Guild Wars 2

Anet is making a terrible impression so far. Instead of actually fixing problems, they were more concerned with a vendetta against players who ran CoF because it was one of the few bug free explorable modes with a clear enough design.

I don’t like wow anymore but I gotta say, WoW’s PvE in it’s prime with GW2’s pvp system would have been the best mmo ever… The pvp in this game is beautiful, no gear imbalances, no healers, no tanks. The only problem is that the PvE is severely lacking. I’m not saying that there should be a holy trinity, but I remember back before I quit wow me and my friends played a lot of heroics in a group.

It was really fun to try to do all the achievements and you had to employ clear tactics for mobs and bosses. But there’s a reason I quit wow, It got boring and not worth my time. All I’m saying is that Anet could take a few cues about clear encounter design. When you do things right in WoW, you win and feel good about it. You get a feeling of satisfaction, kind of like running a perfect run in games like gradius. When you do things right in GW2, you and your group die several times (CoF bomb room).

To be quite blunt, the dungeons are inconsistent and poorly designed. Buffing them to the point of being a head-smashing silver milking waste of time is not only doing nothing to fix the base problem, but also making sure that people stop playing said dungeons at all.

Don’t get me wrong, CoF magg option was by far the easiest, too easy. It needed a buff and I’m all for this. What we got is ridiculous. The community will accept nothing short of the dev team doing a full and perfect run before they stop making their voices heard. You can’t expect other people to be able to pull off something of your own genius design without being able to do it yourself.

The only way to avoid repair costs for the bomb part is to run in naked one by one. And guess what? That’s what everyone will end up doing. You know why? Some dungeon designer says the enemies were intended to be fought. There’s absolutely no way that you can keep up with the enemies, even kill one before you get overrun. The bomb part is not possible to survive consistently.

I’m playing a guardian with a bit of toughness and toughness gear and I get locked down by knockdowns from the devourers. Is it cheap and absolutely not fun? Yes. But you can survive it (sometimes). I still take massive damage from all sources, but every single mob in the bomb part in particular hits like a truck, about as much as a boss.

Another thing, there’s no fun to be had running dungeons over and over for weeks at a time. I believe someone on this forum calculated that it would take 75 hours of fast runs for a set of armor from a particular dungeon. Is that not enough? 75 hours of my life for an almost purely cosmetic upgrade? Some will undoubtedly argue that you “don’t have to do it”, but that’s just it; there’s nothing else to do.

In my opinion, the PvE endgame is already weak. In fact, I’m a little sour that PvP had to suffer with 2 playable maps and 1 game mode so that we could get this sub-par PvE experience. I don’t doubt that more resources would have been put towards PvP for a better experience. PvP is the best part of this game. It doesn’t feel like a grind, even though you play the same 3 maps over and over.

What I’m trying to say is that GW2 still has a lot of potential, by why can’t we grow up and accept that PvE this time around wasn’t what it could have been and move forward? The only thing I fear is that we’re not going to get any new PvP maps and modes until an expansion. I love this game but not enough to play for a year or more on the same maps and the one game mode.

I’m looking for a semi-hardcore PvP guild that does any combinations of WvW/tPvP/sPvP. I wouldn’t call myself an amazing player, but PvP in games is a passion of mine. I’ve played Dota, WC3, Starcraft, League of legends, HoN, Dota 2, WoW(though quit very quickly because the gear grind was ridiculous and unfair), CS 1.6, CSS, CS:GO just to name some prominent PvP games. I don’t bring personal pride into the mix and I’m always willing to take criticism and advice. I’m very cooperative and I’m willing to switch servers off of Eredon Terrace.

I’m not sure if any of you know, but ET’s Ruin has swelled to an enormous size because they went around recruiting from other servers. Now, they dominate WvW all the time and spawn camp the other servers. Not only is this poor sportsmanship, but they miss the point of WvW. It’s about the battle. Not much of that to be had spawn camping the few people who are still trying.

It seems like a lot of PvP guilds gather in a few servers. Why they do this is beyond me, there’s simply no competition. On my server, WvW has been stagnant for days now, with ET owning everything. It’s just not fun.

Tell me Carlin, did you enjoy Lich King? Did you have a DK, Ret paladin and Warlock? You don’t have to answer, your posts scream yes. It’s not likely to be a troll post, simply because this is the work of a WoW player who thinks that game was balanced at any point. Here’s the thing, nobody wants 100-0 burst back, nobody wants healers back, nobody really wants time spent = power back.

You might want to re-sub for MoP buddy, sounds like this isn’t your type of game. GW2 right now is objectively more balanced than WoW ever was, it’s never even gotten close to how balanced GW2 is and that’s only a few weeks into launch.

