Guild Wars 2

What the new combined dailies system should have been like:

Have at least 8 dailies from each of the 3 game modes so players can complete their daily by playing exclusively the gamemode they want, and have the option of completing it faster if they want to mix and match game modes.

This current implementation is a huge step backwards IMO. The old system at least showed the bare minimum of respect for players’ freedom to play the way they want due to the sheer number of options available to complete the daily.

Trying to manipulate players into playing the way YOU want is not going to work out well in the long term. In fact, even in the short term it will impact your player retention rates.

Keep a close eye on those login/daily completion stats, ANet. Hopefully you can realize what a horrible decision this was before it’s too late.

Dear ANet,

There is no question that you have some great artists capable of creating some amazing looking pieces of equipment.

However, it has become painfully obvious now that you simply cannot create new skins fast enough to satisfy the community without resorting to hiding even marginally desirable skins behind ridiculous grinds or RNG. For a game like GW2, whose entire endgame is based mostly* around horizontal progression and attaining a particular “look”, this is practically a kiss of death because even players who desire horizontal progression will give up eventually if the progression is perceived to be unreasonably slow, or capped due to the lack of new desirable skins.

The answer to this is to let the community take over the creation of the bulk of your content that is purely aesthetic, i.e. skins. This is really the only feasible way to keep up with user demand in a (mostly) horizontal progression system, and it can work spectacularly for regular players, content creators, and developers alike.

Valve is a pioneer in this field and has had tremendous success implementing user generated content for TF2 and more recently, Dota 2, both of which have horizontal progression as a major focus. For both of theses games, players enjoy an almost endless supply of new skins to work towards acquiring, content creators get recognition and revenue from creating and selling skins, and Valve has a majority of the burden of creating purely aesthetic content taken off their shoulders so that they can focus on refining game mechanics, adding new features, telling new stories, creating some of the more “special” and theme-fitting skins, and planning cool events, all of which, I think most can agree, is a much better use of their time (not to mention they get a majority cut of the skin revenue as well).

TL;DR: Give the community the tools and infrastructure, and we’ll make better skins at a faster pace than any professional team of artists anyone can possibly assemble, as has been proven in other games like Dota 2 and TF2. Players will have an endless supply of great skins to choose from and progress towards. Content Creators get acclaim and income from popular skin creations. And ANet gets a majority share of the revenue from selling skins on the Gem store, and can turn their in-house artists’ focus to creating timed content-related skins and artwork, which is a much better use of their time.

Think about it.

A rework of Steal is what I feel would be the most important and impactful change they can make for the Thief class at this point.

If Steal itself is potent and genuinely useful at its base level, it would decrease the dependance of Thieves on certain weaponsets for survivability (Sword) and mobility (Shortbow), and open up so many build choices for Thieves due to the fact that it is available for every Thief build to make use of, regardless of weaponsets, stats, or traits.

Iterating on my earlier suggestions, my ideal Steal mechanic would do the following:
1) Have a 30 second base cooldown shared between F1 and F2 (can only use one or the other)
2) F1 – Targeted Shadowstep. Instant, but does not break stuns. Upon success, steal 2 items, one offensive in F3, one defensive in F4. For 10 seconds after using F1, this will be available as a Shadow Return that is also instant but does not break stuns.
3) F2 – Ground targeted Shadowstep. Instant, but does not break stuns. Shares a cooldown with F1. Also available as a Shadow Return for 10 seconds after use. Randomly selects an enemy in the AoE and populates F3 and F4 accordingly. Does not populate F3 and F4 if no enemies are in the AoE.
4) F3 & F4 – Use offensive or defensive item, respectively. Only one of the two can be used per Steal. Overridden by another set of items if F1 or F2 is used successfully on a target

This new Steal would accomplish the following:
1. Give all Thief builds at least 1 way to counter CC through reaction and preparation, instead of through the passive mitigation that all other classes have access to, bringing all builds a step closer to pre-nerf S/x in terms of viability
2. Give all Thief builds a mobility boost in F2, so that Shortbow becomes less of a requirement for roaming (Even with shortbow, many warrior builds have clearly superior sustained mobility)
3. Make it easier for ANet to balance the Shadow Return mechanics since Steal is cooldown based
4. Make Steal inherently useful as more than just a gap closer and situational utility tool without traiting for it, and give it better situational utility through the choice between an offensive and defensive ability
5. Add a survivability aspect to the Trickery line so that it could be a more viable alternative to Acrobatics and Shadow Arts, and possibly making it possible to build more interesting traits around the new Steal to address some of Thief’s weaker areas (see some of my suggestions below)

Possible traited effects for the new Steal below. These are just some ideas I’ve thought of that could address some of the problems Thieves have with low sustain, condi removal, and group utility. It should go without saying that some of them could be problematic when paired with eachother or existing traits, and therefore should be tested and cherry picked accordingly and is not meant to be blindly implemented in bulk.

1) Lower bound of 20s cooldown shared between F1 and F2 (scales with Trickery line)
2) Shadow Returns on F1 and F2 break stuns and AoE heals (Grandmaster Acro, Hard to Catch) – Remove rng and detrimental element from HtC, add more sustain options to Acro
3) Shadow Returns on F1 and F2 remove 3 conditions (Master Acro, new) – Condi removal option for Acro
4) F1 transfers 3 conditions and stuns target, F2 AoE boon rip and daze (Grandmaster Trickery, Sleight of Hand) – Condi removal/application option for Trickery, group utility in AoE boon rip + interrupt
5) F1 leeches from target (2k base dmg + heal), F2 lowered AoE leech (800 base dmg + heal per target) + blast finisher (Adept DA, Mug) – AoE dmg component, situationally higher sustain, blast for utility
6) F1 immobilizes and bleeds target, F2 AoE chills + torment (Master DA, new, moves Improvization to Trickery) – Control + condi dmg option
7) F1 Stealths self, F2 AoE smoke field (Master SA, Hidden Thief) – Group utility through AoE blind field, AoE stealth option when combined with the new Mug
8) Use of F3 does not preclude use of F4 and vice versa, Stealing recharges a random subset of utilities (Master Trickery, Improvization, moved from DA) – Gives Improvisation a useful non-rng component
9) F3 grants might, F4 heals (Adept Trickery, new) – Sustain and hybrid damage boost option in Trickery

Thoughts?

