Guild Wars 2

Interesting. On both my necro and warrior is see significant and noticeable differences in numbers before and after exotics.

It is done to decrease latency and increase gold sinking. But mostly the second.

The original WoW PvP did not have automatic grouping, so healers/tanks would usually not get anything when contributing. They just made grouping automatic, enforced, and all rewards group wide. Done!

Daish.6139:

the WvW Population needs to be balanced out or there is going to be alot of major issues

keep it simple since there are 3 teams no 1 team should out number the other 2 teams combined

say Red has 15 players and Blue has 20 players
Green should have a limit of 35 placed on them

this is not going to hurt the game if a player is interested in WvW they can transfer to another World

if a player enjoys WvW they do not want to end up in a 50v5 battle that is not enjoyable for anyone

This is just plain dumb.

We want to not have queues. If your server does not want to participate – too bad.
I am alright with some kind of an actual buff if you are underrepresented – but definitely not additional limits. Worst idea ever. (In fact, remove all limits and use quantum computing so there are no queues or lag)

The same problem has been around in other mmos, and fixed properly there – such as wow. It sure can be fixed properly here.

However!

The game is designed to encourage using siege weapons. If you use siege weapons, you will get lots and lots of bags of loot. But it costs gold to buy those. It’s just another money sink / currency exchange incentive.

Jedbacca.6297:

Please take this in to perspective, if you are in a real wartime situation

Stopped reading there. The game is designed to be fun to play, not to be a real wartime situation simulator. OP is very much correct that the map and organization tools suck in WvW.

DusK.3849:

3. This sounds more like a computer issue, as I’ve never had a problem with player character loading distance in WvW. Go into your graphics settings and boost both Environment and LOD to at least “High”. If you can’t do that, replace that toaster you’re playing on.

This will not help, the issue was actually addressed here by the devs:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/The-real-problem-here-is-invisible-enemies-Give-their-algorithms-time-to-match-servers-properly/183838

Minion master (5 minions + staff + minion traits) works well for single-player pve and story up to and including level 80. It IS a little bit slow. But – you get to not have to dodge and move much, and usually you will have at least a few minions up to tank for you. You will have problems with champion mobs, but you will be able to take all veteran mobs one on one.

Dee Jay.2460:

Under no circumstances should gold just be generated from thin air.

And where do you think gold comes from?

Hostar.1390:

I dinged level 80 on my alt and bought a full set of rare gear for 3g. This rare gear is about 5% worse than exotic dungeon gear.

End result? Hey, I don’t have to farm dungeons or huge amounts of gold to be competitive.

You grind if you want to for new skins.

The difference is 13%, and in organized PvE and guild WvW even a few % points can make a difference.

Also: Really? Closing the “grind” thread and redirecting to the dungeon thread instead? Good excuse, but it does not pass muster. This is a different topic, as it only relates to dungeon updates, where as grind is apparent in virtually all paths to exotic gear – not just dungeons.

Isn’t EVE’s market a lot more complex though? As in, crafting seemed a pretty big deal, and then distances were also important. I haven’t actually played EVE much.

Wazabi.1439:

If GW2 has food/water/electricity/cellphones, then yes.

What about the gold sinks? Those provide a base, and arguably somewhat predictable per-player deflationary pressure (by taking money out of the economy) – waypoints, repairs, tomes, tools, etc.

The problem of market saturation (perhaps due to the TP not being operational right away) should supposedly self-fix itself in time. But how long? Especially considering the gold sinks? Wouldn’t it make sense to disable those for a short period so the market stabilizes faster?

Necros do fine in dynamic events that require multiple mobs to die. As the event script does not care about damage done to individual mobs, as long as you tag as many mobs as possible, you will get gold. Hint: Use staff

Disclaimer: might not work if soloing the event due to obvious reasons….

Burst? Outside some weird one-off builds the profession has no burst. As designed. Play a thief or a warrior, they have some 15k+ bursts, if that’s what you want. (On a short cooldown, 5-10 seconds.)

However if you discovered something do let us know, please. I’m sure people are still working out builds.

It depends on your build. Not all stats combinations are available everywhere.

That always seemed to be more along the lines of being that we pay a one time fee and then we can play the game whenever we want and within our own time without feeling obliged to log in to make the most of a subscription fee.

What about this?

