Guild Wars 2

Everyone’s too negative about these changes! Sure there are some glaring issues with the game but what game doesn’t have it’s problems? In an MMO, especially, problems with the game will be abundant. It’s next to impossible to cater to the whims of every players desire. And even in a world where the developers were capable of doing so, you’d have a pretty directionless and chaotic game with no foundation for a story or purpose behind it because everyone is going to want/like something different.

With the new wardrobe, allowing us to indefinitely change the appearances of our characters without changing the armor stats ~
Account-bound WXP, which will pool all of our character ranks in to one ~
Account-bound legendaries and ascended gear, which will mean even after equipped, legendaries and ascended gear will still be tradeable between our characters!~
And free trait resets, from our hero panel, any time we’re not in combat?!

I understand that some of these things should have been in the game from the start, but it’s not what they should have done that’s important, it’s that they’re doing it. So give some positive feedback for once! Thank you, ANet! I’m incredibly happy with all of the upcoming changes.

Now buff my Necromancer while no one’s looking >:3, gogogogogo!

I don’t care if I’m not being polite, plenty of people have asked to have this fixed and I’ve asked more than once myself.

The problem: If you place an AC (arrow cart) in the right spot and set your field of view (FOV) to max, you can hit all players and siege inside a tower or keep.

Using this “method” completely eliminates the attacker and defender roles and just leaves the attackers with an unfair advantage. It is absolutely game breaking, a waste of time and money for the people who build and buy the siege and nothing short of frustrating. I am so beyond tired of spending hours upgrading a structure, adding siege and making all preparations for an attack just to have it all become irrelevant when a zerg puts down 1 or 2 AC’s outside, kills all my siege and chases me around inside the tower with the AC’s.

For anyone who wants to say “well go outside and fight”, that’s not always an option. There’s a reason for building defensive siege and most times it’s just to slow the enemy down until your own zerg can arrive to help defend. But you can’t do anything when the enemy builds these stupid AC’s. I am trying so hard not to curse and make juvenile threats but it’s so infuriating to have this happen on a regular basis.

PLEASE FIX IT. I know you, ANet, are busy with the expansion and other things but this has been happening for a long while now and seriously needs some attention. It’s not something that “occasionally” happens it’s something that happens on a daily basis. WvW is not supposed to be a karma train, it’s a strategic war game. These FOV exploit arrow carts used to be called “zoom hacking” and now it’s a “feature.”

I just spent 2 hours upgrading Quentin Lake in Eternal Battlegrounds, sieged it right to the teeth, and Dragonbrand comes by, drops 6 rams and 1 arrowcart, clears all the siege and kills some of the defenders inside the tower with the arrowcart. I was so angry I was about to throw my computer across the room.

So one last time,
PLEASE
FIX
IT
NOW.

As someone who very much enjoys in game casual looking clothing, which this game has a serious lack of, I would really, reaaalllyyy love to see this in the gem store. I stumbled across it while looking up the witches outfit and apparently it’s already in the data files or something?
Anyway, pleeeaaaseeee!! Many gems would pay do want, TAKE MY MONEY.

“yo, dawg. i heard you like masteries so i locked masteries behind masteries so you can master while you master.”

This.

Honestly I don’t even care much to say how I feel about these new maps. I’m not a PvE player, I’m a WvW/PvP’er. So how I feel about this new content isn’t that important. Regardless, I hate being there. I just want to tame my new Ranger pets, get out and never come back. But the pets are so absurdly hard to find right now I’m forced to figure out all these masteries and just… Ugh I don’t even want to think about it.

I appreciate all the work they put in to HoT. I’m not the kind of person to always be complaining about everything or always looking on the negative side. Some of the new WvW improvements have been really cool. But these new maps I just hate, haaaaaaate so very much, lol. I mean at least with Orr it’s only one layer. You have to deal with a lot of irritating creatures that will CC and chase after you but if you go the wrong way all you have to do is turn around. In the new maps… You’ve gotta deal with these awful enemies while you’re trying to figure out whether you’re on the right layer of the map or not then you have to worry about whether when you get to where you want to go you’ll have the proper masteries or not and the list just goes on and on, lol. You can’t just turn around if you go the wrong way because if you don’t have Updraft or something (which I currently don’t) then you’re force to waypoint and that 20 minute hack and slash through the jungle just became totally irrelevant.

I could whine about it for a good few paragraphs but I’m just gonna say for the people that like it, great. The people that don’t? Probably like myself and OP. It just makes you angry and confused and feeling like you’re being forced to do things you don’t want to do.

If we’re “missing the strongest story stuff” you should have made humans stories better.

This…

… Is literally the best patch ever. So much loot… So much activity… So much art to appreciate. LA has never looked better than it has up in flames. As if I wasn’t addicted enough to this game I can hardly get enough of the destruction and despair that’s now plaguing our once peaceful inlets. Feels like we were suddenly slapped in the face with an invasion, thousands are dead and we’re now fighting to avenge the fallen and reclaim our lands.

… Or maybe I’m just over-imaginative ._.
Either way I love this to death. I’m not big on PvE what-so-ever. I spend 90% of my time in WvW occasionally farming dungeons for a bit of loot/gold but besides that PvE has never caught my attention for more than an hour or so. But now… I can’t pull myself from LA for longer than a few minutes. When we’re all sent back to the nearest safe zone when the event ends, I’m just waiting anxiously for it to start again.

Great job, ANet. For this player, this is by far the best thing to hit the game. I can’t wait to see how this progresses ( :

-Consumes endless quaggan tonic- Quaggan out! ChooOOoo!

Pre-note that there are more positives than negatives but I explained the negatives so as to be more constructive than complain-y.

Positives

Braham’s outfit is beautiful, very well designed.

I love Bitterfrost Frontier, also beautiful and very immersive. I see a lot of players wearing coats to bundle up, myself included.

