Guild Wars 2

Sarrs.4831:

Genuinely worse solution to the issue than the currency rollover.

Seriously just play for the Diamond box on reset week you’ll have enough of the new Proofs to get the espec.

I usually complete the 6/6 diamond box multiple times per week, so if the new skirmish chests will just award similar amount of the new currencies, I will accumulate it quickly.

I still think the new currency and proof of heroics should be merged sooner or later.

Serenity.6135:

No it is the proper move, because if they just keep proofs of heroics as the standard currency for PoF as well, then players who have thousands stockpiled can simply unlock all the new stuff immediately giving them an unfair advantage.

This is yet another lame excuse. They could very easily introduce some delay e.g. 2 weeks before one can buy the new hero points using existing currencies, such as proof of heroics. Thus NOBODY can unlock all the new stuff immediately. Either you wait 2 weeks and unlock them with proof of heroics or go to pve and unlock them there. Problem solved.

A new currency is a NOT solution, it is a PROBLEM.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

All skirmish chests earned before PoF launch will contain Proof of Heroics. All skirmish chests earned after will have the new currency.

I hope the player will be able to select the new currency or proof of heroics from skirmish chest, because otherwise it would mean that obtaining proof of heroics will be really difficult after PoF.

I am speaking this for others. I personally have over 15k of proof of heroics. I don’t think I will ever be using them all.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

We will be adding a new currency that is similar to Proof of Heroics that will allow you to buy new sigils, runes, recipes, and hero points from PoF.

Yet another currency? This is a seriously BAD idea. We are already have a lot of currencies, which have become more or less obsolete: karma, laurels, proofs and badges. I have so many of them, that I cannot possible spend them into useful things and clicking 1000+ times will give a sore wrist.

Arenanet: please stop adding currencies to this game. Or make existing currencies at least convertible to others. The crazy amount of currencies in this game is example of bad game design and makes game more confusing for players. And a lot of players are irritated to have currencies which will never be used (unless you really plan to equip 9+ with legendaries and multiple full ascended gear etc).

Dawdler.8521:

Engineers, forever ignored.

Engineers are probably the least played profession in WvWvW. They have never been the meta. I don’t think holosmith will replace hammer scrapper, because it lacks defense.

Arenanet could sometimes perhaps read the engineer sub forum and do some of the sensible suggestions from there.

Engineer rifle needs serious love. Currently it is extremely high risk ranged choice, which requires to be at close range for maximum burst. Rifle #4, overcharged shot, with the all the projectile hate e.g. reflects, is very easy way to kill yourself. I think rifle #3, blunderbuss, should be a blast finisher and rifle #5, leap shot, really needs a bit faster animation + evade frames. Then it could be used as additional source of mobility (currently it can even lead to immobilized at air = death). These would also benefit holosmith elite spec as rifle could suit it.

Orbital Command grandmaster trait should increase mortar’s auto attack radius from 120 to 180 in addition to its current effect. This would increase the likelihood of comboing, without still making it too overpowered compared to staff ele. Mortar is pretty low DPS kit, but it has a lot of fields and 100 % projectile finisher auto, which suffers from too small radius.

Medkit needs serious love. Medkit #1 currently only heals others in way too small cone. It should heal the engineer as well and/or do some damage effects e.g. compare with water staff ele #1 or druid staff #1. Medkit #2-5 should be turned into 1/2 s cast 360 degree burst centered on the engineer 360 radius, affects up to 5 allies including the engineer. This would give engineer the sorely needed group utility instead.

Overall with 3 changes alone, engineer could find itself in meta. Without any changes to the core engineer, I don’t think holosmith / core engineer will be part of the zerg meta.

Zenith.7301:

If by steamrolled you mean a warrior or thief bursts you down, that is going to happen with those classes no matter what. Condi classes ignore toughness, too.

Warrior in WvW is pretty broken, since their healing signet and healing traits are not nerfed unlike in spvp.

Actually the berserker burst counting as 1 adrenaline bar (instead of previous 3) is active on WvWvW as well. That is a massive 3-to-1 nerf unless you manage to land all your berserker bursts in a row. Nevertheless I feel the balance will once again have a massive shift with PoF and the new elite specs.

