Guild Wars 2

Hello, returning player here. I purchased the game when it launched. I was thinking to return for the structured PvP, but I have a few questions about that:

1. Do I need to purchase the expansion, or is that just for the PvE content?
2. Is PvP still completely seperate? In other words, do I need to do stuff in PvE to unlock gear options or abilities for PvP?

Keep in mind I last played this game around March 2013, so I don’t really know a thing about the current state of the game. Answers would be greatly appreciated!

vicious.5683:

Archage was much better game. Is a shame Trion killed with so much p2w cash grab

Tbh even if they did not, I doubt it would have been a huge success. Too much gold spammers, botters, hackers, and general griefing / toxic community. And then there’s poor design decisions such as including Hasla weapons at the western launch. So I agree that the payment model kinda ruined it, but a lot more than the payment model would need to change for it to be as great as it should have been.

Arcadio.6875:

I am a little worried for the future given a long string of high profile failures in the genre. Those kickstarter MMOs may carve out their own niche and I hope the best for them, but I like the big budget MMOs. My first was EQ1 and it was a mindblowing experience logging into the game for the very first time all those years ago. The big 3D world with many people running around made me feel like I was in another world. I don’t think a smaller MMO would capture that feeling.

The way I see it, those Kickstarter games are simply going back to the roots of MMO design. After all, those early games of 10+ years ago didn’t start big either. Back then, there weren’t millions of MMO “nomades” who were flocking to every hyped release. Those early games started small, and increased in size and playerbase over time. Kickstarter MMOs have an opportunity to do the same. Start with a small dev team, make a quality game with a niche target audience, and build from there if it turns out to be succesful.

I agree that GW2 is the best recent MMO. It’s not my personal taste, and I’m not even playing… but yeah, if I try to be objective, I think GW2 beats everything else that’s out atm.

That said, I don’t agree with you people about the dark future of MMOs. I think the future is in fact bright. There are lots of games in the making right now that do things different, and focus on a quality game rather than one that sucks most money out of people. Pantheon, Crowfall, Camelot Unchained, Shroud of the Avatar… and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I look forward to what the future brings to MMO-land.

Mobs dying instantly in cursed shore events was an issue 2 years ago. Was nothing done about this in all that time? I’m disappointed tbh.

Vayne.8563:

But I think the game does match the manifesto.

Oh come on, defending anet / the game is fine up to a point, but saying the game matches the manifesto is getting ridiculous.

1. gw2 takes everything you love about gw1 and puts it in a persistent world
well obviously not true, the vast majority of features that made GW1 as good as it was, was left out of GW2. It’s a lie.

2. fully branching personalized storyline: yes until lvl 30-40 or so, then you follow the same story as everyone else and the characters from before don’t even remember you… also the story is more about trahearne than about you. Not a lie but misleading at least

3. most games have boring grind (I swung a sword, oh hey I swung it again!) we don’t want players to grind
this is of course the biggest joke of the whole manifesto, there are numerous features in GW2 that not only encourage but even require grind, and because of GW2’s skill system the “I swung a sword, oh I swung it again” is more true for GW2 than it ever was for any game I played. “we don’t want players to grind” is a lie, if it was true we wouldn’t have dailies in their current state, or achievements like “pop 150 pinatas”, or requirements like stacks of T6 mats

4. in other games the boss respawns 10 minutes later, it doesn’t care that you’re there etc…
well nothing is different in GW2, the boss also respawns a while later, and it still doesn’t care that you’re there. It’s not like anything happens if you don’t kill it.

5. in other mmos mobs stand around in the field and you have to kill 10
in gw2 95% of the mobs stand around in the field too, and the hearts tell you to kill some just like quests in other mmos, the only difference is that you get the choice to do some even more boring and grindy item-based task instead

6. you effect things arround you in a very prominent way
this is subjective I guess, but I sure don’t feel like it

7. the most important thing should be the player
given the randomness of skins from gem-store boxes even though people put up loads of negative feedback about this, and have been asking for direct skin purchases since october 2012, I’d say the most important thing is their income atm.

Great post and I agree.

Yes if the game is made more boring, then you can make up lore reasons for it being so. But that’s not a reason or excuse for making the game more boring. Arenanet writes the lore, they could have made Primordus run through Divinity’s Reach and still make it consistent with the lore.

Stark.1350:

3.) RNG RNG RNG RNG RNG RNG RNG RNG

The RNG boxes have worked the same in EVERY OTHER HOLIDAY BEFOREHAND and if you’re a sucker enough to keep buying into them, then I have no hope for you as a human being. The weapon skins DO NOT AFFECT YOU, in ANY WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, so have some WILLPOWER and DON’T BUY THEM.