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Kaon.7192:

What the new combined dailies system should have been like:

Have at least 8 dailies from each of the 3 game modes so players can complete their daily by playing exclusively the gamemode they want, and have the option of completing it faster if they want to mix and match game modes.

This current implementation is a huge step backwards IMO. The old system at least showed the bare minimum of respect for players’ freedom to play the way they want due to the sheer number of options available to complete the daily.

Trying to manipulate players into playing the way YOU want is not going to work out well in the long term. In fact, even in the short term it will impact your player retention rates.

Keep a close eye on those login/daily completion stats, ANet. Hopefully you can realize what a horrible decision this was before it’s too late.

Likely, one of the reasons it was streamlined is because many people were unhappy because they felt the need to do every Daily offered. It is too bad for the rest of the population.

This should be a non-issue for those people now since there is now a cap on achievement points from dailies. The people who feel the need to do every Daily offered should have long since reached that cap by now.

Even if this wasn’t the case, I don’t see how it is acceptable to degrade everybody else’s gaming experience for those few players. It doesn’t make sense from a ethical or business standpoint.

JonPeters.5630:

Recharge rate means the speed at which it recharges, so it recharges 30% faster not 30% shorter recharge. Think of it this way.

New recharge time = (old time / 1.3) not (old time* 0.7)

Why have 2 different ways of calculating cooldown changes in the first place?

Some traits use cooldown reduction and others use recharge speed increase. Cooldown reduction is additive and much more intuitive to calculate, so why not translate all recharge speed increases to cooldown reduction and adjust the numbers accordingly?

God knows we could use some more consistency in this game.

Common legitimate use cases that this change negatively affects include:

-Playing in Hot Join while waiting for solo/team queue now rewards essentially no glory because it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to finish a match before queue ends. Even if you do finish your first match, the early half of your next match would likely reward nothing.

-Players with flaky connections dc’ing before end of match will not be rewarded glory for anything they accomplished before that point, even if they connect back before match ends.

But more importantly, this change doesn’t put nearly enough of a dent in those disgusting glory farm servers that can still gain glory at many times the rate of regular play.

Ban the server owners and anyone who has spent more than a dozen hours in those servers since their introductions (I’m being generous with the definition of willful exploitation here).

This is an exploit that completely destroyed whatever pitiful value Glory, the only currency sPvP players had access to, had remaining. Please deal with it with at least a fraction of the gravitas that you have demonstrated for exploits that devalue gold and undermine the PvE economy.

Frankly this double standard you have shown so far on this issue speaks volumes on how seriously you guys really take sPvP as a game mode.

The Stealth mechanic at the moment is defined around 100% Invisibility. I would like to present my case as to why Stealth would be a better mechanic without it, and suggest how it could be removed without a necessitating complete rework of any mechanics surrounding Stealth.

As we have all seen by now, Stealth is one of the major contributors to Thief QQ in the forums. The sheer amount of negativity surrounding the mechanic in the forums is astounding, and this forces ANet’s hand to repeatedly nerf Stealth to the sad state it’s in today. 100% Invisibility is the reason for most of this negativity, and understandably it is not exactly fun to play against something you can’t see at all for a significant percentage of the fight, balance considerations aside, this alone is true even from the perspective of a Thief player such as myself.

The biggest issue with Stealth, however, is not how others perceive it, but rather the fact that Stealth in itself is mostly a liability for Thieves in the sPvP conquest meta, because Thieves cannot contest points while Stealth is active. This is why a large majority of Thief builds based around Stealth are doomed to be unviable in sPvP, because they cannot contribute effectively to the single most important mechanic to winning games in high-level play. This is again, a direct consequence of the 100% Invisibility aspect of Stealth, because by any measure, to be able to contest points while remaining completely unseen is not fun or fair to play against.

Now that we have laid out why Stealth would be better off without 100% Invisibility, let’s move on to the how:

First and foremost, 100% Invisibility to enemies needs to go. Make a player in Stealth look the same to enemies as they currently do to allies. Keep the name tags removed, and make enemies have to work reasonably harder to see where a Stealthed player is, but not have to guess for it as they do in the status quo. A player in Stealth should still be untargettable by single target skills that require targetting, because without this, Stealth would be completely worthless as a defensive mechanic for classes or builds that have no traits to augment it.

Secondly, allow Stealthed players to contest points, because without 100% Invisibility, there will be plenty of reasonable counterplay options available against a player contesting a point in Stealth. This will immediately improve build variety for Thieves, because Stealth related builds that have been doomed to a lifetime of unviability can now be experimented with. Allowing point contention will also undoubtedly open up many additional non-roamer roles for Thief players in teams, further disrupting the stale sPvP meta. The possibilities are exciting indeed.

Additionally, a passive movement speed increase in Stealth may also be necessary to counteract the loss of 100% Invisibility, for the purpose of facilitating escapes and positioning-based Stealth mechanics like Backstab that would become much more difficult to pull off after the change. I would recommend integrating the +50% movement speed trait for Thieves into the Stealth mechanic itself, which effectively makes a Stealthed player able to move at the same speed in-combat as an out-of-combat player with Swiftness (out-of-combat movement is also capped at this speed AFAIK). The exactly value of this speed increase needs to be experimented with but I feel some degree of improvement to mobility will be required to maintain balance.

