of the same general material type should be designed to be very close.

I think you are trying to simplify things too much. It’s not just a case of metal, cloth, leather. Different metals have different properties, as do different textiles or types of leather.

Just a few examples, compare iron to silver, silk to cotton, hard leather to chamois leather. And so on. Every one of these materials will handle dye differently, handle lighting environments differently etc.

So when you talk of an armour piece being “metal with bits of leather” – what type of metal, what type of leather? Perhaps one chest piece has shiny metal and soft leather but another has dull metal and shiny hard leather. Inevitably they will handle dye differently.

Tarkaroshe.8370:

Regardless of how much someone may want to defend the developers design choices on what material textures they used and where they used them, the fact is that some combinations of items of the same armour type result in colour variations even though the same dye is used.

Do you mean same armour type (as in all light armour, all heavy armour etc) or do you mean same armour set?

I think it is fair to expect all armour within a set to react the same way to the same dye. For example, all Gladiator heavy armour, all Noble medium armour, all Masquerade light armour etc. These should share the same texture / material type and respond the same.

But if you start mix and matching sets (eg Gladiator coat with Draconic legs) then you have to expect differences because these sets will have different textures.

tzko.2370:

I do not know how live is in the peaceful place you come from. But in my world bears, lynxes, wolves, panthers, scorpions, spiders, moose, mothers in law, etc rip you a new one if you come into their range.

That is one of the reasons everybody, including you in your OP, calls them wild animals.

Yes of course they will defend their young, their den, their nest et, this is usually why wild animals attack humans. But with the exception of the odd rogue beast they don’t usually attack to eat you or for no good reason. They also don’t usually just stand around in the open in broad daylight waiting to pounce on passers by. In many cases you’ll be hard pressed to actually spot a wolf, a bear, a stag, a boar etc because they will smell you coming a mile off and slink away into the undergrowth.

I’ve got no issues with fighting giant spiders in caves, having to beat off a pack of wolves or bears if I go into their den etc etc. My issue is with moving around in the open and having to constantly kite wild animals that have been placed randomly around the landscape to fill the map up, often on the roads and even directly outside of towns and settlements.

Why does almost every wild animal in this game attack you as if they are some blood crazed beast? Not only does it make travelling around the world tedious, fighting more things than you really need / want to, or else kiting long trains of wild animals behind you. But it also makes no sense. Bears, lynxes, wolves, panthers, bats, scorpions, spiders, fish etc, these are generally not aggressive creatures in reality, they are mostly afraid of people and will avoid them, only fighting if threatened or cornered.

Yes I know this is a fantasy game and giant aggressive wild animals are a staple, but they are also a huge huge cliche. There are all manner of aggressive fantasy mobs to keep the game world dangerous and challenging – grawl, dredge, centaurs, ogres, trolls, elementals, undead etc. You don’t NEED to have the wildlife attacking as well. It’s just unimaginative and creatively barren to do so and it makes the game world tedious to navigate. Please consider making all wild animals neutral unless attacked.

I don’t think it’s the number of skills which is the problem. It’s the fact that out of those 5 skills there are too many which are either situational or on a long cooldown. End result is you spend most of your time spamming auto attack and perhaps one other ability.That’s where the tedium arises. There’s no real rotation for most weapon types and combinations. And where a good flow and rotation did exist (Guardian Greatsword) they nerfed it, altered it and destroyed it.

pandemos.3497:

Aside from the communication issues, assuming you mean “up/down” by z-axis, I’m curious what the issue is… I’ve had a lot of mobs go into walls, and I have to kill them with my pet and AoE. What’s the axis issue?

The issue mostly affects melee and involves the mob bugging out and going invulnerable (and healing back to full health in the process). This tends to happen most often when you are fighting on a different plane to the mob, either above or below (so yes z-axis means up/down in this context). If you aren’t level there’s a good chance it’ll bug out (and a fair chance it’ll happen even if you are level).

Of course this wouldn’t be so bad if the mobs stayed in one place as you could just make sure to keep level with them, but most underwater mobs warp around all over the place in 3D space and bug themselves out. If you play mostly as ranged underwater you won’t notice it as much, but if you try and melee you will.

I was adventuring on my Asura Warrior in Metrica Province and wandered into one of the Skritt caves that was a bit too difficult for my level. I pulled too many Skritt and decided self preservation was the better option and so ran out of the cave with a horde of Skritt chasing me. An Asura NPC stood outside the cave taunted “Ha, you ran from Skritt!”. Oh the shame

Underwater combat is a mess and one of the weakest aspects of the game. The invulnerable mobs, clumsy Z-axis, clunky underwater weapons (many have abilities poorly thought out for underwater use) and so on. Urgh. It’s marginally easier with the ranged weapons, but the ranged weapons seem underpowered and take forever to kill anything. Melee weapons do more damage but the mechanics are just plain horrible, especially the Spear. And the mobs seem to bug out invulnerable all the time if you attempt to melee them.

As for the underwater environments, yes they are beautiful and atmospheric. But the underwater combat is so horrible it makes big chunks of the game world somewhere to avoid. Anet owe it those who worked hard to design the underwater environments to fix the combat.