PS. I still roam with a power hybrid core engineer using rifle and medkit. Don’t laugh. I am probably the only one in the game doing it. And yes, I die a LOT, because my build has zero blocks, evades, reflects or invulnerabilities.

I want celestial back. The current meta builds rely only on few amulets, so we could definitely use some more variety and bring back some builds which were deleted when so many amulets were removed.

Dead?!? Yesterday in WvWvW I still saw more guardians and necromancers than other professions. Revenants, elementalists and thieves come probably after that in popularity. Engineers and mesmers are perhaps the least played professions, but wouldn’t call them dead either.

Brutaly.6257:

Playing with obscure numbers is just silly if it is some sort of credibility you trying to achieve by stating those numbers. If you have such an abundance of guardians on Desolation its not a class issue, its a server/community issue. I played thief the last year or so and i havent seen that many reapers/guardians in either my own server or the server we have been playing against.

They didnt nerf guardian at all imo, they destroyed the auto attack on one weapon and a weapon with a non working auto wont be used, period. And they also removed the only working zerg condition build the guardian had.

Saying something like that is good for the game (regardless of profession you play) just baffles me…

The reason why they did this is a knee jerking action based on that they realized that the staff guardian with permeathing wrath will be a condi menace when they introduce Tome of Justice and the condi mantras and will outshine the axe by a mile.

So instead of actually fixing the weapon they broke it.

It has nothing to do with guardians being overrepresented or hitting thru walls or tagging loot.

Please let have an open discussion. First of all, guardians (and reaper necromancers) are exceedingly common on every top server in EU, not just Desolation. I have witnessed enemy zergs where the vast majority is playing these two top professions coupled with revenants, elementalists, few mesmers for utility and few medium armor professions. You basically almost never see an zerg composed 50-60 % of engineers and thieves, for a good reason. Pretty much every decent commander was assigning at least 1 guardian to each melee group and generally more than 1 guardian for 2nd stability for the commander party. Most WvWvW commanders still will play guardian. If you see this as a healthy meta, it just means you are heavily biased towards guardians. It is ok to love 1 profession over others, but let’s then at least be honest about that.

Guardian Staff auto attack was way too good, as it hits through gates and has so massively wide cone making it probably the best loot bag tagging auto attack in the game. After the 300 range nerf it is in the same ball park with elementalist air dagger #1 (lightning whip), which is probably the best auto attack for a dagger ele (btw). I would have personally nerfed it only to 400-450 range.

Guardian is still far from dead in WvWvW. There is still a good roaming spec and besides DH guardians rarely used staff anyways. AH frontline guardian can use other weapons e.g. hammer + greatsword.

Other professions experienced much worse nerfs e.g. the berserker (warrior) got a massive hit in survivability. Previously berserker burst was counted as 3 adre for adrenal health + cleansing ire, now just 1. I can attest the difference is really huge. Necromancer shroud depletes faster. I could go on. So it wasn’t just the guardian, which got hit.

PS. This doesn’t mean that guardian wouldn’t still has some garbage skills e.g. signet of mercy, which would need improvement or at least CD reduced. But every profession has some lousy skills, which pretty much nobody uses. Need I mention medkit on engineer or most of the engi rifle skills?

Thani.8569:

Remove the wealth gain and most of Frontline Guardian will either quit WvW or play another class.
This is not good for WvW meta. Frontline guard are a good asset for WvW.

I am going to get flamed for this:
Actually this is GOOD for the WvWvW meta. Guardians are one of the rare professions, which have always been in WvWvW meta since Autumn 2012. Before this patch I did sound profession counts and observed that roughly 1/3 of players in a squad are playing a guardian with reaper (necromancer) being almost as popular. This means that guardians and necros were heavily favored over other professions, also implying that guardians were also overpowered or some other professions were underperforming significantly. It is never healthy for a meta to have a situation like that.

PS. I have guardian with full ascended celestial gear and some of the stuff on that build was pretty expensive e.g. sigil of concentration on my staff. Still I am not whining. I think Arenanet did the right decision finally nerfing guardian a bit.

