Guild Wars 2

kayo.3817:

Build1: Hambow. This, as mentioned before, is kinda unexpected because the nerfs are targeted at nerfing Hambow, yet somehow making it the most, if not only viable build.

Build2: Sw/Sw and LB. See how the build is using LB again? And go full condi gear for that OPness we call condition damage.

PVE: basically still anything goes since its a 11111111 feast anyway.

However, an OP build is playing a ranger, trait for max damage and max range, and rapid fire away for free loot-bags. Or just play whatever professions that is good at dealing condi. You’ll be kinda useless at World Bosses, but hey, free loot-bags in WvW!

I’ve never been able to make sw/sw LB work, but I had a pretty successful sw/wh LB build for WvW before the nerf. It’s now unusable because it’s so hard to land a combustive shot at full adrenaline. Back to playing thief/guardian for me until ANET makes some sensible changes by giving a 10 sec count down before adrenaline starts draining.

Turrets need some kind of overhaul to be viable. Heli-turrets is one way. Giving them massive hp boosts is another (given their meager offensive capabilities). Another interesting fix could be to simply bundle all of them into a kit and increase cooldowns or nerf them a bit.

WvW is a gimmick, not a serious PvP game mode.

Vertical progression sucks for PvP; ANet clearly acknowledges this because there’s no ascended gear in sPvP. However ANet insists that WvW is partly PvE and therefore needs a “shallow power curve”. Hopefully they have more PvE content in store other than taking camps and killing dolyaks but I digress.

I think I know how to solve this problem. ANet needs to introduce some mini WvW maps with sPvP rules (GvG maybe?). Everyone who doesn’t like vertical grind will transfer over to that and everyone else can have their ascended items. Problem solved!

DevonCarver.5370:

Doing so would invalidate the time people spend acquiring that gear. I think the heart of your post is in the right place, but what we would rather do is make possible for people to get the gear by playing WvW with a sprinkling of PvE, rather than the other way around.

Did any GW1 players feel “invalidated” because their high end armor (chaos gloves, obsidian armor, rare weapons, etc) did not give them an advantage over other players who didn’t want to spend their time acquiring such items? No. That was part of what made GW1 great.

The smart way to randomize match ups would be to put 3 servers together as allies for each side in WvW, calculate the weighted sum of the group based on points captured, kills etc, and have equally strengthed groups fight each other. So it could be servers from T1/T3/T5 vs T2/T2/T4, etc. This way every server could conceivably face every other server while keeping it balanced. Of course this would require servers to be 3x smaller or WvW to be 3x bigger, so I guess it’s not gonna happen.

The one profession I can never seem to kill in WvW are eles, whether I’m using my backstab D/P or condition damage D/D build. They simply have too much condition removal and survivability.

ANet is aware of the problem and has already solved it with stealth traps. A thief spec’ed for stealth that can’t stealth for 30 seconds is deader than Microsoft’s future ambitions for the OS market.

Awesome, reminds me of the solo assassin dungeon runs from GW1. This is the kind of PvE content that’s missing from GW2, where the build and strategy needs to be carefully considered and tailored to the situation.

I almost never complete dailies during WvW sessions because I go to WvW to PvP, not to PvE. I do understand it’s better for people to buy siege with badges rather than hoarding them for ascended gear though. Why not just let players buy ascended items through WvW ranks?

Here’s how we can fix turrets: Put wheels and rotors on them so they follow you around like minions.

I think it’s reasonable to expect to acquire ascended items in WvW at the same speed as if I were playing PvE content like fractals/guild missions.

I burst down another thief in WvW the other day with basilisk venom + backstab before he could react. Thieves OP, pls nerf.

