Guild Wars 2

I get why nerfs are for PvP only but buffs to traits and skills that aren’t used in PvE? Is there any reason why things like that virtue of justice change aren’t applied to PvE as well? I mean, PvE balance is completely out of whack between the different classes and builds so giving a breath of fresh air and allowing new builds to shine wouldn’t hurt at all. I want my condi guardian to work so badly but it’s just not good enough ;__;

Maybe it’s a different group of people in charge of PvE but it’d be great if you could pass forward some of these ideas to whoever is in charge of PvE balance!

I’ve been trying to conjure up a condition PvE mesmer build (silly I know) and there seems to be a bit of an issue with the trait placement in dueling trait line that makes very little sense if they ever want to make pve condi mesmer a thing.

The traits Phantasmal Fury and Duelist’s Discipline are on same tier of the dueling line. Having 100% crit chance on your phantasms is essential for a mesmer condition build (so you get as many Sharper Images procs as possible) so you really need both traits. Would be great if they could swap the placement of either of the two with Evasive Mirror or something to make this work.

The bleed stacking really packs quite a punch but with the trait placement being as it is the build can’t reach its full potential. Not that the build is much good with it revolving entirely around sustained damage output after a relatively long setup but at least one could use it in boss encounters.

Daishi.6027:

A warp behind your target might have some merit, but I just feel an obvious tell your opponent can trigger, that puts you in a specific spot is not the best way to go imo.

That’s the thing though, I don’t think it really has a tell and if it does that’s entirely a good thing. The blockframes are instant as far as I know, so the idea is you use this skill on reaction rather than on prediction. If youre being predictable with it you deserve to get thrown into their combo, thats counterplay for you. The counter blade should help to make it a bit less predictable too.

In my mind the ideal situation is: you see an enemy trying to poke at you with ranged attacks (ie. necro scepter) and you catch an attack for a free ticket in. If blinking behind is impossible to implement they could just give it a brief evasion-frame during the counterattack. That’s probably better for consistency too come to think of it. The delay is there just to give the opponent a slight chance to react to the damage, not to make you vulnerable.

As for the other suggestions I do agree there’s more that could be done with the sword. The 5th skill is about as boring as they come but I can’t come up with any ideas off the top of my head though that wouldn’t negatively affect the PvE DPS phantasm casting. As for the viability, well, all of the viable PvP offhands for mesmer are picked for survivability, to boost the weapon to viable status without making it too blocky or stealthy it should probably have some half-defensive mechanic like the block-blink I suggested on 5 as well. Maybe with evades? Who knows, it’s great to have some constructive discussion here on the forums though.

I’ve always enjoyed the theme of sword-sword mesmer but it’s always been somewhat out-shadowed by other options in PvP, now with the advent of shield there seems to be very little reason to pick it in PvP as the sword block is “twitchy” and significantly weaker as a defensive tool. Currently the 4th skill, Illusionary Riposte, blocks one incoming attack. Upon a successful block it teleports you a very short distance (this is the twitchy part), creates a clone, and delivers a counter-blow up to 900 range away.

My suggestion is that instead of blinking you where you already are, it blinks you to the attacker instead. It makes the sword a true offensive option even in PvP, giving you access to a long-distance gapcloser and adds some identity to the weapon over the other off-hands. Other than the blink I don’t think it needs much changes, maybe speed up the actions after the block, it seems to have almost a full second of delay before the riposte effects happen. I don’t mind the damage being delayed but the clone and blink could happen nigh-instantly.

The activation skill, Counter Blade, could use a little love as well. It has far too long of a cast for what it does as it is. It could use a little extra treat if it actually interrupts something, for example a damage proc, reduced cooldown on sword skills or something extra like that to give some depth to the weapon and reward skilled sword users.

There’s no way we can have 3 separate queues for gw2. The queue times already are 5-10 minutes and there are only 2 queue types that allow all sized parties. Make it have soloQ and partyQ. Solo queue is only for solo players, party queue allows any and all party sizes 1-5 (or you can restrict it to not allow 1 and 4 player parties but that’s not really the main issue). This would mean you remove unranked altogether to maintain decent queue duration but it’s a sacrifice worth making if this ranking system actually works.

Unavoidable damage just to make healer specs viable? That’s just horrible design decision, I’d rather have a dedicated trinity than this. There are so many ways to make healing good without adding unavoidable damage. Consistency of rules is one of the most important aspects of game design. Nothing makes the player feel worse than to feel cheated by some attacks arbitrarily being undodgeable/unblockable or both at the same time.

I guess they didn’t learn a kitten thing from all the currently implemented content that makes condi useless ie. arahp2 boss, structures and tons of other mobs. It’s horrible game design to invalidate someone’s build arbitrarily and to see they think it’s a good idea to add such content in raids… I don’t know what to say.

If you have no idea how to make condi/healing viable, just copy what works for other games. There’s no shame in doing that and it’s much much better for the players than what we have now.

Revenant:
-Resource management
-Long cooldowns on heal skills at least
-Situational utilities
-Cast times
-Telegraphs
-Distinct weaknesses
-Weak-ish autoattacks
This should be the design of all classes, not just revenant. I absolutely loved the feel of the skills and it was a ton of fun to try and learn the class instead of it being extremely simplistic with no depth. Unfortunately, right now it’s the odd one out with actually good design that involves a ton of counterplay.

Why play revenant and not a thief that has:
-Basically no resource management
-No cooldowns
-1200 range 2-way blink that breaks stun both ways, instant no cast time and removes conditions for utility
-Instant casts on high impact skills
-No telegraphs whatsoever
-No distinct weaknesses
-Stealth
-2 weapon sets
-Extremely strong autoattacks

My point and sincere wish being that we get to see revenant-like reworks to ALL the classes so we might actually be able to call this game an esport some day with a straight face.

