Guild Wars 2

Ferik.3127:

Translation:
Guys! Look over here! I am gold! Very gooood, right? I know, i know~~
~but I am even better than that, just you see. All these others around me are all stupid and don’t deserve to be my height. If I win I deserve it, if I lose it’s the kittene balance~

So the only legit post complaining about matchmaking can only be from bronze or silver players? Dude, come on.
It’s normal that I’m in this position, been playing this game non-stop since beta.
I’m sorry if my post seemed like I wanted to brag or something, it was not my intention at all. I just wanted to point out the terrible matchmaking this game currently has.

Btw, on the topic of playing with the same people over and over again… I’ve been playing these past few days with and versus a guy I have been reporting for idling and verbal abusing for a year now, maybe some of you guys know him, is that guy who always write: “bad team terribad, i’m afk”. He is well-known in ladder already, which speaks loudly about Arenanet’s report system.

Well, I keep getting paired with the same guys that goes afk over and over and over again after a 50 or 70 points difference before 200 points. Or with people that goes 1vs3 on mid over and over again instead of waiting for help or going decap far.

After 4.5 years of game, I can assure you this is the WORST season ever. Been playing PvP since beta and this is pointless…. my block list keeps growing every day with flamers and afkers and I keep seeing them in my matches and, most of the time, in my teams.

How am I supposed to carry these guys over? Another season stucked in gold because of guys like these, making my rating “establish” because the system thinks that I’m getting close to my real ladder position…

Azel.4786:

Sigh…..

Simply no comments on bringing build diversity to eles.

Another patch comes and goes and underused traits, skills, poor elite skills continue unaddressed and ignored.

Having the opportunity to chat with the devs and actually pass along this grief is meaningless if it is just ignored.

I just give up on it.

Did you really read all of their responses? Irenio said he wants to review Conjures already.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

In particular I’d like to review and revisit Elementalist Conjures, Guardian Spirit Weapons, Engineer Gadgets and potentially Mesmer Mantras.

Well… elementalists got an answer at least, time to talk about necromancers already please!

I see a lot of elementalist and necromancer posts, we need answers to calm out anguished heads!

Edit: right now I feel that a lot of elementalists would gladly trade some of their damage in exchange for some of the necromancer’s survival and vice versa.

Did you guys ever considered having an open test server? I think a lot of drama could be solved this way, as well as gathering a lot more information about the balance changes themselves.

Assic.2746:

What about impacting the PvP/PvE meta by adding some missing healing & elite skills? Are there any plans too add those skills in the future?

THIS. It would be totally awesome to see a spectral healing or a well elite for necromancers! I am sure other classes would really appreciate that as well.

First of all, thank you guys for being here answering our questions, we really appreciate that ^^

Now the questions!

1. Are you planning on giving Death Shroud some love? It’s been useless since the release of Heart of Thorns because Reaper Shroud is a direct upgrade of it.
2. How do you feel about Necromancer needing a babysitter support in PvP? I think that maybe is time to reduce Shroud defenses in order to give us some more scaling defenses like invulnerability or blocks.
3. Concerning Spectral Grasp and Well of Darkness, almost every necromancer I know still feel that these are extremely useless, no matter how much their CD is. Have you considered giving them more effects, especially Well of Darkness?

Thank you again for reaching us and for the awesome work that you guys do. I am a videogame developer myself as well and I know how hard balancing is, so hang in there guys!

Zero.3871:

What the hell does GS buff brings us in raoming, if every nub is faster than you as GS necro, and you can never hit any enemy…

next useless balancing…

Why they should only balance for one of the many aspects of the game? No wonder why devs stopped chatting with us in the profession forums a long, long time ago.

Rickster.8752:

BigKev.1927:

Jekkt.6045:

Phineas Poe.3018:

Jekkt.6045:

gw2 is everything else than remarkably well balanced.

What did you feel was so egregiously overpowered last season?

the whole game is in a state of overpoweredness and spam. core specs are basically useless, half of or even more of all skills / weapons are useless and should in no way be buffed with cooldown reductions. gw2 pvp used to be all about dodging high impact skills/combos or baiting dodges so you can land yours. this aspect of the game is close to nonexistent these days. balance looks different. just because it is playable doesn’t mean it’s well balanced.

You nailed a very important concept here. The dodge mechanic of this game is so unique and is really what made it special for pvp. They keeping giving more and more block/evades to the point where dodges are becoming less and less relevant

Yup, it used to be clever use of dodges was key. Now you simply have to chain all your dodges/blocks/evades as much as possible because all skills are spammable with short cds and hit so hard.