Turrets have been conceptually broken since day 1. Let’s look at the only other build that focuses on summoning NPC’s, the necro minion master:

-Much greater variety of minion traits to choose from.
-Flesh golem has much shorter downtime than supply crate.
-Minions are mobile. For sPvP this matter less since you can bunker nodes, but in WvW it’s a huge drawback that can’t be fixed with a small buff or two.
-Necros have 2 weapon sets, which makes up for the lack of utility from filling up your skill slots with minions.
-Necros can wield dual daggers for a permanent speed boost in WvW. Turret engineers have to sacrifice the healing turret for healing kit, or go around at normal speed which is unacceptable.

The only advantage that turrets have is that healing and flame turrets can generate water and smoke combo fields respectively, but the ele and bomb kit do these better. So yeah turrets basically suck, bugged traits or not.

I’ll make it very simple for everyone:

People hate grinding for non-cosmetic rewards because it adds nothing to the game, reduces play-style variability, give older players an unfair advantage and forces players to work before they can have fun. ANet is well aware of this and therefore has designed sPvP to require no grind. Some people, such as GW1 players, would like to see this play style extended to PvE and WvW as well.

Manuhell.2759:

But they’ve got many means of getting stability and coupled with endure pain (that has also got a longer duration than our elixir, even more if traited), it gives them quite the advantage, even in tactical terms. Whileas we can just pop the elixir and wait for it to end.
Our choices for unblockable healing were either to heal during elixir S or having a chance of getting stability by toss elixir S and healing during those seconds. Now we’ve got just the latter, that means, no reliable way of healing when truly needed.
And it isn’t like there weren’t other way to change it. They could have changed toss elixir S to give stability and some other random boon and give elixir S, say, 3s invulnerability and 3s or 4s stealth, so that they can’t simply come after you and wait for it to expire to kill you. And we would have got some reliable way of getting stability.

Warriors do not have “many means of getting stability”. War banner is of course very powerful and gives stability but has 240s CD. Other than that you have balanced stance which is not simultaneously usable with endure pain because it’s also a stance, and dolyak signet which has a cast time. Any warrior that brings endure pain + dolyak signet into PvP isn’t a threat to anyone.

Now I’m not saying the other aspects of the engineer are balanced, but I think the invulnerability skills from each class are actually pretty balanced. You can’t use mist form or endure pain to stomp a ranger/guardian/necro/engineer/warrior without getting interrupted.

ClassyBear.5078:

How is there even complaining about the parity between elixir S and Endure pain? Endure Pain has a 90 second CD and can still be CC’d. My only issue is that elixir S doesn’t have the possibility of an early-breakout so it’s extremely easy to predict when to drop burst. However, I do agree that elixir S shouldn’t be the same as mist form just because elementalists have a number of “passive” bonuses that still work. Plus, it just doesn’t make sense! Mini-us should be able to use stuff, air-y crap shouldn’t be able to!

Yup, this thread is pretty silly. The engineer has problems but it has nothing to do with endure pain being OP. I don’t think I’ve ever been solo killed by a warrior on my engineer in PvP before. Between static shot/shield skills/air blast/smoke vent, they can’t even get a hit in. Also endure pain has 90s CD as you said (whereas elixir S is 48s!), has no stability or protection from conditions and has no toolbelt.

SmoothHussler.6387:

I think you people are overreacting. Engi is very viable.

The only issues with engi are that turrets still suck and gadgets need re-work.

Agreed. I replaced the nerfed elixir S with the buffed elixir U for my flamethrower PvP engineer and it works great. The problem is that turrets and gadgets simply need huge buffs rather than minor tweaks in order to be viable.

Significant nerf to elixir S but I think I’d still use it in sPvP to finish people. Not much else to talk about. Turrets still suck and gadgets’ cooldowns are way too long for their effects.

I don’t think it’s about repetition. I could cycle through every dungeon/fractals which is technically non-repetitive but it’d be extremely boring. I think the truth is that GW2’s PvE is basically boring because it trades depth for accessibility. I’ve only been playing WvW and sPvP for months.

Kaleban.9834:

The problem is with definition.

Dynamic implies change or variance. How much change or variance can you get while running the Plinx chain? There’s only so many outcomes, loot/reward is not scaled very well to difficulty, most DEs follow similar quest structures “hidden in the background”, etc.