JonPeters it was the cleanse nerf that countered Master Yi. It used to give 3 seconds I believe of CC immunity which was more than enough time for Yi to blast whoever he wanted. Get it? Cleanse nerf? Cleanse conditions, too strong? Anyways, I made a Mesmer to PvP with, which by the way is the premier pick-up sPvP class, as well as being too strong right now. Mesmers will remain so simply because of their tools.

If any of you Devs read this, right now mobility and escapes are the most important things you can have in the average pick-up game. Thieves, mesmers and elementalists get to pick their battles, which is a much stronger tool than you can imagine. Elementalists aren’t a problem, they are pretty underpowered at this moment, but Mesmers and Thieves excel at sPvP.

I think you guys should seriously take a look at Necros and Elementalists. They really have it rough. I don’t play a necro myself but the only viable spec to play is condition damage. How about some love for a power or damage build? For the axe weapon which my bro who plays necro tells me is the worst thing he’s ever seen.

A simple solution would be to implement a curse that makes sure conditions stay on for a set amount of time so they actually see some damage ticks. And also, the engineer trait that lets them enjoy complete condition immunity under 25% health is fundamentally broken.

Let’s get something straight here, you can craft exotic armor with the exact same stats as the dungeon gear. There is literally nothing to be gained other than aesthetics from spending 75 hours running for gear. This game’s PvE endgame is already kind of nonexistent, why put something in place that explicitly exists to waste time? I’m not asking for the gear for free, I’m just saying that 75 hours is wayyyyyyy too much to spend on a cosmetic upgrade.

With the way things are now, W3 is essentially a money sink in and of itself. Dying makes you pay, upgrading makes you pay, buying siege equipment makes you pay. The problem is that it’s not worth it at all, you won’t make this money back or anything close to it doing W3 which is a real shame because W3 honestly has the most potential for end game fun in GW2.

Mike why is the outmanned buff a magic find buff? Seriously. I’m on Eredon terrace and every time we have to play against Henge we systematically get overrun and spawn camped. I have to wonder if there isn’t some sort of bug being abused to get more people on their side. Also, come on now. The outmanned buff doesn’t help in combat in any way, I just use it to farm skelks.

The end game for GW2 is PvP and grinding out hundreds of gold for a legendary weapon. If that’s not your thing, move on. Personally I think it could be better, but I’m not paying monthly so I have no issues.

I don’t know what to think. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if the sound design wasn’t broken. For me that battle was spent in absolute silence with nothing but the cannon fire. Where’s the epic music? The is supposed to be the culmination of everything we’ve been doing in the game. I don’t know why Anet dropped the ball on this so hard. The more I think about it the more I start to wonder if this game was released way before its time.

I don’t know why people are bashing WoW, there’s no denying that their PvE system is extensive. The only problem I really had is constantly moving around from guild to guild with a few of my friends. I would have loved to see mechanics like that, really tough ones like jmcdg mentioned only scaled down for 5 players.

I want to like the world events like the dragon, but it feels like you could tag the event with a bit of damage and just AFK while it resolves itself. I don’t feel important or entertained. Overall I think GW2 is primarily PvP focused. The poor PvE implementation isn’t going to keep people away from other MMO’s for long.

I can’t speak for GW1 dungeons, I only played PvP. But I definitely think that the PvE in GW2 is extremely weak. Is it because the holy trinity is gone? Absolutely not. The dungeon design is sloppy, that’s the bottom line. There is nothing wrong with requiring support/dps/toughness for dungeons. Since every class should, in theory, be able to fill any of these roles. The biggest mistake a lot of developers make in MMOs is not understanding that PvE and PvP can never share the same mechanics/progression and both be good.

Unfortunately, it seems like the entire system for PvE wasn’t particularly well thought out. The PvP systems work well, but there’s no progression to be done in PvE. The way gear progression works, by which I mean there is none, won’t keep anyone running dungeons past the slow grind towards a full armor set of whatever level 80 dungeon, and right now that looks like CoF because it’s quite easy. I mostly PvP and save up for legendary weapons, in the meantime I’m running CoF to get a full armor set, after which it will be pointless to do anything in PvE anymore.

I’ve done a few dungeons now and I must say that I find them disappointing as well. The first one I did, Ascalonian catacombs, was kind of a mess. The biggest problem I find is that the mechanics aren’t clear. You don’t really know what kills you, the boss doesn’t have a set strategy, it just kind of does whatever. In fact, I read that a lot of people are complaining about mobs being harder than the bosses. It’s very true, the mob packs in AC that include elementalists are almost impossible to survive. If you stand in the elementalist aoe for even a second you’re taking half your life in damage, take any other hits and you’re done. Me and my friends actually carried 5 boulders with us and abused the hell out of the knockdown. By the end of the day it was Boulder Wars 2.

