Guild Wars 2

It’s sad how these threads (and the game) are more and more about points and less and less about good fights

Dynamic events are a big part of GW2 open world PVE experience, yet the use of events in WvW feels – after almost 2 years – a bit lacking.

I was thinking that strategically meaningful events and event chains could be really interesting, I’ll give you a few examples:

• when an important upgrade (t2 walls, t2 gates, t3 walls, waypoint) is nearing completion, start dynamic events in the camps providing the supplies and on the dolyaks transporting those supplies. The events would prompt for allies to defend the camps and dollys and for enemies to try and cap the camps and kill the dollys.
• when starting a structure upgrade, use the same “collect” mechanic we’ve seen in some PVE events to collect money (with maybe the option to instantly start the upgrade by paying the whole sum in a single click);
• when a structure is under siege (siege weapons hitting gates/walls), defenders should see a major event that prompts for wiping or driving off the attackers (the generic “defend” event we have right now) and several minor events for building or using defensive siege; the attackers will have events around the structure that prompt for preventing defenders from getting inside and maybe even events to “tag” nearby structures that have a waypoint to prevent more defenders from joining the defense effort, events for destroying external and internal walls/gates, and finally for capturing the structure (each event rewarded separately, will require some tuning base rewards).
• after capturing a structure, the game could spawn several small events that request building some defensive siege and events for capturing the nearby supply camps.
• the completion of one of the major upgrades (t2 walls, t2 gate, t3 walls, waypoint) could start more “build defensive siege” events, since the more upgrades you have, the more you want to defend your structure;
• in a “outnumbered” situation, when even the events to take back the spawn towers fail, provide alternative guerrilla style targets: for example, cap camps and kill dolyaks to prevent enemies from upgrading towers and keeps.
• events could even take into account the 3-faction system: for example, if Red is attacking a Blue structure and attacking Blue would be better for Green, Green could get an event to “attack this Blue structure on the other side of the map” since attacking 2 Blue objectives increases the chances of flipping at least one and gives the chance to flip both. If Green is fighting in points head-to-head with Red, instead, they could have a “steal the cap” event! Thrilling!

These are only a few examples, and the possibilities are endless.

I don’t think these changes could fix all flaws the current WvW system has, but it would surely help with some issues.

Given the “dynamic” nature of those events, the rewards could scale with the number of enemies and maybe number and quality of siege involved: “yeah, good job capping this t0 keep with 5 superior catapults and 60 man blob: have this blue item” vs “wow, you capped a t2 tower with only a handful of men and normal siege? Are you a strategy wizard or something? Have this rare item for a chance of ectos!”
There could even be a “tiering” system similar to those we’ve seen in the Crown Pavillion and Zephyrites events, with better rewards for long-lasting sieges.

From a scoring system point of view, linking the results of the events (including the scaling!) with the score would help balancing the night capping and point-per-tick system: structures that see no attacks for a long time will provide less points in the same timeframe than those that are heavily contested: successfully defending T1 towers could probably give more points in time than a fully sieged T3 keep that no one dares attacking.

Having a map full of “meaningful” things to do would be really useful for new players getting in WvW (“hey, that’s an event! I know how to do that!”) and would maybe help in breaking down the blobs a bit by spreading attacks (and the relative “defense” events) in the whole map. This would help groups of all sizes to be able to enjoy WvW again.

Edit: added some terrible mockups
Edit: I posted some more ideas in another thread – if you like this, maybe you will like those also.

1. Make large scale fights fun again: this will require a huge rebalancing of the game to sort the power creep and make sure that every profession has a few viable builds for this game mode.
2. Empty maps are bad: a dynamic system is required so that players don’t need to sit in a queue for hours and at the same time are not forced to play in empty maps where there’s nothing to fight.
3. Give players a reason to defend objectives: defending can be fun, but right now it isn’t. And it isn’t perceived as rewarding, either, so there’s only a few players that actually care about that. Making defense more important and more fun is key for a healthier game mode.
4. Give WvW his own identity: the game mode needs exclusive rewards and powerful “bragging rights” incentives for both guilds and players. Veterans need to be rewarded for their persistence and new players should realize that this game has an amazing large scale pvp system and could be attracted to the game for it.
5. Get rid of gold sinks and PVE farming for WvW upgrades: WvW should only be tied to WvW. PvE players are not forced to farm WvW objectives to upgrade the Workshop or the Market, why do WvW players need to farm PvE to upgrade the War Room? Why are they tied to level up Scribing to access their upgrades? This is broken and needs fixing.

Beta: gives unblockable, then gives invuln. Weird but interesting.
Launch: gives evasion. Great for PvP. Too great.
After the first round of crying on the forums: gives distortion. Crap for PvP but great for organized groups in WvW. (who gives a kitten about pve? NPCs won’t complain for sure)
After even more crying: complete garbage.

Makes me sad.

apharma.3741:

You should also add that some runes are prohibitively expensive with alternatives being either not very cheap or sometimes require you to PvE a fair bit to get. For example nightmare runes, hoelbrak, strength etc.

That’s without mentioning ones you can’t get any more like generosity or the recipes aren’t around like tormenting and perplexity which also require items which are hard to get.

I think the cost of runes and sigils is a direct consequence of wrong design choices. They already reworked many runes, and still the vast majority is considered either a “cheap alternative” or downright “useless”.

There’s a reason if everyone wants Strength runes for PVE (and some WvW builds too): they give the best overall damage. Why can’t we have alternatives that can give the same amount of damage with some secondary effect variation?

Hoelbrak… good damage boost and 20% negative condi duration. Very strong for WvW, so people will seek those runes and avoid the rest. It’s not by random chance that many frontliners use Hoelbrak or Melandru… why not rework some of the runesets now considered “useless” to give some variation around the negative condi duration?

Same goes with the price of food btw… you have 3 or 4 food buffs that cost tens of times more than the others. Why? Because they grant negative condi duration or the best damage in game. Everything else is sub-par. The nice thing is that they introduced some more recipes with negative condi duration, the only problem is that those are even more expensive to craft than the old one

I love how ANet cares so much for Mesmers that they go out of their way to find things nobody consider bugs to fix, when they have a community-confirmed list of ~35 bugs and broken spells/traits that has been like that for months.

