Guild Wars 2

My feedback based on a night of playing pve and www:

1. Nerf the smokescale at your own peril, devs.

2. The healing output is pitiful compared to the damage output of champion event mobs.

3. Building up energy to switch to celestial form is clunky. When you need to heal, you need to heal. Celestial form should probably just a be a straight up toggle.

4. The #1 staff ability in celestial form is awful in mobile fights. Miss. Miss. Miss.

5. The #2 on staff, the wisp thing, is pretty slow and only seems to heal once. Kind of disappointing.

I think Jon Peter must have just forgotton about that nifty little warrior trait.

They won’t release a new tier of items. But what they will do, and what they said they would do way back when, is increase the level cap. And people will have to grind for new gear all over again.

1. I’d like to replace rapid fire with that charge up sniper snot from the Wintersday’s snow brawl. Just copy and paste it as is.

2. Lightning reflex clearing all immobilizing effects.

Here’s your answer:

JonPeters.5630:

As I stated, this change is a lot about low hanging fruit. The problem with ranger is things that are good we don’t want to overpower and the things that are not as good are difficult to change. For example:

• Skirmish and Wilderness line could probably swap half of their traits.
• Beastmastery has basically one generic trait per tier and just needs to be more generalized.
• both primary ranged weapons are a mix of single target and AoE.
• Both marksmanship and skirmish lines lack traits to enable power rangers.

Despite those problems rangers have some great builds in PvE, PvP, and WvW. The core problem is diversity but it just so happens that rangers are not setup in a way that makes it easy to improve that diversity problem.

They should be in wilderness survival, but there’s no time to actually swap them.

Have you considered that they don’t allow dueling because they don’t want people dueling, not because they can’t allow it? That it would just shine a spotlight on another unbalanced area of the game and create more drama?

Some builds are just stupid in one vs one situations, like P/D thieves and PU mesmers. People would be asking the devs to balance around dueling and they have enough trouble balancing team pvp, wvw, and pve.

Some things I’d like:

Better ways to defend siege camps. Maybe a palisade upgrade.

I’d like to be able to capture upgraded towers, keeps, and castles in the same state they are in just prior to the capture So keep existing upgrades, but don’t auto fix the walls and gates.

Put upgrades in the hands of players not npc workers, i.e. a group event to deliver boxes of armor/weapons from a supply camp to the tower to upgrade the guards.

Objectives should award points on capture as well as over time. Objectives should be weighted differently based on their distance from the home waypoint. Either more points for distant objectives to encourage aggressive play or less to encourage defense. Objectives should should be worth more points the longer it has gone between captures too, and none at all if it has recently (within 10 minutes) been captured to discourage flipping.

Waypoints need to go. Maps are too small as it is.

Server#2 needs stronger incentives to go after server #1 in a matchup. Right now it’s to their benefit to go after server #3 for easy points. In other words, the two weaker servers should go after the strongest server, but the way it works now is that the two stronger servers pick on the weakest.

I just want to say that I am pretty disgusted that here we are over a year from release and the balance team is still mostly padding out the patch notes with nothings. There are real problems with all classes and they require real fixes. This whole act changing tooltips and moving a few numbers here, like a kid playing with his vegetables, just to appear like they’ve been doing something every month is getting old.

Hire more people to work on the classes or replace them with better people.

As someone that plays GW2 on-again off-again, I can say I stop playing because I get bored. I get bored because the gameplay is shallow, repetitive, and most of all, it’s lonely. Go here, do this, collect 250 of that all by yourself in a crowd. GW2 is ironically the least social mmo that I’ve ever played. We play together, but we don’t really interact with each other. For the most part, the only direct interactions we have we other players are combo fields. And with all the flashy effects, who the hell can tell when that’s happening.

kRiza krimos.1637:

Same mechanics doesn’t apply same way in small scale and large scale encounters. Trying to think of a way to strip boon from entire zerg of 50+ ppl is silly. It means that in ZvZ both zergs would strip eachothers boon and were back to square one. What would be point of boons then anyway?

Boon stripping and stealing are mostly exclusive mechanics available to few classes, while boons are common thing for all classes. If you want to be able to strip boons from zergs get your own zerg with 20 mes/nec in it, there you go.

The point is that gw2 is balanced around counter play: you thrust, I parry. Mass boons have no effective counter but boons of your own. Then it becomes who can get the most boons to win, an escalation. Now its not you thrust, I parry; its we both stab each other and whoever stabs hardest wins.

