Guild Wars 2

The bottleneck are those maps. That, and your CPU since gw2 doesn’t take much advantage of the graphics card.
From my own experience the required specs stated on the gw2 box are way too low to what the game demands. Neither my laptop nor my slightly-old desktop perform too good with this game; and some maps are unplayable for someone like me who’s used to FPS games.

See if you can tweak windows power consumption to high performance, that helped me.

In this thread we play a little game in which we create currently impossible builds which would be possible if an unlocked slot could take any trait from any tree (but still restricted to tier; no grandmaster in adept slots ;p )

Then make a brief description of it.
It’s best if you use the build editor to put all (gear, trees) except what isn’t possible.

I’ll start:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQJASWlsApWo97wVI0ENBGRk3ZtgdQzCA-TJhCwAdLD8c/BAXCgKPBAA

Missing traits are Writ of Persistence and Writ of Exaltation

This build is based on high retaliation uptime (which can be boosted by blasting the symbols). The symbols are large, long, increased damage, inflict vulnerability and heal.
Build also has all shouts, each clearing 2 conditions on all allies. 2 stun breakers and some stability.
A great support build, especially in pvp.

Google doesn’t show any good quality.

I recommend you boot up the game with the highest quality and resolution and just enter the queen chamber and take a screenshot after disabling the HUD.
CTRL-SHIFT-H. I think that’s the key combination.

I know there’s an option to entirely disable the hud, but I can’t remember about the key combination anymore.
Something like ctrl-shift-h?

I can’t say that rank farming annoys me.
What really does are these guys which are clueless about the game and start venting chat with rage at the rest of the team backed up by how they’re dragon rank.

Whenever I see a dragon finisher it automatically comes to my mind one of these rank farm servers and I assume they have little skill.

I hope they work more on the features than on the living story.
Roll out a huge pack of skills and traits, reworking the old useless ones.

Dadnir, could you describe a specific scenario in which you objectively see removing hard ressing while in combat and limiting ressing to one player as something more negative than positive? Or do you agree?

I believe you have misread the entire thread as “remove soft ressing while in combat”.
You also seem to be OKAY with limiting the ressing to 1 player.

The current state are condition bunkers.
Or at least that’s all the whine I see.
Although I’ve got to admit these perplexity engineers are everywhere.
As for the rest of the classes, to my eyes they use the same stuff as before.
I haven’t touched my build.

Whatever works most is the short answer to your question.

I’ve played tons of RTS games online, and I’ve always reached the top of ranks by following this rule:

If it works more than it fails, and when it fails it doesn’t imply a loss (or when it succeeds it implies a victory), then it works.
Forget about what most players consider unacceptable or cheesy. A strategy is a strategy.

So following this rule, try the game out. If you go without condi removal do you often have more success because you have better tools for the current meta? Then go ahead. Otherwise stay with it.
It’s about seeing what’s more typical and build against it. So you should start on higher ground. The rest of atypical scenarios depends solely on your skill.

The smart thief would kitten bricks and start running.
But I spawn the dogs as he’s already stabbing me.
By the time the dogs are leaping in the air with might he’s already burned all his initiative.
Add to the leap attacks which are 4k base the might + 3 active VoJ with might and chances he ends up roasted are high.

If that doesn’t work, the fight will be as it is vs any thief. Either he kills himself to retaliation or it’s a draw.

Reviving/resurrecting one player at a time and resurrecting only when out of combat.

This solves the whole issue. Just like that people can keep the downed mechanics and the whole hard ressing in combat problem disappears.
It’s easy to implement and wouldn’t raise complaints around the playerbase.

Let’s hope this thread gets proper visibility and gets into the game.

As full support I deal no damage.
But when I’m roaming wvw alone, I tend to roll with Hounds of Balthazar so when I see one of those annoying thieves, I just empower the hounds, grant them retaliation and beef them up with VoJ

If he sticks around, he’ll normally get instantly killed.

Hey there! I’m a veteran guardian and I’ve played since the beta with the same original build, just making constant variations of it until it became what it is now (it started as a consecrations only build!).

