Guild Wars 2

Anet has been trying to make WvW more rewarding lately, but I think they could do more to improve the rewards system without hurting the game’s economy.

I would like to see a reward track similar to that of SPVP implemented to reward players. I would like one of these reward tracks to have good looking armor as a reward, similar to what is found in SPvP’s glorious armor.

This will help for two reasons:

1) Unlike every other game mode, the rewards in WvW feel almost completely random. As a player you don’t have a long term goal which you are working towards such as the balth backpiece, Fractal weapons, etc. Adding reward tracks that don’t hurt the in game economy, but offer dungeon armor, etc would reward players for effort without increasing monetary gain.

2) Unique rewards will bring more players to the game mode as they hunt said rewards. As a game mode that has been taking a serious hit lately it would be nice to bring the fashionistas of Guild Wars 2 into the mode, if only temporarily.

Implementation

Different tracks require different types of objective completion. For instance, a combination of sentries captured and camps captured contribute to one track.

Not only would this break up zerging a bit, but players would be pushed to contribute in different ways, spreading them over the map and making small fights more common.

Lastly, I would add a bonus track progression buff which is based on how long your server holds an objective. Hold lots of objectives for long periods of time? you get more exp. There would need to be a cap, but this would also give players a reason to defend objectives instead of k train.

Let me know what you think!

mordran.4750:

Robert.6790:

As someone who’s played every single class in PVE, PVP, and WvW… Learn to play.

lol what ? You should clearly take your own advice dude and play a bit without or against stealth. The amount of burst stealth classes can dish out is obscene with no real counterplay. Other classes in contrary to the thief for example have cooldowns on their skills. Do you know what a cooldown is dude ? We can not spam something until our class ressource pool is empty.

The amount of stealth thiefs and mesmers have access to makes it super easy, even for only decent players, simply to hit and run until most of your stuff is on cooldown and if they come to the conclusion that you are not a “fun” target they simply stay in stealth and teleport happy away. Stealth is perfect easy mode game play in GW2 because there is no skill based gameplay involved other that “stay away from red circles” Really dude, even a monkey can learn that.

Some of the points the OP made are really the most overpowered crap i´ve read. Longer lasting stealth ? Protection in stealth ? Dearmor non stealth classes ? and my favourite “No reveal” ? Wow this is ridiculous. How many classes can reveal now ? Ranger and Engie afaik. With hot Revenant too. So three professions out of nine and that´s too much for you, come on i dare you……….

“No real counterplay”

Try anticipating where the thief is. I don’t main thief but they aren’t that hard to counter. All you have to do is anticipate where they are. Which is really easy.

I agree that what the OP said is a bit ridiculous (cue rogue from WoW).

My main point, which you seem to have missed, is that if you know how to play your class it isn’t hard to counter a thief of EQUAL skill. Considering that the thief class relies entirely on their stealth mechanic to be viable, this makes them easy to counter because you know how they will attack you. Learn the timing between attacks/stealth durations and you have yourself an easy fight.

Btw I don’t main thief, so I know what it’s like to play against them.

dancingmonkey.4902:

Robert.6790:

If you can’t survive being attacked by a thief, then you probably are not very skilled. For a lot of the players who complain about thieves being OP, they are probably the same people who, when they see a non-stealth class running at them in wvw, choose to run away. Yes, if you’re not a skilled player it’s annoying to get killed by someone you can’t just run away from in advance of the fight.

you seem confused in my opinion. It appears to me that the complaints are not about the thief directly, but thee stealth abuse they can be capable of at times.

Example :

https://youtu.be/nfsylqFPJuE

https://youtu.be/jpOb3YO0p8c

The players losing in those videos clearly don’t know how to fight a thief/play the game in general.

As someone who’s played every single class in PVE, PVP, and WvW… Learn to play. Seriously. If you can’t survive being attacked by a thief, then you probably are not very skilled. For a lot of the players who complain about thieves being OP, they are probably the same people who, when they see a non-stealth class running at them in wvw, choose to run away. Yes, if you’re not a skilled player it’s annoying to get killed by someone you can’t just run away from in advance of the fight.

As it comes to good players: It’s really not that hard to counter mesmer or thief. Guardians and warriors are pretty much safe, as it’s really annoying to hunt people in heavy armor as a thief… they take so much damage!

