Guild Wars 2

I know this is still an ongoing project and these things might already be being worked on, but here are my suggestions.

Effects LOD option is currently a bit too aggressive, making nearly every skill effects invisible. Not being able to see timewarp in a 5-man fractal is absurd.

• Set priorities to each effects, so important effects are less likely to be culled. Hide melee weapon trails and spammable explosions, do not hide feedback bubbles.
• Maybe make it a slider or a drop down menu, rather than a checkbox?

Auras are too hard to see now. They could all use more visibility, but important ones like magnetic aura should especially be more visible.

I’m glad this is being worked on, open world bosses are a lot easier to see now and I like that, but I think some missteps were made. Hopefully we can see improvements soon.

Fractals
Revamp how you interact with different levels.

• No longer asks you to pick a level on entering the instance
• A full list of available levels inside the observatory
• You can choose and change which level to enter at any time from this list
• This list displays which level is which fractal (1 : Ascalon, 2 : Swamp …) A small thumbnail art for each fractal would be nice.
• This list can be sorted by level number or level type (ex: display in ascending order/display all molten boss levels/etc.)

I suppose fractal UI revamp would involve more than just a UI redesign, but it would still be nice. Current fractal selection I feel is outdated since the fractal restructuring and clunky to work with.

Inventory
A one-click ‘deposit all materials’ button, now outside of the drop down menu. (fast, convenient, and no more misclicking ‘compact’ by accident either)
‘Automatically deposit all materials’ and/or ‘Deposit all materials when inventory is full’ checkboxes from the drop down menu.
Key items(crowbars, machetes, etc.) are now in the account wallet, and shows next to the map currency when in appropriate map.

LFG
A search bar, similar to the one in your inventory.
A separate Raid category

Bank
Add a search bar for the material storage tab

If you have any other UI or Quality of Life suggestions, post them below.

I wish there was a bit more obvious UI element for remaining time on Continuum Split other than the flashing buff icon. Something like the radial boon timer around illusion counters or a little bar that only appears when you are in CS would be nice.

I’m gonna skip Hammer #3 and Gyro(including F-gyro) complaints, since pretty much everyone already told you what I think as well.

Using hammer #2 as a reflect was a bit too finicky, even compared to flamethrower#3 which is also a one second-ish reflect. I don’t know, maybe it’s because the area of effect is much smaller? Or maybe flamethrower #3 is slightly longer than 1 second? I couldn’t quite pin the reason down, but the result felt a bit unpredictable.

Traits I’m noticing a lot of ‘required’ synergies, which limits build flexibility a lot and makes traits underwhelming on their own.

All three minor traits feel a bit underwhelming, I wish they did either more noticeable/exciting or less situational things.
Shocking Speed radius could be bigger. Also, given we don’t get a lot of lightning field without Final Salvo, ICD + stacking restriction + short duration feels a bit too much.
Rapid Regeneration is good but almost requires Shocking Speed and/or Final Salvo for half of the trait effect to work. Maybe shocking speed could be merged into this trait with lower superspeed healing value so it’s more self sufficient, and the entire traitline will be more flexible.
Decisive Renown is way too situational with uninteresting payoff. It could be merged with something else, or even if it was flat out deleted I don’t think people will notice much. That’s bad. Forgettable and unnoticeable is worse than a trait everyone wants improved.
Expert Examination is very good, but is held back by Hammer #3 unreliability. I kinda wish this to affect other forms of CCs as well, since we have a lot of those, but maybe that’s a bit much? I think it could work if you cut back on weakness duration.
Impact Savant, we don’t have that many skills that stun, and 25% increase is kinda unnoticeable as well. Again, maybe you can make this affect more forms of CCs (daze is an obvious one)
Final Salvo just needs to do more, right now it feels like a mere fodder for other trait synergies, and doesn’t feel good by itself. Also, all of the benefits being loaded on gyro death makes it proc at unpredictable times, unless you pop all your gyros immediately after casting.
Perfectly Weighted I personally would prefer longer lasting stability with less stacks, but maybe that’s just me. Hammer damage increase is nice, if a bit unexciting.

Kodama.6453:

A new idea I got for an added class mechanic.

Since Anet seems to want to improve the ability to combo for engineers, maybe something like that:
As long as you don’t use your function gyro, it will encircle you. Whenever you are standing inside of a combo field, it will collect its essence and grant a unique effect

water field: pulsing healing for allies nearby (just allies so we don’t improve the sustain any more for scrapper)
lightning field: pulsing small aoe damage
aether field: pulsing random boons
smoke field: pulsing stealth for 1s each second
poison field: pulsing random conditions
dark field: whenever you get hit in melee range, you steal life from the foe
that’s all I had so far, maybe some suggestions for missing fields?

Just like combo finishers, it should just provide 1 effect at the same time. So we will not be able to stack multiple combo fields on us to get “super strong buffs”.

Would also have some needed synergy with some of the new utility skills, cause half of them have a toolbelt skill which will provide a combo field. And each destroyed gyro will be a combo field too.

Thoughts?

I like this idea a lot! Simple, versatile, constantly impactful, influences your moment to moment gameplay decisions in an interesting way.

I wholeheartedly agree with the goal, we need to be more than ‘an engi who may or may not use a hammer’, and new trait ideas are really cool.

I love the idea of managing f-gyros as well, but for this to work, I still think the active portion of them should be expanded/changed first. The decision between using F-gyros and keeping them should be an interesting trade off, and for that to be the case, you need to give everyone at least one compelling reason to spend f-gyros.

Passive benefits for not using the f-gyros solves the issue of them being less useful for some(mainly pve players) by essentially turning them into permanent passive buffs. Permanent passive buffs as a class mechanic still does not solve the issue of scrappers not actually interacting with the new class mechanic and changing the way they play. (It’d also be a balancing nightmare :p)

If the active portion of F-gyro was something more universally appealing and can be constantly utilized, I think your idea would work wonderfully.