The Kodan torch skills are really fun and the mechanic is simple enough to not feel unnecessary. I also love the combat Kodan tonic which I’d love to see more of.

The character’s (at least for human female) and Braham’s voice acting in the final chapter of the story are very well done.

I love the events during the cold storms!

Mini’s being awarded in game are a nice feature that I’d like to see more of. Of course it has been this way for some time, but I enjoy this theme.

I’m happy to see under water combat being acknowledged with the ascended aquatic head gear.

Negatives

The new map is annoyingly difficult to traverse as highlighted by another poster in the Living World section of this forum. Two waypoints and very isolated thermal tubes force you to do a lot more walking than what feels necessary.

A couple of the mobs, particularly the Svanir shamans and Icebrood Kodans hit a little harder than I think a level 80 mob should. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for more difficult content but I’ve been literally one shot (or at least multiple attacks happening so quickly it amounts to a one shot) by these two particular mobs. Earlier this morning a Svanir shaman hit me for 9k, 8k and 8k with that ranged attack that they do and my character has 2.8k armor. That’s a pretty nasty attack for a non-veteran.

The first half of the story, bonding with Aurene is extremely boring. Escorting the wounded soldiers in particular is very uneventful. If you destroy the portals before beginning, it’s a pretty snooze-worthy event walking NPC’s from one side of the room to the other uninterrupted. The story itself, as in the lore and dialogue are decent but the combat (at times lack there of) isn’t very enjoyable. I particularly disliked timed attacking with Aurene because of how you are basically forced to circle strafe for 60 seconds until you can attack because you can otherwise do very little.

The final boss has way too much CC coming at you. This CC obsession has to stop and I’m confident that a lot of players agree with me. It’s one thing to have attacks that punish you, it’s another to make it a game of “no matter how much stability you have or many times you dodge, you’re eventually gonna get hit.” I did the story 3 times and not getting knocked down by those 932042830948320 AOE’s was impossible and just felt irritating.

The thermal tube that sends you to the Mastery Point in the Bitter Cold half of the map is very unintuitively placed. I’ve seen a lot of players asking how to reach it and it took me quite some time to figure it out myself. I actually wound up gliding to it from the hot springs area and realized I could have gotten there a different way.

I find it really funny that people still complain about conditions.

There have been times when condition builds were plentiful but this is not one of those times. There are a lot of condition Reapers and some condition Mesmers/Chronos. If we exclude those two professions I’d wager 80% of everyone else are running a power build of some variant.

I roam plenty and I very rarely encounter condition builds that aren’t one of those two. Just because there are a lot of condition Reapers lurking about and some condition Mesmers/Chronos does not mean that it’s meta nor that conditions need a nerf.

Reaper’s need some adjusting. Deathly Chill still needs to be nerfed again IMO (and that is a class specific nerf not a blanket nerf to all conditions) among other things. Besides that, I very rarely have issues with condition builds and this is coming from someone who is active in all areas of WvW be it roaming, zerging, scouting, etc. and 95% of the time I roam I’m solo on a glass Ranger. If I’m not having problems with conditions… No one else should be.

Also protip for fighting condition Reapers: Kite for god sake. I swear just about everyone I see will either go melee or will be careless about letting the Reaper get close to them. Don’t let them get close to you and they’re cake. It’s really not hard to do. Force them to camp staff, bait their Shroud #2 (the only mobility they have) and range them to death.

The only people that claim condition builds are OP or are crying that there are too many condition builds around (especially right now…) are either a) not bringing enough cleanses or b) tanking conditions instead of dodging or kiting.

These threads have been being made basically since Gw2’s inception. I’m sure if I dug hard enough I could find a few dozen.

WvW is not dying. It’s been through worse.

Treating others the way you would like to be treated is key. It’s not about honor or a sub set of personal values, it’s about making the game mode fun for everyone so you can all have those epic fights where you pat each other on the backs and say “good game!” If you’re always spawn camping, roaming in large gank groups that emote and pester solos or acting like hungry wolves trying to crack open a tower filled with a zerg half the size of yours it just becomes unfun for both sides. You can only farm easy bags for so long before it becomes boring and it gets lame a lot faster for the ones being farmed.

Learn to understand that all servers, maybe with the exception of BG, have more than a few hours during the day where they’re heavily outnumbered. During those hours you can PPT all you like but farming people off the map is just going to crush their spirits.

You can see all of this happen in EOTM at a much faster pace. It’s WvW on fastforward and you can see the attitudes change as the numbers fluctuate. When I command, if we’re the largest zerg, I don’t harass the smaller zergs until they quit because it’s no fun. I catch them if they’re in our way and when they’re big enough to fight back, either they’ll come to us looking to fight or I’ll test them out to see if they can handle themselves. Then you get commanders who like to spawn camp or defend everything on the map even when they’re clearly far too big for the other sides to fight, then the map dies. Which is exactly what BG is doing to it’s opponents.

Find a happy medium and learn to accept that WvW is never going to be perfectly balanced. Work together with your opponents so that the game can be fun for everyone and have a little grace during the hours your enemies are heavily outnumbered.

Before I write the following I’d like to state in advance that the OP’s question is offensive to me. Which hopefully gives you an idea of whether or not you’d like to read what I have to say.