While I hope it doesn’t end up like it, I see GW2 rapidly approaching collapse under its own hype, just like SWTOR. TOR was supposed to be the Second Coming for MMOs, but failed because it oversold a very limited mechanic, story. There’s only so much change and effect each player can have in an MMO, after which it becomes painfully obvious that your character’s story doesn’t matter in the slightest.

Other MMOs like WoW acknowledge this, and basically sell themselves as GUIs grafted onto a Pavlov’s Dog system of respondent conditioning. Push the button, get the treat as it were.

Agreed. I think most people think that dynamic events, as a general term, is good for MMO’s. However Dynamic Events in GW2 are a complete misnomer; they are scripted events with a few different outcomes. GW2’s big innovation is to remove player limits for these quests, making them super accessible for all players. OP’s suggestion that players should be more focused on DE’s is wrong: GW2’s scripted quests are not superior to scripted quests in other games. To make an event “dynamic”, you need player interaction, and the only place where this really occurs is WvW.

ikiturso.4026:

expect if elixir engi face thief or warrior that engi becomes useless haha

Nope, I crush thieves and warriors in PvP with my flamethrower elixir engineer. Turrets really are useless though. I wouldn’t use turrets in WvW if they were invulnerable.

etiolate.9185:

I’d prefer a change to the scoring system. The way it works now, you gain more by winning briefer periods of time where you are out-populating a server than you do winning by small amounts over long hours during prime time. As has been seen, this has an overall negative impact on the game’s population towards WvWvW. ArenaNet hoped that server transfers and such would balance things out, but that was sort of a naive approach to player behavior and obviously did not work out.

If the game divied up the match into mini-matches of even time periods and rewarded points for winning time periods, it would put each time period more in balance with each other. Your server may have drastically lost map area when your population was asleep, but you make that up through bonus points for winning more overall time periods during primetime. Until you do something like that, you will have the current situation where periods of population imbalance matter more than the more competitive times of day.

Good suggestion. Server caps aren’t necessary and ANet has already stated that they won’t prevent people from playing WvW to prevent night capping. There are two better ways to balance persistent stochastic server populations that are supposed to be about equal (on average) based on the tier system.

Averaging out scoring and upgrades over a longer time period is one way. It could also take the form of lengthening the process of capturing structures e.g. Requiring a keep to be defended for, say 30 minutes, while supplies and NPC reinforcements arrive. The other way is to have a buffer variable that makes up for population shortfalls. This currently exists in the form of the outmanned buff and breakout event serving as a force multiplier for the low population server, but it doesn’t really work that well. Instead, NPC’s could spawn from your base at regular intervals (in inverse proportion to your server’s population) and attack supply camps and towers along the main roads.

Dividing WvW into mini-matches would be interesting (I’m thinking sPvP style matches that determine the capture of nodes on a large grid), but it would require WvW to be changed entirely. Personally I am not holding my breath for any major WvW changes like these to be implemented.

In sPvP I play all classes except ranger. In WvW/PvE I only play my engineer and thief because training and buying max’d equipment is so tedious.

If you want to use the rifle, go full berserker’s gear. It’s not terrible for 1v1 but it’s not that great for team fights. For PVT, you definitely want to go with the hammer. 30/0/30/0/10. Signet of healing, bull’s charge, stomp, + skill of your choice. You won’t necessarily be getting solo kills, but you will greatly help your team by cc’ing the enemy.

Depends how you define “endgame”. Some people believe endgame is gated content that you can do after grinding X hours for a certain level of items/levels/exp. In my opinion, this label is not very fun or interesting. What proper “endgame” means to me is a set of activities that have the highest difficulty and skill cap in the game, and requires you to have mastered the “pre-endgame” content in order to excel. There is currently no PvE content that fits this definition. I see sPvP and WvW as having huge endgame potential, but they need sooooo much work and it seems that ANet is more focused on providing PvE content.