I became Gold Invader tonight. In almost 1400 ranks I got 2 ascended rings (one of which has zerker stats, the other is useless), a few exotics (10-15?) and rares (I’d say maybe one every 10 ranks on average?).

The other day I did a few PVE world events to gather some money. In about 2 hours I got about 10 rares and 2 exotics just spamming autoattack…

The reward level from WvW is abysmal.

I look forward to see the third attempt in fixing iWarden.

ArenaNet seems to be trying to balance the whole game around the “competitive” pvp mode because that’s where people care the most about balance. But sPVP is a closed environment with very specific constraints: first of all, it’s a Conquest game mode that forces people to fight on points. Maps are designed with lots of Line-of-sight breaks and are small. The pvp choice of amulets, runes and sigils offers a very strict and controlled environment. And the population is limited to 5 players per side.

WvW is nothing of that and balance should acknowledge it.

• being able to customize your gear is great, but the availability of certain stat combinations and runes in WvW make for some builds that are not fun to play against, like perma stealth Dire condi trapper thieves/daredevils, druids or dragonhunters, or PU mesmers or necro/reapers with perplexity runes and Dire gear or fully tanky/healing druids, tempests, revenants or guardians.
• thanks to gear customization and availability of ascended gear and food buffs, the power levels and damage output in WvW can be extremely higher, leading to builds and classes that can nearly instakill their enemies. Instakills are not fun for either side.
• same goes for the amount of tank on some builds (especially healers and condition builds): fighting a seemingly immortal enemy is not fun.
• the power creep started being intolerable when the traitlines were revamped and the stats moved from the traits to the gear and it became even worse with the release of HoT, since the new gear has even more stat points.
• some thought must be put on the skills that affect multiple opponents because fights aren’t limited to 1-5 opponents in WvW.
• “passive immortality” is a horrible thing. Right now, Warriors, Engineers and Necros are particularly bad, with traits that automatically save them. Guardian has a lot of those traits too. It seems like these passive traits are necessary because the class active play is insufficient to their survival and that means that there’s a balancing problem somewhere: either the burst damage is too high in general or the class doesn’t have enough active defense mechanics.
• fixing the fact that is impossible for players to use their own ranged skills from the top of the walls would go a long way in making a nerf to arrow carts possible and make the game mode more about players and less about siege.

Countering the current meta

The current WvW meta (at least in the EU) for organized groups in WvW is heavily influenced by PvE raids: you can see groups buffing up before the fights and end up with dozens of seconds of Resistance and Quickness for example.

There’s a few ways to balance this. The first that comes to mind is to revise the boon duration across all classes and the boon share on mesmers, but that would probably affect PvE raids a lot and unlock another can of worms.

Another option is to make AoE boonstripping more widespread or more efficient, for example rework Null Field .

A third option would be to add new mechanics specifically tailored against boon sharing in PvP, like for example a new condition that works the opposite of Resistance, “disabling” the boons for a target for a very limited time.

Defending objectives always felt pretty useless. Yes, you might lose the upgrades, but in the end the objective will be easy to cap back once flipped. You lose maybe a few ticks of PPT and the effort required to upgrade it again (that happens automatically if you hold your camps).

What we need is a complete overhaul. Remove Points-Per-Tick completely: factions will gain points by killing enemies and capturing or defending objectives.

Capture and Defense bonus points are to be calculated based on a sensible balance with the PPK score.

Having the scores based on combat and capture will automatically give a more balanced result that reflects the level of activity thorough the day AND night without any need for complicated systems to calculate the population or force servers to have a predetermined “prime time”: only active play matters, from every player in any timezone.

This will also greatly reduce the influence of “nightcapping”: once the objective is captured, it won’t bring in any more points, unless there’s someone attacking it and the nightcappers defend it.

Capturing objectives will reward points based on the objective type (camp, tower, etc) and the upgrade level. Capturing a fully upgraded Stonemist will finally feel rewarding!

“Under attack” and white swords

Camps are considered “under attack” when any of the guards is in combat.
Towers, Keeps and Stonemist Castle are considered “under attack” when any gate or wall receives siege damage or falls below 95% health: this should prevent most griefing/exploiting by tagging objectives with bots.

When the objective is under attack, white swords appear instantly, for better reaction times in defense.

Defense events

When a Tower, Keep or Stonemist Castle are under attack a new event spawns for the defending server: they have a “defensive window” of N minutes (2 minutes seems like a decent value to start with, could scale with the upgrade level since it takes longer to break into upgraded objectives) to kill or chase away the attackers and/or destroy or disable their siege. The conditions to win the event may vary, I’m not sure how the event engine works internally and what statistics can it hook to, so that’ll need more research.

If the defenders win the event, they gain a fixed amount of wvw score based on what objective is being defended.
This bonus doesn’t scale with the objective upgrade level for a simple reason: while it is more important to defend an upgraded objective (because you’re denying a bigger chunk of points to the enemy), it is also easier. Keeping the defense bonus equal at all upgrade levels should be an incentive to defend non-upgraded objectives, even if it’s harder.

Camps would not give bonus points for defense, because having the supplies delivered to upgrade objectives should already be incentive enough for defending them (strategic value).

The objectives are not considered under attack anymore when they are captured or there’s no damage to guards, gates, walls or stationary defensive siege (cannons, mortars, etc) for two “defensive windows” in a row.

New mechanic: “Desperate Defense”. When an objective is being captured (“ring up”), defenders gain rewards for each second they can stall (account bound currency – proof of heroics? – capped hourly or daily to prevent exploiting). Bonuses could be applied for specific situations, for example there could be increased rewards for upgraded objectives, or for strategic objectives like the shrine of a keep that is under attack.

New mechanic: “Multiple objective bonus”. When multiple objectives are conquered by the same faction in a short timespan (let’s say, less than the “Defensive Window” duration), the faction receives bonus points for the feat: rewarding attacking multiple objectives at the same time, we give incentive to split the blobs in smaller groups and make fights better for everyone.

I reported this more than a week ago to exploits@arena.net but still hasn’t been fixed. Reporting it again on this forum to see if this changes.

Warriors having Healing Signet equipped and enabling the Deep Strike trait will get the Signet of Might effect (icon, stats, etc) “for free”.