PS.
Yes the skillsets and such felt like they had poor synergy but I’d file that under the missing traits, weapons and utilities. The individual parts felt great but you couldn’t make a coherent set out of them with what we had available here.

Putting more gas in the tank won’t make the car go any faster. Anet is profitable and as long as it remains that way they won’t need donations.

Chances are that all the money you donate or put towards the project via whatever channel just increases their profits and the extra would end up in the pockets of their investors/shareholders, not on the employees paychecks.

Thanks for the feedback so far!

RJMazz.6798:

But I think it Balanced Stance shouldn’t apply only to stunbreaking, it could apply to “when a stun is negated from 1 or 2 seconds from first activating Balanced Stance, reactivate it, gaining double the bonuses”.

When playing sword, I generally foresee incoming CC and use Balanced Stance so I can keep flurrying my enemy without being interrupted. See where I’m getting at?

I considered quite a few different possibilities for it and this is where I landed at as it made the skill use situational and predictable for the opponent. I like your iteration as it’s about as proactive as a stance can be without being cheap, but I fear it might get a bit cluttered tooltip-wise and might be hard to communicate visually when its safe to apply CC again.

EvilHero.1248:

well just as you said, there is not much we can do to evade type thief and rangers, and as for mesmer, lets be honest here, the only effective duration of the whole stance with your propose change is only about 5 seconds? you really wanna spend that precious few sec to tag a mes clone just for the 2 sec buff? i would very much rather not. everyone uses berserker stance is mainly for the reason it provides u the resistance from condi for the whole duration from the start and by removing it, dude u just killed that stance and not to mention, u have to TAG a target for it work. Like what i previously stated, you don’t get to tag a target all the time. you will know it very well when you are fighting FEAR necros without the resistance, you just a walking drum stick for them at least till u tag a random target.

I know very well what zerk stance is used for and what this iteration struggles with. I went with this one specifically because it fit the theme ‘berserker stance’ letting you ignore all conditions and letting you stack over 3 bars of adrenaline, not so it retained as much power as the original (thus the heavily reduced cooldown and increased duration).

Kinda similar to evade spam fear spam can be extremely oppressive to the receiving end. You are pretty much dead unless you have instant cast condi cleans or several stun breaks combined with stability once you get stuck in the loop. I don’t think that’s as much of an issue with my iteration of berserker stance as it is about necro fears coming mostly without a telegraph. For alleviating cases like this I figured you could get the first proc of the skill on activation, giving you 2 seconds to make a hit and get the ball rolling. If it becomes too hard to chain to feel effective and rewarding the duration of the resistance can be adjusted as needed.

EvilHero.1248:

i’m not saying your suggestions are bad, i do personally like the balance stance change but for endure pain, i just dont see it as viable, mainly due to it won’t synergize well with what we have… think about it, you use endure pain to avoid physical dmg, while condi kills you, you use your adrenaline to cleanse the condi while activating endure pain which only blocks 50%? if you have prioritize, cleansing the condi always come first, and if that is the case, the skill will almost certainly not gonna be optimal at all times

That’s the whole point. You get endure pain with shorter cooldown and longer duration but you are forced to choose between damage immunity and eating condis or damage reduction if you go with cleansing ire. On paper the current endure pain seems nice as you can work around it by dealing condition damage. In reality very few builds can actually transition between physical and condition damage on the fly and in most cases where this skill has any impact it completely shuts down the damage output of the opponent with no downsides you wouldn’t otherwise have.

Also bear in mind that 50% damage reduction is pretty huge, you won’t get bursted down unless you are severely outnumbered or already on low health.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

combustive shot is different because it creates a fire field on the ground.

it can be denied by blocking or reflecting the combustive shot before it explodes, creating the fire field.

hammer burst skill earth shaker is a leap aoe physical attack, not exactly the same.

But if you aren’t hitting anything why is creating a combo field somehow meeting the requirements of cleansing ire. Why doesn’t creating a blast finisher count? Just because it’s a combo finisher and not a field? It’s pointless exception to the rule and shoehorns all meta warrior builds into playing longbow so they can spam free condi clean with no worries.

Only way you can really reflect or block the spell too is if the warrior uses it while standing inside a bubble or WoR as they fire it on the ground, not to mention no bubble has 12s cd to really counter the free clean spam. It’s pretty much free cleanse where nothing can go wrong on a trait that’s supposed to reward you for landing your burst skills on enemies

EvilHero.1248:

problem with all your suggestion is that they requires us, warrior to actually hit our enemies for them work.

Quoting from you " “on hit” meaning that you damage an enemy with any direct damage ability, condition damage does not count". in most cases, stances are used by only melee warrs, which when up against mes, theif, rangers (which makes up of most classes that pvp), we often don’t get the luxury of being in melee range most of the time as we all know, they will stealth, run teleport before we are even near. The evades and stealth coming from rangers and theif is so ridiculous,i dont know where to even begin. Thus this explains why shoutbow is meta now, and will still be meta even in the next patch.

Frenzy and berserker stance require you to hit people, the others not really unless you want to clean condis with a traited stance. I don’t see a problem with mesmers as it’s rather easy to tag their clones at least. For thieves and survival ranges I see the problem, though I think that’s a major fundamental game design flaw on that side of the alley that needs to be addressed.

The thought process behind the grandmaster is that you’d have a somewhat viable option for an offensive warrior condi clean that doesn’t force you to pick shouts or cleansing ire. Stances might not be meta but they might carve out a slightly bigger niche for themselves and create more viable off-meta builds.

