Guild Wars 2

This forum had hundreds of posts from veteran WvWvW players telling that the bloodlust on BL was a bad idea. It just adds more power to the winning server, making already imbalanced matches even more imbalanced. We already had the Power of the Mists, which was also doing the same (even up to +10% bonus to vitality, healing power based on your WvWvW server score). Both should be removed / changed immediately. I want even match ups, not that one side face rolls the others.

I don’t wanna repeat what I already posted on the buffs topic, but here is very short summary. Defensive buffs for the weakest (outnumbered side), especially their structures and NPCs, make sense, but adding any offensive buffs to any side, especially to the winning side, doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

I used to be called the King of the Lake or the Lord of the Lake by the members of Desolation WvWvW community. I spent a lot of time in the lake and really enjoyed the underwater fights. Now I am king of nothing. The lake is almost 100% gone. I am incredibly sad, beyond words to express what I feel. The new map replacing the lake looks ugly. Instead of something more creative, why to add yet another ruins? Why to entirely remove water combat from WvWvW? Nobody was forcing anybody to enter the lake, thus it was optional. Versatility is good, especially when it is not forced.

This is the day when WvWvW died.

Ayna Micro

PS. Attached a screenshot. Normally SFR, Kodash and Desolation would be ticking roughly equal score at prime time. See income evolution history:
http://mos.millenium.org/servers/view/15

Right now Desolation is ticking 35 and SFR is ticking 590 and has all the 3 blood lust stacks. Trying to hold them is very difficult as SFR has far greater number of players. A good game should be fun for all sides involved. I do not understand how this could be fun for all.

Stealth is much more powerful in WvWvW than in spvp/tpvp. It is nowhere balanced there. Perma stealthed opponents contesting enemy keeps are extremely common and thieves (many of them the perma stealth variety e.g. D/P) are also by far the most common roaming profession.

They should limit the maximum duration of stealth to 8 seconds and make revealed 4 seconds, just like in pvp. Then nobody could stealth more than 2/3 of the time, which is still a lot of stealth in combat and would allow reasonable time for thieves to heal and cleanse conditions during stealth. Also any attack – missing or blocked or attacks done by clones or illusions or turrets or pets – should cause revealed. Currently there is no risk of trying to spam backstab etc. from stealth. Even if it misses or is blocked you still get no revealed. Currently PU mesmers can stay stealthed, while their illusions deal damage. This does not promote skillful play. And doesn’t make the fights fun at all.

Attacking stationary targets, like gates or enemy tower walls, should not give stealth with cloak and dagger.

Note: this is NOT a thief or mesmer rage comment. My suggestions should affect all professions. Currently engineers can also stealth for more than 8 seconds using smoke field + blast finishers. Limit this to max 8 seconds, please.

Profession Selection Guide (Part 1)

After completing the personal story many times and playing all 8 professions and doing quite a lot of WvWvW, I decided to make a guide, which would help players to choose a profession.

Explanation of the guide:
Ratings: * = the worst, ** = average, *** = the best
Melee damage = closer than 300 range damage output
Ranged damage = ranged damage output
Area Damage = Area of Effect damage output
Support = skills and traits to help your allies, crowd control
Survivability = avoiding death
Mobility = Ability to move fast, teleport, hide in stealth, leap
Beginner Friendly = How easy the profession is to begin with
Weapon of Choice = most popular / easiest weapons
Essential utility skills = to help players to choose efficient utility skills

Warrior
Melee damage: ***
Ranged damage: **
Area damage: **
Support: **
Survivability: **
Mobility: **
Beginner friendly: ***
Weapon of Choice: Greatsword, axe, rifle
Essential utility skills: "For Great Justice", "Shake It Off", Signet of Stamina, Banner of Discipline

The classic heavy armored warrior is a very easy profession to begin with and very popular in dungeons and other forms of pve. Warriors are very good at dishing out melee damage and their heavy armor gives them decent durability. Warrior can support its team using banners and shouts. They are not very good at getting out of combat situations, which puts them at huge risk in player-vs-player.

Why should you play a Warrior? You want the ultimate macho character and be in the front line, smashing many enemies at same time

Guardian
Melee damage: **
Ranged damage: *
Area damage: **
Support: ***
Survivability: ***
Mobility: *
Beginner friendly: ***
Weapon of Choice: Greatsword, Staff, Scepter
Essential utility skills: Contemplation of Purity, "Hold the Line", "Stand Your Ground", "Save Yourselves"

Guardian is the mixture of classic healer and fighter, aka "paladin". Guardian can burn its foes, get regeneration and block attacks using its virtues. While guardian lacks in mobility and ranged attacks, it is perhaps the best profession for tanking, but nobody in Guild Wars 2 can tank like in some other games. Due its superior support skills guardian is very welcome addition to any team.

Why should you play a Guardian? You want good survivability and ability to buff and heal your allies in many ways

Engineer
Melee damage: **
Ranged damage: **
Area damage: **
Support: **
Survivability: **
Mobility: **
Beginner friendly: *
Weapon of Choice: Rifle, use one of the following weapon kits
Essential utility skills: Elixir S, Grenade kit, Tool Kit, Elixir Gun

Engineer is a versatile profession, capable of doing a lot of crowd control, buffing its allies and doing area damage. Engineers have a unique feature called kits. Equipping a kit replaces all weapon skills and each utility skill gives a specific toolbelt skill, potentially giving engineer using many kits more skills at same time than any other profession. This versatility comes with a price. The slight lack of direct damage and the complexity of the profession make engineer the most difficult profession to play efficiently. Engineer can create turrets, which automatically attack enemies, but the turrets are usually easily destroyed. Many consider engineer as the weakest of all professions and certainly it is the rarest.

Why should you play an Engineer? You want quirky fun and challenge

Ranger
Melee damage: **
Ranged damage: ***
Area damage: **
Support: **
Survivability: **
Mobility: **
Beginner friendly: ***
Weapon of Choice: Longbow, Shortbow, Greatsword
Essential utility skills: Signet of the Hunt, Signet of Renewal, Signet of the Wild, Quickening Zephyr

Ranger is the master of single target ranged damage using its bows. Rangers are also great underwater. Rangers can create large variety of traps and they are always with a pet, which can not only attack enemies, but also provide support, depending on the pet type e.g. Bear type pets are great at soaking up damage, while the ranger can safely attack from range. Rangers can always have two different pets equipped and swap between the pets at will. Ranger is a good all-rounder choice, unless you want fast burst damage. Being jack of all trades, rangers aren’t particularly good at anything (except long distance damage), making them not that welcome in dungeons.

Why should you play a Ranger? You want to attack your foes from range, place traps to hinder foes and have an array pets to assist you

(continue in next message, part 2)

I seriously disagree with the OP. WvWvW has a lot of problems, but original WvWvW maps are not the main problem.

EotM is a good example showing that making the map larger and removing most of the waypoints will not reduce zerging, in fact the EotM map design pretty much killed all the small scale roaming and EotM is nothing but zerging. I really hope NONE of the EotM map designs are copied to WvWvW. If there would not be achievement points tied to EotM and EotM would have equal or worse rewards per hour than WvWvW, very few people would play it.

The biggest problems of the WvWvW are:
1. Boring and stale meta
- has been the same since Autumn 2012, with hammer warriors, staff guardians, staff elementalist and staff necromancers dominating
- skill balance is based on tpvp, which is completely different from WvWvW
- stealth is overpowered in small scale and roaming, yet no developer comment

2. Coverage imbalance
- The wins are decided by coverage and population
- To make matters worse players can transfer to the winning servers
- Matches are often decided already in the beginning, the last days don’t matter
- outnumbered buff is not very useful

3. Horribly bad commander UI
- no possibility to toggle the commander tag just to be visible to your own party members or guild members, no chance to customize the commander tag color

4. Lack of communication with the player base
- the player base doesn’t know the direction the game is heading for and many are severely disappointed by the direction Arenanet developers., who do not seem to be hard core WvWvW players themselves, are taking WvWvW e.g. totally unneeded buffs to siege, more and more emphasis on pve side (champions etc. in EotM), borderland bloodlusts (still not removed from the game!)

Redesigning the maps should be lower priority than fixing any of these. The hard core WvWvW players are not leaving because of the maps, but because the fights are the same and same, with few professions and builds being overly abundant and overpowered. Like one of my friends say “Arenanet is making this game ONLY for casual gamers, so let it be”. Arenanet developers never understood that WvWvW is the game mode which attracted the highest amount of serious, competitive hard core players, not the pvp. They poured more resources to tpvp, trying to make it esports. April 15th update show that this game is far from being balanced and many of the earlier changes made this game easier (way too powerful passive abilities like passibve healing, increase areas for AoE skills, reduced cast times for several skills). While these changes are nice for Mr Casual Joe and make it easy for beginners they also make the the game less skill based.

John Corpening.9847:

To kick off the brainstorm I’ll throw out this idea:

1. When a player places a piece of siege they receive a stack of “Exhaustion”
2. A stack of “Exhaustion” expires after three minutes
3. If a player has three stacks of “Exhaustion” they can no longer place siege

A good idea, but it has a problem:

Several EU servers are running a policy where only commander should deploy siege blueprints. This is to avoid each player throwing ram blueprints on the same gate and thus causing just confusing and players not having enough supplies to finish them. A commander can easily alone put 3-4 rams on one gate or set up 4 catapults to take down a reinforced wall with the current system or deploy more than 3 superior ACs to siege up a tower or a keep. Now he would need to wait to break in the inner keep or somebody else would be needing to deploy the siege. Siege blueprints are a big cost for PuG commanders (myself included), but some receive donations from their allies. Popular commanders are generally trusted by their community and the least likely to be trolls due their visible role in the game.

Siege building and ordering last minute upgrades is also used to burn the supplies in case the keep is full of them, it is surely falling to the enemy hands.