+1 just for this.

It’s exactly how I feel when I’m reading the 4528th whine post about RNG in boxes.

I can only think of evil ideas… like sending random people packets of 100g to see them banned for gold buying

when all the not-so-smart people stop dropping their month salary on gems to get RNG event boxes

I kinda agree, in events the PvP rewards always suck compared to the PvE rewards. It makes me wish they would just award glory like normal PvP.

Arenanet kinda did encourage this behaviour by making them so easy and with such low HP. If a single person kills them in 2 seconds, waiting for everyone to show up is even risky cause if there’s warriors they might as well have all the mobs down before you can tag.

Population is good in some event areas or in some high level areas where people do dailies and stuff, but in the majority of the big game world it’s pretty low, at least on the servers I play/played on. Don’t expect to be leveling purely by events cause there won’t always be people to do them with.

Big changes… since launch? Nothing big I would say. If you are a fanatic dungeon runner perhaps Fractals of the Mists (use wiki for more info )

PvP is fun if you personally think so. I like it less than most PvP I played in other games, and I know lots of people agree when I say the high amount of NPCs (clutter), the high amount of flashy light effects and the high amount of stealth/teleports are bad. GW2 PvP is very chaotic, it’s virtually impossible to see what’s going on in a typical fight and that doens’t improve tactical play.

You can play whichever class you like in PvE.

When an event fails you get the reward anyway (I’ve never understood why) so maybe you saw more events fail but you thought not cause reward popped?

I actually laughed when seeing this thread. I might not personally like GW2 all that much, but it’s funny how forum posters seem to actually succeed in giving new players the impression GW2 is dying. I get into overflows every day I play, enough said.

I didn’t read every wall of text in here, but I see one issue with this: the Living Story is a story. It makes no sense to first do secret at southsun and then flame and frost for example. You need to play them in a chronological order. But then, if we made all new players do that, it would mean that to play the currently running event they had to play through all past events first. I don’t see a solution to this.

Dragon ball is easily the most fun PvP experience I had in GW2. Reasons:

1) no stealth / teleport
2) no 10000 minions/clones/pets/turrets
3) no downed state

Oh, how awesome GW2 would be if they implemented these points in normal PvP somehow…

swiftpaw.6397:

A wild CC has appeared.

Forum Community used ‘scare away’.

It was super effective.

lol’d

google.3709:

10vul from ranger is different that 10vul from warrior, Ranger doesn’t really have any hard hitting skills, 10% more dmg on a bow which hits for 800-1.5k crits will not have as much of an impact on lets say a warrior who can drop 15k+ killshots, 15k+ 100B 10k eviscerate and auto attack does 2-3k on quick succession.

Even in your example, the ranger can do his 1,5 crits or w/e but his warrior buddy next to him can still throw his kill shots and eviscerates on the vuln stacks the ranger inflicted. GW2 is team based game with team based balance, I don’t think arguments about 1v1 situations are very relevant.

Kardiamond.6952:

Veldan.4637:

then I don’t see why a warrior utility should be wasted on something that must suck because it’s not a warrior mechanic

It is an instant cast AoE CC, a very long CC.

How is it sucking?

Because of the cd. Of course the actual effect doesn’t suck, but I would never use it as it is now.

I think it actually is just lag, not direct lag but a GW2-consequence of lag. I only recently started noticing it in sPvP, but it only ever happens to me around times when it’s also laggy (busy part of the evening). And in WvW I’ve had it for ages, also only when it’s laggy.

Warrior defensive stuff will obviously be in defensive trait lines, while the warriors most people in this thread seem to talk about (better dmg than thief, destroy you in seconds etc) is from offensively specced warriors, which I don’t think will benefit much from defense buffs.

hatlan.9462:

Fear is a entire part of necro gameplay / dps.

I don’t see why warrior or other class should have better acces to fear than necro…

then I don’t see why a warrior utility should be wasted on something that must suck because it’s not a warrior mechanic

ozzero.3892:

if u take away stealth from thief how the hell he can put dmg to you?

the way every other class does

Yes, stealth gives you a big advantage. That’s kinda the point of it.

The day I see twilights sweeping the screen black or rainbow bows shooting unicorns in sPvP, is the day I alt+F4 and deinstall.

Minos.3450:

Not to mention you can’t even have any legendary.

And thank god you can’t. If I ever see a twilight or a unicorn shooting bow in sPvP, I’m deinstalling.

