Guild Wars 2

Plaguelands added something no one wanted, and took away a pretty valuable elite. Especially with Scourge coming out, having old plague form as a defensive CD would be extremely competitive in WvW. Now I get this puddle that someone would need to take a picnic in before it does anything.

It’s like they changed plague because “well CTTB is what everyone takes so let’s spice other things up” and forgot that they were making an expansion where people would not be able to take reaper if they were scourge. whoops!

don’t listen to anyone that recommends a single spec

play everything – go to a dummy and practice the basics if its applicable (thief burst, mes burst, ele scepter rotations as examples), then play at least 10 spvp games as that until you feel you Get It

then play what you enjoyed. now you’re probably going to do a LOT better playing what you enjoyed because you have a pretty good idea of what everything can do

too many really dumb people caught up on “40 TIGERS VS 40 SHARKS LETS THEORYCRAFT”

the point is the concept of barriers that has very little opportunity cost, how barriers work (stacking), and most importantly, all applied with a above average ally aoe limit. people are really not appreciating how having up to 20 allies be affected by anything is an insane power multiplier

I can’t imagine a world where scourge isn’t dragging the game back to an unhealthy state where zergs are too tanky. Again, this is because scourge’s mechanics scale unhealthily with number of allies around you. Scourge is already VERY good in 5 man, but gets stupid in zergs due to previously mentioned mechanics.

I don’t see the issue with dueling at all. Tons of places to duel, they happen fairly regularly, and getting run over doesn’t really matter.

BG is years of population manipulation, inadvertent or otherwise, leading to a huge imbalance in population compared to everywhere else.

Anet’s alg to calculate population is partly to blame. From everything we’ve been told about it, there’s nothing at all to account for inactive accounts becoming active. Stack on 4+ years of active → inactive cycling to the most in-demand server, and when large content comes back, suddenly all those years of “inactive” switch to “active”, and whoops!

finding it referring to using a skill as it’s intended

yes mag was one of the servers that used a necro skill now disabled as it’s intended

can you believe them?! using a group teleport?

You might want to look into it.

Lord Trejgon.2809:

Pinko.2076:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Shadow_Meld

If you thought it was hard to kill daredevils that spammed 5 dodges away when they lost 2% hp, get ready for the shadow meld future.

3s stealth duration, 2 charges, 45s to recharge one charge.

the only “issue” I’d see with it is that it removes revealed – but hey that’s a hefty CD on it and you know what will be also added with that expac to one other class?

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sight_beyond_Sight

AoE reveal, 2 charges, 20s to recharge one and if revealing that thief who have just stealthed was not enought it also removes blindness and guarantee next hit being a crit – and is much more spammable

frankly I’m afraid that most of thieves will actually need that 1500 range to not be masacrated by all those spellbreakers that are bound to show-up on them…

Of course removing revealed is the strong part; that’s what makes it ridiculous. It also uses the Elite slot which is a bonus, because there’s traits in Deadeye that already give you Stun on first hit, so Basi Venom is essentially free.

You could see a lot of odd weapon sets used with that elite, because re-initiation from non-DP weapon sets is just too hard for things like S/P or P/P. Giving 2 re-initiations every 45 seconds is a lot more killing power and survivability for those sets.

I plan to main spellbreaker but don’t think it will counter thief at all.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Shadow_Meld

If you thought it was hard to kill daredevils that spammed 5 dodges away when they lost 2% hp, get ready for the shadow meld future.

condi is not as bad it was. honestly seeing a bit of a Glass resurgence since patch.

If it’s true that Reaper Chillbleed trait will get gutted in PoF, that’s a large potion of the condi backbone. Solo roaming there will be dumb cancer condi kitten, but the game has NEVER been balanced 1v1 at all. If we are talking solo roaming balance there’s far more egregious kitten than conditions.

RedBL also bugged for Mag
also BlueBL lost outmanned but still only like 30 players

The resistance experiment is a failure for WvW. It RUINS comp diversity even more (guardians and the stability relationship never stopped being an issue, people are just used to it to think it’s okay) than it was, it doesn’t actually solve the condition problem at all, and they nerfed or neutered many of the old tools that used to be more reliable.

