Guild Wars 2

lagrangeify.5641:

I’m going to adopt the tiniest voice possible when I say that there is another way of looking at this – ANet have already been far more active in trying to evolve the game with stuff than any other MMO operator that I’ve ever known. Perhaps only Trion are similarly proactive when it comes to their game, and they charge a sub.

I’m not saying you should suck up what you don’t approve of, just bear in mind that what this isn’t a case of, is a hands off developer operating a policy of fire and forget, post launch. Anything but.

My pint is half-full. I paid £40 for a game that contains an absolute ton of stuff for me to do, some 2 months after purchase. Most devs would have charged a micro-transaction for this latest set of events…..and frankly had ANet done that then I’d be joining the bloody revolution. But they didn’t, the gave it to us for free, warts and all.

The sense of drama on this forum far out-strips what I would personally think of as verging on hysteria, over a game that makes no financial demands of you whatsoever in order that you can take part….or indeed to not take part.

Some perspective gently offered, though I’ve no doubt I’ll get my face chewed off.

Like I said, this isn’t it even about the money. This is about a broken promise. Sub or not, I just want what they promised me in the manifesto back.

I don’t think money should ever be used as a way to justify this kind of thing.

Are we gamers really so shallow that all we can think with is our wallets and not our love for a game?

Look guys, I am not trying to whine here.

The massive amount of untested content / bugs were fine, the ramptant hacking / botting / cheatting was ok, but the day Arenanet turned on their manifesto I actually felt pretty terrible.

This isn’t supposed to be a whining thread, its about a gamer who was let down big time not because a company failed to deliver, but because they turned on what they believed in so vocally. I know how MMO launches go, not always the smoothest. This isn’t an MMO launch issue.

GW2 was a beacon of hope in an otherwise bland and done to death genre. It had a chance to be revolutionary on an epic scale to a huge audience when it was released. Pretty much everyone was talking about it like it was going to change the genre. I honestly am astounded that we are only three months into release and the developer has already sold out their vision for the ultimate MMO for a quick buck.

I thought this game would be different, I thought finally there is a company that won’t cater to the all the things I grew to hate in MMOs. Boy, was I wrong. Look where we are today and think of your expectations before launch. What in the kitten happened?

In these hard times when people need something to believe in, GW2 let me down.

I don’t care about a sub or buying things in the gem store or can I have your stuff, all I wanted was the ideals ANet promised in their manifesto. Thats all I needed to keep playing despite all of GW2s flaws. Money isn’t even an issue here, I want the game I was promised so many times back

Out of chances. I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that the game would improve over time and I would continue to play and support them with the gem store. They were taking their sweet time fix things that should be been working if they had actually released “When its done”. I was able to live with that.

Well, the announcement of the Ascended Items and the going back on their manifesto combined with this abysmal performance of a patch means ArenaNet has lost their last chance with me, thats all there is to it. I won’t be spending ~$50 USD a month on gems anymore and won’t even be playing.

ArenaNet you need to get your kitten together or this game’s population will look worse than SWTOR soon.

Dormedas.9524:

Nageth.5648:

We don’t know how expensive infusions will be. It could be doable to swap them with some regularity.

You still have to overwrite the ones that you already have slotted. Even if they’re relatively cheap, I think this idea is dumb simply because gear has nothing to do with jumping puzzles now and it should stay that way.

Right now jumping puzzles are somewhat organic; you find one or show up to one and start jumping. You figure out the traps and little issues and overcome them. If people show up to one and try to do it and Gravity is screwing them up, there’s nothing to tell them “Hey go gear up before you do this, ya dingus.” Chances are people will just leave frustrated.

Problem is there is no clear progression for a major part of GW2s content (jumping puzzles)

Maybe we can add a new slot just for jumping puzzles to solve this issue?

Its also unknown if infusions act the same as upgrades, we may actually be able to remove / swap them out on demand.

So me and my friend briktal were talking on the IRC and he came up with a great idea. We both really liked Ascended Gear / Infusions for PvE so we though it should extend to other areas of the game.

-The Idea-
Add vertical progression / ascended gear infusions to jumping puzzles. Basically, have jumping puzzles give higher debuffs the harder they are and require you do do a bunch of jumping puzzles to get infusions for ascended gear so you can do harder puzzles.