I’m not upset with the OP themselves, more so that they have the nerve to ask such a question. Let me be clear I’m not trying to be rude to the OP with what I have to say because they seem to have a good understanding of what is and isn’t okay. I’m only upset with the fact that the question even has to be asked.
This is a video game. I don’t know how many times I have to remind people of this. Men and women aren’t perfect in real life. Although creating a standard that isn’t possible to achieve isn’t necessarily a healthy idea, the vast majority of people who play these games understand that. The vast majority also want their characters to look good. There are some who prefer their avatars to look hideous, and all the power to them. That’s the will of preference. But the fact of the matter is, most of us want our characters to be attractive and sexy comes in kind with attractive. Not all men have 6-packs and hulking bodies and I can almost certainly assure you most of them wouldn’t want to wear any kind of armor/clothing that reveals any great deal of skin. But there are plenty of revealing male armors in this, and many other video games. Women on the other hand, enjoy wearing some what (and on the more free-spirited individual, very) revealing clothing. I don’t think it to be very far from the truth with these breast highlighting outfits as women in the actual world are comfortable wearing yoga pants which aren’t a whole lot different in the sense that they’re figure hugging and don’t leave a lot to the imagination.
I just wish that people would stop having to ask questions like these when it’s not supposed to have an effect on anything other than whether you choose to wear it or not. So the breasts are a highlight of the costume, then you might be surprised to learn that not only are they beautiful there is a form of art known as body painting that utilizes them in a similar way. The male outfits aren’t significantly less revealing so I don’t see what the fuss is about. If I saw a man in a outfit that complimented his figure by revealing his muscle mass I can’t say I wouldn’t turn my head, so… Why the double standards?

That’s what makes roaming exciting to me though, lol. Zergs are like an environmental hazard, they can roll through at any time and if you’re not constantly aware of your surroundings you’re going to get rolled. Don’t roam on the roads, take shortcuts and back ally’s, don’t spend too long with anything you’re doing, the longer you stay in one place the more likely you’re going to get rolled. And lastly, always check your map for swords. You can scout for your server by calling out where enemies are (if you’ve seen them physically) or where you think they are (if you’ve seen swords on the map) and it gives you an idea of where you should probably avoid going unless you’re able to make a quick get away such as a Thief, Mesmer or a Warrior can accomplish.

Any of the veterans like myself who continue to WvW do it for the fun and the family.

We enjoy the excitement, not the rewards. We enjoy the victory, not the win. We enjoy the memory, not the trophy.

WvW is about friends, not loot.

PvE provides plenty of what you’re looking for in material gain. Changing WvW from what it is will only alienate the population causing the ones that hold it together to leave. If the benefits were too great for winning and the punishment too much for losing, everyone would transfer to one server and WvW would be no more. Yes, people already bandwagon to the winning server, but only the ones like yourself who care more about the number on the scoreboard than the time you’re spending with people you care about.

I apologize if that sounds condescending because it isn’t wrong of you, or anyone else, to prefer XP, loot and winning. It is a game after all and those things are often big parts of other games.

As far as I’m aware, the core of WvW, the players who are there day in and day out, the ones that keep that world turning, they, we, don’t care about anything but our friends and our fun. We don’t want WvW to be changed in the way that you’re asking so I can’t see you getting much support on it.

P.s. “What do we fight for?” We fight because we can.

I’m not a PvE player. In fact, I only leave Eternal Battlegrounds, Alpine Borderlands or Edge Of The Mists maybe once every 3 – 4+ months excluding any time I spend in LA doing stuff in the Mystic Forge.

I always explore new maps such as the ones released with HoT or other ones prior to it like Silverwastes, Dry Top, etc. but I only usually go there a few times to see what’s up then I never come back. PvE just isn’t my thing.

That said, Verdant Brink was the first map I ever enjoyed being in. I went there quite often just to relax and do what ever. Sometimes I even tagged up to lead event trains but the biggest reason I liked the map was for the events themselves.

Now with Bloodstone Fen, I like both the events and the physical design of the map. It’s both fun to be there and pleasurable to look at/explore as well as easy to navigate. The red skies and mixture of landscapes are like candy for my eyeballs. I go there daily for the daily rewards and just to gather some loots.

There’s one major problem though… NPC’s throwing rocks at you from 1000000000 away and being dead accurate. It drives me insane and as far as I can tell, there’s no way to stop it. They even hit you while using the stealth mastery and the damage adds up quick.

Can we please either remove this rock throwing business or add some kind of skill that gives us a reflective bubble while in flight? Because besides pre-nerf PU Mesmers in WvW, this is the single most obnoxious thing I’ve experienced in the game. The second I leave the ground to fly, I’m being pelted by rocks and they don’t tickle either. Especially if you’re coming down near a mob of them, it’ll only take a few seconds before your health is at a critical percent.

EDIT: Thank you for the changes to the final fight. By the looks of the patch notes, it will be much more bearable. The following post was how I felt prior to the changes and is no longer relevant.

As someone who enjoys challenging content. Someone who intentionally plays vanilla builds in WvW/PvP because she both genuinely prefers the vanilla builds and because she enjoys that it makes fights more difficult. And someone who is always most interested in video games that don’t hold your hand (a Dark Souls/Soul series veteran, Dragon’s Dogma lover, Act Raiser and Super Meat Boy fan)…

That final fight and a number of other fights in the Living World stories prior to this one was awful (yes, I believe “was” is grammatically correct).

It is not difficult. It’s artificial difficulty and it’s nothing short of obnoxious. There’s no way to avoid/negate every CC that’s thrown at you unless you build full tank. In which case the fight will take all day and even then, I’m sure you’ll still get slapped around like an Irish nanny at least a couple times.

A challenging encounter is when you immediately recognize your mistakes and learn from them. Either you understand what punished you or you allow yourself to be hurt again so you can observe and memorize the tells.

Having so much crap thrown at you that it becomes a matter of RNG whether you’re hurt or not isn’t difficulty. It’s artificial difficulty and that’s the worst kind because it doesn’t make you a better player. Maybe some people will enjoy it but they won’t approach the fight differently the second time.

I appreciate that Guild Wars 2 is a free to play game and that there’s so much quality content. Don’t get me wrong, I love this game, but fights like this have to stop… Enough with the CC spam, very few people like it and no one gets better by being exposed to it.

