Guild Wars 2

<<If you want to stick to the “100 words” version, just read the bolded text. The rest is for explanation.>>

First, the feel of the specs was fantastic overall, so much effort was put into them and it showed. Kudos!

I’ll limit constructive feedback to Firebrand and Deadeye, the two specs I played. I will only discuss mechanics that are “broken”, i.e., I won’t discuss tuning of damage or overall philosophy, which are open to debate. The focus here is on PvP exclusively.

Firebrand:
1. Tomes should be instant cast like Ele attunements. Right now it is not possible to use them reactively in a fight. At most, you can set one tome in advance of a fight, then stick to weapon swapping, unless you withdraw to “reset”.
2. Mantras have very short range cone skills and should be reworked. I feel a basic tradeoff between range/directionality was not appreciated here. You either have cones with longer range (600 or even 900), or AoE skills with short range (300), depending on the intended style of skill. Mantras are both, and are not very usable, either support or offensive. For example, blinds were very hard to apply to enemies and I would frequently see that my foe was not blinded, even though we were fighting in melee range.
3. Mantra casting is too slow. This forces you to not rely too heavily on mantras otherwise you will be spending a lot of time disengaging from a fight just to charge up your mantras.
3. Axe attack skills are too slow (and lazily designed as they are essentially mace animations). It seems obvious that axe 2 was a reworked mace 2, including the identical animation. Mace makes sense for it to be slow as it is a support weapon. Axe should be a fast weapon especially given the Firebrand theme. I feel a fraction of a second can be shaved off each AA swing. The best way to do this would be to remove the delay the blue energy axe animation appears after the physical swing of the player’s axe.
In general, the Firebrand lacks sustain in a fight not because of lack of defenses but simply because the choice of slow cast times for Mantras and Tomes (I’m not even talking about Tome cooldowns here) REQUIRING you to disengage from a fight which, since you lack effective disengage abilities, means in practice that you are at this point dead. For a spec that is supposed to be about offensive support, this is a bad design.

Deadeye
1. Marks should be instant cast like steal, there shouldn’t be a delay.
2. (Minor point) The Malice stacks UI should be reworked to be slightly more visible. I couldn’t see them at all at first and had to ask in map chat.
3. Basic movement skills like WASD and dodge should break you out of kneel. This is very important. The spec feels very clunky because of this. Not “clunky” in the sense of “oh my thief is slow”, which is not what this feels (and anyway this spec is not meant to be a quick and agile playstyle), but clunky in the sense that in the heat of battle, you EXPECT to be able to dodge to avoid something coming, but with the current mechanic you can’t just dodge. You have to do the extra keypress of release from kneel, then dodge. This is a fundamentally bad design. You must never allow a player’s expected movement action to fail or be stuck. An analogy: long casting skills can be broken out of by movement and dodging. If the Deadeye kneel mechanic was applied as a general principle in the game, then anyone casting anything would be forced to go through the animation before they could cancel. This would severely hamper the feel of fluid combat in the game.

As for its effectiveness in sPvP we shall see; Sindrener has very good points about Deadeye not being able to supplant Daredevil in the role of +1/decap in sPvP and doesn’t bring anything else to the table. As Sindrener (and others) have also pointed out, players learn quickly how to deal with a deadeye, and if you try any sneak & ambush shenanigans you get focussed down hard. I feel the overall design of the Deadeye is brilliant (and I was over the moon when I learned that thieves would finally get my most wished weapon set – rifle). But in practice, it is still a question of whether it will actually work (in sPvP).

At the Grenth task region in Siren’s Landing, when a ley-line scavenger is killed and the 4th skill (“Transfer Magic”) used to channel magic to Grenth’s reliquary, even though the skill bar is reverted to the normal equipped weapon skills, the backpiece on your character does not reappear, even when out of combat. You need to enter the Hero panel and uncheck and check again the visibility for the backpiece for it to show up again.

The new Living World Portal tome is a handy tool but once the Bitterfrost Frontier scroll is inserted into it, teleporting to the Bitterfrost Frontier no longer places you at the Sorrow’s Eclipse waypoint but rather at the very entrance to the zone at Koda’s Welcome waypoint.

Since this is the only LS3 map whose entrance location is not close to the unbound magic vendor and repair anvil, this behaviour change makes travel to Bitterfrost extremely inconvenient as a long trek needs to be made to the vendor, or the waypoint fee needs to be paid which previously was not the case.

Please revert the behaviour of the Bitterfrost Frontier porting to how it was prior to when the Living World Portal tome item was introduced.

With the new nerfs to LB (again) this meditrapper build is even less meta than it was before, and it wasn’t even meta in the first place. LB 2 is nerfed to the ground, LB 3 is very situational, and LB 4/5 are easily avoidable and merely gimmicks. LB 5 is in fact suicidal, as you are a sitting duck. As a guard myself, when I see another DH entering LB 5 this is the best time to spear them in and burst them down.

The symbolic build is much more powerful. Scepter/focus and sword/shield (or vice versa, sword/focus etc) give more sustain and more options. You see this trend in matches, even in ranked in last season. Very few effective LB use in ranked, much more scepter use, and to greater effect. It almost has the same range as LB (900 vs 1200), scepter 3 immob is deadly and can single-handedly win matchups to trap that almost dead ranger/thief/etc that was just about to escape, and scepter 1 punishes to great effect by stripping blocks and forcing enemies to engage when they’d prefer to stay at range. Mace+shield also gives great bunker potential and though situational and tricky to master, is nevertheless a much better option than LB.

Seteruss.4058:

Occasionally swaping longbow with sc/focus.

Just swap to it 100%, and reap the benefits.

Thanks for the suggestion. I will try this. Since I’ve experienced my second disconnect just an hour later, towards the end of ep5, something must be up, and perhaps ping plotter might reveal it. (Thanks for the tool suggestion – I hadn’t heard of it before!)

Since a few patches ago I’ve been regularly disconnected during the transition into maps, or out of PvP matches, etc. I just now got d/c’ed (“lost connection with server”) while in the middle of the Caudecus mission at the end of LS3 ep4. My desire to replay this mission at the moment has plummeted so I will have to do other things before I retry it.

The constant disconnecting now in the game is completely unacceptable. I don’t think there has been any acknowledgement on Anet’s part that this is even occurring.

So my suggestion here is that if the networking issue is too difficult to address, that a system of checkpointing is implemented instead, at least for instanced content. This would resolve so much frustration in the playerbase.

Abazigal.3679:

What can happen, as an extreme example, is that you had 1-9 in your placement and your friend had 9-1. You started at 1100 and your friend at 1400. Across the season, you both have the same amount of loses ( 50) and you have approx 30 more wins than him. If you assume one gets 10 points per win, then it makes the 300 points difference and you both end up having the same amount of points.