Random idea :

Maybe you can make passive effects only trigger on a certain condition, and when they are triggered, you expend a gyro. The more often you trigger this, the less potency the subsequent effects will have, and eventually not trigger at all. The obvious downside to this idea is that, depending on the trigger condition, you might be unintentionally spending gyros. Trigger conditions, therefore, should be carefully picked.
Also, rather than implementing the passive effect into a minor trait, what if we could customize them? It could be something like a ranger pet UI or Daredevil GM traits.

Examples :
-Disabling an enemy weakens and damages nearby foes. Radius and damage based on number of gyros.
-Immobilizing an enemy stuns them. Duration based on number of gyros.
-Healing skills used when above 50% health creates a chain lightning, dazing foes. Number of targets based on number of gyros.
-Blocking gives you mobile Ice field. Ice field itself chills enemies at creation, but have no further effect. Field duration based on number of gyros.
-Blocking gives you mobile Lightning field. Lightning field pulses heavy vulnerability on short duration. Field duration based on number of gyros.
-Incoming CC creates a Static Field(Ele Staff Air #4). Duration based on number of gyros, lose all gyros afterwards.
-When taking lethal damage, become invulnerable and lose all conditions instead. Only activates when you have 3 gyros, lose all gyros afterwards.

Random thought : I think ranged res/stomp bot is an idea better suited as a utility or a toolbelt skill.

Random regret : It’s probably too late for a big change. Welp, it’s still fun to imagine.

All of the following is based on speculations, so grain of salt and all that.

I think one of the big problem of gyros is that there’s not much actual play being created around the skills.

• You have zero control over them, it’s fire-and-forget for you with inconsistent results.
• Enemies don’t need to think too much about them because they stay in cleave range already, so even if gyros are really powerful and you wanted to counter them, you don’t actually have to change the the way you are playing to do so. There’s also not a secondary ability you have to watch out for like most other pet skills in the game.

Another one is how they do not seem to synergize much with the rest of Scrapper. Some bruiser-specific benefits would be nice. I’m not saying they should only be useful for hammer engis, but at least not make being in melee disadvantageous. (we are mostly in mid~melee range for many builds anyways)

• Possible useful effects : A pulsing short-range, short-duration vulnerability/weakness? Ranged CC, both soft and hard variety? Combo fields useful for bruisers, like Ice field for Frost Aura?(mobile fields will make perfect sense on gyros) Position based offensive effects like PBAoE, tethers, directional push/pull, orbits, boomerangs, etc.? Combine some of them, like boomerang projectile that cripples on the way out and pushes towards you on the way back?

Re : On-death/manual destruction effects

On-death effect can be messy counterplay wise, and does not solve the issue of you not having control over how to use gyros.
Manual destruction effects can work, but the effects will have to be carefully thought out so there’s a meaningful use for both passive and active component. Having a persistent pet then to incentivize losing them can turn them into another case of healing turret, people will just summon them and immediately destroy them for reliable effect. Also, having an HP bar means if your gyro is under attack, it is always advantageous to destroy them when they get low, which then raises the question of ‘why not make them on-death effect as a QoL change?’
Maybe making them just overcharge abilities on a cooldown can work, meaning you don’t sacrifice them to activate secondary abilities. This can reward you for keeping them alive longer by letting you overcharge multiple times.

Ideas

I don’t see a way out of all these problems without making gyros invincible or giving you a lot more control over it. And given the time constraint I’d go with the invincible option. Maybe they can make it so that gyros are invincible but the opponent can ‘persuade’ you out of keeping it.

• Example : Medic gyro heals you over time, but you can sacrifice some of its duration for a quick interrupt/aegis/evade/stunbreak etc. (Secondary effect can be anything, my imagination’s running wild, but I don’t think anything crazy can be done in a short time.)
• It can either be a straight up sacrifice, or decrease the duration per use(since it’s now invincible, hp bar can be used for duration. 15hp, -1hp per second, additional hp damage when using secondary abilities. Fuel system without UI clutter, right there. boom!)

Some other thoughts and ideas.

• Shredder gyro. The idea of an on-demand long-term whirl finisher is interesting, but it will be very unreliable outside of niche situations until you make whirl finisher itself more reliable first. Also, what’s to differentiate it from a turret? The ability to move the shredder is definitely a good idea and will help a lot, but I think the base effect itself also has to be a bit more than just whirl finisher. Maybe apply conditions or cc around it, like cripple/torment or occasional pull on touch?
• Purge gyro. I don’t like the sound of a skill that cleanses condis slowly and automatically over a long period of time, both as a scrapper and as an opponent. I’d like to see it be given more active power and less passive power. How about a big condi cleanse on activation + short resistance pulse(1s of it every 3s or so)?
• Blast gyro. This feels like a jarring inconsistency. Also this seems way too easy to avoid. Maybe make the recharge very very low but the gyro slow and fragile? Or make the explosion be a field you cannot dodge out of, like Ele Air #4, so you HAVE to destroy it before it reaches you? Or… a crazy idea : give it slick shoes.

Not very happy about bulwark gyro either,(for similar reasons to purge gyro) but not sure what can be done about it. I think sneak gyro is pretty cool as is.

I wouldn’t make assumptions about his level of enthusiasm for his work, but this is basically what I have been feeling since the reveal.

If it’s weak, they can buff it before release. If it’s still weak, they can buff it after. If it’s boring and uninspired, their track record tells me there’s no way they are able to fix that within a couple years, if ever.

Really, I don’t see any fun factor in these skills. The obvious hook of a pet skill is either you have some control over it, and/or your opponent has to think of how/whether to deal with it. Gyros are fire-and-forget AI pets that you have zero control over and stays perpetually in cleave range that helps you in the most boring ways possible. And there’s the clunky rocket launcher in a shape of a drone. Seriously, it’s such a waste of a cool theme.

Also I still don’t know what being a scrapper have to do with gyros, neither thematically nor mechanically.