Too many dodges, blocks and evades which are just spammed to avoid the massive damage skills on low cd with hugely powerful passive traits behind them.

Well…. from a main Necromancer point of view, dodges are still EXTREMELY important to keep me alive in PvP…. in fact, it’s almost the best way of doing so… sad times XD

trueanimus.4085:

They buffed a weapon that no one uses.. GG anet.. way to make reaper viable in wvw.. buff a melee weapon that no clothie should ever be using.

That is exactly why they are buffing it. If only a low percentage of necros uses it (because that nobody uses it is a lie, plain and simple) they have to buff it to bring it to the same powerlevel of the other weapons to create more choices and builds.
Seeing comments like this I am totally glad that they almost pay attention to these forums, because the game would be extremely stupid taking """"feedback"""" like this into account.

On the topic at hand, I am glad that they buffed it, I like to use it on PvE and maybe it would be more desired now in PvP given that it now corrupts boons on AoE and deals more damage and gravedigger is more responsible. I will test it for sure.
On the hand…. almost every CD buff is useless, I mean Spectral Grasp could have 5 seconds CD and I won’t use it at all (hillarious that they decided making it 20 seconds CD on PvE would be OP so they only did it on PvP). Others are highly appreciated, like Well of Blood or Spectral Wall (I still have hopes that Terrormancer will come back to PvP).

Vyrulisse.1246:

I want to ask them why Scrapper got ZERO attention.

With statements like this I would not appear on the forums if I were in their shoes….

- Shredder Gyro Self-Destruct: Increased damage to match other gyros.
- Shredder Gyro: Increased damage by roughly 50%.
- Explosion: Skills that count as explosions for the traits Steel-Packed Powder, Explosive Powder, and Shrapnel are now marked with a skill fact. Scrapper gyro detonations are now considered explosions.

There are only a few tweaks for Scrapper, sure. But that is not equal to ZERO as you say…

In any case, I am totally glad that devs finally started buffing and paying some attention to base professions, because that is what everyone needs right now: reduce powercreep of elite specs and improve base ones.
Speaking of which, I would like to ask them why there are still no changes to Death Shroud, because that is the only thing holding base necro back.

Hey guys! First and foremost, thank you for this awesome update

The only bad thing about this patch is that the new raid map isn’t fully discovered the first time you enter it, like the previous ones. This is a minor issue, but an issue anyway, for people like me who doesn’t have enough time to raid and love to have all the map fully explored. Why did you changed this? I was really glad with the previous raid wings because I just entered on patch day and voilá, all discovered and my world map looked good!
Now I feel forced to do the most hardcore content in this game just to have the world map fully explored…. not fair at all.

This very thing has been happening to me these past days… I was on rank 200ish on EU and then, suddenly, incredible lost matches streak. Out of sudden, my teams were filled with people flaming and raging BEFORE matches started. So now here I am, gold 3 and thinking seriously about stoping playing PvP for the first time in 4 years.

Oh right, that makes total sense :P

Patch notes:

Infinite PvP Rank Progression
PvP Ranks are no longer capped at 80. This number will now increment on both the in-game HUD as well as the character-select screen.
Players will be retroactively awarded rank-ups for every time they’ve repeated rank 80.

So my question is where are those? I was rank 189 after patch and got no rewards whatsoever but then I thought that maybe they will give them like the WvW ones, giving one more with every rank up until you have no rewards missing… But now I just got to rank 190 and only had just one regular rank up reward. Is it bugged or something?

Better suggestion: nerf all the powercreep introduced with HoT.

Spartacus.3192:

I haven’t seen the builds but unless its pure metabattle builds (I tend to use modified version so even that wont help me) who would use that new function?

It’s not a matter of the usefulness of builds or not, they are there to help newcomers start fighting right away. The thing is they have now the technology to load builds out, which is freaking awesome because the only thing they need to do now is linking build templates (like in GW1) and solve several other problems like what happens when you don’t have a weapon of the template or a trait unlocked when you are in PvE?
So, all in all, we are really close to the release of the build templates. They just decided to give newbie people a new tool for PvP and the rest of us a glimpse of the incoming system. Honestly, I prefer knowing that the build templates are close than being kept in the darkness more months.

Spartacus.3192:

Well considering build diversity is so bad and everyone copies Metabattle I guess ANET just uses those as templates?

/sarcasm

Cant believe ANET had a chance to give us what weve been asking for and they f it up.