Removing the suggested “exhaustion” restrictions from those who have the commander tag up would not completely stop the abuse, but make it much rarer and more visible. Many now have a commander tag, but a typical siege troll has his main on the enemy server and and is using an alt account and often has an upleveled character, who doesn’t have a commander tag.

Neither of these address the intentional destruction of golems. I mean intentionally taking control of golems from waypoint and just walking them off the cliff.

I cannot invent a foolproof system to stop the siege trolling. My best advice is: use the ingame report tool and have more Arenanet employer or volunteers (among the player base), who handle the reported cases. Serious violations should lead to banning that account from entering WvWvW. Hacking is another issue, which would need human interaction. Infracting the players who report hackers and possibly denying them the access to these forums, is just aggravating the player base.

Here is my TOP5 priority list:

1. Bring the original maps back (Alpine bl with lake). Turn Desert BL into a pve dungeon.
2. Much improved rewards (spvp reward tracks, more things to buy with WvWvW related currencies, like ascended back item, ascended armor + weapons, unique skins)
3. Merge" medium" population servers with “high” population servers
4. Real profession/skill balance based on WvWvW (e.g. stealth is more powerful in WvWvW than conquest based spvp, stability matters even more, current meta is too much ranged pirate ship, some elite specs are way overpowered compared to rest)
5. Focus on reducing lag, bugs and glitches. (everybody wants this)

I know Arenanet would not do the following, but this would be the best option for many:
Bring us WvWvW Classic mode. Skill balance before the stability changes. No HoT revenant or elite specilizations. Original maps. Original camp/tower/keep upgrade system. Original siege system (no banners etc).

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Hello everyone,

Many of you have been inquiring as to why we made the decision to remove the crafting stations in WvW. We made this decision because we have been seeing an increase in queue times with world linking. Upon observation we found there have been players taking up space in the maps who are only crafting and not participating with their teams.

What a stupid change. The quality of the life just became worse for basically no good reason. I am sure the number of players who were at crafting stations are an extremely small number and much smaller than the number of players AFK at spawn.

The crafting stations only existed in home border. Since when have the queues been a problem at home border? I don’t remember this been any major issue already for 2+ years. The vast majority of the time there is no queue to ANY border and I am playing in so called “full” server in EU tier 1. If you want more players to attend WvWvW, this surely isn’t a way to do it.

If you want to remove something from WvWvW, please start by removing some of the power creep introduced after the launch:
- minor/major/superior bloodlust (30/50/60 ability points)
- HoT introduced power creep: SMC air strike and banners

None of these mechanisms are allowing the much weaker side for come back. In fact most of them merely benefit the winner to win with even bigger lead. Well designed games, like MarioKart, give better bonuses for those players who are far from lead, while the leading player gets weaker bonuses.

Please also significantly reduce the grind required for guild upgrades.

Thank you!

A lot of things happened, which were BAD changes:

- power creep introduced by HoT (never remedied, instead they added even more power creep)
- deletion of way too many amulets and thus valid builds
- lack of variety in builds (because of above mentioned reasons)
- match making has been horrible (leading to totally lopsided games)
- newly designed Hall of Memories lobby area is simply confusing, not to attract any newbies
- generally the spvp in Guild Wars 2 is not newbie nor spectator friendly (essential for growing player base)
- Arenanet developers have been listening to the wrong audience: elite players and falsely thinking this game could be esports

I want the old borderland back as soon as possible. Now I am going to spend much less time with this game as the BL maps are horrible as WvWvW maps.

When I want to WvWvW I need to queue to Eternal Battlegrounds. The current situation just creates massive queues to EB and leaves borderlands mostly empty.

Sky Fell.7604:

Participation decay timers have been adjusted so that players must be more active to keep participation from decaying.

RIP solo roaming, defending, off peak scouting, and defense calls.

^^ this ^^
The change was way too drastic and makes solo roaming and any sort of scouting a pain. Is Arenanet trying to promote even more zerging and blobbing? karma train the maps in a big kitten blob.

Here is a sad story:

After being stuck to EU tier #1 for 4 months and utterly hopelessly imbalanced matches together with a game breaking lag, Desolation lost almost all of its major WvWvW guilds. Iron Triangle moved to Sanctum of Rall (after that SoR has been dominating NA). VotF, GH, FG, Bull etc. just to mention a few other major ex-Desolation guilds moved to lower EU tiers.

Except for that week when Seafarer’s Rest (SFR) wanted to drop to tier #2, Desolation always been third in its tier. In other words Desolation has lost every single match up in year 2013, when enemy hasn’t intentionally been tanking. We also finally tanked to tier #2, but then comes Arenanet and their new “improved” random ranking system. Many players, including me, raised the consider that the random number added to the rankings was too large.

We are desperately trying to rebuild our WvWvW community. We can only do it within our own server. Trying to recruit new pve players for WvWvW, since no major WvWvW isn’t going to transfer to us. Now what are those new WvWvW players experiencing? We are outmanned on every borderland, including our own, even during primetime. Anybody knows the outmanned buff actually doesn’t help you, but always leads to 2 vs 1 situation, both enemy servers picking on the weaker outmanned one. I have often seen enemy guild teams of 30 to 40 players sometimes even combining their forces into a 50-70 man blob or running around the map and capping everything using 4-6 guild golems. I do a lot of solo roaming besides commanding and sometimes the huge enemy teams chase me across the map, despite I roam with an engineer without any stealth. 1 vs 5-30 enemies must be a fair game and happens all the time.

We usually get 5-15 guys following our PuG commanders (not counting EB where the “PuG commander” actually has his guild mates following him as well). Surely when we play really smart we can capture a keep or tower fast, but we can rarely hold anything against enemy with superior coverage and numbers. We don’t have any night capping team during the week. When the weekday morning comes enemy control 95-100% of the four maps. It doesn’t make any sense to upgrade any structures as they are lost anycase. And we need to try to claim back tier #3 structures, which are so full of siege, it is no longer fun.

The numbers before the Friday reset would have played Desolation as #7, but now the random roll (or evil glitch by Arenanet devs?) upranked us #5. We got placed against Visunah Square and Jade Sea. Two French servers with much larger numbers. Even SFR, who have been our enemies, feels our pain. I have gotten personal chat messages in the game from SFR players telling how screwed up this system is. They are not playing for Desolation, but even they can understand how badly our server is getting matched month after month.

Losing every single week is no fun. We cannot rebuild our WvWvW community in such dire situation.

I can imagine the situation is worse for Vabbi and Fissure of Woe, who are permanently stuck to EU tier 9 and always facerolled by their enemy. I give my warm hug to those few brave Vabbi and FoW players who are still doing WvWvW!

Arenanet needs to start to listen to its player base:
Implement a new match making system: Winner goes up, Loser goes down one tier.
For the 1st few weeks the reset needs to happen every single day as forcing a server into unfair match up for weeks and months, breaks a server as this sad story tells you.

WvWvW coverage should be taken into account when calculating server points. Now the side with superior coverage always wins. Night or morning capping is by far the easiest way to win. If EU servers like Desolation would have some major guilds from a different time zone e.g. NA, that would of course change things, but I just don’t see that happening. We tried to recruit NA guilds for 4 months without any success. Currently we are only strong in primetime, which is evening time in EU. Then any enemy admits, Deso is strong.

The outmanned “buff” should actually be made into a buff, which helps the side with smaller amount of players to survive better. Give the weaker side NPCs, structures and players increased defenses, but limit the player defenses to a small amount, so they wouldn’t become overpowered or impervious to damage. If you have just random PuGs, which is the typical scenario for Desolation after our WvWvW oriented guilds left, pushing our 20 player PuG team against enemy guild team of 30-40 in the open field is gonna be a suicide. As a PuG commander I have become very skilled in avoiding enemy fights and anticipating enemy movements. But doing that hit and run with smaller force months upon months, would be nice to have something different for a change.

Please hear our prayer. Thank you!

Ayna Micro
Desolation PuG commander

I fail to understand WHY Arenanet developers are doing this, unless they think every player and his uncle enjoys trolling. We already have EotM which has excessive amount of ledges to launch off other players (perfect for trolling), abundant amount of choke points (horrible for solo roamers to move around the map unnoticed), powerful NPCs, automatic turrets and so on. So instead of having EotM, we seem to get “EotM 2.0” in the form of the new desert borderlands. Not to be completely negative, I think it will be better than the current EotM, which is so bad in so many ways, I don’t want to repeat myself.

My logic is:
Those people who like EotM map design, can always go to EotM. Thus that map caters those who like such. There is no need for more of the similar. And there is absolutely no reason to turn WvWvW into more pve alike experience, as this game as pve content for those who want that. There is even a pve desert alike map at the Dry Top with tons of annoying ledges to fall and jumping puzzle alike mechanics, which distract the core game play heavily (plus that map zone seems to be mostly vacant from players as well, should be a hint, majority players don’t like it).

Developers should be more transparent and honest. Everybody makes sometimes mistakes. Smart people learn from their mistakes and admit them publicly. Now it is dead obvious that the earlier borderland changes with the bloodlust and replacing lake with ruins were a fail. That area has extremely few human players (even less than the lake had), all the most interesting fights happen outside the ruins area. Such map design simply doesn’t work well for WvWvW. Even the guild vs guilds (gvg) audience and dueling (1 vs 1) people choose to fight somewhere else.

Now let’s see when the map is, when it is actually released as I understood it is still being worked on and HotT will be released much later this year, maybe in summer 2015.

3. The end content is mostly repetitive and boring. There is just one level 80 dungeon which people like to play: the Fractals. While the beginning content of Guild Wars 2 in mostly superb and the game offers 5 different rich, beautiful cities and beginning areas to give it a lot of replay value, the game’s personal story begins to drag after levels 48 and it is pretty much the same for all characters. Instead of letting the player to be the hero, the lime light is stolen by a character called Trahearne. There is a separate thread about people’s complaints about Trahearne, so I won’t refer it further.

