Guild Wars 2

PvP reward track offering trait books?

1. Make edge of the mist not count towards tournament achievements.
2. If the achievements are going to be this generic, at least make it 25 events (comparable to monthly event completer), and give 2-3 AP (again comparable to monthly event completer).

The previous achievements were much better than this (except the edge of the mist ones which need to go). Just tweak the tournament-long total numbers on those and then split them into the same weekly format you are currently running.

You could potentially merge worlds based on total hours spent in WvW (not edge of the mists) summed across the entire servers population and roughly match the total values across each merging. This would prevent the merge being affected by falsely counting PvE/PvP players who rarely go into WvW.

This could be a moving (4 week?) average, and could probably be calculated easily from already available data, while you would have to potentially strain the servers when you sample an entire population, you would only need to do it once a week or so. It could even happen during WvW reset to reduce server load.

Changing world allegiance could be restricted for any server which is above the current average for its tier, creating a way of maintaining steady population in the league.

You could also do this to create separate population limited leagues based on server population, rather than gold/silver/bronze leagues based on ratings, which can be used to cheat your way into an easy league. In this method rather than just ignoring PPT, a significant fraction of the server would have to deliberately not log in for a month before the league.

The best way to avoid league tampering though is probably to announcing them a league as close to the start as possible.

These look like some pretty solid ideas, and whilst I haven’t had the time to look over the dev posts thoroughly, (apologies if anything below is massively uninformed) I would say:

- Listing issues you are “aware of” seems to be an attempt at skirting around the company policy of not discussing active development, this is sad, but I will take the next best thing. Especially if it also involves some idea of how heavily you currently weight each issue.

- Please date stamp each thing on the post for your own benefit, even if some issues get overtaken in priority, letting some of the less important ones go unattended for a long time can be worse.

- Maybe have one overarching thread somewhere listing some of the most significant pieces from all of the forums, to help the player base know that although something at the top of their forum’s list haunt been addressed, there were other more significant issues or other areas that hadn’t seen much love in a longer time than them.

Voting on voting – the new meta.

I think the following should be done in this order:

ANet pick the number of CDIs to be run in each of the subsections:

PvE (Including Living Story & Dungeons)
PvP
WvW
Class Balance/Development
Fundamental gameplay mechanics (UI features, Downed State, Commander System, etc)

This can be better chosen by ANet who have information on team sizes, and current workloads set by current projects to each team.

ANet announce the number to be run in each area, then within those constraints the player base votes for the top x subjects in each category.

Given the options in the OP, I would pick 2 over 1.

Don’t forget you owe Ele its CDI from last time!

Chris Whiteside.6102:

And whilst we are on the subject. if you think everything mentioned in a CDI is going to be agreed upon and magically created overnight then your expectations are perhaps a little bit high.

Chris

About a month ago you had a stream of necroposts from neglected WvW players detailing issues from practically beta where feedback had been given, acknowledged by devs and nothing had happened.

You had people digging up your own words on purpose to highlight how much the feedback was ignored. Your response was to threaten to infract or ban people. That’s one hell of an environment to create before telling people ‘maybe feedback is not for you’ or ‘your expectations are too high’.

Given that the Commander CDI was 8 months ago, I think “overnight” might be a bit of a hyperbole. As for the balance and interface implementation cycle, I would expect that the majority of expectations on these forums are set by user experiences with other MMOs. Take from that what you will.

All I personally expect is that the CDI serves its purpose – to get the Devs and community on the same page – the response of the community to the results of the last CDIs (normally just a flat out request for another CDI) leaves me a little doubtful.

Take the finished CDIs, make a summary post like before (give it a day for people to point out anything significant missed out). PIN IT to the top of the respective forum, and announce any time any of those topics changes in that thread. Even if it is ‘we had a meeting today and we decided not to go ahead with x (because…)’ or ‘we are trying do address x and our initial approach is y’. That isn’t speaking “speculatively about future development”, it is speaking openly about current development!