Lets call this defuff “Gravity” and you need infused ascended gear in order to ignore it. The more you have, the more stacks of gravity you ignore. If you don’t have any infusions to counter it and try to do a hard jumping puzzle you should instantly splat on the floor and die on the first jump.

I feel like we need clear progression on jumping puzzles as I have no motivation to do them without it.

Please limit feedback to constructive only.

Yeah, it is annoying.

What is more annoying is the complete lack of balance in most classes down states.

Anyways, I think in WvW you should only rally off of player kills, not random critters although it isn’t much bigger than a small annoyance to me.

It doesn’t really hurt small gang or blob PvP imo, its the solo fights where that guy rallys off of some stupid goat and kills you because of it. Thats what I find really annoying.

1. They are mutually exclusive
2. Marks do a small amount of damage and don’t trigger on siege, only players. While they reacquire LOS to place, like all AoE they wrap around edges.
3. Yes, consume conditions is strong. However, we have alot of abilities to generate conditions on ourself and it is on a 24s cooldown.
4. Plague signet has some pretty awful bugs and is redundant with our other abilities.
5. If you have 3 people in down state in a small AoE you want to res you have already lost the fight 9/10 times. Sounds great in theory, fails terrible in practice.
6. Spectral grasp has slow travel time but yes it is very useful in sieges for pulling people from the walls and ganking them or to assist you tackling someone.
7. Spectral Walk is a very strong ability, yes.
8. Well Of Suffering does strong damage but to actually apply it recquires you spec into non power related things (20 in curses). Players just dodge out of wells most of the time.
9. Lich form is only good in power builds, Plague Form is more useful in viable necro builds. Power specs are not where we shine.

By far our strongest skill in WvW is epedemic.

Ive been running the same build minus the emphasis on frost (0/30/20/0/20) and its quite effective.

I tried out the runes/sigils you recommended and WOW, does it make a huge difference.

Great build sir.

Invisible armies were never fixed drifter.

Yeah, this is seriously annoying and it makes Lions Arch feel completely dead

Casia.4281:

Istarien.3147:

Casia.4281:

incin powder trait is single target. Its awful.

So is Incendiary Ammo, from what I’ve observed.

Interesting. Had not actually tested that.
Just looked at the 60s CD, and the 3 uses. and said. are you serious? yes. that is TOTALLY on par with grenade barrage, and big ol’ bomb.

Yeah, that is probably the worst part about flamethrower besides the bugs TBH. Its completely redundant and useless with an AWFUL cooldown.

Casia.4281:

Sundial.9015:

You forgot that each boon gives +1% damage, that is the final trait of Alchemy.

I am basing my damage off of: 70% crit, 15+ stacks of might (Putting me around 2.3K power), 4 other boons.

When flame blast passes through someone it does a significant amount of damage as well. I have seen the actual blast hit as high as 8K with alot of vulnerability.

You also failed to consider crit procs with 70% add a significant amount of damage (33% bleed, 50% vulnerability, 33% burn giving you close to 100% burn uptime). Since the flamethrower has so many chances to crit… well you do the math.

The bleeds are ticking for around ~70 and burns ~500. 1 bleed proc is going to do 350 damage.

Yes, some of the big hits / high DPS are against squishes or glass cannons or people with alot of vuln stacks, but don’t discount a properly speced flamethrower engis ability to melt people.

I’m not even sure that +1% damage trait even works. I’ve had it since beta, and have never seen a notable difference in damage.
How many boons do you have on you? might, swiftness, regen? 3%
Elixir B, giving ret and fury for moderate duration. 5% Prot, vigor for short term. 7%

crit procs are not significant.
33% chance on 70% crit is 24% chance per hit. FT is 10 hits per 2.5s.
P1 is 3 hits basic, 6 hits with coated bullets, 9+ with triple or quad procing, in 2.5s 5 with PDV in2. 2 in static, 3 with bt.
R1 is 3 hits in 2.4s.
Grenades is 9 hits in 2.4s.
so, that 10 hits is not significantly more then other typical weapons. yes more then rifle.
2 bleeds in 2.5s from 10 hits average. 42.5+.05cond damage/s 3s duration. so 255+.3cond total. 825cond. 247.5= 502 damage. “free” damage is free damage. But thats 167dps. I don’t consider that significant out of 3000dps. A nice addition yes. something to be focused on. no. Absolutely not. Granted we did factored FT scales like —--, and only does 1200 dps. so yeah. 167 is a significant amount of that.
Grenades DO do 3000-4000dps though. And proc those crits just as much, and stack vulx3 EVERY throw. not 50% chance on crit.

incin powder trait is single target. Its awful.