Wow… sounds seriously overpowered, especially for WvWvW small scale roaming (which is already badly balanced). If shadow gust and blinding shadow have shorter CD than the typical stun breaker, the marked enemy is toast. I am not claiming it will be the best 1 vs 1, but if there would be 2 dead-eyes on same target, I think that basically means that target is dead.

Trajan.4953:

Bottom line is, not enough people play WvW to make it worth ANets time to bother with it.

The sooner we all accept this, the sooner we can all just move on.

There is very EASY remedy to this, but Arenanet once again missed it.

Pve players play for rewards. Arenanet brought more rewards to WvWvW, but made them to time consuming and difficult to obtain that the pve players gave up very quickly.

Desolation has a massive pve population. When the WvWvW patch hit we had long queues on all maps for few days. After 1-1,5 weeks the pve population and queues were gone.

Please NO new WvWvW maps. They end up as horrible as Edge of the Mists or Desert borderland. Instead: give us the ORIGINAL maps back.

SneakyTouchy.6043:

Deniara Devious.3948:

- Arenanet developers have been listening to the wrong audience: elite players and falsely thinking this game could be esports

Stop right there! They didn’t listen to the elite players, they listened to carebears, whiners, and those with little fortitude.

The game also has plenty of potential to move back into Esports if they mend the other points you mentioned.

A big thing would be making every game automatically record to demo files for better spectating, anti-cheating, and reduced storage space like they do with Counter-Strike and many other Esports games.

Sorry. This is not how most people operate once you have been betrayed and ignored.

Any game who wants to have a healthy pvp player base, needs to cater those normals, which you call with derogatory names. It also needs to be beginner friendly. Despite having put about 5000 h to this game, I consider myself as normal and casual when it comes to spvp. The match making was so utterly bad for 2 seasons, catering the elite and giving many players totally lopsided games. Lopsided wins or losses (100-500 etc) are NOT fun. If the vast majority of the matches end up totally lopsided, why to play at all?

The game also needs to be spectator and community friendly. Look at the lack of communication of Arenanet in these forums. I know reading and writing replies is a lot of work. I am myself administering couple of popular social media groups and I also have a fairly popular YouTube channel with millions of views and 20K views/day average. Despite having a full time job + family with kids and a small baby, I still have time to reply dozens of questions per day + write online articles, explaining things. I also myself sometimes have to ban people, but I generally do that only for repeated use of extremely foul language or death threats towards people. Here you can get infractions for breaking the rules, which often don’t make sense e.g. in WvWvW subforums you are not allowed to talk about the matches (makes sense, right? ). Catering a good vibrant community means tolerance also towards those who sometimes have heated opinions and discussions. I have several times myself allowed this to happen and afterwards some come back to me and regret: “sorry, I was telling bad things about you and your channel before”. Yes, they come back, can become fans and the community grows. Here the policies cause the opposite to happen.

Rightfully a lot of players felt betrayed and frustrated. Some feel that Arenanet doesn’t want to include them as players nor as forum users. There is really no easy way to bring them back. Even if Arenanet would fix all the above mistakes, the harm is already done and the vast majority will not come back.

Sorry for all the possible language mistakes I made. English is not my native language.

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

Sword #3, final thrust, needs to have faster animation / cast time. Now it feels so clumsy and slow that it breaks the flow.

I have personally been able to finish diamond track in past few weeks, but because I now have a vacation = this more to play. I also have high rank and I am often playing outnumbered (Desolation doesn’t have a link, but we are facing a linked server every week). I checked and found that the vast majority of my PIPs come from the rank and outnumbered.

I can imagine that for players who don’t have high rank or aren’t often getting outnumbered it is really a full time job or even more to finish diamond track in time.

The ticket requirements for the armor and weapon skins are unreasonable. Even as a WvWvW veteran with 4000+ hours in the game mode, I am not going to bother. Why to play full time for minimum 2 years to get cool looking armor skin, which is NOT even legendary. And minimum 2 weeks to get one mistforged exotic weapon skin (350 tickets + 250 memoirs of battle) is way too much. Make at least the skins ascended or double the rate of tickets per week!

