Guild Wars 2

So I tested a full blown dps power soulbeast build during the demo weekend and was thoroughly disappointed. I was merely eyeballing it, but it seemed clear that the extra damage you got from traits and boons while merged was almost identical to the damage your pet would otherwise do. Soulbeast might solve the corrupt-the-pet WvW issue, but that’s about it.

I would love to see power ranger be competitive in all game modes and while it’s true that its sustain is well above the norm, it’s damage is not. Thing is, I believe this was the original intent in design as far as balance is concerned: not to normalize but to differentiate; and although GW2 is becoming more serious about instanced content, it’s original form remains.

Toxic Trail, Social Awkwardness, Final Laugh, etc., etc., etc. are horrid mechanics, in my opinion. It’s not that they’re difficult, they’re just annoying and add little to the experience. Sure, they might catch a tier noob unawares and do some damage, maybe once or twice, but what do they really add to the experience? More hecticness? More dodging?

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t feel they add any significant value in making higher level fractals more difficult, just more annoying. It’s especially fun when, say, you dodge a golem’s pull in aetherblade and dodge the other golem’s knockback only to take damage from an anomaly’s flux bomb because endurance. I think high level fractals, taking into account the extra damage, mobs, mechanics, etc., have enough going on without adding seemlingly random agony effects just because. To me, all they accomplish is being a minor inconvenience and making vigor and mobility potions more important, but they don’t make it more fun by any stretch of the imagination.

To me, the ideal form of agony would be something akin to an enrage timer whislt at the same time punishing consecutive mistakes severely. Is it really necessary to have one attack with a minor telegraph obscured by all the kittens GW2’s UI has to offer (with everyone’s names, guild tag and titles, coupled with damage number and enemy names right where the action is… brilliant) hit for 21k because higher difficulty? No, it really isn’t, and it doesn’t actually make it fun nor relevant because if your team is good enough you’ll get ressed anyway.

So, my suggestion/feedback: get rid of random agony effects and make it instead something that ticks for X amount per second for as long as you’re in combat, perhaps increasing by tier, whislt at the same time reducing healing by X%, again varying according to tier. Agony, then, becomes something that punishes manifold mistakes (rather than needing to have absurd damage given the health pools to make higher tiers more difficult) and punishes underperforming builds/subpar players, because with reduced healing and a consistent DoT you’ll need to be on point with dodges and finish that fight fast. That, in my opinion, would add enough excitment and make higher tiers more rewarding without having to add a gazillion new things, including increased health pools and damage numbers.

Of course many won’t like it but, hey, there are four tiers… it should be a thing that some people are t2 players whereas others are t4 players. And while we’re at it, let’s make fractal avengers actually finish people off so that if you suck you die. As it is, a group ability to complete a fractal is reliant upon having 2-3 players that are good enough to ress those that aren’t and even if they can’t it doesn’t matter because those 3 players could probably finish it on their own.

I understand the dev team is trying to make them harder, but the way it’s being done is somewhat ridiculous, with too many notches being turned up rather than a few well defined and thought out tweaks. Take Nightmare, for instance, it’s become quite epileptic in its pace. It was good as it was, one of the best. Throwing an attack every 1.5s your way because more hecticness = good is just not the way to go.

I’m all for making them harder, mind you, it’s just a question of how.

Crackers.9628:

Maybe I can offer a different view point. In thai boxing there is a move where one repeatedly kicks the opponents thigh. At some point, if you take too many hits, you just can’t stand up straight anymore. It’s allowed, but it’s cheap and generally frowned upon. That’s what condi is in this game. It’s the easy short cut.

I can’t quote everyone I’d like to quote, so this fits best.

First off, I’ve made condi burst builds that can stack 4-5k ticks worth of burning within seconds. Most players will drop before they even know what hit em, especially if they are otherwise engaged which is what you want with this builds. Condition builds shouldn’t be able to burst. If we are to differentiate them, lets.

Power is much easier to mitigate if for no other reason than you can walk away from the fight/kite/block/evade/etc. Power needs to keep constant pressure to be effective whereas conditions, once applied, mean gg if you run out of cancel-I-win buttons.

This game is too bursty and in fact if you were to have a 20% increase in sustain across the board coupled with a 15% reduction to power damage and 30% to condition damage, you’d barely notice the difference other than fighting a few specific high sustain builds in 1v1 situations. The reason being that in spvp fights are often decided by one guy getting dropped and the rest of that team being outnumbered. Whoever dies first gives the opposite team a huge advantage, even more so thanks to the oh so pointless downstate mechanic, and it leads to a rampage of sorts leading to very one sided matches. 1v1 balance in this game may be superb, but 5v5 it’s terrible and the burstyness + cc + conditions damage ridiculous.

Stability is silly as a mechanic, as many professions/weapon sets cannot be played in pvp because of it. Instead, defensives rather than cc become preferable. Also, without stability you can get knocked around like a ragdoll. I’d change stability to only active for X number of seconds after you’d been cced, so only to prevent chain cc which, again, in group fights it’s very real and very annoying.

Conditions are cheap, without a doubt, and it’s the very reason I don’t play condition builds: cover or wait for cleanses, gg. That is its measure of skill. With power, you have to do everything right comparatively speaking to get the kill. With conditions, it’s just a matter of time before they run out of cleanses; so don’t use everything if you can’t cover your main conditions and stay alive just a few seconds, because that is all it takes.