You can only remove the effect by equipping Signet of Might and then switching to something else.

Hi everyone! This is my first attempt at redesigning the traits for our beloved class. It is by no means a “finished” work. There’s a lot of stuff I’m not happy with, but I wanted some feedback on the ideas and the general direction I’m pointing at.

Some premises: I started doing this only because I wanted to familiarize better with our traitlines and the basic design behind our class. I don’t pretend to have the ultimate solution to all mesmer problems, I made all of this just for fun. Also: the names of the new traits are terrible, any suggestions are welcome

Trying to “drill down” and categorize our traits was enlightening to say the least: we’ve been called an “utility” class for a long time, yet we have very poor support options (only 5 traits), while a huge amount of traits are dedicated to our own survival (16 in my categorization). We have lots of major traits related to our class mechanic (14 traits somewhat related to shatters), yet only 5 for phantasms. And we have lots of traits unrelated to anything else (cooldown and range for manipulations, glamours, signets, etc).

Another thing I noticed is how many traits felt “misplaced”: for example we get confusion on clone death on a Precision/Ferocity traitline and yet Phantasm damage in a Vitality/Healing traitline. Our traits are spread all over the place and that doesn’t help while making our builds.

Finally, another point that I never liked was that I felt like some of our traitlines lack a proper focus: while Domination and Dueling are quite on point (nice synergy with the stats and traits), some others felt weird, like our Illusion traitline, tied with Condition Damage, while for a long time we didn’t have any real option for condi shatter.

I started by reworking the focus of each traitline and switching some stats around.

Domination
Focus: Control/Damage – Direct damage
Stats: Power, Condition Duration

Dueling
Focus: Damage/Survival – Phantasms
Stats: Precision, Ferocity

Chaos
Focus: Survival/Control – Conditions
Stats: Toughness, Condition Damage

Inspiration
Focus: Support/Survival – Boons & Healing
Stats: Healing Power, Boon Duration

Illusions
Focus: Damage/Support – Shatters
Stats: Vitality, Shatter cooldown

The basic idea is to make Domination and Chaos the preferred traitlines for Interrupt builds, Dueling for Phantasms, Chaos a good choice for tanky and Condi builds, Inspiration for anything support-oriented and Illusions for Shatter builds.

Edit: added a screenshot of the current iteration

This is a list I made reworking some ideas I already posted and some new ideas I got from other posts and Reddit.

Make WvW rewarding

• scale rewards with the fight difficulty: small organized guilds wiping zergs must have better rewards than zergs steamrolling smaller groups. Capturing a well defended T3 keep must reward significantly more than a t0. (this would be fixed by The Eventful WvW )
• better achievement system and rework of the current achievements (somewhat fixed with HoT): reward long term committment with a better distribution of achievement points for long term achievements and make people want to push themselves to “achieve” amazing feats like winning a 1v5 fight or get 5 interrupts with the same skill (more examples in this thread )
• consider adding reward tracks similar to those added in sPVP: reward the player long-term commitment with unique stomp finishers and WvW-specific armor and weapon skins. - added in 2016, April 19 patch
• get rid of PPT, Glicko-rate every fight (open field and tower/keep defense) instead, weighted for number of players in the area (see the Eventful WvW and The fundamental flaw of WvW )
• fix and improve rewards for defending, running yaks, building and refreshing siege, scouting, etc (again, this would be fixed by the Eventful WvW system)
• Reaching the “legend” rank in each tier should grant a new title and an unique stomp finisher

Improve tactical aspects

• commander messages have a different color in team and mapchat (wvw only). Commanders also have a different cooldown trigger for the spam filter (so they can write more than 3 times in a row, for example)
• commanders can choose to “join” another commander, so a proper chain of command can be established - not in game but can be done with the current squad system
• each commander can register players as scouts: scouts will have a simple interface to report enemy sightings, keeps and towers under attack and so on and receive rewards if the scouting is accurate - something similar has been added in April 19, 2016 patch
• new map interface for commanders, bigger than the minimap, but still windowed, that will show scout reports and will allow a commander to assign missions to scouts and other commanders that joined him
• commanders can now choose to show the tag on map for everyone or only for their guild; if they are showing it only for their guild, they can still be seen by other commanders.
• make a new tag “guild commander” that can be purchased with a guild currency that can only be gained by doing wvw as a guild. Guild commanders can only be seen by their current guild and by other commanders.
• cap the number of rallies from a defeated player to 3 per server - this has been done around January 2016

Fix and improve siege

• arrowcarts and trebuchets should not be able to hit from behind the gates
• arrowcart damage and accuracy should falloff with distance
• all projectile siege start with a finite amount of projectiles, after that amount has been used, they are disabled and require a 10 supply recharge
• new trap options, for example an “ambush trap” that put enemies in combat with a few veterans (scaled by number of players), sold by friendly mercenary camps
• import the sentry mechanic from EOTM - sorta added with HoT (with some limitations)

Improve guilds and introduce alliances

• make it easier for guilds to move to other servers. For example: buy transfer discounts with guild influence/merits, and be able to maintain the upgrades (this has been added when guilds where made multi-server).
• alliances of guilds can provide a better framework for organizing coverage

Quality of life

• allow players to gain the option to reset wvw traits every few (30? 50? 100?) ranks
• make team chat readable across all the borderlands and EB, every message will be prefixed with the map that has originated from
• make it easier to choose a new server: provide the option to sort servers in the server list by queue length and number of players from the same geographical location
• since the servers only make sense from a WvW point of view, get rid of the “population” tab or adjust it to reflect actual WvW population (and rate transfer fees accordingly) - this has been done
• fix retaliation
• bring back the matchup forums; to access them, make players sign an agreement that what they read is not endorsed or controlled by ANet in any way, but killing the forums had a really bad impact on the community.