I think there’s a way to make cleanses (“Remove x conditions” effects) be more relevant without needing a vast overhaul that will impact your PvE balance:

Expand upon a recent buff to Ranger where you changed dodgecleanse to remove 1 non-damaging condition and 1 damaging condition. One giant obstacle to cleansing conditions is that there’s a staggering amount of “garbage” soft cc condition that flood the condition table and can get in the way of cleansing ones that really matter. Create sub-categories to conditions (maybe “debuffs”, “movement”, and “damage”) and specify cleanses to affect each table accordingly.

If I knew my warrior warhorn was going to 100% cleanse 2 “damage” conditions, that’s a very different story than throwing my fates into wind that the 2 conditions cleansed are relevent. This gives players more control to cleansing conditions and will greatly bring back cleansing’s relevance to the anti-condi game.

The change to ranger already shows that you have sub-categories in the game, and the only thing you would need to do is refine those categories, and change all cleansing skills to affect those tables differently. This even opens up new support categories; some cleanses that have more impact on certain sub-categories than others, talent choices that make you choose what support classes can mitigate more, etc.

“a lot more stealth than I do” is a common misconception people have vs. mesmer

mesmer’s have finite stealth, and as the fight goes on, as long as you’re applying periodic pressure, their buttons just run out. You as a thief have infinite stealth. Landing damage on a thief before you run out of kitten is very hard on a mesmer, maybe you’re running too few stun breaks??

Power mes is really weak honestly, and a properly played thief can lame out that matchup pretty easily.

Still a good idea. Anet please ask your engineers if they can do this.:)

WvW’s lifeblood is enjoyable pvp and class balance.

Focus on making the expansion specs good, flexible, power-based. Also consider breaking the stability grip that Guardian has. More specs should be able to be self-sufficient with stability. Reaper’s 3 is the hidden reason they became so good.

Also, consider nerfing your previous decisions that spamming blocks, evades, and invulns is good class balance. Mesmer shield was a dumb idea, staff evade was a dumb idea, DH block was a dumb idea. Also, mass introduction of unblockable was equally stupid.

kittening around with invuln’s (effectively evade, block, and invuln) and anti-invuln’s willy nilly that HoT did was really unhealthy for PvP.

or they just do an algorithm automatically and people are way too paranoid??

IDK why people are hung up on his build when proper DH play would have been fine for surviving a single 100% power mes burst.

There’s a LOT of classes and builds that can 100% you if you give them a second of non-reaction. You could replace this thread title with so many specs.

I like the overall changes you are recommending, but to boil it down to any Devs reading: Spending a lot of time in WvW should allow us to play WvW with more options without having to play non-WvW game modes.

The current system makes people go do what they don’t like doing (or we would be doing it already) in order for them to go back to having fun:

Players that like sPvP don’t need to stop playing their preferred game mode to get sPvP gear.

Players that like PvE/Raids don’t need to stop playing their preferred game mode to get PvE/Raid gear.

Players in WvW are forced to go play PvE/Raids/sPvP to get the gear to play their preferred game mode.

You don’t gain playtime by making WvW players grind PvE to get gear, you get people going inactive. I know a lot of WvW players, and generally we just get disheartened and stop playing rather than go grind in PvE or Raids to try New Fun Spec. (IMO most gamers in general SHOULD do this. Don’t play games you aren’t having fun playing.)

When I play zerk in WvW for a YEAR, I shouldn’t be daunted at the costs when I want to get 14 ascended peices of gear for a new prefix. Especially when all I want to do with that new gear is go back to playing WvW. If I had spent that amount of time on the others modes, I would be rich. Instead, all we want is Ascended gear to keep playing a dead game mode.

Keefe.3821:

Play as a berserker warrior using stance and signet. You’ll never worry about conditions again.

eh warrior is alright, but it’s very easy to play around if the warrior can’t seal the fight quickly.