Splitting them into conditions and afflictions (non-damaging conditions) and having cleanses remove afflictions as well, perhaps just one, would do wonders for this game in terms of it being a game of skill.

I remember a post not too long ago, from a top 10 player, asking his build be nerfed because it was ridiculous: being able to place so many cover conditions the other player could do literally nothing but die, and there’s still players who’ll argue conditions are warranted, needed, require skill, etc. Lame!

Those “applies condi on crit” traits are secondary, really. They’re quite lackluster, if you can isolate them (say equip a power weapon on a condi build and see how much dmg those “applies condi on crit” traits actually do) you’ll notice this.

Conditions are cheap, period. I don’t play conditions because it feels godkitten cheap. It’s a question of covering conditions or waiting for cleanses and gg, there’s no skill involved. Granted, this doesn’t apply to all professions as some are quite slow to apply conditions, which is how it ought to work really. It’s gradual, slow, then painful; as opposed to power which is just burst. But more and more, and especially in the demo weekend, I saw instant applications of 6+ conditions, which is impossible to work around. Even if you spam your condi cleanses, you’ll be down to 50% health and left with nothing to counteract future applications after than initial “burst”. That is absurd. Conditions are already absurd as a mechanic (“I win” vs “Cancel I win” buttons), but 6+ conditions being instantly applied… no true game of skill would allow this to become a thing.

My suggestion would be to split conditions into damaging and non-damaging to prevent condition application without the counterplay possibility. They could be named conditions and afflictions and cleanses reworked so that “removes 1 condition” becomes “removes 1 condition and 1 affliction”. That alone would make conditions manageable given the current amount of cleanses and it can still be a valuable addition to any team without it being a question of: “oh, did you run out of Cancel I wins? I win now!” Struts his skill

Kuya.6495:

I always hate when someone yells out to fight on point in a match. If the point is covered in aoe circles, don’t fight on point. If you are the target of a focus, don’t fight on point, seek to break LoS. The only acceptable reason to yell at your team to fight on point is when they’re off chasing a thf across half the map for no reason.

In my experience I’ve been frustrated more by teammates nose diving into a point and blowing up in seconds than off point fighters.

This. A million times this.

It’s only trash players who think they’re too good to lose as often as they do that would yell this for no good reason. Sure, if the entire team is chasing and giving up caps left and right, that’s one thing; but more often than not the “fight on point” philosophy doesn’t fly. It’s better to give up the point, for instance, and stay alive long enough for help to arrive and 2v1; or give up the point in a 1v2 but stay alive long enough to troll those same two players, giving your team an advantage in the rest of the field.

As a scrapper, I regularly decap and cap a point, only to lose it to a 1v2 a few seconds later as I troll and kite them as long as I can, only to retake the point a few seconds later when one of them leaves and I kill the remaining player, only to give it up to another 1v2 a few seconds later, and so on so forth. And this is much, much, much more beneficial than dying on point to a 1v2. Also as LB ranger, I regularly let people decap or even full cap a point only to kill em a few seconds later and retake it for my team, as opposed to “fighting on point”, aka “dying on point” for no good reason.

I actually found soulbeast to be extremely underwhelming in PvP. My main gripe with it is that merging does nothing: the extra damage you gain if you picked a ferocity pet is basically the damage your pet would do.

I didn’t check the new dagger too much because I dislike condition builds and the little I did see felt underwhelming as well. Dagger is a main dps power weapon for every profession that has it, with the exception of now Warrior and Ranger, which just felt like a giant slap to the face. Also, another condition build? Hasn’t condi ranger outperformed since forever?

My suggestion would be to reword the pet boons, as most are utterly useless. Seriously, vitality and concentration? No one’s gonna want that. On top of those nigh useless boons, depending on which pet category you merged with, gain vanilla boons on an interval: might, protection, fury, etc. That’s one. Two: make pet swapping possible while merged, because anything else feels too clunky. At the very least, swapping pets while merged should take you out of form and swap pets rather than doing nothing. Ideally, you could just swap while merged, remain merged, and thus change your boons/skills; now that would make soulbeast far more appealing.

Overall, I don’t feel it adds enough to ranger playstyle to really warrant it being an elite specialization. It basically ads three skills, and your choice there is quite limited because of how utterly useless the boons while merged are. So you either go with meh boons and okish skills, or terrible boons and good extra skills.

Also, condi cleanse and stability is lacking. Signed of whateverness (condi transfer) needs a rework. Compared to other elite specialization and their power creep, soulbeast is lacking substantially. So much so, that I even wonder if it’s worth playing over a vanilla build.

This is mainly from a power ranger PvP perspective, mind you.

Conditions is one of the cheapest, worse mechanics this game has to offer. It seems designed so that complete noobs can get kills when people run out of cleanses, if their enemy is good enough to survive a burst rotation and stay in the fight long enough to burn through their CDs, conditions will wither them away because there’s literally nothing they can do about it other than wait to die.

Core ranger has too many cleanses? Every class needs more cleanses and conditions a major nerf, period. There’s no room for such a gimmick in a supposedly skill based game. You’re basically giving someone an “I win” button and someone else a “Cancel I win” button, and it’s just a question of who has more. Horrid design choice.