Of course it won’t be perfect, Edge of the Mists managed to sneak level synced champ trains past its player testers, but at least there will be no more emergency weekends for Zach and Tyler.

You are so against promising things that might not materialise (excluding the WvW forums of old) that you are willing to waste significant amounts of time developing in a completely different direction from what the community wants or needs (e.g, the shift to passive play in PvP). Taking smaller steps between communication allows you to make more solid progress and makes it plain to the community that you are actually doing something (seriously, this is all you need to prevent the WvW forums from revolting again).

Oh and just to remind you: Elementalist was assigned a CDI towards the end of the last batch. Don’t forget that off your list, or at least let the class forum know if it’s cancelled.

Also, Ashen:

Some of those you mention are so terrible as to be almost unbelievable that they were intended as anything other than a joke or attempt at a troll.

…

Not implementing every half baked idea some random player could manage to put into words is not, “ignoring,” the player base.

You might want to check the references before you post, that “random player”/troll is Isaiah Cartwright, and that post is a summary of the most commonly requested things throughout the entire CDI.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

nexxe.7081:

lordkrall.7241:

Jandopo.2107:

Mr. Whiteside, I have a question.

Do you remember the Commander CDI 1 year ago? Why we got only 3 more colors out of it? I love the idea of CDI, but after this I wonder if the community’s time and effort are wasted…

Or maybe the big improvements to the commander system are yet to come?

Do you?

The main things that came out of that CDI was different colors for tags and account-bound tags.

Both which we are getting now.

Wrong. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Collaborative-Development-Commander-System/page/14

Commander Visibility
More options for the Color/Shape of the tag itself. This could be tied to functionality or rank of commanders but mainly targeted around organization.
Removal of buff display to enemies. As well as we should avoid doing skills/abilities that highlight the commander to enemies.
Ability to limit visibility to a sub group, party, guild, ect..
Tag sizing. (I debate this a bit as when you auto size the tag you can often lose the ability to see how far away something is but it was brought up a lot so listing it here)
Add squads to LFG system.

Commander Tools
More detailed supply info that’s always up. (Increased radius)
Ability to create sub roles within a squad.
Current squad tools are rarely used.
Seems to be some debates on buffs to followers, but there is a lot of good examples of ways to do that.
Squad size needs to be increased.
Ability to group up parties or other commanders to form different squad organization.
Improved chat suppression for commanders
Commander announcements (yellow text across the screen)
Open/Closing Squad tools

Commander gating
Current 100g gate isn’t the cleanest gate. (Whole goal behind a gate is to limit the number of commanders out there.
Gating using WvW abilities seems to have some debate to it, but seems like something we should avoid.
Account bound commander tags vs character bound.

This wasn’t even half of the suggestions in that thread either. The fact that Anet paid it’s WvW team (if there is one anymore) for 8+ months to add different colors to Commander Tags and make them Account-Bound is baffling. Yes, i know, they also worked on EotM, and Golem Mastery, and Siege Disabler, but EotM came out in February 2014. That’s 7 months for Golem Mastery and Siege Disabler?

So yes, i agree with Chris Whiteside, and it’s not worth the frustration when player’s suggestions are ignored. And yes, they were ignored and weren’t implemented.

Hi Nexxe,

My advice to you then would be to not get involved in the next round of CDIs.

Chris

Ask for feedback.

Ignore feedback.

Realise this is pointless and tell people not to bother with feedback any more.

Sweet, sweet progress.

GoodWithGravy.8019:

Lich/Wells abuses the same mechanic as Tornado and gets more extra dps out of it, but that isn’t peoples primary concern with Lich form.

Why?

Lich form doesn’t suck.

You appear to have missed my point.

Lich form does not need wells to be OP. Tornado needed meteor shower to just about scrape viability.

Nobody cared about Tornado, but a lot of people care about Lich Form even outside of how it overpowers procs.

By attacking the weakest one, they have set a massive precedent for having to nerf Lich and all other similar transforms or it will be a ludicrous case of double standards.

Then again, that’s what happened with RTL.