Will you finally be fixing the interaction with longbow burst skill (combustive shot) where it doesn’t require you to hit any enemies to cleanse conditions like all of the other burst skills. I mean, if it’s okay for ground-targeted skill to whiff and still cleanse why not give same functionality to hammer burst skill? Would be nice to get some variety at least

EvilHero.1248:

I think stances are fine with the way they are. your overhaul suggestions, imho are nothing but nerfs. with anet promoting shouts now more than ever, are you trying to wipe out stance all together?
BTW… your enduring pain is wrong and messed up…

Care to explain why they are nerfs?

Berserker doesn’t make you immune, but you get much shorter cooldown, longer duration and more adrenaline potential.

Balanced stance gives you 50% more duration (when used right) than before and soft CC immunity.

Endure pain is on shorter cooldown, longer duration but you need to keep your adrenaline full to get the full effect.

Frenzy is well… more frenzy. You can go nuts in melee and chop them to bits as long as you stay in melee.

I understand that risk-reward is a pretty unknown term in this community but I really don’t see how these are exclusively nerfs. I mean, the numbers can be tweaked around to be more balanced, I just wanted to give an example of how to make the skills more rewarding to use and have some sort of counterplay too aside from ‘just wait for it to end’.

Instead of making the stances passive press X to gain X for the duration, how about we change them to be something more interactive. Ideally this would implement some risk-reward to stances without breaking them too much (cant really tell how much things would break without some playtesting).

Berserker stance:
- Cooldown 40s
- Duration 10s
- On hit: gain 2s of resistance (1s internal cooldown)
- On hit: gain 5 adrenaline (1s internal cooldown)
“on hit” meaning that you damage an enemy with any direct damage ability, condition damage does not count

Balanced stance:
- Cooldown 40s
- Breaks stun
- Duration 5s
- Gain 3 stacks of stability for 5 seconds
- Gain reduction to soft CC (-50% duration)
- Breaking a stun with this skill doubles the buff intensity and duration (soft CC immunity and 6 stacks of stability for 10 seconds)
soft CC includes cripple, chill, slow and immobilize

Endure pain:
- Cooldown 40s
- Breaks stun
- 5s duration
- Gain damage reduction based on your endurance:
1 bar -> -50%
2 bars -> -75%
3 bars -> -100%
you are still susceptible to conditions and crowd contrl effects

Frenzy:
- Cooldown 50s
- Duration 4s
- When hitting an enemy that’s within 240 radius of you:
- On hit: gain 2s of quickness (1s internal cooldown)
- On hit: gain 2s of superspeed (1s internal cooldown)
this might be a bit insane, if it’s too strong swap superspeed to normal swiftness

Defiant stance:
- Base heal moved to the end of the effect
- Add visual to when the base heal goes off (indicates to enemies when the effect ends)
This one is pretty fine as is, main change comes from trait synergy

Bonus – the upcoming stance grandmaster Last Stand:
- Increases stance durations by 2s (rather than 25%)
- Gain 6s of flat vigor on stance activation (unchanged)
- Added: During a stance: on-hit cleanse one condition (1s internal cooldown) (does not stack when activating multiple stances at once)
- Removed: Automatically activates Balanced Stance on incoming CC

Feedback is always welcome!

Since we aren’t getting rid of the passive virtues by the looks of it, could you please finally remove the floating aegis of virtue of courage when you are out of combat? It’s known to ruin every screenshots ever that you want to take with a toy or a weapon drawn, and my hopes of getting rid of it with the specialization now lie crushed.

It’s been over two years, could now finally be the time I get to take good screenshots despite choosing this profession as my main?

Please, just please let me get rid of it somehow.

EDIT:
even the specialization-specific glove skin gets ruined in the vid by the aegis, lol

If you want good PvE you must make the mobs function like other players, using the same mechanics and tools available to the players with enough AI to not stack in corners.

But hey, increasing hp and damage and making more stuff unblockable/undodgeable also makes it more difficult! :^)

DevilLordLaser.8619:

Your traits are extremely specific, with very stringent requirements that are difficult to reliably meet, which means that most of the time, you may as well have an empty hex in your trait bar rather than the trait you slotted.

I don’t think that using your dodge roll to roll an attack or absorbing crowd control with stability are extremely specific or have requirements that are hard to meet at all. If anything they are the opposite, rewarding you further for using the skills the way they are meant to be used, I mentioned that balance was not a concern to me this early on either as we don’t have a revenant to play with. They were merely examples of how to make extremely boring and automatic mechanics into something that isn’t unfun to play with and against and most importantly try to get the point across about how you can make traits that don’t reward you for poor play (ie. getting hit by a CC)

Phalanx might is not a passive proc either, it’s an active proc and a powerful one at that and creates a whole new build type. Imo it’s a great trait because of that and it’s not auto-include in every warrior build either because it’s specific, you need to build a bit around it to make it worth it too.

I like your idea of the roll thing even better, though it’s not much of a defensive trait and would fit an offensive line better. My example was just to introduce the concept.

I know criticism (constructive or not) isn’t something that’s really welcomed in these forums but I thought I’d give a shot at it since this is a rare chance to talk about content that’s not yet released and is subject to change.

The new traits we’ve gotten to see seem to follow some of the icky trait designs we’ve had for the past two years. Sure we don’t have all of the traits yet but the stuff we can see so far are very alarming in how they’re designed. As far as I know traits are supposed to let the players create more playstyles and/or further define their builds. There are a few good traits we’ve gotten so far that let you do that but majority of them follow the old formula of passive procs, passive effects and arbitrary active procs that provide you benefits while doing actions you would do exactly the same way regardless of the procs.

I attach you my classifications of the traits a few edited pics of the traits (posted originally on dulfy). Green being good, orange being bad, red being awful.