They didn’t f it up. It’s a really complex system to implement and they just finished the hardest part of it. Just wait 2-3 more months and you will see

YAY! No nerfs to necromancers!!
I like to see the glass half-full hahaha

As a game developer myself, I can confirm that if they have this system now in place Build templates can easily be implemented for the next content patch. As Tim pointed out, what they have now is the most difficult part to code so I think it’s really close to be a thing FINALLY!!

Completely agree. I reached Legend the first 3 seasons and I had a total blast playing and improving through the process. Now, I just don’t find the patience to even get to Diamond, every single match is one team facerolling the other one. Period. I’ve been winning-losing the whole time since this season started and I’m now still in T1 Sapphire.
Worst thing? Getting people with absolute 0 clue of how to play PvP sometimes in my team (I guess that when my team facerolls the others is because they have these newbie players with them). I’m talking about people just running around in the map with no clear direction, not paying attention to the map, to the signals heck! they don’t even pay attention to the team chat!

All in all, I can say this is the worst PvP season by far, which is sad because it’s their 4th one and they are still experimenting with matchmaking. I probably won’t play many more matches this season, I hope if people that think like me do the same we can send a clear message to Anet.

Traps are easy to get out of and kite if you are experienced enough, that’s for sure. The problem of them is they are slightly over the top because of, as other people pointed out before, the game revolves around capturing points and controlling them. With that in mind, DHs are the very best class suited for this game mode. Period. They have access to several blocks, long-range damage, CC and traps to force people to get out of points or die. So it can be toned down of course, but if we had more game modes (not that crap of Stronghold) DHs wouldn’t be so op as they are perceived now.

PS.: With more game modes I mean something like the old Heroes’ Ascent of GW1, different game modes, maps and objectives as you won matches, so your team had to adapt strategies and builds around that.

Zelulose.8695:

Good no holy trinity was what we were promised.

Support =/= healer, which is holy trinity. In fact, we were promised before the game released another different trinity: damage, support & control. This new trinity would be far less restrictive than the holy one IIRC.

bearshaman.3421:

jacim.5904:

The only thing thats worth noting out all the the balance patch was the significant nerf to Rise!.

Umm seriously? You’re gonna ignore all the other awesome stuff, just because this one skill that was obiously OP got nerfed? Really?

MM was viable before HoT came out. What happens to Rise! is not gonna change that. And several people aren’t seeing that much of a difference anyways.

Why is people’s default response to patches always overwhelming negativity?

Point me out what was awesome about the balance patch for necros, please. After 4 months we got QoL stuff (and minor ones tbh) and a nerf (it was coming sooner o later but it has been really harsh). Oh right, we got fixed an underwater skill, YAY!

Tim.6450:

jacim.5904:

Also Master of Corruption seems crap compared to other cooldown reduction traits.

The balance team and some players seem to believe that having extra conditions on you is a good thing because you can transfer them.

That is a shame of trait that should never have happened in the first place….
A 33% CD reduction is cool, but not so much when the skills it affects are mediocre skills at best that hinders you. That alone could be playable at least… but giving even more bad effects to those skills when you are already reducing their CD a lot is just stupid.
Making that trait 20% CDR and giving some resistance would have been a hell of a lot better.

Hi fellowmancers!

It just ocurred to me that we could use a rework of the weapons to be like the guardian symbols but with the marks. In this last balance patch, they gave guardian’ sword and scepter a symbol each to make good use of its related traits, so I propose to do the same with our marks. We all know that staff if terribly designed, because it’s only an utility weapon with no identity at all. Wouldn’t be nice if we split marks all over the other weapons (changing them if necessary) so we can have some nice buffs to weapons like axe and greatsword and freeing skill slots on the staff for a potential rework towards long-range condition or power weapon?

Just food for thought, let me know what do you think about this guys.

PS.: Since we just got the most boring balance changes ever, I need to have some fun at least by giving some crazy ideas :P

In fact, what we need is more masteries in Pact to spend the remaining points on

Bazs.1470:

I just finished the story of the first episode of LW S3 and this is what I currently see: we had a story that can be beat in an hour, a new, very small map with no new armors and no new weapons. If I say I wanna do the all achievements, then maybe this content will be good for 1 or 2 weeks…

Arenanet said the new episodes of the living world season 3 episodes will come in every 2-3 months. So this means this content with Bloodstone Fen should be enough to solve the recent content issues in PvE and it should be enough until the next LW patch, wich will come 2-3 months later and until it, the game will just vegetate just like it did in the last half year?