If you think Warriors got screwed with elites you really need to get a grip and try some other professions. Signet Of Rage alone is better than ANYTHING a Guardian or Engineer gets (and other professions too probably, can only compare what I play). Boring perhaps, but it isn’t broken, works underwater and gives you some lovely long duration boosts on a very short cooldown. Play some other professions and deal with their broken and underwhelming elites and put it all into perspective. Seriously.

Respawn rates and mob density are insanely high throughout all areas of the game, from dynamic events to hearts and just generally trying to make progress across the map. It is making adventuring a chore, not to mention immersion breaking when the mob you just killed respawns before you can finish off his friends nearby. The respawn rates definitely don’t scale properly to the lower player densities now in most zones. Everything still seems tuned as if it were launch week and it’s no longer appropriate.

Apparently, one of the reasons the devs refuse to give us any FOV settings is because situational awareness is so incredibly important in this game, especially in PvP. But I’m puzzled about how it’s possible to be situationally aware in a total storm of a gazillion spell effects and combat animations. I suppose situationally aware means don’t stand in the AOE field that fills your entire screen. Still at least Anet are doing their bit to reduce screen clutter by making players invisible =)

I’ve got no problems with there being PVE content in the WvW zones, risk reward and all that.

BUT (and its a huge but) …. the queues.

At peak time it is difficult to get into the WvW zones to participate in WvW. Having players in the queue who have no intention of participating in WvW and just want to PVE just makes this worse.

And then when you finally do get past the queue you find that whilst there’s lots of calls for assistance at various combat flash points, many of the people in the zone are just standing around AFK, or doing the PVE objectives, or farming crafting mats etc. I’d have zero problem with this if there were no queues, but there are queues and so it’s very frustrating.

Since Anet knew there would be queues, I think it was a very bad design decision to put PVE content into the WvW zones.

Rawkzter.2160:

You know what WvWvW needs? The ability to read an invader’s name. Make things personal!

I’d settle for being able to actually see the enemy invaders at the moment

I loved DAOC, flaws and all, still do. But I’m not wanting GW2 to be DAOC2. That said, GW2’s WvW badly needs some kind of personal incentives / objectives / purpose. The fighting for your server in the weekly ladder thing only goes so far. Players need some kind of personal progression. It doesn’t have to be realm points and it shouldn’t be gear. But it needs to be something. I’m sure Anet can come up with something unique to GW2.

But before they add any kind of progression they need to find a way to remove the queues. You can’t have personal progression if a hardcore of players permanently live in the WvW zones and make it difficult for others to get in. And of course removing the queues will cause performance issues, which have already reared their heads. They need to work on this so everyone can play, lag free, in larger numbers than at present and without all the culling and invisibility issues we currently have. If they can’t then I don’t see much future in WvW.

Snoflake.9087:

And yes, I’d just started my guardian prior to these adjustments and yes it sucks to relearn stuff, but I’d rather play a good profession rather than suffer through a broken one.

There was nothing broken about the Guardian Greatsword before they changed it. In fact, of all the different weapons for all the different classes in the game this was the one that had the best synergy between the 5 abilities and the best flow during most fights. Not overpowered, just balanced and well designed. And now it’s broken.

I get that they wanted to address the retaliation issue, but they’ve done so in a totally clumsy fashion that has had a number of knock-on effects and broken the whole fluidity and balance of the Greatsword in the process. That’s poor design, no other way to describe it.

I’d rather they left alone things that work fine and address the things about the Guardian class that don’t work that well, of which there are a number. Less nerfs, more fixes please. Once you have everything about a profession running smoothly and properly, then you can consider what needs rebalancing. But until then, please leave stuff that is working alone.

Just had to bail from WvW on Gandara (EU) server as kept getting killed by invsible enemies. Not much fun taking damage from enemies who won’t even load on your screen. This has happened both in the zerg and in small scale encounters away from the zerg. I’ve not had problems like this before the latest patch.

I think the plan is to periodically randomise the order in which weapon abilities appear on our hotbars, just to keep everyone on their toes

A well argued case, but for one glaring flaw. Greatsword is not the Guardian’s starter weapon they get at level 1. Guardians start with a Mace. By the time they gain a Greatsword they will be at very least out of the starter zone and probably quite a few levels into the game. By which time I’m sure the 10 or 15 minutes spent unlocking all 5 Greatsword abilities won’t be too difficult to cope with.

Regardless of if the nerf was justified or not, the re-ordering of the skills is a senseless change that has messed up a lot of people. Sure, we can all re-learn our rotations and move on – until the next time Anet decide to shake it all up on a whim.

Just allow us to re-order abilities 1-5 how WE want them on our bar please. just like you can in just about every other MMO ever released. Then problem solved.

This is a really stupid and unwelcome change and I really can’t see the justification for any of it.

Firstly, moving the skills around. This is insanely frustrating given how muscle memory tends to work. This proves one thing very strongly – we need to be able to move the weapon skills around on the quickbar to where WE want them, not where Anet think we do.

