Guild Wars 2

Legendary gear has ascended stats, so getting that should be your goal (as a WvW player).
The difference between exotic and ascended is around 5% (weapon and FULL armour or trinket set). Closing the difference is what you can work on.

How to get ascended stats from only WvW is difficult.
1. Ascended items drop from rank up chests and can be rings, weapon and armour boxes (with a stat type, so a Shaman’s Weapon box gives you a weapon of choice with Shaman stats).

2. Use the Mystic Forge to change unwanted stats to you stats of choice
You need some materials, wiki the Mystic Forge page about what you need

3. Close the gap via food
Using food buffs and Sharpening Stones/Tuning Crystals can close a bit of the gap between exotics and ascended. Watch out for food dropped by commanders or bring your own. Lvl 70 food can be bough with Badges too in WvW.

3. Go on the Legendary quest
To access the WvW ascended items at the Vendor you need to have the exotic variant unlocked first via the Triumphant Armour reward track. Buying the ascended items requires you to have gold, WvW skirmish tickets (around 1.4k for a full set) and Marks, which are the crafting component. You will need to have ascended crafting levels for making the materials for them (more than 400).

All of this just covers the items, but like Vayne posted, your build might be outdated (if you come from a long break you might still use an outdated build), or you could just lack training in fighting competitive players.

For me, there are several levels of visual mess in GW2 (list in no particular order)

1. Realism vs. Fantasy mess
GW2 has a good mix of stylized & realistic overall look. If you are a purist of immersion in a realistic world, you should use basic crafting swords and the few rapiers and gladii in game. Everything else is a “combat paddle”. The same applies to armour, like basic chain mail. Gliders also contribute to this.

2. Dye madness
You can break any realism with “golden male Norns” (as we have seen in this thread). With GW2’s dye system, we have to live with that side effect.

3. Skill effect visuals
GW2 has gone worse with that with every addition after launch. Just compare some ground targeted abilities of Guardian to Firebrand or Necro to Reaper/Scource. As you are supposed to react to a visual clue or skill wind up e.g. in PvP, this is hardly possible with todays particle effects. IMHO, the devs should at least give us a better options to reduce / turn off the visual combat noise via skills.

4. Prestigious flashiness
With a few exceptions, Legendary items are not very modest when it comes to visuals (animation, shine, footprints etc.), which was not be the problem when we did not stack the effects. These days, you might carry a legendary weapon, an aura, a shiny backpack, an animated armour price and a trinket with hovering globes. over your mist emitting Ley line shoulders. The possibilities to create something obnoxious have risen. At least we can mute the horse bow now. Perhaps some sot of button to reduce clutter on fellow games you see would be another side project for a dev.

5. Meta gatherings & WvW
When you see events like HoT metas, world bosses and large WvW battles all those factors combine. because there are so many people crammed in one spot of the map. OK character models get toned down automatically and you can chose some visual options in competitive play. Some issues like skill effects remain though.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Commander#Shared_participation

I am talking about the designated slot reserved for scouts here. Perhaps I did not make that clear enough in my initial post.
How would that contribute to more spamming? If the scout is abusing the privilege, take away the shared participation slot and he not only loses this benefit but will also mute himself fast via the anti spam measure in place.
If there is e.g. a PUG commander and a guild commander squad on the map, why should the rest of the map not profit from the expertise of one or two designated scouts. The squads might be occupied by a siege or open field fight. Calling out contested camps, describing roaming parties or asking for help to refresh siege is good information for everyone on the map.

Dear Devs,
please find some way that a person who has a scout slot assigned by a squad commander is not suppressed in map chat for “excessive messaging”.
It is the job of the scout to not only keep his squad, but also the map informed about what is happening. A scout should be able to call out spotted roamers, structures under attack or any other tactical information without being cut off by a mechanic that wants to keep “sell bots” away in cities.
Is it possible to “wipe” the “talk count” or whatever you want to call the mechanic that monitors excessive messaging for people with the scout role in squad automatically every minute (or what ever is appropriate)? This way we can do our job for our commanders and other teams and random players on the map.

Thank you for considering this idea.
Please reply to this thread in a positive way, if you think this is a useful addition to the game.

An Aurora Glade scout

Khisanth.2948:

Gorani.7205:

Soldier – The “balanced tanky” set, but that one will cause you to abandon you condi burns to a large extend. You will have to cope via Tuning Crystal food.

The condi version of Soldier is Dire … so just use the right stat instead.

I have reasonable doubts a set without Power stats will be good, once you need to leave Fire attunement. You could use D/WH, Sigils of Smoldering and Bursting and try to stay in Fire, but once you swap out into something else you damage will drop significantly (and you have no Healing Power or Boon duration to recover). Ele needs a baseline of Power (IMHO) or some of its main attack skills hit like a wet noodle.

I am not sure if Carrion gear is desirable for a PvE Ele, because you have to rely so much on burning as your main condi to damage.
If you switch to Viper completely, you will see better results (but it is expensive)

To make you less squishy, you either have to spec into traits, skills (both weapon, e.g. WH or F and utilities) or more defensive stats.

Celestial – Those will always help you as an Ele, but the noticeable effect will be small by only going for one or two pieces to switch out. A complete set will ward you against most “one shots” and allow you to gain extra seconds to heal & cleanse.

Soldier – The “balanced tanky” set, but that one will cause you to abandon you condi burns to a large extend. You will have to cope via Tuning Crystal food.