Some crazy ideas

• rework WvW completely and make it eventful
• enemy siege can be “conquered” using supplies (maybe 30% of the build cost?). Allies (maybe restricted to guild?) get the option to “demolish” it to prevent the enemy from capturing it.
• supply storage in keeps is now split between inner and outer depots, inner depot contains 1/3 of total supplies, outer depots contain the rest, once the external perimeter of the keep has been breached, outer depots become neutral and both defenders and invaders can take supplies from there
• consider abandoning the server system like has been done in EOTM and make an interface to join specific overflows instead, so that guilds can choose where to go and what kind of fights to face; points conquered by guilds and players could add up to the server’s total score and ranking
• “import” some good ideas from EOTM: for example, secondary objectives that give powerful tactical advantages, like the wurm tunnels or sentries

This post is part of a series I made for the 4th birthday of the game. You can find links to the other posts in the overview

Server linking is a temporary solution to a very messy problem: WvW population.

For WvW players, there’s two main constraints to consider: faction and server. Faction (“color”) is a hard constraint: during a match you shouldn’t be able to join the other factions to spy, grief and what else. The Server is a “soft” constraint, as server linking clearly shows: players from two or more servers can easily fight for the same faction in the same matchup.

The problem is: how to spread out players to different factions in a way that is as balanced as possible during day and night and during the course of the week-long match? And how we keep guilds or servers “together” when we split the factions around? And how we maintain a healthy number of players in every map as long as possible?

In PvE it’s easy: everyone is on the same side, just create more copies of the same map and put them all in different copies. But for WvW we have the factions to consider, and possibly even the “server pride” that kept many communities together.

Getting rid of “servers”, consolidating the population in 3 different factions and having multiple copies of the same map(s) for each faction would open many options, for example there could be (player driven or ANet enforced) maps dedicated to different group sizes and playstyles: sometimes you are looking for small scale fights and there’s only blobs everywhere. Some other times you would rather relax and follow the blue dorito for some blobfest.

Maybe squads could be a good way of splitting the population. The commander picks a faction at the start of the matchup and who joins his squad is asked if he wants to lock with that particular faction for that matchup. Squads are big enough for a blob, but not enough to saturate a map, allowing for more people to join the same overflow (roamers, maybe one or two small guilds).

How to balance things up for the long term then? If everyone can pick his faction every week, we’ll soon end up with everyone trying to play for the same color and that wouldn’t be very funny.

Maybe there could be a system to spread out WvW guilds (but what if a player is in more than one WvW guild?) and public commanders (more questions: how do you define a “WvW guild” and a “public commander”?) between the factions, and players unaffiliated with either are assigned to the lowest population faction the first time they join WvW during a matchup, to balance things up.

I don’t know.
I gave this topic a lot of thought but I couldn’t find any solution that would completely satisfy me, so my “constructive contribution” here is limited to pointing out what I think the problems are and a few ideas I had about how to solve them.

Your initial post was about “a solo or pvp scenario”. In that scenario you can stack 20 vulnerability using Diversion (with Dazzling) on your target with 3 clones and IP and subsequently burst it down with Mind Wrack enjoying a 10% bonus damage from Fragility.

In PVE, applying vulnerability on the target is a group effort and other classes are arguably better than mesmer, but who cares? Everyone in the party will benefit from the vulnerability, and the mesmer will benefit 50% more (37.5% vs 25% damage increase).

After so many years, we’re still a long way from having proper rewards and recognition for guilds and players in WvW. Something has been done, the reward tracks are a very good addition and the opening up of vendors selling the HoT gear and sigils is another good one.
But we want and we deserve more.

These are a few things I would personally like to see in game.

• a system to acquire exotic and ascended gear with the stats we want, automatically updated with the newest additions to the game
• exclusive WvW rewards (legendary backpack, armor sets, weapons sets, etc)
• guild and personal wvw ladders
• guild ladder based on objectives captured (with bonuses for upgraded stuff), objectives defended, objectives held for longer, camp flipped, dollies killed, kill ratio, etc…
• once a ladder is in place, the WvW upgrades system could be tied to it
• cool siege skins and other cosmetic stuff (different tower/keep skins?!) for the top ranked guilds
• player ladder based on similar stats and on the contribution to fights (damage, healing, interrupts/CC, etc)
• unlock better personal rewards based on the personal ladder rank (exclusive skins, finishers, titles, badges near the name, etc)
• add fun, new achievements as a way to keep people entertained and to offer a challenge to veterans

ODB.6891:

The wave from ToT appears to begin in front of the mesmer…not behind or inside. This means that we don’t get the quickness/shield #5 recharge from its use unless we combine it with iLeap to get in front of it as it is on the way to our target.

Wrong, just watch the video again. He gets Quickness on using the skill, and Quickness again on the return wave. So: no target limit, quickness on (you and) allies, damage & stun on enemies… we don’t have ANYTHING like it in any other weapon.

/thread

We’re 4 years in and WvW still struggles at being considered a game mode on his own. Some steps have been taken, albeit very late, to fix some of the stuff that is broken, but the most important things are still “in development” after 10 months since the release of the expansion.

Skill balance and power creep

This isn’t the most important, but for me it has been the most annoying problem with WvW for a long time.
Balancing around a 5v5 conquest game mode with nearly entirely different gear is not working very well for WvW. I made a separate thread to discuss this problem more in detail and offer some ideas and possible workarounds.

Population imbalance

This is by far the worst and the hardest to solve. We want lively maps, full of bloodthirsty people killing each other, but we don’t want long queues. Even with server linking, we’re far from this. I made another thread discussing this problem in detail with a few ideas on how it could be solved, but TL;DR: make only 3 factions and map overflows that can scale in number during the day and during the week when the active WvW population grows and shrinks.

Scoring and nightcap

Frankly, I think this is the easiest to solve. I posted a long thread discussing all the details, but TL;DR: remove PPT and make the scoring based on capturing and defending objectives and number of kills.

The WvW guild upgrades system is completely broken

TL;DR: going from starting your guild to dropping your first Guild Catapult it’s gonna cost you around 2500g and a few weeks of your time. No, it’s not funny. I posted all the gory details and a few ideas on how to fix it in another thread.

Siegeing is boring and siege weapons are OP

We play games because it’s fun. Sitting there for half an hour watching trebs firing against a reinforced wall is not. Having your blob killed by a bunch of enemies sitting on arrow carts and cannons is not great fun, either. I posted all the changes I would make to siege in “excruciating details”, as Taimi would say.