With less than a month left until release, this is basically what we are getting, no amount of complaining will fix that. That is so frustrating to accept. I hope I don’t have to wait 3 more years for the next new toy.

My main concern is not how gyros might be weak, it’s about how bland and uninteresting they look(aside from Sneak gyro). Reading through their skill description and even seeing them in action, it… it just does nothing for me. They are even less exciting than turrets. With turrets you can at least think about where to put them and when to overcharge them.

I get that you might want utility skills to be simple, but for skills designed for a class that is very much dependent on the right side of the skill bar, they just feel so half-baked and boring. What do they add? How do they fit in with the rest of the spec? How are they gonna compete with kits and gadgets in terms of fun factor? It doesn’t even seem to create interesting interplay, it’s basically like turrets but they stay right next to you, and you have no control over them, so if your opponents have some aoe or cleave they don’t have to change anything from the way they were already playing while you have nothing you can do about it.

I always wanted flying drones for engi, and I was excited to see them in HoT trailer, the possibilities were endless! Now it kind of feels like a waste of a cool theme that might not be revisited for a long time.

I’m underwhelmed by gyros. It feels like a cool idea haphazardly done and pushed into somewhere it doesn’t belong. A wasted potential.

Thematically, a Scrapper as they described doesn’t seem to have much to do with using clean and futuristic flying drones. It sounds more like something a mastermind or an inventor with a lab coat type character would use. I think hammer fits the depiction of a rough improviser, a melee weapon that can be used for multiple purposes(whirl and reflect, evade and leap, attack and block…). But gyros, not sure how it fits in with the rest of the spec.

Mechanically, I don’t get why they come bundled with a hammer. I know I don’t have to use both(or either), but it would be nice to see some connection or synergy, a common thread in the playstyle or something. (Reaper’s a melee spec, so shouts. Berserk needs adrenaline, so rage skills, things like that.) Right now Scrapper’s package seems kinda randomly put together.

Even if I look at gyros by themselves, they seem rather bland and not very exciting, again, wasting the cool theme. Some of them might as well be gadgets or stationary turrets. The only interesting thing I see is the stealth gyro. (The idea of a stealth skill that gives your enemy some information, but not all, is very cool, and I hope to see more like it.)

This honestly just feels like two people came up with their own separate ideas and then just mashed those two ideas together and went “we now have enough stuff to fill one spec.”.

Since they plan to add more elite specs and you can only pick one, I want unique, tightly constructed, and clearly defined packages that support new playstyles. Right now this feels like a bundle of random shinies sorted by date added. Now I worry if we will ever see ‘what could have been’ of drones, since they are already checked off the list of ideas.

Of course I haven’t played it yet, so I’m ready to eat my wall of text if proven otherwise.

tl;dr – Gyros feel like a wasted potential and don’t seem to fit in with the rest of the spec, both thematically and mechanically.
-Hammer and Stealth gyro looks cool.

I agree with some of your points, but I think it’s really just about execution and knowing which part of the story to put where.

For example, I think Iron Marches part benefited from not being instanced compared to Concordia instance of the last episode. It’s a far better way of showing players that the threat is spreading. It just feels much more real, and flows better with the game structure as well.

You are right about the Frostgorge Sound part, while it was fun having a meta event as a part of the release, story-wise it felt forced. The section was supposed to be about Eir, Braham, and me, and it didn’t fit.

I and some of my guildmates are having problems as well these couple days. We would randomly disconnect from the game often, and/or get severe latency, while in-game chat and VOIP and other things worked fine.

And by severe latency, I mean unplayable level of latency. Everyone around you would just stop moving and skills would take anywhere between 5~60+ seconds to activate, while you can still use in-game chat and everything else that requires a net connection. While you lag, others seemed to have no such problems, and this happens in both open world and in dungeon instances.

This started happening mostly after the 4/15 patch.

I love the fact that maps are not dead and you are the only one doing the odd event chains. Orr is bustling with people which is fantastic too. I worried about meta events dying, but I found out that world bosses schedule included pre-events too, so I’m happy about that too.

I just hope anet reconsiders the fixed world boss schedule thing. I do not want to change my playtime just to be able to see specific bosses. Maybe spawn multiple bosses at a time, since now we are not supposed to worry about spreading the playerbase too thin. Also, an in-game reference/notification about boss spawn times would be nice.

I was wondering about this as well. Tooltip damage didn’t change as much as it should, and testing on an enemy was not easy due to random damage range. It would be nice if we could get an official answer, this is bugging me too much.

A few concerns :

• Static timer and very slow respawn of bosses combined mean people playing at particular time of a day will be fighting the same bosses again and again.

• Also it just feels odd that these bosses will wreck havoc on a strict alarm clock. Really defeats the purpose of Dynamic Events, it’s not dynamic and players do not actually affect the world.

• I was hoping megaserver system would help revitalize meta/chain events, but separating these and their finale boss encounter will do exactly the opposite.
  This change seems like it will make the Meta event chains, which is the coolest part about GW2 PvE in my opinion, a lot less exciting.

To be honest, I just think they are laid out throughout the playable areas, not in a specific pattern. If there’s any pattern, it’s the zones, not the dots. Current explorable areas are already laid out so that we can go to places with heavy dragon influence. If you just put dots on the center of each zones and connect them, you get an overall similar looking pattern. Not saying they have nothing to do with dragons, they could, but I wouldn’t read too much into how those dots connect.

I was sure they would fix the dredge fractal with this update, seeing how people hate it so much. I’m honestly kinda surprised they didn’t.