I’ll compare it to mine and tell you what I think about yours.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQJARWlsApWolCxVI8DRRFBldLOf6tB7DEgIcDA-TJxHAB1eJAQqMgO7PAwTAAA
Of course my build has been crafted mostly in spvp and wvw roaming in groups of about 3 players (I despise zergs)

The main issue I see in your build is the lack of stability. Stability is along with protection are the best forms of support you can give. It gives me the feeling you’re focusing too much on healing. If you want a healer you should take a glance at the water elementalist.
Notice how I get two skills with stability. You can even swap vengeful with master of consecrations and with hallowed ground you’ll give nearly permanent stability if you rotate properly. In dungeons I tend to get that trait to use consecrations.

Notice also how I have runes of the trooper (soldier) instead of runes of the monk. We have nearly the same boon duration, healing and toughness (remove from runes, add from traits) but I don’t have the vestige of critical damage, which is more of less useless; but also more vitality.
At the expense of 10% more outgoing healing (which I make up with healing aegis) I get all my utilities to heal two conditions. Do the consecration swap for purging flames and you’ll make your team immune to conditions. And that’s godlike with the current meta.
I don’t have battle presence. I’ll give you that.
You can get that instead of pure of voice but believe me that removing 2 condis with each shout isn’t comparable to removing just one. That’s because dangerous condis are often bundled with inoffensive condis. You’ll end up removing the inoffensive one more often than you’d want to; having to waste another utility to get that one out.

I greatsword instead of anything else because of the mobility it gives. Things get ugly? You can leap out. And it deals damage.
But you can swap to anything else if you prefer, one of my favourites is hammer to blast light fields for area retaliation.
Cleric gear gives some power, which I use for the permanent retaliation. That’s why vengeful over anything else. It’s great considering how virtues give retaliation too. Notice how vengeful also works on retaliation applied to allies. And facing a team with permanent retaliation (staff might also says hello), big protection and stability uptime, constant healing and nearly immune to condis IS scary.

You can change the pure of heart for dual handed mastery, but each aegis heals over 1k so this means with renewed focus you can chain 3 times virtue of courage which is a good emergency heal of 3k just with courage (then you’ll be out with greatsword leap). 2k to allies.

Also, the 2 points I’ve configured in radiance and valor are absolutely free for you to change.
Right now I have em like that because virtues recharge fast meaning aoe blind each 20 seconds and valorous defense does well with aegis healing.
But you can put them both in valor for strength in numbers (although I prefer burn on block with so many aegis with shelter).
Or you could put them both in radiance if you want to unlock signet mastery. The healing signet is a big one (it heals DOUBLE as much as shelter) and you can trade retreat for any choice of signet you want. 1200 range knockdown with 200 extra power is delicious. Or even more retaliation stun breaker with aoe weakness. Yum yum!

Not exactly. It’s more like entering a major city and just chillin’.
Something more in the terms of using the game to chat and /dance in contrast to the hardcore gamers which do tournaments with teamspeak on.
It’s the most casual play you can do.

You can add the “I’m a wizard” touch to it, but that’s just optional.

Because of the pure of heart trait with cleric gear I use 0 1 1 6 6.
With my gear valorous defense and the trait pure of heart it heals for over 1k. And an extra 1k every minute and a half. You can compare it to the newly added GRANDMASTER trait which gives 3k only. For a trait which is at the bottom I believe it’s pretty amazing.

Selfless Daring: This one is borderline useless to me because its real effectiveness is only useful if you happen to have tons of HP. Unlike other dodge-roll traits, this one is heavily influenced by a stat that scales terribly.

You can’t be serious man. My entire build revolves around this. I even have 2 energy sigils for that.
It heals much less in spvp and I still believe it’s an amazing trait.

I’ll tell you what came to my mind.

A different-than-white kodan with two of those blazing daggers, green gaudy armor and holographic wings.

Reurgh…

As a veteran wvwer, I can come up with some explanations.