-Why are passive procs a bad thing?-
You get rewarded for doing nothing. It doesn’t really matter how the proc activates as long as you have no control over when it goes off. Getting rewarded or punishing your opponent with no thought should not be part of any well designed game, it’s just abhorrently bad game design. It’s 100% no fun to fight against and it’s not really that fun to use either as often you don’t even see them go off.

example:

• “Eye for an eye – when disabled taunt that foe for a short duration”

Instead of rewarding you with a taunt on a good play, you get rewarded for getting hit by a CC. Your opponent can’t see this one coming and will get punished for trying to attack you. How to make a trait like this (passive proc) interesting? Instead of making it proc off of a random chance or a passive trigger, make it a situational trigger.

example:

• “Eye for an eye – when you are hit by a disable while you have stability, taunt that foe for a short duration "

This would let you punish opponents with taunts when they make mistakes or when you activate stability predicting incoming CC, enemy gets punished off of their mistake instead of random invisible factor. Preferrably give the revenant a buff indicator when they have this passive on during stability but even without it it’d be way better than the original.

-Why are active procs sometimes a bad thing?-
Active procs aren’t always bad, sometimes they do let you refine or change your playstyle! Sadly most of the active procs in this game are inconsequential boosts that work in the same way as passive procs do, rewarding you or punishing your enemies even though you aren’t really putting any thought into what you are doing. Having boons tied to rolls or heal skills is a good example of this, you will roll and use heal skills regardless of if you get a boon from those actions.

example:

• “Retaliatory evasion – gain retaliation after you dodge roll”

A good active procs changes the way you use the activator so you are giving something away when you are using it not for it’s original purpose. Other good active procs reward you for using the activator in a specific circumstance.

example:

• “Retaliatory evasion – gain retaliation after you evade an attack”

There, immediately you remove the reward for just spamming rolls and give the reward only when you evade an attack aka. use dodge roll right! It’s still pretty boring but way better design regardless.

better example

• “Retaliatory evasion – gain retaliation for the duration of your dodge roll, proc retaliation on evaded attacks”

Now the trait is really unique, giving you high reward for successfully rolling as many attacks as possible but giving you nothing if you just mash roll and your enemy isn’t falling for it.

Hope the feedback is welcome. Too early call anything about the balance or how the weapon and utility skills work (they seem really cool) but the traits are exactly as poor design as the ones we got now, hopefully it’s not too late to change that!

PS. same design can be applied to all of the current and upcoming traits in various ways, the post is already long and a drag to read so I’m going to leave it at this here

To all the people complaining about leaderboards measuring skill: you are playing the wrong game. GW2 PvP is about conquest, not fighting other players. As long as the end goal of the game is to hold 2 points out of 3 the won’t be about beating other people. There’s some strategy to rotations, sure, but playing solitaire is harder than learning point rotations.

To have a skill-based leader board we need 3v3 koth arena (or some other actual player versus player mode) and someone to do PvP balancing more often than once in a blue moon.

oneply.9586:

tbh tho, all 4 of the games you mentioned are built around PvP not PvE. this is the exact reason why current mmorpg models will never be truly esports. until we get a mmorpg built around pvp there wont be a esports to speak of.

Well it’s different people making the two gamemodes. SC2 out of the 4 have a decent PvE playerbase. It’s not that much you need to do to make something a competent PvP game, spending all the money in marketing is definitely not the right thing to do.

silvermember.8941:

They aren’t enough players to support your terrible GvG format.

There already are enough players that are self-supporting the “terrible” GvG format. A place where guilds could fight regardless of WvW server matchup rotation would be nice so people can organize tournaments and such. Standard player models would help a lot as well.

BlackBeard.2873:

Are you arguing they should support gvg? A few points:

1. When you are measuring the number of participants in only hundreds, you have a VERY SMALL market.
2. How many of those “hundreds” are the ones actually spending on the gem store?
3. Is this game mode (15v15 or 20v20) accessible for casuals and easy to get invested in (and not NEED to get TS and get in a HUGE organized guild).
4. People already have trouble forming teams of 5 players. How will this mode not face an even more difficult obstacle?

I am not saying gvg as implemented by wvw-ers should see no support or way to compete, but its super-hard to justify this to a business.

Very valid points and a lot of the are very much true so I’ll just give my 2 cents on the topic.

Going for a non-existent market instead of already proven one is a huge risk. The most sensible thing to do would be 3v3 deathmatch arena. Small team size, proven concept, high interest and easy to organize. It does require frequent balancing which might in itself be a nail in the coffin for the idea, knowing anet’s track record when it comes to quality and frequency of balance patches.

Another downside of a player vs player gamemode like that is that it’s not casual-friendly and they lost practically all of the hardcore players during the first 6 months with poorly balanced conquest. Their target demographic seems to be people to whom intractable objects in starting areas are too complex and need to be removed. And there in lies the issue with stronghold too. I don’t think those people will find stronghold any more compelling than conquest over a long period of time. If anything it already splits the small sPvP community

The current GvG scene eats up a lot of gems. Most of the people I see around have a gemstore hair, face, finisher, backpiece and so on.

The team size is the real killer I agree, but all I’m saying is that it wouldn’t be a huge effort to give the game mode some love. They already have the map, and the players. It shouldn’t be that hard to make it accessible from PvP and make it no longer restricted to just WvW server rotations, enabling proper tournaments and rankings. Hell, it even balances itself with the sheer amount of moving parts unlike the current sPvP.

A game mode like that is also completely unique and doesn’t have to compete against other games so it might even draw more people into the game in itself. It just irks me to see so much potential going to waste thanks to the complete neglect of arenanet.

silvermember.8941:

@Uuni.3561

If they didn’t care they wouldn’t be making a new mode or attempting to do all this world tournament stuff.