I legitimately cringe at the thought of future Living World bosses because of how consistently bad they’ve been. The new maps, the story, visuals, everything is great but holy mother of Grenth, please consider not turning your dear Tyrians in to pin balls… Especially as someone who has been a Necromancer for the last 3 years, I can tell you from the bottom of my heart, I’ve had plenty enough of being knocked around, thanks.

It’d sad that it has taken me this long to realize it, but I think I’m going to finally stop commenting on the “nerf condi’s” threads.

Let the kids complain and hope that someone is listening, but no one who actually knows how to play cares. Which is, I hope, exactly how ANet feels as well.

I had over 6k badges and I’m now down to 78 just from buying scrolls with Proof’s of Heroic’s.

Now, I obviously understand this is my own fault for buying so many but besides that point – 6k badges coming from someone who does WvW something like 8+ hours a day is not a lot… I shouldn’t be able to burn through my life’s savings that easily with so much time invested in WvW and neither should anyone else.

I really think badge awards need to be improved a bit to keep things like this from happening. It’s kind of ridiculous that I only had a little over 1k badges more than my WvW rank itself and I don’t even spend those badges very often.

Anyone else agree that the drop needs to be buffed a bit or am I alone on this?

+1 for the OP. I made a thread something like this awhile back and although some of my opinions have changed the core ones have stayed the same. And that’s that Guild Wars 2 is one of if not the single best and most beautifully designed games I’ve played.

Also, one of the problems with the community is that many people play for loot not for enjoyment. They play to farm and to get what, as you’ve said, they feel they deserve. Which isn’t how you’re supposed to play a game. You play it because you enjoy it and the reward comes from the experience not the material counterparts. Games like Dark Souls are a perfect example of no loot but still amazing because it grants a feeling of accomplishment. If people would stop whining they haven’t gotten what they wanted and learned to embrace the fun the game provides there would be a lot less griping.
This comes from someone who does nothing but WvW and 98% of the time only gets blue and green loot rewards. But I don’t even pay mind to the loot I get until my inventory is full because I’m having too much fun playing. Valuable loot is supposed to be a bonus, not an objective.

I keep seeing people complaining about how mastery’s split people up, how “there aren’t enough” people at certain bosses, etc. and THAT’S THE POINT.

Events and bosses scale incredibly hard in the new content. It’s much easier to do events/bosses with fewer people rather than more. It’s best to spread out and get things done in groups of 5 – 10 not an omni-blob of 100 otherwise the bosses get more health or the events spawn a ton of champions.

I know it’s hard for people to grasp because of how all the other content in the game works but it’s not the same for HoT, or at least the majority of it.

And on that note: I’ve been farming the hell out of Verdant Brink and the same thing happens every single night cycle. A bunch of camps get overrun by the Mordrem because people are piling up in one place and the map never gets past T2. That, or a bunch of people just AFK until the legendary’s spawn and all blob them one at a time which takes twice as long because the health scales so much.

Just spread the word that it’s better not to zerg everything on the new maps. I hate to be that person who’s nagging it all the time.

Stupidity is something else that needs to be nerfed. It’s getting out of hand.

What the actual kitten are those who are defending this behavior talking about… WvW is not a kittening karma train it’s a strategic war and fighting game. Using arrow carts to clean everything inside structures eliminates important roles in WvW to favor greater numbers while crippling the smaller numbers.

You don’t go “oh, this tower is well sieged, guess we should build an arrowcart, stack around it, kill all their siege then take it.” You come up with a different strategy to take the structure by range attacking it (using a catapult or trebuchet for example) or you wait for a more opportune moment to attack it such as when it’s left un-defended.

I’m really tired of people wanting to always take the easy way out by abusing broken “features” like this. It is not at all fun to just steamroll maps all day. People complain that WvW is stale and “dying” for exactly this reason. Because people are ruining the dynamics of it by refusing to think outside the box.

I will NOT build cheese arrowcarts when/if my commander places one. People need to stop breaking WvW then complaining that Anet doesn’t care about it.

As a woman who plays way too much GW2… If I had a boyfriend, I’d breakup with him if he got me a legendary. I mean, your hearts in the right place and maybe she’ll appreciate it, but… I’d say don’t. Spend time with her outside of the game, there’s already enough texting and socialnetworking that ruins our real life experiences as is. Don’t make your relationship a virtual one.

Good luck though and that’s just my two cents. I hope you two do well.

Guild Wars 2 has, without a doubt, the nicest MMO community. I believe a part of the reason behind that is because a) there is no holy trinity. People can’t beat you up for being a bad healer, tank or DPS. There are of course disputes about how to use your profession properly but I think the direct insults and general unpleasantness that comes with the holy trinity is a lot less prevalent thanks to GW2’s design. And b) because there is no option to duel people in the open world. Although yes, GW2 has PvP options, they are in separate instances. This keeps arguments and competitive people confined to those areas to have their verbal and in-game battles while keeping other areas of the game free from hatefulness.

Let me be clear that I am fully aware of the axxholery that occurs during open world champ farms, dungeons and general trolling. But if you’ve ever played a game such as for example, DC Universe Online, where there is open world PvP, it’s like always being in a Heart Of The Mists map. There are always people yelling at and insulting each other and it’s a very unpleasant environment. I enjoy PvP from time to time but I also enjoy that when I go some place like Lion’s Arch or Divinity’s Reach I won’t see or have to deal with people trying to show me their kitten, bragging about how tough they are and how bad I am, or how bad someone else is.

tldr; I don’t want to live in HOTM. Open world PvP would turn open world in to HOTM and we’d see nothing but people flaunting their fantasized superiority and putting other’s down to indulge their over-inflated egos. If you want open world PvP, solo roam in WvW.

After a bit of research it appears that this armor may not have made it in to the game. And if that’s the case, I would really love to see it at the very least put in to the gem store. It’s pretty darn nice.

