Guild Wars 2

ANET, please listen to the player base.

Staff is simply not a justified “weapon” right now. It’s a buffing stick with little combat viability. The viable cleave damage scenarios are too few for Wave of Wrath in WvW now. Certainly worse and almost never utilized in PvP, and overshadowed by nearly all other weapons in PvE.

We are better off using a stronger Melee weapon than trying to “range” at 300 units.

This will be especially true once more classes are generating might, healing and swiftness in PoF. Staff will simply not be worth using at all in my view.

Let’s look at the Skill:

“Make a powerful shock wave, hitting up to five foes.”

Damage: 242 (0.6)?
Number of Targets: 5
Range: 300

Path of Fire pre-patch:
Wave of Wrath: Reduced the range from 600 to 300. Increased the attack angle from 90 degrees to 110 degrees to better line up with its effect.

Suggested Change:
Maintain 600 range, reduce angle of attack from 90 degrees to 60 degrees

or…

900 range, make the attack animation much more wave like and a bit slower at a set width.

Lower damage potential is okay, if the ability is doing something else (applying an effect) or has enough range.

Lowering the range to 300 just feels horrible, not to mention now base guardian has only scepter at 900 range and nothing else about 300.

Revert the range back and change the damage or aoe width.

No reason I can thing of. It’s feels awful now in combat and its completely strange to have 300 range main attack. It’s definitely not a ranged weapon anymore. Guardians now only have scepter for ranged—most unfortunate.

At least increase the range and less the cone or something. Guardians shouldn’t be forced to use Scepter for ranged damage.

I agree 100%. This change was a very bad one for the vanilla Guardian. We now only have 1 ranged weapon, and Scepter does not work well with many Guardian builds in several game types. It’s decent in PvP and good single target DPS in PvE. Now we have to go dragon hunter for another ranged option?

If anything, the width of the cone should have been reduced and the range remaining at 600. Instead, this weapon is now nothing more than inferior cleave to Great Sword, Sword, Hammer and even Mace with a bunch of support options in slots 2-5. Thing is, I don’t want a weapon that is bad and fighting and staff feels absolutely useless in WvW from a combat perspective. 300 range might as well be 150 range and true melee from a WvW perspective. No one bothers to use staff in PvE outside of halloween farming. So great, now we have Engineers with better cleave (flame thrower) than a guardian? Seems a bit like a bad joke to me.

Based on today’s link and transfer update, this analysis from ANET is failing the player base. Our server continues to have low participation, but is still closed and still has no server link.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

1. World sizes are based on WvW play hours and players. People who do not play WvW, or are guests, do not factor into the population size of a server. If a world is locked, it is because it has a larger population than our “Full” threshold.

2. Yes and no. We look at timezone participation but timezone participation is hard to balance because people who play at certain times tend to all gravitate towards the same worlds so they can play with a lot of people. There are not enough off-hour worlds that we could link to create 24-hour coverage for every world. It just is not possible with our current world populations.

3. Yes, high population servers are usually the benchmark for when we link worlds. For example, if Blackgate has 10 players and it’s the highest populated server, then we try to link worlds so their populations are also around 10. We can’t be totally precise so sometimes worlds might end up with 12 or 9 but we try to get as close as possible.

Greetings ANET,

It seems we have an issue with monitoring server populations, WvW participation, and server links based on my observations over the years and especially recently.

Questions: What is being done to monitor the following?

1) Server over-all population vs % WvW participation. Right now friends and guildmates who want to WvW on my server cannot transfer there even though our WvW participation is much lower than in the past. Yes, i realize there is a guesting system.

2) Does ANET in fact monitor timezone participation and attempt to balance around that with server links? IE, smaller servers with high concentration of players in Time Zone X combine with larger servers with much less player participation in that same timezone?

3) Does ANET use a WvW high participation server such as Blackgate as a benchmark for balancing competition from server to server? I’ve seen server transfers open to high participation WvW servers many times during the period that my server has been locked while those servers already high very high WvW participation than my server. This seems odd given the linking policy.

I fully realize it is not easy to prevent this from happening or detecting who is transferring where for WvW vs other reasons, but it’s clear that at least the server linking policy needs to change where WvW is concerned.

Great post!

@JordanPaul, it totally depends on what you are doing. If you are in a powerful and efficient group capping Keeps and Towers and wiping every group you encounter along the way, you could do it in a day or two as it’s only 120 ranks.

“The first 4 ranks (up to rank 5) only require 1,000 WXP; after that, each rank requires 5,000 WXP.”

So 5000 wxp is definitely doable in 30 minutes, so 1 hour seems more reasonable for the average player in an average group with average server participation.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/World_Experience

Also seeing huge latency tonight from NYC Verizon FIOS to ANET servers.

Testing my connection through Pingtest.com revealed no high pings or packet loss on my connection to NY, Seattle, Dallas, or San Jose test sites. Only having issues in GW2.