Unfortunately, guild wars 2 PvP is handicapped by the fact that it isn’t a f2p, so it creates a loop where they aren’t enough ppl to justify resources and at the same time because of the lack of resource people dont play it.

They are making plenty enough money from the gemstore to support the development. It doesn’t cost them any extra to do an official GvG arena for the hundreds of people that are already playing the gamemode without proper support. If anything it would attract more people to play it. Why not support something that’s already popular inside the game? Why try and re-invent the wheel by trying to appeal to players who aren’t interested in PvP with some and wacky innovative gamemode?

By world tournament you mean the sPvP tournament marketing thing where they tried to push the game as an esport even though it lacks pretty much all the things that make the currently popular esports so popular? The current top reigning esports like starcraft, LoL, dota and counterstrike didn’t become esports overnight just because someone decided to add prize pools to the game. They were already excellent multiplayer PvP experiences with extremely high skill-ceiling that kept people playing for years and competing online without any prizes. They all also receive relatively frequent balance patching to keep the game alive and players interested.

Like someone mentioned already, the GW2 PvP is as stale as a 3-year old bread. It won’t stop being stale by adding prize pools and labeling it as an esport.

Narkodx.1472:

Bottom Line – PvP is as stale as 3 year old bread right now, it could frankly be a piece of crap game mode and it will still revitalize the game but it won’t be

With the care they’ve shown for the sPvP (updates bi-yearly and mostly consistent of tooltip fixes) the new gamemode will be as stale as sPvP in about two months, especially since the skill-requirement is promised to be lower. I honestly don’t know how much lower than dropping supply drop inside a circle you can go but by the sounds of it they are aiming to do it somehow.

Narkodx.1472:

WvW players will also come on over and it will take over GvG

People play GW2 style GvG so they can fight people instead of AI units on a control point. This new game mode seems to be even more about fighting AI units and even less about fighting other players so I doubt it will garner any interest from that specific sub-community. Maybe the average EOTM player will find some fun in it since the rewards can’t possibly be worse than in WvW

Why didn’t they just add 15v15 or 20v20 KOTH arena type gamemode to make GvG tournaments and such possible is beyond me. They could just copypaste obsidian sanctum and make the huge circle into a control point, bam, game mode of the year right there. Who knows, maybe that’s too much like something that actually works and doesn’t involve enough re-inventing of the wheel

Can’t know anything for certain yet but based on everything they’ve said so far it will still not be a PvP mode where the emphasis is on player versus player instead of some other arbitrary objective.

These are the people who anet uses as an excuse not to balance the game? Pic related.

ColinJohanson.2394:

As for content for level 80 people, I agree, we need more awesome stuff there too. However if you don’t keep people at early levels, you don’t have level 80 players to ship content to

No no and absolutely no. This game has sold over 3 million units, you’d think that is quite enough to keep the studio of 200-300 people running and investors happy. You’d think so but no, the dropoff rate of people around launch was massive when people found out that there’s nothing to do once you ding 80. Since then you have added more customization to the cash shop, fractals and living story. Too little too late. This game does not need any more new players that run out of things to do once they hit 80, what you need is to retain the godkitten people. Veterans are leaving all the time (or taking extensive breaks) because the development is focused entirely around catering to whales and people who want to do the extremely casual living story. Nothing wrong with being a whale or wanting the casual story experience but what about the actual gameplay. Veterans have been happy with very little for a long time so when they heard SAB isn’t coming back they felt really betrayed, that kinda stuff was the only gameplay content this game had been getting and hearing there are no plans for more is a huge blow.

Your metrics say that not a lot of people played the difficult content like aetherpath or the hard parts of SAB, sure, but you have to realize the cause and effect. The reason why this stuff is not popular is because you failed to retain the ‘hardcore’ audience that came to GW2 from other MMO’s, mainly WoW. There was no challenge here, there was no things to do. This game still only poses one well designed dungeon boss called Giganticus Lupicus, the other great boss encounters are all either zerg content or have been removed since their inclusion. That stuff stayed largely undiscovered by the people who wanted the hardcore stuff because of how much this game lacks direction, not a level-gated tutorial of how to press space bar.

For every step forward this game takes two steps back, the most recent feature pack was half a step forward and ten steps back, ruining the freedom of early-game discovery and sense of wonder. New players are strapped to a kiddie ride that shows them the attractions of the game the way devs want them to see them, essentially grabbing the controller away from the player. Sure it appeals to those people who really have no idea what they are doing but making it the only way is definitely a mistake. Make a ‘disable new player experience’ check-box into the options menu that anyone can uncheck and go back to the previous model and there’s no reason for anyone to feel betrayed or left out. Forcing a veteran ele who decides to roll another ele to wait until lvl 24 for earth attunement is dumb beyond comprehension

mtpelion.4562:

This patch is the result of R&D that told them that they would inconvenience a minority of players while making the game accessible to many, many more people.

They are not going to lose money or players (overall) as a result of this patch.

Actually the game is far less accessible and new player experience is worse than it was before. Their demographics test was obviously horribly misguided and was probably done with people outside the group of people commonly known as ‘gamers’. China had these changes made and they hated it, now NA and EU gets it and everybody hates it. Colin is trying to backpedal and blame it on bugs but it’s a harmful change regardless, removing many of the features that made GW2 so appealing to the players

I think the dream would be that the devs actually loved the universe they are in control of the same way fans do and thus would give it the care and love it deserves. I’m sure there are a lot of devs who actually care but from what I’ve read from glassdoor.com it’s certainly not the people in upper management, the official forums and the ‘creative environment’ inside Anet is more akin to North Korea due to all the censorship.