EOTM is a PvEvP environment, similar to that of quote-un-quote “normal” WvW. The reason I say “normal” is because EOTM is not a competitive WvW format, the score counts towards nothing, and is therefore meaningless. I cannot say that playing street hockey, for example, isn’t fun because it’s not the NHL, but the points don’t matter therefore most people won’t take is seriously.
A lot of people enjoy karmatraining. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not what ANet had in mind when designing EOTM, but it’s what those people enjoy doing. I don’t think they would do it every day for hours a day if they didn’t. I understand your desire to engage in large scale player versus player, but the vast majority of people don’t enjoy doing that in EOTM. Forcing what you enjoy on these people makes you no better than they for forcing what they enjoy on you. It’d be like if they came to Eternal Battlegrounds and complained that people were defending towers. People would call them noob and whisper them cruel things, because that person would be a fish out of water so to speak. You’re no different doing what you’re doing in EOTM.
Beginning with something that shares little in common with “normal” WvW isn’t a good way to learn. Join Eternal Battlegrounds or a borderland, you don’t need to be an expert to participate. Do what you please and if you enjoy defending things or attacking other players it’s much more acceptable in a regular WvW zone.

Let me be clear, I understand your wishes to have EOTM operate more like traditional WvW. The fact of the matter is, unfortunately, that the vast majority in EOTM disagree and they enjoy doing what they’re doing. It really isn’t fair to ruin their fun in favor of yours.
I rarely ever set foot in EOTM unless I’m waiting on a Q for exactly this reason. I don’t enjoy karmatraining (or not for long periods of time) so I don’t stay there any longer than I have to.

Video game. Not real life. Don’t take it so seriously. I wouldn’t go to battle in a bikini let alone go to battle at all. Characters being too realistic defeats the purpose of “fantasy.” Though, I do very much support the idea of allowing females to wear male armor, and males to wear female armor, I do still believe that people take this matter far too seriously.

Because I enjoy it.

After many hours of both playing WvW and browsing the forums, I’ve pretty much concluded that I’m in the minority for this.

I don’t care about score. I don’t care about winning, fights, PPT, KDR or otherwise. I don’t care about defending or capturing or what ever else.

I enjoy WvW because I enjoy socializing with server and guild mates. I enjoy that I can roam, I can scout, I can zerg, I can do what ever my heart desires without anyone or anything to tell me to do otherwise. I can play what ever class I want, I can play what ever build I want, I have nearly total freedom.

There are things in WvW that frustrate me, sure, but I don’t expect it to be perfect. Much like I do with a lot of things in life, I take WvW for what it is and I look on the bright side. What’s the point of always being upset? If you have constructive criticism, give it. Make a thread with ideas and be sure to consider all the variables. Your thoughts may or may not be heard by ANet but if it slips under their radar it doesn’t mean they hate you, they hate WvW and they’re not listening.

People are such drama queens. Yes, WvW has problems and yes, ANet doesn’t do a very good job at maintaining balance or keeping our interest. But at the end of the day, it’s still just a video game and it isn’t here to be a substitute for happiness. Enjoy it for what it is and give feedback where necessary instead of pouring your hopes and dreams in to a better future for the game (and probably your life) then getting mad with ANet and the world because things didn’t pan out the way you imagined they would.

Yes let’s nerf conditions because a couple builds that happen to be condition are overpowered.

While we’re at it let’s cut power damage in half because I’m tired of Heralds critting me for 15k.

/sarcasm off

Just because a couple builds are over performing does not mean conditions need to be nerfed across the board. Target what’s causing the most problems instead of destroying a play style entirely.

\o/ ! More QQ ! If it’s not one thing it’s another. Oh well, I’ll melt ya on the battlefield.

The same thing we do every day, Pinky… Try to take over the world.

Anyone who’s roaming in groups of 4 – 8 as a guild aren’t roaming. Half the point of roaming is the danger of it. You take away the risk, you’re just another insta-gib pain in the @ss for the players who are actually looking for fights.

I don’t know what people expect when they gank solos or pugs groups then laugh like “oh we’re so pro.” If you’re all communicating be it on TS or through group/squad chat, on top of being familiar with each other, you’re already at a huge advantage over any random groups you meet.

As far as I’m concerned, you are not roaming if you’re not putting yourself at a high level of risk. Which means you’re either solo or with 1 – 2 friends tops, looking for fights against 1 – 6 players/picking at the slow ones in a zerg, and actually taking the risk of being picked apart instead of having enough people that you can just hard res anyone who goes down.

DeceiverX.8361:

Well, you’ve pretty much figured out now why most seriously competitive players have dropped GW2; A lot of the defense in this game is passive and requires little thought or little resource management.

This is a big part of why I don’t roam as much as I used to nor do I take losing as seriously as I used to.

I don’t know about everyone else but personally, I do not enjoy losing because of mechanics. I appreciate/recognize when someone is better than me or when I’ve made crucial mistakes but those kinds of fights are getting fewer and further between. Both with the people I fight and with myself as well, there are just so many times where either I win and I shouldn’t have or my opponent wins and they shouldn’t have because of mechanics.

With that said, WvW isn’t designed with small scale combat in mind. It’s a large scale semi-sandbox type environment and people shouldn’t go there expecting perfect balance (or any at all). It’s unfortunate that that’s the way it is but there’s still fun to be had despite the faults.

I enjoy all areas of WvW but I’d be lying if I said I enjoy it as much now as I did pre-HoT. I very much miss the glory days of roaming when it felt like your decisions and skill had a greater impact on the outcome of your fights. Now, it’s pretty much rock, paper, scissors and occasionally someone brings a bazooka.

As always, the one you’re best with.