That’s a good explanation. If this is true, then the system is truly terrible, in that the first 10 placement games have more of an impact on rating than the next 90 games. It’s incredibly disproportionate.

There should be an “oops” factor in the rating adjustment if, after the 10 placement games, the system notices that you are performing very well for your placed division. And not this +10, +11, +12 increase in points only. In other words, there should be a “placement routine” always active, always ready to jump in and make larger adjustments as required.

Either that, or the placement shouldn’t affect your starting division that much at all, if it’s so much based on RNG (in terms of who you’re matched up during placement). Let people start out in a similar mid-range tier, and then they can float up or down as appropriate.

In any case, the system as it stands is massively broken – either in implementation or in DESIGN - to allow such discrepancies as I showed in OP.

Sivannie.2670:

Not everyone focuses in killing

Yeah you’re right, it’s not even about killing. It’s more about strategy. Heh, sorry, that was a silly suggestion on my part.

In any case, my second last point stands, how it is illogical for two people who face on average similarly skilled opponents – by virtue of both being in the same division – to still have the same rating even though one has a much higher win %.

Thanks for the replies! I understand, but it seems a bit circular let alone flimsy as a basis of a combat rating system. If I play against bronze and someone plays against plat, how do we know the plat is any good? His rating? But ahhh, his rating is also dependent on who he plays against, not his W/L ratio. So it’s basically whoever happens to get in plat, stays in plat, and vice versa.

Also, it still doesn’t make sense. If both of us are in silver 2, we should on average end up facing the same skilled opponents. BUT if over 100 games I have a much larger win % than my friend, whose win % is quite poor, how is it still possible to have a similar rating? Certainly they should be more divergent at that point.

And finally, if combat rating is a measure of your effectiveness or skill as a player, it should be based on how well you do objectively speaking, not relative to anyone else. Why isn’t it based on K/D ratio for instance?

Wow, my experiences echo those posted here. I’m glad it’s not just me (crazy win/lose streaks only). Good idea about setting firm rules for when to stop playing, kin korn karn. I will adopt those and see how it goes.

MrPinks.2015:

Today i had 4 matches vs legendary players and i am in gold tier …. And i get bronze tiers some times on my team.

How can you determine the ranking of the opposing teammates? As far as I know you have to be mutual friends to see them show up in your “Friends and Guilds” leaderboard. I’ve tried adding opponents as friends and they don’t show up there. And in a Conquest match the rank icons disappear, so you can’t tell just from looking at their nameplate.

I know this has been discussed and explained, but sorry, when you see something like this (attached), it makes zero sense.

How in the Mists can I have almost the same number of losses as my friend here, with more than 50% more wins, and yet have LOWER rating?

This, more than anything, demoralizes me from playing. I don’t mind being in perma silver 2, but this… it just feels insulting.

I started paying attention for the first time to my life counter when I fall off the raft into the rapids in SAB w2z1. I would expect you’d lose one life, but in fact I was losing TWO lives. I went from 5->3 and then again from 3->1.

This encounter is frustrating enough for this excessive loss to be unacceptable. It should be one life at most.

Reporting this as a bug.

Thanks, this is very helpful and explains how there can be a divergence at the beginning. But it seems that over time the system should learn enough to know that 51% win/loss should be higher ranked than 41% win/loss (using my example). Both players in this case have approx. 100 games each, so I am still very confused how we can have similar rankings.

Even if you look at the screenshot in that thread, the initial divergence starts getting smaller, and the x-axis only shows 10 games. I’d imagine after 20 or 30 if they both win/lose approx the same they’d have the same rating.

Maybe it’s an issue of the “soft” reset? I was in bronze last season, so perhaps my starting point was lower this season and it just takes more time to go up in ratings.

Hi all, I hopefully have just a quick question here for ranked play.

I’m confused how the rating system works. I see that I get an increase in rating per win, and decrease per loss. For strings of wins, the increases go down (e.g., +13, +13, +12). Same for strings of losses, their magnitude goes down (-14, -12).

So in theory, those players who have very high ratings should have a lot higher win/loss ratio than those who have lower ratings, right?

And there are such people, e.g., top ten have tremendous win/loss ratios. However if I look at my friends and guilds list only, I see people who are (e.g.) ranked in the 250s but with 57 wins/53 losses. This person in particular has 1,583 rating. I have 49 wins/46 losses, which is a similar ratio, and yet my rating is an abysmal 1,151.

On the other hand, one person in my friends list has slightly higher rating than me (1,160) and yet has 32 wins/45 losses, a very poor win/loss ratio compared to mine (41% vs 51%). How is it even remotely possible that this person is higher ranked than I? I know from talking to them that they’re in bronze tier, whereas I’m sitting in silver with two pips. It’s frankly ludicrous.

How is it possible for the ratings for similar win/loss ratios to be so different? Does something else happen to the rating increases/decreases depending on what division you’re in?

I can’t seem to find info on this other than some pseudocode on MMR on the wiki that is not helpful with this specific question.

In any case, it seems to me that this system is not fair, or at least arcane enough that it makes no sense to the player who is not aware of whatever intricacies it operates on.

Thanks!

I can understand both sides here, but the “lol warr op? you’re joking” responses are slightly myopic as they are thinking of very limited scenarios where it’s easy to beat a warrior, that does not happen very often at least in ranked. I have a short and a long explanation of what I mean.

Short version:

It’s quite telling to me that the most common response here is “oh just learn to dodge and block”. This is a tautological argument because you could say that for ANY class. “Just dodge and block” should theoretically win you any match up. The problem is that if that’s the ONLY thing you can say to beat warriors, then you have in fact just proven that warriors are OP.

Full version:

IMO this is more than just a case of dodging and blocking the headbutts and all the “lol why u didn’t block??” and “just kite lol git gud” responses miss the mark. Why? Because sPvP is not a pristine 1v1 environment. The issue becomes especially glaring in teamfights. You can’t just focus on aoe fields and ranged attackers but now also have to watch out for that warrior coming in unsuspectedly. If you don’t block them at just the right time, given all the rest of the chaos going on around you, then you are down…hard.

So, having to deal with such a high amount of spike damage with cc is indeed blockable/kiteable but the timing has to be >< just right, is what causes the problem here. It turns the outcomes into hugely divergent categories.

Either:
1) You support your teammate (e.g. being +1 on a 1v1 on point against a warr) and the warr is focussed on the teammate, who is taking the brunt of the attacks. All you have to do is wait out the 0 and then lay into them and they are gone. So easy! This is where the “warr op? lol what a joke” responses are coming from.

