Guild Wars 2

There is another stress test tomorrow – can we get some golem tests run and get some concrete info on whether there has been an actual damage nerf? If people are comparing rifle to longbow, that suggests something pretty freaky has gone on.

The rewards from investments may go down as well as up…..gotta be quick if you want to play the market and when things go sour, the skill of a good trader is to get that sale in before the losses go bad.

If anyone wanders away from the game and misses out due to these….well….you thems the breaks really.

Still waiting for a precursor drop and I have played since beta. Leaves a real bad feeling in my mouth, especially when others have had several in that time.

We actually had a conflict with our own linked server the other day. The commanders from the smaller, linked server refused to cooperate with our server, effectively meaning we had a split and non cooperative force on a borderland. Usually the smaller server falls into line with the larger, but it was only a matter of time before we ran into a smaller server with a strong identity and it has caused a lot of tension and ill feeling.

I have a lot of sympathy for their stance, as smaller linked servers are losing their identity and its about time one of them fought back and tried to keep it. Unfortunately it hurts our matchup and is not going down well for anyone.

Hmm, cant delete topic unfortunately. You make a good point that I had not realised – with the burst cap that would really make the idea sub optimal. NM, lets let this topic pass.

I can confirm this – if using a rifle with non standard firing sounds, it is either silent or messed up.

Deadeye is exactly what a thief should be – very high damage but highly dependent on a good setup and judging when to strike. Too many thieves have become sloppy and reliant on the daredevil style of endless evades to keep them alive.

I ran into some deadeyes in WvW with my ranger and it went about how I would expect. When I got the drop on them, I tore them to pieces, but when one of them got the drop on me, I had to run my rear off as I got rapidly torn to bits.

It’s a ranged assassin class and one that seems surprisingly well balanced in terms of its vulnerability and damage potential. I`m really looking forward to playing one, but it will always have a different style to longbow ranger and other typical range classes, much as it differs from evade spamming daredevil styles.

I think the way they are doing it sounds pretty fair. It cant be used to hop over walls as the enemy airspace kicks you off the glider and it will make the desert borderland actually work and be enjoyable (at last).

On the rare few occasions I end up there, I find myself wishing for a glider. Fall damage is a bigger threat than enemy action and regularly I end up looking at a location and having to puzzle out “just how can I actually get there?”.

I regularly get lost in the desert keeps too and once watched as an entire zerg tried to cross air keep and nearly fell to their deaths by turning a corner and somehow falling off a cliff while still inside.

Jski.6180:

Its one of the best BL now. Now only if they would update the older ones.

Its posts like this which have kept this terrible borderland around despite all the evidence that it is unwanted. The map is empty, to the point where it now unbalances whole matchups regarding whichever team is red (as nobody bothers to go there and the fighting stays on other maps).

The KD and activity ratios show that this map is avoided like the plague and yet people pop up whenever this is discussed to post about how they think its the holy grail.

Its not and its return was a catastrophically bad idea that has been shown to be such as the whole area is almost 24/7 empty.

Considering the amount of visual spam about, its a wonder anyone can see what a character model is doing. In many cases, the smaller avatars are actually easier to see than a honking great one with massive, elaborate armour and oversized weapons.

One of the world leaders is hanging on, between the border of life and death. An entire race may potentially die out, if she dies. She was once significant enough that she managed to hold a conference of the leaders of the free world when others said it could not be done. She also sings the GW2 theme song “fear not this night”.

Could be considered to be quite an important character.

This being the pale tree, who was put in a coma before the last expansion as part of that expansions living story and who is still, apparently, in a coma and nearly dead, but nobody actually cares enough about that to mention it in the living story. We may even go into the next expansion with her still in this situation.

Please, someone on the story team tell me that this is going to be resolved in some way without Sylvari and other concerned players having to wait till the next expac?

Will it even be resolved in the expac?

Very worried that this is just being forgotten or put at the back of the queue.

HazyDaisy.4107:

I can’t for the life of me figure out why Anet would be so confused about what a wvw player wants, I mean it’s not like we’ve been wishy washy with our requests :-p

Then: More zergs / MORE people to fight
Now: LESS zergs please / My guilds bag flew away….

Then: More Open field EPIC battles, less hiding behind walls and trebbing
Now: Rearrage DBL so we can treb Earth from NWT

Then: Give us a new map, ABL is boring, no one plays there
Now: Give us a new map, DBL is boring, no one plays there

Just because they attemped to give a new map doesn’t make it good. I, for one, would welcome a new map, just not one that has such catastrophic negatives as the desert one. Oddly, I would love desert border if we could use gliders in it, because its clearly designed with those in mind.

Arenanet has a history of trying to fix something in the most negative way possible. Just look over at the new “leather farm” and how well that is going at the moment for fixing the leather shortage issues. The intention is good but the execution is so bad that it makes the situation worse.

That’s often why the best thing they can do is actually remove the content they put in and I, for one, am endlessly frustrated that this should be the case. Cant we just get it right the first time?

Leather farm – Terrible.