In terms of general effectiveness assuming the player using it is of average skill however:

1. Thief
2. Mesmer
3. Druid
4. Warrior
5. Engineer
6. Guardian
7. Elementalist
8. Necromancer
9. Revenant

Mobility and adaptability are key to being an effective roamer. You need to be able to disengage if you’re taking too much pressure/if you find yourself outnumbered and to be able to fight a variety of builds effectively. Skill will always be a big factor in whether or not you can do these things.

As for the reasons I’ve listed them the way I have:

Thief because it has plenty of skills that work in most situations coupled with high mobility, damage and stealth. It is objectively the best roamer even if it’s 1v1 capability is up for debate. I’m talking engaging and disengaging, surviving/winning and having an ace up the sleeve against nearly everything it meets. Not necessarily that it’s the best fighter.

Mesmer for similar reasons to the Thief but with less mobility, more sustain and effective 1v1/X potential.

Druid again for similar reasons to the Thief but with nearly the same mobility, better cleanses and high sustain. It’s skills/traits are much more situational but overall, it does well in most encounters despite being on the weaker side in 1vX unless very heavy kiting is going on.

Warrior because of it’s durability, damage and passives. It’s a powerful fighter that can be extremely difficult to bring down or even get close to but it struggles in 1vX unless it can kill it’s opponents in less than a minute. It has a lot more situational skills and thus why 95% will be running identical traits/utilities and is easy to overwhelm once those skills have been put on cooldown.

Engineer, despite having lower mobility, has incredibly high sustain similar to Druid with skills that are relevant in most situations. It is highly adaptable but suffers from skill demanding gameplay with less pay off than other professions but excels in unpredictability and 1vX. In my own personal experience, I in fact find that I do better against multiple players than just 1 on 1’s.

Guardian, also like Engineer, suffers from a lack of mobility but of which can be remedied with skillful use of 1h sword and Wings Of Resolve. Since it has such high access to powerful defensive skills much like Druid, it can adapt well to dealing with most builds and can survive being outnumbered for a good deal of time. High cooldowns and reliance on proper blocking and healing are however, the bane of it’s roaming effectiveness.

Elementalist has potential to be a very strong roamer. It could honestly be placed much higher on the list but only with certain builds that are well played. It has potential to deal with most encounters effectively but suffers from poor mobility without sacrificing utility. Ele is a bit of a wild card in the sense that it can be extremely strong and a great roamer in the right hands but very mediocre – poor in average hands. Which again is why I made this list assuming average skill.

Necromancer has poor mobility (albeit decent land speed) and doesn’t generally fare well against multiple players. It can be an extremely dangerous opponent but is easily overwhelmed by simply disengaging and forcing cooldowns. Although if you over commit, a Necromancer can seem like a very strong roamer, it still lacks much of what makes a good one. Situational skills and obvious tells are just a few things to note when considering it’s place on a solo scale.

And finally Revenant. Because most will not have any cleanse, or very, very little, they are straight up hard countered by condition builds, which there are a lot of. It’s mobility isn’t the worst but it isn’t a lot better than Guardians and it doesn’t tend to last very long in 1vX. Although it can deal massive amounts of damage and played well, it can pull itself back from the brink of death (hence the name “Revenant”), it still suffers greatly from lacking a lot of the key elements that make a great roaming profession.

Note:
I have seen at least one of each of these professions used to great effect in the roaming scene. I have seen Necromancers consistently winning outnumbered fights, Revenants that were impressively quick, Guardians that seemed unkillable and Elementalists that always had a back up plan. Although some professions are strictly better than others for the things they have access to, in the proper hands, the things they don’t have access to won’t matter.

I’ll say the same thing I always say when this topic is brought up; “pay attention.”
I’ve never used teamspeak, don’t ever intend to. I’ve never had a problem with following the commander and the rare times I die are my fault for being distracted. Although yes this is personal experience and opinion, it still doesn’t make it any less valid that all people need to learn to do is to pay attention.
If a commander pauses, stack. If he/she throws down siege, build. If they start to retreat from a zerg, follow. It’s common sense, really. I find that depending on teamspeak would, if anything, make you a worse player rather than better. Because without hearing the orders you’re going to forget to follow the pin because you’re used to hearing it not seeing it.
Also, people complain about the most ridiculous things in map chat sometimes. And as I’ve heard, they do the same in teamspeak, too. I’d much rather not pay attention to mapchat and listen to music than have to tolerate peoples b_tching in my ears while I try to pay attention to what the commander is saying.

Choppy.4183:

1. People regularly complain that Anet staff never talk to them.
2. Anet staff leave posts asking people to be cool to each other.
3. People respond by giving Anet staff plenty of reasons to not talk to them, because, reasons
4. gg

It legitimately makes me sad to know that I’m in the minority when I say I play this game to relax and have fun. Seems like far more people have so little to worry about in their daily lives that they just look for reasons to be upset and GW2 WvW is a perfect candidate.

Not liking how the devs handle the game is one thing but the sheer amount of entitlement and berating that happens any time a dev appears in a WvW post makes me really disappointed in this community.

Ranger is a powerful profession whether people want to admit it or not. They are the 1v1 duelist profession and if used properly can provide a fair bit of group support. Unfortunately being a duelist in WvW doesn’t get you much unless you like to solo roam, even then you’re not going to always be fighting just one person, and in a zerg and/or havoc any other profession can fill the bill better than a Ranger can. Ranger was formerly my main and I love the profession to death. If played properly they can be a huge asset, especially in PvE dungeon runs where they’re actually one of the most useful in a speed clearing group composition. But as for WvW, well… They’re squishy, their pets die fast, Spirits are basically out of the question in anything larger than 4v4 and the only real AOE they have is Barrage which, although if timed right can be pretty awesome for crippling mass amounts of people, does little to no damage unless you’re full zerk. In which case you’ll probably die within 30second of zerg contact.