1- I’m a nearly unkillable guardian. My build is designed for that. 1v1 I will either win or tie; unless it’s some very rare engineer condi build which will eventually wear me down after several minutes of chase.
I’ve once met a thief which could kill me; so because of my surprise I checked his attacks to see what his build was about.
Unknown hits you for crapload using Cloak and Dagger.
Player hits you for 2k using whatever attack.
Unknown hits you for another kittenton using Cloak and Dagger.
I still believe he wasn’t playing legit. It could be he teamed up with other thieves which were permanently under stealth due to great build and extreme coordination; but I doubt that.
I’ve also met 1 thief which would warp around when moving normally and have his attack speed be much faster without using quickness.
So my 2 cents go to he was cheating as I believe due to thief combat mechanics, it is possible to bypass certain restrictions by hacking which isn’t possible with other classes.

2- Some runes spawn friendlies. It could be that. Or there could be a ranger nearby which you didn’t see.

3- You can boost stomping speed by using quickness. Warriors have an utility for that; right?

Nerfing those was a mistake. The game was a lot of fun back in the beta.
It wasn’t too hard. Enemies would kill you if you were careless or pulled too many.

Right now it’s about hitting all keys in a random pattern and you’ll win anyway.
It’s pointless to roam around the open world. There’s nothing. There’s no threat.
Events are too easy and give no rewards.

And dungeons…
Dungeons should be a place to crawl in slowly for exploring and discovering hidden places. Some really hard place which should take several retries to complete for an unique item such as an ascended backpiece. Not the current lf warrior 6000+ ap link berserker rush which skips everything and strategy is no more than stacking for phat lewtz.

People seem to forget that the fun in videogames is the challenge in them
Makes me imagine id developers rolling out a patch for quake4 in which, because of deeming it too hard, decide to make it so enemies miss 95% of their attacks and deal half the damage. And to compensate, they have 10 times more health.
And with that swing the game would be destroyed.

I wish I could enjoy aetherpath as much as you do. My framerate runs unplyable even though I have an early generation of i7.

The solution is simple.
Make the content actually hard.
Remove the infinite health bars.

My first experience in which I leveled up my main was the most enjoyable.
Party would stall constantly with our mediocre gear and some bosses felt impossible to defeat. We even changed skills and strategies in different scenarios. But the sense of achievement was great when we completed them.
And it sort of felt like crawling down a dungeon; like it’s supposed to be.

Right now? Right now you enter the dungeon skipping all the content with people who yell OMG COME STACK U NOOB at the whirlwind boss in AC.
Everything can be resumed to stacking in the same place, mashing all buttons because it doesn’t really matter when to do what.
Comparing that to the play I get in wvw revolving in timing the skills, playing with blocks, evades, retaliation, blinds, burst, condition cleansing, stability…

I’m not surprised I quit playing pve altogether.

That’s false.
I run a triple shouts build and not only I’m unkillable but with the best support in the game I can turn any battle.

I couldn’t agree more to this. It’s utter nonsense to cast Ray of Judgement without target to put it under a 3 second cooldown.

According to condi > bunker > zerker > condi…

Then what the hell defeats condibunkers?
What’s the proper way to defeat one of those engineers with apothecary gear which unload 2398479832 condis on you and then just explode their healing turrets a thousand times in water fields?

I really hope they do something about it. ANYTHING.
In fact, I’d choose the mad solution over anything.

They did a great work with the feature pack but I think they should do something bigger.
Adding new skills. Doing big changes.
Entirely reworking WvW. New systems. They need to pull out papers and come up with new ideas. Radicalize the design.

Right now it’s some zergfest bullkitten with no strategy whatsoever, no emphasis on defending. Just zerg around because choochoo karma train.

I don’t really understand the question.
Just swap runes and go.
But I recommend you try it in spvp first, where it’s free.

I run a support guardian with a build designed ENTIRELY to cleanse conditions.

Ironically I can face multiple berserkers at the time but a single proper terrormancer will make me kitten bricks.

I agree people with healing power should be able to resurrect other players faster.
Or better yet, people without healing power make it slower.

I’m satisfied with the look of both my only characters.

I play guardian, my build was nerfed only slightly because of vigor internal cooldown being raised from 5 to 10.

On the other hand I play greatsword staff, so adding two more sigils make the change an overall buff. I can’t complain. I still consider my build borderline broken OP.

And why exactly do you want to nerf them?
They’re strong, that’s true. But why nerf?
To nerf something, it would have to be deemed way too powerful and see EVERYONE using the same thing. (Hint: previous lyssa runes).
Or you could state how perplexity runes are too powerful when they can be combined with stuns.