Opc.4718:

Well stacked boons is a sign of an organised group, and it sounds like you’re getting wrecked by one of those. However, it’s not the boons that are wrecking you, it’s the fact that they are ORGANISED. An organised group will be running heavy bunker front-line classes (warrs and guardians) which will absorb all your ccs and damage with stability, protection and retal, and if flanked properly, split you up where you will be weaker. The peripheral players (ele, mes, necro) drops DPS and condis on top of you while you’re disoriented and cc’d, and then water field blast everyone back to full health.

What you’re trying to counter here isn’t the boons specifically, you’re trying to counter the organised group meta. You can do that with your own organised group, in which case it just becomes a game of who can manoeuvre better and take out the other group’s peripheral players first, while managing your own restacks and water heals. The idea is to NOT try and head butt your way through the heavy bunkers who WILL have a ton of boons and ccs.

To destroy those bunkers though, it’s a matter of kiting, and then “bombing” them at an appropriate moment with as many boon rips and condis as possible, and then immediately chucking a static field or some other form of aoe cc which will disable the majority of them, prevent a heal up, and allow a good chunk of raw DPS to get through.

tl;dr to counter an organised group, you actually need to be organised as well. They’re designed to wreck zergs who don’t know how to position themselves.

Yes, I agree 100% wholeheartedly that an organized group using sound tactics should prevail against a disorganized rabble. But the organized group already enjoys better communication, morale, cooperation and all of the ingredients you need to pull off crazy feints, flanks, and ambushes. When you further skew the fights with mass boon, it becomes a little much. I mean, Jon Peters wanted to add a boon hate trait that would increase outgoing damage to buffed up bunkers because boons were screwing up SvP balance. Instead he just nerfed Save Yourself and some other abilities (but not in WvW. Hnnnnnng..) And that is just 5v5 pvp. When it’s 50 v 50? Forget about it. You get the defense of a bunker guardian whilst being able to roll around as a dps monkey. So please, nobody say boons don’t matter that much. Because they do.

Support builds should have a role in WvWvW. If someone wants to build around sharing boons, I want to give them a hug. But if we’re going to have buff builds, we also need debuff builds. And we’re just not there. We need better boon removal options for big fights, and better condition uptime, too.

style.6173:

@OP. What? You are upset that a large group kills you. You really think you’d survive as solo against a large group even if they had no boons? Gameplay tip: Do not enjoy when it is 20 against 1.

When did I say I was solo?

I said no matter where I go, or what I do, sooner or later I end up getting steamrolled by a group with massive boons. I don’t roam solo 100% of the time in WvW. In fact, most of the time I’m in a group of 5-50+ people. But it’s just with random people usually, not a guild, so there isn’t always the coordinated boon generation meta going on. Sometimes there is. I’ll follow a guild blob, get all booned up myself, and steamroll other players. That will last for a while, but then commander/guild will log out leaving a total pug and we’ll roam around, try to take objectives, fight etc. But sooner or later, we’ll meet a boon stacking wrecking ball enemy force. At that point, we might have equal numbers, or even more people than them, but with the boons they’re immortal and we lose. It just all comes down to boons. And there’s no counter to boons but boons. That is my point. I’m not crying about getting 20 vs 1.

The question is, what is the counter to mass boons?

It used to be people would stack on one spot and warriors would shout the pain away. That got fixed. Now people run around in melee pain trains with literally all boons for the duration of the fight, whilst also mass cleansing conditions. But what is the counter to this? Bring your own boons? Boons countering boons? That’s..silly. That is counter play, that’s just escalation.

See, gw2 combat is about counters. If someone has high toughness, you can get around it with conditions. You can counter conditions with cleanses and higher vitality. You can counter vitality with spikey dps. If someone wants to go heavy damage, you can make yourself a bunker. At least that’s what the goal is. It doesn’t always work in practice.

Now with boons, what do you do? You strip them off. And that is working great for small fights, and borderline OP in 1v1s. But it just doesn’t work in mass blob fights. People share so many boons that you can’t strip them off with current skills.

So what is the counter?

alanis.6094:

Only allow combo’s to work while in combat.

That would be a good start.

Can we talk about boons in WvW? You know, people running around in a train with all the boons, all of the time. Is this working as intended?

It’s not fun getting obliterated in WvW, and it seems like no matter what I do, where I go, sooner or later I end up getting steamrolled by groups with perma 25 might stacks, stability, protection, vigor…well you get the idea. It seems like the blob with the best boon stacking wins the fight. I’m not sure if this is promoting organized play, or simply the stacking of boon sharing classes? To be honest, I don’t even fully understand how so many people are getting so many boons.