Last but not least, AIs need to treat Stealthed players as they always have (as if they were still completely invisible). Without this, Stealth would loose all utility in anything other than PvP.

TL;DR: Stealth as a mechanic would be in a much better state if 100% Invisibility was removed, and allowing point contention in Stealth would improve build variety overall for all classes that make use of Stealth. These changes should also help make Stealth just generally less un-fun to play against, which is definitely an important consideration for new players and player skill progression overall.

Feel free to point out any balance considerations that I may have missed or leave any other constructive feedback.

How about allowing us to Mystic Forge 4 Superior Runes/Sigils to receive a random Superior Rune/Sigil in return? In a similar manner as we already can with Major Runes/Sigils.

I think this would give Superior Runes/Sigils a much better baseline price and keep the prices of the most desirable ones in check.

Current price disparity is a bit ridiculous at 10g+ for the most desirable ones and less than 1s for the least desirable ones. To put that in perspective, even most major Runes/Sigils cost 4s+ precisely because they have a chance of returning a random Superior Rune/Sigil in the MF.

I don’t think giving other classes the Revealed status is an acceptable way to provide counter-play to invisibility.

Revealed, as a self-regulation mechanic on Thieves for Stealth attacks, is perfectly fine. However, when given to other classes to apply on Thieves, Revealed becomes a hard-counter to the Stealth mechanic, completely disabling the mechanic and all it’s related effects and abilities and traits that depend on it. Revealed disables an entire traitline of utility effects for the Thief and disables the Thief’s best burst/control/condi abilities (Stealth attacks), severely crippling any Thief built around any of the above aspects.

Hard counters should not exist in a balanced game, because they result in rock-paper-scissors interaction between classes and builds that are simply not fun for the player on the wrong side of the equation.

The fact that hard-counters do not exist currently in GW2 for any other major mechanic for any class is what I consider to be one of the most impressive accomplishments in the design and balance of the PvP aspect of the game. This will no longer be the case once Revealed becomes available to other classes.

I would like to suggest an alternative to Revealed in the form of another effect that specifically counters invisibility, rather than the entire Stealth mechanic. Let’s call it “Detected” for now.

The Detected effect will make the Thief fully visible and targetable for its duration, but will not prevent the Thief from entering the Stealth state itself like Revealed does. This effect will provide counter-play to the invisibility aspect of the Stealth mechanic, but will still allow Thieves to go into the Stealth state to gain the effect of any traits he built for and to access stealth attacks that are a key component of a majority of Thief builds.

In other words, Detected would be a soft-counter to the invisibility aspect of Stealth, but will not hard-counter the entirety of the Stealth mechanic like enemy-induced Revealed would. Detected should be implemented in place of Revealed in the upcoming Sic Em change, and in the previously implemented Stealth Traps in WvW, and in any similar anti-stealth skills going forward.

I feel this would be provide counter-play to invisibility while being much fairer to Thief builds that rely on the Stealth mechanic.

TL;DR courtesy of Zacchary: Offer a counter without completely negating a traitline.

Thoughts?

Roaming-Teamfight-CC-DPS-Bunker-CondiPressure Warrior says: ALL YOUR ROLES ARE BELONGS TO ME.

I’ve been spending about 30-40g on gems every week for more than a month now and just dumped another 100g into gems today. All of it I spent on keys to open BLC’s in hopes of getting the permanent version of the Black Lion Trader, which I happen to want more than any vanity item in this game.

The results have been discouraging so far to say the least. I have not yet gotten a perma-trader, merchant, banker or anything of the sort. The only non-common items I’ve gotten so far are a few Halloween skins (only 2 of which are weapon skins, and that’s after converting everything into Mad King chests) and an everlasting tonic that transforms me into a random tree, which is a lot of fun, but not exactly what I dumped hundreds of gold trying to get.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t upset, but I’m not here to vent out my frustration. Having opened over 500 chests, I’ve noticed a number of serious issues with the BLC mechanic in practice, and would like to discuss some of them here:


1. Rare items need a cap on effective Gem price

Before I went into this BLC opening business, I knew the terms, that this was all based on chance, and that I could very possibly not get what I want. I decided to take that risk and in fact did not get what I wanted. This, I can accept.

What bothers me is just how very little I DID get from it, and the spine-chilling thought that the results would have been the same if I used real money instead of gold to buy these keys.

Let’s do a little bit of math here: 500 chests requires about 500 keys to open. There is a chance of getting a key from a chest, so let’s peg that chance at a generous 20%. This means I used about 400 keys to open all of these chests. 5 keys cost 450 gems, so 400 would cost 80 times that amount, which is 36000. 4000 gems cost $50 of cold, hard cash, so 36000 would cost $450.

I hope you can see the problem now. The fact that Gems have a real world price associated with it means that there really does need to be a reasonable cap on the amount Gems you are expected to spend to get something you want. “Better luck next time” really doesn’t cut it from a MORAL perspective when the player has paid $400 and received nothing but boosters, tonics, and inferior tools (I’ll get to this in a bit).

I can’t help but feeling that the current drop rates of rare items from BLCs are simply not fair when put into perspective the “average” amount of real world money players need to spend on keys to be able to get one. Many players probably share this perception, and as long as this perception continues, players will be discouraged to spend money on gems, which is both bad for business on ANet’s side, and bad for players due to the inflating Gold to Gem prices.

By rare item, I mean any time-limited skin or anything permanent, because let’s be honest, those are the only real desirable items from BLC’s. Other games with successful models of key purchasing have desirable items with EVERY key purchase, as in the case of TF2 with unique weapons and hats.