2) You have a straight-up 1v1 encounter. This is not too bad, but if you make an error then you are finished. This is the place where “l2p” can make the greatest gains. But only here. And this kind of situation doesn’t even happen that often. Instead, you get the following:

3) Teamfight with 3-4+ people in total. Warrior can cruise in and destroy you since you most likely have blown dodges, cc’s, and blocks on all the other stuff you’re dealing with. There is very little recourse here. Good luck even trying to run away.

4) The worst IMO is fighting 2 warriors. The funniest game I’ve been in a long time was when matched up against 2 warrs recently that stuck together the entire game. They just demolished everyone. You think you can carefully time and dodge/avoid one warrior’s endless chain of cc’s, massive damage, and invuls? Good luck doing that with his buddy right next to him as well.

So yes, I can see both sides here. I understand the “warr is op” point of view, and I get where the “lol git gud” point of view is also coming from. I just don’t think the latter are remembering very well how they’ve fared in all possible scenarios with warriors included. Or at least, haven’t had enough experience with warriors at high enough level play.

Lately, within the past couple of weeks or so, I am regularly disconnected at the end of events like stories, SAB zones, PvP matches, etc., and am booted to character select screen.

I hope it’s not my internet since I spend good money on it and it has never been a problem in the past, only lately. I haven’t kept notes but it may have started around the time of the last patch.

If you die while fighting assassins on the raft and need a continue, you get teleported to the room with bombs and closing barriers with Moto, except you’re still in motion from the raft and get bounced around a lot. When you settle down you’re way off to the side and can’t talk to Moto to use a continue. Then the barriers close and you reset to the hub.

Please terminate all velocity when entering continue room.

I’m in a strange situation and was wondering if anyone’s been in a similar boat and what worked for them. (This is PvE centric btw)

I have mained Thief in PvE since release, but started playing a Norn guardian last year and have steadily been playing that more. Now, however, I’m in a weird spot where I don’t feel fully committed to either as a “main”.

What I mean by “main” is the character I spend the most time with, gear up first, use for doing the first runs at LS content etc. I don’t mind having alts but I do feel like I need a character I most identify with. I also have charr warr and human mesmer but they are definitely only alts.

This is such a GW2 version of a “first world” problem, but it’s been nagging me more than I’d have liked.

How have others dealt with this? Ignore it? Flip a coin and just go with it? Thanks!

I opened this thread expecting a troll post from Lordrosicky ….but ended up agreeing with you on almost every point.

2) is especially spot on. The description I find best regarding this is that high level players end up “hoarding rank points”, they just accumulate and then sit on their characters and not play. It’s hilarious to see how few games some top ranked people actually play. A quick glance at the top 10 ranks show 60% of those players having a miniscule amount of total games.

ich.7086:

If you need to heal, use your signet of agility to get full endurance if not already the case, and you get a condi clear on top of that, to get full heal.

Can you explain this a bit? Are you saying the signet provides heal through some trait or something? Because I know of no such ability, so I must have either misunderstood or you may have meant something else. Only thing I can think of is that you meant to say to use the heal skill after condi cleanse to then get “full heal”, right?

And thanks for the advice… I generally find mesmers not a problem whatsoever as thief (mainly D/P) but it’s a good reminder to run Improvisation more often for that crazy stolen item that I love to get from mes. So juicy.

Yup. I main thief and even I abhor these constant evade builds.

They are a nuisance but not invincible. The key is to time your stuns/snares when the evade frames end. As a thief playing against these thieves, this is where skills like Impairing Daggers can come in handy.

Once you get them cc’ed you can apply burst pressure and they will die, or get sloppy and make mistakes and still die.

Vault and evade spammers are one trick ponies and pure troll builds. Hopefully they get patched out soon but until then, don’t let them stress you out too much, they are more a pest than an actual threat, especially condi evade.

Wait, what? Thief OP? You mean the class that has one viable and serious sPvP build?

Or are we confusing “OP” with “annoyance that I can’t just kitten stomp that thief that gets away”. That, in fact, is the class design. It would be like thief players complaining how many other classes can actually teamfight, so “nerf those classes”.

I’ll repeat the “rock says to nerf paper” thing everyone is saying, because it’s true.

As for mesmer, both as guard and thief I haven’t really been having many problems with them in ranked (up to gold). Frankly haven’t seen a lot of moa either. Mesmer to me today is just an annoyance with clones, but once you get to the real player, they are not particularly difficult to down. I probably haven’t seen any top tier mesmer players though, but then, how is this different from any other class?

Awesome build, thank you for developing and sharing it. I quite like the novel combination of sneak attack + focus on stealth AND pairing caltrops with bound. And with all that stealth, rending shade can truly shine. Tons of synergy there. Will give it a try.

Mushin.3928:

Thanks for the constructive feedback. I can see why the gw2 pvp player base is so very, very small.

I think they were being sarcastic.

But in seriousness, I understand your concern. I’m an unabashed PvE player dabbling in PvP, but oh boy, did this season pique my appetite. PvP is just an intrinsically fun game mode. It’s like any old school fighting game – the reward is the activity itself, the challenge. At best, keeping track of points or ratings is a bonus.

Aside from the ascended shards, you could also collect the various reward tracks. Maguuma and others can drop pretty awesome stuff, so it’s not like there aren’t any other rewards aside from ascended shards.

Frankly, even as a mostly PvE player I have to say that the idea of unlimited ascended shards for gear is not very appealing, because it dilutes the value of ascended gear in general. Why bother grinding or gathering mats at all when you can simply wait for a PvP season, play nonstop until you get all your gear, and you’re done forever?

On all counts, it makes sense that ascended shards are a limited reward, IMO. Just my $0.02.

Burjis.3087:

I have gotten lots of points in matches that I had my dead corpse carried by team players, and have lost lots of points in matches that we’ve lost despite my exceptional performance. A player’s climb or descend in the ladder doesn’t seem to be based on your performance.

Exactly. The current system is seriously kitten braindead.

I can’t believe no one at Anet realized the simple way to make this work and reward players for playing well: make loss/gain of points dependent on your own individual performance, NOT that of the team.

Otherwise, we get the kinds of experiences reported here and elsewhere. I just can’t believe Anet thought it would be a good idea to have your rating depend on a random assortment of teammates AND to not allow you to form full teams to counteract this.

It should be either full team formation capabilities and current ranking system. Or no teams and ranking dependent on individual performance only.

At this stage I don’t care about my rank because of this. I just want enough ascended glory shards to get those ascended gear. Any idea of a way to compare myself in PvP to others is irrelevant now to me.

Interesting build! Can you go over some of the points on how to use it? I’m a big sucker for sword on Thief so I would love to find a build using it that works. One question though… sure, sword 3 gives evade (though there is that initial delay where you’re vulnerable), but what about rooting opponents in place? This was always the difficulty with this setup for me when I was experimenting with it a year ago or so. How do you deal with this using this build?