Things I want to add :

• I wish the pressure plates on the first part were bigger, maybe covering the whole corner where they are located. Standing still and not dodging is generally a really bad idea in GW2, and expecting people to do just that, while having to survive respawning waves of enemies who are also all immune to blind, feels like a bad idea. It would be much better if they make it so that even if you dodge and move around, as long as you don’t leave that small corner of the room the switch is pressed down.
• Make condition damage more useful on the final boss. Maybe make it take 0 damage from all attacks and immune to conditions when it’s not heated, instead of magnifying damage when it is.
• I agree Bomb room seriously needs to change, but making dredges not respawn at all is kinda defeating the purpose I think. If you can just kill all the dredge, why have a door at all? I think there should be other ways to fix that room(options including a complete redesign).
• I know dredges are immune to blind for lore reasons, but blind is such a big part of many play styles and builds, rendering them completely useless for a fractal this long is a bit too much, and doesn’t really add much to the experience in my opinion.(same can be said about Defiance mechanic, but another topic) Maybe mix up the monster composition a bit, so only a part of the enemies are immune to blind? Or make them resistant to blind, not immune?

1. Living World/Living Story (both its concept and implementation)
2. Reward-oriented content design vs. Experience-oriented content design
3. Open World (how we are using it and how to use it better, kinda overlaps with living world/living story discussion I guess)

Edit: Oh, I forgot to add. Currently I get the impression that Balance team is paying attention to pvp almost exclusively. PvE (and wvw too) deserves more balance attention than it gets now.

1. Match Imbalance (blow out matches, points snowballing, morale snowballing, how sheer numbers has little counter, etc.)
2. Defending vs. Attacking
3. Lack of attention to WvW-specific class balance

I think evening out server population shouldn’t be our focus. As long as there’s a reason to ‘be on the right server’ people will transfer and the problem will repeat itself. Solution should come from within the WvW game mode. (also, encouraging server transfers to fix a game issue is not the nicest thing to do, and it’s very damaging to the community)

Maybe if you could comply while still moving, (and maybe do not block other skills, since villagers already has a lot of free skill slots open), it would be more balanced imo. I think ghosts already has some powerful tools other than ‘mad king says’. But I guess there’s the technical problem of not being able to emote while moving.

How about rooting ghosts in place when you cast it instead, so it’s fair for both sides. …Unless you are being chased by two or more ghosts that is.

I did see how the new floaters look, including the confusion floaters. (and I liked it )

Retaliation floaters still show up as just numbers with no icons, at least to me. They look exactly like the old bleed floaters pre-patch, so it actually became harder to see now. I don’t think that was intentional.

After the Blood and Madness patch, I can no longer see the retaliation damage floater. The damage numbers are still popping up, but not with the usual yellow fist icon, so it’s harder to notice. Maybe something went wrong while introducing the new condition damage floaters?

I think this is a new bug introduced after the Blood and Madness patch.

After a couple fights, Sound Effects, UI, etc. get suddenly quieter, about to half its usual volume. Volume sliders in options menu stay where they are, just the actual sound output becomes way too soft. Changing sound quality fixes this issue temporarily, but it resumes to its library mode very soon after(it doesn’t even last one fight ).

I also feel like the game goes completely silent a bit more frequently. It usually happened when I was in a big fight, like in WvW or world bosses, but it feels like it’s happening in more places now.

While I do not have a specific idea good enough to share right now, I think WvW imbalance should not be solved by encouraging/discouraging server transfers. It’s just way too damaging to both communities and individual players, and is hardly a long-term solution. As long as ‘being on the right server’ impacts WvW experience, people will keep transferring from places to places, and the problem will forever repeat. (that’s why I think the current server transfer sale is not to be viewed as an attempt at fixing wvw issues, at least I hope it was not supposed to be…)

As WvW is set up right now, there will always be population/timezone imbalance, and I do not see a realistic method to balance it reliably in the long run. Instead, the game mode should be built to work even in such imbalance. It could either take a form of…

• A system that tries to balance out population by changing how teams are set up, such as grouping multiple servers into one team and enabling wvw-guesting between teamed servers. Not my idea, saw it somewhere on youtube Admittedly, it’s still not a perfect/reliable enough solution, but it’s just an example.
• A feature that impacts the actual fight, kinda like outmanned buff/breakout events but better.
• something that changes the whole dynamic of the game so that smaller numbers actually have some advantage(we need a wizard to design this, so no examples here. I think BL ruins and bloodlust(points for stomp) is in this general category of changes, but I can’t say it’s helping the balance, nor do i have any idea if it was intended to).

I personally think the third category is the ideal way to go,(I’d be reasonably content with second category as well) but I realize it’s also the hardest to get right. It will also take a sizable amount of work to even attempt. But in order for WvW to reach its potential I believe something big needs to happen.

And sorry for the lack of a specific suggestion, but I wanted to just get out what I feel is the appropriate general direction

Very nice write up! I think your points are really well thought out and agreeable.
Here’s my view on this update

I keep thinking that Tequatl and the format it was put in does not exactly match. While I really think something as massive and epic as tequatl being in open world is… well, epic, it could have been made more appropriate for the nature of the format.

Dynamic events are good for certain contents. However, encounters that require certain number of people to gather up, organize, plan ahead and be ready is not one imho.(and yes, I believe you can definitely make it not be a yawn-fest or a ‘stack here and press 1’) Or, make something truly challenging and put it in an instance which works with the new LFG tool, cuz frankly, if tequatl were an instanced raid it would have been really easy.

As of right now, it feels like just an inconvenienced raid more than an appropriate challenge.

Also, things that lowers success rate and a proper challenge(a good challenge that adds to the fun) is not always the same thing. I’m sure million other people repeated this.

Yeah, a massive group event that requires preparation + partly random, unpredictable spontaneous spawn time = not ideal.

If it were a immersion-breaker issue, they could alternatively give it a pre-event or two, so people would know it’s coming in a few minutes. (same goes for the start of Arah chain, but they made it a lot easier, so..)

I agree, I do not see this event sustaining itself after the ‘newest content hype’ dies out. I’m all for difficult contents, massive group contents and contents that require organization, and I actually liked the Teq fight when I had enough people and reasonable coordination, even when we failed. But in a general sense, yeah, this Teq fight is kinda not matching the format. Imagine how easy it would be to beat this guy, if it were an instanced raid where you could actually gather enough people before the fight starts, organize and plan ahead, and do not have to deal with wait times/afk’ers. Put it in as an open world spontaneous spawning event, and we get all sorts of problems, both gameplay-wise and not. I feel they got carried away by the epic idea it is on paper, and did not think how this would be like on a not-so-perfect world.