Rewards and recognition

Between the reward tracks and the new vendors granting access to HoT gear in WvW, ArenaNet closed most of the gap that kept WvW lagging behind the other game modes. We still lack access to all the stat combinations from the vendors, but what we really need is the recognition of our efforts as WvW players and WvW guilds. We want to brag about our game mode of choice. Yes, we want a ridicolously good looking legendary backpack. We want shiny armors and weapons. We want titles and preposterous finishers to throw in our enemies faces. We want ladders to show our enemies that we’re better than them.
I created a separated thread to discuss this .

Quality of life

QoL comes last in “importance” and “urgency”, but we all know how it could greatly improve the game experience for everyone. I posted a few ideas but these forums are filled with other good ideas to improve our favourite game mode.

Grav.3568:

- Players gain one free WXP re-spec with every 10 WXP ranks they gain.

10 feels a bit low, I would say every 30, 50 or 100.

Caliburn.1845:

-Arrowcarts are now line of sight.
-Unique skins and items attainable only in WvW.
-More attainable WvW achievements and titles.
-WvW match-ups now offer substantially greater rewards to the winner server.
-Extensive statistics tracking added to WvW. Including man-hours played by server. WvW kills by server. WvW deaths by server. Number of siege equipment deployed by server. Average player lifespan on server.

With the big issue of establishing what the reward for a winning server is.

Urrid.4593:

- Several annoying invulnerable spots near team specific borders have been tweaked.

Fizwitz.8240:

- Killing a player can only revive up to 5 people

I would say 5 people per server, considering you can have 3 way fights…

And now, my turn:

General

• a new structure has been built by the krait in the middle of the lake in every borderland: capturing the krait keep unleashes the power of the storm on it. The storm slowly destroy the walls and gates of the keep, opening it to enemy attacks and requiring constant repairs to maintain sovereignity over it. The krait keep cannot be upgraded and once completely destroyed is unavailable for an hour, while the kraits reclaim it and rebuild the walls.
• a new “fight difficulty” multiplier has been introduced: WXP and magic find for player kills will be influenced by the numerical difference of the opposing forces: a 20 man group wiping a 60 man zerg would get bonus WXP and magic find, while the 60 man zerg wiping a 20 man group would be punished, getting less than normal WXP and lower quality loot.
• team chat (/team or /t) is now readable across all borderlands and the eternal battlegrounds, messages will be prefixed with the borderland of the player that wrote the message to avoid confusion
• all projectile siege start with a finite amount of projectiles, after that amount has been used, they are disabled and require a 10 supply recharge
• supply storage in keeps is now split between inner and outer depots, inner depot(s) can contain 1/3 of total supplies, outer depots contain the rest, once the external perimeter of the keep has been breached, depots become neutral and both defenders and invaders can take supplies from there
• you can now easily spot more expert invaders: from rank 150 upwards, a medal (bronze, silver, gold, and so on) will display beside their name.
• more achievements have been added and the existing achievement rewards have been updated to reflect the effort required to get each of them

Reaching the “legend” rank in each tier (rank 120, 570 and so on) will grant new rewards:

• a new unique stomp finisher animation
• the related title: “WuhWuh Legend”, “WuhWuh Bronze Legend”, and so on
• access to a new vendor where you can exchange badges of honor for unique armor and weapon skins

New and improved commander interface:

• commander messages have a different color in team and mapchat (wvw only). Commanders also have a different cooldown trigger for the spam filter (so they can write more than 3 times in a row, for example)
• commanders can choose to join another commander, so a proper chain of command can be established
• each commander can register up to 3 players as scouts: scouts will have a simple interface to report enemy sightings, keeps and towers under attack and so on
• new map interface for commanders, bigger than the minimap, with the the reports from the scouts and tools to order where to go and what to do
• commanders can now choose to show the tag on map for everyone or only for their guild

In an effort to spread out the population and achieve better coverage for all the servers and timezones:

• on the world selection window, each player will receive a server suggestion based on server wvw populations/coverage requirements and coverage statistics from player’s past 4 weeks in wvw: he can transfer to the suggested world for a minimal fee or can choose another server for the usual fee.
• based on similar coverage statistics, Guilds can apply for guild transfers: if applicable, they will receive a special discount for up to 50 members if they move to a suggested server. All guild upgrades, influence and merits are transfered aswell.

(ANet, I spent hours writing this, make me happy, make it happen!)

As I mentioned in OMFG guild chat: at least they can’t nerf the 3 weapon skills we didn’t get because we got “something just as good”.

The alacrity nerf is just bad. They could at least have changed the major trait to grant the 66% back for the mesmer… but alas, that’s not ANet way. When ANet nerfs mesmers, they double or triple nerf it. So now we have less uptime AND less effectiveness. And we’re stuck with skills with base cooldowns that accounted for the old alacrity. Who decided this either fails terribly at understanding the mechanics or just wanted to gut Chronomancers for good.

Well of Precognition is now complete garbage and on top of that it still has his 45 seconds cooldown and insane .75s cast time. And they made sure thieves could just ignore it if any chrono decided to slot it. Heh.

The scepter “buff” is a sad joke that I’m sure will make some PVE player happy for a tinypercent more damage if you sit facetanking a single target. People that think hybrid power/condi mesmer DPS will be viable will be sadly disappointed (or will keep living in their own imaginary world).

The Chaos Armor nerf was like: it gives too much blind. So, instead of reworking the chance to happen for blind (like: add weakness to the rotation, or lower the chance for blind and increase the chance for the other conditions) they removed it completely, swapping it for weakness.

Chaotic Dampening has been nerfed again because it was just too good. Boooo bunker mesmers! Not fun! ESPOOOOOORTSSSSSSSSSSSSS.

The buff to Restorative Mantras makes me smile sadly: I played support Tempest and our mantras can’t even begin to compare with what they can offer from that point of view. Mantras are the most clumsy skills in game (excluding Ventari on Revenant) and they want us to support people combining that with the most weird boon sharing in game (everyone gets double boons EXCEPT the mesmer).

Mistrust: buffed by 100%. Still complete garbage.

They even nerfed our CRAZY Resistance uptime: 5s every 90s on shatter, 3s every 180s on timewarp, 3s every 72s on veil, 3s every 32s on null field and feedback. WoW. Basically if we ran 4 glamours and chrono + inspiration we would still be worse than a Revenant with Mallyx. Crazy stuff.