Basically length wise the latter half of the pve story is about the Risen. This may come as a big surprise to those players who thought they had bought a fantasy game and then find out “oh, I am fighting endless zombie hordes” (zombies = Risen).

The Orr maps are full of Risen, which respawn way too fast. I have 100% completion on all Orr maps for two characters. I did solo everything except for 2 specific skill points, but I understand many players will have significant trouble completing those maps without the help of other humans. It is very difficult to get into groups there. Basically you try to invite others and nobody joins your party. Or if you are trying to solo a group event to gain access to a contested skill point, some other human players appear. They just rush to commune with the place of power and leave immediately afterwards, leaving me to kill all the enemies alone. Oh, so fun and fair. :-)

Often major part of map teleport locations are contested, meaning you cannot even teleport there. Fighting the same and same Risen again and again, plus kiting away from endless hordes (without killing them) gets tedius. When the game is repetitive, it starts to feel too much like a dull work. People want to fun and variety when they play games.

Solution: reduce the respawn rate of Risen, making the Orr maps easier for solo players. On many low population servers I can imagine how painful it must be do Cathedral of Eternal Radiance alone.

Rewrite the end part of the personal story (levels 70-80). Make it progress faster, eliminate half of the redundant dialogue. Give players much better rewards after finishing Victory or Death. I can help you there. In fact I already made another post on this topic: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/story/My-version-of-Victory-or-Death-and-marriage/first#post1082123

Suggestion: After gaining 100% completion on a certain zone of the map, you could teleport there with half of the price and teleport also to the contested areas. This would not affect game economy and would encourage players to get 100% completion of map zones.

cillard.3986:

Here is what an intelligent, thoughtful, and experienced game designer would do at a bare minimum:

1. Make the chest stack like every other bag/chest in the game.

2. Keep the chests account bound.

3. Make the scrolls account bound.

Excellent ideas!

Instead of just complaining we can try to suggest changes to the problems. Asking Anet to completely change the game mechanisms e.g. add energy, make XXX weapon, won’t be happening, but I think the following changes could be feasible / rather easy to implement and would make the game better. One the key principle in my suggestions to make the game more accessible. A highly successful game needs a large player base, thus it should be accessible also for casual players and new comers. Another principle would be allow more variety in tactics and strategy to cater the needs of hard core players:

1. Balance the professions and skills
- analyze what professions are most widely played (based on hours spent / spvp matches played) and which skills are most widely used. The most widely used professions, weapons and skill are most likely ones to be overpowered, thus some of them might need some minor nerfing e.g. reduce damage, increase cooldown, minor tweaks. The least played professions, least used weapon combinations and skills are probably most underpowered and thus might need some minor buff e.g. reduce cooldown, increase damage.

2. Fix broken traits and skills
- A lot of traits are simply broken (not working at all), especially the engineer traits. These have been reported many months ago and still no fixes. Make them work according to the trait description or at least adjust the description to match the current state
- balance the skills and traits e.g. minor traits from different trees and professions should have roughly same power. Now in worst case a grandmaster trait of one profession (adrenal implant) is exactly same as the minor 5 point trait of another profession (natural vigor). Each profession has max 70 trait points. It is not balanced design if one profession can get exactly same effect with 5 points vs 30.

3. Fix Stealth
- several ideas to choose from:
- give each profession either a trait and/or skill to see stealthed opponents. E.g. engineer’s utility goggles would be logical skill for this and ranger’s spotter major trait could be reworked to see stealthed opponents
- any damage over time (burning, bleeding poison) should make a stealthed player visible
- any AoE damage should make remove stealth (if you stand in a cloud, you won’t be invisible)
- introduce at least 3 second delay, before a person can enter stealth again
- make stealthed character semi-transparent, just like a person who has consumed omnomberry ghost. You can see him, but you you still cannot target him with 1-target skills
- not to make the huge thief population completely angry give them more useful utility skills besides shadow refuge, signet of shadows and shadowstep

4. Fix teleportation
- give each profession skill or trait to prevent / deny teleportation e.g. teleportation doesn’t function within certain radius or pointed enemy player cannot temporarily use teleportation skills. Most players would still opt not to carry such skill or trait.
- introduce a 1 second delay of no actions right after teleportation
- remove it from WvWvW (why to have castle walls if you can teleport into enemy keep)

(continued in next post)

Here are some important questions for the developers:

1) WvWvW skill balance
- Why is WvWvW treated like pve for several skills?
- Why is revealed 3 s in WvWvW, even though stealth is obviously much more powerful in WvWvW than in spvp/tpvp?
- WvWvW meta aka Guardian Warrior Elementalist Necro (GWEN) or hammer warrior + staff guardian melee train has been the same since Autumn 2012. Any chances to shake things up? I consider this as the one of the most important reasons why many competitive hard core WvWvW players quit this game. “Hammer stun, blast water fields, double dodge left, stability, lines of warding, veils, strip boons, hit their backline now…” commander talk remains the same already for soon 2 years in this game. Thieves are most common roamers and enemy flank gankers in zerg fights. What do the developers see as the role of rangers and engineers?

2) PvE skill balance
- Just like in WvWvW certain professions are overly represented in dungeon runs, while some others are generally not wanted.
- most CC skills are useless in boss fights due unshakeable and defiant, single target CC is generally waste of time against normal mobs
- total armor is not important due very slow attack speed of bosses, making the fights all about well timed dodging/evade and berserker gear is still prevalent
- What about reducing the damage per attack, but increasing the attack rate of pve monsters? (while keeping the total dps roughly same, this would probably lead to more varied builds)
- Will the balance patches continue to revolve around spvp/tpvp ?

I would like to point out a serious mistake in many people’s replies. Warrior has the best in combat and out of combat mobility in this game, if you just build for it. Merely equipping a greatsword (no traits or utilities invested) allows warrior to outrun most professions. Combine with sword/warhorn or hammer (earthshaker is 600 leap), bull’s charge, dogged march, mobile strikes, signet of rage for another on demand swiftness (besides warhorn), signet of stamina and/or berserker’s stance, balanced stance and endure pain. After thieves warrior is the 2nd most common roaming profession in WvWvW. Mobility is king in roaming.

I also do not agree that warrior has low condition removal compared to other professions. Cleansing ire + warhorn + signet of stamina + “shake it off” + signet of rage (with 6x Lyssa runes) = massive amount of condition removal, especially if traited. Cleansing ire alone combined with longbow allows more condition removal than most other professions can achieve in long term without the use of any runes, sigils or utility slots. Mesmers, engineers and rangers are the professions, which currently struggle against conditions.

JJBigs.8456:

Make retaliation affect damage taken from arrow carts.

That would be a really bad idea. AC can affect up to 50 targets. Arrow cart skills 8 times in a row. Assuming mere 200 dmg from retaliation (modest amount). That would mean 50×8×200 = 80000 dmg = instant death to anybody.

They should just revert the AC buffs and not allow AC nor other siege hit through structures (now you can damage enemies by catapulting through the gates etc).

If previous posts are correct, the current point system is really illogical. Why should 2-3 or more people killing one Dolyak give more points to the server than one player killing the Dolyak? Developers, please explain your logic!

More power to the groups and even less reasons to do solo roaming?!?

Completing an objective should give same amount of points to the server, no matter how many people contributed to it.

WXP reward pool per objective should be constant and divided by the amount of people who contributed to it e.g. let’s say capping a tower would give 1500 WXP. If 10 people would contribute to it, each would get 150 WXP. With 30 ppl each would get just 50 WXP. If just two players would cap a tower, they would get 750 WXP each. This would steer people away from zerging and we would have more varied split team tactics. Probably less lag as well.

I agree with Eagle.3574. Excellent three posts by OP. Really worth reading & thinking. I think Red Falcon.8257’s reply was rude and not constructive at all.

The thing is: the moment you say something bad about thieves, mesmers, elementalists, stealth or teleportation, people who abuse them get defensive and all logic is thrown out of the window. End of sensible conversation.

GW2 shares the mythology with GW1, but game-play wise it is very different from GW1. I feel that GW2 is more FPS style than most MMORPGs.

No doubt GW1 had much deeper game-play, especially pvp. From pvp point of view GW2 is like GW1 for dummies and people in a hurry.

I teach game design and programming at university. One of the principles of good game design is that every important game mechanism should have a counter. Now both stealth and teleportation lack hard counters. There is no way see stealthed people (aka “see invisibility”) nor to deny it (“invisibility purge”) and same for teleportation. There is no skill, game item or anything e.g. to prevent teleportation in some area or prevent an enemy player of using teleportation skill (skill like thief’s shadwstep are instant cast and stunbreak, so even a stun won’t stop the thief from using it). Some people argue that chilling, knockdown, AoE dmg, channeled skills etc. are counters to stealth and teleportation, but they are not. They are general game mechanisms to hinder any opponent.

Gone are the days of GW1 where mesmers and necros could shutdown enemy with their hexes like diversion, backfire, empathy, insidious parasite. And ranger was ruling the open fields with many interrupts. Instead of 100+ different hexes (for players to recognize and learn), we have just conditions, which can be removed easily. The interruption meta game is also almost fully gone. Since there is no energy, there is of course no energy denial, which was very important in GW1. Knockdowns were also more frequent in GW1.

GW2 introduced some new good mechanisms though e.g. dodging. But you can only dodge once in a while even with vigor. Continued in the next post:

Amulets were not the problem, but the power creep introduced first in June 23 2015 patch (trait rework) and made much worse by the release of HoT. Elite specs > core specs. Now tone down the elite specs to same level as the core specs.

Better yet, make the Legendary Spikes not account bound. Some of us got plenty of them and would like to sell!

The problem is that there are just few Anet devs working on game balance it seems. And most of the game balancing comes via pvp, which is a serious mistake, because we have just one pvp mode (conquest). Pvp skill balance correlates badly with WvWvW or pve.