Basically… If you’re a Ranger in WvW you can do what ever you like as you’re entitled to play the game the way you enjoy it most. But if you want to be in any way effective you’re better off solo roaming because 1v1 the Ranger is second to none. You just better hope you can either get the hell away or you’re a kitten good Ranger if anyone else decides to join the fight.

Oil is extremely strong but it’s also stationary which means it’s easy to avoid in most cases.

I think a fair change would be to make it so that you do not need to be touching the pot of oil to use it. Instead, place a lever or button inside the structure on the ground, similar to how tactivators are placed, that you can use to operate the oil from afar.

This would eliminate any risk of taking damage on the players part without making the pot of oil more difficult to kill. Oil dies fairly quickly as is if enough people are focusing it down and as I’d said, it only has a very small radius of effect. I think it would be absolutely fair to remove the risk of taking damage while using it. It’s a totally different story with things like AC’s and cannons that can hit many different places however.

Straegen.2938:

Lately, I have gone to running Lyssa runes, Shadow Step, Signet of Agility, Escapist’s Absolution, Pain Response and Trickster with Withdraw. More than a dozen times last night I was unable to clear alpha strike condi fast enough to survive in skirmish. Either I get bombed with so much condi no clear can do the job or I purge them only to be reloaded a second later.

What on earth are you, and everyone else, doing to attract so many conditions? I understand that for frontliners the problem is a lot more prevalent. They’re forced in to taking heaping wads of damage and conditions. But if you’re a Thief, or any kind of mid/backliner, you shouldn’t be getting loaded with condi’s every 5 seconds. I can literally frontline (at least during a winning push or in certain opportune situations) on a full glass vanilla Ranger. I can remove 8 conditions if I blow all of my utilities and you know how often I have to do that? Almost never. At maximum I’ll get 5 conditions on me at which point I’ll quickly retreat to recover and wait for cooldowns to come off.

You’re better off retreating for 60seconds to let your cooldowns and health come back than overextending and subsequently dying. If you’re not a frontliner, don’t frontline or if you can’t handle it, don’t do it.

As I’d said recently in other condition related threads, I’m about 99.9% certain that people are just blowing things out of proportion/have no idea how to watch the flow of a fight. As a very mediocre player and someone with motor skill issues and backwards keybinds… I should be having the same problems you are but I don’t. So I’m pretty darn sure this is L2P and/or straight up lying.

EOTM is the new fight meta. Sad but it’s true. Last night all three sides must have been capped because the blob v blobs were like 80+ v 80+ and the fights lasted for the first 2 hours straight of the match. Haven’t seen fights of that scale in a long time. EOTM has been great for fights in general for the last maybe 5 – 6 months or so but it’s getting to the point that so many people are going there for it that it’s reminding me of when WvW was younger, healthy and active.

The fights are extremely fun and nostalgic but at the same time, a lot of uplevels and people completely new to the game are in Edge that don’t know how to listen to a tag. It makes it really frustrating when you’re the one commanding because sometimes you get a good zerg other times people just don’t want to listen. That and the majority of PUGs quit after only a few wipes which means these large scale fights only last until one or two of the three sides gets tired of being wiped which only usually takes between 1 and 2 hours.

I’ve been going to EOTM to vacation from real WvW at least a couple times a week since it was released and I’ve seen how it’s evolved from pure ktrain and fight avoidance to nothing but blood thirsty fightmanders hunting each other and running people down. If you want fights, albeit hit and miss in quality, go to EOTM. I’d much prefer it if people would stay in EBG or the borderlands to fight where there are more 80’s and co-ordination but my word won’t change everyone’s mind so I’m just letting you know where the action is if you want it.

ThomasC.1056:

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

I appreciate/recognize when someone is better than me or when I’ve made crucial mistakes but those kinds of fights are getting fewer and further between. Both with the people I fight and with myself as well, there are just so many times where either I win and I shouldn’t have or my opponent wins and they shouldn’t have because of mechanics.

As someone who only plays small scale, I perfectly relate to that.
Depending on whom I’m playing at a given moment, I know there’re fights that I can engage and when I lose, I end up saying “should better’ve done that”. These are the exception.

Unfortunately, there also are encounters which I don’t even try. Because I know, just from the profession, some skills, food and utility, that I’ll be helpless. Not because of skill, but because of perma evades, perma invulns, or perma stuns. In a nutshell : mechanics that allow the opposite player to play as if my chair was empty and I was afk brewing some tea. Of course, the set of encounters varies upon the toon I’m playing, but as I can change toon on the fly…

That said, some may argue it’s mechanics, and it’s balance : you can’t kill anyone with every toon. Some encounters have to be harder than others, there’re natural enemies, etc. I agree with that. To me, issue is : natural enemies aren’t skilled players or smart tactics in that game. Natural enemies are mechanics favoring a one-sided fight, and eventually making me feel helpless.

To give a perfect example;

There was a time I was fighting a meta Berserker who was using Rousing Resilience, Dead Or Alive and GS + Mace/Shield with Durability runes (mind you I was also using Mace/Shield at this time) and I interrupted so many of his attacks. I’m talking countering his bursts and other heavy hitters constantly. This fight went on for a solid 8 minutes until I literally ran away because I couldn’t kill him even though I was massively outplaying him evading/interrupting/countering crucial skills.

But, I wasn’t running the meta traits and I wasn’t using Berserker Stance so in the end, had I stayed around, he would have won.

That’s what I hate. Losing to mechanics and not to the player. I wasn’t using some kind of in-effective slapped together build.

If I lose because a player is better than me, if I lose because I made a mistake/poor judgement call, if I lose because I’m using an off meta not-super-effective build, all of that is fine. It’s when I lose because my opponent is being carried by mechanics that I hate and those kinds of fights are becoming more and more common.

I want this outfit please.

Sincerely: Money.

I can picture it now. Certain servers tanking for a few weeks so they can plow their way back to the top from the very bottom. Cough BG cough.