Generally the fights feel cluttered and chaotic, there’s no way to tell when some bosses will do something that will kill you, and you feel like you don’t really have control of the fight. Another big problem is how inconsistent dungeon design is. For example, the first boss in explorable Cadecus manor, the guy with the shotgun, he walks up then shoots with his shotgun, giving you time to dodge. He also does a rapid fire from afar that you can see coming. It might be a little easy and bland, maybe it could use more timing required, but at least it’s clear what exactly players should to do win.

Later in the same path, you come to a hallway with spikes with no clear solution to it other than trying to run through. This gets you killed every time and you can’t evade it, we tried. This isn’t fun Arena net, it’s an extremely stupid mechanic, especially for a dungeon that has sub 80 gear as the rewards. Speaking of dumb mechanics, the CoF breach part where you have to kite increasing amounts of mobs seems to be made specifically to charge you for repair bills. It’s not hard to survive just by ressing each other and running back, so what exactly is the point of it? You can’t have enough dps to deal with the enemies as they come. The only thing left is to run and kite them around which will also eventually fail you unless you’re running 5 guardians with walls of reflection

I just thought I would leave my opinion, whether Anet pays attention to us or not. To be blunt, they could learn a lot about PvE design from certain other popular MMO’s. I feel like PvE is perhaps the weakest part of the game. Either way, I doubt anything major will be done until the expansion. I can only hope they learn from their mistakes and bring us a proper PvE experience when that time comes.

When I first heard about and got excited for GW2, I was under the impression that your class decided your flavour and your traits and skills decided your role. This is mostly true, but I find that current PvP balance forces classes into one specific spec that excels significantly better than the others.

I first started this game as a guardian because I thought spirit weapons would be cooler than they are. I was never a support player so I thought it would be OK because I would have a defensive alternative. 80 levels and a bunch of sPvP later I find that Guardian is heavily pigeon holed into support roles, as I had feared at one point. I won’t extensively list why I think that is, suffice it to say that I believe too many Guardian skills have support functions built into them.

I’ve learned since then and played a few different classes in PvP, an engineer and mesmer. I’ve found similar things in those classes, a dominant build that gives heavy incentive to play one spec. Is it that much of a problem? No, not really. It’s a bummer that I don’t use my main character to PvP with anymore, but I was just hoping for more. I would love to see arena net get into more aggressive tweaking to open up more options for all the classes, though.

As milo mentioned, prevention is key. The problem with this game is that some classes have flagrantly better movement and escape options than others. If you’re a warrior, guardian, necro and i would go as far as to say ranger and you get caught out of position by more than one person, you’re finished. The remaining classes, mesmer elementalist and thief have some pretty ridiculous movement/stealth abilities that allow them to very easily pick their battles and rack up points. Mesmers and thieves however do extremely well in sPvP while elementalists seem quite weak at the moment.

Blazer Hellsing.9184:

Prelude.3817:

I got Moaed 4 times in a single match yesterday.
Killed a lot of phantasms, not so much Mesmers.
Lots of fun.
Mesmer sure is strangely popular nowadays.
Wonder why.

Bad PvP Players complaining, what’s new? There is this mechanic called “Dodge” and there is this thing called “movement”. Pay attention and you will have it much easier against mesmers

Pro Up and dominate in game or stay Bad and QQ on the forums, which choice will you make?

Boy this guy’s making it obvious. He’s even putting in cheesy emoticons. You think we don’t know that thieves and mesmers have an understanding to not fight each other? There’s really no point, you will never kill the mesmer and the mesmer will never catch you with your ungodly mobility. You both run off instead to prey on less fortunate classes. But it’s OK though, being a self proclaimed “professional thief” really shows your understanding of the game and the overwhelming amounts of skill you must possess.

Stun breakers, stability. Nothing in the game will allow you to win a 1v2, nothing should, anyway. Some classes can, but for the most part, you should die to a 1v2.

milo.6942:

Nofe.7269:

From what I remember of GW1 pvp, you stand there with your enemy trading blows. No thanks.

That’s not the gw1 I remember… And I was playing it competitively up until the gw2 release.

I didn’t play even until the first expansion. Just checked a few videos of more up to date pvp. You still have to stand still to do anything, you can literally sit there and click skills at your leisure. Melee vs melee is literally trading blows, a battle of numbers. I would rather have more action and no holy trinity.