Dodge/immune/invuln for Berserk Rage duration, then load him up and corrupt the heal resistance. Condi revs are becoming a more common thing in WvW after their necro-like buff, so that’s more common specs running around ready to convert your signet resistance. In fact, condi revs in groups fights can afford to just corrupt 2-3 berserker rage pulses in a row and kill you straight up with team support. IMO the signet is quite trash in a lot of situations in WvW. I use defiant Stance way more now.

GS/Rifle Glass warrior is probably my favorite. A screen full of damage, the burst durability to use your damage against any number of enemies, and the tools to cut through most of the game’s most common crutches.

Least favorite is by far Druid.
Instead of writing a book or more on why Druid is easily the stupidest roaming spec in the game, I’ll just put it like this: Druid is likely the only spec in the entire game that can run literally any stat combination and be at minimum decent. Extremely mobile, flexible damage ranges, lots of stealth, reliable damage, high durability (even in glass).

Condi is being buffed because after years of not caring what was best for PvE, they now care. Mathematically, it’s FAR FAR FAR FAR easier to adjust and tune conditions to get the exact DPS you want compared to Power.

Its underbudgeted/staffed or inexperienced devs taking the easiest possible path to giving attention to the game’s most popular mode (PvE)

GW2 will go down as one of the best MMOPVP combat systems that its creators slowly dwindled to irrelevance.

the players would just join the casual tier and continue killing because that’s where most players would be

interaction with players is what encourages pvp, not points.

The easiest way to more roaming build variety (because in-combat movement and out-of-combat movement are 100% different things) is to remove the out-of-combat penalty that a lack of 25% movespeed imposes.

anduriell.6280:

I think more speed in game is in general bad idea as it hurts the build variety.

Any runes that gives +25% should be removed as it is a powercreep and instead give all classes a couple of different ways to achieve speed. I never got the lack of swiftness in the necros, even while in combat for example.

I mean, come on at least some minor trait that guarantee long swiftenss on kills.

It’s a bad idea to have more speed because it hurts variety, but you want a lot more ways to reach the speed?

Play druid. It doesn’t have bad matchups, because any bad matchup is one where you can use druid’s insane evade/stealth/movespeed to just stall it to a draw or run.

25% should be changed to base. Reaching for the stars: 33% should be base and the boon removed. Also, in combat movement speed reduction is dumb for many paragraphs of reasons.

Annoying the playerbase shouldn’t be a design goal.

Aenaos.8160:

Pinko.2076:

it’s really pointless to hypothesize without any skills, but consider why it will PROBABLY suck:
D/P is the lifeblood of thief. Running non-DP of any for is sort of cheesy or considered trollish, because it’s so kittening impractical to not run D/P.

The weapons that even get swapped to need to have evade, movement, or their own form of escape to warrant even occasional use (SB, S/D, P/D, Staff). Thief is a really strong class, but it’s also completely dependent on D/P to function in WvW, and the Rifle needs a LOT going for it to be good.

Thief uses 2 separate weapon sets.
Rifle-D/P.
Easy.

You must play a slow motion version of WvW where a thief can sit in a weapon set for 10 seconds that doesn’t have its own movement, evade, or escape.

The threshold rifle needs to hit to even be swappable without getting destroyed is pretty high, and it’s all survivability based instead of damage.

If people want a ranged, very high damage, very dangerous build P/P already exists. It’s good until you face people with fast reactions that just punish you for running a glass cannon set.

it’s really pointless to hypothesize without any skills, but consider why it will PROBABLY suck:
D/P is the lifeblood of thief. Running non-DP of any for is sort of cheesy or considered trollish, because it’s so kittening impractical to not run D/P.

The weapons that even get swapped to need to have evade, movement, or their own form of escape to warrant even occasional use (SB, S/D, P/D, Staff). Thief is a really strong class, but it’s also completely dependent on D/P to function in WvW, and the Rifle needs a LOT going for it to be good.

Cerby.1069:

The tiers are just arbitrary numbers at this point, have been for a while.