However, this problem takes more than just increasing drop rates to solve. As long as the rare drops are RNG based, there will exist people with bad luck like myself who end up spending hundreds of dollars in real money with practically nothing to show for it.

To put an effective cap on the price of these rare drops, we can introduce a new guaranteed drop in the BLC, let’s call it the Black Lion token for now (we could also just use the Mystery Tonic). Each BLC would drop 1-5 of these tokens, and once you have accumulated enough tokens, you can exchange for the exact item you want from an NPC, where all the rare drops are available for exchange.

This system would retain the luck element (some at ANet would call it “fun”) of the original system, in that there is still a chance to get a rare item from the chests themselves, but ensure players are adequately rewarded for each BLC they open, and progress toward getting the exact item that they want instead of opening chests aimlessly hoping to hit the jackpot, which, as anyone who has opened more than a few hundred BLCs can attest to, is an extremely demoralizing process, and does very little to encourage Key purchasing.

*Apparently there is a 5000 character limit. Continued on next post…

2. Receiving non-stackable/soulbound tools from BLCs

This is one of the most annoying non-droprate related issues with BLC’s for me personally. ANet wants to give players incentive to open Black Lion Chests, yet there is a completely unreasonable inventory space cost to the player for opening them. Black Lion Salvage kits and Black Lion harvesting tools, are some of the most common tools received from opening BLC’s. Every time I get one of them, I let out a small sigh… Because every time this happens I have to say goodbye to a valuable inventory/bank slot, which is one of the most costly assets in the game. Once you get past a certain point in number of chests opened, the only valid option left is to discard them, which I really shouldn’t have to do with something that I spent Gems on.

Setting aside the usefulness of these items for a moment, consider the regular harvesting tools: The sickle comes in stacks of 50, and axes/picks in stacks of 100. When you take into account the cost of inventory space, the 10/stack BL sickle and 25/stack Axe/Pick becomes by far the inferior good. Black Lion Salvage kits are in a similar situation due to the existence of Mystic Salvage kits that stack up to 250.

To add insult to injury, Black Lion Harvesting tools are SOULBOUND. This compounds with the stacking issue mentioned above, which means if you opened the chests on a single character, those 50 other stacks of tools are only usable on that specific character. So now you have 50 dead inventory slots, which is about 30g worth of space. If you have other characters you use for harvesting high-end materials, tough luck, they won’t be able to even HOLD the tools to save inventory/bank space, let alone use them.

Opening BLCs costs Gems, so it really should not give us an inferior tool that is more costly to store and use than available elsewhere, that is if ANet wants players to bother spending gems doing so. Making all of these items stack to up to 250 each would greatly improve the user-friendliness of BLC’s and thereby their desirability.


Black Lion Chests are a serious point of contention right now. And the issues I discussed above I feel are at the core of the problem. Address them, and many people, including myself, will be happy to spend money on Gems again.


Congratulations on making it to the end of my epic post. =)
Thank you for taking the time to hear what I have to say.

Update: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/After-opening-2-stacks-of-BLCs-some-constructive-feedback/first#post602943

Zietlogik.6208:

HAMBOWS. i’ve had enough.
DECAP ENGI. i’ve had enough.
BUNKER GUARDIANS. i’ve had enough.
SPIRIT RANGERS. i’ve had enough.
PISTOL WHIP. i’ve had enough.
MINION MASTERS. i’ve had enough.
PU MES. i’ve had enough.
Ele….wait nm

Pretty much this…

ANet has a tendency to introduce cheesy builds with their “balance” passes, and then instead of doing something to bring them down to the same level as other, more reasonable builds available, their idea of “balance” involves introducing new, equally cheesy builds on other classes.

This process has led to the cheese-filled meta we have today where everybody plays builds that are incredibly tedious and frustrating to play against because they’re the only builds that are even viable against all the other cheese the enemy team will surely bring.

It’s a 33% blanket cooldown increase on ALL things stealth related, people.
How do you go from a change that you “felt would be an unpredictable change to make” to something that affects every single aspect of the entire mechanic and call it less drastic…

I’m sorry, but you have your priorities completely mixed up when it comes to Stealth.

If there is a problem with Stealth, fix Stealth itself.

If it’s perma-stealth dagger/pistol that’s the problem, fix that, and tone down the initiative regen traits that make it possible.

If it’s C&D chaining that’s the problem, fix that and make revealed apply when you drop out of stealth even without attacking.

If Backstab being too easy to land is the problem, fix that and make only the first slot1 attack in stealth act as a Stealth attack, and the rest regular auto’s.

If it’s perma-dodge that’s the problem, fix that and leave stealth alone.

Whatever you do, please don’t continue down this path of turning Stealth into a mechanic that can be disabled at the whim of anyone who happens to hate thieves enough to run these Stealth disabling items/abilities/traits.

A mechanic like enemy-induced Revealed that disables a major class mechanic like Stealth has no place in this game, period. This is by far the most lazy and reactionary form of balance I have seen from you guys.

First stealth trap, now this. Two points make a slope, and this makes me very concerned about where you’re trying to take Stealth as a mechanic.

If you go far enough Stealth will be practically pointless as a build option for Thieves, and you might as well scrap Stealth entirely and give us something that maybe people will hate on less, so you don’t have to be pressured into making ridiculous mechanic-specific counters like this.

The Waypoint cost scheme as it is right now discourages exploration and pushes players toward time-wasting workarounds (such as going to mists -> LA -> closest nearby city -> goal) in order save Waypoint costs.

I’m proposing the following changes to the current system:

1. Eliminate fees for all Waypoints in all major cities

Because they are essentially free within the current system by going to Mists -> LA -> Asura Gate. If ANet really does value the player’s time, why make them sit through so many loading screens?