People like Robert Hrouda and Josh Foreman who put their love into this game are getting laid off or frowned upon. I think this quote from Hrouda sheds light on how kittened up neoAnets ways are. First quote reflects the sheer amount of disconnect inside the studio and how awful the living story is/was as a content delivery method

“Today marks the release of the last bit of content I built for ArenaNet. I had always hoped my last hurrah would be an epic dungeon that would stand the test of time, and provide entertainment for players to the very end… but instead it’s an instance that will only persist for two weeks, and then go away.”

Foreman on the other hand tried to be transparent about SAB and talked about it to fans. What did he get? Positive feedback from the community and a frowny letter from his higher ups. To quote his blog:

If the company that pays my paycheck and lets me work on my own crazy pet projects like SAB tells me to resist a difficult urge to interact with players because I’m jeopardizing the company so be it. I’m told I can still post, but much much less, and I need to get my posts approved first.

They should just lock off swimming, new players might not know how to swim. Also locking off movement backwards because new players might fall off from cliff if they aren’t looking where they are going. I’d also lock away taking damage because you might die and get confused if you die in a video game, a player might get confused by their mortality to the point they stop spending money in gem store

Hopefully posts like this finally snap players out of their shilling coma. Maybe players finally realize that Anet is actively killing this game and making it worse for everyone, giving empty promises and only developing stuff that metrics tell to increase the money made by ncsoft investors

locoman.1974:

It seems to me that it’s a bit of “bad if you do, bad if you don’t”, at least as far as the forum community goes.

Forum: Please give us harder and more challenging content!!!

(buff Tequatl and add Triple Wurm)

Forum: (After they haven’t been defeated within an hour of going live) “It’s impossible to do, pls nerf now!!!!”

Forum: (several months after they’ve been introduced) “They’re impossible to do unless you join a specific guild and/or show up with enough time in advance to coordinate properly, pls nerf now!!!”.

It is impossible to cater to every demographic. It’s impossible to take care of every disability. This is a video game not some necessity that needs to have handicap-ramps and lifts installed in every step of gameplay. Before launch I bought this game because it set out to deliver the vision of people who made GW1. The vision was not the current iteration of Guild Wars 2 or if it was, boy are they good at lying with a straight face.

People who made GW franchise what it is must be crying right now because of what their flagship looks like – the development of GW2 revolves around extremely casual players and microtransaction store. The people who wanted to deliver that original vision must have left the studio or been forced into submission because this is not what this game set out to be, this is not what I expected at all when I first bought this game

This game already is insultingly easy and there’s barely any skill to be expressed in any aspect of the game. It’s obvious that their target demographic is EXTREMELY casual players to the point where calling them players is almost not applicable. People who log in every two weeks to buy the newest additions to the gem store and click F to get through the latest iteration of living story, following the green dot around the map.

Anyone who actually wants to be challenged by their video games has likely left the game or hates Anet for turning the sequel of Guild Wars into a glorified cash-shop simulator with low-quality writing and 0 gameplay updates since launch. And who can say that these people are wrong? Anet clearly doesn’t care about their wants and needs because they bring in less revenue or are just small percentage in the margins, not worth investing resources into, not worth the investment, not worth their valuable time – time that could be spent on making more items added to the gemstore.

Race: Asura
Class: Any
Sex: Female
Issue: Hair accessory has no shaders at all
(tested with all shader settings from low to high, low obviously was least noticable)
Problem can clearly be seen from screenshots like these being ruined

Very funny thread!

Bi-yearly balance patches (with AI-based build buffs) and esports totally mix well together right?

Svetli.4276:

key farm was always an exploit
i expect the nerf

I don’t think you quite understand what the word ‘exploit’ means

Kitten Commander.8952:

As for “forcing” it, I dunno about that, either. They interact like any couple might. It’s definitely PART of their characters, which is fine, and I don’t feel that it’s the ONLY part of them.

Yeah, sure, they act like any couple might. The issue is that I am not part of their relationship, my character has literally no reason to care about their relationship yet their ‘hey sweetie’-dialogue gets massive amounts of screen time for absolutely no reason. It’s forced as all hell

Kasmeer Meade: When Scarlet struck you down, my heart stopped.
Marjory Delaqua: Oh, Kas. I’m sorry-

Kasmeer Meade: Listen. I’m sorry about how I’ve been acting. I just can’t stand the thought of you getting hurt again. That scared the fluff out of me.
Marjory Delaqua: I know, honey. I’ve felt the same way about you. But you convinced me that you can handle yourself. Now, let me convince you.

Kasmeer Meade: Get those survivors clear! This area isn’t safe. Move them to the order camps outside the gate!
Kasmeer Meade: Go on. Go with… the Lionguard. Why are you staring at me, Jory?
Marjory Delaqua: I’m just admiring you.

Marjory Delaqua: Too bad you can’t mesmer up a fur cloak to keep you warm
Kasmeer Meade: (laugh) I don’t need one. I have you. Come on over here.
Marjory Delaqua: With Pleasure.

This stuff is so awkward, so out of place anyone that has ever read a book will cringe. Why is my character forced to stick with these airheads? I can see why people that played GW1 are absolutely disgusted by the way GW2 living story handles the IP, it is the main focus of the game after all, it is the reason why we can’t explore the mysteries of orr, legacy of jotun, the floating castle and anything else remotely interesting there is in the world. This fanfic-tier fluff is what they write instead.

nexxe.7081:

Key farming is an unintended consequence of bad design. I’m glad they are changing it.