But rather than nerf boons, could we maybe have a counter? It seems easier to get boons than it is to remove them from your opponent. I know necros and mesmers have AE boon strippers, but they are pulse based and the enemy simply runs across the pulse ignoring all but 1 or 2 ticks. And even then, they just reapply whatever boon they lost.

Could we change the mesmer null field skill to strip a bunch of boons all at once instead of over 5 seconds?

Another problem is that to even craft celestial armor you need the recipes. The only sources for those recipes are the trading post or possibly a friend with extras in the bank. They sell for over 20g a pop in some cases. That is insane.

Perplexity runes will probably be nerfed soon. If your build relies on them, you might want to rethink it.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Perplexity-runes/page/2#post2994201

I just want to remind the WvWvW devs that the overlook (red) keep in the Eternal Battlegrounds is missing its burning oil and canon at the rear/secret entrance. I realize that these things are arguably useless, but since every other gate has at least 1 canon and a pot of burning oil, it’s only fair that this gate gets them, too.

Bigger and better map design would help with the blob problem. I would think that the counter to one giant horde is either an even bigger army or to break up into smaller groups and hit several places at once to force the horde to also split and defend. But maps are small and the home waypoint allow it to easily march to a besieged holding’s defense far better than a few siege engines on thin walls ever could.

But I think if we had bigger maps with more chokepoints, such as long and narrow bridges, it would mitigate the strength of the blob and encourage realms to split up their forces, because they couldn’t just roll from one end of the map to the other in less than a minute.

Everyone is talking about the haste nerf while the greatest troll nerf in the history of gw2 flys under the radar: pets will nowproperly preserve their cooldowns when stabled. It ’s like reaching for an empty gun in gunfight.

Why did you do it anet? Why?

They might be adding new gear to the honor badge vendors. So that’s something.

The realm rank abilities are pretty uninspired. But there’s probably only so much they can do without making new abilities that skew the battles too much. DAOC had some pretty crazy ones, like passive crowd control reduction, that were mandatory. If you were new and didn’t have them, it wasn’t a very pleasant experience…

Anet probably just wants to take it slow. I’m sure they’ll add more abilities later, and maybe even new class specific WvWvW utilities.

There must be 50 flame rams scattered around Jade Quarry’s keep in eternal battlegrounds right now. There was no point in building those there except to grief, and possibly to throw the match in a certain other realms favor.

I don’t see how someone can compare doing PvE stuff in WvWvW, like the jumping puzzle or harvesting, with intentional griefing.

The sun spirit may not have the internal cooldown, but I know the lightning spirit does. You can test this easily. Equip the spirit, attack something and you’ll get a 10 second swiftness buff. But no matter how many attacks you make after you get the buff, it will never refresh before it runs out.

edit: I just noticed this :

So there you go. All spirits have a 10 second recharge.

So I’m wondering just how much dps ranger pets provide compared to other class abilities. I can understand that rangers would take a personal dps hit because of the pets. But if you’re telling me that the combined dps of the ranger and the pet is about equal to the warrior before considering the warrior’s own f2 abilities, that kind of sucks. ’Cause, you know, 5 digit killshots are non trival.

I don’t think we have any pets with a defensive f2 ability yet anyway. Some have utility like regen and one of the cats gives might stacks, but none are purely defensive. So it would be a good area to explore that doesn’t threaten the use of current pets. Griffons with a f2 flying evade on a moderate cooldown would be super great awesome.

edit: we could add the whole griffon family and give each a different kind of evade + something unique. Like owl griffons could evade + chill near by enemies. Eagle griffons could evade + knockdown their target. Hawkeye griffons could evade + weaken, etc.

But if thats too much trouble, how about just swapping one of the whiptails current f2 attacks with its burrow ability?

Yes, I would like all of these pets added to the pet menu at some point. I just thought griffons would be ideal test in light of the Robert Hrouda thread where he said

“-A button that makes your pet momentarily not take damage. A sort of “Dodge” button for you to control. This is mainly due to us making sure players know how to use their dodge-roll or damage mitigation skills, which pets don’t have, and don’t always know how to escape properly when recalled without a direct pet swap. (NOTE: This is a springboard idea for pets being able to avoid damage)”

Because griffons already have a working dodge. It would just be a matter of hooking that up to f2 and playing around with the reuse timer. Could do the same thing with whiptails by switching around their burrow ability with their poison dart volley.

Better and easier to test it out with griffons before spending countless hours doing all new dodge animations for every other pet out there.

Anet is looking for solutions to pets getting smashed in dungeons, including implementing a pet dodge button. So I thought why not just give us griffons. Rangers want them as pets, their art is completed and they already have an innate evade ability.