Assuming 100% of those grenades hit (which rarely happens to a single target) you would be right.

However in practice that is almost never the case. Even if you have frozen your target, the grenades spread and all 3 don’t hit one player most of the time. Grenades have travel time, with flamethrower if you are in range or close you can take an opportunity and put out IMMEDIATE consistant AoE damage.

Of course, you typically open up with your main weapon (when approaching I usually use pistol 2,3), then flame blast, then start using flamethower autoattack if there are enough players.

Grenades have the most potential DPS, but that doesn’t translate to them being the best in all situations (especially outside of PvE). They also have strong disadvantages, that is one of the reasons I stopped using them.

Still though, I wish people would stop assuming that you can actually achieve those DPS numbers in PvP with grenades on a consistent basis. It is simply false in every way shape and form. I base this on playing over 100 hours in a grenadier spec.

It seems like it fails to knock me back a significant distance some of the time. I’m sure it is a bug, but kitten was it annoying. its the reason I stopped using rocket boots.

Yes.

1. If it hits an object it can’t pass through, it fizzles and does nothing. It should explode IMO.
2. Yeah, I think it should fire even without a target. I hope Anet fixes this.

Takes skill to position correctly with the flamethrower. Like I said, I am able to nearly completely mitigate “missing” with camera angle and distance management. It wasn’t something that came overnight. Also yes, its not a spec very good for holding people down who are trying to escape. Luckly I have other people in my group who are good at that. I tend to try to stick to mainly medium sized engagements and preferable terrain conditions (alot more of this in EB then borderlands).

It is not for everyone, but I am able to use it very effectively in WvW. I wouldn’t discount it just because you had a bad experience with one build.

You forgot that each boon gives +1% damage, that is the final trait of Alchemy.

I am basing my damage off of: 70% crit, 15+ stacks of might (Putting me around 2.3K power), 4 other boons.

When flame blast passes through someone it does a significant amount of damage as well. I have seen the actual blast hit as high as 8K with alot of vulnerability.

You also failed to consider crit procs with 70% add a significant amount of damage (33% bleed, 50% vulnerability, 33% burn giving you close to 100% burn uptime). Since the flamethrower has so many chances to crit… well you do the math.

The bleeds are ticking for around ~70 and burns ~500. 1 bleed proc is going to do 350 damage.

Yes, some of the big hits / high DPS are against squishes or glass cannons or people with alot of vuln stacks, but don’t discount a properly speced flamethrower engis ability to melt people.

OP, once you use the flamethrower long enough to learn to mitigate your misses with distancing and camera angle to the point where you hit 95%+ of the time.

Also, you don’t need a high survivability build to use flamethrower. What you do need is creative positioning, good mobility and escapes.

I build with full berserker and have very minimal issues surviving in small / medium sized engagements with my build while being able to put out MASSIVE dps.

I have the ability to open up on a group for 6K+ damage with flame blast and then continue to hose them down at close to 3K DPS. Get in, do big damage, when things start to heat up this is when you use your defensive cooldowns (shield stun, reflect) elixer S, exlixer S toolbelt, dodges. You can easily decimate groups of players if you play your cards right and build correctly.

Try to fight at choke points and during small/medium sized sieges constantly move in and out of the portal of your tower/keep. Of course you can use the flamethrower through the door as well.

I recomend zerkers armor with fire runes, pistol/shield 10/30/0/30/0. Thats about all the advice I can give.

Have to agree with coglin here.

Engineer does not suffer from bad design (imo). I would highly doubt they have a rework planned.

I expect balance changes / fixes which will improve on their initial vision.

Engineer is a blast to play once you work around the bugs and will be even better once they are fixed.

Thank you Volitile for reducing the chances that us engineers as a hole with get carpal tunnel.

@Lysico: you might want to understand what OP posted before you report him for it.

Thats good to know lorazcyk, thanks.

So it seems here that the bug is the visuals do not show a direction change when you adjust your camera with right click.