I was messing about with a core ranger build yesterday since SB will be closer to core builds than druid builds, sorta a warm up, and found it to be surprisingly strong. Granted, I’ve pvped a lot most of it on ranger so I know what I’m doing (easily better than 90% of rangers out there), and now I’m even considering making that my main build because of how much fun it was. Got top damage on all three matches, mostly on account of my being able to stay alive longer than most. Having tried soulbeast, I must say it’s underwhelming considering how close it is to core ranger builds and how clunky it feels.

Also, next specialization should be something along the lines of Barbarian, with either hammer or dual maces. What ranger is missing (LB power ranger at least), is a solid melee alternative. So druid gives it support so it’s desirable in pve pugs, soulbeast removes the pet so it’s better in wvw situations and Barbarian would give it a high sustain/cc melee option to complement ranger in every other way.

I appreciate this post and share and will definitely check it out. My thoughts on the demo when it comes to spvp are the exact opposite: deadeye ruins it. So I will gladly check out the footage to see if my bias is justified or not. Hope the devs do too, posts from experienced and high rated players, as well as those who spend an awful lot of time in arenas, should receive more attention.

The very concept of stability and its lack thereof is illconceived in this game, to be honest. The very concept of downed state in pvp is ill conceived as well.

The problem with stability is that you get knock around like a ragdoll if you don’t have it, yet professions that rely (or would rely) on some form of cc to stay alive are neutered if they face an enemy with stability. It replaces reactive gameplay with “stab-lol” gameplay. In my opinion, stability should be reworked to be a passive, reactive trait to avoid chain cc. You gain say 5s of stability if you are hit with any cc, when that cc ends. This is unccoruptible/etc in the same way stealth is. There can still be traits and abilities for it but of shorter duration.

That said, ranger has some of the worse stability in the game and taking both sources out in back to back patches is unjustifiable. Even if we gain dolyak and whatever, whatever happened to the oh so treasured build diversity angle/pr line?

And yeah, this was a great ability to take as power druid: damage, stability, passive avatar power generation and some active gameplay in terms of timing the use of this ability. Instead we get a passive set and forget ability that will be a must have regardless because 5%+ dps. I’m against changes that dumb down the game, this is one such change.

It’s not immunity to damage, it’s immobilize which is horrid. In open world it’s a total cheese: immobilize and go to sleep, nothing will survive it; in instanced content it’s pointless and in pvp it’s horrendous, immobilize and it gets instantly cleansed/cleaved away. Losing stability, a 25% damage increase and the avatar power generation from passive heal for ferocity (worse possible stat) and an immobilize (worse possible cc) feelsbadman. Not to mention that avatar power generation goes to the most popular choice for druids because they desperately needed it after shout regen nerf, maybe? Two wrongs don’t make a right. Guessing they didn’t want Soulbeast to have stability outside of Soulbeast. Other changes are actually good in one way or another, although the 4s immobilize on the 25% movement speed increase might have made more sense.

SotW should have been an elite as it was. Make Strength of the Pack! … might and fury, who needs more of that? … into what SotW used to be and while we’re at it let’s rework entangling roots down to 3s but with an unblockable/undodgeable/unbarriable 1.5s if the first is somehow removed. Entangling roots trait in Druid down to 15s CD without the 1.5s extra one and call it Lesser.

What are we balancing for, exactly? The “you can play your toon any way you want” line is unrealistic at best. Perhaps as you’re leveling you can build and explore as you see fit and if you don’t care about challenging content nor pvp you can have a perfectly viable whatever build and have fun with it. For 90%+ of the population, however, this isn’t the case.

So I’ll say it again: what are we balancing for, exactly? And I’m not talking exclusively about the recent patch but responding to the many times I’ve read, say, “X weapon is severely underused” or “Y traits have fallen out of favor so we’re buffing them”, etc, etc, etc. What’s the point? The community as a whole will always, invariably, gravitate toward whatever is most effective and ignore everything else.

Not to criticize the goal nor the effort involved in making an infinite number of builds equally viable, but is that really the best and most efficient use of resources? Seems like an impossibly tall order, in my view. Could we not, instead, focus on making build types equally viable and fun to play? Say a power, condition and support variant for each profession, both in pve and pvp. That is already a monumental challenge, yet still less than the aforementioned approach.

I fail to see the point of this new mechanic being introduced. So yes, some abilities can be spammed but is that really a plus? In my opinion, it would have been better to simply reduce their cooldown as the ammo mechanic is more difficult to internalize. Let me explain what I mean by that…

Good combat games aim to replicate what would be appealing in that scenario in real life without the threat of injury or worse. Take something simple like a shooter, it’s eye hand coordination, reflexes, battlefield awareness, etc., which put human being into a heightened state of adrenaline. With experience, game specific mechanics which were foreign at first become second nature and the overall flow of the experience is greatly improved.

My issue with ammo is, like I said, it’s more difficult to internalize. After playing a certain profession for a given amount of time, one develops a sense for its CDs and the overall immersion is better. Ammo, instead, is something that forces me to look at the skillbar more often while adding what exactly? Spammable skills.

I’m not saying it won’t be useful, I’m saying it’s a worse mechanic as far as gameplay and immersion is concerned than the standard CD mechanic. I honestly don’t see the point of this mechanic other than simply having a new mechanic for the sake of having a new mechanic.

Silv.9207:

The scourge gameplay will be totally different from the Necromancer and the Reaper, you have to kite More, to Run More, have a Better Position. But any enemy with a Teleport will catch you easy and fast anyway. And then all your barriers will grant you half of the survavibility of a core necromancer.