When your game systems are designed to achieve the prime motivation of a subscription-based MMO, you run the risk of sacrificing quality to get as much content in as possible to fill that time. You get leveling systems that take insane amounts of grind to gain a level, loot drop systems that require doing a dungeon with a tiny chance the item you want can drop at the end, raid systems that need huge numbers of people online simultaneously to organize and play, thousands of wash/repeat item-collection or kill-mob quests or dailies with flavor text support, the best stat gear requiring crazy amounts of time to earn, etc.
But what if your business model isn’t based on a subscription? What if your content-design motivations aren’t driven by the need to create mechanics that keep people playing as long as possible? When looking at content design for Guild Wars 2, we’ve tried to ask the question: What if the development of the game was based on…wait for it…fun?

— http://www.arena.net/blog/is-it-fun-colin-johanson-on-how-arenanet-measures-success

There are other examples.

OK so its been like what 3 week?
You are telling us that you are upset because you can not have the best of the best items in 3 weeks?
In an MMO?
Seriously?

It was marketed as being different than other MMOs in exactly that sense.

Edit: They should at least provide a non-grind gear path to a full set of exotics with good stats for an arbitrary profession and build. This is lacking.

I see people keep complaining that items sell bellow or at vendor prices. I think the reason for this is that gold is hard to get, and money is deflated to the point that an item’s real value is significantly BELOW the vendor sale price. Obviously the vendor sale price serves as an artificial bottom, or the prices would be way lower.

Again, the reason for this is not enough liquidity (not enough gold in the economy yet).

This should mean you should invest in materials or items now, then sit on them and hope for inflation to kick in. I am actually thinking of doing that with some higher-level materials. Thoughts?

I am pretty sure the Currency Exchange dungeon is not nerfed yet. There is a button to queue for it top left of your UI.

He might have to do only one thing because the particular gear set required by his favorite build is only available from one dungeon – for example. Also very likely.

Cooking for example costs at least 10g more to level now.
With the dungeon nerfs top-tier material costs will be going up again.
If you played non-stop the first 2 weeks you would be a lot wealthier and better geared than if you played for 2 weeks starting now, as you would have been able to obtain a lot of stuff before it was nerfed.

I would just prefer competitive play in WvW and PVE to be less time-investment based.

What is ironic is that I did consider spending some money to buy some gems for storage, extra slots, and some dyes. Maybe even more stuff. That was before I was level 80 and before they started making patch changes.
They made dyes be character only and not account-wide.
Exotics cost was increased 10 times or so – karma and gold.
Professions and dungeons were nerfed to take a lot longer to be rewarding, if at all.

Here is what I wanted to do:
Get to level 80, get my exotics within 20 hours or so, do some WvW, level 2-3 alts, gear them the same way, and then do dungeons and WvW with guildies. If I could do that, that would have justified investing in some gems.
However, grinding for gear is not a productive use of my time. As this seems to be the only way to get up-to-par stats, I have since reconsidered investing more money in this game.

ref.8196:

@PawPrince

why does this game require grinding?

Because the costs of rares and exotics were greatly increased (be it karma or gold).

http://www.arena.net/blog/is-it-fun-colin-johanson-on-how-arenanet-measures-success

I guess they decided success is better measured by number of gems bought?

To the OP:

Very well said and correct on all points. Arena Net did switch game directions upon release to encourage more pay-to-win mechanics, which I also find very disappointing – as the game had a lot of promise.

You should not be doing puzzles in WvW.
There should be no puzzles in WvW.
There should be no mobs in WvW.
There should be no gathering in WvW.
Map completion should not include WvW.
Or at least, fix the queues.

Kal.2376:

I would add WvW overflow servers :P So you can play there while waiting on queue. It would just group up people from different servers on the 3 different teams. Just to go bash skulls. When your queue is up, you can go to your server, or even stay there if the fight is fun.

No score on that overflow, just gory skull bashing and combat.

This would make sense for guild groups too, if guild groups can go to the same overflow and have a queue pop for them simultaneously.

They might have to boost the defense rewards for that, as without a point system there might not be a lot of incentive to defend. Siege and upgrade costs would also have to be reduced, perhaps.
I think the problem with a overflow WvW might be balancing?

Regarding implementation – it is certainly doable on a larger scale, it’s just that they don’t have it yet. I am saying it’s a good direction for future work and solves a lot of problems at the root.

Regarding AoE – an upper total damage cap might be balanced for offensive AoE. Perhaps some buffs should just not stack defensively.

Regarding population cap – of course an outnumbered world should never have a queue.

Regarding loading PCs – I have everything on max on a very beefy system, but I will have a look. Again I have mostly seen this in very large fights when more enemy players join the battle.

There are a few seemingly server-side optimizations in WvW that are very annoying:

- AoEs affect only up to 5 people. Makes AoE spells and buffs feel very weak in groups.
Fix: AoE spells should affect everybody.

- The WvW matches are small (up to a few hundred people, compared to thousands on the server). Also resulting in huge queues.
Fix: Allow everybody in; make outnumbered worlds significantly more powerful (structures and players). The current buff is a joke.