And why isn’t Mag fighting BG?!!?!?! Wouldn’t that be the perfect matchup? srsly what are you thinking dev team? Toss in yb, but maybe give them a third little server for population buffs.

I just feel that every matchup the biggest servers are ALWAYS winnning first place and having an easy time.

Mag fights well….they have a full que ebg 24/7….and enough runoff to have a full que on 1-2 other bl at the same time during primtime…and they are well coordinated. Why aren’t they fighting the top of the top population worlds? Shouldn’t that qualify you for fighting the best of the best? And don’t tell me they “dont ppt”……come look at our maps and say that, wouldn’t surprise me if the “we dont ppt” is a propaganda movement created to ACTUALLY ppt. They hold the things they take, they upgrade them with watchtowers and ewp. They direct their numbers in concentrated areas and they hold to increase their ppk, while maintaining their foots up the other enemy bl’s doors. I mean thats what I would do if I was planning PPT.

Tc and cd just getting bullied at this point. We can’t fight their zergs since they run so huge. Unfortunately the primary reason their kd is so high is due to them just eating the smaller numbered fish. That shouldn’t be the case! I’ve only seen like 1 mag group fight through a group larger than them this week…and they did a good job even though they lost. Ya, the fact that mag even loses when outnumbered should tell you something about this mode…

BG had decent fighters as well, they fight like monkeys and guerilla fighters its kinda cool (they plan ambushes all the time and engage you from behind or hide behind hills or whatever)…. in terms of winning fights I’d give a slight nod to mag though but thats just cause they abuse stealth and mesmers and they run larger.

This is a funny post all around. It’s good that we have humor in these dark times. Going to hop on Mag where we have 2-3 queues apparently and have a chortle!

you’re insane for wanting Anet to redesign their most successful map. Have you seen their history of maps?

a more enjoyable pvp experience is why people played WvW, it getting worse is why the hardcore people left WvW

the most significant change would be an enjoyable pvp experience IE. Balance some of the stupid kitten in WvW

I don’t know what people want re: WvW changes besides removing DBL. New Crap (siege, upgrades, traits, scoring) doesn’t matter at all to me or most people I know in WvW.

It’s all about game balance being fun. The expansion might do that, but who knows at this point. Balance and meta being enjoyable is far and away what would bolster the population, not New Crap.

It’s a neat gimmick that won’t really scale well, and honestly doesn’t even look that effective considering you’re devoting 5 people. Not dying isn’t the same as winning.

(not to be too dismissive, it’s just I’ve heard of this for a while and even theorycrafting it’s just a neat trick rather than New Meta)

It’s a useful mesmer skill if there’s only 1 mesmer and he’s very good at timing, but that’s always been true.

like if you look at SEA and you can either

a) sit your 15 people on carts to boringly and stupidly play the seige game for HOURS

or

b) go run around and kill people

if you chose A you might need counseling

Crinn.7864:

Pinko.2076:

just make WvW able to get ascended armor like sPvP can.

You’d have to be a fool to consider sPvP a viable method for acquiring ascended. The current ascended gear is sPvP is both just as expensive to acquire and requires even more grinding than standard crafting.

The best acquisition method for ascended is raids.

The best method to get me to kill myself is to attend a raid. People should play what they like and get gear to play in that mode they enjoy the most.

The map is too big, but there’s many other design problems with it. For what its worth, Alpine is also a bit too big and wasn’t really lauded until DBL showed how bad it can be. EoTM main complain is also that it’s too big.

Anet design had big issues with making things way too big.

When you look at the stats of thousands of players over an extremely long time accurately gathered by their own API you would see DBL is a garbage can that the vast majority hate.

When you look at forums suddenly half the posts are people saying they enjoy it.

Maybe based your development decisions on forums posts (aka Reddit sympathy kittens) is a terrible idea because the population in no way represents your average player.:):)

just make WvW able to get ascended armor like sPvP can.

Swagger.1459:

Seriously peeps? Y’all are really niggling and chest thumping about servers in a decaying game mode?

It’s a joke to think there is any real competition going on when wvw is half dead.