For true endgame, go play Eve Online or Dota 2.

I completely agree with this thread. The fact is that GW2’s PvE and story are not very interesting or superior to other MMO’s. It’s strength lies in the dynamic meta-game present in builds and strategies for PvP and WvW. I think ANet is making a huge mistake by allocating resources to things like ascended item, guild missions and the living story at the expense of WvW content, but then again I don’t have any stats on what people are playing.

Just logged on after taking a few months off GW2, and yeah the much heralded WvW updates are pretty disappointing. The culling fix is really good, but other than that the WvW ranks really don’t add anything to the game. Hopefully when I check back in another 6 months they’ll be adding things like more interesting structure upgrades, more contestable nodes, and more active NPC’s to keep the action going, which are what a real WvW overhaul needs.

The thing is, with HGH, Juggernaut and might stacking runes, the flamethrower looks very good on paper and does excellent aoe damage under ideal conditions, such as in PvE where groups of enemies don’t move much. However its damage application drops drastically in sPvP and WvW where you either need to burst the enemy down or have some kind of stun/immobilize/cripple to stop them from escaping. The flamethrower doesn’t have this; it is incredibly hard to get chased down and die to a flamethrower. I can see it being useful for its combo field/CC/aoe damage in certain group builds but by design, the flamethrower isn’t very useful on its own.

Here my Asuran engineer does her morning exercise, putting to shame the abdominal fortitude of the mightiest Norn while breaking numerous Rata Sum health and safety regulations.

Ausra of course. Who needs dirty coal powered Charr steampunk engineering when you have Asuran warp portals, alchemy and ecto-physics?

Here’s the problem in a nutshell

Fractals: Fun level: low. Reward level: highest.
WvW/exploring: Fun level: High. Reward level: low to negative

The staying power of MMO’s is a very interesting topic discussed in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvK8fua6O64

Basically it draws a distinction between “theme park” games where players complete scripted content, and “sandbox” games where players create content for other players. It points out that the problem with “theme park” games is that players will always burn through content faster than the developers can create it, which leads to the introduction of grind so as to pace the game experience. Almost all PvE in GW2 are basically theme park content. If ANet sticks to this path, they have to keep rolling out free content while pacing it with grind. PvP and WvW contain sandbox elements. This is where I think ANet should focus if they want GW2 to have staying power.

Myrina.4658:

If you try to remove the stats from the ascended gear at this point, you’ll only trade one group of angry players for another. If adding ascended gear to the game was a mistake (and I’m not saying it was or it wasn’t, personally I’m on the fence), I think the only fair way to correct it at this point is to add the gear to other vendors. Put it on the karma and the WvW badge vendors at an increased cost compared to exotic gear, and then everyone has access according to his or her playstyle. From that point, you could keep any further vertical progression in the fractals limited to increased agony resistance via new infusions.

I’m thinking maybe ANet can minimize the number of angry players by changing WvW to sPvP style gearing, but with free transmutes for PvE armor skins. The raiders and traditional MMO endgame players can have their gear treadmill, while WvW players can freely experiment with different builds without grinding.

Heijincks.9267:

Ironically, if you go to the Crafting subforum, people are actually complaining that they have too much ascended and can’t do anything with them.

Very true. This is because there are dedicated PvE players who enjoy fractals, have been doing them since launch, and now have a surplus of ascended items. There are also PvP and WvW players, who find fractals repetitive and boring, and as of yet do not have a single ascended item, despite playing just as actively. I would like to see this discrepancy fixed.

Mackdose.6504:

Czar Peter.7961:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Revolution.6301:

still ascended have an advantage.

Really Anet should make ascended sellable on the tp, and make them as easy to get as exotics. Problem solved.

Have ascended ONLY in dailies and fotm makes anyone who does not have 2 hours at once to blow annoyed.

