Guild Wars 2

My roommate can log in and play just fine, but I can’t. Network problems my donkey. Glad to see its not just me.

Has anyone got Dust Cloud to drop off the dust mites? The other specialization items seem to drop after a few kills. Maybe Rnjesus is frowning upon me? Also can we get a heads up on whether there is a fix in the works for the double Machined Warhorn bug on the same achievement?

This is a bug that I believe only affects those with 100% World Completion.

Does Dulled Sense even work with anything except Hammer of Wisdom(nonactive), Shield of Absorbtion, Heavy Light and Downed 2. Ring/Line of Warding, Hammer of Wisdom(active) and Bane Signet are knockdowns, Hammer 4 is a Launch. This is all according to the wiki. Does knockback in the Dulled Senses trait mean the effect knockback? The wiki has it linked from the trait to the knockback effect page. Couldn’t find anything using the search function before you ask, so sorry if this has been asked before. I got to tell you if this is the case then Dulled Senses is pretty terrible. Only one of those skills is on a weapon and one utility(semi-random), trait is RNG and one is while you are downed.

Anyone got clarification on this?

HardRider.2980:

Considering there is no underwater combat as far as we know that’s not surprising..
But it also means they know about it and when they finally work on underwater the hype would be soo real.

One would think they would have to if/when they introduce the deep sea dragon. I for one would love the Pact to set up pockets of air on the sea floor, maybe some of which have begun to degrade, creating areas where there were aerial rivers that you could fall out of. Imagine the jumping puzzles!

InViictuZz.1705:

LONGBOW: I really like it and i don´t think changes are needed. I´m tired of reading how bad it is that True Shot can´t be used while moving… come on guys this Shot can hit like 5000 DMG every 4 seconds..

I mostly agree, except that LB #5 is absolute garbage in SPvP. A person in a coma could dodge it. In WvW AoE garbage can work even if it sucks. The rest of the LB is fine. I’d like to be able to move on the 2 but you can’t always get what you want. The root is annoying but not bad. Change the 5 to something good and you have a home run weapon.

Troma.3250:

InViictuZz.1705:

Shield of Courage: I really like but it would be awesome if the shield would actually “Block” attacks. That would help to remove condis with Hunters furification.

This is exactly what it does check your screen and combat log

Perhaps he is confused because Hunter’s Fortification was bugged and not working during the beta.

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

Varathiel.9128:

Lyger.5429:

If Karl doesn’t want to make all traps ground targetable, how about adding an F4 where you can slot one trap at a time to be placed using ground target, maybe that could work?

This is my thought for F4:

Virtue of Perseverance
Active: 25% Increased Movement Speed
Passive: Teleport an untriggered trap to your target.

Then the trap trait could be a GM that lets you teleport all untriggered traps to the target. Not sure about the cooldown. Probably high. This would make traps more interesting and give Guardian the much needed move speed increase(though I would prefer that particular boon to be for the base Guardian).

The idea of adding a new F4 skill is nice….. but it should not be tied to traps as traps are very situational at there very best & crap most of the rest of the time. Not to mention many players may not even have traps equipped.

As for a 25% movement speed increase, it really should be tied to a trait.

There are several majors that could still use quite a bit of tweaking.
There is also the two latter minors which should either be merged into existing majors or just plain deleted.
A movement speed trait could easily go in any of these spots.

You’re definitely right. That was a half-formed 5 second idea while I am bored at work. Didn’t think it through. DH doesn’t have to take traps and shouldn’t given their current implementation. Movement speed increase needs to happen in whatever way they will give it to us, lol. I really don’t think ground targeting will help very much for traps ankitten ot sure what will.

Lyger.5429:

If Karl doesn’t want to make all traps ground targetable, how about adding an F4 where you can slot one trap at a time to be placed using ground target, maybe that could work?

This is my thought for F4:

Virtue of Perseverance
Active: 25% Increased Movement Speed
Passive: Teleport an untriggered trap to your target.

Then the trap trait could be a GM that lets you teleport all untriggered traps to the target. Not sure about the cooldown. Probably high. This would make traps more interesting and give Guardian the much needed move speed increase(though I would prefer that particular boon to be for the base Guardian).

Mercurias.1826:

Obtena.7952:

Fashion Mage.3712:

Obtena.7952:

Is that what Anet thinks, or what players decide makes sense to them? Again, Anet determines and owns the concept of the class. What players decide/interpret/think has likely little to no influence on this. The only problem here is that players aren’t aligning what they think the class concept should to the class concept that Anet has created.

How the hell could anybody not see the connection guardians have with monks?

I don’t see how it’s relevant. Is that the connections and lore that Anet are using to create DH? I don’t think so. Does that lore exclude Rangers from having Druid? I don’t think so either.