- Enemy PCs not loading timely in WvW. If somebody is within range of my spells, but they have not loaded yet on my screen, it becomes very annoying quickly, and happens often when there are a lot of people fighting.
Fix: Increase distance at which PCs load. Make sure enemy PCs are loaded first, if needed.

Have I missed something? Let me know. Thanks.

alanis.6094:

I love Carrion’s for WvW, and I think you are downplaying how power is still useful for someone focused on conditions.

I think you are mistaken to overlook how much power provides for your weapon swap, which will normally be the staff. Additionally, power is very helpful for WoS. Both the Staff and WoS are staples of my WvW build, and I’d imagine staff is pretty popular with almost every WvW Necro.

That being said, I think that there really isn’t a reason that this set isn’t able to be obtained — though I though I had a piece of it from Grenth for Karma (the legs).

This is correct. Staff actually benefits from power, especially with the 20% reduced cooldown and fear-does-damage. In WvW, you would almost exclusively be using staff for area denial and with the 20% cooldown reduction switching weapons will rarely be needed during combat. Also, while conditions are great in WvW, they do get removed somewhat quickly, which makes power even more important.

I would encourage people to run their own tests using different exotic specs/gear in the mists on the target practice dummies. Not all abilities scale as expected or advertised (check the bug list too).

- Auto loot (badges, items, gold) instead of having to loot with F
- Show player presence on the map, regardless of distance. Showing only combat is not enough. Perhaps use larger circles to indicate large player groupings. As WvW is mostly zerg based, this is a needed feature.
- Show keep/tower names instead of, or in addition to, “green keep” etc.
- Provide a run-speed boon NPC next to the WvW waypoints
- Provide chat messages when objectives are under attack
- Provide more sets of gear to purchase with WvW badges, also more karma sets and lower level gear sets. Reduce cost, and make items account-bound
- Grant full trait points and slot skills while in WvW when up-leveling characters, provide a free trait reset (similar to sPvP)
- Allow siege plans to be purchased with karma
- Make out-numbered worlds more powerful
- Increase WvW map capacity to reduce queue times
- Provide queue time estimates and allow players to queue for multiple WvW maps
- Allow group queues
- Guild chat should emit a message when a structure the guild owns is attacked

Thanks!

roachsrealm.9284:

what’s everyone complaining about? I’m loving my necro and I’m not having any problems enjoying the game. I can solo anything but a champion and I can run across whole zones quickly. What’s not to like?

Well a lot of us got to 80 and got some perspective on the other professions, such as this:

So this is what happened.

You would not notice much of this if you only did world pve though.

I play a WvW necro, so this will have details about wvw necro gear in addition to general information, specifically for a marks-based build (power/vitality/condition dmg)

1. Crafting
Crafting is the best way to get max optimal stats (exotic) armor at level 80 for this build. You can either use the TP to purchase the crafted gear (1-4g per piece) or level crafting to 400 (tailoring for necro). This should cost 10-15g to level plus using all relevant raw materials you got on your way to 80. Getting the materials for crafting the actual armor is also expensive, perhaps 1-2g per piece. I was able to purchase one of the weapons for 3.5g.

2. Dungeons (badges only)
Unfortunately only one dungeon has the right stats exotics, but the set bonuses are off. This means the runes will have to be replaced. A dungeon set requires ~45 dungeon runs, so plan accordingly. Dungeons are not a walk in the park to pug.

3. WvW (badges only)
WvW only has one set of exotics, power/toughness/vitality, which is a pretty weak stat set for WvW for a necro (and other dps builds). It cannot be purchased with karma, and costs about 250 badges per piece. This should take 100-300 hours of WvW, depending on how well your server is organized for WvW.

4. Karma
Only available in the Orr zones, you can purchase exotics from karma vendors that spawn from completing dynamic events. The cost is about 45k karma per piece. I did not see a set with optimal stats, though some mix-and-match might be possible. It seems to be the only way to spend karma for exotics that have somewhat decent (suboptimal) stats.

Does gear make a difference?
The difference between exotic and the previous tier is 13%. With base stats included, the difference is roughly about 4-5% actual damage and health over the previous tier, which certainly is enough to make a difference, especially during siege and versus non-level 80 characters in WvW, and less so in siege defense situations.

In essence, there is no quick power plateau upon reaching level 80. Your character gear selection choice will be limited to a single upgrade path following one of the choices above based on which stats set is optimal for your build. And to be perfectly clear, ensure you are using level 80 exotics, as the amount of stats is of course based on the item level, and some vendors might offer different level exotics as well as level 80 gear.