The “Ascended Group” only have an advantage The advantage goes to whomever can use what they got the best. That may be the “Ascended Group” or it could be the “Exotic Group”. I’d be willing to put money down that a group kitted out in 100% Ascended randomly chosen from one server would NOT be able to beat a group of the top WvW players in MASTERWORK gear.

The same logic can be used to defend any pay-to-win scheme (as long as you can’t literally pay to win outright).

Good thing it isn’t pay to win: Ascended gear exists, and you can’t buy it with gems, gold or karma. Only by playing the game.

Your move.

Apologies for not making my point more explicit, thus leaving too much room for strawmen. According to Tobias Truelight, a system where some players have ascended items and many don’t is not a problem, because a highly skilled player with low level items can still beat an average player with ascended items. This kind of logic is commonly used to defend games where players can purchase in-game advantages for cash, because a highly skilled player can still win without paying cash. The parallel with GW2 in this case, is that ascended items take too long and are too boring for many players to obtain, leading to a subset of players with them and another subset without, like in P2W.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Revolution.6301:

still ascended have an advantage.

Really Anet should make ascended sellable on the tp, and make them as easy to get as exotics. Problem solved.

Have ascended ONLY in dailies and fotm makes anyone who does not have 2 hours at once to blow annoyed.

The “Ascended Group” only have an advantage The advantage goes to whomever can use what they got the best. That may be the “Ascended Group” or it could be the “Exotic Group”. I’d be willing to put money down that a group kitted out in 100% Ascended randomly chosen from one server would NOT be able to beat a group of the top WvW players in MASTERWORK gear.

The same logic can be used to defend any pay-to-win scheme (as long as you can’t literally pay to win outright).

critickitten.1498:

The problem here is that you don’t seem to think that something can still be a “long-term goal” unless it has higher stats attached to it. I assure you that it can.

Correct. I had full obsidian armor in GW1. Having a rare and cool looking armor skin was sufficient motivation; I did not need it to give me an advantage over others in PvP.

Mackdose.6504:

The gap that you say wasn’t there before wasn’t a stat gap. It was a time/effort gap. Ascended gear takes more time to acquire than exotics, less time than legendaries.

Except games should primarily be about skill and fun, not rewards for “effort”. To be fair though, I can see how traditional RPG fans may want to grind for high stat items. I just wish ANet would keep it out of WvW. After much repetition I’m up to lvl 9 fractals so I can get ascended rings for WvW and it’s boring as hell.

Either dwarves or tengu. I have no idea why we have sylvari when there are plenty of lore races to choose from.

Zerging is a valid tactic, however the current problem with zergs in WvW are:

-Culling.
-No collision detection, which causes stacking together to be an optimal strategy that feels unrealistic and diminishes the lethality of real tactics like formations, flanking, etc.
-The map is arguably too small and portals are too convenient, leading to insufficient strategic repercussions for concentrating your forces, i.e. having less map coverage.

Ansultares.1567:

I’m unfamiliar with EVE and its history, other than that I’m aware it’s practically the only MMO which experienced net population growth over the very long term. In fact, I wasn’t even aware it was subscription based.

You could elaborate, maybe?

http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/06/26/eve-evolved-the-day-that-eve-online-died/

Pay attention in particular to the final quarter of the article, where it discusses the developer’s reaction to player protests on the forums,

EverythingXen.1835:

With the number of quality free to play/buy to play options out there now… there are NO MMOs worth a subscription anymore.

F2p is a valid business model but I disagree there are no MMO’s worthy of subscription. I happily pay a subscription to Eve Online for its regular content updates, grind-free skill training system, interesting gameplay and economics, and cost of maintenance for servers that host the occasional 2800-player battle.

WvW is fun despite having imbalances, not because of having imbalances. The best battles occur after reset and/or during the peak times of at least two servers, where your guilds need to co-ordinate, delegate and strategize in order to crush your evenly matched enemies. Flipping towers defended by 1 guy on an arrow cart with your zerg isn’t fun.