Another idea (Straegen already hinted at in a way) is using Deadly Arts but with Mug, Panic Strike, and Executioner. That way if you can get them down to 50%, it will root them and you could then burst with sword 3 and then followup with steal or sword 2/cleave to close the gap again and finish with impact strike. But it seems vulnerable to stun breaks and general kittenery of opponents who (gasp) refuse to stay in one spot.

Basically I can’t help but feel extremely pessimistic about the viability of pistol whip, so any hints on your end are appreciated.

Huskyboy.1053:

It is far inferior to D/P in teamplay and it takes way too long to 1v1 somebody. And in fact many builds (any ele, meta scrapper, Meditrapper and symbolic DH, condi necro, condi mesmer, any warrior, condi rev, probably others) directly counter condi thief and cannot be beaten by it.

So I had an interesting experience related to this thread and thought back to it. I’ve played Thief for a long time but was dissatisfied with the class so switched to Guardian for the past few ranked seasons. I haven’t played in a while though and I haven’t nearly mastered Guardian yet, so take this with a grain of salt. But I just encountered a formidable condi evade thief earlier today that I simply could not beat.

We duelled 3 times throughout the match and I lost each time. Each match took a while, though, but not that long.

The thing is that meditrapper is not a direct counter to evade thief. At all. There are a few cc’s and they are all evadable. Spear of Justice and Chains of Light just whiff as they dodge. I didn’t know what else to do (was running S/F and Sw/Sh). Just kept seeing “Evaded” “evaded” “evaded” over and over. To say it was frustrating would be an understatement. I did not mash my keyboard but attempted to approach the challenge methodically.

Yes I know git gud but I wonder – as a power based build what can be done? I was thinking the only way I could counter this guy would have been to spec specifically for condi cleanse, condi delivery, and perhaps look for more cc’s elsewhere. But it speaks volumes IMO that I would even have to think about spec’ing JUST to counter condi evade thieves.

It was funny to see the counterpoint after I decided to stop duelling this guy. Next target was a ranger capping a point. He went down in seconds with my build. So the difference spoke volumes.

So in the end regarding OP’s point, I think condi evade thieves certainly have a place in most ranked play that is not super high level where everyone knows what they’re doing and are communicating together by voice chat. I agree condi evade is more nuisance than anything and I was downed more because I forced myself to duel with him rather than disengage. But I could probably have walked away too if I wanted. The point is that condi evade is a very effective harassment build that is great for +1 and also for mentally disrupting the opposing players since if they take the bait and are undisciplined they will exhaust themselves fighting the thief.

OP’s total dismissal is not warranted in my mind, although I can see where he’s coming from since a bad condi thief that is not playing objectives right and rotating their +1 will not be contributing much, just annoying people. But it’s not a kitten build and in the right hands (which does not take much skill really) it can be used very effectively perhaps.

Hm, interesting. Thanks. For my future reference I’ll try to remember “physical damage” = non-condition damage since it’s different from “physical skill”.

Hi all, I hopefully have a simple L2P question here. The trait Bounding Dodger states, “Physical damage is increased for a period of time after you dodge.” Given that this is a DD trait and that the DD specialization introduces a bunch of Physical class skills for Thief (Bandit’s defense, Fist flurry, etc), I assumed this meant damage for physical skills.

However, on the Metabattle page for the DD “Berserker Staff” fractal build (link here), the rotation includes always using Bounding Dodger first “for the modifier”. But as far as I can tell based on the above assumption, this is a wasted move since the damage would only go up for Physical skills, not staff and dagger skills/autoattacks.

Am I right here, and the Metabattle skill page is wrong? Or does Bounding Dodger proc increased damage for more than just the Physical class of skills?

To add $0.02 to this overgrown (har) topic.

I liked HoT thematically, visually, map design, story progression, etc. Basically most things except primarily (1) the difficulty and (2) the solo-ability (or lack thereof). It’s just impossible to play unless you go with a party (maybe this was by design – to enforce the “M” in Massively/Multiplayer).

Ultimately I had to follow the hero point trains in order to progress, which broke the immersion somewhat. It was hard to even traverse the map solo since many mobs would be devastatingly difficult. Kinda reminded me of the GW1 difficulty where you’d have to carefully and painstakingly pull one mob at a time otherwise it’d be a full party wipe…

Another issue with HoT, that is relevant to LS season 3 as well, is that the world explored in the expansion felt far less like a place I’d like to hang out in, which I get is by design since Mordremoth corrupted the jungle, but even the Itzel/Hylek/etc. don’t have very well fleshed out villages and stories, and don’t make me want to stay there and explore at all, unlike with pretty much the rest of Tyria. I think perhaps the lack of quest hearts, no little local story chains that add flavour, etc., contributed to this.

And if the new maps in LS 3 are any indication, this trend is set to continue. Getting a bit tired of running into godforsaken areas and fighting endless minions of dragons and dealing with cataclysmic world-ending crises (let alone being called the “Commander” forever). Where are the peoples and cultures of the world? Let’s see more intrigue with Kryta, and revisiting of established areas with some more NPC population in them!

Anyway I’m enjoying myself overall. Sorry for the longwinded post.

GinghamLion.3614:

Secondly, I hate so much that you want thieves to get greatswords – literally the furthest thing away from everything they do thematically

Aside from you needing to tone it down, I must begrudgingly agree with this, as much as I like greatswords (Unlike you, I was greatly disappointed that staff was the first specialization. They are just so boring).

I think perhaps OP is not realizing that Thief in GW2 is not the same as Assassin in GW1. Maybe if we were talking about GW1 a greatsword for an assassin class would make sense, but thieves are specifically designed in this game to be thematically stealthy, to sneak up on their foes. You can’t really do that with a greatsword.

Focus with shadow magic would be a fantastic addition, honestly I would prefer that over rifle/sniper as the second specialization.

WizardBro.4510:

… I do no damage. I am full zerk medi trapper. True shot was literally the only reliable damage.

Equip a GS. Setup some attacks with LB, teleport in and lay traps, and GS 2/4/3/5. With proper timing, you can wreck pretty well (excepting very skilled players, of course).

—A Satisfied Post-Patch Guard

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

It would be near impossible for any company to get all 8 professions performing roughly equally.

Absolutely agreed, I was just responding to the notion that somehow, mathematically, half of the professions must be “below average”, and that half must be “above average”. But nothing of the sort is the case. It is possible for multiple professions to be average or equally capable, though whether that is actually the case is entirely a different matter as you’ve outlined.

Obtena.7952:

Again, it’s simply statistics here so it’s not about ‘asking for it’. Half the classes are going to be below average. You’re just biased towards your more desirable one.