Just make it their f2 ability the evade and put on a 1 second cooldown. They can’t do anything when evading so it’s not like a spamable evade would be op as long as NPCs drop their aggro when the pet evades like how stealth use to reset theif aggro.

I am so close to just uninstalling this game. I have given it six months. I’ve made gem purchases to show my support, even though there’s nothing really exciting to buy in the gemstore. But patch after patch and what have we seen? Chipping away at professions like it’s some kind of side project, after ancillary features like guild missions. Guild missions, alternative svp modes and new maps are fine, but not when the core of the game is rotten.

Every profession, not just rangers, suffer from bloated, cobbled together, senseless traits and mediocre utility skills. This whole, tinker with one or two things a month isn’t cutting it. At this rate, it’ll be years before things are worked out. I had thought that we would be seeing new skills and new weapons by this point.

Please, instead of developing new features, pull the dev team together and, over the next few months, focus on professions. Fix the fundamentals. Priority a-number 1.

It breaks down something like

120ish for signet of the wild
60-80ish for the food (I forget the exact amount)
30 for the dolyak set
250-300 for regen boon

Thats with 1000+ healing

To get 500 regen you need to stack the regen boon, the healing signet, regen food (for example peach pies), and 6 dolyak runes.

That will give you around 500 regen with 1000+ healing.

Pets will never be fixed. They would have to go back and redo the attack animations for every pet to let them attack on the move. That or they let them skate around, or increase their attack range to 10 meters or something like that, which they won’t do either. The best we can hope for is that future pets will have better animations.

There will be no presents left after the charr blow the little monster’s golemblimp out of the sky. It’s the only way to be sure.

You could do it via badges and the mystic forge, too. But since the devs want WvWvW to be a mix of PvE and PvP, I think an open dungeon like Darkness Falls would work. Sort of like the Jumping Puzzle in EB, but with monsters.

That would be one way to introduce ascended items into WvWvW.

Are there any questions being asked about class balance, improving traits, new weapons and skills? Seems like he’s answering the same questions about ascended gear over and over.

Ragman.1690:

The new infusion system, which will be released in tiers, means if you want to obtain a fully infusion equipped armor, which as stated in the blog post is necessary to experience later released content:

6 armor slots:

1 Precise Infusion as example (blue: +5 Precision, +5 Agony Resi):

250 Passion Fruit
100 Vicious Claw
1 Eldritch Scroll
20 Mystic Coin

1500 Passion Fruits
600 Vicious Claws
6 Eldritch Scrolls = 300 skill points
120 Mystic Coins = 120 daily achievements

If you want these for trinkets, rings, back too:

1500 Passion Fruits
600 Vicious Claws
6 Eldritch Scrolls = 300 skill points
120 Mystic Coins = 120 daily achievements

fully equipped that means:

3000 Passion Fruits
1200 Vicious Claws
12 Eldritch Scrolls = 600 skill points
240 Mystic Coins = 240 daily achievements

but only to the next released tier, which will be green I guess.

If that is not asia grind at it’s best, then I live in another reality than most other people. But wait, you can use the cash shop…without words.

The really horrible thing is that is only for one set of gear on one character. If you want to mix it up, change your build from conditions to power/crit or something else, you need a whole new set of gear. And god help you if you have alts…

That is just pure insanity.

I like this game, I want to like this game, but not that much.

I had a thought while killing the overgrown grub in the Eternal Battlegrounds. I thought, as I read off the bile and vitriol scrolling in my chat window, wouldn’t it be great if instead of killing this fat grub, we could beat it into submission and make it guard Durios for an hour. Like a giant guard grub?

And then I thought, instead of dumping silver and gold into upgrading keeps, why not have dynamic events to upgrade them instead? Want reinforcements for your tower? Then go and thin out the local wolf population a bit, and that’ll free up some npc guards. I’m sure the designers could think up some neat and logical events.

I’ve just been noticing that fewer and fewer people seem willing to spend their silver on upgrades, because they know it’ll just be wasted when the zerg comes to flip the tower in the middle of the night.

And people would be more amenable about killing the grub/arboreal spirit/mosquito horde if there were benefits beyond a few tokens.

WvWvW isn’t pvp, it’s RvR!

RvR is to pvp what war is to lasertag

or what warriors are to rangers

I don’t have 10, but how about

Marksmanship

• Signet of the Beastmaster has been removed. Active signet effects will now affect rangers and their pet by default.
• NEW Read the Wind – Increases the projectile speed of all arrows by 50%.

I wouldn’t expect anything until January. The team will be busy working on testing/implementing Christmas holiday stuff next month. After that, who knows.