2. Calculate Waypoint fee using the minimum of the following two distances: distance to player and distance to nearest Waypoint in a major city

Also because this is essentially what it could cost within the current system, only that players have to deal with multiple loading screens in the process.

These changes should make Waypoint costs across Tyria more reasonable to all players in most situations.

Any thoughts?

Lilith Ajit.6173:

….. >.> make the most fun to have in the game…. Shorter?

I respect your opinion, but I would like to request this not happen…

Instead, fix bugs like harpy invulnerability and such… But keep it challenging and fun so we can still feel amazing after finishing.

The “fun” parts of every Fractal can definitely be condensed into 15 minutes or less. The rest of it is just mindless tanking and spanking trash or giant DPS sponge bosses, i.e. filler content.

Aiming for a ~50 to 60 minute completion time for a full set of Fractals (for levels 30 and below at least) is the reasonable thing to do.

I wanted to start this exact thread but you beat me to it.
Completely agreed on all points.

PvE/PvP split should be by damage/healing coefficients or skill durations only. Mechanics splits are completely counter-productive when it comes to easing new players into the format. Not to mention how ridiculous it is that sPvP is where the nerf is staying.

The all caps title doesn’t exactly help make your case though.
Your points are good. Don’t cheapen them with a title like that.

I really don’t want to see this thread die out so I’ll post my 2c also.

Yes there is vertical progression in most games, GW2 and 1 included. But whether or not the vertical progression has a defined end is one of the defining factors for my enjoyment of a game with a competitive aspect (WvW). I want to reach that final plateau in stats, however long it may take, and know for sure that I will be on an even playing field with every enemy that I might face. Taking that plateau higher every few months makes that impossible without mandatory grind with each update, however shallow the power curve.

WvW is basically dead to me now. At least there is still sPvP.

… instead of adding a cast time.

Around 5 seconds would be ideal. The Thief will have to choose between staying past 5 seconds to keep up pressure, or to disengage and re-engage using Infil Return and spending extra Ini.

There will be an Ini deficit if the Thief uses it to engage and disengage continously because, 5 seconds is how long it takes to refill 5 ini post buff, but Infil Return needs to be used within 5 seconds under this new availability window.

Cast time on a skill makes reactive use impossible for everything but the most heavily telegraphed skills, and Thieves need this mechanic to stay instant to actively displace themselves before/while CC’d because we have no passive immunity to CC or passive damage mitigation.

I absolutely love this feature, and have been using it extensively since the Beta’s. However, it could definitely use some polish.

Here are some of my suggestions for improvements and bug reports (in no particular order):

1. Battle music in sPvP fades out to silence as we approach any Conquest Point… VERY anti-climatic. Would enjoy sPvP a lot more if this wasn’t the case.

2. Crafting playlist doesn’t work at all.

3. LA plays Ambient playlist instead of City.

4. Give us more playlist options for Scenarios that are not yet covered (Defeated and Dungeon, for instance).

5. Allow us to override currently hard-coded playlists like the ones in Dungeons (CoF theme gets really old if you run it daily), Southsun, and certain Living/Personal Story themes.

6. Allow us to adjust/disable hard-coded silence/volume reduction for certain game mechanics (Death Shroud, Downed state), and areas (Orr).

7. Have the MainMenu playlist extended until the loading screen ends to make it last longer than the typical 1-5 seconds. Having to stare at a static background is bad enough, why give us silence as well?

8. Pause and resume the current track instead of starting from the beginning of the next track when the playlist changes from ambient -> battle -> ambient, nighttime -> battle -> nighttime, etc.

9. Allow us to choose whether each playlist is to be randomized, randomized after first track, or played in-order.

Just to emphasize, I like most of the tracks you guys put into the game. However, everything gets old eventually if you listen to it for thousands of hours as you would in an MMO.

This is why I appreciate Custom Playlists so much, and hope you’ll be able to implement the bug-fixes and improvements I mentioned and give us choice to replace currently hard-coded tracks.

Ladders are nice as a competitive feature but it’s transient (temporary) by nature.

The rank system is permanent. It’s a lifetime achievement showing how much time you’ve invested into sPvP.

How can anyone in their right mind think it’d be a good idea to just take that away from a dedicated playerbase after they’ve been slaving over the ridiculous requirements for over a year?

Feel free to remove glory as a currency, but keep rank points the way it is (except for the Skyhammer farmers who need to be banned). There is no reason why we can’t have both a long term lifetime achievement and a seasons system.

Definitely a horrible idea.

For me, the greatest appeal for sPvP in this game is the ideal that everybody should be able to compete on a level playing field regardless of time investment.

Please don’t make sPvP players, new or old, grind their way to equality.

Daeqar.8965:

Scootabuser.4915:

…revealed apply to us even if we leave stealth without doing any damage.

That wasn’t as much of a nerf as this was.

Disagree completely.

That change would have destroyed a thief’s ability to turtle and play defensively, which with this change remains entirely, 100% intact. Taking that defensive ability away from the class just to preserve a little bit of offensive capability would have been a huge mistake.

Frankly, I’m ashamed that so many thieves on the forums are so short-sighted to think the 4s revealed is a worse nerf.

There’s a difference between playing defensively versus popping out of stealth only for a fraction of a second every 4 seconds, the latter of which is the only “playstyle” (read exploit) that the originally proposed change would prevent.

Instead, this new change is a blanket 33% nerf to the entirety of the stealth mechanic EXCEPT for those who make use of the aforementioned exploit, ahem, excuse me, I meant “playstyle”.

I also find it very hypocritical that Legendaries are tradable while Ascended items are not.

Imagi.4561:

Pixels.6532:

Acrobatics X – Assassins Reward. Increased healing scaling by 35%. Moved to Grandmaster Tier.
fine.

