Guild Wars 2

@Op, one issue is that most of the current NA servers are full, so you can’t transfer to them.

Also you didn’t mention your US timezone which is a factor on server activity. Some are more heavily east coast weighted, some west.

I can say that Sea of Sorrows is a pretty decent east coast server. There are at least 3-4 active guilds that run in EDT prime time and use TS. I’m on borlis pass and we were recently linked with them, now we are on crystal desert which seems to more active in PDT time. Borlis has also been having something of a revival recently, but its still a linked world so our fate changes every two months.

Bummer that they are leaving, but it makes total sense. If you are a Pro team you want to compete and you want to make money by winning. They can’t just keep waiting around for GW2 to provide that, its too much of an opportunity cost. They have to strike while the iron is hot, both in terms of their skills/team and in terms of the landscape of available games.

I did learn a lot about playing Druid from ROM’s stream though. Probably would have been stuck in bronze forever if I didn’t watch it.

An optional amulet system would be nice. So, if you want, you can select an amulet and it will override your equipped stats. But you don’t have to use it. Perhaps the stats only sum to Exotic armor/weapon + ascended trinkets, so that all the ascended farmers don’t feel cheated. Base weapon damage could still use your equipped weapon type.

It would make experimenting with new builds easier and cheaper. Also certain stat combinations from PvP (like Mender’s) don’t have an easy equivalent in WvW/PvE.

Start new players, or players who skipped ranked last season, at rating 0.

Award 100 ascended shards for each byz chest repeat.

Not expecting this suggestion to be well received by the community:

What should happen is that the rank requirement should be completely eliminated. New players, or players who haven’t played Ranked mode in more than one season, should start with 0 rating. Even if you ace your placement matches, you’ll still be in bronze coming out of them. This also solves the current ridiculous problem of people placing in Legendary straight out of placement. If need be, a new division could be added (“Iron”?) so that people have some experience under their belts by the time they get to silver.

Unranked just doesn’t prepare you for ranked mode. People run off the wall builds there, so you might be more (or less) successful depending on what your build is. These days half the matches are in Coliseum which you can’t even play in ranked. You get teams in unranked and none in ranked. And during the season, the unranked queues are bad: long queue times often followed by ridiculous stomps one way or another.

There should also be a smaller rating change for early placement matches. I’ve seen a rating shift of 117 points for a loss in the first couple matches, thats just too much, whether for victory or loss.

Bottom line, if you want people to get better at ranked mode then they have to practice in ranked mode.

Thanks for the constructive feedback. I can see why the gw2 pvp player base is so very, very small.

I am finding that I am not motivated to play ranked PvP anymore since I have finished the season reward track and received all the ascended shards that I am going to get. The
repeat rewards are not enough to keep me playing.

Even 100 ascended shards per byzantium chest repeat would be good. Since you need approximately 18 wins to complete the chest, this doesn’t seem like it will shower the world with ascended stuff. Especially given that most people will be close to their actual rating level by the time they complete it once, and thus will have a winrate closer to 50/50.

I enjoy PvP, but only in limited doses, so I need some incentive to keep playing and right now I just don’t have that. Also, inb4 “GTFO pve n00b”-type comments, I’m actually a semi-competent player and climbed from 750 rating low point to 1200.

Thanks for the thread. I’m silver 2 ATM. I play shoutbow druid (basically ROM’s build – I have watched some of his streams too).

At the start of the match, I’m not sure whether I should go to mid to help with the team fight there, or push far. Pushing far seems useful since it slows down the enemy team. I seem to win more matches when I do this, rather than fight on mid the whole time. But if I do it up front then my team might be undermanned in the mid fight.

Its a bug or its intentional, the Devs haven’t said which. I’m waiting to spend my shards for this reason.

I play druid and it does not have easy 100% swiftness uptime, unless you think wasting an elite skill or heal just to get swiftness is a good idea.

@Sarrs swiftness is not pointless even if all classes have 25%, its a noticeable speed boost still (about ~6% more). And anyway, why should PvP movement be designed around swiftness, if there are more balanced/fun ways to approach it. In every game context where there is a need for continual swiftness, its a big drag on the gameplay (WvW is even worse).

Why not give everyone a 25% movement speed buff in PvP?