Necroes: use fear, marks, deathshroud, AOE’s. you’d be surprised how easily you can convince a stealthed player that you’re not a fun target.

Engies: You have two blinds, lots of leaps, confusion, and decent condi cleanse+lots of heals. Use your skills to chill, then AOE blast that thief to death! If the thief tries to SR or Powder shot, use your shield 4 to knock them out.

Rangers: Sorry, ya’ll are still screwed. Anet please buff?

Elementalists: Even if you get surprised you can still outrun a thief or mesmer if you don’t want to fight them. If you’re running staff, then stick to your zerg because honestly anyone should be able to wreck you 1v1 at that point.

Why is it “ok” that thieves can cause mass panic in roaming situations? The only niche that thieves fit into in WvW is roaming. Every other class fits in well to a zerg except thief.

Also, in my experience playing thief, players running cheese builds are very easy to kill. If you slap a few pieces of soldiers gear on, all of a sudden that’s a different story. Theoretically it’s kinda fair that a player who has foregone taking any extra health or damage reduction shouldn’t be very damage resilient when faced by another “cheese” build.

Lastly in my experience I’ve noticed that most players run for the hills when they get attacked by a stealth build. If you never learn to fight/counter a stealth build then you will probably never beat someone playing one.

Lastly pt. 2: When Anet tests classes for balancing they have the best players play the builds. If the best players end up playing balanced between classes then theoretically losing to a class simply means you are less skilled than that player.

TL:DR stop QQ’ing over stealth when it really isn’t that hard to fight.

Thanks everyone for the replies. Just a quick disclaimer though, I was only speaking from my experiences playing the game, so what I consider the hardest classes to play may be different than yours.

I want to change my main statement though a little bit: I think what I should have said originally is that, because the top tier engies and thieves were very very OP at one point, but also very hard to run from, they got nerfed. However the problem I have is that a thief and a warrior being played by people of equal skill would have unequal success. In order to be a “decent” thief you have to be in the top 25%. In order to match that thief on a warrior, you don’t really have to be that great.

I can speak to this form personal experience; when I got my warrior to 80, I geared him up and hopped in wvw right away. I ran into a couple thieves from FA who usually give me a pretty kitten good fight when I’m on other classes. First day in wvw on a warrior that I used tomes to level, I was able to stomp them pretty bad. I was a bit disappointed that a novice warrior like myself managed to kill a very skilled thief even though I consistently missed my stuns and attack combos. I pretty much killed them by spamming one on GS and timing a block or two correctly.

Thanks everyone for the replies, a lot of great stuff!

I wanted to raise a few questions with this post as well as give my opinions on the questions posed. Before I start, I’ve been an avid player of GW1 and GW2, both since their respective releases. Both games I’ve maxed pretty much everything, be it class, gear, etc. I’m not including this to brag on accomplishments, just to show that I’ve seen pretty much every stage of both games through different patches, nerfs, balances, etc.

Recently both the Engineer and Thief classes have been nerfed pretty bad. To say otherwise means you probably don’t play either class. Both these classes have incredibly high skill caps to be effective. In the past they have both been “OP” because, when played by the top 5% of players they’re really kitten difficult to kill or even survive an attack from.

Naturally this causes people to beat on their chest and cry “NERF THIS NOW” because getting obliterated by a highly skilled player is very frustrating.

The question I’d like to pose, however, is whether classes with high skill caps should be “balanced” with other classes to bring that top percentage of players to be equal.

It’s very easy to be good at Warrior, Guardian, Mesmer, and Necro in wvw be it roaming or zerging. They simply have a lower skill threshold before they become competitive.

So basically someone in the ~50th percentile at playing warrior(in terms of skill) can compete with someone in the ~75th percentile playing a thief or engineer.

Both thief and engineer, especially thief, are high-risk-high-reward classes. A novice thief or engineer isn’t going to gank someone back to last week like a highly skilled player will. A novice, or even middle of the pack engineer player isn’t going to use their skills with as much coordination or creativity as an expert either.

So is it fair to mercilessly “balance” classes like thief and engineer because people cry and QQ when they run into the very best of those classes even though reaching that level of skill has a MUCH higher cap than other classes? I don’t think so.

TL;DR
Thief/engineer take the most skill to play, therefore they should have the potential to be dominant(See highest skill caps) over classes which require significantly less skill to be competitive at.