I actually thought that was fine, too, although I didn’t think the 35% increase was enough to justify moving it up a tier, since the healing is massively underwhelming as it is.

Then I realized that, after this patch, if I put 30 into Acrobatics for this trait there’s absolutely nothing I’d want in the Master slot. I’d probably still take the vigor-on-heal trait, but nothing remaining in the Master tier looked even remotely appealing enough for me to want to pigeonhole myself into Acrobatics.

Yes at roughly 100 hp/s if you spend all of your ini all the time, it’s extremely lackluster as a Grandmaster trait, especially when comparing with the sustain options of other classes or even our own Shadow Rejuvenation.

Another point I would like to mention is that most other stomp securing mechanics counter your target’s allies’ attempts to save him/her as well. Whereas in a stealth stomp you are still vulnerable to every form of cc in existence, and one of the major pillars of stealth, confusing your current position, is rendered moot due to the fact that they know exactly where you’re standing for those 3 seconds.

Immunity from the other CC effects that players throw at you is often the difference between a successful stomp and an unsuccessful one. And the prospect of taking a player out of play for certain is most definitely worth blowing a long cooldown utility. If not, you wouldn’t see stability/invul stomps in the current meta to begin with. The thief has 0 access to reliable stomp securing options like invul and stability, so in return, we’re granted a semi-reliable way of securing stomps that only works on a subset of classes that stability/invul works on, but can be activated more frequently at the cost of our actual combat effectiveness. This alone was not enough to make up for the lack of a reliable stomp securing mechanic, so they also gave us one of the only ways to save teammates, with good coordination, from these stomp securing mechanics, which is also stealth.

This combined with my posts above is why I believe stealth stomp is more or less balanced in its current state.

Wasn’t this supposed to be one of the categories?
If not, please consider implementing it.

The Open World category is limited to your own server and doesn’t really seem like an appropriate categorization.

Our small guild will be unlocking Challenges soon, and with anywhere from 3-7 members participating in missions each week, it sounds like we will have absolutely 0 chance at completing one of these unless we get some help. I was hoping that the LFG Tool could be part of the solution but the lack of a cross-server Guild Mission category makes this rather unlikely.

Proper scaling needs to be implemented, not necessarily lower scaling. The key to success in TTS runs is having only the bare minimum number of people defending turrets, while the remaining majority spends all their time DPS’ing Teq.

Teq’s health needs to scale to the number of people within 1500 range of his actual hitboxes, not to the total # of players in the area. The players at the turrets are defending instead of DPS’ing Teq himself, and are already scaling up difficulty of the defense event. They shouldn’t scale up Teq’s health at all until they come within range of Teq proper.

Also, removing the spawn window and introducing set spawn times for world bosses would definitely help with the player turnout at the very least.

Wasn’t this advertised as a game where you didn’t have to wait to have fun?

Bottom line is:

Balance should consist of toning down aspects of the game that are excessive (condi spam) instead of introducing more excessive measures (immunity and hard counters) to “balance” them.

As long as ANet doesn’t get this concept, there will be ridiculous power creep and rock-paper-scissors/whack-a-mole style balance with every patch and every player will be shoehorned into the cheesiest meta build for their class in order to be even the least bit competitive.

I know the thread has ended but this OP bothers me so much that I just have to reply. =P

Stealth does not make you invulnerable to CC. Anything that CC’s a Thief while he’s visible will CC a Thief while he’s stealthed. Stealth is the only stomp securing mechanic that DOES have counters by almost every class, as opposed to your ridiculous claim. Stability/Invul/Blind stomps are the ones that you literally can’t do anything about in down state unless you have a downed skill that allows for repositioning.

Another huge factor is the discrepancy between the frequency of attacks in PvE vs PvP.

In PvP, even when you’re facing a single enemy, you’ll be showered with constant harassment through auto-attacks that you can’t possibly avoid through dodges alone, and this is what makes mitigation/sustain factor into the PvP build-making process, and why balanced builds tend to do better overall in sPvP than extreme DPS-oriented builds.

In PvE, most mobs literally pause seconds between attacks, as if waiting for you to regenerate enough endurance for another dodge, and each attack hits an often ridiculous amount of health in higher level PvE content, making sustain/mitigation almost irrelevant and DPS the king, since you can and often MUST dodge any and all attacks coming your way.

Significantly reducing the damage of mob attacks and increasing their attack frequency proportionally is what I think would be the easiest and most efficient fix for increasing PvE build diversity.

I’ve wanted something like this for quite a while.
Not just for Thief but for most other classes too. 5s cooldown on weapon swap would make combat a lot more enjoyable from the added flexibility.

Just finished a tier 1 bounty with 6 people, only prescouting the Karka, Keg, and prisoner, none of which actually showed up as a bounty lol…

And we didn’t get the super easy to find ones like the quaggan. It was Tarban (Brisban) and Teesa (Frostgorge). We had 3 people on each map and found Teesa within the first 5 minutes, and Tarban around the 7 minute mark. After the other team finished off Teesa they came to Brisban to help take down Tarban faster. Ended up having over 3 minutes to spare.

Granted, with smaller teams it definitely requires that you know their mechanics and can play your class well, as some of these guys can be extremely tough and punishing for groups smaller than a full party. But hey, Tarban is supposed to be one of the most difficult to fight and we were holding our own with a group of 3 at the beginning. =P

TL;DR it’s completely doable with smaller groups (with very limited prescouting for the most difficult to find ones, if you want to increase your chances for success). Just queue up more than 1 mission in case something goes wrong.

Is it just me or does it go through dodges/evades?

I’ve been doing AR daily pretty much every day lately and I can recall multiple instances where the teleport damaged me during my dodge’s invincibility frames.

