Guild Wars 2

another thing you could do is make a necro alt, choose the skull mask or one of the others, transmute that onto a white piece of low level trash armor and hand it over to your mesmer for a more menacing look

Male norn, for superior dance moves

Alex Behemoth.4952:

…
For me its not about getting nerfs or buffs. Its about making different builds viable for different situations and not having a supreme build. I really don’t get what the point of that buff was.
…

I played GW1 for a few years and starting to see similar patterns in GW2 from ANet. from what I recall, most of the organised PvP was an endless chase for the next FOTW build for every class, everyone switches to it and plays only that because it’s the most effective, then everything that makes that build effective gets nerfed, while the things that struggle with that build (usually other classes) gets some kind of buff. This process repeated many many times in GW1.

I assume they decided to make it easier on themselves this time by avoiding the struggle of trying to balance mixed classes, which is a nightmare to balance.

I’d rather them not work with illusions and avoid a 30% reduction in damage like grenades got… unless of course that’s a 30% reduction only to the clones… I’d be ok with that :P

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

for WVW i strongly DISCOURAGe adding more swiftness to mesmer. They already have never ending clones, each time you think you kill the mesmer, it’s a phantasm. Secondly when they are almost dead, they just decoy, with means stealth + culling (wich is long in a lot of cases). I rarley have been able to catch and defeat a good mesmer in wvw. Now you giving then more escapabilty? No thanks. If mesmer gets this, then necro needs more spammable minions (like clones), and a blink skill. See no reason why mesmer can have reliable summon, blink, everlasting swiftness vs necro with only reliable swiftness (if you sac utility slot of it, and warhorn). We have no cloack either.

reliable summons? You mean like dodge-clones that chase random targets and phantasms that have at least half a dozen ways to be prevented from even summoning? All of these summons also die with 1-2 hits from an auto attack or an AoE and any time a target dies…

This complaint coming from a class that has none of those problems (though necro pets are pretty much useless)

also decoy, which almost NEVER causes a target to be dropped, all channeled attacks keep going right to the mesmer, etc. and everlasting swiftness? unless using a full set of centaur runes, I’m not sure how that happens.

Would it have been OP to grant that distortion (and if traited to it, reflection) to the blurred frenzy? I don’t really think so, but I also think it’s probably easier to change a tool tip than it is to make something work as described. I also suspect that Anet knows that we count our blessings that when a new change/fix comes along, when it doesn’t drastically break our entire class mechanic.

I suspect the only reason they don’t do better drops for solo farming is because that’s the easiest way for them to lessen the impact of bot-farmers. I’m not arguing against you, though. If I spend time doing farm more damage to each mob when I go around and solo kill things, it seems a bit daft that I’d get far less loot than if I just hardly tag a mob in a mass farming group.

Stop wasting time balancing classes against each other before classes are actually working as intended.

I’m not sure if the same people working on skills and traits for balancing issues and fixes are the same, but the general rumor I hear is there’s 2 people working on some 500+ traits and skills. If these really are the only people working on every class, I highly suggest that you have QC go through and simply read the stickied posts on every class page to see what everyone who knows their class knows is entirely broken, not working as advertised, etc.

It doesn’t make any sense to me for there to be “nerf” or balancing patches before classes are even working as they are intended to. Any balancing that goes on this early, when 1/2 the classes are malfunctioning, just seems like wasted time, since re-balancing will have to happen again after everything is fixed.

lol, blink exploits to take the bay

I’m upset that one unique utility option we had was removed (being able to clear siege where others couldn’t). I never saw that as game breaking, because any auto attack will take it down in 1-2 hits, and even if you have 3 iZerkers out attacking a treb, it’s still going to take AGES to take it down.

But…. I can’t believe everyone didn’t see this coming. How do nerfs happen? people complain is how. who complains the most? no-skill whiners who sit on wall siege all day and can’t take 1-2 seconds to kill the thing killing them. so who gets nerfed? the people using really flimsy, but marginally effective skills to clean them out. these are the same people that don’t equip a stun breaker to get deal with thieves, so guess who else got a ton of nerfs? uh huh…

I’m sad to see that utility go, and if the claims that the damage of the iZerker are accurate (I haven’t seen any noticeable degrade along these lines, and I still am easily as effective in open combat), then that’s no good, but really… this doesn’t break the class at all, it just changes some aspects for what we can do.