Lich/Wells abuses the same mechanic as Tornado and gets more extra dps out of it, but that isn’t peoples primary concern with Lich form.

Why?

Lich form doesn’t suck.

3 Clones, Earth sigil, Sharpened images, Condi DMG/Precision build.

Edit: Clone attack time 2s, so it’s 2 Bleed stacks, 3 torment stacks per second from auto attack.

Still at a rough equilibrium value of 4 bleeds 6 torment from AA alone, this is about 1600 DPS from range on a bunkery build using no skills whatsoever.

Mbelch.9028:

-I don’t know how our mobility was cut by 50%, the max speed buff is +33% and eles aren’t moving -17% slower than other classes currently, so I call BS.

Ride the lightning.

Don’t worry guys in 6 months they will rename applied fortitude.

killahmayne.9518:

no other healing skill got changed.

/thread.

Virtute.8251:

Ew, gross. Imaginary numbers.

I believe it’s more politically correct to call them ‘Complex’.

People are throwing out numbers so here is one I like:

Defend objective x events last 3 minutes.
Defending Stonemist 500,000 times is ~1,042 days, or 2.85 years of continuous play.
Wat.

Grimreaper.5370:

As for all the people saying blah blah vapor blade should lose range when running forward because of physics, go throw a boomerang and try to out run it.

Actually if you are running forward physics states it would gain range, which can be seen from a basic inertial Galilean frame transform. Maybe with a boomerang moving in an arc it would haves some effect, but vapor blade goes straight forwards and back, so it’s more like something on a spring.

This may be on a small tangent to the topic. Oops.

Eles probably will, although we cannot swap them out, their bonus will probably be better than anything else we can keep in the slot.

It never went away.

In the MMO world merging your servers is a sign of weakness, companies avoid it as long as they can.

With the new megaserver system though, it does seem like it would make a lot more sense converting the concept of a server into an allegiance and merging some of the lower pop allegiances. These could be much better managed to account for some servers being PvE heavy etc, also, allegiances could (lag allowing) potentially become shared between NA/EU servers, allowing a better time-zone spread, allowing one of the game modes oldest problems to fix itself (Nightcapping, which ANet do not want to fix, for very valid reasons).

To maintain identity certain town maps (eg new LA) could have allegiance as a massive weighting factor when placing a character in their instance.

Considering the massive population skew at the moment – even between long-term adjacently ranked servers – and the importance of population to the game mode, it seems silly not to.

1. Aurora Glade
2. Aurora Glade
3. Aurora Glade

It’s happening.

ThiBash.5634:

But it also causes 2 stacks of vulnerability, something people often overlook. And it hits everything in a line, so in some occasions it’ll be more useful than Lightning Whip (and sometimes it won’t be).

+2% damage for 55% (more practically 78%) dps loss?
On a skirmish weapon?
It’s not that it isn’t there, it’s just not enough.

ThiBash.5634:

And it’s still a spammable 600 range attack, something full melee weapons never have. Flamethrower is the only thing that comes close.

GoodWithGravy.8019:

As for the range on vapour blade, it already comes with the same penalty as all our staff auto attacks – and an unfairly large proportion of our other stronger attacks across all weapons – that it is an absolute faceroll to avoid. This alone balances out its range.

I stand by this, increase projectile velocity or make them track in arcs, and continue through a target to their max range along that arc length before returning (this one please) and the range might actually be a bonus instead of a detriment. Having something unique is only good if it gives us an advantage, (or is at least on par and a novelty).

Honestly though id much rather earth’s auto attack got some attention. It needs to not require a target to use, and needs to be some kind of cleave (like just about every other close combat auto in the game). I think having it sweep out a 90 degree cone from right to left over the period of 1/2 a second would be a pretty nice mechanic.

Edited to underp my maths.

Stone heart is really underwhelming, because attuning to earth reduces an Eles outgoing damage by much more than it reduces its incoming damage, even against crit builds. So whilst it makes you less vulnerable to focus, and burst, unless your opponent has long cooldowns on their burst, making them another Ele, they are at a net advantage. Also, for those who still havn’t realised, doesn’t work with lingering elements.