Anet creates the lore and concepts they want; why should they be restricted to conform to something outside of GW2?

As another thread recently pointed out, the wings, spear, and shield you get in Dragonhunter are very reminiscent of the Paragon class, and considering HoT is going into the site of Nightfall, I think it’s really a nice touch.

And while Anet can tweak lore, some of it, as ancient superstition (e.g. Bloodstone being stones with stored magic the dragons eient eat rather than the source of all magic, and the original four schools of magic now seen as ancient superstition), I can’t think of an outright retcon like WoW has done in the past.

As for Druids? To me they seem like Melandru’s answer to Guardians being all angelic and Dwayna-y, or Necros and their obvious connection to Grenth’s (at least for the Six).

As far as I am aware, Heart of Thorns deals almost entirely with the Magumma Jungle. Elona is nowhere near there. Elona is connected to the same continent by way of the Crystal Desert, far south of Ascalon. (https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Elona)

If this was supposed to be the spiritual successor to the Paragon, then they failed. They should have introduced more shouts or even have Refrains attached to existing shouts, so you turn Guardian shouts into flip skills. The Dragonhunter is boring beyond imagining. I don’t care that Ranger got the Druid. I care that the Druid/Scrapper/Reaper/Mesmer/Herald/Berserker are all much more creative and/or feels like they are a natural extension to the class. The three specs that our Dev worked on are all consistently on the bottom of most rankings on the rank the specs thread. Its just sad. That is my opinion.

They said that these weren’t all the changes, they were just hitting a few for each class. Granted Guardian and Thief were the fewest.

No 500 total for all 3 servers on each map, but I never saw anything about that being split 3 ways so 166 for each server on each map.

@ Arcaneclarity

The only thing i have ever seen about the caps on the WvW maps is that its 500 per map. They never mentioned that it was split 3 ways. I could be wrong, do you have a source where you got that from.

@ SoS people saying that there queues are nonexistent since Saturday, it’s easy to explain why.

You still have mostly the same number playing, but now, Dragonbrand and Maguuma are queuing maybe what 20 people on some of the borderlands, which means you can fit the same numbers you already use into the zone without queuing. Just thought I would point that out.

The people at Anet who came up with this system clearly aren’t fans of college football.

I think most people are upset by the current state of WvW. Mainly because of population imbalances that are causing landslide victories. There are other issues of course, but I wanted to address a common argument that is made by people who seem to have no problem with landslide victories and thus 5 days of no activity. The argument is as follows:

“Anet has said that WvW is supposed to be an unbalanced fight.”

The people that say this are assuming that Anet apparently just throws 3 servers together and has them duke it out with no thought for population balance. This theory is patently wrong as they wouldn’t have bothered with a ranking system to try to pair like servers together.

There is also an error in their logic when they assume that the ‘Balance’ Anet is talking about is population. When it is more likely that they are talking about class structuring, i.e. There is no way to balance what would happen if 15 thieves rolled up against 3 rangers, 4 eles, a guardian, and 5 warriors.

If you truly believe that Anet’s vision for WvW is a week long slaughter fest every week, with the occasional lucky accident(SoR,YB,NS), then you are very pessimistic and I have trouble understanding why you even play the game when you know that they want it to fail.

I choose to believe that WvW is not working as intended and that they KNOW they need to address population imbalances in some way.

How do these numbers even work. Blackgate got stomped almost as bad as Dragonbrand but gets 6 pts added, but Dragonbrand loses 70+ pts, and IoJ only loses 8. I just don’t get these numbers.

What about having it so that if a guild has claimed an objective they can pay Guild Influence to upgrade instead of money? Nothing too drastic.

Sure, it goes along way from discouraging individual/casual players from transferring servers. The real problem is large guilds transferring servers in the middle of matches or just deciding they don’t like the WvW PuGs on their server. Paid transfers won’t stop large guilds from doing this. Guilds like Team Legacy and other well organized guilds have piles and piles of gold, which means that, unless they set the price exorbitantly high, they will just convert gold for gems and transfer anyway. If they set such a price they are only screwing over casual PvE players who just want to play with friends or find unbugged skill points.

The only way to help WvW, in my view, is to give people who transfer a debuff, maybe called Deserter, which renders them unable to enter WvW until the next match begins. This does nothing to prevent people from leaving a server, but at least they can’t jump on another server and turn the tide of battle or pretend they are some how a part of the win.

Anet already knows how to do this with the old GW1 Dishonor debuff. This is the same concept.

I think part of the Outmanned buff should be no repair costs.

I am a guild leader on Dragonbrand. Pretty small guild, as in only about 5 players in WvW at any given time. We do need way better organization if we hope to stop the slide we’ve been in. We also need more people.