We got many strong – and long awaited – buffs (IE, IP, phantasm damage, shatter cooldowns, blink range).

The changes to Confusing Images and Scepter AA 3, alongside with the new scepter traits, are the love scepter deserved.

Looking forward to test the changes to Illusionary Leap this. But the problem in big groups remains: the clone will die before we can swap.

Mimic: oh, nice! Another 90s skill for our skillbar, exactly what we needed! </sarcasm>

Mirror: traited it could be quite strong.

Phantasmal Mage: will the condition removal come back when traited? This phantasm needed a buff, if anything… this feels like a nerf

Signet of Inspiration: Mesmers can’t have perma swiftness, can they? :\
I love the cooldown reduction, tho.

Time Warp now pulses 1 second of slow every second on foes in the affected area: WOW!

Domination minor traits: still can’t understand why interrupting an enemy applies less vuln than merely dazing. Fragility will require a little more work for that +12.5% damage, but it should be very good in PVE where vuln is always on the target.

Rending Shatter: feels really weak compared to the alternatives.

Imagined Burden: even if I loved the cooldown mechanic they announced the last time, this trait feels a lot more solid. Tons of might (will work better in roaming and PvP than zergs) and cripple uptime for kiting. Nice!

Mental Anguish: nerf compared to what we currently have as an adept trait, with a slight buff if you manage to land mind wrack on a dazed/stunned/etc foe. Feels weak to me, although 25/50% was probably too strong. From the wording, it applies to Cry of Frustration too (so the overall damage might be buffed actually), but that’s not our primary burst… and without burst we won’t be able to kill anything.

Confusing Combatants: even if only a chance on crit, this will probably grant huge confusion uptime

Duelist’s Discipline: guess the recharge will work even with interrupts NOT made with a pistol? And even when you are on a different weaponset?

Fencer’s Finesse: Soooo they moved the stacking ferocity buff from mantras to sword and somewhat nerfed it (it was a percentage of your ferocity iirc). 6 seconds seems way too short, even considering that BF will give you many stacks. Upkeep won’t probably be a problem when fighting multiple opponents, though.

Harmonious Mantras: it went back to the flat damage buff that won’t apply to our phantasms :\

Illusionary Defense: “We want you to shatter! But we also want you to keep your illusions alive!” — Anet.

Mirror of Anguish: still on a huge cooldown. Not worth it imho.

Prismatic Understanding: I can already hear the crying.

Bountiful Disillusionment: I’ll try it, but I still think it’s horrible.

Mender’s Purity: minor! WOW.

Inspiring Distortion: This is cool! Love it.

Healing Prism: Support mesmer is real!

Restorative Mantras: I like how you split Mender’s purity from this. Good job!

Restorative Illusions: the merge is real! Strong trait!

Protected Phantasms: I guess distortion on the illusions on shatter was too strong. Not sure how useful Protection will be, but I still like the trait since it allows us to use iZerker in zergs

Mental Defense: can’t really think of any scenario where this would be useful. Maybe dueling thieves? But the summon will fail because blind/evade/stealth.

Illusionary Inspiration: with the cooldown lowered to 30s, this trait feels a lot stronger.

Temporal Enchanter: the wording on this is unclear at best. Does this apply to people going through portal? Or veil? Or timewarp? Does this have a max target limit?

Shattered Strength: I don’t know how I feel with this now being a major trait and not being buffed.

Ineptitude: does the ICD apply on the confusion application, on the blind application, or both? If I blind an attacker, I apply confusion on him. If I evade an attack from the same attacker during the next 10s, does he get blind? Does he get confusion too?

Master of Fragmentation: some utility but nothing that really screams “PICK ME PICK ME!”. Weakest choice in this tier…

Malicious Sorcery: considering how awkward scepter has always been, this is the weapon trait it deserved. Looking forward to test it!

Svarty.8019:

I’m guessing that the guild upgrades weren’t behind a 3 month paywall in the beta, lol?

Nope, and we didn’t even have an hint about how stupidly time/money gated they would be.

During the beta, every upgrade was available for free and in unlimited quantities.

Changing that would make for a completely different experience in WvW – right now.

skcamow.3527:

The alacrity nerf is so bad, this afternoon I started to take a second/third/tenth look at some of the other chronomancer traits and quickly determined that core mesmer may now be in the ballpark of coming close to chronomancer. Maybe this was the intent, to buff the core by severely nerfing the elite. Whatever the reason, in PvP well of recall is 100% necessary to maintain any stretch of remote viability of ANY chrono build, and that’s sad.

“Core mesmer has never been competitive – let’s nerf chrono to the same level!” — Anet

Jon_Peters: i wont say when they are coming
Jon_Peters: but I will see we made some updates to arcane magic for elementalist since last we showed it
Jon_Peters: yeah here is a spoiler boon on attune is becoing a minor trait
Jon_Peters: elemental attunement
Jon_Peters: we made som pretty heavy changes to the lines since last we showed them
Jon_Peters: both blood magic AND inspiration changed a bunch
Jon_Peters: and even what we showed in engineer ended up changing a lot
Jon_Peters: im sure we will show some of this stuff again soon
Jon_Peters: Credit to the whole team working on these changes. Everyone has really kicked a bunch of kitten on this thing
Jon_Peters: but some info on them coming soon

from the twitch stream

They are listening!
(maybe)

Edit: kicking kittens sounds awfully mean.

“Skritt burglars are no longer affected by Polymorph Moa.”

I’m late, but I wanted to add this to the list because it’s borderline hilarious/sad. ANet please share with us the stats about how many times has this been “exploited” in game that required priority fixing over the list of game breaking bugs mesmer has. Please.

Just got kicked from Gandara and logged back to an overflow where of course the event wasn’t playing. Fix this please…

They seem pretty quick to nerf our stuff. Priorities…

Well it makes sense since you are not interrupting anything, but feels like really bad design. Some ideas from the top of my head:

• when traited, CC effects could have increased effect on the breakbar (so you don’t get the normal trait effect, but at least your traiting it is worth something)
• make the interrupt traits work at least on the “guarded breakbar” (assuming this applies to NPCs casting some powerful spell that you want to interrupt)
• grant a X-seconds window after breaking the bar where all CC effects grant the interrupt-trait bonus effect

Aomine.5012:

Menaka.5092:

Aomine.5012:

A lot of panicking Mesmers show up to defend their broken stealth because they’re abusing it right now :P

Anyway, I don’t think stealth has to go, but I think PU should go, and using any clones or phantasm in stealth should instantly get you “revealed” at the moment of cast. It should be more in-line with thief. When in stealth, Mesmer shouldn’t be able to do damage or set up burst at all.