• Matches would go faster
• It would level the playing field, since some classes give up very little to get speed, while others basically can’t take it without disrupting their meta build
• It would let you pick a rune that corresponds with the build you want to play, rather than picking it basically just because it gives you speed

If we have to keep doing this with runes though, I propose two new ones:

• Cheetah: power, vitality, 25%
• Roach: condition damage, vitality, 25%

I main’ed rev up through season 4. For season 5 I switched to Druid due to the rev nerfs. Now that I play druid, I’m happy with the rev nerfs I wouldn’t consider switching back to rev in its current state.

I haven’t lost any 1v1 fights vs power rev in season 5, or even had a standoff with one. After a bit of fighting, i’ve always sent the rev running; some get away but I attribute that more to the fact that I am bad at hunting vs Rev being good at running.

Condi rev is more of a problem for me, but people don’t seem to play them as much.

I definitely get heartburn now when I see a Rev on my team. If they are on the enemy team I often focus them first, even as a druid you can put some hurt on them. In general, though, revs of any type are pretty uncommon now.

If this is fixed, do you know if it would take effect for old games? I could implement a workaround right now that queries an old game and checks to see if it’s “ended” time is what I expect it should be. If it isn’t, I can do my own date calculations based on end time and duration. But this presupposes that its just a code bug or that the data the API uses will be refreshed with the correct values for all time.

Thanks for the hard work on the API. I dig it.

I’m a lowly silver player, but warrior doesn’t seem OP to me. If you kite out the berserk (admittedly not easy) you can substantially reduce its effectiveness. I play druid and I basically just try to stealth/run away when warrior goes berserk, or immob him if I can. Warrior is the counterpart to DH, the damage comes to you instead of you stepping in the damage.

Other classes seem stronger for PvP, like thief and mesmer, because they can do a lot of damage AND move across the map quickly. Warrior seems to be mostly about single point control, his map movement isn’t so great. Right now I have more troubles with thieves than anything else.

Shaogin.2679:

If you’re playing during peak hours then mm isn’t really much of an issue. If you’re playing during low population times then it is completely possible mm is putting together some crazy matches.

Agree with this. You can see this now if you queue in Unranked, even at peak time. There are fewer people playing it, so the matches are pretty nutty, with a big difference in skill levels in a single match. And you are more likely to see class stacking – I had three thieves on my team yesterday in one match. I use unranked to warm up/practice just because its so totally random.

Also, the top stats badges in OP’s screenshot aren’t really significant. You can often get the revive badge just by doing it once. Kills/Damage are strongly correlated. And a DH can easily get top heals if there isn’t a druid/ele on the team. I play druid and I pretty much get heals/revives every match unless there are other druids.

I have been taking screenshots of the end game leaderboard after a PvP match ends. I have the game set to display the time in-game so I can see it on each screenshot.

In the API response for a game, It appears that the “started” time actually is the end time. The time value in this field matches my screenshot. The “ended” time is always later than the start time but I don’t know what it represents, since it is often much later than the actual end time (in one case I see that it is 12 minutes later).

I know that the time on my PC is correct, because it is synced to the network and it matches other things like my phone. I know I’m looking at the right game from the API too because the map and final score matches what is in my screenshot.

The reason I’m looking at this is that I wrote a program to querymy games from the API and then organize screenshots/videos associated with each game. Since the time values are off, my program isn’t matching up the media files correctly.

I don’t think there is a problem with the rewards in PvP, or that you still get pips if you lose. The problem is that the rewards in other game modes are bad. For instance, many people are basically farming the same fractal or meta event over and over, which seems like an indicator of a bad reward system. So some people come to PvP, even if they don’t want to, to make progress.

Also the rating system should be designed to handle an influx of new players without causing too much disruption for established players. I don’t think it does that currently, but the fix should be for the rating system, not discourage new players from trying the game mode. More placement matches and a lower initial rating for new players might help the situation.

@Stormleaf, whether in fact there are fewer players or not is irrelevant. The rating adjustment should be able to handle mixed-rating teams and do adjustments fairly, and if it isn’t doing that, its a flaw.

It does seem like the penalties are too harsh for high tier play. It might cause high rated players be be overly cautious about matchmaking: only play in prime time, play just the minimum needed to prevent decay, and hope you don’t RNG roll a bad team or a bad comp. Matchmaking may be even more risky at the top because there are fewer players there and the rating sort may balance available players into the same teams over multiple games – I believe I saw ROM get screwed by this on his stream.