I feel the current PIP rate is too slow and makes the game feel like a chore. Combine this with the recent changes to the decay timer, which make scouting a pain, unless you have a wall to repair (and endless supply).

I feel Arenanet is making typical game designer mistake: listening to a small loud elite minority, which doesn’t mind the grind. But trust me, most of us have family, job(s) and/or studies, we don’t need yet another full-time job.

I think Arenanet made a fundamental mistake by using yet another time gated currency, the skirmish tickets, instead of using the badges of honor and proofs of heroics. People could accumulate badges and heroics at their own speed and even small increments would eventually matter and none would be wasted (now for example if you start diamond track, but don’t finish it in time, you are getting 40 tickets less).

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.

Dayra.7405:

Tournament is a bit boring when the winner is determined by ANet via full-status and server-linking.

^^ this ^^

Here in EU the TOP #1 server usually always has a link. And if that server loses a link, then it is just a matter of that it is no longer #1. Transferring to a linked server is cheap, so the tournament would just lead to massive bandwagoning to the linked server for easy win. No thank you for such kind of “tournament”.

1. Power creep from HoT ( = really bad expansion in so many ways, also for fights in WvWvW)
2. Incredibly badly balanced matches, which end up something like 50-450 in favor of another (maybe this got fixed, I stopped spvp a long time ago as huge blowouts or wins
seemed to be the norm)
3. Deletion of too many amulets (which isa big reason for lack of diversity in builds)
4. Lack of diversity in builds
5. Lack of real 100 % solo queue
6. Lack of templates, ability to easily save and load builds
7. Some spvp maps are just irritating, like Skyhammer, Temple of the Silent Storm, Spirit Watch

fosfor.9076:

10 badges for 1 ticket conversion ratio it is ok, that will save some WvW veterans for trash out the badges, and reward them with respect because WvW veterans din’t get anything substantial comparing to others, like fractal/raid pve veterans. At least, if Anet continue to support pve gear for wvw, then, completely remove the pve grid part, as the update for runes. But, i will like more WvW exclusive items, as “Mistforged Triumphant Hero’s armor” or “Warbringer” to see in the incoming updates, this will make WvW GREAT AGAIN and is a HUUUGE BIG plus for Anet, i expect many more players to play GW2. Look at the queue for borders, before legendary wvw update was barely 10+ in prime time, now we almost got 100+, this is a huge difference! this is the way!

Desolation has probably the biggest pve population in EU. And we know that many pve players are for shinies.

Desolation didn’t used to have much any queues before legendary WvWvW update. When the update hit, we got queues to all for 4 maps, but those queues died out quick. Within less than 2 weeks from the update, the situation is back to the old one.

In other words: the pve players noticed that it takes way too much grind to get anything decent out of WvWvW. This should be a clear message for the developers. The current speed of obtaining weapon and armor skins from WvWvW is set artificially way to high. The pve population in general couldn’t care less as pve rewards are still far greater than WvWvW rewards.

We can argue whether 20 badges or 10 badges per 1 ticket is the right conversion rate. And how many proofs are equivalent of badges, but we really need a conversion.

100 badges = 1 ticket is a bad joke. I know that some hardcore WvWvWers can get 500-1000 badges per week, but even that would then equal mere 5-10 tickets = close to nothing.

Ulion.5476:

It should be 3 proof of heroics = 10 badges of honor = 1 ticket. Since you get 6 proof of heroic or 20 badges of honor from the skirmish chests. This would add upto 80 extra ticket per week once you convert the rewards from completing the pip track. You would also get around 50 tickets if you gain 25 wxp level a week. The conversion system would add an extra 130 tickets if you complete the reward track and gain 25wxp levels a week.

The biggest issues with a conversion system is that the top wvwers would instantly complete the Warbringer and at least 2 prestige set(forgot proof of heroics). Zerger would have an advantage in getting tickets. That why it should cost some silver per conversion (10-25s).

