Guild Wars 2

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

So at the most you’ll have 6 minions with you (two bone minions, flesh golem, blood fiend, and 2 others), with maybe a silly little Jagged Horror that dies almost instantly. You don’t think that’s enough of a hard cap already?

From cluttering perspective, yes I think 6 is too much, especially if – what frequently occurs due to recent Minionmancer popularity – you find yourself pitched against 3 of them fighting for a cap – that is some 20 toons running around that small circle, not even counting the jagged horrors.

Of course in case of capping the number of minions, each individual one would need to get a buff (perhaps even desirable from PvE or WvW perspective: instead of having 6 that die instantly in AoE, have 3 that can sustain and put out same dmg/effects as the 6).
But anyhow, this is hypothetical and will not likely come.
And actually I am more concerned with the issues of DS that need some improvements to make other builds more viable.

My comments are based on (s/t)PVP, therefore considerations from PvE/WvW may lead to different conclusions.

1. Changes to Guardian: indeed very few changes. There are many suggestions and remarks in the Guardian Forum. What comes to my mind is the relative uselessness of Condition Builds. This however would require a major overhaul, such as review of the Radiance trait line. E.g. why precision with condition dmg when there are no “on crit” conditions? Swap Condition Damage with the Crit Damage in the trait lines, introduce a chance to chill on crit as 25 trait in radiance, making glacial heart obsolete (could be replaced with the +10% dmg on targets with conditions). Also, unless you play full bunker or triple med monks focus, sustain is just too low (especially comparing with e.g. warrior healing signet and adrenal health). Buffing Virtue of Resolve to the level it has with Absolute Resolution would be one possibility.

3. Necromancers: the toning down of Minions is a step into the right direction, perhaps not radical enough. In order to reduce the clutter-effect, one could think about having a cap on the number of minions (like mesmers have only 3 illusions). Or else reduce their health (at least in PvP). On the other hand, all non-Minionmancer specs are currently very subpar. Death Shroud needs some urgent improvements, first of all the many reported bugs fixed, such as health reduced while in DS, skill lag after leaving DS or be defeated without downed. Changing Dhuumfire to burn on Lifeblast looks like a nice addition, but actually the damage output in DS is not an issue (in fact, with proper traits it can be formidable), it is rather the total lack of defense and easy avoidability of DS attacks. Increase the travel speed of the Lifeblast projectile by at least 20%, add some way to gain at least one of the following possibilities while in DS: stability (other than via the grandmaster trait), condition cleanse, regenerate health or stunbreak (maybe via a second set of utility skills while in DS), add possibility to stomp and rez while in DS. Improve efficiency of Life siphon by direct attacks and reduce it by minions (already planned with changes to Vamipiric Master).

4. Warriors: The changes to Healing Signet show good will, but are too small. I would suggest reduction of base heal by 15% and scaling with healing power in a way that at around 700 Healing power (i.e. when you trait/equip for it) you have similar heal like today without Healing power. Also, in order to tone down the Hambow overpoweredness a bit more, make small adjustments (~5%) to the damage of Fierce Blow and Arcing Arrow. Regarding the potential perma-lockdown caused by Hammer (knockdown, knockback and stun on a very low cd) I would not advocate further nerf of hammer as it is intended as a control weapon, but rather think about a general diminishing return mechanic for disabling attacks (e.g. for each knockdown, daze, stun etc., gain a 5 sec stacking boon which at 3 or5 stacks converts into 10s stability or something like that).

I think it has to do with the patch they are planning next week. It happened several times when they made major living story updates such as Tequatl (was also completely unplayable then).
For me, since 2 or 3 days it gets unplayable around 18:00 CET.

And yes, only GW, all other web-traffic completely normal.

Anet, please fix this. Or stop doing These living Story things – or create a completely separate Server landscape for PvP and WWW that doesn’t get impacted by PvE patches.

?? this has absolutely nothing to do with my hardware which probably is better than yours.

It is a server side issue – before patch game ran flawlessly except in heavy zergs in wvw with 150+ player in a zone and even there by far not as bad as now after patch on an even empty map.

This has been reported by many people with all kind of hardware and erratically occurs after major content patches like this and then tends to improve over time.

Unfortunately completely impossible for me to even get close to Tequatl due to minute long loading screens and then extreme skill lags of the worst kind.

Worse than that, it seems to impact also WvW where skill lag happens even on unpopulated (outmanned buff) maps!

There have been content patches before that had caused severe lags, luckily the last few patches were ok. I think Flame & Frost was almost as bad, but this one is just pure horror. After dieing I cannot even WP anymore as nothing happens and after some minutes I lose patience and ALT+F4.