It seems like at the high level (and at every level?) its better to incentivize the exact opposite: more matches instead of fewer.

Ultimately I think the rating adjustment should take into account personal performance at some level. Its just not fair otherwise. Using the stat badges might be a start, but there are some kinds of activity (like holding/stalemating far) that may not generate many badges but are very useful to the game as a whole.

Even at my lowly bronze level, I don’t play offpeak anymore. Had a 6 game loss streak saturday afternoon, ugh.

I also think it would be nice if all ratings were displayed. It could be done at the end of the match so there was less opportunity for blamestorming, since most people leave the match quickly after it ends. People could still salt-whisper you, but there is always the report/block button for that case.

Are ascended weapons from PvP also not transmutable in forge? It looks like the chests just give you the standard ascended weapons, so I was hoping they wouldn’t have the bug.

As a bronze player, I would like the bronze badge to look like ???? (the unicode pile of poo character)

DH has a low skill floor. Maybe thats a good thing, and then, why don’t other classes also have at least one build that has a low skill floor? Why does DH get special treatment?

Its one thing to expect players coming from PvE or elsewhere to change their build to be successful at PvP, that is fine. But having to change to an entirely different class is pretty annoying, and doesn’t seem like a good idea if you are trying to get more people into PvP. Though, if you only want to get skilled people & DHs, maybe its a good idea.

As a denizen of the bronze pits, it would be nice to see fewer DHs. Makes the game a bit dull.

Glad I abandoned rev, as it looks like total kitten now.

ZOMG is Commando coming in next expac I just deleted all my chars to make room for 14 Commandos.

As to OP’s question, I like staff/greatsword druid. You just pew pew from the sidelines, use the smokescale to mess people up, and run away with greatsword 3 and staff 3. Best used with beer.

A compromise may be to add another queue for 4- or 5-man premades, and a pref for soloq people to see if they want to be included in those matches, to round out the 4 man groups. One bonus of this is that it lets soloq people find teams/guilds they may want to play with in the future, which is hard right now.

4/5ers will probably have long queue times, but not much can be done about that. Not sure its worth having something similar for 3- man groups, they should probably only be matched with 2 duo or 4 soloq.

The S5 changes look good to me. Unfortunately I don’t have much interest in playing Ranked after that balance patch that wrecked Rev. I still do unranked as a druid sometimes for dailies, thats about it. Druid is better than Rev for PvP-with-beer, at least.

Even in tier 3, three-way SMC is usually a skill-lag disaster area. It seems like it would be extra-awful in tier 1.

Note to self, necro this thread in 6 months, will still be relevant.

This is yet another thing that the original Guild Wars did better. It had Hard Mode (https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Hard_mode).

It could be added to GW2 in a straightforward way; just run a set of map instances for open world that are in hard mode, and a set that are “normal”. Players need to explictly opt-in to hard mode, and new accounts trying it out receive a stern warning that they might get rekt.

I also think, however, that HoT content should be toned down in “normal” mode. Its just super jarring for a player who comes out of Orr/Silverwastes and then goes into Verdant Brink, even after all the HoT nerfs. But, Hard Mode for HoT should be significantly more difficult than what is implemented right now; probably requiring 2+ person group play unless you are really good.

Some day we may rediscover these game design gems of the past! Lets not even get started on Build Diversity.

1. This seems like a reasonable proposal, I think you will have a hard time getting people to transfer off worlds existing though, even if it is free.

2. You may actually need to compensate people to get them to transfer. Maybe give them 500 gems. Or else, roll in the new worlds over time and give new accounts a gem bonus if they create characters on those worlds.

3. I would not. But I don’t play WvW much anymore, I just go there for dailies. (offtopic: for me, the mode is just too unbalanced for fighting at every level, even when the player counts are uneven, as they usually are. 1v1, 5v5, 10v10 etc, doesn’t matter, the side running the cheesiest build wins, unless their opposition is incompetent.)

Olrun, the change to retribution made Rev harder to use for the general population. I think my point still stands, they are making changes that actively push out new or less dedicated players. Whether they are doing this in support of Pros or to meet some vision of their own doesn’t really matter, the outcome is the same.

I agree with Olrun except on point 7, class balance.