I agree on all of your points. The comparisons you made with past examples were spot on too. I like open world exploring, I like LW side activities, I like scavenger hunts, but this one really only felt rushed and unfinished, only worsening the issue of achievements turning into fetch quest list minus flavor. I also agree on the point that it might work if it were not temporary, but alas, it is.

Another thing I did not like about it is how little guide or instruction you start with. You get a mail telling you to go to splintered coast, but that’s about it. If you paid attention to the mail, you might talk to Narru, and if you paid attention to update notes, you might talk to Rox, but they both are not particularly helpful when it comes to explaining the new ‘activity’. They could have marked the first tooth on the map to get people started, and Rox could have told you there might be more, scattered all over the zone. Right now there are so many confused people on map chat, and who knows how many more that aren’t so talkative.

Speaking of Queent’s gauntlet…
I think queen’s gauntlet could have stayed permanent. (if the rewards needs to be tweaked/removed, go ahead and maybe add some titles) If crown pavilion closing down was the problem, they could have moved those domes outside of the mini-zone and put it in DR, which I think would be even better. People randomly passing by can watch the fight like how it was intended. If the reward isn’t too crazy, it won’t be too crowded and wait time shouldn’t be too bad of an issue.

and to the main topic, while I am not too against the idea of temporary contents, yes I think they missed some permanent content opportunity especially with fun-oriented solo contents(as opposed to reward-oriented mass scale events) like the gauntlet, SAB and so on.

While friendly fire idea is interesting, I think that’s more fitting for an organized small group content. One or two inexperienced players being able to ruin the whole thing will cause way too much drama I think. Other ideas, I quite like. Aircraft would be awesome.

I think to remedy the safe spot problem, they should punish stacking and being stationary. (and/or not paying attention to his tells) I think we can borrow some ideas from Dwayna statue fight.

• Add some attacks that target each individual players, doing considerable but non-lethal damage, but explodes in an AoE. if you are tightly stacked, you and everyone near you will just be wiped out. It leaves a moderate damage pulsing AoE behind, so if you are downed alone, it won’t kill you and people can res you, but if you were stacked, you are out of luck.
• Also, something that will make ‘being in range’ a bit more risky. it still should be manageable and dodge-able, since we want melee to still be an option.
• Make turrets more interesting. I like the new tequatl turrets a lot, it’s easy to use but you have to pay close attention. Give people on turret more things to do and less ‘pressing a button for 2 seconds to charge up one attack, repeat forever’. Or we can turn it into a mobile bundle, like in Jormag fight. I like the idea of an event giving people a melee option or a ranged option if they aren’t built for the specific situation.

And make it so that some of its more dangeous AoEs can target people in the safe spot more reliably. Seriously, this should have been done way earlier.

While I really enjoy harder bosses and event chains, I can also feel for people feeling frustrated by new Tequatl. If you get a large organized group going consistently, you’ll surely have fun, win or fail. If you can’t however, you pretty much have nothing you can do, other than keep bashing your head on an iron wall until you are too frustrated to continue.

The problem I see here is that, to even have a remote chance, you will need a big, big group of people, and if you are not so lucky, it’s no longer even about knowing what to do in the fight. Given the tendency of pve players of late, it becomes the ‘smart’ thing to not even care. Compare it with the Orr temple chains. You can rally up a lot of people and try to organize and tackle it, great fun. If you end up only getting like 5 people or less, you can still give it a shot and try really hard, because there still is a good chance of success. You are still ‘allowed’ to care. Seeing how some Orr temple chains are still abandoned except when the daily farm train arrives, I fear tequatl will see worse.

I think they might have to just reduce the minimum requirement on number of people. Instead of scaling up starting from 80 people and up, it could scale up from say, 20 or less people and up(which will still be very hard to gather after a month or so tbh, especially since teq just comes out of nowhere without pre events or anything. god we need in-game world event tracker…).

Additionally, more specific complaints.

• Movement/dodge roll as primary means of defense is a nice mechanic, but one that does not always work in a platformer environment, especially in tight spaces and near ledges. Perhaps if we could replace dodge roll with a stationary channeled block that drains endurance meter….(SAB team against the engine part 3 coming soon!) Whip can sort of work like this on 1v1 situations, but as stated above, hitbox/position lag isn’t all that reliable.
• Enemies charging through you and damaging you on touch. I don’t know if it’s an intended behavior or just another case of lag doing its magic(the fact that i cannot tell them apart is… :/ ), if it’s a bug or a lag issue, please fix it!
• If it is intended, I do not think it works too well in GW2 environment. They are hard to see coming, and sort of not fitting since your main attack is melee. I think it’d be better if this was given to select enemies as a well-telegraphed attack pattern, or remove it entirely, or at least make it do 0 damage + stationary knockdown, not a launch.
• monkey projectiles/racoon kingpin bombs/ etc. should do damage only when they land on the target location, not on the way there. We have shuriken assassins for that. It will also make it easier to balance the time it takes for them to throw those projectiles, since you now know exactly when the damage will be dealt.
• Assassins. omg those red assassins. They provide the prime example of a combat where ‘you desperately strafe and auto-attacking in the air, praying that it hits the enemy before it hits you’. Break up their movement in multiple parts(for example, moves less frequently but dashes at you faster after a wind up), or make them pause for a second before doing their leap attack, or something.
• Assassins. omg those flail assassins.
• As I said before, you guys did a great job at clearly telegraphing enemy attack patterns, but some attacks still feel a little bit too fast/unclear. For example, compare polar bears’ snowball throw and claw attack.

How do you guys feel about the combat in SAB? I personally feel it’s a bit wonky combined with SAB’s sensitivity to lag, hit detection issues and Josh fighting the engine etc. To me personally combat feels like just an obstacle between me and the next part, rather than part of the fun.