I think we should have a summit tonight in one of the BL or just a zone in the game where there won’t be many non-WvWers running around. I am partial to around midnight G.M.T-6, but really anytime before the next match begins tomorrow. We need to discuss and propose strategies and get as many people behind them as possible so everyone is on the same page.

Also, my guild welcomes any WvWers who are looking for a home on Dragonbrand.

What do you guys think?

Sure.

Well, good luck running up the score enough to actually pass us in the rankings. We beat CD by 10-15k when we both lost to JQ and we got dropped a tier because we didn’t start the match close enough to their ranking number. Also, we started the match closer to their rank than TC is to us at the moment.

When I say out of their way, I mean that between their spawn and our supply camp there is veritable sea of green supply camps for the taking.

The point was that saying 2nd place was someone else’s to lose is detrimental to the 3 team concept.

@ Sharpclaw
“CD outplayed all of us, to be sure. But second was DB’s to lose and TC’s to take. Not CD’s to give out.”

Dragonbrand was playing for 1st the entire match and constantly being harassed by TC the entire time. In some cases TC went out of their way to take DB supply camps and towers. I don’t think you were working for CD, but you might as well have been. The whole point to 3 teams is so that 2 and 3 team up when 1 gets a big lead. Instead your server immediately started playing for 2nd and DB began having to fight 2 opponents intent on removing them from the game. It’s this mentality that makes the 3 team system not work.

@ Xandax
I don’t know what post your reading because you must have read it wrong. No where do I say people shouldn’t be able to play. You are using a Strawman Fallacy. If other players choose to not play because they don’t want to transfer servers, that is there business. They can play all they want when they move servers and thus even out the populations.

@holska
I’m going to use your example to show you why point 1 SHOULD work. FS has 20 players and VS has 100 but can only field 30. A guild of 35 people on VS thinks to themselves, ’you know if we transfer to FS and queue for this battleground, not only do all 35 of us get to get in and play, everyone currently in the VS queue will also get to play and we can fight a 65 v 55 somewhat balanced fight. Then maybe they remain there and it stays balanced.

Anet’s current strategy is to let players jump around hoping that they will eventually stop and then they can start having fair matches. I just don’t see it working, especially in the 2nd tier and last tier brackets. Waiting for players to balance the game out themselves will never yield fruit.

This system would force players to balance the servers if they don’t want to sit in queues all day. And it would serve to give each server even strength during the off peak hours.

Its not a hard concept to grasp.

@ Ignicity
I think you might be the one misunderstanding what we are saying. Lets use your example, simple as it may be.

C is full queued at all times which means they are going to win almost without fail by virtue of outgunning the other 2 servers. Which is the entire problem. You have Americans and Australians playing on the same server, which is fine, but a server that has all of one and none of the other is going to get rolled. Kefka’s system would virtually force some Americans on server A to move to a server like server B to avoid queue times, and some Australians on B to a server like A for the same reason. C meanwhile would have some of both leave to head for servers with smaller populations. Add all this together and you, in theory, have all the servers with similar populations at similar times and no one has any more issues. Fights become about strategy and organization instead of overwhelming numbers and runaway games.

@ Xandax
Arenanet already made it into sPvP by adding a score. Let’s not split hairs. As long as the scoring system exists, sides must be even and I believe that Kefka’s proposition would work to balance server populations as all the bandwagoners flee for less queue times.

@ Nachtnebel
Off peak queue times would balance out in the same way as oceanic players spread themselves to other servers that don’t have a ‘night’ presence to avoid queue times. The point is that this system would encourage people to spread to the low pop servers and thus, hopefully, balance the populations.

There is no fun to be had on either side of the equation of a murder train. I’ve been on both sides of it. Being up by 100k + seems like fun, until you hit ‘M’ and see that there is nothing to do but spawn camp or stare at the map until a symbol changes colors and then haul kitten there with a 50+ zerg. Being on the receiving end of it is even worse. Players just quit playing and there you are with a 5 man team taking a supply camp and just before it flips the entire contingent of the winning team falls on you like rabid wolves. So….much…..fun!!!!! /sarcasm

@Raydaq

Only a bully would see an evening of the playing field as ‘punishing the winner’. Population balance is the only thing that will make WvW competitive without removing the points aspect of it. As it is now 4 out of 5 matches will be decided by more than 50k pts. Those kind of scores differentials are not caused by servers winning through skill and/or strategy (though they may have both or either). They are caused by population differences.

@ Kefka
Thank you so very much for this thread. It was a great read and you said it all very eloquently. I agree with all of your ideas.

Your first point would do more to level out populations than anything else. Without the constant ability to overwhelm that high population servers get, the players on them would leave to other servers to ease their queue times. Right now there is an epidemic of WvWers in this game who seek to win at all costs, even if that win comes from nothing resembling skill.