Knight’s or Cavalier – getting a high Toughness will make you an absolute aggro magnet in PvE (you have low health, low armour AND high Toughness), which trigger a lot of AI behaviour to attack you and follow you around. Although it sounds contradictory, this can actually help defend yourself: If you know you enemies, you exactly know what they will do, so you can use defensive skills, like reflects vs. ranged foes or lead enemies into your fire fields.

Klipso.8653:

it does not matter at all how fast or slow you gain PiPs. you don’t even need to afk farm or hunt outnumbered maps.

whether i blow through to cap in a day or if it takes me a week to do it. i’ll still never get more than 175 tickets.

Looking at you attached pictures and doing some math with your world score + seeing 5 days remaining in the match-up:
You played almost 19h within the first two days of the match-up. That’s not representative, even for a hard core WvW player and unhealthy (just my opinion).

Both back items are tied to an act of the original “living story” (act 1 and act 2) of the first Halloween event. If you have the corresponding achievements unlocked, support should be able to unlock the skin for you. They did it last year for my account, as I could prove I had the complete edition before it was lost during the wardrobe introduction.

We definitely need some more armour and weapons that take inspiration from historical designs.
e.g. German gothic armour, with lots of fluting and the typical Sallet helmet (Penguin posted pictures before); Italian / Milanese style plate armour, which is more plain, with flat surfaces and often asymmetrical shoulders and vambraces/gauntlets. There is no kettle helmet in game yet. A coat of plates could even be made into a medium set. We have no jack chains as arm protection for medium classes. 16th century armour, especially those commissioned for lords in England had been etched and blued a lot, which could be transcribed into runes or magi-tech symbols on the armour.
The lack of normal looking trousers for light and medium classes is obvious, especially in conjunction with chest pieces that are either trench coats of stuff “with skirts” or other weird pieces of fabric around the hips.

IIRC, there are no kopesh swords in the game, no leaf shaped gladius, no sax, Dacian falx, hardly any swords that suit the early middle ages, like a migration era sword (Viking sword). We have no small sword, no classical side sword. I could list a handful of very unique other swords as well and I have not even touched other kinds of weapons.

We have too many weapons that look like painted paddles and too few that could actually be a useful weapon. Getting a few of the later ones would be great.

I think both both Swagger & Slyther can agree on this:

The whole new system of Skirmish rewards and acquisition needs a version 2.0 to address several issues.

What does the current Outnumbered +5 buff do?
With the exception of a small part of players (those with e.g. +5 pips from rank, fighting for a server with a predominately 1st place) the +5 bonus is kind of essential to having a chance to be rewarded fairly for the time invested.
This currently leads players focusing on going for the buff at all costs (by map hopping, being silent on Outnumbered maps and staying on Outnumbered maps without participating in any team play activity)

What does the current number of awarded tickets do?
The amount of tickets you get rewarded in correlation to the time invested, feels out of balance, especially for those players that want to go for rewards fast. They want to be able to earn more tickets each week.

What could be done about Outnumbered?
1. All pips could go
This would take away the incentive to go to a “losing map” completely. The missing pips would have to be distributed to the world score (currently 1/2/3) if you don’t want the progression speed to drop significantly
2. The bonus gets reduced to make it less important
Reducing the +5 to +2 and increasing the world score to +2/3/+4 will award everybody in WvW with a better pip acquisition, reducing the need to go for the buff.
3. The +5 bonus gets stretched out over time (OP’s idea)
This is an attempt to be “fair” to those playing on an “underdog map” compared to map hoppers that only go to the map just before the scoring. It requires tracking each individual player on a timer though, which might not be technically feasible.

What could be done about tickets?
1. More tickets for everybody
The total number from Wood to Diamond chests could be increased (currently capped at 175 a week). This would mean everyone playing WvW would get more tickets over time.
2. More tickets for the dedicated players
The tickets for the dedicated players could be increased by deviating from the linear progression of tickets on the Mithril and Diamond chest by awarding 40 and 50 instead of 30 and 40.
3. Add bonus tickets to the repeatable Diamond chest.
I really can’t put down a number here, because I can not judge how many people actually repeat those several times at the end of the week. Does 5 sound reasonable?

You can try to build beds from tables, shelves and cushions, but I agree that beds would be a nice addition to the available furniture.

PS: The only useful floor tile (or ceiling) comes from a raid wing. Why?

KrHome.1920:

Gorani.7205:

As far as I know the following borderland veterans count:
>> ice wurm between Bay and Quarry on Alpine BL
>> harpy NE for water camp on Alpine BL
>> warg west of SC on Alpine BL
>> sand wurm NE of Maclain’s camp on Desert BL
>> warg west of SC on Desert BL
>> harpy on plateau west of Air Keep on Desert BL

There are veteran spiders (e.g. between Skritt camp and NC on Alpine or in the valley SE of Bauer’s camp on Desert) that do not count as they have no DE attached to it)

This is even mentioned in the daily description:

“Daily WvW Veteran Creature Slayer — Defeat the veteran warg, the harpy veteran, or the veteran wurm on a Borderlands map.”

It is 3 creature types, but six locations you can kill them. I don’t think the ice wurm is hard to get. it might be the easiest for a home team on Alpine. The harpies are usually not “contested” by enemies. The only “difficult” one is the desert warg, as it is right next to the camp.
I just try to wait there, my kite raised and will allow enemies to tag the veteran too. If we had less people ganking waiting players, the daily would be less of a hassle too.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Perhaps, those that frequent the WvW sub-forums would have more interest.

This is a decoration and/or scribing idea and not a WvW related topic. It should be discussed here.