So… thief can “setup” burst by going in stealth, but it’s a no-no for mesmers?

1. Currently Mesmer is allowed to stay in stealth while phantasm or clones dish out damage. It is reasonable to do that if the caster cast them BEFORE they go into stealth, but able to summon some of the phantasm and clones while in stealth just because it doesn’t directly does damage is unreasonable.

So they shouldn’t be able to setup burst at all while in stealth. At the same time, a thief can open with a 8-12k backstab from stealth without any issue.

Aomine.5012:

2. Thief’s burst involving direct contact with the foes, while Mesmer’s burst can set up on any location. Not to mention it’s also AOE too.

Try using mirror blade from 1200 range, from stealth, on an opponent that is aware that the mesmer is around. You’ll fail. The projectile isn’t stealth, so it can be dodged. Also, from maximum range it doesn’t bounce back and you lose a ton of damage on your burst, and the shatter from IP doesn’t apply. The optimal burst is Mirror Blade + Mind Wrack from melee range.

Also, only the mindwrack component of the burst is AoE, actually having mirror blade bounce to a secondary target will lower your burst.

Aomine.5012:

3. Many of the Mesmer’s stealth completely ignores reveal and still go into stealth..

I didn’t test it after the patch, but before the patch only Decoy worked that way and it may have been fixed since.

Aomine.5012:

4. Thief cannot do their burst while being in evade mode or invulnerable mode. If you’re talking about S/D that can evade, they lose a tremendous amount of stealthing potential by choosing that weapon set.

If you are talking about Blurred Frenzy, it roots you in place, so it’s easily countered. F4 shatter uses your illusions so you actually trade your potential burst for survival.

Aomine.5012:

5. Thief is much much MUCH weaker than Mesmer now, with way more counter-play than Mesmer.

[citation needed]

Aomine.5012:

6. Thief does not have easy access to reflect like Mesmer does, so projectiles that can track through stealth works less on Mesmer.

reflecting projectiles back will give you revealed, would you enjoy that?

Funny that everyone is complaining about power shatter combo mirror blade/dodge/mindwrack and that’s… pretty much identical to what you had before… If you still play domi/dueling/illusions, the build is pretty much the same, the big difference in damage is that you don’t need to waste points in condition duration (domi) and condition damage (illusions), so your playing in full zerk gear gives you this “amazing damage” with the same identical combo you used before.

It was broken before, it’s fixed now. Stop calling for nerfs for kitten sake.

Arewn.2368:

I’m going to try to re-identify my problem for you here. Maybe from this perspective it will be easier for you to get where I’m coming from.
Base mesmer is facing an identify crisis. Chrono Mesmers will have everything base mesmer has, plus chrono additions making them distinct. When we get more elite specs, each of those will have what base mesmer has, plus new-elite-spec additions making them distinct.

Unless some traits in the chronomancy spec completely overlaps with traits in other lines, that is the difference between a Chronomancer and a Mesmer.

Let’s pick an example: the standard power Shatter build, that has been in game since the start, after the trait rework will probably still look Domination/Dueling/Illusions. If you pick Chronomancy over any of those lines, you won’t be able to run the “standard Shatter build”. You can run “a Shatter build”, using what the Chronomancy spec may offer in clone generation and Shatter damage, but it won’t play exactly the same.

If for any reason you’ll end up thinking “wow this Domi/Chaos/Inspi build would work perfectly with F5, shield or Wells!”… sorry! No dice… if you want access to shield, F5 and wells, you need to trade one of those specs for Chronomancy, even if the traits are less suited to what you had in mind.

While you say a Chronomancer has more flexibility, in fact it has less, because if you want access to any of the Chronomancer goodies you are forced into choosing that Specialization and your “flexibility” is reduced to two other specs you can choose from the 5 core specs.

You are saying there’s no tradeoff, but that is the tradeoff: you are giving up your nature of “mesmer” as defined by a “core build” (made only with core specializations) to get access to the new shinies. You’ll be a Chronomancer. ANet even said you’ll get a new class icon when you pick the Elite Spec.

I guess that’s the new content for WvWers…

As I said in the other thread, if they wanted to fix it, they could make it similar to the engineer trait: 12% of what you heal yourself will go to your allies. You could even rework the number since it’s a minor, make it 10% or 8%, but that works, scales well up/down and apparently is not OP since it has not ben nerfed in the same patch.

The current version is completely useless, far worse than any of the other support traits in game.

Mirage Cloak: if you compare it to Daredevil, it’s worse in every possible way. We don’t get another endurance bar, we have very limited endurance regeneration, even slotting Dueling, the movement on the sides and back is crippled by how the movement works in GW2 (did anyone try it with action camera?), we don’t get any meaningful way of customizing the dodge for condi/power/other builds. Also, the notion that any pvp player would be fooled by the blur effect is absolutely ridicolous.

Mirror mechanic: Mirage doesn’t get any movement speed bonus, mesmer doesn’t have any decent access to movement speed. And our secondary mechanic is obviously “walk towards the mirror to activate your primary mechanic”. How didn’t anyone see a problem with this? Also, we have very limited ways to create these mirrors. The only possible way I can think this could somewhat work is by wasting Jaunt to get to the mirrors. As usual, mesmers have to work hard against their own mechanics to achieve any result.

Utilities

False Oasis: has a long cast and heals over time; it creates a mirror after a while (the description is somewhat confusing: is the creation of a “mirage” important in any way?). I don’t see any reason to take it over any other heal since the mirror mechanic is pretty hard to use in any pvp context.

Crystal Sands: in theory our best option to apply some aoe conditions, in practice it pales compared to what Firebrand, Revenant and Necromancers/Scourges can field. Just another gimmick.

Illusionary Ambush: this felt like the most consistent of the utilities, when paired with main hand sword gives a nice option for a gap closer.