Untill you’re able to move and flee, there’s not so much problems but when the enemy immobilize you or use a teleport you will regret to don’t have the old Death Shroud.

This. Besides, any profession that is referred to as “having mobility” in this game is not only because of some random utilities with long cooldowns. All these professions have great tools on some of their weapons as well, which necromancer does not. Scourge will not fly. It’s a clunkier form of shroud which needs to be activated with precise timing and the added benefit of team support… because, let’s face it, when people make a necromancer they’re thinking “I want to help my team stay alive”, that’s the perception and appeal of the necromancer.

Let’s be honest, this is a “run Scourge or die” change. If it was so powerful, it could have been nerfed to half its effect, but no. If other traits were the problem they could have been buffed, but no. If this trait was so powerful, it could have been moved to the ultimate column and compete with something useful, but no.

Straight up useless trait as it is and necromancer, which relies on shroud to stay alive as it has no vigor, no blocks, no mobility, terrible healing, etc., feels awful to play. What’s more, I’m certain Scourge will not fly as necromancer is not built to function without shroud. The barriers decay too quickly but they will still require shroud generation and perfect timing. There’s no sustain outside of shroud because necro was built with shroud in mind, so we’re getting a lesser, clunkier form of shroud and a nerf to shroud itself because raisins. Fun, great fun.

Nothing learned, nothing gained. That’s all I’ll say. Looks to me like Soulbeast will be severely lacking in actual sustain mechanics. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Soulbeast seems to grant random boons when merging rather than a transformation and skill bar changes? Regardless, have your learned nothing from warrior? Eleven seconds (+ signet of stone) of 100% power damage mitigation is ludicrous. Terrible, terrible, terrible change. I main ranger and I hate it.

Context: I pvp.

3s on a 60s cooldown would have been far more appropriate, if we must go the lesser signet of stone route, or even on a 90s cooldown.

What to make of this? First off it severely nerfs avatar power generation as that passive heal meant +2%/s if you and your pet weren’t at full health. Granting another immobilize is nigh worthless, as it is one of the worse pvp mechanics against many professions… or was it unblockable attacks? Situationally useful at best. Removing the stability after Strength of the Pack nerf is utterly ridiculous. Yes, dolyak stance but who cares? This ability was good enough to be an elite, especially considering Strength of the Pack didn’t grant anything other than vanilla boons and stability.

If this is a way to make druid less appealing and soulbeast a must have, lame.
If this is an unintended consequence of making useless abilities more appealing, lame.

Well then you can kiss the pvp scene goodbye. Top stats, in a different form mind you, would be ideal to track individual performance and adapt rating accordingly. Not as such, since as such they are nigh irrelevant, but consider this: relative to your team, how do you score on a series of match defining measures? Everyone gets ranked one to five, perhaps even in percentages if you wish to be more accurate, in terms of: damage, deaths, cap contributions, decap contributions, healing. It’d be close to impossible to rank well if you’re chasing stats: you could get 0 deaths by being afk but also 0 damage. It’s the cumulative effect that matters, in the end.

Personally, I’m sick and tired of getting four or even five top stats and losing rating. That’s just ridiculous. Also, by the same token, the new and improved post match display is ludicrous as well. Top three players, regardless of team; that’d engender more competition.

This is supposed to be a game of skill where I literally represent a tenth of the match I’m in? One tenth! So for 10% contribution you get 100% reward/punishment, brilliant! The other 90% that goes into determining the final outcome is irrelevant because raisins. Yeah, that’s a good system.

PvP pop is dying, the new xpac won’t bring it back as long as the game remains as bursty, team dependant and cheeze prone as it is. No eSports? Think they’ll just milk it with no real involvement nor intent thereof. Sad but probably true.

Aquatic Ruins and Solid Oceans need to go away, pronto. By far the most boring fractals and no one wants to do them when they come up in rotation.

Having six dailies (including recommended) is rather silly as there are approximately a dozen fractals. Six dailies means you will repeat every fractal every other day. That’s too painful a grind, too monotonous and repetitive. Let’s face it, most people do fractals for the rewards and not the fun, after a while that is. That being a proven format in MMOs there’s nothing wrong with it per se, but there should be a balance struck. We know MMOs are a grind, we partially enjoy the grind otherwise we wouldn’t play, but repeating six instances every other day misses the mark by a mile.

In my opinion, recs need to go away too and fractal pages redesigned in such a way that they are baked into dailies (the 3 tier dailies) and provide a greater reward the higher you go. At least this way you’ll be repeating fractals every four days instead of two, making it seem like less of a grind, and provide a further incentive for moving up the ladder.

Ideally, you’d want more fractals so it’s less repetitive still, but at the moment this is the easiest way to achieve that end. That said, 21 fractals seems like the sweetspot. Assuming 3 and not six dailies, that’s a one week rotation if you do them every day. It’d still be a grind, just not as apparent.

Also, less mini-games and more interesting fights please. The trek up Chaos/Uncategorized, for instance, while fine and fun the first few times becomes such a chore after a while. Fractals need to be designed always keeping in mind how the user will experience them. If we are to experience them as dailies, gimmicks and mini-games become tedious once you’ve gotten the hang of them, especially if you are to repeat them every… other… day.

Everything they said: a clumped group generally results in someone dying, might be useful to grab a weapon/utility with some mobility for those situations.