There are two common perspectives on class balance you see here:
1) things are pretty good, but some classes could use a few tweaks
2) things are completely out of whack and it’s kitten

I think both are valid depending on your point of view, but people don’t have all the same point of view. For instance, for pros like Olrun, its reasonable that classes seem pretty balanced because they know the classes and can adjust to whatever changes that are made.

For non-elite players like me however, the changes are harder to deal with. Take Rev for instance, my preferred class for PvP and WvW. They nerfed stab on dodge in the patch, which makes it really hard for me to play now. I spent months getting used to this class and this particular feature made it easier for me, now its gone. I’ve played a few matches since the patch and I just get CCed into next week in every one. The class is not fun for me anymore, but its a big effort to learn how to play it again or pick up a new class, because I only play a couple of games per day max. So I’m just giving up and I am not even going to bother with sPvP anymore.

One response is, who cares? Just tweak balance for the elite players and its all good. However, that conflicts with another goal the community claims to have, which is making sPvP more popular (both for playing and streaming). There just aren’t that many elite players out there, so making the builds continually more specialized and exclusive doesn’t help with that goal.

Just bringing this up because perceived build balance is different based on skill level and the differences do affect the population of sPvP.

I don’t feel so bad for running Mallyx/Glint now. Some of the best heals I get are after I get condi-bombed and I switch to mallyx and resist/heal. Too bad mallyx isn’t really useful for anything else – I try to use the boonstrip but its underwhelming.

Rev heal also got nerfed, the upkeep cost is now 2 in PvP, so there is more energy conflict if you want to keep it up along with anything else. But not keeping it up can be bad…if you think 0.75 is slow, try a class where you have to activate your heal skill twice (usually while being CCed, etc).

This along with the fact that natural resonance has the same upkeep cost but less effectiveness.

They polled on server links way too early, before the first rotation.

Results would probably be the same now (in favor of linking) but it would probably be a closer vote since people have more of an idea of the negatives of linking.

I think sPvP is actually reasonably fun right now and the classes are as balanced as they have been since HoT launched – although it took almost one year to get there, and there are still some screwed up classes. There are a few problems with it otherwise:
1) The in-game community can be annoying. I solve this by playing offline (so that I can’t get whispers) and disabling all chat. I’m at a strategic disadvantage at times, but for me, its worth it.
2) Conquest, the main mode, is a bit dull for me. I like fighting, but I don’t like the point rotation and the secondary gimmicks that are present on most maps. To be a good player, you have to be good at these things. I wish there was a simpler, classic game mode like CTF.
3) The matchmaking is deficient. They are working on this, but its probably a hard problem to get balanced matches if the player base is small.

By the way, you can play PvP on a free account but don’t expect to win much. Last I checked, it doesn’t give you access to the elite specs from the HoT expansion. Without those, you’ll get knocked around and roflstomped unless you are some kind of PvP god.

As for rewards, for me they are kinda meh. But I’m an average player (literally; my winrate last season was close to 50%), and better players probably get better rewards through faster reward track progress. I earn gold through PvE mostly.

Would have liked to see what could have happened after they both staff 5’ed, too bad other people showed up and ruined it the 1v1.

I like big mid points. I am in favor of making them all Legacy size. I suppose the side points could be kept smaller to balance it out.

I don’t mind that fights at big points are longer, in fact, I enjoy them because of this. It feels more strategic. On the small points, it is such a spam fest that after its over I’m left thinking WTF just happened (whether my team wins or not). Forest mid is notorious for this, and Khylo is small and has the friggin treb too.

Also I think most of the problems this season with the DH are not because the class is OP now, but because so many points are small.

I am not sure that spvp is the main focus for balancing changes anymore. Raids seem to be the new hotness for balance – which is arguably even worse for wvw than pvp and also has annoyed some of the spvp community as well.

I think wvw would benefit by importing the amulet/rune system from pvp. We would need some tank amulets for front liners, but overall I feel like it would help cut some of the extreme cheese builds and level the playing field a little. This seems like a relatively simple thing to implement as well – compared to forking all the skills and tweaking each one separately.

@Ceesa, thanks for feedback!

1) Comms often do fake pushes to trick the enemy into wasting their bomb. Was he on TS? He probably would have called out the fake push in TS, but there just isn’t enough time to do it in chat. Sometimes also, a comm sees something when charging in and decides to back off. Things can happen fast. As far as zerg size, yeah that is a real problem as the populations are still uneven, as is whether a given world tends to blob up or run smaller groups.

