Guild Wars 2

Bhawb.7408:

The concept of DS is fine, the only thing they need to do is fix the UI.

Indeed. Seeing actual health and conditions/boons is all that’s really needed.

Bas.7406:

TLDR: Having multiple builds is better than having one great niche build

+1 for that one.

Visionary.5681:

Most (if not all) other classes have 1 spec that is just miles better than all the others. This is why there are lots of diverse specs used by the Necromancer Community. It isnt due to awsome balance, its due to not excelling at anything.
[…]

The reason they [eles] dont is , they have 1 awsome spec.

I’d rather have a class with several viable choices than a class with essentially only one reasonable build.

One could go as far as saying that a D/D ele build is likely a little bit OP, but that’s off topic. Then again, we must keep in mind that Anet doesn’t want a 1vs1 balance, but rather a team balance. Not every class (and every possible build) will be able to fight all others with ease. Some are harder, some easier to beat.

For example, on my condition necro, a guardian bunker can often be annihilated quickly, if you can get him to remove his conditions early, wait for his self-boon spam and then turn them all into conditions at once and send him on a walk with staff fear and DS fear in short succession. Share the love with Epidemic if anybody else dares standing close :-)

On a damage necro build that’s same guardian is a lot tougher to beat.

By the way, Flesh Golem is immensely powerful too. Its knockdown is a life saver and deals decent damage as well. And his chills are extremely useful too. Lich form and Plague or whatever it’s called on the other hand are too slow. Useless elite skills in PVP. Your opponent will just stay at range and wait for the fight to continue, while healing up. But I’m digressing.

Back to your point, which I understand, I can only re-iterate that in my personal opinion having choices and diversity is much more desirable than having a single killer-build and that’s it.

I don’t know… Nothing wrong with Necros at all. I use three different builds in PVP: Damage with D/D and Axe/WH, Minionmaster mainly with Staff, Condition with Scepter/Warhorn and Staff.
For the D/D build you need to put some love into DS as it compliments it very well as a ranged “finisher”, gap closer and damage buffer (Thief going stealth next to you… time for DS to buffer the burst damage from backstab etc. — Mesmer with gazillions of clones and illusions? Siphon health and they’re gone in no time, all of them!)

I can’t decide which build I like most, quite honestly. All of them are viable. Sure, all have their strengths and weaknesses in certain situations, but overall they are fairly well balanced. That’s something you can hardly say of any other class.

With slight variations in utility skills, all of these builds work well in PvE for me too.
In WvWvW on the other hand… doesn’t really matter as it’s zergfesting most of the time. So you better go ranged/condition with Epidemic to give those people hard times while they knock the door :-)

Oh, and a Warrior is no threat for a Necro. At best they are entertaining, unless the Necro is asleep and doesn’t see the 100b coming.

I should point out that my main suggestion really is a profession balance. 4 Mesmers in a team of 5? That invalidates the whole “balanced around teamplay”.

The other part (being ranks) is obviously a lot more difficult to “fix”. I coped okay in all matches with players that seemed to have a lot more experience, but only because my other account has a higher ranking than the one I provided the screenshot of. If I was really only level 5 (that can be done in a few hours and a bit of luck without any skill whatsoever), it would be a different story.

A developer could probably point out how this new balance system actually works. It can’t be ranks, and it can’t be profession-based either, or else we’d never see screenshots of matches like this one.

Hi,

Could we get some improvements in terms of team balance for sPVP tournaments, please?

As you can see in the screenshot, the average level of Blue is about twice as high as Red’s, plus there’s 6 Mesmers in this match, four of them alongside necro me.

A game which is “balanced around teamplay” should surely have equal teams and a healthy mix of professions in each team?

(I’m not even complaining that I was 32 levels below the lowest level player of the other team in this match, although that can’t be right either.)

This was NOT a one-off sort of match setup. I’ve seen this happening often on my other account (and different server) too. This particular screenshot is just showing off all those balancing problems in one go very nicely.

TL;DR version: How about making up teams that cannot have more than two players of the same profession? And how about roughly equal levels?

(edit: reordered and TL;DR highlighted)

Doh! Well hidden and so brief that I must have missed them… “Fixed various server crashes.”

Thanks for the pointers!

Apparently there was an update today. Can we have release notes? Couldn’t find them in the News & Announcements forum. Or do I need to put my utility goggles on? :P

As others said, laptops are not ideal for gaming, and if they are capable, they aren’t really portable any more

Nonetheless, I’m on a laptop myself, which I have mostly to play games…

- i7 3610QM (quad core with 2.3 GHz – number of cores matter more than clock speed)
- 16GB Ram
- Radeon HD 7970M
- 240 GB SDD
- 15.6 inch full HD resolution

It’s built-to-order from PC Specialist in the UK, and it cost about £1,500. That’s somewhere between US$ 2k and 2.5k

I would have gone for Alienware, but they couldn’t deliver (then) recent graphics cards. ETA was that time beyond 2 months, which was unacceptable for me.

As to performance:
In normal PvE easily 100 FPS and more on almost maximum graphics settings.
In WvWvW I have to tune down settings a bit, otherwise a big battle will not be playable as FPS then flaps between 30 and 100+. In lower settings I can survive even big zergs there (graphics-wise, not the actual fight)
After all, for me personally gameplay is a bit more important than the shiniest graphics. But the laptop does do better than expected on all counts.