Karizee.8076:

Czar Peter.7961:

Same here. An MMO subscription doesn’t cost much compared to most hobbies. I’d rather pay to play an MMO that respects your time than play a grindy f2p game.

Good thing GW2 is a non-grindy B2P game

Requiring PvP players to log in and spend half an hour on an activity every day for a month to acquire 1 max stat item out of 14 potential slots is f2p level game design. Of course the good thing about f2p is that I can’t quit, and will be back when ANet fixes said issue =)

LOCO.1785:

I can’t bring myself to play it now even with no obligations…

Same here. An MMO subscription doesn’t cost much compared to most hobbies. I’d rather pay to play an MMO that respects your time than play a grindy f2p game.

eisberg.2379:

medieval combat were just zergs, so I don’t see anything wrong with WvWvW being medieval combat simulations with Magic.

I don’t know, this seems a lot more tactical than a WvW zerg: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p7S25_kv4I

Icko.1307:

Gw1 and gw2 are different games.. What do you expect in a legendary item? Why do you think it is called legendary if you can achieve it in a month or two.. I’ve been playing gw2 for 4 months about 2-3hrs a say yet im still aiming for legendary(sunrise) im only around 60%-65% from completion and im not complaining about it.. Anet wants us to have fun with gw2 and you may submit your recommendations to them but they must check if its applicable and we dont want to destroy the game

regarding items in guildwars 2 all items are achievable to everyone but we really need to put up some effort to get it.. In every game you need to work really hard to achieve something unless you’ll go and buy in online market but anet wanted to be fair to everyone and they decided not to put any items that may result to distort the balance between characters

I think you misunderstand the issue. GW1 had lots of things you could grind for. I had full obsidian armor in GW1. However it gives me no satisfaction to kill people in PvP just because I have better armor, in the same sense that I take no satisfaction in beating someone at chess because they started with two pawns down.

Crespus.7405:

I see your point about strategizing and build-testing. I enjoy many of the same things in games that you seem to. I think you’re overestimating the investment needed to change your build though. Even the priciest gear on the trading post is 6 gold/each at most. This can be gathered in either a long day or two days of modest playing.. At 6 pieces of armor, two weapons, (four if you count awatic weapons), six trinkets, and 8 runes/sigils. Assuming the ABSOLUTE most expensive new equipment, you’re looking at a month of farming to completely replace your old gear with exotics. That seems like a reasonable commitment to make your character the strongest possible in a new build. If you’re unsure of the build, then test it with significantly cheaper rares first. You’ll quickly see if it’s viable and worth the investment to get exotics.

You’ve just described the state of GW2 before the fractals update, which no one was complaining about. I agree, 1 month to get full exotics/runes for a new build, while worse than GW1, is not that bad. Now it takes 1 month to get 1 ascended item. Cue the people who say ascended items make no difference to gameplay. If it makes no difference to gameplay, why have extra stats? People could “work” towards legendary items, but clearly it was “pointless” because they didn’t have better stats. Methinks some people are engaged in Orwellian doublespeak here.

Crespus.7405:

My point is, no matter what game you’re playing, you need goals to keep you interested. Grinding is exemplified when you need to do something repetitive and boring over and over to be able to access something that looks fun. Everything in Guild Wars is accessible without grinding. You can naturally enjoy playing the game in nearly any way (PvP, Dungeons, Fractals, Dynamic Events, Exploration) and STILL be able to go anywhere or do anything.

I accept your definition of grinding. The issue here is that for some people, the gameplay itself is not the most fun or challenging aspect of a game. Take Magic: The Gathering for example. At least half the fun and challenge comes from building your deck, not from playing a game.

Likewise in GW2. When I do stuff in PvE and PvP, I am not just evaluating my twitch reflexes, but also how well my build is performing. My satisfaction when playing my engineer doesn’t just come from the fact that I can set things on fire, but that I’m putting my choice of traits/skills/food/equipment to the test. The fact that ANet have decided to make changing your equipment require a large time investment is what frustrates people.