Wait, what? Whoever noticed that class “performance” (if this could be assessed using a single metric) had to take on unique values?

Nothing is stopping multiple professions from having the same average performance. You could have 8 classes be “average” and one above/below average, for instance. Again, we are talking about a specific performance metric (kill ratio, win ratio, what have you).

mrauls.6519:

This is the build I run. I hit legendary x3 in S2. If you need a screen shot feel free to ask for one…

I run a very similar build and still wreck in unranked after the new patch. Not much difference than pre-patch, frankly. Few professions scare me, and I even enter most 1v2 encounters without too much worry. The rotation is just that good, with cc and pulls to get 1+ enemies fried by the traps/GS AoE.

Revs are not that much of a challenge to this kind of DH build, on average. Of course, this is not talking about pro leagues or anything like that.

Really don’t understand the defeatist attitude in this thread.

Talonblaze.3175:

Honestly as a baseline warrior, not a fan of the change.
With the amount of blinds, blocks, dodges/evasions, invulnerable and reflects (in the case of rifle) going about still, landing hits solid is not all that easy and has been a sore spot for Warrior ever since the Cleansing Ire change.

So missing now not only nulls any damage, but now you can’t even recover with a bit of healing from adrenal health until you fire again with these new changes.

A nerf to its base healing would have been better in tandem with the buff.

Pretty much this. I think there are a couple of overall problems with Warriors that makes them fundamentally flawed.

1. Poor survivability. Anet tried to fix this with Adrenal Health but as noted, if you can’t hit anything, you can’t get the necessary adrenaline. And having a large HP pool doesn’t help if you also don’t have mobility yourself, which the Warrior routinely lacks, aside from equipping GS simply to use slot skills 3 and 5. With the availability of cc that each class has, the Warrior is spending too much of his time either chasing enemies, or trying to run away from enemies that have cc’ed him and are laying down bursts or condi damage. With the inevitable consequence that the Warrior utilities used are all related to stun breaks or cc (Head Butt, etc). Rarely for offense.

2. Inability to kill. This is both due to the difficulty of hitting anything, but also due to the sub-par damage offered by Warrior. Aside from burst and primal bursts (which if missed have sentenced the Warrior to a lost fight), the damage and effectiveness of most Warrior 1-5 slot weapons are simply sub-par. Warrior longbow is strictly inferior to DH longbow in every way, for instance. The other weapons just don’t have heft to them – either lacking in damage or in mobility. GS3 is a great burst skill, but keeps you immobile (compare to Guardian GS2), for instance. The end result is that once you blow all your slot skills on both weapon swaps, you’re left with autoattack and the enemy is still nowhere near death. Then you try to hit a burst skill and pray it connects. Compare this to many other professions that have massive AoE or mobile burst skills (thief, DH, ele, etc etc), and the Warrior pales in comparison.

What this all comes down to, I think, is that due to these little changes to professions here and there, the “blind powercreep” has resulted in an overall meta that has effectively made the basic Warrior design obsolete. And really, the small tweaks to traits like Adrenal Health will not change this basic fact.

Running my Warrior, I was barely staying alive in fights in unranked post-patch, and almost but not quite being able to down enemies. Most of the time was spent in trying to cc and avoiding cc, not doing any appreciable damage.

Compare this to DH. When I swap to this, it’s GG. The powerful bow attacks (True Shot is still a massive damage dealer even after the nerf); AoE (both bow and GS); powerful mobility with teleport (Judge’s Intervention) and Wings of Resolve (X2 if you also use Renewed Focus); crazy cc with being able to use GS 5 as well as Spear of Justice for pulling in enemies multiple times into your traps each fight. The end result was (still) faceroll for DH in most unranked encounters. The first match I queued with my DH after suffering with Warrior, I had downed 2 people at mid within seconds. The difference in power is simply unavoidable, and ridiculous. The same goes for the other powercreep professions – Mesmer and Necromancers at the very least.

TL;DR – small tweaks won’t change the fact that warriors are fundamentally outclassed and their design is fundamentally outdated. I think Anet needs to realize this eventually. And yet I’m incredibly surprised that they stated, “We’re generally happy with the offense and damage potential of the warrior” in the April 19th patch notes. :/

I’m still figuring out the class as I only started playing it recently but from my experience so far and reading about it I believe this defence comes from CC and blocks (staff + sword/shield) plus mobility e.g. from Shiro.

There’s probably a lot more to it, but in general sustain in this game is dependent on avoids and damage mitigation rather than flat out standing in one spot and soaking up damage and I doubt rev is any different

Hope someone with a lot more experience with rev can chime in.

Maybe not. There are “snipers” in vanilla GW2. Just think of the Charr guarding the Asura gates in the Black Citadel.

A lot of people already addressed the early criticism by oEnvy and shadowpass but I must say that saying things like “SA carried you” and “lucky last refuge” is pretty nonsensical. It’s not like they’re some cheap external factor. “Being carried” applies when other players carry you. You can’t be carried by skills you use. You just win using the skills you have.

“Lucky last refuge” is especially ludicrous. Last refuge is be definition meant to be used as a L-A-S-T R-E-F-U-GE. If you can’t pop it when in trouble and need some help, how are you “supposed” to use it that isn’t scrubby?

The bottom line here I think is that there is a difference between suggesting ways in which to improve gameplay (though in this case it wasn’t asked for), versus flat out knocking someone for not being “perfect”. As others pointed out, the critics themselves aren’t flawless in their own videos.

For me, I found it especially impressive how OP came so close to dying several times, but pulled fast ones just in time to get back into the fight. That last refuge where he hid in the corner was pretty impressive. Very good stuff. The results speak for themselves. Much more impressive than a “good” player who wins without being in danger, because that just shows his opponents were particularly bad.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

ArenaNet sure mentioned where the bottle neck is, but that is hard to believe when they expect at least 500 players going out on each other in a massive zerg vs zerg scenario. So either they are full of kitten into believing that their server can handle that many players or they are full of kitten into saying that the server CPU causes the bottle neck — take your pick. I simply choose to believe the former while you choose to believe the latter.

Isolated networking issues will always persist, which explains why you still see skill lag in the middle of the night. Your traffic was choking somewhere even prior to getting to Anet’s servers. This will not and cannot be fixed in a general way (until the day that all ISPs upgrade to gigabit+ speeds on all routes).

On the other hand, the server-side race condition was indeed a general problem that impacted a lot of players, and stopped impacting them once resolved (some even commented to that effect directly in that thread). You can rest assured that Anet monitors the results of these changes and will have been satisfied with the fix (or not – and then fix it again, but from the looks of it the server-side optimizations succeeded).