Wvwer would get to many tickets to fast. Atm you can get upto 8400 ticket every year and it takes 2 years to get all of the high end wvw rewards. With a conversion system on top of the most active wvwer getting the warbringer and 2 prestige armor instantly, they would be able to get the next prestige armors within 3months. What would wvwer do with their tickets after that? Would ticket become like badges of honor and be stored endlessly?

Currently the accumulation rate is way too slow. To spend about 2 years in a row every week 20+ h of WvWvW grind to get a prestige armor, which is not even legendary but merely ascended with cosmetic effects is outrageous grindy.

Most top WvWvW players probably play more than just 1 character e.g. play both guardian and necro. Thus they would need to purchase and obtain prestige armor and legendary backbag for both. Even with the currency conversion basically NO player I know of could afford it to do instantly for multiple characters.

Also according to https://gw2efficiency.com/account/statistics/statistics.proofOfHeroics
https://gw2efficiency.com/account/statistics/statistics.badgesOfHonor

Only 0.5 % of GW2 players have 4500 proofs or more and only 0.5 % have over 40500 badges. The number of players who have 10k proofs and 100k badges are extremely few. We are talking something like 1 out of 1000 players or less. Is such a tiny minority a real issue at all since we are talking about account bound stuff!?

100 badges for just 1 ticket is way too little. If you look at
https://gw2efficiency.com/account/statistics/statistics.badgesOfHonor

You can see that the average GW2 player has just 2951 badges (mean) and 1196 badges (median). That would translate only to 29 or 11 tickets. Proofs of heroics are even more rare: mean 212 and median is only 16. The players who have over 5k of proofs are exceedingly rare. Same: players who have over 50k badges are rare.

I think it is safe to say that most players earn much less than 500 badges per week. With your suggestion that would translate to mere 5 tickets.

I agree that there should be a conversion of WvWvW currencies, but the conversion formula should be more fair. After all these currencies are account bound and you cannot sell them to other players.

My suggestion:
10 badge of honor = 1 ticket
2 proofs of heroics = 10 badges of honor
2 proofs of heroics = 1 ticket

Any idea, which is totally altruistic and does no damage, like medkit #1 currently is, is doomed to failed. The problem is that medkit #1 doesn’t heal the engineer himself at all! Compare that with druid staff #1 and elementalist water staff #1, both which are 1200 ranged attacks, which do damage and heal at same time (significantly better, as everybody wants to tag targets in pve and WvWvW to gain loot).

Simple fix to medkit would be:
change all skills #1-2 to 300 radius skills centered around the engineer, affect up to 5 targets, including engineer (thus max. 4 other targets). Why 300 radius? that would be half the range of most shouts (600-1200) and 1/4 or smaller area compared to shouts. Thus much smaller range, yet also lower cooldowns.

Medkit should NOT have any throw skills as that is just clumsy with ground targeting and stuff. It works very bad in the heat of battle. And I have played over 3000 h with medkit, so I probably have much more experience with throwing those medkit #2-5 skills than almost any other GW2 player.

Aury.1367:

They drop alot by guards (NPCs), havent seen any Spike drop from a player yet even though we farm all day long.

^^ this ^^

I don’t zerg that much, but I flip a lot of camps, attack towers / keeps alone or in small group. And the legendary spikes come plenty.

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

Even better to give us more useful things to buy with badges, instead of just exotic armor and weapons (useless except for skins), 75 level food (I use level 80 food!), normal siege (superior siege is better), traps (useful), infusion (useful), ascended trinkets (useful, but lacks some choices e.g. ascended backbag).

I know you can convert badges Badge of Tributes, but even 30k badges gives only about 250 g, which is very little considering the effort to obtain 30k badges.

I have over 65000 badges and tons of siege of my main character.

Aeolus.3615:

ANet can… u guys do something for class out of pvp as well?? i would like to play my guardian in WVW again since i only use mace shield / staff with shouts…

the problem on guardian core support is not only in pvp.