Secondly, the Greatsword nerf. Thanks for wrecking the Guardian’s one good weapon. It’s not like Guardians were dps powerhouses compared to some other classes, but the Greatsword did work well, it felt balanced and had good synergy. And now you’ve wrecked it, without making any much needed improvements elsewhere.

The Guardian classes has some pretty major issues at present – a lack of ranged viability, poor elite skills, a number of lacklustre weapons which need attention (hammer, mace, scepter, staff) and some broken traits. Yet rather than make the effort to fix some of these issues you’d rather just twirl the nerf bat and break one of the few aspects of the Guardian that was working quite nicely. Fail.

The original thread about this was closed by a moderator because they claim the issue is solved. It isn’t. I just tried to delete a character I wish to reroll and it failed. No error message, the delete button lights up but nothing happens. EU servers.

Indeed. Elite skills seem pretty weak.They should probably rename them Bonus Skills.

Too many of them are transforms which usually aren’t very powerful in their own right and because they lock you out of your regular abilities they can actually be disadvantageous, even dangerous, to use.

My Engineer has one Elite which is of use, the Supply Crate. It does help a bit in an emergency but it’s far from a game changer. My Norn Guardian has a really poor choice of Elites because they are nearly all transforms and most of them don’t work underwater (that’s a huge design fail right there). The tome with the big heal is situationally useful, as long as everyone hasn’t already died by the time it finishes casting.

I suspect they didn’t want to make the Elites too powerful for fear of them coming to dominate too much. But they seem to have achieved the opposite, the Elite skills are mostly a huge letdown and I rarely bother to use them.

Completely agree. I have a 80 Engineer and 80 Guardian, properly geared in endgame gear and there’s very little fun to be had playing either of them in Orr. They can survive, sure, but the combat and moving around the map just isn’t fun. Once my personal quests are done there I doubt I’ll go back.

I totally get that the devs wanted to make Orr feel epic and dangerous. But they seem to have achieved this by dubious means – by giving the mobs superpowers rather than obeying the normal game mechanics. Nearly all the mobs seem capable of teleporting, warping or super sprinting to their targets, all have insane crowd control and all do silly amounts of damage and dump a heap of conditions on you so frequently it’s not even worth trying to clear them.

Orr feels like they turned the dials up to 11, gave every mob every trick in the book (regardless of whether it suits or not), ramped up the respawn and aggro ranges to max – then sat back and laughed to themselves “hah, that’ll give the players something to deal with”. Trouble is, it’s not fun. And if it’s not fun, people won’t go there. The less people that go there, the less events can be completed and the harder it is to move around the map and so it spirals downward.

I’m fully up for a challenge, but only when it is a credible challenge and doesn’t feel like the difficulty is achieved through simply overtuning everything.

The same tired old arguments get trotted out every time anyone raises the issue of FOV. It’s either “I don’t suffer from this so what’s the problem”, “this isnt a real problem, you can’t really get sick from playing a computer game” or the seeing around corners thing.

Firstly, if you don’t suffer then good for you, really. But why should it bother or concern you that those who do suffer want to ask games developers to take some steps to help? Do you also stand around in doctors waiting rooms telling patients “I don’t suffer from that so what’s the problem?”. You wouldn’t be adding anything to the discussion there, so why do it here?

For those who say it’s not a real problem, do you perhaps hang around on boats telling people there’s no such thing as seasickness? It’s a proven medical issue and something which wholly avoidable if games developers are willing to be flexible with FOV settings, as many thankfully are, but sadly not Anet.

Regarding gameplay balance issues, a FOV of 90 is not extreme, it is closer to how the human eye expects to see things in peripheral vision. It will not allow you to see around corners in most normal circumstances. No-one is asking for unlimited FOV adjustment, just a setting that is closer to natural vision and therefore less likely to cause nausea. That’s all. And besides the ‘competitive advantage’ argument is already totally nullified by the fact that anyone with 3 monitors can gain a FOV advantage without breaking the TOS anyway.

I’m sure people will say, Anet aren’t budging so why keep flogging this, either find a workaround (if you can) or move on to another game. Well, sorry, but the only way to get companies to make improvements to their products when they are causing genuine issues is to keep campaigning and point out why it doesn’t make sense for them to be so stubborn. So let’s put it in financial terms, which is all most companies care about.The bottom line is Anet will lose customers over this. Enough to hurt them? Almost certainly not, they’ve sold a huge number of boxes anyway. But why cut off any revenue stream if you don’t have to? People aren’t making unreasonable requests, people aren’t being entitled whiners, they are just asking a games company to be a bit flexible and find a solution to some genuine problems their game is causing.

I don’t think you can learn much from levelling professions to 10. Most professions take quite a bit longer than this to get into their stride, even the Warrior.

If you found Warrior a bit mono-dimensional but like melee and don’t want to micromanage, try the Guardian. It’s a profession you can play in a variety of ways, from whirling greatsword maniac, to a tanky sword/mace+shield/focus, to something more support oriented with staff. Just don’t expect to be viable at range because the only true ranged weapon Guardian’s get, the scepter, is spectacularly awful. Other than that, it’s a great profession.