Mag didn’t start this or the last 5 threads complaining about Mag.

the breakdown of GvG (which is related to the breakdown of 15/20 mans all together) is there’s a lack of incentive to even try. Players like to compete in tests of skill, and the balance of WvW has gotten so far gone that practically no one cares about proving themselves the best anymore.

Losing in old WvW metas always had me thinking about specific points where I could have zigged instead of zagged, used this button at a different time, target switched to a better guy, etc. It demanded a lot to be very good.

Losing in current HoT doesn’t even feel that bad. You find yourself without a lot you could even do differently game-play wise. It’s so buildwars that it’s a parody of itself at this point. This is why GvG’s and group competitive spirits died; it’s just not fun to take the meta seriously at all. (for most)

It’s a nice feel-good thing to want 20 mans back like it’s 3 years ago, but the game doesn’t reward the participants like it used to through competitive skill measuring.

Justine.6351:

I could make a vid demonstrating why their KDR is so high but does anyone want to see spawn camping and 2XvX ratio 1push fights with zero pushing of equal numbers and lots of chokepoint condi aoe spam? Or small scale where they will happily 2v1 but are just as likely to run from a 1v1 as yb? 6v6, after 2 wipes they hide in tower and stare at us cataing only to build a treb lols.

But ya this totally not going to be a matchup thread.

idk how this excuse gets brought up on reset night

On reset there are queues vs queues, and that’s mag’s highest time all week.

I’m not saying Mag has the only good players; there’s definitely a ton of great players on other servers. We just have better zerglings for a lot of reasons.

Mag is kind of a retirement home for a lot of decent to good players. It was probably the most common server in the NA GvG scene before it died, so a lot of people just hung up their junk there.

kind of anomaly that Anet can’t fix

RE: HoT

HoT’s damage was a LARGE amount of good players left the game for good as a final straw. GvG’s died slowly over time for a lot of reasons (the shifting Stability changes that brought Pirate Ship, then killed it were big) and was barely relevant when HoT launched.

Then the wombo combo of Guild Halls being still crap for GvG’s (way too small), and the balance of the game shifting to a really, really dumb boring style compared to before ended a ton of people’s interest. The biggest different between now and Vanilla Gw2 is how many good, fun people quit.

Trajan.4953:

Obligatory resume… Been around for a while.

The advent of server linking initially seemed like an elegant solution to a larger problem however, imho it seems that it has created a much bigger problem for its Band Aid fix.

The simple folding of smaller servers into larger, more established servers pretty much killed any community those servers had, or at best it is a few guilds hanging on by a thread.

The reduction of a large tier system has boiled everything down to 4 tiers of a whole lot of “Don’t give a kitten”

The bandwagon effect from guilds and players has further eroded any semblance of server identity.

Guild migration has undermined server trust to the point that most guilds are barely noticed.

MOST OF ALL. We are all getting to know each other, and rivalry is becoming less important.

In closing, Linking made WvW seem more active than it was but at the cost of every server, great and small.

Just my opinion.

Guilds don’t matter? You are telling me when you run into a random zerg, your mindset is the same as if you ran into BoRP raid? The guild poking your back that’s in random tags means the same to you than if it was Trex? You know that’s not at all true. Guilds are known for playing better just as they always were.

Every other point I can’t agree with, but I guess Mag just is a special flower. We hate some servers a LOT more than others, we deliberately focus servers based on past history, we focus the entire server on securing certain matchups based on server identity.

Getting to know people doesn’t get rid of rivalry. Every time someone transferred it was exciting to go kill or hunt your friend a bit. It’s even better if they weren’t friends.

hell yeah nerf the condi without addressing physical mitigation

onward toward the 3.5k armor future boys

Desert BL is bad and anyone who thinks the vote was good (accurate) or mattered needs to get a better argument. If you really think game design by Reddit Democacy is how MMO’s should be done, I don’t even know how to make a case that can appeal to reality that warped.