If engineers would be as super powerful as some people claim then we would constantly see people looking for engineers into their dungeon / fractal parties. But instead we see “LF1M thief or warrior only”. Or looking for a mesmer or a guardian. As a warrior I can get into a dungeon party in just 1 minute!

To make engineer a desired profession in a pve setting, it needs:
- easy to play builds (currently engineer is by far the most difficult profession to play efficiently)
- a little bit more dps (easily implemented by buffing the attack skill #1 for all weapons and kits)
- some powerful utility, which other professions don’t provide (something unique to engineers e.g. mesmers have portal)

Same sad situation for WvWvW. I was yesterday listening in Team Speak as Desolation commanders organized a big 5+ h rush in EB. The commander was asking how many guardians and making them mark themselves with X and checking that they have a few specific skills. Mesmers were also requested constantly. Nobody was asking for engineers. In fact there was a comment in the voice chat “engineers are not needed”. So reroll into something else?

Anet developers are too much obsessed on what the engineer should not do and cannot do. They obviously don’t want engineer to have a high burst damage or have good sustained damage either. Granted the kit refinement was too good (but so is elementalist’s elemental attunement, and it still hasn’t been nerfed). KR was totally destroyed, instead of just toning down the grenade kit related KR effect. This destroyed a lot of other builds, which were not 100nades. Every single patch has limited the versatility of engineers. The developers do their best to pigeon hole engineers into one build. Currently HGH, expect it to be nerfed soon. Usually they nerf things so that other builds get trashed as well. So I expect the grenade kit will be nerfed in the next patch (instead of touching HGH trait), making engineers a completely irrelevant profession in any form of play.

Anet developers also don’t want engineers to be too good bunkers, thus the recent nerfs to elixir S and survivability related traits (cloaking device and Low Health Response System. Yet they are planning to give warriors even more buffs, as if warriors were ever weak in pve or WvWvW group fights.

Anet developers want engineers to use turrets, but currently all the turret-related traits are broken and way too weak to make them viable. Turret hit points are a bad joke. See http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Turret#Health
Compare this e.g. with ranger pets: ursines have around 2.6k armor and 29000+ health. That is better than most players have! And pets are mobile, they do a lot of useful utility and/or conditions. And ranger doesn’t even need to waste a utility slot to use a turret.

The recent buffs to the arrow cart have made turrets even more non-viable in a WvWvW settings. With the new trait even the normal arrow carts have huge range, don’t require target in line of sight = destruction of turrets in seconds. Turrets have always been useless in a zerg fight. They get destroyed in a second in zerg clash. E.g. I have seen elementalist’s burning speed crit hit over 7k damage = there goes your turret. I urge the developers to try turrets in such setting to see how utterly useless they are.

Almost all engineer gadgets are simply not worth the slot. Easy fix would to reduce the cooldown of some toolbelt skills and utility skills.

The trait lines are full of bugged or seriously underpowered traits e.g. adrenal implant (30 trait points) does exactly the same as ranger’s natural vigor (5 trait points). And does anybody ever use grandmaster traits like Autodefense Bomb Dispenser (60 s cooldown!) ?

So what does that leave engineers with? Few working kits (bomb, elixir gun, grenade and tool kit) and elixir B, C, H and R (elixir S is broken now, U seems bugged as well). The rest is pretty much meh.

Every single WvWvW update in past 5 months have benefited the server with the best coverage. Even more power, rewards and buffs to the winner. When will this madness end?

I guess the original idea for the BL ruins and bloodlust was that it would benefit small scale play and “force” to split zergs (LOL), but the developers didn’t understand that the seriously outnumbered servers will be at huge disadvantage. If you have just, let’s say 30 people, how to spread them on all 3 BL maps to capture the points, defend them, plus defend and attack keeps and towers, supply camps and all. Not gonna work if the enemy has 70+ and can dedicate 3×5 = 15 for the BL bloodlust and the rest will still outnumber and easily will that smaller WvWvW population server.

I can only conclude that all this just is further evidence that the WvWvW design team is not just incompetent and lacks previous game design experience (background in QA doesn’t count). I am not saying this is an easy job. It takes easily 10-15 years minimum experience to design stuff like this well.

Good ideas, feedback and problems pointed out in these forums are consistently ignored with arguments like “You don’t represent the real player base”, “WvWvW is supposed not to be balanced”. No bad decision gets reverted as truly bad designers cannot even admit that they were wrong.

PS. I don’t play WvWvW anymore.

Paying customers have right to complain. I completely disagree with the original post.

My own full time work gets evaluated, lots of anonymous feedback is gathered and some of it is also negative, maybe even down right harsh. Arenanet developers should be able to handle the same. The lack of communication (notice almost zero dev posts in these forums) is also inexcusable and will continue to insult the player base.

The problem of designing is that you need to know your subject material extremely well. You simply cannot make great design by just asking people if your own knowledge on the matter is lacking. Otherwise people who make queries would be the greatest designers of all time, but of course they are not. A great developer tries many ideas, but abandons most of them. Even the greatest designers make mistakes. Bad designers have trouble admitting their mistakes and stick to them, even when it is sure that their ideas didn’t work. The most typical excuse you hear then is “let’s give more time for users to adopt to …”

The big problem of WvWvW is that Arenanet developers simply don’t know the game mode well enough. They also went too far with the changes. A lot of players complained about EotM, Skyhammer etc. What did Arenanet give us, more of that!!!

Let’s compare with Counter Strike, since that is a game I am sure most of you are also familiar with. It has remained extremely popular already for over 15 years. Many of it’s map have remained more or less the same already for over a decade and people still flock to CS! Now imagine if the favorite CS maps would be removed and replaced with an landscape, where it takes a very long time to travel and actually see enemy players and where they would be massive chasms to fall into and have winds to blow you into the chasm. No more dying to enemy bullets, but dying against environment. You would need to defeat simplistic NPCs to activate some shrines which would give you things like ability to take no falling damage, become invisible and so on. CS gamers would be rightfully aggravated and beg to reinstate their old favorite maps and have simpler game mechanisms which favor player-vs-player, not pve. Now same thing is happening in GW2 WvWvW. Players have every right to be angry!

We have had some good things happen in HoT patch:
- faster dolyaks
- sentries which finally make sense
- condition duration food capped to +/- 20 %
- synthesizer nodes
- no money required for upgrades
- removal of ruins of power and bloodlust

But I feel that ALL the other changes were bad and just alienated the core player base.

PS. One thing I actually agree with OP. Balancing and designing WvWvW is the most difficult task in this game as this game mode can be played in so many ways. I really hope Arenanet will hire somebody who knows WvWvW inside and out, lives and breathes this game mode and has a game design background as well (both are essential).

(continues from above)

2. Failure to communicate with the customers. Communication is a two pay process. My online friend’s GW2 account was hacked. They asked her guild friends gold to get her account back. She wrote me that Anet support department is very very bad. " I can say I don’t have a good time talking to them. :’P"

These forums are full of people’s complaints, but also sometimes very wise constructive criticism and ideas to improve the game. I very rarely see Anet employers reply to even the most popular and long threads. Why can’t you hire a person who really reads the forum messages and replies to them?

Also the replies should be free of arrogance. I know you made two very popular MMORPGs, but you will remain popular only as long as your customer base is happy. Keeping the customer happy is priority number one. If hundreds of people complain about some issues and there is no reply from Anet employers, this is basically same as saying to your customers: “we don’t care about you… keep moaning”. You should be sympathetic about your customers. Have some die hard GW2 players among your staff, whose paid job is communicate back towards the customers. “I feel your pain. I am now talking with the lead designers about ways how to fix… soon”.

Make the users feel that you really care and do stuff to address their issues, which take the fun out of the game!

Terrahero.9358:

There is no viable counter to Stealth.

…
Stealth is the only mechanic ingame that doesnt have a real counter from other players.

..
Everything, except Stealth.

I fully agree that stealth has no hard counter, but there is in fact another game mechanism, which also lacks a hard counter: teleportation.

You can all it shadowstepping, mesmer portaling, but GW2 has no hard counters for that. There are no skills, nor abilities to prevent an enemy player from teleporting.

Some other games e.g. the good old Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) from 1970s, already had a counter for both:
- see invisibility, invisibility purge (invisibility area denial around you), true seeing
- dimensional anchor (preventing an enemy using extra dimensional travel),
forbiddance (area where teleportation doesn’t work)

One principle of good game design says that every powerful game mechanism should either have a hard counter or be made very scarce / rare. Now everybody knows stealth isn’t rare at all, especially if you are playing something like a D/P thief. And shadowstepping is very common as well with low cooldown e.g. thief sword #2 and mesmer sword #3 (swap).

Currently both game mechanisms are broken. The only way to fix them (without fully removing them):

1. Offer them hard counters (like D&D has), which are as easy and common to use as the skills themselves e.g. if a counter skill/ability requires long activation or has very long cooldown, e.g. 3 minutes, then it won’t be used. Would be problematic since all professions would need them and using some consumable item during hectic combat really isn’t an option when a stealthed thief is already bursting you down.

2. Make those abilities very scarce e.g. very long cooldown (120+ seconds or more). Now this would of course completely kill the thief profession.

3. Somehow reduce their power e.g. stealth doesn’t make you fully invisible, just semi-transparent, stealth also reduces movement speed by 50% and any damage during stealth makes you revealed for 4 seconds. Teleportation skill could be toned by so that everytime you use a teleportation skill you cannot activate any of your skills for 1-2 seconds. This would still keep portal as a very powerful and effective skill, but give enemy team some time to react before the portal bomb.

I think the last option is the best and would require the least amount of programming and balance changes.

Pity I cannot view this stream, but I really don’t understand the Arenanet “logic”. So AoE is too powerful e.g. level 80 engineer doing 2-3 × 200 dmg with his grenades is “too powerful”. But single target damage e.g. thief doing 7000 dmg with Backstab is okay?!?!
Siege weapons do less dmg than backstab. Ah, but now I get the “logic”, engineer is all about being versatile, so engineers don’t need damage.