@Ori agreed, like so many other mechanics in fractals, they become incredibly tedious after you’ve run em a dozen times or so. Mai Trin, for instance, is fine but three phases seems rather silly as two would be more than plenty and perhaps have her provide more of a challenge once her shield is down.

Agreed, at least you’d know to stay away.

There’s no way this has anything do with new CDN providers? https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Peerblock-and-Your-Servers
Guess not, since even the forum went down a moment ago.

Shame, and so close to a new expansion… wink.

I don’t play condi because it feels cheap as hell. I’ve played it, it’s lame. Pressure, wait for cleanse, reapply, gg. End of story. Condi is easier to counter than power? Lmao. Power has to apply consistent damage, often staying in melee or keeping their distance (either of which is difficulty to upkeep) in group fights, cycling through both defensive and offensive skills while maintaining pressure on their target constantly.

Every condition builds relies on a one-two knockout punch and is able to apply many more conditions than there are cleanses. Animations are horrid, and in that one or two seconds they can apply upwards of 10s of power damage on a target and the counter to that is a CD. Don’t have it? Go ahead and /gg as soon as you see your oponent. I’d even go as far as to say that 98% of the time I check the logs after a death, it’s something ridiculous like 20k poison, 30k burn, 15k bleed… and 3k power damage.

Conditions are kittened in this game and take away any semblance of skill in pvp.

From what I’ve seen, GW2 balances by nerfing that which is most used and buffing that which is least used, in order to promote diversity and reach a state of balance. Sounds good on paper, but there is a deeper issue at work.

Many of the weapons and utilities which get buffed will never be used in any serious PvP scenario because they are inherently flawed when it comes to this gamemode, no matter how many “+10% here, reduce CD by 3s there” tweaks are done to it.

Take Ranger’s SB vs LB, since that profession I know well. In LB you have range, an invisibility shot and a knockback; on SB you have one evade skill which pushes you back about half an inch. That alone is enough to make SB obsolete, for the most part, and in fact condition rangers (already a minority) are almost always trapper rangers playing with rune of the trapper, seeking to 1v1 and load a point with all their traps… because they get rekt anywhere else on the map. See my point? It’s about balance, sure, but internal balance and coherence.

Success in PvP comes down to a balance between burst and sustain, so I can’t help but feel that by nerfing everything that’s overused and buffing everything that’s underused misses the mark. Any PvP build worth its salt will have a fair bit of sustain skills, and the reason people gravitate towards a certain build or even a certain profession is because that utility, that coherence, simply isn’t there elsewhere.

Let’s nerf the things that actually make sense and buff the things that don’t. That’s my impression of this philosophy put to work.

Even if it is a nerf to damage and sustain across the board (seriously, because of sigils? they contributed so little in PvP anyway) nerfing Elementalist’s one good role is madness.

I want to say… Added to the list of features that have been requested dozens of times since day one. Dully noted.

For me, it’s so bad I don’t even want to play certain characters. Take elementalist, for instance, I PvP and sometimes swap so equipping anything other than DF could be dangerous in the event of a particularly long loading screen. I’d gear her up to have Berserker’s stats for dungeon/fractals but can’t be bothered to swap builds every time. To make matters worse that build and gear combination wouldn’t do too well in HoT areas, much less in WvW, so I’d have to swap gear and possibly builds yet again. End result? I just don’t play elementalist outside of the occassional PvP swap, period. It’s too big of a hassle.

How hard would it be to implement a script that auto loads a certain configuration depending on which area of the game you’re in? How long would that take a professional development team to write? A week, maybe? If that.

As a new player, I would have enjoyed dungeons being a thing. I’d use it to get “cheap” (paid for in time) exotic gear and explore yet another area of the game… seeing as events I find dull and crafting an uphill grind. To me that makes sense: you reach level cap, you do dungeons to get exotics, fractals to get ascended, raids to get legendaries. You have a system of progression and something to shoot for (so important in an MMO, must have absolute time sinks with the promise of a shiny at the end). But dungeons are pointless!

Stat combinations, that’s what I’d aim to change: make dungeon token gear stat selectable and add a worthwhile daily and dungeons will be back in force. Simple as that. Why hasn’t this happened? Why are devs not paying attention to their own game?

To illustrate a point: what’s up with me not being able to hide player’s names, guild tags and titles whilst in a squad?! It’s unbearable! Game is at least five years old, this should have been addressed in month three. So I’ll say it again, why are devs not paying attention to their own game?

My suggestion is three-fold:

• Add a new equipment slot and accompanying legendary -belt- that can accommodate up to three rune sets.
• The belt would then work in conjunction with the soon to be introduced legendary armor in that it would change the stats to a pre-configured set when you right click the belt and swap rune sets.
• Make minor runes actually useful by making them into a crafting component for major, then rare and finally exotic runes.

The final point is to make inventory management less of a hastle, and while we’re at it we might as well add an “open all” function and auto sell trash to vendor It’d be about time…

The rest is self explanatory, I feel. Eventually, the legendary belt rune/legendary equipment stat swap could be coupled with trait and utility swap (at specific locations to prevent abuse, I might add) resulting in a rather major QoL improvement and yet another reason to grind for that legendary armor.

Jumping puzzles, achievements, mastery points, hero points… yeah, having to do research for a game feel likes a chore.

Yeah I just noticed. Didn’t think it’d deposit since it’s not a material. Guess it’s better in a way, not as good as having them in the currency tab and a trade option with vendors for unbound magic, but at least they’re not taking up space in your inventory.