Khisanth.2948:

Meh … got a few siege decoration from the first couple of chests but they are so disappointing that I stopped caring about them every since

Why do you think they are disappointing? Compared to other decos you can craft they are quite large and in case of the guild siege very detailed (they display your guild’s emblem by default). Trebs can be used as scaffolding for building in three dimensions and shield generators as serve as “magictech” lights.

I think the Veteran creature should stay, its repawn timer cut in half (to 5 min), but “rewards” for it should be halved too. I would be fine with it not being an event that gives you participation, to avoid AFKing for pips.

As far as I know the following borderland veterans count:
>> ice wurm between Bay and Quarry on Alpine BL
>> harpy NE for water camp on Alpine BL
>> warg west of SC on Alpine BL
>> sand wurm NE of Maclain’s camp on Desert BL
>> warg west of SC on Desert BL
>> harpy on plateau west of Air Keep on Desert BL

There are veteran spiders (e.g. between Skritt camp and NC on Alpine or in the valley SE of Bauer’s camp on Desert) that do not count as they have no DE attached to it)

Doflamingo.6957:

With the recent leaks about the new GW2 expansion its not easy to understand who is the next elder dragon is or if there will be one in this expansion, is the Vabbi area near Jormag or something?

I assume that the core of GW2 lore and game play will revolve around the elder dragons. With LS season 3 currently hinting toward a stalemate between Jormag & Primordus (they cancel each other out) and Kralkatorrik being the elder dragon stirring in the Crystal Desert, this one is most likely the focus of the expansion pack 2 as far as I can see it.

Keeping with the “theme” of the first expansion (Heart of Thorns hinting towards Mordremoth and “plant stuff”) I guess Anet marketing will chose something similar, so my guesses are:

The Crystal Desert (using a GW 1 location)
Bones and Sand (assuming that Palawa Joko plays an important role)
Land of the Golden Sun (another lore phrase)

PS: No Sands of Time. People will think about the Prince of Persia games.

Since the distribution of what WvW siege decoration you get from a deco box seems to be pure RNG, can we please have the option to change a “normal” AC to a guild AC or a superior AC? The guild versions in particular have a lighter colour and some nice guild emblems you might want to show.
e.g.
1x normal + 1x Fine Crafting kit + 3x Badges of Tribute = 1x Superior
1x normal + 1x Journeyman Crafting kit + 3x Guild Insignia = 1x guild siege

PS: There is a great opportunity to give us static supply caravan dollies, too. There are normal ones, packed ones, the alpine and the desert type. Don’t forget the Lunar New Year dollies and the Wintersday dolly.
There are Lunar siege skins, too. Perhaps those could be inside the boxes during the event weeks of those festivals.

Old stuff I am missing
Pretty much the stuff the OP has mentioned, too

>> Supply management. Your dependency on supply to attack, defend and upgrade allowed more tactical game play (supply traps; when to upgrade and what)
>> “Bannering” the lord to some extend, but it was a tactical option
>> defending & holding camps was another nice thing to do
>> Crafting stations; Since HoT, it is much more common to travel to your guild hall to buy/sell kits and drop off some mats … and return to your initial location … than to use the WvW crafting station and blow up queues (which I think never was an issue on my server).

Things we still not have
>> reasonable achievements, that show some constant progression (just look how the “modern” PvP achievements are done)
>> benefits for individual guilds for attacking / defending a structure (e.g. with a bonus pip to the next counter when you either took or defended a structure or all representing players on that map)
>> Something to give back some sever identity after so many servers got swept under the rug due to linking
>> A fix to point blank catapults at walls, which would IMHO make placement of siege much more interesting both defensively and offensively.

Since the skirmish reward update, WvW siege can finally be used as decorations in your guild hall. How have you used the new decorations? Please place screen shots here for everyone to enjoy your creativity and ideas.

I have attached my guild’s current airlift operation of supplies to the home borderlands.

Tangeld Depths
While VB and AB have verticality too, you are not able to get a hint in TD how all the surface area an tunnels are connected. The meta events sometimes start at strange locations and jump around to areas you are blocked off (e.g. by a contested WP). So many foes with CCs make passing through areas annoying. An there are those watery tunnels too. One of the prime examples, why GW2 area maps are completely obsolete in conjunction with current map trends.

Dragon Stand
My main problem with the map is that it is useless to play there unless you have a full meta map. The event stages of the meta are OK, but everyone is just zerging in a huge group and in the worst case auto-attacking. It is a very long meta too, which yo can (usually) join at any stage (e.g. like Silverwastes).

Southsun Cove
The map meta is “defend against Karka” at all camps, with no variety (egg collections and golem parts aside). Young Karka are a very annoying enemy and the veterans are even worse.

Those are the easy picks

The last two spots would be reserved for things I personally don’t like, but others may find not that bad:

1. Sylvari home instance
My least favourite home instance, because unlike the human or charr one, it is tiny and really uninspiring.
2. Ember Bay
It narrows down to the insane JP volcano, being insane and holding collector tokens too.
3. Edge of the Mists
Because it was a doomed map right from the start, when ANet decided to give it better loot (from capping/flipping & rank up boxes) than the regular WvW maps. If you take a look at the “new people” after the skirmish rewards in the regular maps, you see how much they are focused on that “k-train” mind set.
4. Kessex Hills
Because I think the blown up toxic tower is too detached from the rest of the maps hearts and quest narrative. It feels like something alien on the map and not an evolved map after the LS chapters.

The reason so many of us hold on to them might be, that we never know whether Anet adds another upgrade to the Guild Hall that requires a stack or more, too.