Are you kidding me? Guardian is the MOST COMMON profession in WvWvW. At least here in the top tiers of EU. It is not unusual to see that one third of entire zergs are made out of shout guardians. If any profession needs toning down for WvWvW, guardian comes to my mind 1st. It does NOT make any sense to buff guardian for WvWvW, because soon we could see almost everybody there just playing a guardian, while other professions get more and more ignored.

Rifle doesn’t need a complete overhaul, but at least the following should happen:

net shot, rifle #2, reduce CD from 10 s to 8 s
blunderbuss, rifle #3, also a blast finisher (suits the skill), maybe also unblockable
overcharged shot, rifle #4, remove self-knockdown
jump shot, rifle #5, add evade frames and make the animation a bit faster (to allow it
effectively be used as movement skill vs swiftness)

This would still make rifle high risk vs hammer, which offers more utility and defense. Unlike most players, I think rifle auto attack is fine. It is just the other skills are too risky / unreliable or don’t have enough.

daw.4923:

well,im glad that offhand MACE,SWORD AND AXE is ok. no need to look at that.

Not to mention warhorn, which almost nobody uses. Currently shield is the best off-hand choice.

Most of the heals would still need a buff, as almost everybody takes healing signet and the other options are ignored (year after year).

I am not asking to make warrior all powerful without any weaknesses. Sometimes small things like 20 % cooldown reduction, while not nerfing anything, might do the trick.

Feanor.2358:

Big blob vs big blob is still a fair fight. And to me it is much more enjoyable than roaming. I can’t really accuse FSP of backing off fights they’re losing. Two nights ago we won a few rounds against them in the open field and they were always coming to fight again. It’s up to the commander, ultimately.

I agree that the commander matters. And obviously the best FSP commanders generally play at prime time. I generally play at day time and evenings and enjoy the day time more, because it is easier to get more equal fights and there is generally no issue with the lag.

Size of the blob matters lot. Even 30 vs 40 gives the latter an advantage, not to mention the usual 20 vs 40-50 situation. Also a guild of 25 should have an advantage vs 25 PuGs.

It is obvious that both FSP and Gandara are over stacked with their linked servers, at least compared to the current active Deso population. Let’s see if Arenanet finally would be able to make a sensible linking next time. Some of the lower population EU servers definitely need a link, but the higher population servers don’t. Making perfect balance is probably not possible because of the language specific servers.

On the positive side it has been really easy to enjoy the outnumbered on Deso. Despite being a casual gamer with family + kids + full-time job, I have done the diamond track many times (+11 pip or more). It was nice that Arenanet allowed to repeat the diamond track over and over again (sadly without the extra tickets though).

Anyways, see you on the battle field!

I think these are numbers are possible and not necessarily sign of botting or glitch.

FSP used to be proud to be the best open field fighting server in EU, but in recent match ups, I have seen them fight only
1) if they have a significant number advantage e.g. 50 FSP vs 30 others
2) if they have a position advantage e.g. fight near sieged fully upgraded structure owned by them and of course using all possible siege on enemy.

Gandara+ is acting in similar ways. I am NOT blaming anyone, I also use siege. This is all legal and so called smart fighting. But it will inflate K/D numbers as long as there is an enemy server which keeps feeding them deaths.

Ayna

PS. Before somebody flames me, I know there are still a few brave players on FSP, but I was talking general. And yes, Gandara also still has some gankers and many prime time guilds, but mostly I see a big blob.

I am glad that Power of the Mists was finally removed. It is favoring the winning side. I have been advocating removal of power of mists already for 4+ years.

I agree with the original poster. I have way more badges (64k+) and about 9.4k proofs and well over 10 million karma and I haven’t even been doing EotM, just regular WvWVW. I have already 5 characters with full ascended sets. I could easily equip 3 other characters with full ascended set as I got the ascended materials, armor/weapon chests for that, but I am too lazy to bother. I think most players play max 4-6 characters regularly and the rest of the alts gets fairly little play.

Karma, Badges and proofs of heroics have become more or less useless. I guess I will at some point be sitting with 20+ million karma, 100k+ badges, 20k proofs….

Arenanet please give us useful stuff to buy with the badges, proofs and karma!! Also laurels have become quite useless, I got 1200 laurels despite already putting all the infusions I managed to do without fractals.