@Pifil & Sevendeadly, thank you for correcting my misunderstanding in such a polite and mature manner… no wait, that was Randulf. I don’t think you understand how the internet works Randulf

This sounds about right. I made a rev because it looked fun but turns out its awful, just awful. Way too much work for so small a bang and the choices you have are quite limited: few weapons and no utility swap, just legends. Take something like glint which is clunky because everything requires two presses to activate and there’s hardly anything useful on there.

If this is how it is to be designed I fear it will never be good because it seems put together from a theoretical rather than practical perspective.

Now I have a useless character slot and I’m one step closer to realizing just how broken this game really is.

After the last update, much to my surprise, hitting salvage all masterwork and lower resulted in me salvaging all LS3 special map currencies: jade, petrified wood and winterberries, which is what I had.

I sincerely hope this was a bug because if someone intended this to be this way, it’s beyond kittened. You’re left with two choices: salvage what you want manually, one by one, or go to the bank after every gather session to deposit these currencies. Makes no sense.

In fact, inventory management as a whole makes no sense and I sincerely hope someone at some points decided to make it more intuitive and user friendly. Example: we don’t need four dozen types of bags, we don’t need bags within bags, we don’t want two dozen types of keys that need to go into our inventory and what’s the point of having a currency item not go into the currency tab?

It’s a terrible system, truly awful.

There is no denying it, this new and improved PvP system makes people salty. There’s three main issues that keep popping up: placement, matchmaking and rank changes. Placement is OKish in my opinion, it’s not perfect but it has to be done somehow. Matchmaking leaves a lot to be desired, but I suppose that’s unavoidable with low population. Onto rank…

Having your rank gain/loss be dependent on personal rather than team MMR is ridiculous. You’re 20% of a team and 10% of the match, yet for some reason your personal MMR relative to the enemy team’s is the only one that matters? Are you fighting 1v5? Team MMR baseline should be the first step. Second step would be to incorporate some form of individual performance monitor. We have stats: damage, defense, deaths, healing, etc. How about having each person on the team ranked one through five on these statistic and having their personal rank’s win/loss be dependent on their performance. So say the team’s MMR baseline is 20 and you ranked 1st on each statistic, you get the full 20 on a win and deduced 10 on a loss, whereas someone who ranked in the bottom gets 10 for a win and deduced 20 for a loss.

Being 20% of a team and 10% of a match makes winning or losing a match a bit too random. In order to have skill appropriate rankings, there needs to be some form of individual performance gauge. Without it, I am convinced this game mode will continue to lose population because there is no incentive to play and get better and you aren’t rewarded for your efforts even if you outperform.

Amulets are messy and rather pointless as they are. There’s probably five amulets that 95% of the population uses. I’d advocate selectable stats with certain restrictions as well. I’m thinking more in terms of categories: say you made carrion condition + vitality, and those are the main stats, but the others could be selected and distributed as you pleased. Rather than having this bizarre 1200-1050-900-560 system, make it 1200-900-600-300 give each amulet a maximum stats number and voila, done. Lock the main stats in the upper tier but if the player so chooses they could use 900-900 and free up 600 for other stats; let there be five stats selectable to increase variety for those builds that need it.

Seems more fun, intuitive… only problem is that Anet wouldn’t be able to simply remove an amulet to nerf certain builds, they’d actually have to balance said build! Oh noes! The horror!

That’s why it will never happen. Because balancing builds takes time, which translates into dollars in the form of salaries and resources diverted from other projects which could generate a palpable income (say, an expansion or gem item) whereas this contributes to the health of the game and while it may draw more players in and keep them engaged, there’s no way to quantify that so it appears as a cost and because there is no measurable upside an unjustifiable one at that.

Just my two cents.

The problem, as with any MMO, comes about when you add new things and fail to balance (with) the old.

A simple example of this is increased in condition damage without buffing condition removal. Seriously, there are still traits that grant one condition removed, which in PvP is pathetic considering any condi build worth its salt will instantly load you with at least five conditions. Solution? Simple: increase condition removal by 1 accross the board.

Another example would be DH’s elite: refreshes virtues. This may have been balanced when virtues were useless, but when they have a 6s block and a 4k heal with five conditions removed, while the elite itself giving 3s of invulnerability, it’s a bit too much. Think about what a DH does if he wants to stay alive: block heal, jump heal, block, invulnerable, block, jump heal, possibly block heal if off CD, all the while hitting for 5k easily in both range and melee.

New things in MMOs aren’t “cool”. They present problems that are hardly even addressed because changes (or new expansions) = more money, and fixing issues costs resources. The problem comes when people get too annoyed to put up with all the nonsense and they quit, leading to a further tightening and emphasis in things that will apparently increase revenue whilst at the same time draining the population.

It is true that this game is unbelievably bursty. That’s something that doesn’t contribute to getting new players as new players, by definition, don’t know what they’re doing and they can be dropped in 3s by an experienced counter. If you don’t agree, you haven’t pvped long enough: walk into a full DH trapper traps’, instant death for many professions; a strong head butt + arc divider crit = +50% of you hp gone in an instant; a vault crit? 50%, 2? dead; get instantly loaded with engi’s conditions, drop 50% in the blink of an eye even as you spam your condi cleanses. There’s so many cheeses in this game it’s not even funny. And this is coming from someone who plays tanky builds and is always below 20% team deaths in ranked matches, zero or one death isn’t rare for me either. So I’m not saying this because “git gud”, it’s just the way it is.