A side note, on topic:

Legendary precursor (weapon) crafting shows that a legendary weapon requires you (intended by the Anet Devs) to take part in all types of core game (I say core, because Raids are not required for weapons), because of the “Experimental Weapon”.
This one uses both Shards of Glory (PvP) and Memories of Battle (WvW). By having both “unbound” currencies available on the trading post, you can bypass that intention with money (probably from PvE).
EotM and its k-training is already cheapening the effort in WvW, adding a PvP way for the Gift of Battle (and the ability to use custom arenas), would further make Legendary weapons less special than they are right now.

PS: Time spent for Gift of Exploration vs. Gift of Battle is really all I can say on that topic after so many wishes and complains about the Gift of Battle.

I like the idea of a WvW enrichment in general.

What could that be?
>> +1 pip bonus (as suggested by the OP)
>> +5% WxP gain
>> +5% WvW track gain

To avoid the possible “amulet swap” Artemis Thuras.8795 metioned, perhaps the +1 pip gain should be added to the guild enhancement from the guild hall tavern instead, making those either 10% & +1 pip to either WxP or WvW track.
The enrichment, being a multi purpose WvW enrichment (so, just one enrichment for the game type, not several), could be +5% to both WxP and WvW track gain.

“Yeah yeah yeah, lady, but WHAT’S ON THE LIST!?”

The list is a lot longer than I thought it would be.
I could live with less items on the list, but I will be happy with all 125.
The one addition I would like to see are the lvl 65 Crests to go into the “Doubloon category”), which are pretty much the same thing than Orbs, without the ability to promotion via crafting.
Keep the Unid Fossils (which are kind of up for debate here on the forum thread)
I’d rather see the rare random scribing items (Arid Lumber Core etc.) than the Nibs, Pulp and Book Covers, if you have to chose. (Having the Kits there is great, because they can be created in bulk and left for the final construction of the decoration)

I don’t like the idea of making a 3rd guild boost WvW have to decide to chose from (now that rank matters again in terms of ascended availability) and would like to stick with the Aura idea of the OP.

The matter of “technically possible” might be the biggest issue here. Also, we don’t have to forget the limited number of structures that can be claimed by guilds from each server.

Playing as a guild (e.g. a min number of 3 people in party or squad), should earn you a +1 for the people playing.

My suggestions, trying to keep it simple and just distributing points differently to what we have now:

1. WvW rank points get cut from 7 to +6, by shaving off the last rank “of bragging rights”
2. Outnumbered gets reduced from +5 to +3
3. Squad Leader +1 gets reworked to "be in a Squad of 5 " (on the same map as leader, if that’s technically possible)
4. Loyalty bonus +1 gets changed to +2
5. Server rank pips get changed from +1/2/3 to +2/3/+4

Reasoning behind the changes:
The incentive to do map hopping needs to be addressed, while still encouraging players to play vs. greater odds (Outnumbered). You get rewarded for getting to know your allies better (stay on a world longer) and participate in organised map tactics (being in a squad, no matter if you lead or not). You are still encouraged to play in “bad for your server” match-ups by not having such a great difference between leading server and underdog (necessary since #1 & #2 teaming up vs. #3 is currently encouraged instead of #3 & #2 vs #1)

All of those are my subjective personal opinions, but I try to elaborate briefly, why I don’t think we are at a good spot with the patch and it needs some tweaking.

>> WvW ranks to +pip bonus
This one seems to be way too much in favour of people who have farmed EoTM compared to the “veteran” WvW player, who played for his server (like buying siege, scouting, refreshing) over the past few years.

>> +5 for Outnumbered
This bonus is pretty high. It will encourage people to farm higher pips once the queues have gone down, by hopping to Outnumbered maps (most likely a map that needs help in numbers) and remaining the tick there – not contributing to defence (e.g hopping from ruin to ruin instead of fighting for the keep).

>> Loyalty bonus
Is this suppose to work from the beginning or just after three weeks after the patch went life. Everyone I talked to during my match (EU RoF/DL/Ko) did not have a loyalty bonus.

>> T3 armour locked behind rank 1500 to 2000
This seems to be too high. Is there a similar barrier set up for PvP players and their ascended armour?

>> Memories of Battle
You need 1.5k Memories of Battle (among other things) to buy a full ascended set of six pieces. Memories of Battle seem to be in much lower supply than Ascendend Shards of Glory from PvP (where each chest awards 50 ASoG and a rising number of tickets). The WvW chests award a lot less Memories and tickets, because the rewards increase with better chests, but still stay below the PvP numbers as far as I can see now)

>> Minimum participation to tick
Correct me, if I am wrong here, but PvP does not seem to have a minimum number of matches played before you can start earning pips. This minimum requirement could easily contribute to not awarding any pips for players who do their daily (e.g. camp cap, sentry cap and a defense) and want to log out again.

>> Decorations as fun rewards for the whole guild vs. individual rewards for you
While it is great we finally have WvW siege as decorations, why do those have to compete with individual rewards at the vendor? They cost both tickets and Memories.

I know quite a few very loyal WvW players, that have played for many years pretty much daily, who’s WvW rank is between 1k and 1.5k. Those people have contributed a lot to the success of their server, by buying and placing siege, scouting, dolly escorts, refreshing siege and calling out enemies in team chat. All of those activities have not help them gain a lot of WvW ranks.
Reading remarks on the forum and this thread, that 1k rank is nothing, it worries me how much Anet Devs could be influenced by those opinions and consider k-train gains in EotM or higher tier server zergs in EB to be “normal” for the players.

I would even be happy to have just static NPC als patrons in the Tavern, as customers at the market, as guards at the war room, as farmers at the guild nodes.