No attack should be able to do this. Please fix it and make sure no future bosses suffer from this bug.

I have 2 endless tree tonics…
Needless to say, I support this suggestion.

Why do I get the feeling that each and every single one of these new traits will be at least as much of a grind as the 25 SP healing skills?

Being disadvantaged in terms of trait/skill build options is no better than being disadvantaged in terms of gear/stats.

All sPvP had going for it was the fact that everybody had access to the same build options regardless of how much or little time you had to spend grinding. This simple ideal is at the foundation of any truly competitive e-sports game.

Well, if sPvP wasn’t already a joke before, it certainly is now. Very funny, ANet.

I believe invisible bags could prevent an item from being deposited by deposit all.
What we need then, is a way to purchase invisible bags using glory. =)

Winston Charrchill

Wow that timing…

Chaszyrr.6479:

-There was a good idea about condi transfer (maybe a venom Trickery Adept Major trait? 10s cd), this fits the flow toward party support if it worked with sharing, and makes taking 1 venom more viable without sharing. Venom share not OP at all with no break stun or defensive utility.
-Another good idea posted was a Shadow return chained skill on Steal, I would add an Ini cost or slightly longer steal cd if used. If not used, it is wasted when steal cools down. This may also lead to removal of Shadow return on Shadowstep, for a huge cd cut.

Wow. I think it’s safe to assume you’ve pretty much read through the entire thread since I think you saw my post back on page 4. XD

I’ve actually made a new topic for it here.

A rework of Steal is what I feel would be the most important and impactful change they can make for the Thief class at this point.

If Steal itself is potent and genuinely useful at its base level, it would decrease the dependance of Thieves on certain weaponsets for survivability (Sword) and mobility (Shortbow), and open up so many build choices for Thieves due to the fact that it is available for every Thief build to make use of, regardless of weaponsets, stats, or traits.

Iterating on my earlier suggestions, my ideal Steal mechanic would do the following:
1) Have a 30 second base cooldown shared between F1 and F2 (can only use one or the other)
2) F1 – Targeted Shadowstep. Instant, but does not break stuns. Upon success, steal 2 items, one offensive in F3, one defensive in F4. For 10 seconds after using F1, this will be available as a Shadow Return that is also instant but does not break stuns.
3) F2 – Ground targeted Shadowstep. Instant, but does not break stuns. Shares a cooldown with F1. Also available as a Shadow Return for 10 seconds after use. Randomly selects an enemy in the AoE and populates F3 and F4 accordingly. Does not populate F3 and F4 if no enemies are in the AoE.
4) F3 & F4 – Use offensive or defensive item, respectively. Only one of the two can be used per Steal. Overridden by another set of items if F1 or F2 is used successfully on a target

This new Steal would accomplish the following:
1. Give all Thief builds at least 1 way to counter CC through reaction and preparation, instead of through the passive mitigation that all other classes have access to, bringing all builds a step closer to pre-nerf S/x in terms of viability
2. Give all Thief builds a mobility boost in F2, so that Shortbow becomes less of a requirement for roaming (Even with shortbow, many warrior builds have clearly superior sustained mobility)
3. Make it easier for Anet to balance the Shadow Return mechanics since Steal is cooldown based
4. Make Steal inherently useful as more than just a gap closer and situational utility tool without traiting for it, and give it better situational utility through the choice between an offensive and defensive ability
5. Add a survivability aspect to the Trickery line so that it could be a more viable alternative to Acrobatics and Shadow Arts, and possibly making it possible to build more interesting traits around the new Steal to address some of Thief’s weaker areas (see some of my suggestions below)

…

tolunart.2095:

So… say you asked me for change for a $10 bill and I thought it was a $20 and gave you four $5s. I realize the mistake too late, but that doesn’t mean you can come back and give me another $10 and get four more $5s.

When you learn from your mistakes you don’t repeat them.

Why exactly would you consider making Ascended tradeable a mistake?

Legendaries, I understand, as it is a prestige item and making prestige items tradeable undermines their status.

However, Ascended items are, for the most part, valued only for their utility. It is the extra stats they grant over Exotics that makes them valuable. These items are required for vertical progression, in other words, to remain on equal footing with other players in the game. Limiting trade for these types of items is a rather despicable way to “encourage” players to do content that they would otherwise rather not do.

I am of the position that the ideal equipment acquisition system would be exactly the opposite of how things are currently implemented in GW2. Utility items (best-in-slot stats with mediocre skins) should be freely tradeable and require reasonable amounts of effort to obtain and have no time-gate in any shape or form. Prestige items (good or great looking skins) are the ones that should have limited player trade, require a wide variety of content to be completed, and possibly be time-gated to allow ANet to keep up with player demand for high quality skins (at least until they implement User Created Content).

RoldyV.9876:

thechamp.3092:

Last Refuge is an extremely usefull trait, just learn to play with it.

Traits are supposed to be beneficial, but in a stealth oriented build (p/d) Last Refuge is an extreme disadvantage.

If you “just learn to play with it” then LR would require you to disengage combat before 25%hp …

Not to mention you’re going to have to “learn” when your opponent (or opponents collectively) are going to use their big bursts to bring you down to 25% in an instant and plan your moves pre-emptively.

I suppose we should all just “learn” to read minds over the internet like Mr. Champ over here.

An update:

I just dumped another 80g on keys today, and opened over 100 chests. As you can imagine, by now I have VERY low expectations when I open these chests (I still do it since it’s the only way to “progress” toward getting my perma-trader, and there is very little else in the game I’m compelled to work towards at the moment). These low expectations mean I don’t get disappointed as much when things don’t turn out as I’d like them to when dumping huge sums of gold into keys. This is great since I have never once gotten the result I had hoped for (perma-trader), or anything even remotely close (perma-merchant, banker) with the exception of the everlasting tree tonic I got a few weeks ago, which was, thanks to my low expectations, a very pleasant surprise for me.