Please, please, please add this pronto.

Enrichment slots are meh to say the least. 20% magic find? OK nice. 20% extra gold? Awful. 20% extra xp? Who cares? 25% movement speed increase, on the other hand…

This should be a standard by now. Every leveling spec out there makes this a priority, there’s so many traits, runes, sigils, weapons, etc., that grant speed that everyone goes out of their way to ensure they have it and not have to walk-crawl when in combat.

I’d ask for 25% extra movement to become a standard and rework everything that grants this passive buffs but that’d require far more work than adding a useful enrichment, so that’s my suggestion: make an enrichment that grants 25% movement speed and I guarantee it’ll be the most popular one. Heck, even having it as a gem item would be an improvement. Not ideal, but better than nothing.

I just remembered: the script to have your character turn around and face the enemy when activating a skill, rather than have it misfire and go on cd, is already written and has been given to Mesmer’s shield 5.

I understand that could lead to all sorts of shenanigans if it were universally applied but when it comes to evasive skills, such as invisibility and knockback, it should be a standard.

Now let’s get rid of the double cast by simply placing the excess gathers on the first cast and gg. Quality of Life > All.

Thank you for writing this. Hopefully someone over at Anet will take notice. Experienced player’s advice should not be overlook, that’s how imbalances and inconveniences are allowed to thrive whilst at the same time, due to the nature of an MMO, new mechanics are introduced that are not without their faults also. This is the pattern with every MMO ever created and the very reason most quit or take their money elsewhere.

Agreed on pets, there are too many and many that are utterly useless. Many skills are wonky indeed and the 3-5s CD when the shot isn’t aimed propperly is beyond frustrating, especially with moving targets and considering lag etc. Ranger has two way to stay alive on LB: knockback, negated by stability, and invisibility shot, which can be blocked by say a random DH aegis proc. I mostly pvp so that’s my focus.

Invisibility shot should just grant invisibility, 3s of superspeed if it connects. LB 4 needs to have its damage increased and further increased against targets that cannot be knocked back so that it’s remotely useful. GS 5 utterly pathetic, you need to stand still while casting and the range is minimal; instant cast and range increase.

Many don’t enjoy playing bunker druid but truthfully the alternatives are lacking in sustain or dps, especially considering projectile hate. I feel ranger is probably the worse ranged profession at the moment, which is simply ridiculous. People who are new to the game and select ranger do so to play ranged, yet their burst potential is among the lowest: LB 2 for DH, Burst for Warrior, and unload for thiefs are all better at pressuring than rapid fire; and even Eir was replaced by a DH, so go figure. The one good skill we have is insanely telegraphed and anyone with half a brain can dodge; the two sustain skills we have are easily negated resulting in a quick death.

I say reduce Rapid Fire cast time, maybe even the damage and lower the CD. Make invisibility shot grant invisibility, period, and 3s superspeed if it connects. Make LB 4 do at least 2k damage on medium armor and 50% more on targets that cannot be knocked down (that seems like a lot? consider DH’s LB 2 with a 4s CD) so that it’s actually useful and have pets that provide useful utility such as protection or stability.

Every profession should have a viable power, condition and support build. That’s my suggestion for addressing one such issue, since that’s what I know best.

Forget the formulas, I tested it. The chieftain is a great test because he always opens with the same hit which apparently cannot crit.

Test done on Ranger:
Upping my toughness by 1200 points decreased damage by 33%. Upping my vitality by 1200 points increased health pool by 75%. Considering how bursty this game is, toughness desperately needs a redesign and to apply (perhaps especially) to condition damage.

Enough said.

moba ftw, I say: people have no trouble whatsoever running in a straight line and killing things along the way, in fact they try their hardest to do that in conquest.

Offense shouldn’t be a top stat, it’s pointless. You can get top healing simply by playing warrior so that’s that. Revives are totally random: if you’re in the right place at the right time, you’ll get it. Deaths, probably the most important stat, as well as decaps, is unaccounted for. Generally speaking, top stats are meh.

Proper top stats would be a different story. Personally, I feel Anet should rank each played on each category, then distribute points accordingly. So if you’re a feed mid kills type of guy, you’ll get close to nothing and a gazillion deaths, resulting in more points deducted for losing and less points gained from winning.

Being 20% of a team and 10% of a match is too ludicrous a measure to be ranked by, obviously.

MOBA ftw: people have no problem moving in a straight line and fighting enemies along their path. Perhaps if gws hadn’t been made for esl we could have had a different mode of pvp. Actually, a few 3v3 moba style maps, perhaps with two paths only, wouldn’t be a terrible idea. That and 1v1 tournaments every weekend.

Please, the rate at which we gain ascended shards of glory is kittened. It goes three, four, five, five, five, six in terms of tier completion and all of these give 50 shards. Now I pvp quite a lot, got 200 matches this season and that means 3 gear pieces for one character. That’s not enough to entice anyone to do anything.

Three, four, five, five, six with 50 shards for the first two, 75 for the middle two and 100 for the last feels more appropriate.

The point of this, I’d imagine, was to reinvigorate the pvp community with an influx of new players. This misses the mark by a mile. What’s more, because current ranking is so random between placement and team composition, etc., low individual representation in any given match and no regard whatsoever for individual performance, chances are less people will PvP than they used to. This new system makes people salty, that much is clear, and the rewards are lackluster to say the least.