The fight basically plays this way:
- Thief stealths and an Ele is aware, pop earth attunement, Thief uses tactical strike, doesn’t crit, still takes out a decent chunk of Ele’s hp.
- Ele can now try to kill the Thief before they stealth again or sit in earth to reduce the incoming 2 spam, maybe pop some utilities that will be back up in a few hours.
-If the Ele stays in earth, it does not have any way of damaging the thief the Thief, the thief just 2 spams it down, it is now dead.
-If the Ele swaps out of earth, it is now just as squishy as it always has been, also earth isn’t available again for ~12 seconds, revealed wears off in ~3. Thief either bursts down Ele, or if it gets hurt stealths. Earth attunement is still a long way from cool-down.
-If the Ele specced water it can try and heal but not having much in arcana means stone heart is miles off, and the thief is about to use another tactical strike, so the Ele is about to be instagibbed.
-Alternatively the Ele specced 30 arcana, but therefore either had no points in water and therefore no hp and didn’t even last this long, or it took vit gear and had no damage, so the thief didn’t need to stealth in the first place. See the second point.
-Alternatively the Ele may have not gone full bunker and traited neither Arcana or Water to go with their 30 earth, they are very dead.
-GG. Such wow. #Elepocalypse.

Fighting theives on Ele will be the same as it always has, dodge the spike, never eat it.

For backstab theives, whilst you can’t chase them down very well (hurr durr on thief running away counts as a death, disengaging isn’t OP etc etc) , I find Necro to be a good counter. Standing in Fear marks prevents backstabs (and unlike Aegis or a dodge, it doesn’t just mean all they have to do is press 1 again), and if you do get a thief low and they only just manage to stealth up, just pop into death shroud and drop 5 and then 4 on them. You can also use fears to prevent panic stealth’s. Harder time against pistol whip cheese.

Sceptre mesmer is pretty funny against 2 spam thieves, confusion (3) wrecks them, the second skill blocks backstabs, blink gets you out of a steal ambush, and you can counter stealth with stealth. If you run PU though, be prepared for thieves to complain about how your stealth is OP. Also a reasonable bet against spvp pistol whip cheese. I keep sceptres in my bag for every type of WvW build I run just for the thief troll factor.

Zero Day.2594:

Turamarth.3248:

…
Depending on player skill every class can beat a thief.

/thread

Personally, I think when considering profession balance we should probably not consider a skill imbalance because that’s not very…….balanced…..
There is a reason why so many top tier mesmers rerolled thief, and there is also a reason why the number of Eles there can be counted on one hand.

Utility cooldowns need a significant recast reduction, they are outside of the attunement rotation but still suffer from the same recast penalty.

Let’s look at Cantrips:

Eg 1: Balancing Invulnerabilities: Mist Form vs Endure Pain
Mist Form’s recast is far too long compared to to Endure pain. Our ignore CC and movement speed buff is more than balanced by our locked action bars and point capture prevention effectively removing us from play, and having 3s vs 4s uptime. 45sec to keep the same % uptime on invulnerable seems more balanced. That’s just comparing the skills, completely ignoring the context of war having far more access to stability, and higher passive defence, so if anything the comments above have a mild anti-ele bias.

Eg 2: Balancing Stabilities: Stand your ground vs Armour of Earth
Shout has a 1 in 6 uptime, Armor of Earth has far lower 1 in 15 uptime.
Shouts are AoE 5 people, Armor of Earth is just 1 person.
Protection vs Retal seem equivalent because of relative passive defences.
Armor of Earth recast should be 36s to give same stability uptime. Whilst some may argue Protection is more useful than Retal, Ele needs the extra defence, and Guardian is still getting away with it’s shout being a 5 target AoE.

Oddly enough, the non defensive cantrip is relatively balanced (comparing to to Blink, for closest match in utility) although arguably the radius should be bigger (180-240) to allow more use to be made of the damage spike rather than just dropping the Ele straight on top of the target. As with Endure pain, this is a utility for utility balance, not taking into account the rest of the class.