Bad because you don’t like it or bad because of some actual reason? To me the fact that they pretty much only release new black lion ticket skins and gemstore armor is annoying as all hell. The game makes a lot of money and they keep milking it more and more as seen by the massive rise in gem price. In-game gold is absolutely worthless and soon it will be even more worthless when the skins that currently cost 70-100 gold will spike up a couple hundred gold at least. The economy is horribly mismanaged in the first place, this “bad design” (lmfao) is going to make it worse and is just another way to show middle finger to the players who don’t have a gambling issue and rather work in-game for their rewards because that’s what they don’t like, a person that doesn’t gamble real money for miniscule droprates

I’d love to be able to change my default camera view in a way that would let me view the scenery while traversing the world. The default camera angle is 80-100% ground textures and quite frankly this is the only way you can fight enemies properly. The game is absolutely gorgeous, the beautiful skyline, massive monuments and breathtaking skyboxes all go to waste because the camera is extremely keen on showing me the ground textures. Alternate camera options would be extremely welcome, an up-down slider (to accompany the left-right camera position slider) so the center of the screen wouldn’t forcefully be blocked by your character’s butt when you tilt the camera to show more of the scenery. Currently if you try to view the sky you have to drag the camera along the floor (made a demonstration in the attachment). What I want is the camera to be able to turn around an axis/point that’s not the center of the character model but rather the air somewhere above his/her head.

First person view for the characterless screenies and more immersive exploration too please. You can have it automatically turn off in combat, I just want to see the beautiful scenery from my characters point of view too

Shriketalon.1937:

The Secret of the Sorceror’s Spire

Ghost Ship of Lady Glaive

Into The Gray

The Magnanimous Seven

The Fancy Feline Finalists Have Been Catnapped!

This stuff was pretty interesting and I like the fact that we get to see a lot of different characters fleshed out. I know some people who are really fond of Professor Gorr. Why aren’t you the lead writer of this game again?

coglin.1867:

That would be relevant if you had any evidence what so ever to show that the PvP community pays the bills at Anet. But I suspect that the PvE community is where the money comes from. Simply because they promote the PvP as an Esport does not define the other 2/3 of the game modes as an Esport. Game modes that no MOBA has.

I get that sPvP isn’t an area they are really invested in, the tournaments they are doing etc. are just for marketing purposes but still, they have paid employees whose work is to maintain balance in this game. I’m not sure if they themselves decided that they only need to do kitten every 6 months or so or if the balance patches are only allowed to go out every 6 months. My biggest two issues are:
1) You can’t have a balanced game if you dont do frequent changes to the balance
Balance by nature is iterative and there is never a perfect balance. Balanced game is a game that is in constant change of play and the best players are able to use their knowledge and skill to craft the strongest strategies with the available pieces. Especially in an MMO where the execution side of things is very simple and larger overarching strategy in a 3 point conquest is very limited, the amount of emphasis put on the class builds is MASSIVE. The fact that they change things up so infrequently pushes the skill ceiling and skill floor claustrophobically close together, the fact that majority of this games mechanics are poorly designed from competitive play from the get go and have little to no counterplay isn’t helping either.

2)The balance changes we get are out-of-date or just poorly thought out
Take the most recent suggested mesmer scepter changes as a concrete example of how poorly the balance team is in touch with the ‘PvP scene’ if you can call it that. PU mesmer is a build that is generally unfun to play competitively because you have very little to no chance to show your skill over the other player. The build relies extremely heavily on negating counterplay via grossly overpowered stealth mechanic that is only remedied by the fact that you can’t contest points while stealthed. The suggested changes will heavily buff this build, taking even more of the agency away from the player and encouraging the mesmer player to just spawn more AI controlled units to do the hard work. There is no skill required in this kind of strategy and it’s extremely unfun to play against too.

Another great example of poor game design regards PvP is condition spamming. Autoattacks that apply condition stacks constantly without consequence removes any skill or thinking required regards the whole condition mechanic. There’s no timing, there’s no thinking in applying conditions, just press 1 and let the conditions fly. To remedy this they condition removal (or counterplay removal like stealth, evade, warrior stances) has to be available in mass for any build that wishes to be viable in PvP because otherwise it will get destroyed by a player pressing 1. That’s the simplified theory at least. Stuff like mesmer staff clones, engineer turrets or the new scepter clones are a whole next level of awful design. The player itself can be completely away from the harm and the AI controlled units do the 1 pressing for them, completely negating any meaningful decisions, skill and strategy from both players. I have no idea who came up with this stuff initially or if it’s all because of PvE and PvP can’t be balanced separately (because “it might confuse players and they might stop playing entirely”) or what but it’s a really kitten shame how poorly the PvP mechanics are designed and balanced. Conditions aren’t even viable for 99% of the PvE so I have no idea why conditions have to be so awfully designed in PvP.

PS. A bit rambly and ranty post but read the first point at least if anything

Chanra.3561:

Honestly I don’t know what you’re complaining about. After playing my zerker guard for over 2 years I have finally found a build that wins around 80% of my 1v1s and around 20% of my 2v1s. Atm I think most of PvP is balanced.

Yes, There are some things that should be changed but most of it is fairly trivial. If you’re playing a META build….I have news for you. A build only works well if It fits your play style, You may e playing the most OP build but if it’s not working for you then you need to tweak it or play a completely different build. NONE of my classes run anything anywhere near meta build setup and they all do fine.

The recent nerf to the runes of the pirate have made the rune pretty much useless due to it being able to 1-2 hit like the rock dog. So complaining about things not being nerfed when they should be is invalid. If you read the patch notes for PvP balance over the last year you will see there is no comparison between 1.5 years ago and now….It’s all changed.

The fact that you have played the same build in PvP for two years means the game has no balance patches or any semblance of balance

CaptainVanguard.4925:

- Dry top is only ONE zone with no new sign of a dungeon any time soon, that took 2 months to “fully” make over the course of 4 updates.