4,5,6) The rewards for WvW used to be even worse than they are now. Its true that is basically poverty level income and that is definitely a wall for primary PvEers. Most of us who do a lot of WvW just do it because we like the game mode (and personally, my account is old enough now that the lack of rewards doesn’t concern me much. I’m also sick of most of the game’s PvE).

As a herald main I’m actually coming to hate the glint heal. More and more players are aware of it and back of their attacks. I wish it was just a straight up heal for a larger amount rather than a conditional thing which can easily be countered with smart play.

Its still good for getting a free huge heal off DH traps, I suppose.

Anyway I don’t agree the herald is a damage facetank class. If I don’t dodge, evade, block, etc, I’m dead. Also, outside of stability on dodge, I’m easy to stunlock – and I often have to waste dodges just to get stability. Herald has very little passive defense other than the protection elite (which you can’t keep up without crippling your skill use), F2 (doesn’t last long), and dwarf elite (which nobody runs in PvP).

I watched the whole video.

I don’t mind that pro players are getting paid to play, especially if its coming out of the marketing budget. But I think the main reason there isn’t more interest in GW2 is just because of the design of the game is just too weird.

I enjoy playing it, but I’m not the greatest, and to me it just seems like a CC/condi spam fest. I don’t even know what is going on half the time while PLAYING the game. I don’t know how to explain the design to a viewer who doesn’t follow PvP. It gets even worse when I imagine trying to explain some of the game’s design: For example: Moa? Yeah I know it seems awful but its not OP, really. Yes, thieves can stealth and perma-CC and burst. Yeah, the last team that gets the hit on the forest creature gets all the points, not the team with the most damage. The list goes on and on…

Helseth mentions subtle plays like fake out skull crack, but it is really, really hard I think for a non Pro player to catch those, let alone a person who doesn’t PvP.

I don’t even have much interest in watching Pro matches…sure I might learn some tricks and get better, but because of the above issues and (especially this season) the forced 50/50 matchmaking, I feel like it isn’t really worth the effort.

Picking the world late seems to be a less optimal solution to me. For instance, you might find that you are on a troll-ish world, and you don’t want to play that way. Or perhaps you are a troll and want to be on a troll world Or maybe the world just doesn’t have a lot of people in your timezone, the fights are too big/small, etc…

The free transfer is essentially a “try before you buy” option.

I don’t play condi rev, but in WvW its my job to spam resistance otherwise my group gets melted by condis.

If I use Pulsating Pestilence and legend swap to trigger it, does it copy all the conditions on me using the source player’s condition damage, or my own? For instance, I’m pretty sure that if had 95 stacks of bleed (which I have observed before), all 95 stacks will be copied, but if it uses my weak condition damage than it may not have much of an effect.

From my experience it seems to be basically a damage nerf. I suppose we all need to get ascended swords with sigils of force to get back some of the old damage, except for PvP guys, they are screwed.

World selection is pretty much the first thing you have to pick in a new account, even before you make a character. Problem is new players often have no idea what this affects, and they won’t know if they made the right choice until they start playing WvW later.

Also, players often join PvE guilds first, and only later find out that those guilds are not on the same world that they selected back when they created their account. So to WvW with those guilds, they are stuck having to pay gems to transfer just because they made a decision early on that they couldn’t possibly have gotten right.

Giving each account 1 free transfer would relieve some of this pressure, since you could recover from a bad world decision without paying a fine.

Wat. They make the game and work on it every day, they can play the game and claim stuff just like anybody else. Its not unprofessional – its the opposite, since it shows that they have an interest in the game.

Also the alleged “favored world” is currently dropping like a rock from tier 1 to tier 3.

The problem with old matchup data is that transfers have probably made a lot of it obsolete. I’m on BP and I know that two major guilds have transferred off for example.

The CD link is still OP though and should have never be done. Really they should have relaxed the pop cap restrictions for transfers a couple weeks before the relink, not two weeks after it as they did. So we’re stuck messed up links that were further skewed by heavy transfer activity. Oh well, just another month of it I guess.

Add a potion of siege resistance. Reduces siege damage to you by 20%. Reduces your supply capacity by 20%.