Exactly the opposite will happen, if it isn’t already: less people will pvp.

I’ve thought about this as well, wasn’t gonna post until end of season hoping it’d get more attention.

Basically, the thought process is that you reduce the importance of numbers (+1ing) and make individual decisions more significant. Fact of the matter is, as it stands, games snowball if the team can outsustain or outdps the enemy. Stealing an empty node, for instance, becomes irrelevant because you’ll be 3v1ed in no time flat with current numbers. If you’re any good you can survive a 2v1 long enough for help to arrive and because there are less players on the map, where to go, etc., becomes a more significant decision. Small skirmishes and even 1v1s actually matter in that scenario.

As it is, being 20% of a team and 10% of match is too ludicrous a measure to even contemplate being rated on.

4v4 and make the game less bursty, which having less players also accomplishes, as that will certainly draw in more people.

This whole thing was a bad idea poorly implemented. It seems to me that, in order to bring PvErs into pvp and boost population, anet introduced gear rewards. Now, so that gear and rank are distinct progression system, we get a win/lose system as opposed to pips and a floor.

PvP is bad enough as in, coordinating with nobodies is bad enough as is, being 20% of a team is bad enough as is, to be ranked according to their combined efforts (or lack thereof). This decision only makes people salty, especially considering how awkward (or non-existent) matchmaking is. Nobody cared this much if they lost before, they do now because, in spite of the “skill” pr-line, the truth is that the final score says very little if anything about individual performance.

Like I said, this whole ordeal was a poorly implemented bad idea.

Really? But pve in this game is terrible.

Apparently the same goes for fractals and pvp matches. Three different threads regarding the same issue have been made in the last three minutes, doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out something is amiss.

I played WoW BC through early Cataclysm, quit right at its peak because many of the decision being made seemed utterly ridiculous to me. Despite Blizzard reporting expansion driven pops in population numbers, the truth is that game has lost well over half of its player base since then.

I now feel the same way about GW2 pvp. This new system is utterly ridiculous. In a 5v5 match, you represent one tenth of those involved and of your team you are a fifth. That’s 10% and 20% respectively and it’s hardly enough to make a difference in its final outcome. I’ve heard from top plays that the lower divisions (bronze and silver) are utter nonsense and even they simply can’t carry. Regrettably, I still enjoy PvP and perhaps that’s a fault with me.

Three matches I did tonight. On the first I decided to camp home because the opposite team kept pushing, and sure enough I noticed there were two players who would only move far and I noticed this because they alternated: as soon as I got one down, the next would show up; this happened at least twice before the match was over. As soon as I did that, and despite being able to hold home, my team started hemorraging points. 4v3 they were in the remainder of the map, yet two in my team kept dying and I noticed because they would spawn, assist with kills (not that it was necessary) and move on. Ended up losing because 4v3 is tough.

On the last one, we were ahead until the very end when I see three players push home in legacy and even after I ping home, two in my team decide to go and die over at far. Of the three, one slipped past me and a recently respawned team member and got the lord, hence the loss.

Bottomline: even though I owned just about everyone I came across and died no more than three times (at most) in those three matches, I’m 0 for 3 tonight. Not only does that mean worse ranking but worse rotations as well, worse map awareness from even worse players. Worse yet, that not only means no reward for my efforts but in fact a penalty thereof. And I do believe this to be the single worse aspect of the current pvp system: people like to be rewarded for their efforts, getting three extra pips towards some random chest for gaining tops stats in a close match doesn’t cut it.

The solution is simple and I want to see it implemented. There is already a system in place that measures individual performance, to one extent or another, and in that system offense shouldn’t rewarded but lack of deaths should. Now, place the five players on your team and measure them against one another in each of those fields: damage, defense, kills, deaths (maybe add decaps and time in combat?). If you outperform your teammates, you should earn more per win and lose less per loss, and viceversa. It really is that simple.

Being a fifth of a team and a tenth of the match is much too insignificant a measure to be judged by. In the long run, a mathematician would argue, those random variances become insignificant, but how is the long run? How many matches would that represent? I’m willing to be good money it’s well over 500 matches. 500 potentially crappy matches, I might add, such as the ones I described.

But that would require more work than saying, “well, certain professions are insta-dying so we’ll introduce say paladin’s amulet, there now it’s balanced”. It’s a cheap non-fix.

I’d like to see amulets with variable stats. Perhaps certain categories like condition + vitality, or power + precision, and the remaining two stats in each amulet could be allocated as one pleased within a certain stat limit.

For instance, before deadshot amulet many condition builds were not viable because of the “apply on crit” traits, although there were condition amuelts with no sustain. Right now, there’s no way to make a decent passive condi passive heal build (not great in either, sufficient in both to be pesky), but having variable amulets would be a start to introducing more diversity.

I’d like to see it, don’t think it’s gonna happen.

Is there any reason we need to see everyone’s name, guild and title while in a squad?
Is there no better way to show an enemy is an enemy than to have their name, guild and title shown above their heads?
Why is there no option to remove damage numbers and only show the important things (block, evade, heal on hit, etc.)?

Why is this still an issue after five years?

And finally, what’s the truth about mods? I know the PR line but my gut tells me GWs was not codded to accommodate mods and we’re stuck with whatever developers or the higher ups chose not to do.