As a caster class, I’d like to see SOMETHING make up for the fact that we have TERRIBLE AoE options, though…

Tarnished Coast makes a fine grilled cheese sandwich

Latinkuro.9420:

Warfare is warfare, the enemy is there to do battle not to chat or grief !
if most of your friends are on that server and you badly nee to talk to them either join that server or use 3rd party programs to communicate !

sure, that’s one way to look at it, if it’s red it’s dead, blah blah blah. but seriously, I have had a blast, learned some great tips, had some really fun duels, and made “peace” at least for a short while on some jump puzzles due to being able to communicate. I’d happily keep that option open and put up with the occasional QQ or griefy nonsense (because you can still block anyone).

I often arranged 1v1 duels with people though whispers, as well as telling someone if I was particularly impressed. these uses were far more often the case than when others would /w me with some cryfest. I’ll miss having it as an option.

stealth change in the patch, doesn’t show account names any more when you report

I thought it was always 30 seconds

wads.5730:

i really like how anet lists EVERY phantasm in the LOS fix, to mask the fact that the change only affects ONE phantasm, the berserker.

really cute

Phantasmal Disenchanter used to work without LOS as well :P

I can understand people not liking the lack of needing LOS on things like berserkers, but this also includes not being able to target things around doorways that your illusions can walk around. this also removes one of the very few unique functions we had in WvW, which is clearing crap from behind walls. LOS is also buggy enough anyway. go play a ranger and check out how many attacks miss due to LOS that you have a very direct line of sight on. the difference is, we have much longer cooldowns for illusions.

Mesmer
Moa Morph: Targets transformed by this skill have 5 new and less-frustrating skills, and this skill can also be used underwater to turn enemies into tuna. This skill now removes Death Shroud from the target instead of the necromancer being stuck in Death Shroud.

so… ok we can use it in the water… but why make a skill designed to frustrate people, for a short period of time, on a long cooldown, less frustrating? -_-

Portal: This skill’s recharge has been increased to 90 seconds.

I don’t think this will effect a lot, other than for those who use it regularly in combat, but either way, it’s a nerf.

Illusionary Duelist, Phantasmal Swordsman, Phantasmal Mage, Phantasmal Defender, Phantasmal Disenchanter, Phantasmal Rogue, Phantasmal Warlock, Illusionary Mariner, Illusionary Whaler, Phantasmal Berserker, and Phantasmal Warden: These skills must now be cast in line-of-sight of the target. These skills now behave as normal attacks that the mesmer must connect in order to summon the phantasm, and they will fail if the mesmer is blind or the ability is cast on an invulnerable target.

I suspect most of us saw this coming, but still, it removes one unique utility feature we had. IMO this wasn’t needed due to the relative ease of destroying any of our illusions. Definitely a severe nerf. I wonder if this means summons can also be dodged, etc. if they are going to take out the utility and require these skills to behave like all other weapon attacks, then I think we should get sigil bonuses on them as well.

I’m having the same problem, as well

I’m sometimes spec’d 30 points in illusion, taking the trait that puts all shatters on you. if I get jumped by a thief, I hit F1 through F4 (if I wasn’t panicking so much, I’d not hit the stun). This puts distortion on you, long enough to react, at least, or get out of the stun, it also does initial damage, which they aren’t expecting, and puts 5 stacks of confusion on them because every shatter causes confusion. 5 stacks of confusion on a hasted thief makes them kill them self quickly. I’ve insta-killed more than a few face-roller thieves just using this, without any illusions out this way. The self-shatter stuff is also good for pinging out people who are hiding.

as others have said, portal bomb rendering issues effect both sides (I’ve been on both sides of a portal bomb type attack and been blind to who’s attacking what). So that aside, those who get upset about portal bombs are upset that surprise attacks are surprising. Go figure.

Before this match is done, I wanna say, I’ve run into some real class acts from Yak’s Bend. no sarcasm there, really good fights, good attitudes, lots of fun all around. (from TC, looking forward to another round with you). CD on the other hand…..

I’ve messaged people who I was impressed with, who gave me a proper butt whoopin. I’ve also whispered people to go off and 1v1 duel somewhere, which most have accepted and it’s been good fun. I’ve also been whispered by people who bring on the ETOUGH when they are upset with tactics I use (I’m a dirty mesmer). Had one just today tell me I made a big mistake in attacking him and that he’s put a hit out on me and that I should go read the forums about what kind of trouble I’m in (never found the post, and be blocked me right after whispering me, so I have no idea). I did whisper one fail-ele who I beat in a 2v1 (2 of them) when she came back to dance on my corpse after 5-6 of her friends took me down, calling her sad. She replied that my whispering her was hacking, that I would be reported, and that she’s personally gotten 8 people banned for whispering. I LOLed.

for those who don’t understand how the culling tends to work. when you leave the area, move far away, TP back to LA or whatever, you’re taken out of the render cache. this is to save resources and makes sense. when you enter a scene, get closer, TP in, etc, you get added to the render cache. This also tends to makes sense… you are approaching from a distance, or teleporting into a room near a battle or whatever. That gives you time to fully load into the scene for other players and should be somewhat fluid.