Couldn’t agree more about this part. There’s hardly anything I like about the story itself because I couldn’t care less about the iffy narrative and they make it screamingly clear every time I try playing it but they really should not throw gameplay under the bus. WvW, PvP and PvE all need updates and PvE at least should be very easy to implement into the living story. Add a dungeon to the new area you reveal, have the story mode be somewhat related to what’s going on in the living story if necessary and make the explorable modes pose a challenge for those that care about the actual gameplay. Bosses that have actual mechanics like pavilion bosses, new armor set for tokens and new weapon set for tokens

And whabam, we get permanent content, long-term goals, worthwhile additions to the world and at the same time the story can go onwards. I wouldn’t mind waiting for 4-6 months for an area like this assuming it’s well thought out and can entertain players for a while

Where can I vote Shriketalon.1937 for lead narrative designer or whatever the highest story telling title is? Seriously this game would be much better off with you calling the shots, I’m so sick and tired of the living story. I’m more of a gameplay guy, caring about dungeons, WvW, sPvP, challenge or any semblance of it but I apparently picked the wrong game for that. If all we get is living story then at least give us a proper story godkitten it. I’ve waited for two years for the ‘good stuff soon’ and it’s not here, it’s probably never going to get here, so in the meanwhile give me a story not a fanfic of some characters I don’t give a spit about

A post longer than the story dialogue we get in an update might be a bit too much for the audience. The point is solid though, this game is focusing on narrative solely while throwing every other aspect of the game (aside from monetization via gemstore) under the bus. It took them 5 years to build gw2 from ground up. It’s been 2 years since the game launched and we haven’t gotten 40% of the content that we got at launch, probably closer to 10-15% and vast majority of that stuff has been temporary. So at the end of the day we got temporary narrative (now permanent and monetized if you missed it) and still no new dungeons, no improvement in wvw mechanics, sPvP still gets much needed balance patches every 6 months, no new skills, no new weapons, no new classes and so on.

Narrative > gameplay is really killing this game. Only people still actually playing the game are repeating same routine dungeons, wvw, spvp that have been there since launch. Only addition to this cycle is fractals which don’t seem to be under any developement anymore either

Jurica.1742:

While I love Anet for giving mesmer some love, I think that this change will make PU mesmers really, really powerful and will need a nerf soon.

Up until this point this was a good post

Anet doesn’t know what good gameplay is like and they don’t know how to balance the game apparently. Condition spamming autos are cancer in the first place, now they made condi spamming auto for a class that already has a condi spam auto that also works with clones. Best thing is that we have to stick with this patch for 6 months, it’s like they actively want to hurt the game and stop people who do any PvP related activity be it spvp or wvw stop playing

300g commander tag with extra colors after all this waiting was a middle finger to WvW community already, buffing roamers more will surely make some people quit

They aren’t even trying at this point. They don’t play the game nor do they have any idea what actually happens in the game and they aren’t ashamed to show it apparently. 6 months of developement and we get more condi spam, less counterplay and colored commander tags

Sevans.4619:

This game is more well balanced than most people would like to admit. There are some problems, of course. No game is perfectly balanced, but Anet has done pretty well considering all the factors that need balancing.

The game is not in any way balanced. A balance in a complicated multiplayer game such as this with a lot of moving parts can not be updated every 6 months and at the same time be called balanced. Balance is a shifting thing or should be a shifting thing that allows the top players to iterate and show their ingenuity by creating new builds and new strong tactics because of their superior skill and knowledge

Any person regardless of skill level can dig up the current meta build for any given class, put a few hours into it in pvp and be virtually indistinguishable from an experienced player who has played the build for a long time. There is absolutely no iteration in the PvP scene after the first few weeks after a balance patch. The meta settles and all skill and innovation disappears

This is the main reason why gw2 PvP was such a big flop in the first place, there is very little room to show your skill over the other people when the objectively best strategy is found shortly after the game is changed to one direction or another

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

He talks about the competition I guess, which is in GW1 (mostly GvG), still bigger than in GW2 nowadays. Hotjoin and soloQ can’t be taken seriously anyways.

And we all know the state of GvG in gw2, devs walking into a GvG held in the WvW and telling the people there to stop ruining his gamemode. Sure it was a single person telling that but still, the GvG people of gw2 are still brawling in an extra area of a jumping puzzle or in a field behind a supply camp

Hugh Norfolk.2798:

• How does that player feel?
• What questions is that player going to ask?
  * Is this a bug?
  * Why is it only different in PvP?
• Who is going to answer those questions?
• Are they going to try and seek out someone to answer these questions?
• Is the person they (if they do ask) going to know the actual reason for this change?
• Is that player going to stop playing PvP or GW2 all together?

That is the biggest amount of condescending nonsense I’ve ever heard from a developer and trust me that is saying a lot. You rather disregard the health of the gameplay just so you won’t confuse a person when their build works differently in PvP? That has got to be the worst possible excuse and most insulting as well, you could appeal to the lack of resources or some sort of technical difficulty and nobody could prove you otherwise. A person who is too dumb to understand that skills might work differently in PvP and quits the game because of it is too stupid to see the difference between 3 and 5 seconds in the first place so please don’t treat all of us like idiots. Add a disclaimer when you swap to PvP if you can’t think of anything better.

“But Uuni, what if the person can’t read the disclaimer, are we being unfair to the illiterate?”
Yeah we are being unfair to the illiterate then. You can’t cater to every single persons special needs, you should cater to the people playing your game

It’s impossible for any sane person to believe that that’s actually the reason why you are doing this. It’s an excuse, an obvious excuse to not balance the PvP properly for whatever reason