My favorite maps:
1. Original Alpine borderlands with the lake (WvWvW, no longer available)
2. Eternal Battlegrounds (WvWvW)
3. Natural looking original pve maps such as Timberline Falls, Queensdale, Harathi Hinterlands etc.
4. Cursed Shore (best level 80 pve map)
5. Battle of Kyhlo (spvp)

Original Lions arch was also cool, but the revamped one is very much meh (over design, just like all the new maps, which I am going to use as examples in my game design lessons how not to make maps).

Most awful maps:
1. HoT maps, especially Tangled Depths and Dragon Stand (pve)
2. Edge of the Mists (WvWvW)
3. Dry Top (pve)
4. Desert borderlands (WvWvW)

Common features among these maps:
UGLY (for me)
too complex
too much gimmicks
too much verticality
HoT maps + Dry Top travel tied to meta events
too much like a jumping puzzle
annoying

My favorite maps are all the original maps. Sadly there hasn’t been a single really good map since the release. It seems the original map designers left the company.

1. Alpine borderlands Lake with quaggans + krait + middle island for some tight fights and underwater fun. (much better than the ruins area)
2. Much less power creep before the introduction of HoT
3. Prime time queues to all maps, often lasting 1-2 h and big epic fights with even number of players. Now Desolation generally has queue to just 1 map in prime (despite the new legendary rewards) and outside prime today has been generally 10-15 Deso vs 30-40 blob from both enemy servers.
4. Manual supply management and manual management of tower/keep upgrades
5. Crafting stations at home border

Capping tickets to 175 = mistake, common cause of irritation among hard core WvWvWers.

Ticket requirements for the armor etc. is way too much.

It requires about 20 h of active play with a good server to get 175 tickets. Thus you need at least 2 weeks and 40 h to get 350 tickets, which is enough to get an exotic weapon or exotic chest armor. Exotic!!! You can get much better looking exotic skin in few hours of pve.

Arenanet is still treating WvWvW inferior compared to pve.

Miyafuji.1340:

Its not just that. Linking was supposed to keep dead servers more alive. But ATM, I’m from Desolation for example, and we got unfortunately put up to T1 again, and we are not linked with anyone, and yet facing T1 servers that have say slightly higher skill levels, and also massive population (queues on all BL’s) and they are linked. Why on earth you would link dominating T1 server which already has huge WvW population is beyond me. The current system is not working fine, that I’m sure off.

Desolation is tier 1 because of night capping. Without it we would be in tier 3 or so.

FSP should have never been given a link. I really don’t understand Arenanet logic why FSP has been constantly having a link despite being a “full” status server. Desolation is also classified as full, but we haven’t had a link for a long time. And the long queues lasted less than 1 week after the WvWvW update. Now it is back to: queue to 1 map in prime time.

It seems Arenanet is not even trying to balance the populations with server links, but favoring some servers with some twisted logic “they deserve to be in tier 1 and this server must get a link to get a fighting change against server X, while this server is considered not to earn a link despite lower population vs server + link”. I understand that language specific servers make the population balance very difficult.

Mammon.9508:

These were the queues for Gandara. “Gandara WvW is dead” is a laughably false claim.

LOL crazy queues on Gandara! When was that screen shot taken?

Desolation had queues to all 4 maps (albeit shorter than in that screen shot) when the WvWvW update was launched, but it died in less than a week. Now it is back to normal: generally queue to 1 map in prime time and rarely queues outside prime time. I like it that way. Long queues = more times spent waiting = less time playing.

I still think this queue is not related to gearing and Gandara is definitely far from dead. You are probably the most populated WvWvW server with FSP as long as you have the link.

Spvp amulets in WvWvW is really stupid idea. We need more build diversity, not less.

I stopped playing spvp because it allows so limited set of amulets.

The UI should display the WXP rank and also show it with 2 decimals. Now it show 1000-1999 WXP rank as 1k. It would be better to show them 1.0-1.9 WXP rank.

Limodriver.4106:

they forgot to say it requires Diamond rank for the final tier lol.