I really hope I just misunderstood something here, because this amount of content is maybe enough to keep anyone entertained for a 2 weeks, but not for 2-3 months. And don’t get me wrong, all the changes Anet made are great, the story and the new map is great, but is this serious that this was the all big update for the next 2-3 months, while we got the same exact amount of story with LW Season 2, just with every 2 weeks?

2 weeks for this release is really high for what it really is. I’ve finished in the first 5 hours 12 of 18 achievements, finished the story and explored the new map to 100%. Heck, I even had time to play twice the new PvP map and to play Chaos Isles in that time as well. This update was high quality, but insulting low quantity.

Well, they have stated in the AMA that PvP, Fractals and Raids teams are independent. Having a new PvP map and a new Fractal map in this release was a mere coincidence. I’m talking about regular PvE. Compare what we got vs what we used to get in previous releases which, by the way, didn’t were preceded by 4 full months of zero content and it falls seriously short. The new map is awesome but really small. The amount of achievements is low and the absence of a meta-event in the map just makes it worse. After you finish those achievements there is nothing left there for you (except maybe collect magic to get those new ascended items if you want the HoT new stats).
And now comes the worst part of it: another 2 to 3 months of content drought.
PS.: HoT expansion was supposed to be the ground work for them to add more content to the game but almost 1 year later they are still working on that it seems…

UnbentMars.9126:

Emtiarbi.3281:

Ithir Darkleaf.7923:

Emtiarbi.3281:

I’m curious if they will release an episode every 2 weeks like the LS2.

Sadly they won’t
They said it before and they just said it today in the Reddit’s AMA: they are splitting resources between LS and the nex expansion to avoid having a content drought pre-expansion launch like the one we had in the pre-HoT months. They don’t have final fixed dates of course, but they said they will release new LS chapters every 2-3 months.

So we have to wait 2 months for chapter 2?

Read the multitude of statements Anet has made regarding this. The 2-week releases were hell on the devs and not sustainable for quality content or continual output. They transitioned to a release every 2-3 months that contains higher quantity and higher quality content rather than trying to continue something that burned out the entire team.

That’s right… except the part of higher quantity, which judging this episode 1 isn’t true at all. That’s why I’m concerned. Here’s hoping the 2nd episode is much juicy content-wise.

Big opportunity missed with the new tech of skill splitting, GS could use a few number tweaks in PvP to be, at the very least, useable. Not surprising anyway, we are necros after all and they have never understood this class.

Emtiarbi.3281:

I’m curious if they will release an episode every 2 weeks like the LS2.

Sadly they won’t
They said it before and they just said it today in the Reddit’s AMA: they are splitting resources between LS and the nex expansion to avoid having a content drought pre-expansion launch like the one we had in the pre-HoT months. They don’t have final fixed dates of course, but they said they will release new LS chapters every 2-3 months.

So let me be clear from the start: I absolutely love this new release. The new PvE map, the story, the new big enemies (freaking awesome)…
But after this eternal content drought we just got an episode of the same length of the ones in LS2 but with no achievements tied to the main quests at all. All we got is the usual achievements of the new map …. and that’s it I guess. I will be done with all of them by tomorrow probably and they already stated they want to focus on less releases, aiming for one LS release every 2 or 3 months. I’m really dissapointed with the low gameplay hours we just got, and if this is the new standard the new expansion must be really HUGE to justify this sad situation.
So where are those old achievements to make people replay the episodes doing specific (and usually difficult) stuff to get some AP and ascended loot?

PS.: I’m not forgetting about Chaos Isles and Capricorn, I love those as well. I’m just talking about of a regular PvE point of view.

Zero Solstice.9754:

The balance patch was perfectly fine. Nothing got nerfed, while at the same time a number of skills got buffs or QoL changes. The change to Rise means that Reapers need to take more damage, but that also means that the minions stay alive longer. The change really only made it so that it becomes harder to sustain, but the amount of damage that Rise mitigates is still roughly the same.

I think you are forgetting they nerfed the health and toughness of Rise! minions as well, so it’s not a change of the skill, it’s clearly a nerf.

Kicast.1459:

The dragonhunter elite specialization has proven to have a very solid impact in many areas of the game……

WUT ????

Are you serious ?
Which areas ? Puzzle jump ? Trading ?

Go back to your cave, Dragonhunter as been used (and dominating) in SPVP at least since HoT launch even with the nerfs it got.

