Guild Wars 2

I’m not happy with the League. Based off community opinion, I’m not the only one. However, I’ll try not to be too salty. Instead Ill say why I don’t like this league and how they could improve it.

Confusion with Ranks.
Every good PvP game needs ranks I know, but the way they work in GW2 is really strange. Ranks are meant to denote how good at PvP you are. In this League, due to an exploitable system, Rank doesn’t mean anything. Rank is also meant to show where you belong and how much you need to improve. I’m in Ruby now, but do I belong here? I’m losing more often? Am I bad? is it the system? I can’t tell due to all the confusion around Ranks. If Ranks worked as intended I would know how good I am.

How to Improve Ranks
Instead of allowing PvE players (myself included) grind all the way to Ruby then have a train wreak at the top of the ranks, have people play 5-10 matches to decide their Rank. They would then need to earn points to improve. Have some form of safety net so that if people lose too much they won’t go far behind their skill level. This way we can know who belongs where.

Reward System isn’t working
So the big prize at the end is that back piece. People want it for the look or being able to change stats. Its a good prize. How you get it is not working. For both the PvP community and the casuals. To earn the back piece you need tickets. You get tickets by grinding up the ranks. Tickets are forcing casuals to grind and forcing the PvP community to abuse the system. Also the back piece loses its meaning the more leagues we go through. More and More casuals will get it since they forced themselves, and the PvP players lose out on having their own exclusive item.

How to Improve Rewards
Remove Tickets from the ranks. Instead you should earn a ticket based on skill. If you win a match, no matter your rank, you get a ticket. This way, even if you are bad at pvp you can get the back piece. Whats more the back peice will then mean you have won a certain number of times, hence it will have some meaning for both casuals and PvP players. Then add more rewards based off your rank. The better rank you have, the better title you could get, or ascended armour/weapons, or even exclusive weapon/armour skins. People can have the back piece, but if you see someone kitted out with a whole league armour set or an amazing title, you know they earned it.

Toxic Behavior
As more people play PvP, the more potential for toxic behavior. At the start of the League, I didn’t notice anything bad, but now a month in, I’m seeing people scream at each other every other game. GW2 was often advertised as the most friendly community, but this PvP League has made toxic behavior more obvious.

How to deal with Toxic People
You need to expand on your report system. Right now you only have the Verbal Abuse option, but that won’t cover everything. Either improve the system you have OR make a PvP system to deal with these issues. Have a pop up come up at the end of the game to report people and why.

The Meta is very Stale
In most E-sports, they change many skills/classes/characters to address them being under or over powered. The aim really is so that everyone has a decent chance at winning. The problems with Guild Wars 2 is that balance patches don’t come often and classes tend to dominate the meta for long gaps of time making the players and the game suffer.

To fix the meta
Im aware A net have said they made this system so they wouldn’t be forced to balance it very often. However, looking at the system as it is can’t work. You need to be able to do slight changes to all classes every 2-3 weeks or so other wise there will never be balance and things become stale. If its too hard, change numbers here and there, or change how a trait works every so often. It doesn’t have to be big changes all the time, just small ones.

This is based of my opinion though, so some of this may not work or not be even true. I mostly play PvE, only playing PvP maybe 20% of my time in game, more like 30-40% with the leagues on. I just wanted to express my sadness with the system as it is. I want us all to have fun, but for that to happen changes must be made. If people have some other ideas, please share them.

This looks a little better now. The Harmonious Conduit is a little worrying. If you want to overload (which is half the reason to take tempest the other half being the war horn) you need that stab just to stand a chance to finish it. I think the stab should be mandatory. For it to be a major trait, it should really give more than one stab, but I think one stack of stab in a minor trait would be the best solution.

On that side note, why didn’t you give all the overloads a break bar rather than remove it from earth? It would have had more flavor and when a person brakes it, each overload could have its own drawback.

Everything else seems to be in the right direction.

I’ve been making fun of Tempest due to all the issues it has. I decided I should at least try it to justify this. Its not as terrible as I imagined and hear, but it seems to have a lot of conflicting parts to it.

Overloads:
To begin with it I have to wait 5 seconds just to use them. I tend to rotate a lot quicker than this, so usually tend to ignore them. The exception being when my rotation is done and I’m sitting in an element for that time auto attacking.

The numbers seem a little off. For me to force myself to slow down my rotation to use these AND then channel them, the result seems very lack luster. Why use these when I can continue my rotation and do more damage and play safer?

Basically, to use overloads as they are now confuse me as it stands now.

War-horn:
I tend to not like these sort of defensive/support skills, so I’ll leave that to people who know better than me.

Shouts:
I kind of like the fire shout. It seems a little lack luster but I like the feel of it. The same goes for the other shouts too. Its just its far more noticeable on the other shouts since they have long cool downs as well.

Traitline:
I hate the trait line. Its all over the place and you can’t really focus on a play style. Overload’s arn’t well supported, No DPS modifiers (even water/earth has some form of these) and there isn’t a whole lot for shouts.

The worst thing about the trait line is Aura’s. I feel like you took Aura play out of the base class a few months ago and just shoved it here in a poorly thought out way.

Overall:
The overloads, war-horn and shouts need a little tweaking still. A little more damage here, an extra effect there and most of these issues will be resolved.

However, the trait line is a mess and needs to be worked on. More traits for overloads, merge some of the existing ones, a trait or two for shouts and you really need to sort out how Aura’s are working on ele as a whole, not just the tempest.

I miss this one:-

“Did you see what she was wearing?”
“NO! I was looking at him”

To this day I still quote it, I also make licking noises after it.

Erm…Guys. If we go with the data mine skills AND assume we are getting war horn, wouldn’t that just mean war horn would be a main hand weapon?

If I recall, on the data mined stuff it was around 600 range on some (which is fairly long range for a sword). What if we use the power of arcana/wind to push the elements out of the war horn?

Mini fire tornado as an auto attack? That sounds pretty cool.

I agree with everything OP said. There are a lot of faults that need to be addressed, but I get the feeling that you guys already know what to do and are working on it now.

As for scarlet, I kinda felt sad for her. I loved how crazy her character was yet the way she went really didn’t do her any justice. I had a lot of theories about her.
At one point I thought she was jealous of the pale tree. She had an obsession with creating things, and I felt that was her way to compensate for the fact that she could never create anything from herself. Maybe she just wished to be a mother?
Then at other times I thought she just wanted to be free. To be freed of the pale tree only to be enslaved by a dragon was a very sad thing to think about.

So when Scarlet asked the other characters if they wanted to know why, I was really happy…only for it to be crushed… I was angry for the whole day after that.

I guess what I’m saying is that I wish for all area’s of the characters to be explored, rather than brushed off just because its easier. I want to be emotionally attached to characters more, even the villains. I mean the idea that Marjory could have been dead really didn’t interest me until I saw Kasmeer’s anger, when I should have felt something way before then.

I wish you guys luck in the next living story, and please give me a crazy villain.

Leaving a reply here. Looking forward to doing radio stuff again.