Mirage Advance: a shadowstep with a long cast time and a short range. Not worth taking over blink.

Sand Through Glass: this could make sense if it had 10s cooldown. On a 30s cooldown it’s just pointless.

Elite

Jaunt: the extremely limited range make using it really painful. I ended up either using it for safe stomps (burning 2 charges) or to run away from angry zergs (using all the charges). I guess it could make sense also in a gs burst from close range, and for some condi application on a condi build.

Hammer plz.
Let me smash faces and disappear in a cloud of pink butterflies…

Swag Captain.5318:

It was exploitable because the Swap skill specifically states “Swap places with your Clone. Immobilize nearby foes.” If you have no clone (specifically one spawned by the initial Illusionary Leap skill) you can’t swap places with one. The fact that people were still able to after the clone was destroyed means this was a bug and therein could be exploited if utilized in certain ways, such as Blinking away from your immobile foes.

You have no idea of what you are talking about, sry.

UltraElectroMagnetic.2187:

• Gotta Go Fast
• Thunderstorm

Ultimaistanza.4793:

• Cutbacks
• Labor Strike
• Light as a feather
• Unlimited Powah!
• Consortium Catalog Siege

sephiroth.4217:

Activate friendly fire.

Seed.5467:

• Asuran Tech-Week
• Elemental chaos Week

x indigo x.6981:

Force-neutral siege

I really like these!

Ultimaistanza.4793:

• OH YEAH! – Siege does no damage to gates or wall, but players can hit walls and do significantly more damage to both.

I would say: no siege can be deployed at all, players do increased damage to gates and can damage walls.

Ultimaistanza.4793:

• Dhuum’s Wrath – No downstate.
• KAMIKAZE!!!!! – When a person (and maybe mobs) dies it leaves a Big Ol Bomb behind. The bomb doesn’t effect friendly units of whichever side dropped it.

Put these together for maximum fun

UltraElectroMagnetic.2187:

Haunted House – Walls, Gates and other Structures have strong perma-retaliation (anti-PvD basically)

What about: Electrified fences, gates have permanent Shocking Aura.

UltraElectroMagnetic.2187:

The Watchers
Caravan

Ultimaistanza.4793:

Un-Righteous Indignation

Put all these together during “NPCs on steroid” week!

Ultimaistanza.4793:

Build Mode – When you cap a structure, all destructible walls and gates spawn in as destroyed.
Un-Righteous Indignation – Lords don’t gain RI after a point is capped, but instead have a constant buff that allows them to do the same damage as RI without the invuln.

What about, instead, capping doesn’t fix walls/gates? So if you cap something you need to repair whatever damage you did to get inside. And the lord is not invulnerable so it can be flipped back istantly.

Seed.5467:

Dolyaks Best Friend Week: Escort and protect Dolyaks on their way to work and earn +2 Points for your world upon successful Escort and Protection. Loosing a Dolyak will cost your world -2 Points.

I really like the idea of “negative points” for NOT defending something.

Hutchy.5430:

Corporate take over. – This mode adds the option for guilds to just buy towers and keeps with gold.

This would be hilarious: bribe guards to get through the gates :°D

Zenith.7301:

Compounding power is 9% extra damage, the trait makes it easier to stay at that threshold since you shatter, spawn 2 phantasms and the clone you got back.

The clone you get back is 3% of that damage, you can resummon the phantasms regardless.

Zenith.7301:

Besides 30% crit to slowed targets, for which you need high slowed uptime. Current crit rate on full berk gear is around 57-60%. Food bumps it higher, and with fury you got around 80% crit so taht 30% extra crit from the trait actually has a lot of its bonus wasted.

even if you “waste” 10% crit chance, you would gain power by switching to zerk – assuming the group can provide slow on the reflects.

Zenith.7301:

As far as the speed trait, the condi reduction part is worthless in PvE and it’s a speed bonus that could have been put in signet of midnight considering 10% boon duration on a class that has no access to boons whatsoever outside the Chaos line pretty worthless

so you would rather have PvP/WvW mesmers waste a utility slot instead of PvE mesmers having to “waste” a minor trait… to each his own I guess

Zenith.7301:

And the Chaos line is plain garbage outside dueling/roaming as it isn’t even used for PvE or large scale WvW.

How can you tell it won’t be used in WvW after the changes? Chaos look pretty good from a survival/group support point of view.

One interesting note about GS trait is that the cooldown reduction now only works when you’re actively using the weapon and won’t apply when you switch to your other set. This applies in part to Staff as well (altough we have some ways to get chaos armor when not wielding a Staff)

I’ll throw in a few more ideas:

• Sudden death: after 30 seconds in combat, all people involved are brought down to 1hp
• Pinball Wars 2: catapult and trebuchet projectiles bounce.
• Super World vs World Box: you can only play with SAB weapons (pointy stick, whip, etc) and maybe special “8bit” siege?

Sebrent.3625:

A Unicorn can kill you with its head (i.e. its horn) … I don’t see the problem.

how much damage does the unicorn do on a golem, tho?

DDCarvalho.2071:

JonPeters.5630:

Minor

• Time Marches On – You move 25% faster. The duration of incoming movement-impairing conditions is reduced by 25%. (Cripple. Chilled, Immobilize)

I have 2 opinions about this trait:

1) It is a trait that gives an immense mobility advantage, so I would put it on a major (selectable) trait, not in a minor one. It should be a choice.

2) It is a fix for one of the main disvantages of mesmer: lack of mobility (mesmers have 1 unreliable swiftness skill) so I would not put it on the elite specialization, it should be on the place of whatever is the weakest/lamest core trait currently (so it can be combined with any elite spec introduced in the future). Putting it on this elite spec will make it required for any activity where mobility is very important (WvW?), in detriment to any new elite specs introduced in the future.

It makes a lot of sense to have it on a minor chronomancer trait: since you control time and space and time are interwined, moving faster is only an effect of you controlling time.

Also, having it in chronomancy doesn’t prevent other elite specs to have similar bonuses…

Yeah I was testing it on my hybrid (rabid armor, traveler runes, sinister jewels) gear and even the direct damage from scepter was nice (AA crits for 600+) with around 1.7-1.8k power

Power Block if I’m playing with Mantra of Distraction, mental anguish otherwise…