Scribes could make “contracts” to hire people, like
1x scribing kit
1x lvl 80 food
1x cultural chest armour T2
1x paper

You have to sign the contract and feed your employees. The type of food would determine the profession (e.g. Omnomberry Cake = tavern patron), the armour the race). Adding a “cheers” interaction response and it would be awesome (or “To battle!”, “Don’t step on the saplings”, “This is good value” etc.

Being my guild’s main decorator, I am held back from building some items (statuary category https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Decoration/Statuary), because chisels take so much leather (4 times the amount of the metal needed) from the still out of balance leather market.
Needing so much leather (for the grip?) is not only unrealistic to create the tool, but is also adding up to the high costs (100 Badges of Tribute = 3000 Badges of Honor) and RNG factor (Visage of “god”) of those decorations.
Can ArenaNet devs please re-evaluate the amount of leather needed for a single chisel and set the recipe to a 1:1 ratio with the metal needed (one ingot, one square)?

Zintrothen.1056:

It’s not a tether and I hope it never becomes one. One of the great things about it (though I admit it doesn’t completely make sense to me) is that you can hit someone with the first skill and then leap to an entirely different target.

Also, if it becomes a tether with reveal, dagger will become even more mandatory for all builds. Anything to deal with thieves is gonna be used by eles.

The revealed could be applied when Magnetic grasp hits, without losing any of its current functionality – including the odd leap to a second target.
Most other professions (base version or specialization) have a reveal skill to use vs. the usually stealthed professions (Thief, Mesmer). Giving the Ele a reveal skill like most of the others, would just even the chances in one on one fights or small skirmishes.

Profession Skills
In this update, you’ll see some changes aimed at normalizing how certain types of skills work. Skills that tether players together now apply Revealed to provide a stronger window of opportunity to players who can successfully land them.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Magnetic_Grasp

If anything the Ele has in it’s repertoire, this skill looks and feels like a tether skill. When Anet said they are normalizing the way tethers work and give them a reveal, why does Magnetic Grasp/Leap not grant the reveal ability. Shouldn’t there be a revealed for the 6 seconds the “grasp is holding”?

Perhaps I am understanding the whole tether/reveal concept the wrong way, so please explain to me why Magnetic Grasp is omitted from the changes done with the last patch.

Fluffball.8307:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Afaik there never has been an official gw1 forum, even when the game was actively supported. It’s been gwguru or (now) Reddit.

There was a much better forum than guru, but I can’t think of the name. It’s where Ruby Bayer came from. GWInc or something? Guru was a mess of childishness that migrated to reddit. Regardless I believe they’re both dead.

It was the forum of gwonline.net, later turned into guildwars.incgamers.com.

It is long gone and I can’t even find legacy posts, the old links get re-directed to pcinvasion.com. Perhaps if you use some way-back-machine you can still dig up the forum somehow.
Great times back then, when I was the Mod for the Ele forum there and we had logged Gaile’s (the Frog’s) appearances in LA International via screenshot for the guild wars player base. Almost 15 years have past.

As OriOri said, taking away points from the other stats and add them to Concentration and Expertise would lower each of the seven existing attributes on Celestial by 160 points, which will push the more important stats to a very mediocre setting.
Adding the additional points on top of the existing total points would make Celestial quite unbalanced compared to the 3 or 4 stat sets.

Making an “Ambrosia” food, that is Celestial + Expertise & Concentration would be a chance to add what the OP wants, or upgrading the Birthday Blaster from the 2nd birthday.

I don’t think ACs should work as anti-siege instalments (=higher damage to siege), they should be an anti-personal threat. I understand why Sviel.7493 wants to make then stronger vs. siege, but the real problem is e.g. Burning Oil being so weak.

It should really be Ram vs. Oil, Ballista vs. Cata/Treb with ACs being the tool to drive away players from the defensive/offensive siege on both sides.
If Burning Oil was stronger (e.g. the use if the Oil would apply Ironhide and Burning Shell would have its recharge reduced to 20sec and radius increased to 400) and proxy Catas would not work at point blank range, siege warfare would be much better for both attackers and defenders.

Sviel.7493 ideas a definitely worth trying, although I don’t agree with some numbers in his suggestion (e.g. AC #1 reduction by 50% makes it pretty much useless unless you could compensate with the #3 vulnerability stacks).

My biggest gripe with siege placement is that stacking of catapults next to a wall. The importance of placement would be so much better, if catas could have a minimum range of perhaps 1200, before they do damage. This way ballistas would play a much bigger role in defending and attacking (e.g. attackers would need to clear defending siege with their own ballistas, because they can’t hide the catas in the blind spots close to the wall).

Swamurabi.7890:

atticus.5284:

The players have jumped on Anet because they’ve given/done things that we haven’t asked for (or it’s their interpretation of what we want):

• Desert BL – all we wanted were more open maps to make the massive fights easier. We got the opposite.
• EoTM – we never asked for it
• Golem Week – never asked for it
• Portable cannons – never asked for it
• Scoring changes – asked for it but the idea was that Anet would continue to change/develop it into something that works better. Granted, this won’t really be fixed until server balance is fixed
• Linking – we asked for server balance and got linking. We’ve given it a try and it just doesn’t work. No one’s fault but a revision needs to be forth coming (not a year and waiting)
• The other “improvements” such as getting gold for daily is only in WvW because it’s in PvE. It never would be implemented only in WvW.

The poster about petting the cat hit it right – Anet rightfully is hesitant to change things given the community response. But the solution is simple – get the darn dev’s to actually play WvW for more than 1 hour a month and they can see what we’re talking about.