Your second point is fairly obvious and should have already been done, even in the current meta.

Your third point would be unbalancing if not for the fact that once the server populations balanced out no one would be getting the buff anymore. Unless, I read that wrong.

@Corvindi
You got your equation wrong. In the current state of WvW, it is not the server with the more organized guilds that win most of the match-ups. It’s whoever has a higher population. To put an even more finer point on it, it’s the server with the higher population at certain times periods. Sure, when two sides are evenly matched, the one with more organization should win. It’s the EVENLY MATCHED part we want.

So, the claim is that 3 teams provide balance. The argument is that the losing 2 teams will be able to team up to take down the bigger team. This argument is flawed, at least in the current method of coming up with server ranks. Here’s why:

1. During off peak hours if the winning team has more players than second place, not overwhelming but just 20-50 more, but team 3 has almost nobody those 20-50 are able to completely decimate the other team. Simultaneously team 3 is continuously taking team 2 objectives while they are (hopefully) taking team 1 objectives, which allows team 1 to gain a more commanding lead on team 2.

2. In the current server ranking system it is always better for team 3 to focus on team 2 after a certain point. And everyone knows it is better for team 1 to focus on team 2 to keep them at bay. So, instead of the two lower teams teaming against the powerhouse team 3 battle for second place.

3. If this system was working we should have more than 1 shining example of a balanced matchup, with the match Sanctum of Rall was in a few weeks ago.

I understand why they did it this way, but it isn’t working. Given how the scores have been going, I don’t see how they could justify moving to 2 week matches.

2 teams has it’s problems, but 3 teams is not working either. In fact, 3 teams seems to be there just to make sure that 1st place has enough players to beat on to keep them slightly interested.

Anyway, given these realities I wanted to get a feel for what other players think would help.

Adding another team or two? Changing the scoring system?

Thoughts?

Lol. I was in his party.

How is the ranking even calculated?

Green from what I’ve seen is the team that got demoted to a lower bracket. That would Dragonbrand who actually came in second in the last match but got demoted anyway by some form of points system that I am not sure of the details on.

I am hoping for an even match up. Good luck all.

Do this on any other profession and I will be suitably impressed. All this video shows is the imbalance of thieves that can down somebody who is running with help and then disappear into the aether.

My standard response to thieves is to do nothing but survive and then watch them vanish when help shows up. Then scream at said help to let him go because chasing him is fruitless.

Stealth while stomping is effingkitten and trying to run from them is pointless because of their ability to spam the same skill until they run out of juice.

I don’t even know why they had to put stealth in thiskittengame. My guess is to try an entice the kitten bags that played rogues in WoW.

@ Gofr

I’m obviously on DB. What am trying to say is that the disorganization or helping on CD and perhaps even DB is what has allowed JQ to dominate. You’re right that at this point it doesn’t matter if you attack JQ. But at the beginning of the week when things were still tight and DB was even in first for a little bit it was bad. The week before that DB was agaisnt Magumma and Isle of Janthir and several times I would be heading to take a supply camp and would find Magumma and IOJ locked in battle. This phenomena did not occur even once in the first 3 days of JQ/CD/DB while I was playing. This could be a coincidence, obviously.

I’m not outright accusing CD of helping JQ just stating the possibility based on my experiences in game. Like I said earlier if even a few people on CD and/or DB are helping JQ then it would have a huge effect.

They need to institute a WvW suspension after a server transfer. Can’t WvW for 24hrs or even the rest of the competition. This would go a long way toward fixing that particular unbalance.

@ Diablos
While I know you are trolling, I will still respond to this. What you posted is true, they need to fix that bs. But maybe you should check around your own Borderlands and post screenshots of your guys doing that crap too. Because I’m pretty sure there are players on every server who know about it and decide to ruin everyone’s day.

Hate to break this to you, but from my experience in WvW this week, Crystal Desert is either incapable of strategic thinking or they are actively working to help JQ win. The nobler part of me wants to believe the former. I did notice the same guild tags on both JQ and CD a few times.

I only played on two of the borderlands and in both I noticed a lack of animosity between JQ and CD, so maybe it was different in the other border/Eternal. There was one moment where JQ was attacking the Bay keep for almost 30 minutes and they owned Garrison(in CD home turf) and CD didn’t take Garrison. If they made an attempt it was obviously a pitiful one.

What’s sad is that it is not a sever wide thing, really all it takes is for one guy to transfer servers spend a 100g on commander icon and then lead the troops to ruin all while conversing with his guild on vent. I certainly don’t believe that entire servers align together, but the way WvW is setup it only takes a few to ruin the day.

Again maybe CD just lacked strategic thinking and I am reading too much into that. Entirely possible that there were same shenanigans on DB as well.