It’s subjectively, by the opinions of most WvW’ers (not reddit people that have sympathy kittens for this dev team), a bad map. It’s is objectively not a fun map to the vast majority that log on to WvW. There’s been how many thread citing actual numbers about how little people enjoy playing that map? a dozen? The numbers don’t lie, it’s just not fun.

There’s a real issue with spec balance and the arbitrary “swiftness tax” that they have. I don’t see ANET balance around having or not having swiftness based on how arbitrary it’s present or not in specs, so it really should just be done away with.

Everyone moves at 33% speed (current swiftness) baseline. Movement increases beyond that only exist in form of Superspeed
Or
Everyone moved at 25% baseline, swftness still exists for +8%, and superspeed still exists.

I’d prefer swiftness just went away, and Retaliation should follow it.

remove it, fortified structures are a bad part of this game from top to bottom

up good idea

bring back jumping puzzle days

the stats didn’t dictate the meta, the meta dictated that these stats are good. Dire has been around for a LONG time, and wasn’t an issue until HoT. I’ve posted why HoT brought on this meta a lot, and don’t really want to rehash the entire thing, but basically:

HoT encouraged WvW zergs to ditch warriors for revs (a lot of reasons). Loss of Warriors led to less mobile, less bursty zergs. Frontline spec revs can deal a lot of damage, but they’re kittening slow as hell compared to the old JI Guards + warrior leaping followups.

The comps changed to be more mitigation focused, less power, and less mobility. It’s too easy to play Condition specs now, and the increase in enemy mitigation stacking means power is balls compared to conditions.

The “solution” to the condition meta isn’t just buffing mitigation or nerfing conditions, because you aren’t addressing the largest issue is that Power is pretty garbage compared to pre-HoT in small group vs large group sizes.

If ANET listened to complaints commonly voiced about conditions, we wouldn’t be in the fun Pre-HoT days, but instead lead into an even deeper mitigation hellscape. I’d rather die to conditions in seconds if the alternative is mitigation stacking borefests.

The Game Slayer.7632:

OriOri.8724:

Lahmia.2193:

The resistance thing was necessary because of how detrimental demon stance revs were to zergs. They would absorb all the conditions from allies around them, then necros would just target them with epi and cause mass downs once the resistance ran out.

A change that would have helped revs more would have been removing resistance and redesigning Revs legends. Resistance can still be corrupted and revs are still kitten out of luck.

No single boon should be powerful enough for you to ignore all condition damage, on top of ignoring all soft CC and other effects from conditions. And now that same boon also makes you immune to 1 skill even being used on you.

This needs to end. Resistance needs t be removed at this point, not continuously made stronger

Nah, conditions were never meant to be a primary source of damage. And if there are builds where it was the primary source, they were never meant to perform better than power. (Which is what we’re in the midst of at the moment.)

If you want to kill someone using conditions, you run the risk of the other player using resistance. (Which there is still counter-play to, as you can boon strip.)

If anything, the power creep of conditions have made the casual player-base more spoiled in thinking that conditions are a viable means of skillful play.

Did you all forget about the past versions of these traits/utilities?

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Automated_Response
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Diamond_Skin
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Berserker_Stance

Resistance simply replaced traits similar to those things. Except, there was no counter to diamond skin. No counter to berserker stance. No counter to automated response. There is a counter to resistance. The game is pretty balanced right now when compared to a few years ago.

If you’re drawing intent from game balance or dev comment’s from 4 years ago, that’s irrelevant now. The same team that made the game doesn’t do balance on it, and HoT kitten on most design concepts the core game got right.

The “balance” by just making X no longer work on Y that has no precedent in the entire game is lazy and boring. The fun of builds comes from various investments and opportunity costs and how they pay off against other builds. Just flat out saying “I have X, so Y doesn’t hurt me” is really stupid. Resistance was a bad idea from the start, and this “balance” change is going further in that lazy, boring direction.

The issue with GW2 is the parent company wants to spend no money on balancing it so lazy changes like this will continue and you get X counters Y balancing that takes minimal man power aka money. The original balance team had a good head on their shoulders.