DBL: Players didn’t want structure to structure siege. (Remember when you could hit bay from garri?) Players didn’t want it so easy to be able to run back from spawn and continue a fight in a keep. Players wanted towers to be more important.

EotM: Players didn’t want to sit in queue. (This was the time Anet could have said “you overstacked a server, you sit in a queue.”)

Scoring changes: Players wanted PPK. Players didn’t want blowout matches. Players didn’t want nightcapping to be rewarded.

Linking: Players complained about lack of players on their server up to and including T1.

Golem week and portable cannons: Players wanted special events in WvW.

Automatic structure updates: Players complained about the cost to upgrade and how they were losing gold playing WvW.

The real problem is that we don’t get a reason why a change is made so we are left to speculate and complain about it.

This is a very good example about how difficult it is to talk about “WvW” in general, because so many people have so many ideas on how WvW should be.

Swamurabi.7890 says something very important at the end:

The real problem is that we don’t get a reason why a change is made so we are left to speculate and complain about it.

Anet has not presented us guidelines or a vision on how WvW should be treated now and in the future. For other aspects of the game, e.g. Raids and sPvP, there are some guidelines and visions (IMO).

e.g.
Preferred group size:
>> Raid 10 people
>> PvP 5 people
>> WvW ?

Equipment:
>> Fractals required ascended (because of AR slots)
>> PvP everyone is the same with lvl 78 exotics
>> WvW ?

Coming back to what Swamurabi.7890 said: What is the vision in all those changes we have seen in terms of “added game mechanics” (e.g. golem week; portable canons)? Is linking really working to reduce the effect of night capping?

Is WvW a thing Anet intents to get out of its decline with Expack 2?
As we know nothing – and this threat got moved from the attention of the main forum – we are doomed to speculate and complain again.

I don’t think we need larger maps. WvW maps need a focus on what they are about.

Alpine’s focus is the strategic value of most of its towers for attacking nearby structures (e.g. the ability to treb Bay from Briar) + almost unrestricted movement across the map for fast tactical changes. Holding keeps is the goal of the home server if they want to contain threats on the map by enemies. If you have those, losing towers is not too bad.

EB’s condenses the features of Alpine on a smaller map with SMC as a central structure everyone can reach from his “home side” at similar circumstances (e.g. range both defensively and offensively). SMC is the goal of all three sides in terms of map domination.

Desert BL’s initial idea was to restrict movement a lot (e.g. barricades) and make the Oasis laser a central element of putting pressure on the enemy (it targeted ALL keeps and towers and allowed you to breach a T1 status with just the event). Sadly, the event caused such bad lags (problem with big map + lots of people) that it was removed completely. The barricades got removed, access to Air & Fire was improved. DBL is now a decent map, but lacks a focus what it is about (shires & bloodlust are only band-aids).

If Anet ever creates a new map, it needs a working focus an map philosophy. Just making maps larger will not help at all IMO.

I have written down some ideas here a few days back:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/WvW-Your-expectations/first#post6567877

Summary:
>> increase strategic choices players can make
>> involve guilds & organized groups more
>> make more engaging rewards to get WvW more on par with PvE/PvP

When GW2 launched, I assume Anet wanted the game to be standing on three foundations: PvE, PvP and WvW.
Over time, it was clear that each “pillar” the game was resting on would not be the same size and of the same importance. WvW these days is not carrying the game forward. It is not in the state of attracting new players or holding veteran players. I think it is fair to ask whether WvW will still be considered a foundation of GW2, when Anet is delivering the expansion pack 2 (in perhaps half a year or early 2018?).

What WvW is missing is a fundamental concept with the new expansion, because what once was its concept – server identity and server pride – is gone. The concept of nameless megaservers and game mechanic band-aids (I consider most of the things vier.1327 has listed as those) has failed.

IF this is true, I currently imagine the system to work like this:

1. you chose “Hybrid-Mage” specialty trait line + two other lines (except Arcana, which might be the “Elementalist” specialty by then?)
2. the two other lines lock your usable elements, e.g. if you chose Air + Water (looks like that in the screen shot)
3. The #3 skills (but why that one?) changes to a hybrid spell of the two elements

Since you only have 2 attunements, the attunement cooldown could be removed?
The Mantras could determine the slot of the hybrid spell?
A new F5 skill could determine the hybrid spell?

If only #3 is going to be a hybrid spell, we would need new spells for 5 weapons (Staff, Scepter, Dagger, Trident + Sword) and 6 trait hybrids (F/W – F/A – F/E – W/E – W/A – A/E), which is still 30 new skills (+ 8 normal sword skills).

If we could chose more hybrid slots, that would be 30 skills for each new skill – which sounds like way too much work for one profession.

What also could be interesting is the question whether the two bars above the weapon skills are just indicators or actual depleting bars of “energy”.

With a new expansion just behind the horizon and Dragon Stand being a map with so many “access issues” theses days (limited time slots to get on the map, less people playing the meta, success needed to spawn Noxious Pods at camps), wouldn’t it be great to have a Noxious Pod at the home instance?
The would allow players to slowly gain Crystalline Ore every day, without running around DS searching for 3-4 Noxious Pods on a non-meta map.

A higher supply of Crystalline Ore would allow us to actually go for GH weapons (Chiaroscuro) and armour (Ornate) + HoT foods more often.
The variety of HoT map mats (Airship Oil, Auric Dust etc.) would also be acquired. without us having to go to every single map (while Oil & Sparks are easier to get outside the meta cycle anyway).

Our focus will shift even more when a new narrative and maps arrive, so making the life of HoT players easier with the Noxious Pod at home, would be a nice addition.