Enemy designs are quite nice overall I think, they have simple and easy to understand attack patterns with clear telegraph animations, you quickly learn how they work and are given reasonable window to work with what you have learned. I think this direction is very good.

But with lag screwing up you and your enemy’s position, hit detection being less than ‘pixel perfect’(both understandably a technical issue), the type of combat SAB is trying to simulate, those 8-bit metrovania(or spelunky for a more recent example) style combat, doesn’t quite work as it should. Those games rely on pixel perfect hit box and responsive/razor sharp controls. What you see and expect is exactly what happens. However in SAB, you cannot exactly afford these for technical reasons.

Position/distance of you and your enemy can be off, especially against enemies that move a lot(assassins, beedogs, sometimes even bunnies!). Hitboxes are largely invisible and somewhat arbitrary(not that it’s a bad thing inherently, it just doesn’t mix well with this type of combat). And compared to general GW2 combat, each hit counts a lot. With 2 seconds CC that can screw up your platforming.(which goes on to further exaggerate every little kinks in the combat) All of these combined, You cannot accurately gauge the distance between you and your enemy/range of your attacks, and I often find myself desperately strafing and auto-attacking in the air, praying that it hits the enemy before it hits me. That’s not very 8-bit.

One thing I noted is that I really enjoyed the boss battles however. I think it works so nicely since it’s more about learning the enemy, knowing what to do and using the right tools, as opposed to being reliant on precision maneuver. You could say it’s controlled and gimmicky, but it works in the context of SAB. It fits nicely with the platformer/adventure side of things. I do not think every single encounter with enemies should feel like this, since it’s also an action platformer, but I think there are ways to find the middle ground that works and fits better. (Maybe a block/counter mechanic, if you want to keep the ‘each hit counts’ aspect? Or make each hit easier/safer to connect while enemies are more aggressive and persistent?)

While I agree there could be more rewards, I think GW2 right now is dangerously close to being all about rewards and not as much as about fun(like any ohter mmos out there, which makes me a sad panda). One of the reasons I like SAB is that it’s mainly a fun-oriented content, as opposed to reward-oriented content(Jennah and Scarlet definitely tipped the game to this side a bit too much). And yes, playerbase shares half the guilt on this trend, but we should keep trying.

I think the main concern should be about what’s in the box, rather than what moto sells. W2 had its problems, and I believe anet will look at those problems and fix them for next release. (I personally think pacing is a big issue here, especially with the increased difficulty and complexity, among other issues) I think it’s fine if people want to play it just to see what it’s like but not everyone plays it for a full month, as long as they had fun while playing it. GW2 pve isn’t exactly short on contents after all. It’s more important that when anyone thinks ‘oh yeah, there was that sab thing’ they should feel like casually coming back and have whatever amount of fun they want, without thinking ‘do I really want to go back there? nah…maybe another time’ which I believe isn’t quite the case right now.

Kite.2510:

you forgot to add:

-A reward will be given to players successfully defending a base.

-Event’s and other activities have been added inside bases that: can speed up the process of various activities and updates, offer a rare chance to get top tier mats upon completion, and generally keep players busy when staying inside a base!

-Dolyaks walk/run faster when they are escorted by players.

-Now the champion reward chest will be given upon succeeding an even of taking over a base instead of beating the champion him self.

Nice ideas. I especially like the dolyak one. Maybe it can have a little ring around it like a capture point, and give everyone inside the circle(including the dolyak itself) a speed boost when out of combat. And at the end of its course, it can give event success credit/wxp to everyone who was inside the circle, so people can feel encouraged to care about dolyaks even when they are not being hit by monsters.

I agree there are a lot of obvious issues being untouched, but the things mentioned in the OP, while very frustrating, seems like smaller fishes that can be fried on the side while they steer the big ship. I am more concerned about WvW itself as a game type, and very unhappy thakittens core issues are seemingly not getting enough action.

For example, they say WvW is not supposed to always be fair and balanced, which I understand, but then they often treat WvW like it was one of the 90%+ of competitive games that are built with the premise of being fair and balanced. The game is supposed to be often played in unfair/imbalanced scenarios, but it does little to keep itself engaging for all players involved in said scenarios? That’s a gigantic issue in my eyes(both when you are on the winning or the losing side), which they have been way too timid on fixing.

Adding additional objectives, cool, hosting a big event to renew some hype for wvw, great, adding nice little things like new wvw abilities and rewards, sure. But to me that feels like adding cool icings and fruit bits on a cake that’s half-baked. People play WvW cuz there’s nothing quite like it(at least in gw2), and they often enjoy themselves, but I think Anet can and should provide them with something a lot better.The game type right now feels way too fragile and missing vital parts, it’s not nearly up to the standards anet has set for themselves, building on top of that can wait a little.

Polish the core of the game type itself. That’s my personal priority list.

Not to mention that systematically matching up servers with up to 11 rank gaps, BEFORE having proper rubber band mechanics, is very hard to imagine as a good decision. We have enough people complaining about random match ups every week, how will this help, if not make things worse?

I agree, WvW is not, and will not be, or supposed to be always fair and balanced, and I feel Anet should stop treating it as if it were. Lot of common rules/conventions do not apply when you strip away the premise of a ‘fair fight’, and they seem to be neglecting that vital characteristic of the game type a bit too much. That to me is why WvW feels, while it can be quite fun at times, far from a well polished/finished game yet. Most of the rules and features are designed as if each match up will be fairly balanced and even. The game does little to keep itself engaging and less frustrating on one-sided scenarios, which it is supposed to be often played in.(we have outmanned buff and breakout events, but…. i think we can all agree they are far from enough :P)

And now they are trying to host a big competitive event with visible rewards attached to it.(however small that reward is isn’t really the point) While I do sincerely appreciate the effort to renew some attention and hype for WvW, I honestly do not think WvW is anywhere near ready for that sort of things to work.