Although a standard response on these forums is that you can’t do this, you can to get a rough grained idea of whether or not two utilities are balanced, before fine tuning, taking two abilities with rough grained equal recasts of 45sec and 36s, and in trying to account for lower passive defences increasing them to 75s and 90s is not fine tuning, it’s poor balance.

If I wanted a pet class I would have mained Ranger.

Is level up affected by the AoE cap? Anti blob upscaled meta go!

Wow, 8 months. Well necro’d.

Living story achievements appearing every 2 weeks, couldn’t change the values attached to already existing ones in 8 months.

What the, I don’t even…..

Yamsandjams.3267:

Snip

Yea, fair point, sounds right to me.

Viking Jorun.5413:

Well, by ANet’s logic this means we should nerf Lightning Whip to encourage the use of the other 3 auto attacks, right? ;D

“Air attunement dps too high, RTL recast increased to 30/60 seconds”

It’s not even the same weapon slot QQ

Except for the OP builds war is not OP enough.

100% healing sig buff inc.

Vapor blade does (assuming the blade hits on the way back as well…) 44% of the damage of Lightning whip. Even with the weakness trait it only does 50% of the damage (again assuming both passes hit).

Just having synergy with something isn’t good enough, the synergy and base skill have to be good enough to make it feasible. We could add a grandmaster trait that added 1% damage whilst in water, and claim it to be balanced because it synergises with other things, but it would clearly be massively underpowered. In this case the trait is balanced, but the basic ability is pitiful.

As for the range on vapour blade, it already comes with the same penalty as all our staff auto attacks – and an unfairly large proportion of our other stronger attacks across all weapons – that it is an absolute faceroll to avoid. This alone balances out its range.

It’s base dps should be doubled so that if both passes hit, and the ability is traited, it matches lightning whip. In reality in pvp/wvw currently that trait is unlikely to be used, and the blade will hit at most once per pass, so we will still lose 55% in auto attack damage on swapping to water, but thats better than the current 80% loss.

Auto attack is the source of a classes of sustained dps, so even in water it should be sustainable. Not having any good damage abilities until we attunement swap, and the time spent healing is already enough of a dps loss to make up for the fact we are in a healing attunement.

Also, all dagger auto-attacks need to be buffed to actually have the cast time they say they do, they are probably being balanced around this cast time, which is why most of them are so underwhelming.

Skill lag has been an issue since culling got dropped, so has damage slowdown/catchup, and conditions not wearing when their timers hit zero. The main issues are not going to be solved by hot fixing recent changes.

These issues probably require a server overhaul. Which is kind of sad seeing as this is the single most game breaking issue in GW2 – it is the only part of the game that becomes unplayable – and WvW is the only game mode which is not receiving new servers

.

Diminishing returns (up to immunity) to discourage abuse/spam. Wears off over a balance tunable timescale.

This fix has been pretty standard for about a decade now.

As an Ele, my decision pretty much entirely depends on what rune set I will be running.

Are we getting a boon duration set to compensate the fact Ele’s 2monk/2water/2traveller is getting the nerf stick?

If not I would guess Toughness/Power/BoonD

Although it would be very sad that we have to choose between being able to crit, or having boons, seeing as how important the latter is to giving Ele a chance with it’s natural armour/vitality deficiency.

Stealth isn’t too bad in WvW if you take some time out to play a thief and know where they are going, or learn its durations and bring a blocking ability. Being able to run a roaming setup until you get to your group and then being able to retrait will help this (I’m going to bait and destroy so many thieves on my mesmer after the patch, it’s going to be so fun).

Stealth just gets a bad name because perma-stealth is relatively broken and gets abused by a large number of thieves that cant hack pvp so they pick on zerg builds or upscales running from spawn in WvW because thats all they can kill.

Personally I think the most OP thing in a thief’s entire lineup isn’t stealth or backstab, it’s Heartseeker – spammable gap closer that does 25% of a full bunkers hp, people complain about 11111 in blobs, but at least there you have to also press movement keys.