Just from a game mechanics POV, I think that WvW should reward the server most, when it is able to do “strategic tasks” on the map & group play over individual skill and zerg vs. zerg.

Let me explain:
>> sPvP has its focus on tactical movement on the (relatively small) map. WvW should be about gaining key locations for a benefit in attacking or defending the next position.
>> Roaming should not be about waiting in stealth (like Ghost Thief did for so many months) and kill people running by a choke points. Roaming should be playing the supply game, knowing enemy movements and taking structures that are undefended because of negligence.
>> Guilds should have a bigger impact on active fighting, not just claiming a structure.

How could that be accomplished? (expansion pack 2 changes?)
>> Guild teams and squads should get an option to challenge the enemy, e.g. by making the squad visible on the map, so that large groups can meet up to fight. If you participate in that challenge fight (both sides agree to fight each other), the reward for killing enemy players should go up significantly, both for server scoring and individual loot from bags.
>> Guild missions should be overhauled, so that they lose the min. requirement of 3 people. A guild team spreading out to suddenly flip camps or take sentries will shake up map awareness a lot. Also do it encourage more players to join WvW for individual rewards from guild missions.
>> Supply needs to be more important again for structures. The auto-upgrading has taken away a lot of choices for the players on how to upgrade (e.g. “rushing” for a WP in favour of weaker defenses)
>> Players and guilds need to be rewarded for using tactics and improvements in structures, because those can provide a lot of individual nuances to e.g. a tower or camp. Perhaps the rewards could be small boosts to the WvW reward track or a chance to get a decoration token for GH
>> Allow participation in WvW to contribute to GH decorations, e.g. by adding a reward token that lets you turn siege blueprints into decorations in GH.
>> As defending is not very rewarding at the moment, perhaps a successful defense event could recharge the gathering nodes at the structure. A tower that has a cloth and leather node could be worth defending for individual people.
>> The home garrison should get an NPC, that can trigger a different (active) server tasks for the map each hour on a random rotation. If you can qualify for that task, you get a buff like “outnumbered”, which increases your MF%, gives you faster reward track gain etc. Server tasks could be: Hold bloodlust / shrines for 15min; capture a keep / tower. “Active” tasks would only be available if you do not already qualify for that reward (e.g. if you already have bloodlust, that would no be available.

You might find my ideas not the best, but you should get the idea of where I want WvW to be in the future:
More and active player choices that reward you for active participation in different tasks.
Thanks for reading the T3 wall of text.

It is just natural that you would tend to agree with Woodenpotatoes on some parts and to some extend and disagree with him on other parts.
Therefore I just want to address only two of his statements

1. Raids being awesome

As a casual player with a full time job (unlike Woodenpotaoes, who’s full time job is to dedicate his time to Youtube/Twitch and GW2 content, IIRC), Raids have been nothing I was looking forward to and would rate significant for the vast majority of players. It is a niche aspect of the game, that is bound to specific times to play (organization of the team, fairly long game time to finish without a pause etc.) , very specific build & group composition and a very complex game play.
For such a small part of the game, the actual (and perceived) Dev time devoted to it was huge and general PvE and QoL updates + balancing seem to have been set to a lower priority. This has contributed to the “content drought”.

2. Character bound masteries

I agree that masteries should matter more and the acquisition was gated behind some strange walls and concepts, but character bound masteries would be a nightmare for me. The fun of the unlocking process will never outweigh the repetitiveness of getting MPs on each character and gaining XP for levelling up that mastery.

The most problematic thing on DBL for me is, that the towers have no strategic value for both defending or attacking other fortifications.
In the original design, the towers were able to control the barricades and had their purposes, but now they are just structures on the map serving no purpose. I don’t want the barricades back (at least in the past form), they were bad and made roaming annoying, but they need some for of use for the faction claiming them.
ABL and some EB ones are able to serve as platforms for attacks on keeps (e.g. trebbing Bay from Briar), perhaps DBL should get another tactical option, like an Asura gate to north camp (if you hold both northern towers as attackers) and to the middle of the map (and the variation for SC and southern towers).

Tactical implications would be:
>> Defenders holding both Academy & Necropolis could get people in those towers to NC for fast responses on attacks and would allow jobs like dolly escorts to skip walking back. Getting northern towers back quickly would be a prime objective.
>> Attackers holding both Academy & Necropolis would be a constant threat to NC and the supply lines. Attackers would need to send a “commando party” across the map (using e.g. the stealth shrines as cover) to cap the tower and rush the NC after that.
>> Defenders holding Outpost & Depot could gate players back to the central oasis, which could be an option for faster map travel and if the Rampart’s WP is contested.
>> Attackers holding Outpost & Depot would have a chance to attack Rampart from the south, which is a spot the garrison is very rarely attacked theses days. It would also open up a new strategic option of conquering the map, which usually is to go straight for Keep (from spawn) instead of the Rampart. Attacking the “middle” instead of the “sides” is viable in ABL and would now be in DBL too.

Even if you don’t like my ideas on how to change the towers, I hope we can agree on the problems of towers in DBL.

In my opinion, SixVoltCar.5248 has made the same “Desert BL is bad post” we can see since HoT gave us the new map (and even after the map got made far less obstructive a few months later). Let me address some of his (summarised from other too) complains:

1- Travel times between points differ from other BLs

So what is the problem with that? Because it is different or longer? Travel times being different is nothing bad to start with, because it is a different map. Are they really that much longer? With fire portals and no-drop-damage buffs on your side you should be almost on par with Alpine travelling times. I agree though, that getting from spawn to NC is a lot longer, allowing you to save the camp being a difficult task now.
The longer travel times can turn into problems, if people don’t communicate with each other, which is partly the communities fault and partly the fault of Anet not giving us tools of communication (e.g. a notification to the guild member if the object you have claimed is under attack).