It’s getting ridiculous because were arguing something based on what they said, when in fact, both statements could be wrong and ArenaNet is full of kitten no matter what they say.

Actually, what they said pretty clearly favours the server-side issues being dominant, as do the technical considerations once you think about them.

As for Anet being full of kitten, they are actually quite competent people! You might find this GDC presentation interesting, it goes into some detail regarding all the complexities that go into optimizing the server architecture to make it scalable for lots of players:

http://www.above-the-garage.com/blog/2013/4/2/gdc-2013-talk-on-guild-wars-2-scalability.html

And going back to the original issue – making thief weapon swap based on initiative will most certainly not choke the servers.

(At this point I’m fine with agreeing to disagree.)

Can we go back to discussing whether Thief weapon swap should depend on initiative and not have a cooldown?

This is a very interesting suggestion and at first glance it seems “obvious” that it would be very congruent with the Thief playstyle, but I don’t think it would make that much of a difference. If the swap cost was not insignificant, it would still be penalizing to swap multiple times rapidly, thus rendering it very expensive to use whatever skill you’re trying to focus on your other weapon set.

I think a good way of going about this would be to think about a concrete example that shows how using initiative-based swap would make things better for Thieves without being OP.

I.e., what is the problem that initative-based weapon swap would be solving? Just the fact that weapon swap has a cooldown? But every class has that. What is it about the Thief that requires them to not have it? It has to be a bit more concrete than just “it’s totally the Thief’s style”, I think.

Let’s say weapon state was not preserved. Assume you have D/D (weapon set 1) and SB (weapon set 2). ~snip~

Um, no.

Seriously? I’m laughing pretty hard right now. You have nothing to say and nothing to stand on.

“But this is STILL saved on the client!” you continue to protest.

That’s what you think I said, but not what I said at all.

First, I am actually helping you by arguing for you, it’s a common tool in argumentation. I’m presenting the most obvious counter to my argument, and then addressing it. Second, yes it is. You are saying it’s saved on the client! You did it in the very same breath! Just a few lines up you said “weapon state does not need to be preserved on the server side because the client is already controlling with skills you have access to.” That means you’re saying the weapon state is stored on the client!

This is why saving the weapon swap state on the server is required.

This is getting ridiculous.

I argued very clearly and you didn’t address anything whatsoever. What is truly ridiculous about this, and this is a first that I’ve EVER seen, is a troll that not only doesn’t read properly the counterarguments, but fails to even understand what he is saying.

<snip>Anet dev Bill confirms this, remember: “most of what goes on in the game is processed on the server.”

Keyword: “most”

Yeah, most. Obviously things like whether you have opened up your main menu or not is not stored on the server. But weapon swap definitely is.

Thank you for your feedback.

What about the cooldowns? You totally ignored that part. Vincent, I’m sorry, I really only joined this thread to bring some light into the innards of programming to help with the discussion about server lag. I wasn’t trying to argue in the first place, yet you incredibly found a way to disagree with this. Why do you even feel like arguing? You are not a bad person if you are wrong. It’s ok to be wrong. Just… tone down your ego, man. And when dealing with a topic with which you have no training in and no sensible ideas, it’s best to not continue arguing.

EDIT: to be clear, I’ve seen your posts in this forum and you have good advice about being a Thief, so I’m obviously cool with you. It’s just about this issue… it really shouldn’t even be an argument!

Sir Vincent III.1286:

It is very clear that there are server issues, yes, but the dev never confirm that IT IS THE ONLY source of the players problem.

They acknowledge that they will fix their end, but it’s not a guarantee that your skill will not lag.

The network will be a wildcard no matter what. But it doesn’t create a general problem. In this case, a general skill lag problem was resolved due to server-side fixes.. Read the title of that thread again (if not the dev answers, which you totally ignored). “Official state of skill lag and server optimizations”.

You insist that it is server-side, yet your request travels thru a number of other servers within your network before it reaches their server.

(Ignoring your blooper about travel through “a number of other servers”… network traffic is relayed via switches, routers, and hubs – not ‘servers’)

The fact that it must go through the network does not mean the network is a problem. I already went over why it isn’t – you didn’t address any of it.

Your statement is logically unsound. Yes, the skill commands always go through the network, and they also are always entered by the keyboard. That doesn’t mean the skill lag problem is due to keyboards.

So which part of their post again where they mention with certainty that it is only a server-side issue?

I already quoted it. Go back and read it.

How does weapon swapping being a toggle in the database require multiple requests? It does not need to retrieve the current state. It just pushes the client state.

That comment is within the context of swapping without cooldown which will result in multiple requests.

Cherry-picking your own words?

Sir Vincent III.1286:

I don’t believe that the weapon swapping is toggle in the database, otherwise the client will send multiple request to query the database just to flip the switch. That’s even a much worst situation than we have now. Good thing that is not the case.

“the client will send multiple request to query the database just to flip the switch”
^^ I was addressing THAT.

Care to try again?

That doesn’t even prove anything. The client can easily send your current state as one request that updates the database when there’s no active connection.

If you find yourself “rubber-banding” back to where you were, that’s a proof that what you do is not happening on the server-side.

So you’re saying the game client communicates with the server (requiring a connection) when there isn’t a connection? (facepalm) And remember, we’re talking about weapon swap state being maintained on the server, which I am arguing for in the quote you are disagreeing with. Yet you say “one request that updates the database” in this context of weapon swaps, which is agreeing with me. Your argument is not even coherent. Do you even understand why you are disagreeing with me?

Rubber banding? Where does rubber banding come into play here? I am talking about preservation of weapon swap state independently of the client, thus indicating it is stored on the server (which you originally disagreed with).

It absolutely IS about the weapon swapping, remember?

cherry picking

Just stating it doesn’t make it so. For example, I showed above where you cherry picked your own words.

Care to elaborate on how it is cherry picking?

There is a huge difference between (1) loading weapon assets and (2) preserving weapon state. The two are entirely different. Yes, #1 makes sense to do when you load your character (however I highly doubt it has to be loaded when you enter a zone, it is loaded when you log on and then updated only when you actually equip weapons).

Um, no. The client is also loading other players’ skills within range of your character, so that when those players use their skills, you don’t have to load them individually. However, as more player gets within range, you start to lag because your client is trying to load all the additional players’ skills — this is where the main issue is in WvW.

What? Does each player have totally different skills? Only 8 professions’ worth of skills need to be loaded at once. What weapons and skills each player has is just a pointer to these assets that are loaded once. You are still confusing asset loading with state preservation.

Weapon state does not need to be preserved on the server side because the client is already controlling with skills you have access to.

Repeating yourself after I disproved you does not make your point legitimate again! Please address the individual statements I made because this is not good enough. If you want to argue, back your statements up. Especially if you’re just repeating old arguments. Otherwise you are just a troll.