This has been something i wanted to be improved the most in WvW for quite a while. When i saw them adding breakout events, I was hopeful that they would keep on working on this front, but sadly I did not see much after that, so I’m posting on the forum. For ‘complain on the forum’ achievement.

I think having better/more Rubberband mechanics, a set of mechanics that tries to close the gap between the leading team and the others, should be very high on Anet’s priority list(…if it’s even on the list. hopefully). Something that motivates the losing server to keep fighting, makes an overwhelmed server believe they can still do something, gives the winning server something to look out for and not fall asleep. I believe it will help alleviate a lot of its issues WvW has been constantly enduring and overall make it engaging in more scenarios.

Ideally, we shouldn’t even need these things, if match ups were good enough. But let’s face it. It’s not going to happen in any near future. Somewhere between the ranks will still be a population gap, time zone gap, or both. It’s no secret that WvW is not a ‘fair’ and ‘balanced’ game type. Devon says it’s not even supposed to be. Add to that the fact that we are talking about a game type where each match is 168 hours long with hundreds of people involved, you have a game type that can very easily feel frustrating/boring. (and I think encouraging people to leave their home servers, with a hefty fee nonetheless, is not the most player-friendly solution)

So, we have an inherently unfair and imbalanced game type, and I understand it’s sort of inevitable. (‘fun’ and ‘fair’ does not always go hand in hand anyways) But if WvW was not supposed to be always fair and balanced, it should have been built to be able to accommodate those scenarios better. The game type works wonderfully when the match up is more even, but it does little to keep itself engaging in one-sided scenarios, which it is supposed to be often played in.

Outmanned buff and breakout events count as rubber band mechanics, but I think we can all agree they are not anywhere near enough. :P I acknowledge that implementing and balancing these sort of things is not easy and may require a couple of wizards, but I think it’s too essential of a missing piece to push back down the list. When WvW is built to better work in its expected environment, then we will be ready to build on top of that game type.(such as adding more objectives, or tying a visible reward to the said game type. cough cough!)

Very nice points. I’m not sure how the last part (sieges on walls) will actually work out, but I am glad I’m not the only one who thinks the wall fights currently are sort of… awkward. :P

And a double yes to making balistas more useful, however that might be done.

I did think of something similar to the first part of the OP as well, as a solution to imbalanced match ups. Not as big and far reaching revamp as OP’s, but maybe that’s the merit, who knows.

My idea was for the teams to be formed kind of like how solo queue sPvP teams are formed, but in much larger scale. No more server-based teams, because, let’s face it, server-based match ups will never be even enough, at least not anytime soon. People will sign up for a WvW team with people they want to be on the same team with(such as their entire guilds, or some of their friends, or even just by themselves). Then the game will put them in one of the teams that has available spots, and try to make the numbers between teams as close as possible. All the other rules, like 3-sided fights and stuffs are not part of this change. (I will not try and come up with details of how the system would work, I’m sure there will be some issues with this idea and some solutions as well.)

This will probably not solve the other problems in the game type(such as ‘zerg it harder!’ mentality and such), it’s just an idea to improve the current imbalanced match ups. It will help both the worlds with long queue times by limiting the number of people who can be on one team, and also help with the less populated match ups, as it can merge low pop teams together to form a better sized team. No more ‘same match ups over and over’ vs. ‘random match ups got us screwed!’ problem as well.

I have to agree that the new Crown Pavilion map is a little disappointing. It looks nice and all, also the premise of doing something with the Great Collapse got me excited. However the actual content in it is pretty much a concentrated farming ground, which I thought Anet didn’t support too much. Nothing interesting or imaginative is happening there, just mobs after mobs, and it seems like they tried to conceal the monotonous design with a humongous wall of fat loot. (and they partly succeeded :P)

I liked the Queen’s Gauntlet though. It’s another one of those updates that actually is fun oriented(as opposed to reward oriented), and is very expandable. If they keep adding new bosses and gambits for this, it could end up being a huge branch of content itself. Too bad it’s only going to be available once a year. Being able to watch others fight is a nice touch as well. It would have been nice if the NPCs ressed you though. Just a nitpick.

Also, the point some people made about Living Story and Dynamic Event having two conflicting ideals is really interesting, and I think Anet really needs to think about it. On one side, monthly contents built with concentrated dev resources and bringing people together are really awesome, but on the other side, a whole world built to be savored in any way you want with slowly evolving contents is also really awesome, game-defining even. Too bad I can’t think of a nice way for both to coexist and work, or a way for thinly spread out updates like dynamic events addition to have more of a visible impact on each player. But it’s not like I’m an Anet employee, so oh well. More work for you guys! :P

I will try not to argue about if flipping is ‘evil’ or ‘helpful’, since people here will clearly not agree on one or the other. Not to mention finding it out will not really solve anything, it’s like that sick old argument of ‘is homosexuality ’natural’ or not?‘. It has been here, will be here, will simply not go away, and we will have to deal with it, no point in arguing over it.
Also, before anyone calls ’stop justifying yourself you filthy capitalist monster!’, I do not flip

The problem OP has is that ‘playing the TP is more effective than farming’, if I understand correctly.

The way I see it, the reason why flipping is more profitable than farming is simple. There are a lot of farmers and ‘regular’ players, but not as many power flippers.

Lot of people who don’t play the TP tend to want to just sell quick, buy quick, and forget about the whole mathematics mess, so they can get back to killing. They can sell to buy orders, or buy from sell listings, knowing that you are gonna lose a bit of coins. But they don’t care, they are willing to pay a little extra for the convenience. All these little bit of coins willingly spent adds up to a huge huge profit for the flippers, just because fewer people go through the trouble of collecting those piles of coins.