But stuff like 2 seconds fear every minute and a half? Or burning duration? Or endurance regeneration on swap because now a second sigil can be equipped now?
It doesn’t seem justified to me at all.

Harper, I have an entirely different approach to the problem than the “you don’t like dull wvw? It is meant to be this way. There’s no skill, just numbers; and if you don’t like it you can go somewhere else.”
That same logic can be applied to everything else.

3 minute respawn timer is more of an issue than a problem solver. Having to wait for 3 minutes before being able to do anything? That sounds like a total game killer to me.
Besides, resurrecting a player entirely circunvents this so the “Zero strategy blob always wins” is still there. Besides, it already takes minutes to reach the fight from spawn.

I described two scenarios which show the game would improve drastically. Now I’m talking about the fun to watch and fun to play challenge without hugging the “don’t like it too bad” premise. I hope you agree the ideal scenarios are better than the current state of mindlessly blobbing.

But since this thread is more about downed-state than KILLED state; I believe I’m going to make a new thread later not to derail this one.
Although it’s somewhat very related: downed state still reinforces the permissiveness of really bad play since you’ll get a chance to get up more often than being ultimately killed.

I agree when you state a bigger army should defeat the smaller one.
And in fact I’m not really in favor of hard-capping the combat to very small sizes since despite I despise zergs and avoid being in one at all costs, some other people actually seem to enjoy W+1+1+1+1+1.

The key point I’m trying to make is the downed state and reviving players removes the element of bad play. No matter how you look at it, a blob is just going to dps down a gate under siege fire with no punishment since they’re going to quickly revive anyone who dies for staying beneath arrow cart fire.

Pyrrhic victories should occur. My ideal scenarios should be:
-Zerg uses time making an encampment near keep using ballistas, arrow carts and catapults. Zerg size is a resource which pulls from capturing / defending other locations. Enemy zerg arrives facerolling through the encampment lol111111 and dies to positioning and siege. They die. Keep yields and is lost.
-Blob dps gate without any positioning nor catapults nor anything. Not even rams.
Bad players die sniped by AC, ballistas. Keep yields because blob is immense. Blob is now a small zerg because of the amount of losses and dies to the enemy zerg which has just arrived to reinforce. Keep is saved.

The current scenario:
Lol I’m blob 1111111111111111111. Blob members die? NP resurrect in an instant. 0 losses. Enemy zerg arrives? lol1111111111. AC? LOLO111111. Keep taken. Skill required: 0. Now choochoo through the map for moar phat lewtz.

So what you’re saying with those words is that a zerg should remain to be untouchable by small groups, which is what ressing causes. Killing a zerg player is extremely difficult and gives no reward, since there’s no effect to it.
But having your small group steamrolled won’t take an effort and it’s guaranteed it’ll have to rally home; maximizing the reward.

So I believe your premise makes the risk-reward ratio unfair to the extreme.

And how is that positive in any way?

They should remove downed state and ressing altogether in all forms of PvP, including WvW.

It demotes skillful play when you’re outnumbered since no matter what you do, they’ll res faster.

Let’s hope since Living Story is stalled we’ll get a lot more of features from now on.

I agree.

And putting the +vit grandmaster trait into the healing and condition cleansing tree which is also the most overloaded was just a bad move.

Gibson.4036:

I have an idea. Why don’t we just reset every character in the game to level 1? That’d repopulate those mid level zones again.

Yeah, your idea is magnificent. Because a new alternative has been introducing to the leveling system which currently consists on walking to an NPC and paying a small fee.
And the same goes for gear, legendaries and achievement. Reset it all.

I’d also like to have my traits locked.
In fact, I’d love it if everyone’s traits got locked.

Even though I only play WvW, it would mean populating PvE again from its current dead state.

If they made lizardmen I’d delete my main character.

OldSomalia.6180:

It’s pretty pointless to claim “PvE isn’t very rewarding” and following it up with “outside of this and this and this”.
Stop cherry picking.

Principle of charity

In philosophy and rhetoric, the principle of charity requires interpreting a speaker’s statements to be rational and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation.