But as I said earlier, that’s not really a laptop any more. The machine is bloody heavy (okay, I’ve got a second small SDD in there, and a traditional HDD, which add to the weight no doubt). But after a full English Breakfast, I can carry it for a while if I have to.

Laptops are expensive if they need to be somewhat competitive. For me the lack of space and inclination to sit at my desk to play a game were the reasons. But if that doesn’t bother you, a desktop is way cheaper for better results!

Hope this helps.

Okay, don’t know why PVP was partly replaced with a kitten there… I didn’t swear. I swear! lol

Hi there,

Daily PV kitten howing 100% in the achievement panel, and has done so for more than two days now. Shouldn’t that reset daily, as the name suggests?

Thanks.

same here. got logged out 10 minutes ago, since then no luck logging back in.

Lorrik.6503:

Sometimes when I’m alone I cover myself in Vaseline and pretend I’m a slug.

Lol, that may not create the sort of discussion you were looking for :P

Back on topic… I like most of your ideas, but I disagree with mounts, unless they are sized appropriately. Nothing worse than a place full of oversized ground or flying mounts. (like WoW, in particular pre-Cataclysm Stormwind)

I’ve got another suggestion to add to this list — Character appearance:

Can we get some of the baby faces replaced with a bit more mature looks? Or even better, could we have something like EVE Online’s character appearance editor? (I do realise that the latter poses a challenge in terms of performance if many very different shapes meet in game)

Also, will there be a way to change appearance (or even character names) later on? Obviously Anet appreciates that looks matter (dyes, transmutations, armor skins etc), so it’s kinda surprising that you can’t currently change your appearance later on.

Same here. UK. Got booted from WvW and instead of being sent back to Lion’s Arch as anounced, it kicked me out and didn’t let me back in.
(Thanks for those super short notices in WvW by the way… could have saved resources and blueprints if I had known 5 minutes earlier)

Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve seen significantly fewer bots in the last couple of days than there were before. Shaemor was swamped with bots. So were some other spots. Not any more, it seems.

GW2 is an outstanding game (not perfect, but still young and with a lot of potential). That attracts many players. And where there are many players, there’s a market for abuse like bots, cheats, sold accounts, and gold sellers, obviously.

It’s a massive challenge for the team for sure. But it looks like they’re getting to grips with some of the more unpleasant challenges they face. Thanks for that! Keep up the awesome work!

Hi,

Would it be possible to remove name tags of dead enemies in WvWvW, please? Not sure if I’m alone with it, but I find it sometimes really hard to decide whether I should advance or not, because all the name tags of dead enemies lead to a bit of confusion as to how strong the group of enemies really is, especially when you’re a bit further away.

As such, dead enemies don’t matter. So unless they are being revived or are still in downed state, their tags can as well be removed. This allows to assess better how big the remaining (and living) enemy group really is.

Thanks.

All, or just a few of the actual players?
If all of them, you probably have a flaky network connection. If just a few, then it’s them having those issues.

Nemui.6753:

Feyr.7283:

- Maintenance exceeded the ETA by a few hours

is this true?

Unfortunately yes. If you look at the @GuildWars2 updates, they were about 3 hours late and had still issues with people disconnecting.
S.h.i.t. happens. Not a big deal — it’s a game after all. But it would be nice to have considerably up to date status messages in the launcher, and maybe a few more details as to why it takes longer. These things build confidence and remove lots of unnecessary questions in the forums, too. Win-win situation

Hi guys,

Could you include server/maintenance status information into the game launcher, please?

Take today, for example:
- Maintenance exceeded the ETA by a few hours
- after maintenance concluded, still lots of login/disconnect issues
- Patch notes are rather short and only relate to the client, not the servers
- Would be interesting to see what kind of work a maintenance entails, especially today’s massively extended one

Don’t get me wrong, please. With your frequent Twitter updates (@GuildWars2), you’re far ahead of your competition. Also, downtimes are part of a service like this. It’s a game after all and not mission critical for anyone.

However, seeing in the launcher what’s happening (and ideally, why) would be much more convenient and helpful than having to gather these things from Twitter, Forums etc while getting misleading error messages in the client.

Cheers.

Same here. No sound at all. I’m on a MacBook Pro from last year, which is supported according to the hardware requirements page.
Apart from missing sound, I get rather low frame rates (sometimes below 20). I know this isn’t a gaming device, but the frame rates are lower than on Bootcamp/Windows7 on the same machine, where it’s at least playable (in the area of ~35 fps, which is good enough for me).

Would be awesome if these issues could be tackled.
What’s left to say? Thank you for showing us Mac users some love, GW2 team! Keep it up!

It was a bug report.
The reasoning behind the lack of swapping for the two classes in question is clear and does make sense. The suggestion to limit this to in-combat swapping was on a side note.
Thanks anyway.

Hi there,

Just hit lvl 7 with my Elementalist and saw the (previously disfunct) swapping button and second weapon set disappear from action bar and hero profile.
Somebody advised me in mapchat that this is intended due to the many different attunements, which does make sense.

However, this isn’t very obvious, because prior to lvl 7, the button and slots in the profile are there. It should be pointed out, at least via tooltip, that these things are not available to Elementalists.

Or even better, could you leave everything in place but disable weapon swapping for Elementalists only when they are in combat? This makes it easier to switch back and forth while practicing weapon skills and/or PvE’ing, without giving them the alleged advantage in a fight.
It’s a bit annoying to manually equip weapon sets, especially when switching from two-handed to dual-wielding as one of the weapons will end up in an arbitrary bag slot.

Thank you