And if the “issue” was some persons getting aoed during their downed state, then why don’t you give equally powerful downed states to each profession. E.g. engineer has grappling line (downed skill #2), which pulls one enemy to you during downed state. Duh! Who would want even more enemies dancing around her? And thief has shadow escape (#2) and smoke bomb (#3), basically teleport away from your enemies + stealth, giving handy way to get away from your enemies and some real chances to use bandage.

Developers: Please give us real reasons. This doesn’t make any sense.
And like the other people on this thread commented, this would just lead to even more zergs in WvWvW and probably also even more thieves. And basically ruining the necromancer profession. Sighs. People want versatility, not be forced into one very narrow game-play the Anet developers want.

The real problem are NOT AoE, but:
1. Huge number of bugs.
2. Lack of rewards in many game forms:
e.g. defeating champions you get blue items
WvWvW rewards, except the jumping puzzle, are a joke
3. Burst damage is out of control, leading to people playing either bunker builds or glass cannons. Solution: cap the max dmg per hit or give each profession better tools avoid / mitigate the damage. Some purely protective skills have very long cooldowns (60 s), while attacks can be spammed. This leads to hit & run, zerging etc. Killing is NOT the problem and most weapon skills do not need more dmg. I have never had trouble killing. The problem is the lack of counters or counters have way too long cooldowns.
4. There is no real counter against stealth (Anet tells AoE is the counter to stealth… oh yes… let’s make AoE weaker). I guess Anet wants even more invisible armies popping up with several mesmers syncing mass insibilibity and portal.

My server is often seriously outnumbered by the enemy in WvWvW. There can be just 2-3 people in the entire map zone, while enemy has dozens roaming by. If there is even weaker AoE, how can you score any kills against the enemy? Ah, we have the “super useful” outmanned buff. It gives us more karma.

Deniara

Continuing to use both PIP + MMR is going to be yet another epic fail, leading to countless of pointless blowout matches + MMR hell for some. You should either use random selection within PIP range or MMR only for balanced matches. The player base is way too small to make anything else work. Also the current scoring which rewards 499-500 and 0-500 loss the same amount of PIPs is a fail, because it leads to many players quit after just 100-150 point loss at start. Season 1 had problems, but had way better scoring system.

Thank you for the reply, Evan Leash! Goodbye and I wish you luck the decisions you made!

(continued from above post)

5. Better rewards
- players should be rewarded better, this is extremely important for motivation
- give players more titles, which they can show e.g. a visible title after completing personal story “Savior of Tyria” or something like that. Players like the brag about their accomplishments
- current treasure drops are not logical at all. Implement more different treasure drop tables per each opponent type
- legendary precursors should be dropped once per encounter after an epic battle against a really really difficult champion boss (he should be much harder than Lupicus). Thus one player contributing to the defeat of such epic boss gets a precursor
- currently using a level 80 exotic geared character gets better drop by killing the mobs
in level 1-15 area than defeating a level 80/80+ veteran or champion fully alone!! If you kill a champion level 80/80+ boss alone without any other human player help you should get much better rewards. Now it simply is not worth the trouble. Blue or even green level 80 items are worthless for most level 80 players.
- spvp / tpvp should give rewards which benefit pve as well e.g. Black Lion Keys
- WvWvW rewards are way too low, compared to e.g. doing dungeons

6. Fix WvWvW
- This is the true crown jewel of GW2. Give it the love it needs! Right now, not tomorrow.
- Revert to original culling, until you find a better solution. The new “improved” culling is killing the game
- Remove Jumping puzzle from WvWvW. Make it a separate map. JP should NOT give any badges of honor, but blueprints are okay.
- Remove WvWvW from world completion.
- outmanned should give thougness and health boost for the outmanned side NPCs, structures and players
- Remove AoE 5 limit cap from skills which target enemies (but keep it for those skills which buff/heal team mates) to give more viable strategies against
- Introduce mechanisms to reduce the effectiveness of zerg ball (current meta) e.g. if there is >N own team players nearby then your effective attacking power is reduced by X % or you get a % chance to be dazed
- remove consumables from WvWvW (at least the totally broken consumables like skale venom, gears etc)
- automatic looting in WvWvW e.g. after each kill the badge of honor is instantly transferred to you just like Laurels
- tiers changed per 24 hours instead of 1 week
- winner moves up and the last in tier moves one spot down to avoid fighting same opponents week after week

7. Reduce the excessive burst damage
- This had lead to the current boring glass cannon vs bunker meta, we need more balanced builds for variety. This is also yet another casual gamer unfriendly game mechanism
- The excessive burst, especially in WvWvW (consumables, ascended gear) can lead to incredibly fast deaths even when the player has over 2500 armor and high health.
- No single fast attack should do more than 3k damage, no single slow attack should do more than 6k damage (slow attacks are more easy to be dodged, avoided and countered)
- The overall damage (amount damage over longer time) is okay, keep it as it is (please don’t get me wrong, I am NOT asking for a general damage nerf)

8. Introduce spectator mode
- For both pvp, dungeons and WvWvW. You could learn a lot by watching how top players play in WvWvW, pvp and dungeons!

I probably forgot a lot of good things. I am sure that after these changes some people would complain and adjust, but most people would be much more happy. We would have a growing, happier vivid player base. More for casual gamers, more for experienced hard core gamers.

Elixir R and elixir S are neither worth equipping in WvWvW anymore.

Oh well, toss elixir R self revive was pretty useless in WvWvW anycase. It basically it could only save you in small scale situations. In a huge zerg fights there are so many people spamming AoE at your dying character that toss elixir R has saved me only once in such situation. I can imagine that toss elixir R is very good in pvp, but huge EU tier 1 zergs are totally different type of play.

But overall engineer got much more buffs than nerfs.

Hmm. What is the logic behind all these unbalanced and overpowered WXP traits? Their power level compared to each other seems random. Wasn’t Arenanet’s official slogan: small changes. Yet every month we seem to get new WXP traits, which can even double the effectiveness of a siege weapon. Sighs…

Once again it seems Arenanet is adding even more power to the side with larger numbers and bigger zergs. Especially adding radius to treb shot sounds like a bad idea (I won’t publicly describe what locations could now be abused). I guess Arenanet really wants that nobody in WvWvW does any small scale. Better migrate to servers, which can summon 50-120 man blobs 24/7. Welcome to Siege + Zerg Wars 2!

Please add a way to reset WXP traits e.g. using few hundred badges. Thank you!

We shouldn’t think this problem just as “your profession is better than mine”, but as a whole.

Currently burn damage is completely out of control. It provides too fast armor ignoring burst. The condition cleansing simply isn’t enough. Burn does too much dmg even using berserker/marauder amulet, which offers no condition damage. If a character hasn’t invested any points to condition damage stat, the burn should do considerably less dmg than it does now.

At the same time bleed damage feels a bit too weak.

Abundant stealth in combat in this game is still problematic. I recommend limiting stealth to max 8 sec. Player animation will turn semitransparent, if player still remains stealthed despite the “warning”, it will result 4 s revealed. More professions should have some stealth revealing skills e.g. warrior’s “fear me” / “on my mark” could give 2-4 s reveal.

The most commonly used sigils: fire/air/doom/geomancy/energy/intelligence need to be toned down
The most abused runes: strength/Hoelbrak/Pirate/Balthazar/Krait also need some readjusting.
I am also using them, so I am asking the developers to nerf my favorite sigils etc.

When it comes to professions here is my list:

super tier:
mesmer (too many stuns and other CC with very low cooldown, ability to set up massive burst from stealth, too long stealth, just too many escapes compared
to the burst potential it has, meaning it is low risk + high reward, mantras and PU +
Confounding Suggestions trait need toning down)
elementalist (cele D/D was already super tier before the patch and now it got buffed even more and D/F +staff is very strong as well. Ele has always been meta in WvWvW and pve. Ele’s ability to stack might, cleanse condition and stack burn should be nerfed)
guardian (ability stack burn needs to be turned down, “Feel my wrath” is ridicilously overpowered in WvWvW, giving permanent quickness to entire guardian
dominated zerg, other professions, which fit the same role e.g. warrior and engi, should have their sustain upgraded to same level as guardian)

mid tier:
necromancer (necromancer needs some of its hardest hitting abilities, like Lich form, toned down, but also get a bit long term sustain or perhaps an utility skill/elite which gives them a movement skill)
warrior (shout warrior sustain was nerfed a tiny bit too much, so it should be adjusted back to closer to the same levels as it was before the patch. Rampage is currently too strong, greatsword + forceful greatsword trait and berserker’s power
too powerful, burst skills recharge too quickly, allowing to spam burst skills without thinking, too low cd on hard CC skills)
thief (panic strike + executioner too strong, abundant stealth + shadowsteps + high burst in one builds counters all other berserker builds, besides mesmer, limiting meta,
pistol/pistol still too weak)

low tier:
ranger (signet of stone needs adjusting down, but please give ranger other defensive ability, not necessarily immunities, the ability to spam two rapid fires almost in a row needs to be toned down, pets should have a “spirit” mode, when they are totally deactivated, taking no dmg, but also doing nothing, this would be highly needed for AoE heavy envinroments, like contesting mid point with 3vs3, WvWvW zerg fights and pve dungeons),
engineer (previously super tier profession suffers from some very underpowered or even broken traits and lack of trait synergy, make rifled barrels trait baseline like planned, grenade kit was nerfed too hard, medkit skills should be “drop vial” like before and not thrown, engineer’s ability to stack burn with IP trait + pistol/pistol + flamethrower needs to be toned down, toolkit shield too good)

Samuel Loretan.8601:

The intent is that since you can’t join or transfer to a “Full” server, their populations are going to diminish over time, until eventually they reach “Very High” again. At this point, all “Full” servers are going to be balanced. This won’t be right away, though, since we’re not kicking anyone out of their servers.