By the way there is no issue with my internet and before patch I played prime-time WvW in Keep-Battles with 3 Full Zergs and skill lags were almost nothing compared to today.

Please fix this urgently – at the moment game is simply unplayable.

It is really getting unbearable. All kind of lags: skill lags, character not moving or getting bounced / not able to pass e.g. portals, huge loading screens, salvaging items with items getting in bags 1 minute later, etc.
And this at the moment almost anywhere, LA, WvW, in the mists, on high-pop home server, on low-pop guest server (EU) no matter …
Only thing that seems not to lag is the main chat.
Please fix urgently or if not possible, rollback this aether thingy which seemed to have screwed it up.

Still having most of the reported problems here on intermittant basis. It is obvious that problem can’t be on client or ISP side.
- Lags vary by time: weekends and peak hours tend to be worse
- Lags vary by zone: e.g. played yesterday w/o problems Eternal Battlegrounds, then zoning to Riverside Borderlands had up to 20 second lags which made it unplayable (strangely, EB was way more "populated at that time than Borderlands which was almost empty)
- Long loading screen vary by zone and server: e.g. after Aetherblade patch was downloaded, it was impossible load my Chars that were parked in Lion’s Arch (other zones loaded slower than usual, but loaded). I had to Alt+F4 and relog – only solution was to guest at some low-population server and zone out of LA …

Kindly provide fixes – the time we spend ingame we would really appreciate to be actually playing and not watching loading screens or watching blinking action buttons with nothing happening until 20 secs later we are dead.

only greeting on Riverside. kindly fix!

Having same issue trying to log into Riverside (EU) from Brazil. I am forever stuck in loading screen (Queensdale). Some alts in other areas load, but super slow.
Was playable still until a couple of hours ago, though the whole game became laggy after 26/03 patch as described elsewhere many times.

Please fix asap!

Twitchiopolis.2397:

Another thought on dungeons meaning for coordination;

GW2 lacks an in-game voice based communication system. For guilds, such communication can be done via vent, mumble, or teamspeak, so no problem there. However, for the PUG, no such option readily exists.

It is actually not a problem to quickly ask for IP and be 2 mins on desktop to enter another guilds TS or similar (on Riverside DE, we have a world TS where anyone can join).
However, while this improves a lot, it will still not save you from wipe if someone fumbles but once in certain bosses …

So while it is a good idea, I wouldn’t rate it Prio 1 (maybe after all other bugs and exploits are fixed and bosses are balanced) …

Castrella.9817:

That being said, I will take a wait-and-see attitude regarding dungeons. I think the developers have the right intentions, though I don’t know if their implementation will work when you take human nature into account.

THIS!

So I hope Robert reads this thread and takes the right conclusions. The patch certainly was well intended, but except for a few (ok, we do not have statistics, but just from own experience and all the testimonies seen here), most people do not welcome this patch. And with this, even those that are not easily demotivated and would even try to go for the new challenge, simply will not be able to do so because of the fact that they will have a hard time finding groups that have infinite frustration tolerance and don’t mind wiping the whole team for a couple of hours until all 5 mates execute a 10 min boss fight without a single millisecond error by anyone …

And for comparison with games that did not allow rezzing you exactly saw this attiutude “tank dies – flame the healer, healer dies – flame the tank, boss reset, flame the one with lowest dps”.
The nice thing about GW2 was that in the past such flaming rarely happened, but with the new patch the – “flame anyone who misses a dodge and goes down” and more often than not rage-kick has become the rule and not exception.

So please either roll-back the change or quickly (but very quickly) fix the balance of the encounters (some suggestions were given, e.g. making combat rez faster / more feasible by changing aggro behavior etc.) unless you really want to see the dungeon exodus continue …

@Silidus: I learned something new – I saw this defiance de-stacking with CC but was wondering what it was good for.

Will try more consciously next time.

Need to find out how to do this quote thing …
@Silidus:

I think in parts we agree, especially regarding the part to try to learn to master an encounter legitimally. But contrary to you, I (and apparently many others) do not consider “res-running” (actually it seems no one even used this term before it was branded this way by this patch) as a “tactic” (much less illegitimate) other than in CoF path 2 Maggi event. It is simply an unavoidable (and not even fun) necessity in some cases.
Removing it will make an anyway painful experience (no one likes to pay repair bills and do the “corpse run” across the whole dungeon that we dreaded so much in WoW) even less enjoyable. Plus: it makes learning slower since you simply spend less time on target.