3-Terrain is too complicated, this is a competitive environment and combined with travel times between points, that makes it a high stress situation to navigate on defense.

DBL offers a lot more spots to put catapults to attack walls than ABL. I don’t think that deviating from “put 3 superior catas in front of a wall at point blank range” is a bad thing, because you can still do that, too. The terrain offers chances for those willing to use it both offensively and defensively, which should be encouraged in a competitive environment. Defenders can use the environment to their advantage, e.g. by putting ACs at spots much harder to reach by 1200 range AoE spams of attackers.

2- Shrines and extra cumbersome mechanics are in the way and they’re proving to not be used even in tier 1 (as anything other than xp for roamers)

Shrines don’t block any paths. What are in the way of? The shrine enhancements give you a speed boost and aids to deal with the verticality of the map. What are the “other cumbersome mechanics”? The old barricades were awful, I agree, but with the oasis laser event gone, what mechanics do you mean?

4-Keeps and towers are designed wrong, they render a lot of siege weapons redundant because the walls don’t join together due to mountains and such

You have some valid points here. The canons defending tower gates are a death trap and due to line of sight issues not even useful when you are not immediately nuked there. Some mortars are at bad spots too. It would have been Anet’s task to find a fix for that for years.

5-The lords are overpowered relative to the other BL’s

I am sure you can kill all lords, tower and keep lords, with two players (I know a few people that have solo’ed some). They just don’t get killed as fast as Alpine lords.

6-Wall segments are guarded by NPC’s

That made me chuckle. How is that a bad thing? Because you can’t leave your battery of superior catas next to the wall forever? Having to deal with a respawning wall NPC is part of the attacking tactics and your ability to time you build / re-supply runs.

Finally, I don’t get all the “remove PvE content / this is a PvE maps” talk.
As long as Anet is unable to put equal & adequate numbers of players against each other on a WvW, you need some “automated content” triggered by player interaction. The shrines are not the problem, as are the hero point spots in both Alpine and Desert – it is how they are used by game mechanics.
Players should be encouraged to use tactics and improvements the second they cap a structure, but in reality, we don’t bother a lot with them because they have such a high cost (as we struggle to get materials for them in our game type) and so little reward (e.g. why don’t they award Influence to the guild that sponsored them each time they are triggered, even if it is only a little).
The PvE events were intended to give casual WvW players from the pure PvE realms a chance to participate for the server, but those have no incentive to play WvW these days, as WvW offers nothing to them (crappy rewards, nothing new, no fun if you get steam rolled all the time etc.)

Long post short: DBL is not ABL or a flat space (just like your current girlfriend is different from your ex)

What the OP (AquaBR.9250) describes sounds a little bit too much like it would add power creep and balance issue.

I like the idea of a “role” though that helps you do a certain task better.

I would use the existing special action key, we see in use in e.g. LS boss fights and raids.

e.g.
Scout – puts a revealed de-buff on the enemy (like Sentries do) at 3000 range for 30 sec; 180 sec recharge

It would be easier to follow a roamer and get others to help catching them, although you would still have to stay in persuit

Steward – refreshes targeted allied siege at range; 2000 range, ground targeted; 5 sec recharge

Makes lives of defenders on low population servers and during off-hours more tolerable

Medic – revive a downed player to full HP; 180 sec CD

Emergency rezzes for commanders and squad leader would be easier

Herder – supply dollies get their “bubble” when you are within 1200 range and not only when you are in their melee range + registers as participating in “Defend you supply caravan”; should be re-appllied (I don’t know how long those are up when you are not close right now)

Makes lives of dolly escorts easier and gives them a chance to engage the roamer trying to kill the dolly

Trickster – After activating the special action hot key, traps and disables only cost 5 supply; CD 60 sec

Encourages the use of traps and disablers

Builder – After activating the special action hot key spending supply on building and repairing counts as “monument” in terms of participation; CD 30 sec

People staying behind and repairing + siege’ing up are rewarded for their efforts

PS: Fix current issues first, before adding something completely new

I happened to turn away from events with people spamming “the horse bow”, because it is so annoying. I could settle with it playing on a skill #5 use (which is usally on a longer cool down), but auto attacking with The Dreamers is hell on earth.
Quip is a bit less annoying, but not far away from The Dreamer.

The option to turn Legendary sound effects into a standard sound (via an option’s check box) would be great, because it would allow owners of The Dreamer to make their own ears bleed, without affecting the rest of the population.

ArchonWing.9480:

Never really understood the QQ over this. What is it used for again?

Don’t forget stuff like guild hall upgrades and decorations, so actually fun extras ANet has put into the game for players to enjoy.

Well, unless you discover that e.g. chisels take huge amounts of leather squares to make statues. Just look at a god statue, which needs 30 Orichalcum Chisels. One chisel needs 4 Cured Hardened Leather Squares.
That’s around 120g for just the leather component of this decoration. Considering the rest needed to make e.g. A Balthazar statue, it does perhaps make up another 12g (max.), you can clearly see the leather problem. (Which is mainly with the neglected recipe, not the leather supply in general. But it shows how much Anet’s people are out of the loop with what “leather in general” generates problems)

At the moment, I think any overhaul to WvW will be packed into expansion pack #2 and not be released before that date. ANet will be putting all hopes for WvW into a new start, with the fresh players that come with the new expansion.

By that time, most of the dedicated WvW guilds will have vanished, after they had been been in decline for several years .