I’m also betting that most players will vote for rewards to take priority over match-making. Knowing how important many players consider loot to be, they’ll greedily request better rewards then cry that matches are still broken.

Wow… This is pathetic on both parts, honestly. Some of us such as myself like to go to EOTM to wind down after we’ve spent the entire day scouting, roaming and doing all the thankless jobs for our server. Then we find that there are people trolling on every side in Edge and we can’t even get a decent farm there? Fun…

How about people just let it go and accept the fact that Edge is not and never will be a real WvW map and PvE’rs like to farm there. So what if one guild controls all sides of the map a handfull of times a day? Any other times it’s total chaos and there are completely new commanders or very seasoned ones leading a massive train of PUGs.

I will just never understand why people get so infuriated over karma trains… If it were in the borderlands or EBG I might understand but this is freaking Edge, it doesn’t matter. I can’t say I’d support [EotM] for being rude to others but I’ve also seen them be polite. They’re a massive guild with very few requirements, of course there will be some a_sholes in it. You can’t blame the entire guild for a few bad seeds.

Anyway I think the people who just want to troll [EotM] are no better than the ones who are bullying others for defending… If I happen to catch anyone trying to troll, I’ll just troll them… And it’ll be troll on top of troll on top of troll because why not. If that’s how you’re going to combat things…

Revolutionen.5693:

My lovely post-patch p/p condi thief!

Needs more scarf and sass. Hair with the flower in it would be a unique touch, too.

zen.6091:

Or, you can simply take the low road and roll a dire perplexity build that can’t be killed with backstabs before the thief is forced to retreat or bleeds / burns to death.

Lmao, maybe I’m misinterpreting this so I apologize if so, but… “The low road”? So rolling a condition build isn’t fair because we’re harder for a Thief to kill? Sorry.. But I can’t burst a Thief down in the 2seconds they’re visible before stealthing again. So I compensate by stacking as many conditions as I can before they disappear and hopefully either reappear downed or running with their tail between their legs.

Anyway, in regards to the subject at hand… I agree with just about everything people have said here. It’s nice to know I’m not the only one who thinks it’s a bullsh** mechanic. Fortunately I’m a high condition damage Necromancer so most of the time they don’t cause me a lot of trouble… But again, as has been said here, if it’s a good Thief you pretty well can’t win because they’ll just keep resetting the fight. And that’s exactly what happens.
Thieves don’t need any nerfs. What they do need is some kind of risk versus reward for stealthing as a pose to being able to spam it at will. If you call that a nerf you’re forgetting that you don’t have to run a glassy build… Thieves are a medium weight profession. Berserker gear isn’t the only stat available to you, there are plenty of others to choose from. I’ve fought Thieves who run stealthless and I respect them like mad because they’re not abusing a broken mechanic. Not only that the stealthless ones are just as deadly, but at least I have a fair chance to defend myself.
Imho, anyone who says QQ when people say something needs to be done about perma stealth are one of two things; someone who has never played anything but a Thief, or someone who rolled a Thief so they could troll and don’t want their griefing abilities removed.

Dawdler.8521:

15 vs 40 was possible once because it was 15 people with secret raid builds and a hardcore commander vs 40 people on random PvE builds following a commander that had no idea what he was doing. The game has matured beyond that now. Today you might have the same 15 man setup, but those 40 people will probably consist of veteran GWEN raiders on a very experienced commander. 15 vs 40 all things equal should not be possible.

Funny thing though, it still sort of is. Just not open field with a wipe.

But you can never have the first thing back.

This is the most accurate comment here. Although there are still new players joining the game or players coming from PvE to WvW, the game has been around long enough now that the majority of them are experienced players/commanders.

Although you can overcome far greater odds if your group is skilled/smart enough, it’s much less common now that most of the players are familiar with the flow of a fight.

The main thing I would suggest if anyone wants to win heavily outnumbered fights is to not brute force it. You’re not being impressive by YOLO pushing triple your numbers and surviving for 60seconds, you’re being reckless. Use the terrain to your advantage. Funnel people through chokes, deny backliners by keeping on high ground, build siege that will support your smaller numbers like Shield Generators or Catapults and stay as tightly packed as possible so as to prevent your party from being picked off.

EOTM might be a totally different playing field but I just want to say for the record, I have wiped multiple guilds/organized groups with intelligent positioning. I’ve witnessed the same things being done in real WvW as well but it’s far less common because people would rather try to be supermen than using their heads. It’s just like IRL, you don’t run at a raging mob with a few friends and some knives. You devise a plan to get them in a position of your favor so that you can eliminate as many as possible without putting yourselves in too much danger.

“Lmfao, people are so over dramatic. It’s for a few days. And it’s a video game. How about have fun with it instead of acting like it’s the end of the world?

I’m excited about this… I can stop sitting in towers, starting upgrades, scouting, building siege and refreshing, etc. for the week and enjoy a mindless farm with a bunch of golems, it sounds great. It could cost us the match because we don’t have enough coverage who knows but it’ll be fun none the less and that’s the point of the game isn’kitten I thought all anyone ever did anymore was PPT anyway.

Please put the game down and step outside for a while if you’re actually angry about this."

As I had said in another thread.

Not upset about this at all and very excited. People just need to relax and get some fresh air. I’m actually a bit surprised and concerned at how many people take the game as seriously as they do… Wouldn’t want to play ball hockey with any of them that’s for sure.

As a Necromancer, I’m not concerned. My love for the Necromancer profession will never expire. I’ve overcome many challenges I’m sure I’ll overcome the Revenant. #ComeAtMeBro.

I actually am beginning to like it strictly because I can solo roam and not expect to get ganked every 10 seconds. Was having a good time there last night and getting some decent 1v1/x’s. The downside is if you die, you have a mile and a half to run to get back to where ever you were.