I have a laptop with a quad core i7 too (though 1 generation older, iirc it’s i7-740qm) and it always overheats. It doesn’t matter if I open it, clean everything, use an external laptop cooler and put all settings on low, it will go to 90C and higher anyway. I think there’s not much to do about it, unless you can open up the laptop so far that you can actually get to the CPU and cooling system and are willing to bother changing / upgrading it.

sPvP has lag problems atm. Everytime I try to play sPvP in the evening, I end up ragequitting because of the lag. A few comments:

1) the lag I am expecting isn’t huge, but enough to make the game not fun, think something in the 400-800 ms range
2) it only ever happens in the evening, if I play in the morning / early afternoon it’s perfectly fine
3) I ran a lot of speed tests to a lot of different servers in different countries, and I always have a nice and low ping (never above 80 ms if pinging west-european servers). From this I conclude that the problem is not on my side.

Back in the days I always noticed that sPvP was lagfree even if the rest of the game was not. Please make it like that again!

I think the aoe / target issue is a pretty big issue tbh. Even as warrior I mostly play sPvP untargeted, because trying to target my enemy takes more time than it’s worth. One reason being the high amount of targets and the other being the even higher amount of stealth/teleport/transform/dodge roll and the high movement speed (cause nobody runs without speed buff). GW2 is too chaotic, and because of that, people favor AoE, which means even more spell effects all over the place etc.

Recently I had a lot of this. It only happens in PvP matches. I’ve already double checked my connection bit it’s perfectly fine. Also mostly when a disconnect is happening, the game freezes while the chat still goes on. I can still read the chat and type in it for a while before the game kicks me out of the round. I hope it can get fixed soon, for now I’ll quit PvP cause it’s not fun this way.

Lupanic.6502:

I like the shield. I never understand why people fight after the match is over

this

Vlad.2641:

Also the light “Apprentice” set seem to be bugged and can’t be acquired in any way because the corresponding medium and heavy armors are easily acquired from rabbit reward chests, while the “Apprentice” set doesn’t drop at any cost.

From patch notes:

PvP Apprentice armor: Added to the loot table for Copper, Silver, and Gold Deer Rank Chests.

that should explain it

Julius.1094:

4- Rather than vendors and manual assignment, in spvp runes and sigils should be selected from a pvp only interface where they are coherently organized and can be set up on the go with minimal clicking.

14- Build templates for easy swapping.

15- Ability to move trait points in pvp without having to reset the whole tree (+5 and -5 buttons?)

These would be great, anything that makes build changing easier is appreciated.

1. A more serious and larger game mode, like the original Guild Wars Heroes’ Ascent.
Seriously, I don’t get why not more people request this. Do you never get bored of meaningless single round matches?

2. An update to the reward system. Things I would like to see are slight reduction of point requirement for ranks (it seems to me that dragon rank is even more unachievable than R15 was in GW1) and more stuff in the boxes. I saw that a few armor sets got added with the latest patch, good job there it’s a start

3. Buff or change all useless and/or underused traits, and make a big trait patch to bring them into play. Much like what was done with underused elites in GW1 at some point.

Null is so easy that I did it on first try with a not-too-bright PUG and I found it boring. If this is the best boss in the game, that says a lot about the other bosses in GW2

Umm, I did it with warrior but didn’t use any skill at all, and it was still very, very easy. All blocks and stability would do is make it more boring. Also, in the way of the OP one could also reason that it’s unfair that warrior has higher base HP / armor.

So yesterday I did my first guild challenge. Since guild rush is imo the best content this game has, I was hoping challenge would be good fun too. So first we gathered with our guild. Form groups, get people on vent etc. Then we got the challenge, crab toss one. We had to get everyone to the same overflow, read up on tactics, talk about who does what etc. All in all I was there for 30 minutes during preparation, and some people even longer. Then we started the challenge and failed in 15 sec. I was astonished that we couldn’t try again. I mean 30-40 minutes preparation for something that can fail in 15 sec and is not retryable?? How could anyone consider this “fun” or worth putting in the game at all??? Epic waste of time.

Now to not make this a pure whine thread, the mandatory improvement suggestion:
Give the challenge a timer, like 10 minutes, and make it retryable an infinite amount of times within the given time frame, so if you fail in the first few seconds you can go again. Rush is timer based like that and it’s awesome, I don’t get why challenge is like this.

Would I buy an expansion? Only if it would meet these criteria:

- WvW would now mean something, taking something would be important and not just flip color every 5 minutes, and there would more reason to win rather than farm WXP
- hot join sPvP would be fixed in the same thing so that winning is what’s important/rewarded and not standing in a circle with 8 ppl cause you get +10 glory for it
- t(ournament)PvP would be actual tournaments instead of single matches
- PvE would get a zone that’s worth playing in

There is a looooot more changes I’d like to see (if it were up to me I’d pretty much redo the whole game, lol) but if they would at least make these few very basic things I’d buy the expansion, if not I wouldn’t.