Now on the topic, it seems like a general good approach of changes and Diamond Skin was the worst trait ever implemented (terrible because of its opness), I’m glad it will get reworked. Hopefully we will get today more specific details about the changes

Tontonino.9736:

Vavume.8065:

cool story WizardBro

I’d call it bad design instead of irony. It may sound harsh but it is what it is. Things like these will only get worse until they sit down and think properly about Shrouds and their interaction with the rest of the game. The more time they take to do this, the more frustrated players will get because more skills will be added and more obvious these desing issues will get.

Edit: To be clear, I’m currenly studying game development and design, and I totally would love to work on Arenanet even with issues like this, remember that this game is HUGE and they have a lot to work on. They just need to be reminded every now and then the main issues we have and the fixes will come, I’m sure about this.

Nice write-up Bhawb, keep them coming!

I agree with everything you said and, like others have already proposed, changing Spiteful Talisman to scale based on boons on the target or to relaxe the trigger condition.

This is, hands down, the best trait line we have and I don’t expect a lot of debate here. I’m impatient to get on Curses and Reaper haha

What hurts me more about this is that devs (not pointing at you specifically Robert) are still making us more selfish with every patch they make. This is bad design in a MULTIPLAYER game which is based on parties (now squads even) to achieve goals.
You can have some traits lines and skills that promotes selfishness for the cases you want them (roaming for example) but you can’t pigeonhole a whole class into it. Heck, even the first successful raid run had their reaper in a separate team for himself…. /facepalm

I want to play with my friends and if I’m in trouble and my friend is support he should be able to help me at any time. As others have said already, when I’m about to die and I’m in a group I don’t know if push the shroud button or hope that the support guy will take care of me. That’s ridiculous to be completely honest.

Well, I know for sure that definitely not everyone wants to play the most efficient way always and I’m an example of that. Of course, sometimes I prefer the efficient way but the most part of the time I just want to try different things which I consider cool. RS1 with Dhuumfire on berserker gear is way funnier to use than spam Lich 1 (yes, I’m running this currently on PvE and I’m having a total blast with it).

My point is you should stop trying to make everyone play your builds, which btw you don’t stop mention and don’t publish. That, my friend, has a name and is generating hype for self-promotion to get more views on your channel…. just the same thing you blame others for doing.

Metabattle, on the other hand, is a total mess, I agree with you on that.

I would balance Reaper by bringing the other elite specs up to its level. Reaper is the benchmark of how an elite spec should be done. Period.

This is a l2p issue, I always have Blood Magic on PvE currently and I’ve run trash mob on dungeons countless times and had no problem at all. Of course, if you let the trash mobs to hit you while running you will proc Mark of Evasion, as intended.

Yeah, I pretend to play my Reaper on PvE with Hydromancy & Force on the greatsword and with a full set of Runes of Ice in the armor to begin with. I expect it to be really tanky but to punch hard as well. For the secondary weapon set I’m torn between axe/focus, axe/warhorn and staff.

Well, the other day I entered a team of level 38 fractals with my necro. They raged about how they wanted a “dps class”, after seeing my AP count of 18.5k they changed their mentalities and started to ask me politely to reroll the class. I pinged my full zerker ascended gear with max AR and they accepted it, probably I was more equipped than them.
The thing is the team had a few wipes over the run, with me the only one standing up and saving them, ON A FULL ZERKER GEAR! That’s the best thing of a necromancer if you ask me, we don’t lack dps at all but we are pretty durable and bring some cool things to the table if needed: CPC, Transfusion teleports, etc.
People like these need education, not ignorance. I bet that after that run they don’t see the necromancer the same way they did.

Edit: Just to be clear, I consider AP a stupid way of proving skill. I could be playing the game non-stop and still be really bad at dodging for example. But for them (and a huge number of players) seemed otherwise :/

Try asking this on his channel instead of the forum? Believe it or not, not everyone here like him so me, for example, consider this spam and free promotion.

Grymlocke.1067:

@ Robert Gee / Karl

IS there any update for our Necromancers / Reapers?

Been over 12 days Since beta and no new notes of changes regarding our feedback

Could we have an update please?

I guess Robert is really busy these days. The only specs missing feedback are his, so that must be the reason. Good news is we are only 7 days away from the launch, so at least the wait won’t be long

Oh god, I think I just got a heart attack. Don’t bump this thread!!

I like it but that light wing kills it for my necro
On the other hand, my dark guardian will be surely pleased

Thing is are we going to get any response from the devs about more reaper changes before HoT hits live? I’ve seen Karl talking about Dragonhunter and Daredevil and Roy talked about Herald too iirc.