@Nokaru: what is easy for some can surely be difficult for others and from what I read here and from my personal experience, the majority is tending to find at least those subjects difficult indeed.
And yes, I have learned a lot and can dodge – at least to an extent that I could solo kite Subject Alpha for long enough that 4 dead teammates could run back on path 2 (and it’s a long walk). Maybe difficult is not the right term – I would say: unforgiving. One split second not paid attention, hit the wrong key, latency problem (I play on EU server, but live in Brazil) or simply RNG bad luck when you get chain imprisoned with all blinks etc. on CD and you are dead and it is 80% of the time not feasible to be rezzed. And then the consequence now is: full wipe for all instead of just one guy paying the bill and do the corpse run.

And again: the only time I cleared CoE wipe-free was with a team that was using exploits and that is not what I consider worthwhile learning.

Also when we start the skill discussion: why can’t we benefit more from our class or utility skills? Why not be able to daze, blind or knockdown a boss when we see the cleave coming? The way it stands, most encounters seem to favor autoattack and dodge roll as the only 2 keys we need to press in the correct millisecond …

@Silidus: the point is not about casual = bad. And the problem is not about “normal” instances like AC or HotW which with a bit of practice and l2p everyone can master (and agree, that gear and class composition has unlike other games very little impact here).
The issue is with those dungeons that for the big majority were extremely difficult even with decent skill and good gear, e.g. CoE, Arah.

So for the easier ones, that you anyway clear without wipe, it doesn’t matter if you can’t WP rez (it does not make the encounter more challenging, just more annoying for the occasional accident that may always happen). And for the ones that before patch were already so difficult that it was hard to find a group wanting to run them, now they are simply out of reach for a casual (even a good one) gamer.
Does it hurt? Not necessarily, but it will simply make content that was anyway rarely frequented (such as CoE) even less appealing to the player community. And that is not what I imagine to be the goal of any MMO vendor in the business …

I am really wondering what benefit Anet expects from this patch. Looking at the comments here there are a felt 90% disagreeing because it would turn dungeon experience “impossible” and some 10% applauding because they found dungeons too easy.

From my limited experience in dungeons (do mostly PvP and WvW) I made observation that the “rez-rush” occurs in 3 situations.

1. During a fight someone (accidentally or for whatever reason) dies and being able to Rez-run or not does not really make a difference. I remember that first boss in HotW on the stairs used to one-hit me and the first time I didn’t even know that I could rez-run so stayed in the dust until the end of the fight. It was no problem for the group to kill the boss with 4 man, so for this situation it doesn’t really matter if you can run or not. The possibility to do so was just a refreshing experience (compared to e.g. WoW) that you could continue to participate in the fight and learn and not be a burden for the team. So for this scenario, there is virtually no necessity at all to remove the ability to WP.

2. Encounters where basically the whole team wipes and rez-rushing is more or less the only way to manage the boss. I am thinking specifically of Subject Alpha, where in my first run I died like 20 times (had to repair 2x fully after I found myself battling in bikini) and where after 4-5 resets we finally managed to wear him down with most of the time 1 person kiting and maintaining aggro while the other 4 were running. Actually after this first run I was thinking to quit dungeon already, but I kept on, learned and after my 3rd or 4th run and with apparently more experienced groups managed to clear CoE with “only” like 2-5 wipes. So in other words, with the no WP patch in place, I wouldn’t have cleared the instance but once, probably I would have given up after the first failed attempt in the first place. Now one word to those who claim that even CoE is “easy mode” – I actually happend to get into one group that really rushed the instance with no problem – but this was a group that used all kind of exploits like porting through walls to skip the first encounter, melee the boss into some crates so that he bugs and you basically need not evade his AoE anymore. So is this how ANet wants us to play dungeons now? Learn exploits to avoid all the deadly parts of an encounter? I don’t know …

3. Encounters where Rez-rushing is intentionally used as strategy – the only example I am aware of is CoF path 2 and I admit that I found this really not a good idea and agree that this should be fixed. But then, similar to the previous point, the reason for this is that even a good and well-equipped party hardly has a chance to do the encounter otherwise, so instead of removing the WP option, maybe balancing of the encounter would have been a smarter option …

So in summary – removing WP rez will be in some cases (the easier bosses) simply unnecessary (just removing the chance for dead players to continue participating/learning) and in the tough encouters tip the balance from hard but doable with some pain (running, paying repair bills) to near impossible (at least for the vast majority of players).

Hence I agree to the opinion that was also expressed in many posts that, before addressing this “issue” of WP rezzing, there are many much more urgent topics to look into to make dungeons a challenging, and at the same time fun experience, i.e. removing the possibilities to cheat/exploit (then these “elitists” will likely stop finding every dungeon “easy mode”), balance the encounters so that they are doable by let’s say an advanced casual (as I would rate myself).