1. Walk up to a Doe with your camera angle facing it directly in front of you. Your toon should be looking at the Doe directly.
2. Start lighting it on fire with your “Flame Jet” ability.
3. Adjust your camera angle 90 degrees while still facing the doe with your toon and watch “miss miss miss miss” start popping up.

Is this working as intended?

Dhar.6392:

“I saw this happen tonight in wvw a couple times with the same toon. while armor repairs are mildly annoying I think alt+F4 is more effort than what its worth….maybe unless they get some satisfaction out of knowing that you didn’t kill them or something”

I get a ton of satisfaction denying folks badges, especially when it’s 3 to 1 or worse… which is common. If I feel like I’m getting rolled… then I think its my duty to make your victory as shallow as possible.

I recommend you try sPvP if you are looking for 100% fair fights.

Mortal is definitely useful in WvW, the main issue with it is it dies instantly if it happens to be damaged.

I like the mortar for my elite since I run a flamethrower build. It allows me to be effective in siege situations somewhat, however I just feel it dies too fast.

forever.6908:

We have at least 3 minutes warning, is that not enough?

10 seconds after the message appeared we were moved back to lions arch. Then 3 minutes later my client reset.

Point is 10 seconds to finish up what we were doing in WvW is not enough. Some people have multiple siege golems built and then these servers reset… It quite franky is ridiculous.

Its basic courtesy to your players to give them advanced warning when you are going to take the game down for a patch.

Pretty much all other companies do this, why doesn’t Arenanet?

@Kardiamond: when I saw the screenshot of your necro you posted in the WvW forum and saw the axe I simply chuckled and thought “He hasn’t realized yet”

Good to see you finally came around just as I did and realized Axe is by far our worst weapon. Its outdone in everyway by every other weapon pretty much besides ability #3, which honestly I still don’t think is as useful as dagger #3.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcAQJAqelspCYnuSrF17IBoHAuu3V0jH34J/pAbB;TkAg0U6Y0RojVHnOSdGVMLA

Another alchemy flamethrower build. Works really well in small skirmish type engagements in WvW.

Also, you are already pushing your survivability to its limits without Elixer U. Elixer B adds far more utlity (the swiftness specifically), has a lower cooldown, and still has great synergy with stacking conditions on crit. Since I don’t take swiftness on crits its vital I have some sort of reliable form of swiftness.

coglin.1496:

Running with swiftness, and you will not get 3/4 of the way before they hit. So it is hard to take anything at all that you say seriously when you “claim” that “walking” gets you closer then running with swiftness does.

When I said walking thats what I meant. Actually, I do get close to 3/4 of the way with swiftness.

You misinterpret what I mean by walking. I meant it as “not standing still” or simply “moving” like I say in every single other post.

For WvW go full zerker if you plan on running grenades. You need to maximize your damage in the small amount of time before people dodge what you already have in the air.

You should be ambushing / constantly disengaging / reengaging to get the most out of them.

There are boss fights where if you use this trait (giganticus lupicus) you completely ruin your groups chances of success because he uses them to build stacks that increase his damage bucketloads.

Engineers, Necros, Eles, and Rangers all got the short stick.

Xyvius.1679:

Bad idea. But a good idea would be to make the projectiles move faster like they did for the Mesmer’s Scepter.

I would argue that this would make them overpowered (if you don’t consider them that already).

Having speed affected by inheritance would make grenades behave consistently at all times as opposed to how they do now. Simply making them go faster does not fix the problem, its a bandaid and it will still be noticeable when moving any direction.

Subhuman Filth.9562:

No. This is a terrible idea. If you want to throw the grenades at a higher velocity, aim farther away from your body.

Aiming at 1500 range I get to the target almost as fast walking there as it takes for the grenades to hit.

It is not a problem at close range, it IS a problem at long range.

Throwing them farther away does NOT make them go faster.

I can almost outrun my grenades when running forward.

I think we need the grenades to inherit our momentum to their speed, but still maintain their original course / trajectory. If you are running sideways it will have no effect on their speed or direction thrown forward. If you are running forwards, they will inherit your speed and travel that much faster to the target. If you are backpeddling and throwing grenades forward, they should go that much slower forwards.

Yes, I know our other kits need work as well but this is a big one for grenades (not that they are unpowered or anything, but this is still needed)

Flamethrower DPS is too low for its range and the gear to maximize its damage while still having survivability (Condition Damage, Prescision/Toughness) is extremely hard to get outside of sPvP.