Good reply. This is how I also interpreted the changes. These won’t however do much to help the lowest tier servers.

Most WvWvW players want a “full” experience. Meaning that their server has reasonable amount of people on at any hour. Currently only the top EU servers can offer this and it is impossible to transfer to them. The current change benefits “Very High” status servers the most. I predict that several guilds and WvWvW players will move from the “full” servers to them, but now people need to think their server transfers more carefully, maybe it is not possible to return.

The only real way to solve the problem of diminishing WvWvW population is to increase the rewards and make the WvWvW feel more fair, balanced and fun. Merging low population servers might be needed in EU, but merging servers isn’t a long term solution if the player base is bleeding.

My suggestions to make WvWvW a better experience:
1. Increase rewards to same level as other game modes (I do not count EotM as WvWvW) e.g. each WvWvW chest should have 1 guaranteed rare, it still takes more time to earn one WvWvW chest than attend a world event in pve
2. Introduce (copy & paste) the reward tracks from spvp to WvWvW
3. Allow more varied gear, including ascended materials, back piece bought with laurels + gold + badges of honor e.g. ascended backpiece 30 laurels + 5000 badges + 50 g.
4. Make WvWvW gear salvegeable
5. Keep WvWvW unique, do NOT make it a watered down copy of pve or spvp. In other diminish both spvp and pve alike elements from WvWvW, less random pve mobs like the forest animals and less contesting the circle like conquest based spvp.
6. Have a separate WvWvW balance team. WvWvW skill balance and meta is different from pve or spvp e.g. stealth is more powerful in WvWvW than spvp and WvWvW has large group fights, still dominated by the GWEN and pirate ship metas.
7. Change the scoring system so that it leads to more even match ups. Encourage the #2 and #3 attack the currently leading server. e.g. if you take an objective from the server, which is leading the match up (determined real-time), you will get double rewards + bonus server points from capturing objectives from that server.
8. WvWvW achievements need to be put down to realistic level, not 1 million dolyak kills, but more like 5000. Introduce multiple level achievements and titles, like spvp has.
9. Quality of life changes, like addition of WvWvW blueprints to wallet

I am sure that after these changes, the numbers of happy WvWvW players will increase dramatically. Then Arenanet can think about moneytizing it.

1. Stats

At least on my server the bloodlust buffs are not evenly distributed. In our current match up one side generally holds all of the buffs (and that is not our side). +50 to all stats is nothing small, like an extra ascended amulet:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Triforge_Pendant_

All sorts of map/server wide stats should be removed as they really skew the match up and make it feel unfair. We already have serious coverage differences and crazily outnumbered fights, so why to make the uphill battle even harder?! I remember when our server has been having all the three BL bloodbuffs and I have had full guardleech + applied fortitude + hefty vitality bonus from Power of the Mists. The combination makes the game very forgiving. One can play WvWvW for so many hours and not die a single time and collect gazillion loot bags, until one finally needs to grab something to eat or go to sleep.

2. Aesthetics

Aesthetically the ruins is mess. Spvp/tpvp map dropped in the middle of a map, replacing the lake. The transition from other parts of the WvWvW map just feels very weird, breaking immersion. Like a different artist had created a new painting in the middle of a master piece. I am not telling that ruins is 100% bad. Surely some trees, small nook etc. there are nicely placed and it has some nice details like the sunken amphitheater (part of Battle’s Hollow), but in general it looks like a bloated expansion of the Southern middle island, which is also called ruins.

I like scenery which looks like real nature and actually big part of original WvWvW maps and original pve zones fit that description (never mind the exaggerated elevations). In my own works I very often use the classic rules, like golden ratio, and the classic stuff is sadly missing here as well.

3. Lake

Deleting of the lake was a bad idea, because:
- it robbed the only large water area from entire pvp part of the game. This was a good test bed for large to small scale underwater combat and place for those who actually enjoy the underwater side. Now where to play test underwater combat? Bay? The tiny ditch in Raid of the Capricorn?
- water is siege free area
- nobody was forcing anybody to enter the lake, one could always go around it, thus underwater was optional for those who hate it
- It’s removal made solo roaming harder (water is the ultimate escape place for those professions who don’t rely on stealth)

The unfortunately changes decreased the variety in this game, steering even more players towards either of these two play styles: zerging or ganking.

I wish all the borderland changes would be reverted back. At least until something better is invented.

A long time ago I suggested that the lake would actually have its own tiny keep/tower, having perhaps some special purpose and much smaller area above the water than even some towers have, but be partially submerged underneath the water. Like a tower which is partially sunk under the water, but not as cramped as you might first visualize in your head, not some tight labyrinth (would hate that personally), but more like a giant stone octopus. This would once again offer more variety to the game as most siege doesn’t work underwater, making attacking and defense require different tactics.

I know that not everybody will like this idea, but once again it would increase variety in a large-scale player-vs-player manner. Having the current, contest yet another node, isn’t more variety, but just copy & paste from spvp.

lLobo.7960:

You can still hit players in stealth.
Your channeled skills still hit (provided LoS and range) even if you loose target
Thief stealth can be countered with blocks/aegis/reflects/retaliation and a series of other working game mechanics.
You can take a thief out of stealth most of the time, mesmers and engis do all the time…

All in all, you should “acquire better knowledge to improve your strategies when performing on the game”, since you dont like l2p

It should be obvious from my signature that I play all the 8 professions. And despite not being in a party nor relying on my team mates I kill much more enemy invaders than I die myself (usually 1:10-1:15 kill rate in euro tier #1). You don’t need to explain me how the profession mechanisms work. I know very well that channeled skills like warrior’s rifle volley or greatsword 100blades will continue to hit the stealthed enemy if the enemy wasn’t yet stealthed when the attack was initiated. And AoE (if you guess the location) will damage the theif. But to call this a counter to stealth is a bad joke.

I can kill bad thieves in WvWvW. The moment I see them use their shadow refuge, I just spam AoE attacks there. This assumes the thief is so dumb that he doesn’t carry any stunbreak and literally stands in my red AoE circles for over 10 seconds (“learn 2 play” issue ). But the thing is: one fast AoE will not down a glass cannon thief with 13k-15k health pool. Good thieves have shadowstep: a stun break and 1200 range targetable teleport. If they notice that they are AoE:d during their shadow refuge, they just teleport away while still being invisible and then lurk away or use heartseeker to quickly jump away. End result: a good thief escaped and can come back half a minute later, while my stun break skill is still on cooldown.

Anybody who has played D&D or Pathfinder RPG at very high level (epic level) knows that teleportation (teleport without error, greater teleport, gate, dimension door) and invisibility (greater invisiblity) are hugely problematic spells and spell-like abilities. Basically so game breaking things that some Game Masters put house rule restrictions or make anti-magic common place to counter the constant teleportation spam and constant invisibility. If you can teleport into enemy’s castle, why to build walls in the 1st place? To partially solve this problem both D&D and Pathfinder RPG have hard counters to invisibility and teleport: teleport anchor (preventing teleport), anti-magic (preventing any magic), see invisibility, true seeing, invisibility purge and so on.

In most other MMORPGs a stealthed person becomes visible if he is subject to any damage or suffering from damage over time effect, such as bleeding. This is logical and should be implemented to GW2 as well.

Are you claiming that all these other games have inferior game design and that their game designers were not as smart as the geniuses of Arenanet?

I think Anet failed. Rogue was highly problematic in WoW pvp before the nerfs. Stealth was always know to be a fun killer mechanism in games. Game designers should have learned their lesson. Now it feels that this game has been designed by novices. They forgot all the good stuff from Guild Wars 1 and didn’t study the existing other MMORPGs properly.

If thief, mesmer and D/D elementalist would not be so easy “I always have a free get away card” professions, you would not see so many of them in the game, but you do see them in plenty.

Please see these great WoW videos. Notice similarities how thief players defend their “balanced” profession in these forums?
World of RogueCraft – Episode 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u55vHURPQSw
World of RogueCraft – Episode 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-KMOc_y7xo

Obviously many servers have lost a lot guilds and I know some guilds completely stopped playing Guild Wars 2 or are in the verge of doing that. I know for example that Piken Square has lost guilds. And if you read this announcement from Arenanet, it doesn’t make a genius to understand that from March 18th to March 27th will see some very large transfers:
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/get-ready-for-wvw-spring-tournament-2014/

People naturally want to stack on that servers, which they will think will have good chances to win. But prediction isn’t always that easy as fair-weather players can vanish if the server gets an unlucky loss at the start. My theory is that great & active PuG commanders and huge PuG population and good coverage is much more important for the win than having lots of hard core WvWvW guilds, who can win in open field and steamroll most of the PuGs.

In Season 1 – Gold League Seafarer’s Rest (SFR) was holding rank #1 and predicted to win it, but of course that didn’t happen, but Vizunah to took the top spot with a very large margin. Similar our server, Desolation, wasn’t speculated to win, but you know what happened. Desolation won every single match up, just like Vizunah. And both are PuG servers.

Luckily our server, Desolation, is doing well, despite the relatively high transfer costs. If the same story will repeat, we can get a huge influx of people from our massive pve population (probably biggest in EU and we have also some non-EU coverage).

I think players and guilds should think wisely where to transfer. Those servers which look strong on paper, might not be the winners.

Unless the original borderland comes back, WvWvW will remain to be half-dead. And the more time goes with the new borderland forced upon the players, the old players might never make a come back. Thus this forcing of the new map is one of the key reasons which is killing the game mode. This is way too little, way too late. Period.

Points per Kills (PPK) might actually lead to less fights as players might safely hide inside their towers and keeps or lead to more zerging since it is safer to be part of a large group than solo roam. In fact this change is seriously detrimental towards solo roaming without stealth or teleports. Does Arenanet really want to kill solo roaming for anything else than thieves, mesmers, stealth trappers and stealth gyro engineers? This change will also favor larger group over smaller ones. If you have 5 players and enemy has 20, what are you supposed to do?