So, it just happens. Nothing you can do about it. Yeah, I know that feeling like you are forced to flip sucks, but it’s like how waking up early sucks, it will happen and you cannot blame a specific person for it. Okay that analogy was bad, but anyway. If there were more people interested in power flipping than playing other areas of the game, flipping would not have been as profitable i guess. (So the way to make flipping less effective is to actually….. encourage more people to flip? XD)

And I honestly do not see the big damage it does to the economy in any meaningful scale. Flippers can’t either accelerate inflation, nor arbitrarily set a price point where they please. They can only pull buy price and sell price closer to each other, only at a speed the community allows them to, which is going to eventually happen anyway.

Let’s just leave it be, it is reasonably easy to make enough money to get anything other than precursors anyway.

…..it suddenly started working now. That’s approximately 30 minutes after logging in.

I just logged on and said ‘helloo’ in guild chat, but it returned an error message saying ‘You are not in a guild’.

I opened the guild UI, and it shows me all the guilds I am in, so I’m not kicked or anything, but it does not show any of the members. The only thing showing up in the roster list is my name, marked as ‘offline’.

It seems like I’m not the only one with the issue. I asked in the guild’s voice comm, and couple other people said their guild chat isn’t working either. Can we get a fix or a solution for this?

nothing.7941:

No it’s not, not in the way you mean anyway.

Care to elaborate please?

Renxian.6982:

How it is meant to be played IS clearly communicated. It is clearly a jumping puzzle designed with a pvp aspect. Just because the sheep keep coming to the slaughter does not mean that there is confusion as to whether this is a slaughterhouse or a love-in.

It’s not ANET’s fault that the hug-bunnies are crying because they can’t get like…1 achievement point. There are 6 other jps that can be completed for the meta achievement. NO ONE HAS TO ENTER OS BY ANY MEANS.

It’s called an achievement because you earn it, not because you get it for existing. The entitlement is enraging. Especially since these scrubs don’t realize that while they can get the cool stuff without doing what they do not like, the pvpers cannot.

I personally do not camp the puzzle (I’ve only been in there once, although I did kill a bunch of poor saps in the puzzle after I finished. I didn’t get my hand held either, the other two servers were openly fighting mine when I did it. I killed my way to the end and killed my way back) but watching these people drown us all in tears is sure making me want to.

Sounds like you didn’t exactly get my point? Maybe I didn’t make it clear, I don’t know.

Blame PvE-ers all you want as if they are some kind of enemy faction of WvW players, and see if that helps anyone. The fact that this argument over OS is constantly happening and never reaching a mutual point of agreement, is the problem. Not figuring out whether PvE players or WvW players are the bad guys here. And Anet is responsible for improving this specific part of the game experience. It’s their job to make things enjoyable after all.

See if PvE players who never play PvP or WvW cries over not being able to get achievements and titles categorized in WvW or PvP section. I’ve personally never seen one. Yet we get so many players complaining about map completion or a couple LS achievements requiring WvW. Get my point? See the difference here? Whether or not they are entitled or not is not the point here. Neither whether or not they are wrong or not. The fact that this happened, has been happening and still is, is the important bit.

I don’t think it’s really constructive to drive the discussion towards the definition of ‘griefing’. Let’s talk about the actual problem.

What i see here is PvEers’ having bad experience, both in getting their living story achievements and in their first taste of WvW. And let’s face it, living story(and associated achievement hunt) is a PvE thing, or at least mostly received as one. Otherwise, ANet did something horribly wrong in either marketing them or composing their contents.

I don’t think the important part is whether Devon agrees with calling this ‘griefing’ or not, or what the intention was when designing Obsidian Sanctum. If your contents, designed to give players fun, are aggravating this many people(very consistently since release as well), something went wrong with your design. Are players just playing it wrong? Are they being wimps? Doesn’t really matter at the end of the day. If this many players don’t like it, if they are not having a good time, you did something wrong.

Why do players have to fight about how it was meant to be played? Shouldn’t those kind of stuffs be clearly communicated by the game itself? Why do we see so many people who let their enemies pass to ‘do the JP’ when it is a PvP zone? Why do we see so many people, even WvW and PvP players, hate on Obsidian Sanctum campers? Why does playing the game as devs intended causes finger pointing? Why is the map so inconsistent with the rest of the game, in that it brings people of conflicting goals and expectations into one place, promotes one-sided unfair fights, often followed by grudges and people calling each other ‘griefers’? Why was it frowned upon to do JP when there is a queue before? If this was to be a part of WvW, why was it split from EB? Why is my post so kitten long?

I just cannot fathom how all the competent people in ANet shipped this full package of confused design while the rest of the game is shimmering with all sorts of smarts. I am sure, for someone who worked hard enough to have a place in ANet office, there could have been smarter ways to do this.(both designing this map, and introducing WvW to Living Story crowd.)

This is coming from a WvW player, before anyone goes ‘go home pve-er!’ on me.

tl;dr – guys don’t fight, let’s blame anet instead!

I am experiencing unusually high pings too. Everything I do takes 0.7~2 seconds to happen, it never was this high. This is a constant lag, not a occasional spike.

ISP : KT

I have a 80 thief too, granted it’s not my main, but I never really considered thieves as a whole OP. But(two ’but’s! yay) I also have always believed that thieves need some serious design work.

They are really good at killing an unaware target in seconds, forcing a fight, running away when they are losing, trolling people with chain stealth, and other things generally involving being annoying, gimmicky, cheesy but not really useful in the end. (Not that all thieves play this way, but these are the things that generate so much hate towards thieves) Thieves are way too limited in the ways they can contribute, and the opponents are encouraged to ignore them however annoying they try to be.

That just doesn’t sound like a fun and deep game design to me.

I think in general thieves need less cheese and more options, and also an engaging counter-play to their opponents. (As vague and irresponsible as that sounds :P)

Also I have been chasing this elusive and mythical concept of ‘counter to stealth’, but nothing i found so far was reliable enough to be called a ‘counter’.(not to mention most of them are not the best examples of what designers call ‘elegant design’ feature) Sure, some things mildly works, but that generally involves either a thief being very low on health and on fire, or that thief not being that good to begin with.