Picking on Jon isn’t going to help. I think he’s doing a good job. But he clearly needs some minions to help him divide up the workload. Two people are working on class balance, and I’m thinking the other guy is probably Isaiah Cartwright, who does a little bit of everything. So, really, it’s probably just Jon doing the lion’s share of all the class balance work. It’s too much to ask of one guy at this point in the game’s life. Later on, sure. But right now Anet needs to hire some help or reassign some people to class/skill balance, and make it a priority until the bugs and trait lists are fixed up.

edit: and for the record, I really like the greatsword changes.

I’m not expecting much. I thought this was going to be a big balance patch, but it sounds like it’s more bug fixing with a side of buffs/nerfs. Now some classes, like the engineer, are hindered by nasty bugs. If they fix the bug that prevents them from getting stats from their weapons while carrying a bundle, that will be huge for them. But rangers? I look at the ranger bug sticky thread and I don’t see any panaceas waiting there. Ranger bugs are mostly incorrent tooltip displays and such. And those fixes, while appreciated, aren’t going to help rangers perform any better. Rangers need trait reworks, mobile pet attack animations, tweaks to weapon coefficients, better condition removal, utility skill buffs (spirits! shouts! signets!), etc. We don’t need bug fixing, we need design fixing.

But hopefully there will be some good stuff in the patch. Maybe they’ll make the signet of the beastmaster trait baseline.

Then again, it’ll probably be:

Rangers

• Increased the vitality of white raven.
• Increased the vitality of the black widow.
• Fixed the trait window to display the correct beastmastery pet attribute bonus.

Ditton.3149:

trion sucked hardcore at the beginning…it took a couple years for them to get it together and be the company they are now with their customers. Took them going FTP and forcing themselves to rely on customer support to make money.

But anet has been at this for 7 years already?

Probably the sword/warhorn for single target, and greatsword for blobs of badguys.

He lied. With rune of rage, a ranger can keep fury up for quite a while with weapon swap fury trait, warhorn buff, and rampage as one, but the thing is, ranger power/crit builds are relatively weak. In fact, I’d say the weakest of any profession. So he may keep fury up but top damage? Not happening.

You were trolled by some beastmaster or BM rangers. Probably because you never fought BM rangers before you didn’t realize that you could have shut them all down with one meteor strike. Bird pets are really, really squishy.

A few reasons:

• Ranger signets only affect the pet when activated, unless you have the grandmaster marksman trait. Again, active signets are of no benefit to the ranger. No other profession has to go 30 deep into a specific trait line to get basic access to their utility skills.

• Spirits. Terrible. Long reuse time, and they have the health of a mesmer clone and the mobility of an engineer turret. You can give them a little more life and make them mobile if you spec deep into nature trait line. But no one does. Because their buffs have a hidden cooldown of I believe 3 seconds. That means when someone procs the sun spirits burning buff, no one else can proc it again for 3 seconds. So only one person is really getting any benefit out of the spirit at a time, when you probably think everyone around you gets the buff. Nope.

• Shouts. Mostly bad. Guard gives the pet 10 seconds of protection and stealth and it’s on a short cooldown, so it’s better than what you might think by reading the tooltip. Sick ‘em? Does this actually do anything? I don’t notice any difference with or without it. Search and rescue, too long a cooldown and no control over who or what the pets revives. Maybe it revives your buddy, or maybe it revives some worthless npc guard. Protect me is nice if you use a bear pet, because the bear will usually survive and the loss of damage from the bear not attacking isn’t as noticable as it is from say a cat. Otherwise, most pets tend to die very quickly if you use protect me, which may or may not save your life, but it will leave your dps crippled.

• Traits. Every class has bad traits and broken traits. But I think only the ranger has randomly assigned traits. There’s condition damage traits in the critical damage line, dps traits in the healing line, pet traits everywhere, bloating up every line. It’s really quite the mess. And it makes it’s unnecessarily difficult to come up with working builds.

Cant free yourself from roots with a ranged weapon. A bug? Who knows

I remember they commented on it before and basically said while they don’t like it they can’t really fix it either right now. It would require a substantial rewrite to the game engine. Maybe someday they’ll add occlusion, but for now we’re stuck without it.

They should have put the trebs further back, at the top of the steps. They’re too easy to kill where they are now. But then, you can just walk passed them anyway. Arrow carts on top of the arena room are 1000x more annoying.

Thanks for the update. I’m confused about one thing though: I thought you already had some significant ranger changes in the works as of last week. Now it sounds like you’re just now adding a handful of fixes that will be ready by the 15th. Which is it?