I am sad and angry of Arenanet addressing the many other serious issues now plaguing WvWvW:
- rewards still suck compared to any other game mode. I have countless of times suggested copying spvp reward tracks to WvWvW and make them so that normal 2 hours of play would lead to a completion of 1 reward track. Also make WvWvW rank chests give a guaranteed rare and increase the rate of ascended drops, which happen now extremely rarely, like once per half a year!
- experience points gained in WvWvW don’t count for anything! Let players pool their exp for HoT or Tyria masteries!
- revenant hammer #2 (CoR) still needs to be toned down, general profession/specialization balance is bad for WvWvW. You can do these changes without affecting other game modes, in other words make WvWvW specific changes, which don’t affect pve or spvp.
- tons of bugs introduced by HoT (players hitting through the gates, keeps and towers being contested by pve creatures)
- reset night on Saturday is lacking players, Friday was much better time for reset
- the new Desert BL is NOT fun at all, Alpine BL was way superior

Time is ticking. Next Spring WvWvW will die.

The recent changes to Elixir S together with the nerfs to engineer trait lines (Low Health Response System and cloaking device) drastically reduced the survivability of the engineer in WvWvW setting. Deaths happen 3 times more common as there is no longer any healing possibility during elixir S! No more solo roaming. More power to zergs.

60 s cooldown on a now fairly weak skill doesn’t make much sense, considering that mesmer gets 2 s of invulnerability every 8 seconds using blurred frenzy, sword #2 and does very good dmg with it as well. 8 sec assumes blade training adept trait, 10 s without the trait. So for mesmers it is fine to have 20% invulnerability uptime without even sacrificing a utility slot and taking no traits, while engineers at best have 5% of invulnerability uptime using an utility slot (non-traited for fair comparison). And warriors can still use their skills and attack during endure pain, have better armor and health!?

But I guess Arenanet doesn’t want engineers ever to become popular in WvWvW. Nerfed with every single update and given back some useless buffs (you know how short time healing turret is gonna last in WvWvW). Guardians were already the most popular profession in WvWvW before this patch and together with warrior guardians have been in top 3 pve professions for ages. Yet they got significant buffs. What is the logic?!

Unlike most professions engineers don’t have any weapon skills which allow fast movement (e.g. ride the lightning, rush, heartseeker, swoop, infiltrator’s arrow just to mention few). Jump shot animation is super slow with the rifled barrels traits (when this bug is gonna get fixed?). So basically engineer has no easy way of disengagement like most professions do have.

Developers please explain.

SkylightMoon.1980:

“The Desert Borderlands Map will be replacing the old Borderlands map (Alpine Borderlands) when the expansion releases and we might reintroduce the old map in a rotation or tournament.”

This is indeed bad news, but I was expecting it already. Excessive amount of choke points and places to fall to your doom (or fear/launch etc your enemies) is nothing to cheer about. Nor the addition of gimmick mechanics.

It seems Eternal Battlegrounds will be the last good WvWvW map in this game. And the lag on that map, sighs…

The combination of both PIP range + MMR does NOT seem to work. Blow out matches are way too common e.g. my last two games are a 46 – 502 loss and 500-105 win. Such matches should be extremely rare, but they are not. This is partially not just a match making problem, but the removal of amulets and the “burst 1st to win” meta with excessive damage and CC leads to snowballing. Thus both must be addressed to normalize this situation.

Some players, who haven’t played much spvp have extremely long win streaks and some decent players are stuck to loss streaks. It seems the beginning of the league did have a major long-term effect for many players. I had 56-57 % win rate in ranked during season 1, despite often playing as warrior. Now my win rate is 20 % or so. I haven’t gotten a single 3 win streak, but long loss streaks are common. I am not a great or very experienced player, but I usually get 3-5 top stat awarded per match, so I am probably not the weakest link of my team, at least not in every game. I always solo queue and I feel that the current system is especially bad for many solo queuers.

Arenanet must do some action as soon as possible, because the current situation leads to significantly diminished player base (I know already several who quit completely), thus lose-lose for everyone.

Suggested actions:
1) Reinstate the old pip gain/loss system. Now many players simply stop playing when their team is behind by 100 points or more. Previously you did not loss a pip even if you lost a match if your enemy team had higher MMR than yours. I remember even winning a pip from a close loss. The old system encouraged players to try their best to the very end, now too many players just throw in the towel, because 10-500 and 499-500 count the same (=loss).

2a) Random match making entirely based on division, giving slightly higher rating for partial premades and higher rating for full premades. No MMR involved in ranked
or
2b) Match making based on MMR, just like previous season. Aiming for 50% win/loss rate.

Forsaker is right about the power creep. Eventually any MMORPG will be hit by power creep. I was just surprised and very sad that this game was so hard with massive power creep, which pretty much got us into this horrible spam spam meta. The game is just 14 months from launch and we have a massive power creep. There has been way too much buffing (even +50% or double there and there), instead of nerfing. A game developer must have a very good self-discipline (or strict senior mentor) to avoid power creep as obviously the player base is always screaming for buffs, rarely for nerfs. Now the only way to fix this is actually lot of smartly targeted nerfs. Players will moan about it, some threatening to quit the game, but in the long run it will be better for the game.

Maybe people misunderstood my post about making very high attack skills telegraphed and slow. I do not want to greatly increase the total time to kill (TTK), but this would really benefit from having attacks more clearly telegraphed (yes, I also mean Asuras). I can sometimes see even the high ranked player dodge/evade spam, dodges which are probably random. Such more or less random hit or miss, isn’t what I would want from a game.

Isn’t it logical that the highest damage skills should be slow and easy to avoid? While very fast attacks should do low damage?

This is a public letter mostly aimed for Arenanet developers. I wish both Anet and the players would comment. Please try to avoid flame wars, stick to constructive comments or just support some other person’s ideas.

I teach game design and programming at university. I am also fairly active in IGDA. I know a lot of people who play or played Guild Wars 2. Here is my summary why some of the stopped playing GW2 and went back to play other MMORPGs like WoW and SWTOR. Instead of just complaining I am actually proposing working solutions to each problem:
1. By far the most common complaint I have heard among my GW2 friends and students has been the “thief” problem. Most people do not like that enemy player, who is stealthed / invisible most of the time can kill them in just few blows. This is in fact a symptom of a larger problem, not just specific to one character class (see my solution below). People like fair fights, which last a reasonable amount of time: not too slow (many minutes to kill), not too fast (few seconds to kill). People like to see the enemy instead of fighting against invisible opponents. I know thieves can be countered, but it doesn’t make any sense to everybody in the game to prepare themselves and assign their stats and skills just to counter this problem. This is a not a kitten contest about whether you can beat thief using particular combination or not. Nor is the problem solved by giving advice like “learn to play better before complaining”. The fact is and remains: people are quitting Guild Wars 2, because of the “thief” problem.

Suggested solution: Thief traits and skills, which give invisibility should be reduced in duration and/or get a cooldown. They should be in line with Mesmer skills and traits. Mesmer is another character class, which commonly uses stealth. Let’s look at the Mesmer skills first: The prestige, Decoy, Veil and Mass Invisibility grant stealth. The last one of them is an elite skill. Their recharge times are: 30 s, 40 s, 90 s and 90 s. So Mesmer can remain stealthed less than 27% of total time, while spending big part of the skill bar to obtain those skills. Thief, on the other hand, hugely benefits from traits like hidden thief and meld into shadows, which add together 3 s to duration of stealth. Weapon skills like Cloak and Dagger don’t have any cool down, instead rely on a class-specific initiative mechanism. Initiative regenerates 1 point per 1.33 seconds. So even without using traits like quick pockets or quick recovery, kleptomaniac or hastened replenishment, you can trigger Cloak and Dagger every 8 seconds. Skills like Heartseeker have too low initiative count, making them spammable. Change the initiative count to 6 to put it more in line with warrior’s sword skill #2 (Savage leap), which does less damage than Heartseeker, yet has 8 s recharge.

Another big problem is the amount of damage per one hit. Skills like backstab can do over 7000 points of damage per hit against a medium armor opponent. That means that a 80 level character will die with just 3-4 hits. Combine this with skills like haste (quickness) and we have a huge problem. I am sure I am not the only person who is playing GW2 with less than optimal net connection. Sometimes the delay to get commands through (I am not talking about me being stunned or interrupted) is 1-2 seconds. If my dodge roll or skill activation activates 2 seconds later after I pressed the key, it won’t help anymore as my character is already dead or close to death.

Suggested solution: This would affect all character classes fairly and would not affect pve at all. Disable the use of foods and sharpening stones, potions etc. in WvWvW and pvp. Now top players can use both a superior sharpening stone and foods like plate of truffle steak/fire flank steak combined to provide a hefty bonus to power and precision or similar (for condition damage). This puts everybody to fight more on common ground. Victory based on skill, not who has the best buffs and equipment.
Put a cap to amount of damage per one hit and/or critical hit chance in pvp / WvWvW. E.g. limit the max damage per one hit/skill to about 1/5th total health of the character or around 3000-4000 points. Falling damage would be handled normally. Currently hidden killer gives 100% critical chance while under stealth, 50-60% sounds more reasonable.

The “thief” problem needs to be addressed fast. More and more people are going to quit GW2 and they will not wait until the February update.

Advice to Anet: Please do NOT fix this problem by introducing new complicated mechanisms or timers. Keep the system simple. Fix the cause, not band-aid it.

Thank you for listening! And sorry if my English wasn’t perfect. English is not my native language.

Deniara

Of course it is way too much. WvWvW is still suffering from serious power creep. Count in the consumables as well.