(…continued…)

Because it was never about the weapon swap, it is about the skills made available when a weapon is swapped without cooldown.

Except that skills are immediately made available upon cooldown, this is how the game works. Why would an additional swap suddenly choke the server’s bandwidth? It’s just one additional bit of information. “Bit” meant in the technical sense, so assuming an 8-bit int as the smallest amount of information, i.e., Anet is not using bitwise operations which I seriously doubt, then weapon swap is literally one additional byte at most. Weapon-based skills are just a fraction of all of the data the client has to send to the server.

When dealing with large amounts of concurrent users accessing a single server, although bandwidth is a factor, it can be easily corrected for – just add a bigger pipe (and Anet did this, again it’s in that other thread). The biggest bottleneck by far is the server’s CPU. The problem is not getting the data to the server. The problem is processing that data simultaneously.

Ok, that’s it for addressing your direct responses to me. Now to address one other response you made in this thread (to someone else).

Sir Vincent III.1286:

You realize that swapping out of combat functions very differently while in combat, right?

Yes, there is a cooldown, but the game logic is otherwise the same. As far as the discussion is concerned (about this taxing the servers) it makes absolutely no difference if you swap weapons in or out of combat (as exhaustively discussed above). The whole point of having a cooldown is not to take it easy on the servers, it’s to prevent players from having too much of an intermixed weapon situation. Anet did not want players be able to mix and match at will skills between weapons because this would break game balance. There would be a particular combination of weapon skills between two sets that would always work better than any other for a class, and players would stick with that without varying. Anet designed each weapon set to work cohesively and be balanced, but only within that weapon set. This is why cooldowns exist. They force the player to work with the designed skills per weapon set, and not mix and match too much.

EDIT: ^ this was needed to point out to you because you have a wrong idea of why cooldowns exist, as evidenced in your comment:

Without cooldown, the client can easily bogged down the server with a massive queued skills. The 10 seconds cooldown allows the server to clear up the queue before accepting new requests.

That’s not why the weapon swap cooldown exist at all (like I said it’s for game balance issues). But treating the “bogging down” of the server aspect, aside from the technicalities discussed ad nauseam above (TL;DR the bottleneck is the server CPU not the bandwidth), you are completely forgetting that skills have individual cooldowns. There is no way to initiate that many skills, and even if there was ZERO cooldown, or infinite initiative for a Thief, there wouldn’t be a problem with choking the server because the bandwidth is not the issue. Another game programming aspect here is the concept of skill buffering. Even if you could activate many skills with zero cooldowns, it does not even make sense from a game point of view to activate them all at once or even to keep them all in a buffer, because say you mash 10 skills one after the other in rapid succession. By the time you’re in the middle of the chain of skill execution there, the goings on in the game will have changed so much that it won’t make sense to be executing any more of those skills you pressed earlier, and you will be trying to enter new commands that will not be executed because they’re so backlogged in the buffer. The experience this would be from the player’s perspective is that your character is “stuck” in executing these other skills and is not responding to your current commands. This is why a very short buffer actually exists, maybe 1 or 2 seconds long at most, enough to keep track of only the very next skill you tried to execute and nothing beyond that.

(continued)

It’s not about the weapon swapping that will cause the problem, it is the request of all skills placed in the queue to be executed. Without cooldown, the client can easily bogged down the server with a massive queued skills. The 10 seconds cooldown allows the server to clear up the queue before accepting new requests.

It absolutely IS about the weapon swapping, remember?

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Kurow.3076:

Thieves really should have no c/d on their weapon swap.

Short Answer: The game cannot handle it.

Moving on…

— CS grad with some networking & OS kernel programming experience (usually not needed but everyone is a little uppity about each other’s credentials on this thread, so…)

Yes it is not needed,..

Well clearly education and expertise counts for nothing on the internet when random opinions can be offered as a legitimate counter-argument (hint: they’re still just opinions, and usually wrong).

… especially stating that the weapon swapping is switch in the database without realizing that each swap will create a query, which adds up to the server load, just to flip a switch — when a more feasible and logical approach is to conduct a single query and load all data into the Memory. This is why GW2 has a long loading time from zone to zone.

No, you’re confusing two separate issues. (I’m very tempted to ask you if you have any programming experience, but it’s actually irrelevant since your argument is still incorrect.)

There is a huge difference between (1) loading weapon assets and (2) preserving weapon state. The two are entirely different. Yes, #1 makes sense to do when you load your character (however I highly doubt it has to be loaded when you enter a zone, it is loaded when you log on and then updated only when you actually equip weapons). Nevertheless, it does not obviate the need for #2. It’s a design decision. Anet wanted weapon swaps to be preserved across game sessions and zones. Why? Because you would have a bad and unpolished gaming experience if you didn’t. Here’s a demonstration.

Let’s say weapon state was not preserved. Assume you have D/D (weapon set 1) and SB (weapon set 2). Assume the server does not keep track of which weapon set is currently equipped. Then, when you enter another zone, how does the server know which weapon set to load? It doesn’t keep track, so it just assigns weapon set 1. So then you have the experience that if you are using SB and transition to another zone, you’ll suddenly find that D/D is equipped, which is jarring and a bug. “But this is kept track on the client!” you say. Not so. Assume it is, and you have SB. Then you transition, but your game client crashes (sadly can happen especially e.g. using the Mac Beta client), or the connection is dropped and you have to reconnect. When you do, the server has to update your client as to the state your character was in. If it doesn’t tell the client what the weapon set currently equipped was, you’ll be back to weapon set 1 and the D/D, which is not what you had before you crashed/dropped.

“But this is STILL saved on the client!” you continue to protest. Not so. Assume you uninstall and reinstall the game, or you connect on another computer. The server needs to keep track of what your current weapon set was, otherwise you’ll get the wrong one. And it really matters to the gameplay. Let’s say you keep a single weapon set 95% of the time, like D/D, and only swap to SB in particular situations (heavy mob and have to use SB 3 a lot, etc.) If you normally use one weapon set but then get strangely swapped to another in between game transitions, you’ll start using a D/D skill but it’ll be the unexpected SB one (or vice versa). This is breaking the gameplay experience and is a bug.

This is why saving the weapon swap state on the server is required.

See, as a game programmer, when you get to the nitty gritty of server-client architectures, the server has to keep track of all or most of the client state in order to preserve the user’s experience regardless of the client. Anet cannot guarantee that the client will maintain its state across logins – the user has full control over their system and can fiddle with it (yes and this opens the possibility to exploits – another reason to keep track of everything server-side). Everything pertaining to the game logic has to be maintained on the server. Anet dev Bill confirms this, remember: “most of what goes on in the game is processed on the server.”