Personally I would leave heart-seeker hitting as hard as it does, but remove the leap, no skill-free 2 spam, no smoke field combo (yes, this would cause an immense level of qq). Then Anet can get round to giving thief the out of stealth buffs it deserves.

Sad thing is, when you add up the the useless GM traits, lack of any other trait news, at best token changes to other abilities followed up by the much bigger hit that is the rune and sigil changes, we are getting net nerfed again this patch.

I have seen the devs say we could do with help, I have seen #Elepocalypse. The thing is, last time round they thought they would open up some builds – by moving Elemental Attunement up a tier. Yeah.

Are you taking any of the opportunities new server structures prevent to solve/help:

- Population Imbalance – Especially where people are given warning to stack servers before tournaments.

- Skill lag.

- Rubber banding.

- Slowdown & catchup in damage/boons/conditions .

- Nightcapping

- Diminishing returns on control – ie, blowing 5 cleanses of binds, only to get hit by 5 more.

Will an improvement in server system be able to provide the extra power to correct errors like false obstructions on projectiles and blinks.

Future of WvW outside of servers:

Is anything going to be done about the blob, hammer-trains state of play in the large scale.

What about the AoE cap and how it interacts with the above. Why are arrow carts allowed over this cap, but open field battles are not.

Anything (ICD?) happening to retal to prevent some abilities being a 1 button self kill. Could anything be done about the abilities themselves. (I have heard of hard counters but the current state is a bit too hard of a counter)

For roaming – Will other fight reset abilities be balanced the same way RTL was.

New weapons – Will WvW be kept in mind when developing the new weapon skill-sets for classes like Mesmer and Thief which are currently lacking good AoE and CC weapons for large scale pvp. Possibly taking this as an opportunity to give Thieves more of a place in larger groups.

Because all loot and credit comes from tagging, currently healing and boon support builds go unrewarded. Is any system being thought out to reward these absolutely vital roles?

It was mentioned before that you wanted to make some kind of reward system for scouting, has any progress been made on this?

Somewhat covered by the server questions, but are any attempts at all being made to balance match-ups? Do you plan on trying to bring in some way of equaling playing field between the current tournament and the next. If not, are there alternatives to having position based rewards in the meta chest, seeing as some servers stand no chance of getting a good position purely because of population.

If competitions are going to be introduced into WvW, the dev team should seriously think about beginning to make the match-ups competitive instead of servers taking it in turns steamrolling and being steamrolled.

Open thread hoping to see Ele buffs.

War sigil buff confirmed.

Sad Panda.

I agree with everyone else here that world xp should be account bound, there is nothing preventing having this system whilst allowing different distributions of the skill points on characters. I play multiple characters evenly to fit whatever gaps my guild needs, I shouldn’t punished for it.

Also, is there a reasonable possibility of getting one achievement point per rank, which is hardly unfair considering the horrific state of WvWvW achievements.

OchrisO.8450:

Next think as for the “10 omegas” on UW hills it was 7… And the reason we hit you is because you night team the night before took all of AG bl with 3 omegas and 30 man team v about 15 people, my guess for fsp hitting you bl is that fact that all there said in EB was blue because you followed up talking the stuff that AG took of them as for the 50 omega rush that was just for fun ^^ always wanted to see how fast a wall would drop

That 50 golem rush was serious business! We had super sneaky stealths and mesmer portals and even a live strea……wait…

Hmm, let’s have a quick look at the numbers for Savage Leap vs RTL

Say we are spamming the abilities as much as we can, and apart from that our movement speeds are the same (swiftness)

at 900 units and 8 seconds savage leap is 112.5 units per second gained on the target

at 1200 units every 40 seconds, RTL is 30 units per second, almost 4 times slower.

with its original cast time of 15s, it is still only 80 units/s, still worse.

we could do the same for thief, but the outcome there is fairly obvious.

It does make you wonder when an ele ability is nerfed for being OP, but the several other classes which have even better equivalents are left alone.