Many people forget the Power of the Mists, which has been in the game since launch, giving up to +10% increase to vitality and healing power (that can alone be massive couple hundred points more).
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Power_of_the_Mists

This is skewing the match ups and I really do not see that any of them add “fun” to this game. Game should be fun for all sides, not just the winning side with superior coverage. Even match ups are most fun and interesting. Thus all of the above should be just removed.

The WvWvW development priorities have been and totally skewed. We do not added siege traits or new stat buffs on top of the existing ones. We need:
1) better UI (for commanders, e.g. different colored tags, guild only tag etc. also ability to kick party members)
2) better match making and scoring (taking into consideration population/coverage differences and an outnumbered buff, which actually does something)
3) less lag (optimizing server code, more server capacity, more maps, slightly reducing players per map, offering less incentives for blobbing/zerging as this is known to lead to the worst lag)

CTFT.2740:

Exept none of the meta builds use any of them. It’s GS for all of them. Might on crit is just so powerfull.

Forceful greatsword is way too powerful as a master trait. It is stronger than most GM traits in this game. The 20% cooldown reduction + might on critical should have been enough, the +10% flat dmg bonus is simply too much.

Nowadays I rarely ever see enemy warriors without a greatsword in any game mode, except WvWvW zergs where some might still run hammer/sw+wh combo, but hammer+gs combo is also very common there. Death to diversity.

NO

We already got Power of the Mists, which offers similar bonuses to the servers based on their score in their current match up.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Power_of_the_Mists

I do not want more power to snow pile on the server which has superior numbers and coverage. I have suggested some defensive buffs to the structures and NPCs and to a smaller degree players on a heavily outnumbered side, but I have explained already well before that giving offensive bonuses even to the outnumbered side is a bad bad idea. Giving offensive map wide boosts to the side, which is already winning, is just plain madness and a great way to drive off the outnumbered side back to pve and other games.

Bloodlust would be bad for guild-vs-guild, who want as equal fighting ground as possible (e.g. stacks from weapon sigils must be nulled before match). EB jumping puzzle is difficult location for gvg and the long queus to EB might make gvgs a thing of the past. Arenanet should be careful not alienate their hard core player base.

The recent patch introduced a slight undocumented “buff” to medkit. The drops from medkit #2-5 are significantly bigger now (just a graphical effect, nothing more). It is easier to notice them in the heat of the battle, but this doesn’t yet solve the issues we have with this kit.

Here is the math how much different skills heal without any healing power:
Medkit heals 273 hp/s from bandage self + 185 hp/s from medkit #2-5 (always use instantly once they are off from cooldown + regeneration 130 hp/s
bandage self + medkit #2-5 = total heal 459 hp + regen = 589 hp/s including regen
Warrior’s healing signet heals 362 hp/s.
Healing turret heals 484 hp/s (assumed one blast per longer water field)

The above comparisons include the use of toolbelt skills. In fact the main heal of medkit is the toolbelt skill “bandage self”, which doesn’t benefit from Mechanized Deployment (bugged or then bandage self is not classified as a toolbelt skill, but a healing skill).

Utility:
Medkit can remove 10x damaging conditions per minute, 5.5x debilitating conditions per minute and almost 4 movement impairing conditions per minute
Medkit offers 63 % swiftness uptime and 55 % fury uptime.
Healing turret can remove 4×2 = 8 conditions per minute + it has a blast finisher + 2 water fields, allowing significantly more heals if you use finishers on these fields

Conclusion: Healing turret heals significantly more than medkit with 0 investment in healing power if we count in just the toolbelt skill “bandage self”. If we would use multiple blast finishers on the healing kit water fields, the total heal can be almost twice of medkit and it also provides more heal to the allies within the radius, thus making medkit even less viable. While the medkit utility looks great on paper, it takes roughly 2/3 of the total time to use all those medkit skills as soon as they are free from recharge. This means spending 40 seconds out of every minute just swapping between medkit, use medkit skills #2-5 and then swap back again. And this assumes the user is not using medkit #1 at all. Each medkit swap takes 1 second.

Obviously no smart player would spend so much time using medkit as this would barely leave time to use other skills and attack the opponents. Even on a less frequent rotation the time spent swapping into medkit, using 1-3 skills and back again is very significant. The loss of DPS in most situations in at least 33 , which is truly massive. Why would anyone select a heal skill, which requires 33-66 DPS loss and heals less than other healing skills?!?

In order for the medkit to be viable, it must heal more than other heals in the game. The idea of throwing the medkit #2-5 for allies simply doesn’t work. It heals so little and usually just cleanses one specific type of condition that it is almost invariably a better option to spend that time doing something else e.g. attacking the enemies, using CC skills at enemies, run to capture another point etc. The biggest problem is that medkit #2-5 affects just one character. The previous behavior where medkit skills dropped bandages and vials at the feet of the user was much better. It allowed the player to more quickly utilize the kit. It also allowed the kit to function underwater. If medkit #2-5 would be like warrior shouts: instant cast, 600-1200 radius and affect up to 5 allies I would see much more use to it. Then probably the cooldown of especially medkit #2 would need to be increased, not to make the kit too powerful.

Anyways the activation time of medkit #2-5 need to be reduced significantly. Make those skills either instant cast or have 0.25 second cast with over no over cast or delay. The base heal of each medkit skill "2-5 must be increased by 60% (still that would be roughly only 1000 per use!). Healing turret is so popular, not just because the utility and huge healing it brings, but because it has 0.5 second cast time (less prone to interrupts, engineer can spend most time using other skills).

This would solve the current BUG:
Have mecha legs trait equipped or swiftness, throw stimulant (medkit #3) in front of you, and run over it. The stimulant won’t activate and you need to backpedal to activate it. All these waiting for the medkit skills to activate really kills the kit in real life usage. If medkit #2-5 work unreliable half of the time, it absolutely kills their usage in any high spvp or WvWvW.

Medkit #1 is problematic in many ways.
- it heals only max 3 allies, and not 5 as in the description
- the cone is so narrow it often can hit just 1 ally
- it auto aims often at enemies, even though it does no damage
- the healing is so tiny it makes no noticeable dent
- it doesn’t affect the engineer (WHY? e.g. elementalist water staff #1 does damage, affects the user and has 1200 range to hit enemies)
- while you are using it, you are not doing anything useful

Here are few ways to fix medkit #1:
2-3x its base heal and make it also affect the engineer himself
or
make it also do some weak damage e.g. 2 sec poison or 4 sec bleed from full 1.5 s channel
double it’s base heal and make it heal 360 radius, 600 range

Discuss.

Well designed skill should do either two mediocre / weak things or one powerful thing, but not more. Skills which do many powerful things at same time are generally overpowered and broken. Pin down clearly violates this game design rule and has too much good things going on.

Right now pin down has 1000 range, 25 s cooldown and does:
minor amount direct damage
6 stacks of 12 s bleed (huge)
3 second immobilize
and it pierces!
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Pin_Down

Compare this for example with engineer rifle #2, net shot:
1000 range, 10 s cooldown
no dmg, no bleed stacks
2 seconds immobilize
can affect only one target, easy to strafe from range (don’t even need to dodge it)
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Net_Shot

Compare this also with the warrior rifle #2, aimed shot:
1200 range, 10 s cooldown
minor amount of direct damage
5 s cripple
affects only one target (unless traited)
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Aimed_Shot

I would argue that 5 s cripple without bleed stacks is much weaker than 3 immobilize.
No wonder why almost all warriors select longbow instead of the rifle.

I think adding some delay to the animation will not solve the thing. 3 second piercing immobilize is already incredibly strong, especially in group situations, concerning that immobilizes are now stacking. Arenanet designers should decide, either reduce the immobilize duration of pin down or tone down the damage part (direct dmg + bleeds). Description wise it would be logical if pin down would only immobilize, but would not do anything else (just like engineer rifle #2).

I agree with the OP.

I am not claiming this game is a total failure. GW2 has superb visuals, audio, some very good introduction stories, quite large pve content for a game which has been out for less than 1 year. WvWvW could have been the crown jewel of this game.

It seems as if somebody in Arenanet, who is in high in power, has certain vision about the game and wants to force spoon fed to its entire player base. It is important that a game developer has a vision, but completely ignore the player base is also dumb. Game balancing is most solely done based on tpvp, even though majority of GW2 players never played tpvp. They keep nerfing and buff skills based on an unpopular game mode and as result e.g. end up buffing those professions e.g. warriors, who are already very powerful in pve, just because warrior is not that good in tpvp. Many build have been utterly destroyed by Arenanet’s “balancing” crew e.g. engineer’s 100 nades.

There has been countless of good suggestions to fix the zerging / blobbing meta and do something about the population and coverage imbalanced. There has been a lot of suggestions how to fix the stale imbalanced match ups and the useless “outmanned” buff. Yet never any comment from a developer.

Nobody on these forums was asking for those Arrow Carts buffs. Arenanet’s official philosophy was “small changes”. Yet without any warning they increased the AC damage by 80% and at same time introduced totally overpowered WXP traits, which further gave AC much more power. E.g. compare the AC traits with those traits giving + 1 % / + 2 % etc. more damage against mercenaries. A child can see that the traits are not balanced compared to each other at all.

The thief, or actually the stealth issue has generated literally hundreds of complaints just in these forums. It has been the most popular complaint in these forums since the introduction of this game. Yet not a single official reply from a developer. Anybody understands that stealth is more powerful in WvWvW than in tpvp. And mobility is also more important in a big open map than in a game mode where big time is spent just contesting and defending a point, which you cannot even contest while being stealthed. Yet for some reason revealed lasts longer time in tpvp than in WvWvW. Never ever developers explained their totally illogical decision.

This really smells that the developers have notion how they would like to play the game. E.g. sitting by the AC and killing lots of enemies, huge zerg running around the map facerolling the outmanned side and stealth is “fun”. I am not suggesting to ban zerging or completely removing stealth and I don’t want to repeat what I have written in numerous other threads (how to fix those issues), but it is obvious that many people in the community would want to see more variety.

Let the conversation begin…