I really hope this is not true. I personally have much higher WvWvW rank than most players (despite not doing EotM), but from
https://gw2efficiency.com/account/statistics/statistics.wvwRank

We can see that the average GW2 players has WXP rank 48 (median) and 277 (average). For those who have played over 4000h+ the numbers are WXP rank 457 (median), 896 (average). 99.5 % = the vast majority haven’t even reached mithril rank.
The number of diamond rank players is very small and I am sure most of them farmed quite a bit of EotM as well.

Kajan.7410:

I am using Medkit for underwater, to be entirely honest. Turret on land, no question about that, but under water i prefer the Medkit to the Elixir. It’s self heal recharges quicker, and its not that much less healing.

Medkit hasn’t worked underwater already for 2 years! (since they changed the bandages being thrown, instead of dropping at your feet)

Sad it is

Rifle is far from optimal. Compared to hammer rifle lacks both utility and defense, which are more often needed than DPS in WvWvW setting.

However I personally have over 3000 hours as core engi in WvWvW using both medkit and rifle. My build is very risky for solo roaming, but can solo towers and upgraded camps with ease and solo a keep if you have crazily long time (probably defenders will notice you). My build works very well for zerging: tons of ranged DPS, AoE, fields and 3 unblockable AoE attacks. But positioning is super important. One small mistake and you are toast. My build has zero blocking, zero reflects, zero stability, zero invulnerability.

In summer 2017 I might finally have time to do some videos, maybe even streaming.

Desolation is PuG heaven, but we are currently classified as “full”, despite we can barely have any queues at prime to any map and we are generally outnumbered on 3/4 maps at same time.

There is activity at all hours.

We have several WvWvW focused guilds, but I would say our strong point is organized PuGs groups. At the moment we lack small roaming groups. Most Deso roamers are just solo roamers, who happen to be in the same place at same time with others.

I cannot speak for other servers, because I don’t have alt accounts.

First of all Arenanet developers should communicate more and explain why these server links were made like they were.

FSP has got linked server twice in a row despite being “full” status. And Desolation is once again the only international server without a link. Well, last time SFR was also without a link. I think SFR deserved a link then, but for some weird reason they linked Piken & FSP, which were both full top servers… weird logic indeed!

The almost total lack of communication and giving players the feeling that things are unfair is certainly NOT going to attract more players to this game mode.

Hitman.5829:

A simple scientific test is to go to WvW and test what toons get faster from point A to B, do it and you will see that the ranking will be:

• Thief
• ranger
• Elementalist
• Mezmer
• Warrior
• Guardian
• Revenant
• Necro

Now, if you you are in combat then the ranking is:

• Thief
• Ranger
• Elementalist
• Mezmer
• Guardian
• Warrior
• revenant
• Necro

Do the test!

Now, considering that warrior is a Meele class, its current mobility rank is mediocre.

Where does the engineer stand on this list? In combat speed should be good with super speed, but I think outside combat engineer is among the slower professions. I know engineer has rocket boots, but it has 20 s cooldown and goes only 900 and has pretty long after cast animation. Rifle #5, rocket jump, isn’t any faster than running with swiftness on, except when going on certain uphill, where it is marginally faster (0.5 s or so).

Carbi.6357:

https://wvwintel.com/

Pick a server, check the ratio on desert bl.
As ive posted in several of these topics before, Desert bl is clearly less active in every single matchup, every single week.

Stop saying desert bl is fine.

^^ This ^^

Statistics don’t lie. I would be happier if we would have 3 Alpine borderlands instead of 2 Alpine + 1 Desert. Desert is favors defenders, but doesn’t cater fun fights and fast paced return back to action, which the Alpine does. Alpine is easier to learn for new comers and believe me or not, we still have people who come to WvWvW and don’t know the maps. Desert map is a text book example of over design and should be scrapped.

Even better if the would bring us back the lake + island in Alpine border, just remake the central island a bit bigger. The ruins of power in Alpine border are ugly spvp map alike abomination wrapped like a plaster in the middle of an otherwise simple, natural looking map.

I agree with the proposal. We need more build diversity.