Not to mention the various bugs it has, I would say stick with rifle/nades.

From my testing it didn’t feel like it scaled very well with power or condition builds without precision.

Can you please separate your post into sentences instead of just a big wall of unorganized thoughts?

As it stands I can’t help you because even looking at what you wrote is giving me a migraine.

“Unfortunately I see it as a problem that is not going to go away.”

Its an NCSoft game, rampant unenforced botting/RMT just comes with the territory sadly.

Thank you to those of you killing these scumbags

Xsadia.9673:

I thought there was an option for the commander just to show his badge to his guild? or am i wrong here?

On another note, the one thing I have noticed is the amount of kittening that goes on about commanders not leading. From experience, some commanders lead their own guilds, not the map as a whole. I don’t see an issue with that, thought it is helpful when the commanders co-ordinate with each other too

The problem is there is no raid group support so people get commander so their guild can anchor / group around you on the map as well as have allies be able to see your groups location.

Hell, you can’t even see your own guildies on the map if you are not grouped with them. “Play the game not the UI” my kitten

Please replace all PC dialogue with “Quaggan’s a piwate! Yarr!”

If I could send you a beer through the internet I would good sir.

Venirto.4208:

“Wanna play “Ghosts and Charrs” again? Yeah, but can we both be Charr this time?"
“Sure, you can be a Charr. It doesn’t matter to me what you are, let’s play!”
“MONSTERS!!!”
“GHOSTS!!!”

Arena, please… ._.

Oh god, how did I forget about this.

One of my friends on IRC said:

Its like they rounded up a bunch of teenagers from a local high school payed them minimum wage and asked them to write one liners for He Man and the Masters of the Universe.

Yes, it is that terrible.

With short CC duration and proper class design diminishing returns is not needed.

DR is a band aid in other games that implement CC only for PvE.

Osskil.1029:

And as far as me removing myself from the thread, this is entertainment while I work, so I will respectfully decline.

This is the reason I am not “trying” in WvW currently my friend

I have more class then to add someone I disagree with to my ignore list.

Talk about your old server all you want to Osskil but when you start suggesting that we are not trying / losing and that AR+GoM should troll our server you should expect this kind of negative attention back.

Anyways, I think I speak for all of us when I say take your nose out from our collective behinds and “transfer” it in your own servers business.

Osskil.1029:

Focus on winning or at least maintaining a lead before you engage in any form of bravado lest you embarrass yourself.

Yes, we are focusing on winning. Of course you would have no clue since when the wind blew a direction you and your irl pals didn’t like you hopped ship and can no longer see whats actually happening your old servers current matchup. YOU pressed the transfer button, no one made you do it. By all means keep posting in here with your inflated ego and self importance acting like you are important to GoM still.

We have been here from day one and won’t be going anywhere soon.

Commander is not just for herding pugs / randoms.

I personally plan on using it so my guild can see me on the map. Since there is no raid group functionality and you can’t see the icons of people in your guild who are not in your 5 man party.

For everyone else that has to see me and has a problem with it: get over yourself. Until there is real raid group functionality this is going to be how it is.

“I’m not saying I hope that happens to BP, just might want to control your own players. Game is no fun when you are getting overrun by an exploit.”

Controlling randoms is impossible. If it was someone from one of our WvW guilds let us know which one, provide evidence and it will be dealt with.

Controlling 100% of your own players is like asking us to herd cats.

" I understand that WvW has a lot of dependance on distance and traveling time, I’m just throwing out possible solutions."

There isn’t a solution if there isn’t a problem. The amount of running is tame compared to other games. If there was any less running you could just endlessly respawn and zerg again. You already have plenty of handicaps to unorganized zerg with including:

1. AoE limit of 5
2. No raid groups
3. Downed state

Pick your fights wisely, know when you are overextending. You can already nearly completely mitigate travel time from spawn by simply not running like a lemming into a zerg repetitively.

Another reason travel time is there is to balance the map between attackers and defenders. Defenders have a huge advantage taking towers/keeps close to their base because their spawn is closer by.

How would you like it if you killed a zerg attacking your garrison only for it to show up 10 seconds later?

The short term solution is set your audio quality to Low.

I was having the exact same problem and this fixed it for me.