The thing that DOESN’T make sense is when you go into stealth, you get removed from that render cache the same as if you TPed out of the zone all together. When you de-stealth, you’re added back into the render cache, but since you’re not approaching from the distance, or inside a building, giving plenty of time to load you to render, you get all that time, based on latency, load time, free memory and whatever else the render engine compensates for, essentially vastly extending your invisibility.

Considering you never actually leave the scene, there’s no good excuse for being taken out of the render cache as though you’ve left the battle field. You should certainly be able to still be loaded, but not seen… this is how most games that have a stealth mechanic do it, and IMO shows kind of sloppy coding.

am I missing something? isn’t 1 week the same length as a match? won’t the fair-weather jumpers usually stick to the “winning” server for that week then just do it again a week later? don’t the guilds that transfer to over-stack a server usually stay for that whole week? I guess we’ll see if this actually makes a difference. I think having a 1-week lockout from WvW after a transfer would have been a more effective fix. makes all the WvW problems go away more or less, and doesn’t effect PvE players adversely at all.

as far as getting badges for taking camps and keeps…. if you do enough damage to the guild boss at camps and the keep lords, you do get badges.

if you just mean changing between Eternal Battleground and the 3 borderlands, go to your spawn area, and walk through the different portals

I can understand a few people here or there transferring to play with friends, but I don’t think that explains when massive zerg guilds, or even multiple zerg guilds use it as a tactic to fake-rank a tier

I know there has been a lot of complaints about how free transfers are ruining WvW, and I tend to agree.

But what this post is about is trying to understand the WHY for the transfers.

It can’t be to push a server into another tier, because once balance is restored and transfers cost money, that will all balance out and go away, and if you can’t hack it as a server in the higher tiers, exploiting your way to the “top” is a waste of time… not to mention anyone could just transfer over to that top tier server anyway.

It can’t be for fun because once one side owns 95% of a map, there’s almost nothing to do for either side.

It can’t be for the bonuses, I wouldn’t think, because they’re so small and insubstantial.

I guess there are minor gains for things like camping jump puzzles for designs… but those aren’t hard to get at, even if on the loosing end of a crush match (I’ve been on both sides, and both are equally boring).

so… what is it? anyone have a theory? anyone who actually does this regularly have a personal explanation?

or sweeping for messmers to stop the portal in the first place….

“Why all these idiotic guilds thought it would be a great idea to totally screw a major part of the game is beyond me.”

Because any time you can gain an unfair advantage by exploiting a game mechanic, it’s much easier than actually competing against people of similar skill levels and a balanced number of players. As far as I can tell, the vast majority are lame zerg guilds that think they are elite, but can’t actually hack it on even footing, so need to stroke their -ego- the only way they can.

Le Rooster.8715:

..we need to have guilds be able to move around at minimum cost sometimes to get a little bit of balance, if it was paid transfers and nobody would move it would forever be the same worlds vsing each other…

this is nonsense. auto-balancing is in place so that servers that are properly matched are faced off against each other. the free transfer system bypasses this mechanic entirely.

probably been 100 posts just like this one, but since it’s on the first page, I’ll post too that I agree. this is a mess. if they aren’t going to stop this free transfer abuse by massive zerg recruit low skill guilds that can’t rank properly otherwise, they should at least implement something like a 1 week delay after transfer to be able to WvW. They talk about the free transfers as though it’s a convenient alternative to their guesting system, but the guesting system doesn’t allow WvW, for this very reason.

I don’t think TC is out played at all, any match ups I saw vs SoR that were remotely even on numbers, SoR didn’t do anything particularly impressive, or TC for that matter.

I see a lot of the lame behavior from SoR that I saw with BG a couple weeks ago… exploiting terrible LOD code on thieves to prevent 30+ from capping … also seeing a poor player -RUN- away from an even fight, abandoning who he’s with to get wrecked, only to come back with a 5:1 odds advantage, not actually get any hits in, but dance over the corpses of people his friends killed off.

the real flaw here is free transfers and/or a totally useless auto-balance system. 2 weeks ago BG utterly dominated, the last round TC did, this round looks like SoR (so far). when there isn’t balance, it’s actually really boring, no matter who’s “winning”