I haven’t come across this much, but for the past few times I’ve played WvW (particularly against HoD), I’ve seen flat out spawn camping in front of the spawn points in borderlands/eternal battlegrounds. After it gets to that point, it’s extremely difficult if not impossible to make a push and try to reclaim any points. I suggest a buff that magnifies in intensity the closer you get to the spawn point of a server, so that spawn camping is no longer profitable and the closest keep or point can be a little easier to defend/take.

I also suggest that it actually help a team’s combat effectiveness. As long as we’re on the subject, why is the buff for being outnumbered magic find? Seriously Anet, you’re encouraging me to give up and go farm skelks for powerful bloods.

Some might debate the balance issues that this might create, but the way I see it, the bonuses for winning WvW are already almost entirely negligible and don’t affect anything in any profound way. I’ve said it before, the fun of WvW is participating in a large combat effort and the reward is actually doing it, as well as the standard event rewards. Everything in WvW should focus around maximizing the amount of player fun and participation.

Nobody wants to play when one server owns the entire map and the effort it takes to take even one point back is almost impossible to muster.

I don’t like the idea but with the current way that leveling in WvW works, it would be for the best. If you go and make a character and try to WvW at level 2, you can barely damage the npc mobs much less another player. This is obviously because of gear difference. Low level players are a burden in WvW to be honest, it’s like bringing half a level 80 player. I would love to be able to level and compete in WvW, but there are simply no options for doing that since the gear between WvW is kept the same and there aren’t nearly enough skill points in the battlegrounds and borderlands to facilitate a proper skill progression.

See, the reason I hate HoD’s guts as a whole is that there is no reward for doing this. They are doing it purely because they can, just to be d-bags. From what I understand HoD has an alliance of really high end PvP guilds. Why would they all gather on one server? To get +4% increase on the speed of crafting a berserker’s darksteel sword? Nah, the rewards aren’t great enough. Instead of spreading the competition around, they opted for an alliance purely for petty gains. I’ve even seen these guys camping spawn just because they can, at which point everyone from ET just stopped playing. Hope you idiots enjoy running around WvW with nothing to do.

From what I remember of GW1 pvp, you stand there with your enemy trading blows. No thanks.

Zerging is the most efficient way of getting points. I hope arena net has plans to help curb this. It’s supposed to be a game mode primarily about taking and controlling objectives, not rolling as a zerg for the whole game.

I’d love to see more game modes like CTF, deathmatch, arenas and the like. I feel that, for a primarily PvP focused game, there really aren’t enough options aside from the standard objective game mode which quite frankly doesn’t seem to be working as intended.

BlackDeath.7834:

xTiMMeHx.5496:

BlackDeath.7834:

xTiMMeHx.5496:

I just honestly can’t figure why you would call the thief OP.

If you break it down to the basics, look at the thief’s role in PvP. Should you not know this, it’s bursting down players, and most preferably, the glasscannons of the other side.

The entire initiative system is build around this simple role, and stating that the thief is too strong because of the heartseeker spam, is insane. Yes you can spam it a couple of times untill you are out of initiative, yet if you are countered (Which can be done easily) you are out of initiative and then the thief’s burst is over.

This is exactly the reason why thieves are easily countered by higher armored classes (Without glasscannon builds obv.) like the guardian, warrior and even necromancers if traited and geared the right way.

I’m even having my doubts about some thief skills while downed if I can state my honest opinion. In one of the earliest beta’s I’ve been in , the thief had the move ability, combined with his stealth one, which gave them another skill. Yet mesmer’s have one skill, to move, stealth and spawn a clone of themselves. Although they have this, it’s not hard to counter them, and apart from the moa skill, the mesmer is fine.

Also saying that thieves that spam HS deal to much damage for the skill required is stupid, a smart thief won’t spam HS because without initiative you’re pretty much screwed against smart opponents. If a thief keeps killing you without you being able to do anything, you might have to watch at your own playstyle at this moment instead of the power of the thieves.

EDIT: Not to forget, the engineers. People have been complaining about them being underpowered, but of all the classes in the game, the engineer is simply one of the higher skilled classes, if not the highest. I will even go to the point of saying that thieves are not that hard to play, yet everyone knows the best players with any class, be it high or low skilled, are still skilled players themselves.

Please tell me how you counter a pistol whip thief with thieves guild up & quickness at his disposal, regardless of class? Thanks. You obviously play a thief yourself.