I believe what he meant to say was “Apart from Farm Wars 2, the rewards are utter kitten”.
Which I completely agree with.
I normally play WvW teamed up with a magnificent warrior to crush the enemy even when outnumbered. We roam capturing camps and biting a zerg’s tail off. It’s the most satisfacting play from all.
But after all this time, I’ve only managed to craft a single ascended armor piece. All weapons are exotic as well. The infusions are WvW infusions because I can’t afford making the stat + agony infusions.
I play about 3 hours a day and I barely make 1 gold.
Even though I ONLY play WvW, my rank is below the average since zerging is far more rewarding. I get 1 kitten silver for actually working towards the WvW score where the zerg swims in income. How is that fair?
Want to wonder why pve is dead? That’s because dynamic events and such give no rewards.

I’ve long wanted to get a full ascended equipment with infusions and the greatsword spiritual weapon, which isn’t even a legendary! But at this rate my computer will rust before I can achieve it.

“Then go farm”. No! I play this game for fun. What the hell happened with the manifesto?

I give up. You’re just inventing virtual complications to bury the idea of open pvp just because you don’t like it. There’s no point debating further.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

Beldin.5498:

Gank Squads can simply harass all Meta Events since they scale the event up and even kill the players that want to make the event.

Since all skills work as open AoE skills it would also be hard to change that they can decide between targets that are flaged and those that are not.

In the end its just wasted developer time .. people who want that kind of game should simply play AION or whatever ..

All these points are invalidated by the PvP safety toggle.
AoE skills don’t attack green players.

maddoctor.2738:

Those “team flags” are not available for players though, they are only available for mobs. From a design side, adding a new variable for players might very well require a completely new field on their database (to hold the team flag) something that is certainly not as easy to do.

How come not? Why would the devs decide to make such a terrible design decision?
How then do they differentiate the greens in WvW? It’s most likely that a camp shares team with its holder. What makes you think otherwise?

Suddenflame.2601:

The bigger question is why do you need a PVP server when there is WvW?
There isn’t questing in this game (only hearts and they are limited) so you can’t use that excuse. Both contain monsters, mining, and events. The only major difference would be that there is world bosses in the PVE servers. In those cases you would not want to have your PVP checkbox on (since that’s the largest suggestion here) as you would get murdered fast from all the AOE and miss out on the reward.

Basically, the only thing that you can do differently in a PVP server from the WvW server would be griefing low level players or griefing events. Either case is negative to the community.

By questing I meant the hearts and the events, also implying the size of Tyria and all the travelling.
When fighting with more people it is evident you’d need to uncheck the PvP box; but that’s the whole point of it.
The thing I’m trying to defend here is you’d be able to PvP in the open whilst simultaneously doing PvE.
With the PvP box you wouln’t be able to grief events nor players.
If you can think of a single situation in which you would be able to, please share.

As you can see, packs of wolves don’t attack each other but aggro anything else.
Another example could be ogres attacking a camp.
There are some “friendly to everyone” teams which can’t be attacked such as the black lion trading company merchant summon; which could be exploited to secure players with the “safe mode”

You’ll have to describe those issues with more detail, since they don’t look like issues to me at all:

• Combo system: It’s the same everywhere. Doesn’t even need to get changed.
• Event scaling: Scales the same as it does now. No change required.
• Mob aggro: The same as well.
• Performance: Exactly the same. There are already teams so the performance remains untouched.

Astralporing.1957:

Why exactly is WvW not enough for this?

WvW lacks questing and all maps are the same.
You can’t compare leveling your character in WvW to leveling it in the open world.
The PvE aspect of WvW is missing.

I’m already expecting the answer “Well if you want to fight go to wvw, open world is pve only”.
That’s a silly response.
What I want is BOTH. PvE + WvW. That would radically improve the game.

What does it take to do? There’s little resources needed to implement this.
What are the cons? Ganking? No! People can activate safe mode so they wouldn’t feel a difference from now.

So, little investment for a small change which would radically improve the game and has absolutely no cons. Why not do it?

Once again, I keep reading “ganking” as an argument.
I’ll repeat myself: what I’m defending is open pvp WITH a safe toggle. NOT a safe zone but a setting which says “I don’t want to fight” so you’re green to everyone else.

As for imbalance… not as much since people get downleveled to a zone.