Wow, I honestly didn’t expect you to become so confrontational, Vincent! (edit: because what I wrote was not really up to debate, it was just stating what the issues in client-server communication can possibly be from a technical standpoint)

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Do you ever have a skill on your skill bar that continues to pulse as if you have pressed it? This is your client waiting for the server data to tell it that the command has been executed, but for some reason that packet of data was lost.

This is irrelevant. I’ll address it very briefly. Sure, that happens all right, and when it does, everything else is non-responsive. That’s when all packets are being dropped between the server and client. But that’s not the skill lag being discussed. Sorry, this is a non sequitur. Like I said, and like Arena.net dev BillFreist has confirmed, it’s a server-side processing problem:

BillFreist.1527:

As far as skills just not executing (noticed some people claiming utilities are more susceptible to this), its mostly just a race-condition as far as processing on the server. You’ll notice that your auto-attack skill seems to process more reliably than other skills. This is mostly due to the fact that we process things like auto-attack timers before player input. Obviously that sounds like a bug (and honestly now that I think about it, I want to look into doing something about it), but the reality is that under normal circumstances, the player input would process before the auto-attack timer triggers. Something you can try to verify this is disabling your auto-attack and see if your other skills become more responsive.

You continue:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

The skill lag being discussed is to determine whether it is client-side, server-side, or the network that was causing it. Nobody is saying with certainty that it is server-side.

On the contrary, Arena.net devs are saying with certainty that it is server-side (added emphasis below):

BillFreist.1527:

Part 1:

To clarify some common questions:

• What does optimization mean in terms of the original post?
  …
  • Though server CPU usage is the biggest factor here, there are other optimizations as part of the changes going on. Bandwidth is another thing that plagues players with slower internet connections. That is something that we’re actively rolling out changes for, with the next set of changes coming at the end of October.
  • Removes the bottleneck in almost all of the game systems. Most of what goes on in the game is processed on the server, including combat, skills and movement. When this bottleneck is relieved, the changes will pretty much speak for themselves. A common example goes back to skill usage where in heavy battles, you press and skill key, but that skill never fires or your auto-attack skill fires instead.

What may be confusing for you here is the conflation of “latency” and “lag” with network slowdown/bandwidth or server-client communication issues. In computer science, latency is the delay between the execution of an action broadly construed (CPU instruction, network packet sending, initiation of task scheduling) and the desired end result. Network latency or lag is but one type of “latency”. But just because the discussion is about “skill lag”, this does not at all mean that it is de facto a network problem. As we can see, Anet does not have a bandwidth issue. It is surely a server-side issue because there are a limited amount of threads on the server to handle all of the players in a single instance.

I don’t believe that the weapon swapping is toggle in the database, otherwise the client will send multiple request to query the database just to flip the switch. That’s even a much worst situation than we have now. Good thing that is not the case.

How does weapon swapping being a toggle in the database require multiple requests? It does not need to retrieve the current state. It just pushes the client state.

All the skills are instead loaded into the Memory, making a single query whenever we enter a zone. So the weapon swapping is happening on the client side, but as far as the server is concerned, we have all 10 weapon skills available and only using 5 of them at a time.

No, it happens on the server. Test it for yourself (I just did). Load the game with one weapon set. Then swap sets and quit the game entirely. Load it again. The second set that you swapped to will be set as your main set. Even if you uninstalled and reinstalled, the weapon swap will persist.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

The fact is, it is a lingering problem in the game when there are too many players sending skills request at the same time.

<snip>

Here, educate yourself

Vincent, to be fair, that page discusses skill lag as a server-side problem due to the high number of players in WvW. This creates a race condition when executing skills on the server, and some skills will not even execute as a result (a race condition occurs when the ordering of the results of two or more processes is highly contingent on the smallest of time delays between them, so the output is unpredictable and can give rise to undesirable consequences). The “skill lag” discussed is purely server-side and has nothing to do with network communication, but is rather (I presume) due to the way the skill execution queues are implemented in the code.

Swapping weapon sets can be thought of as an atomic (or unitary) command – there is no need to send a lot of data to the server, just the command that “weapon swap has taken place”. The client and server can then simultaneously perform the requisite game logic (in fact, the server does not implement all of the details of the client because of lack of a graphical environment – a toggle in the database is simply flipped).

Accordingly, whether a weapon swap happens every few seconds or every second, should not in theory impact the communication between server and client any more than other atomic commands like executing skills. There shouldn’t be anything particularly “heavy” about swapping weapons, from the server’s perspective.

— CS grad with some networking & OS kernel programming experience (usually not needed but everyone is a little uppity about each other’s credentials on this thread, so…)

EDIT: to be clear, I’m certainly not claiming that I know the ins and outs of the GW2 code, only that from a general perspective of server-client programming, I don’t see why weapon swaps should be any more demanding than other commands. This is contingent on design decisions on Anet’s part, of course.

It’s been many months and I’ve had a surge of interest in this game again after the expansion details & rumours (OMG rifle thief…dream come true).

The thing is… last time I checked back in to try my hand at LS, I got stuck at The Dragon’s Reach: Part 2, “Recalibrating the Waypoints”, and the horrid Mordrem leyleecher boss.

I’m running full zerker build with 2/6/2/4/0 and finding it really, really hard to solo this boss. Now, I am not sure as to how to proceed and would deeply appreciate some advice!

- Should I switch from power/precision type builds to condition damage instead, and trait heavily into Shadow Arts for condition removal as well as full Dire (or Carrion) gear?
- Or should I stick with power/precision and just increase vitality or toughness (Knight/Valkyrie) and/or trait into Shadow Arts for condition removal?
- Do a mix thereof or something else?

Basically, I’m not sure if I need to change up my playstyle considerably – especially to avoid the mordrem tentacles and whatnot, so that would seem to encourage SB or D/D condi damage and constant moving (no more S/P brute force that’s for sure).

Or can I stick with power/precision based builds (my preference…I’m not a fan of condi) and compensate in some other way? Toughness/vit/removal etc?

In general, I feel pretty lost with the new meta and all the changes that have happened. It seems like the same game as before … but is also vastly different in subtle ways.

Thank you in advance!

I would chime in here for Thiefs in PvE. Get a good 1H sword with pistol offhand and press “3” from beginning to end in PvE. GG.

Hello,

The quest to Help the Vigil disrupt the Sons of Svanir presence in Frostgorge Sound seems to be bugged or stuck at the Coiled Watch poi. The green quest indicator is displayed above Fenris’s head, and when talking to him he says the plan is to defend the area from the Sons of Svanir, but no one is attacking.

Several players have been standing in this area for the better part of an hour with no change in NPC behaviour.

Obviously, none of us can continue with our Living Story until this is resolved.

Any help or insights? Thanks!