1. Yes I do play a thief myself, yet I also play a guardian and looking between those classes, the guardian has the most favorable spot, dealing a bit less damage, for a ton more survivability.
2. In this situation, you are looking at a thief who uses his Elite skill, and his utility skill for quickness. How do you counter this? Simple, don’t be a glasscannon. If you are a glasscannon, you deserve to be downed because that’s the thiefs role.

Also, almost every class has some kind of stun breaking ability, or even something which makes them take no damage at all.

Guardian is the only class that have a high chance against a skilled thief, I play a 23k/24k health 1700 toughness sword/shield warrior, I get brought down by thiefs and mesmers, and a good engineer here and there, You want to break the stun? Alright, he will pistol whip you against right after hes racerolling with quickness active, “Don’t be a glasscannon” is a terrible argument.

The only reason Guardians have a good chance against thieves is their toughness combined with heals (most likely from monk’s meditation). There’s nothing that can save you against a proper pistol whipping, but meditation guardian does well against most thieves because it shuts down heartseekers execution mechanic by keeping the health of the guardian high enough until the thief runs out of initiative. Of course, then the thief either stealths or switches to bow at which point it’s a waste of time to follow them.

In short, screw off thieves. You already have the best mobility in the game.

I’m hoping for fixes to the water map, maybe announcements about plans for more modes and maps. Seriously, the water map is horrendously imbalanced and not fun to play on. A lot of other things need work too. For example, there’s no good incentive for people to stay and finish a match, I believe this extends forward to create more problems like auto balance that people are complaining about.

You guys really should reduce the sPvP size to 5v5. Making tournaments 5v5 is essentially admitting that that is the balanced team size for the maps, so why is 8v8 even a real option? Zerging is already the superior option in sPvP because it tends to yield the most points.

Speaking of points, why is point acquisition so rigid? You could be doing something important like staying back to defend a point, and getting nothing for it. Meanwhile if you zerg and just tag enemies with a few hits you get the full point amount for the kill/defense. The points for uncapping a point should not be the same as for capping a point. It would be more efficient to simply run around uncapping points since standing there to cap the point is not an efficient use of time for getting glory points.

I made a mesmer exclusively for PvP. I think they are the premier PvP class right now, they put anyone playing against one in a difficult position. Fight the mesmer, take too much damage from phantasms, or fight phantasms and take damage from the mesmer? They have a lot of escapes, ultility, versatility, damage and infuriating conditions like daze and confusion, as well as straight up stun.

I understand that mesmers are traditionally that kind of class, but the damage that accompanies this seems a little high. I’ve only been playing mesmer in PvP for a few days, but there’s barely any classes/specs that I can’t beat 1v1 or hold a point against easily. When I do, it’s usually my mistake and not the fault of the mesmer class/spec. They just have so many tools, so much CC and they force their opponent into difficult, sometimes impossible situations.

I stopped playing my guardian because at the end of the day It felt like a class that was pigeon holed into support. And it’s true, guardians don’t have straight up abilities or a weapon set that doesn’t have support built into it. I never liked the idea of healers or support, so I moved on to mesmer for PvP. Mesmers have it way too good at this point.

With the state of WvW, I don’t think week/2week long matches are a good idea to be honest. Losing to a server for a week or two is not fun at all. In my server’s case, Henge of denravi owns everything and camps the spawn at eternal battlegrounds and ensures that not only can we not gain ground, but nobody wants to actually bother to play. That’s another issue, though.

On topic, I’m assuming there will be point resets, right? Otherwise night capping servers will always win. Night capping isn’t an indication of skill or strategy, it doesn’t really take effort but will win the weekly round in the long run.

Another thing that I don’t understand is, what exactly is the motivation for winning or losing W3? The bonuses are small, so why do we have to have queues, why is a special limited thing? It would be great to have overflow W3 because the fun of world vs world isn’t actually winning at the end of the point tallies, the rewards are pretty minimal, the fun is participating in large battles. That’s the problem for most people right now, participation. We don’t actually get to participate.

Go back to WoW, you remind me of LK DK and Ret dancing/spitting/laughing after they kill someone and feel like they’re special for doing it.

I hope Arena net pays attention to the suggestions and observations players make. It’s one thing to test internally, but obviously completely different when it gets put to a real test.

I’d like to chime in if I may. I think the problem is that there is no middle ground. Right now you either go to sPvP for casual play or Tournament. The problem with tournament is that the few times I’ve tried it, it’s always my group of totally random people against a fully organized guild. All I really want is for team sizes to decrease, make it 5v5, the size that’s considered competitive. I’m sure a lot of players share my wish.

It would also be nice to have some more game modes or maps, anything other than leaving it as it is now.