If they’d acually fix these things before an expansion, I’d probably buy it anyway.

I agree with the OP in some way, I have thought that stacking weapons were bad since day 1 for exactly the reason listed. If you now want to be “competitive” , which I interpret as having stats that won’t be weaker than any opponent stats, you have to use a stacking weapon and swap it out when the stacks are maxed. This is tiring and not fun to do all the time.

killcannon.2576:

Why do you see so many GW1 players hating on this game?

Cause they took everything that was good and/or unique about GW1 and then totally changed it for GW2? Without making any judgment about GW2, I think this can be stated as a fact.

I would love to see a system like this, it’s the only real way in which they can fix the boredom of always using the same skills without totally revamping the system.

Nice ideas. I have only one comment on sprint: it’s too much. Zergs in WvW are already moving super fast (since they usually got perma swiftness cause a lot of people take aoe swiftnesses to WvW), adding sprint would make it over the top. To solve that, I think the current out of combat speed with swiftness should be set as a maximum, so sprinting while already having swiftness would only be effective in combat, to reduce the negative effect of combat on movement speed.

+1

I think Devon Carver already responded once saying they’ll look for a way to improve the looting, the question is how long it’s gonna take.

So your idea is that people need to actively defend stonemist at all times, by completing events that make the castle neutral if failed? Seems rather pointless, since if there’s nobody around to do the event, it would have been easy for another side to cap it anyway. It would only matter if there’s nobody online from any of the 3 servers, which I never saw happen.

Removal of downed state would be the best thing that could happen to WvW.

Wait no. Actually second place, skill lag is still worse >.<

KratosAngel.7289:

No. Cost should not be insane. The reason ? It must stay acessible to people, just as were and are laurels. Laurels are insanely hard to get in that you can’t have more than 40 within a month BUT they are pretty easy and fast to obtain (completing a daily of monthly does not require a big time investment.
The same should go for WvW. Furthermore, it would create a huge imbalance from one server to another : huge queues = you’re kittened, deserted server = you’re kittened …
I’ve spent a moderate time in WvW sitting around lv 50, which is still quite a lot and I only have earned something like 1250 badges. Add to this what I’ve spent with siege weapons. Let’s say it goes up to 1500 badges, taking into account the time I’ve spent before the Wxp.
Now, you see that it’s not a lot.
Now imagine a player who can only play 1-2 hours a day max, he would be totally kittened because, even when you tag a lot of your opponents and take objectives, you still don’t get that many badges.
The cost should be fair as is that of laurels.

Looks like your idea of “fair” is that no matter how long someone plays per day or on what server he(/she) is, he should be able to get ascendeds just as fast as everyone else. If that’s so, then your post makes sense. My idea of “fair” is quite different.

Also, to all the people who spent their badges on siege etc: You always knew ascendeds would come to WvW some day, and you always knew there was a (high) chance that badges would be (part of) the cost for them. So if you chose to spend all your badges on other stuff, that’s fine, but imo you have no right to complain now then.

KratosAngel.7289:

If it’s like 20 laurels and 250 or 500 badges for 1 amulet, then that’s completely bullkitten.
If it’s something like 10 laurels and 100-200 badges, then, that will be interesting.
Also, concerning the infusions, wait and see, hope there will be cool ones.

I think badge cost should definitely be 500+. I’m world rank 30 or so, and have over 2000 unused badges even though I already spent ~800. Since a lot of people played a lot more WvW than I have, both before and after rank got introduced, 100-200 would be a ridiculously low amount for ascendeds. Even PvE players would probably go for the WvW ones then, since doing the JP for badges would be faster than doing fractals / more dailies.

morrolan.9608:

taek.9386:

You need to include ascended backpieces!! I don’t want to to Fractals just to earn them

This! Pretty ridiculous that its only available via 1 method.

Except it isn’t, you can make them in the mystic forge. TP is in WvW, mystic forge is in WvW, and you can make the ~20g (cheapest one) required in WvW as well. That said, I would appreciate it if they made them available for badges too.

Also I’m quite dissapointed that the WvW ascendeds will cost laurels. I stopped doing dailies because I thought “I’ll just get the WvW ascendeds when they’re finally introduced” and now it turns out I can’t because I have to do dailies first anyway.

I think it would be too powerful, warhorn is already great. I run untraited warhorn in WvW a lot and I can’t see how anything would outperform it there cause of group swiftness / self perma swiftness (combined with sig of rage) and snare removal. If it’s buffed, it should be a sPvP only buff imo.