The results of today’s chest opening session, however, made me realize that my expectations just weren’t low enough. 100+ BLC’s plus the mad king chests made from the resulting mystery tonics and boosters got me 3 shoulder skins in total. If those were all I got, this session would be business as usual, and I’d have been able to shrug it off like the past half dozen similar sessions. Instead, this is what I got in addition to my 3 shoulder skins: http://imgur.com/CYEvy

That’s right. A second Endless Mystery Tonic. The exact same one that turns me into trees. They managed to ruin the only bright spot in my pitch-black chest opening career… Having a second one of these is literally more useless than even the countless black lion salvage kits and harvesting tools that I’ve complained about in my opening post, because it’s not even consumable, let alone tradable. I would hope that eventually they might allow me to trade in this for something of similar rarity, but judging from ANet’s complete lack of response on any BLC related thread since the Mad King Chest announcement, I seriously doubt this would happen anytime soon.

It would really have taken a lot to make me give up on getting my trader, but this has done it. I’ve spent enough gold on BLCs to have been able to build any legendary I wanted in the game, and only have 2 (!) account bound mystery tonics to show for it. Until ANet at least shows some interest in improving the situation, BLC’s no longer exist as far as I’m concerned.

rpfohr.7048:

And if you feel pigeon holed into stealth. Think about how ele feels with their trait line.

Many of us feel exactly the opposite. Stealth was always unviable in sPvP, and it’s becoming more and more worthless as a mechanic to build around in this game mode because of the changes that they’re making to appease the WvW crowd.

And the only only valid complaints the WvW crowd has is against the perma-Stealth D/P Thief abusing a broken mechanic that most reasonable Thieves would agree should have been fixed ages ago.

To add insult to injury, the change that they’ve implemented affects perma-Stealth builds the least out of all possible builds that make use of Stealth to varying degrees, because Sic Em requires a target and being in Stealth forever is the only way to avoid ever getting hit by it.

“Bounty Training” missions need to give 10 merits and 2 commendations, so that smaller guilds who can’t reasonably complete 2 bounties in 15 minutes have some way of progressing to a different mission type. It would make more sense to name it Bounty Tier 1 and move the others to 2, 3, 4, because that’s essentially what it is in terms of difficulty, and is a more reasonable baseline for attaining merits.

Failing that, at least introduce a proper alliance system and let alliances share Missions and their rewards.

Something has to be done about this because you do NOT want to be excluding players from even attempting content (Treks, Rushes, Challenges, Puzzles) based on the size of their guild. You don’t see much discussion about the sorry state of guild missions right now only because most of the dissatisfied players have already quit.

Just wanted to bump this because it’s literally my most anticipated bug fix for Thieves. (Yes, more than the Last Refuge of Doom)

A working version of this skill (teleport instead of shadowstep) will allow a Thief to bring so much more mobility to the team. It will also guarantee them the element of surprise against someone trying to backcap.

The exponential increase in glory requirements every 10 levels is completely ridiculous, and is no better than those Korean Grindfests that ANet tries to distance itself from.

For what it’s worth, PvP progression is getting an overhaul eventually, but the damage has already been done. So many of my friends either won’t touch PvP at all, or have quit GW2 entirely because of the many baffling decisions that went into this game…

Kaon.7192:

I’m sorry, but you have your priorities completely mixed up when it comes to Stealth.

If there is a problem with Stealth, fix Stealth itself.

If it’s perma-stealth dagger/pistol that’s the problem, fix that, and tone down the initiative regen traits that make it possible.

If it’s C&D chaining that’s the problem, fix that and make revealed apply when you drop out of stealth even without attacking.

If Backstab being too easy to land is the problem, fix that and make only the first slot1 attack in stealth act as a Stealth attack, and the rest regular auto’s.

If it’s perma-dodge that’s the problem, fix that and leave stealth alone.

Whatever you do, please don’t continue down this path of turning Stealth into a mechanic that can be disabled at the whim of anyone who happens to hate thieves enough to run these Stealth disabling items/abilities/traits.

A mechanic like enemy-induced Revealed that disables a major class mechanic like Stealth has no place in this game, period. This is by far the most lazy and reactionary form of balance I have seen from you guys.

First stealth trap, now this. Two points make a slope, and this makes me very concerned about where you’re trying to take Stealth as a mechanic.

If you go far enough Stealth will be practically pointless as a build option for Thieves, and you might as well scrap Stealth entirely and give us something that maybe people will hate on less, so you don’t have to be pressured into making ridiculous mechanic-specific counters like this.

Just posted this in the Balance Preview thread that Jon claims to have read in its entirety.
Probably the best chance to have your voices heard before the patch hits.

Sanduskel.1850:

So learn to stealth before sic em is applied. Isn’t that what you tell others to do? Dodge before the BS, or swing melee where you think the stealthed thief is?

Again, those of us who don’t rely on perma stealth aren’t up in arms about this. I enjoyed my fights last night. Challenging but fun.

It is not possible to LEARN to Stealth before Sic Em is applied because it’s instant cast with absolutely 0 tells, and 0 possible counter play. You can get lucky and Stealth before your enemy decides to randomly use it, but that misplay will only cost him a 5 second cooldown on Sic Em instead of the full cooldown. And if you’re NOT running Perma-Stealth, it’ll be ready to use before you can Stealth again.

Let me reiterate, Sic Em affects Perma-Stealth Thieves the least out of all Thief builds that make use of Stealth due to the lack of targetting opportunities. If you still can’t see a problem with this kind of design, I’ll take evilapprentice’s advice and stop wasting my time.