Wrong sort of leather. Sniper mobs all over the rocks is a terrible idea. Map completion requires getting to the very heart of it, which is causing a lot of frustration.

It’s not a farm, its pointless and frustrating.

Ninski.5680:

Xca.9721:

SoloQ only and a separate 5 Q mode.

This please.

Yup, I think this is the best option. We need some sort of team mode and duo queue ends up being worse than all or none.

Yes, I too seem to get the string of numbers. A few are ok, but most seem garbled data.

This “leather farm” is another example of good intentions being soured by poor delivery. The leather it does give is largely of the worthless sort and the whole area is blanketed by aggressive, long range sniper type mobs perched on rocks.

I got critically hit by one of those for 5500 today and I`m loaded with toughness. I can only presume that someone with minimal toughness is going to be blasted for considerably more, probably fatally as its often the case that multiple sniper mobs are merrily shooting away.

Why isn’t is just an improved version of the lower area, where there are countless chunky packs of mobs that are all keen to jump into a massive melee rumble. That’s actually quite entertaining and could easily be tuned to require a group, or several players all fighting to try to keep the ground clear.

I can only assume its to try to counter bots. Unfortunately its going to counter everyone else as well. This “leather farm” is, like the new rifle legendary weapon, a colossal waste of everyones time.

No, the achievements are frozen and do not increase.

The system seems designed to destroy points and to drag everyone down. The more they play, the lower their ratings will be, even if they perform far beyond the average.

The only way to win is not to play.

Message I got from this was – if you need ectos, for gift of fortune say, then you better buy em quick.

The gender mismatch is somewhat troubling. The male one has this cool, glowy pattern on the chest and the female one….doesn’t. Why not put it on the back for female characters, or the arms?

It would be like having the crystal arbiter outfit and the female version….not actually having any crystals on it. Kindof misses the point of the thing.

Basically, they didn’t see it coming and the amount of burn damage was so high that they couldn’t react to it. It was 16 plus stacks of instant burning and the tick was truly staggering.

I think that the issue with burn guardians is that they work very well as a planned pair.

I ran into a pair of them a while back, queued up together and they shared a build that allowed them to slap massive amounts of burning down, instantly, on a called target. It was enough to kill me instantly and I`m a hefty, tanky necro that is used to surviving heavy focus. I died in about a second and a half.

Fortunately, I had the shout that shunts conditions onto enemies and I started watching for the burn stacks and immediately using it to give them right back. Sure enough, they started dropping instantly and I didn’t. However, that shout wasn’t available all the time and had I not had it, I would have been helpless.

Do I feel it needs nerfing? No. It is highly effective, but there are counters and counterplay to it. Its like a heavy rifle warrior or pistol thief, it gives up a fair bit and once you see it in action, its possible to act against it to the point where it becomes a liability to the user. Its also interesting in that it encourages teamplay and a team build, which should be fairly rewarded.

Nightshade.2570:

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Nightshade.2570:

I don’t understand, I have seen countless posts on here about how PvP does not get good enough rewards. How the rest of the game gets better gold and rewards, and how PvP players can’t afford and can’t get the materials they need to even make ascended armor.

So during seasons, they offer a chance at almost a full set of Ascended armor. I am lost as to why people would not be happy that finally PvP rewards are getting looked at.

Thank Goodness for Ascended rewards! They are NOT over the top they are appropriate.

It could be a mixture of PvE/WvW players complaining that PvP finally has decent access to to good of rewards and think that it shouldn’t since ermegherd sPvP don’t use stats!!!

This is just the reaction of the different gamemode communities clashing when specific gamemode get attention/love from the Devs, so soak it up now it may not last long buy up all the Ascended you can/need now!!!

Yeah I had noticed on the WvW forums they are suddenly calling for easier access to Ascended armor…

Well, not easier access….more just “access”. Also legendary backpack would be nice too.

I am having a personal game to count the number of legendary pvp wings I see per match in Silver. I`m seeing quite a few. There are a lot of terribads who aren’t from pve.

The gain amounts are pathetic and the loss reductions are huge. I`m actually seeing the standard of play rise as I bounce down the ranks….because so many average to good players are ending up with low scores just by virtue of having an average or slightly poor win loss ratio.

The way it is now, if you get an average ratio…..that means you fall to a below average rank.

Something desperately needs to be done. So many older recipes treated mystic coins as worthless and demanded them in hefty amounts. Now most of those recipes and items are unobtainable due to the daft coin price.

And it is only going to go up, up up unless someone makes changes.

Ele and dragonhunter riding high. Everyone else….not so much.

I want to see ventari healers getting some major love. Even just adjusting the way it applies healing power would be good. As it is, you can stack healing power and still get sub-par healing output compared to other healer types.

Maybe this is a direct attempt to push WvW players into Spvp.

Only justification I could see on this would be how incredibly cheap it is. Compare to, say, getting it from fractals.

Dragon.8762:

Played a few matches with Rev, its still really good. Time to kill, honestly was just slightly reduced. Staff 5 eh, I never used it for damage anyways. Mainly used it for cc on people trying to res downed team mates, stopping a stomp from happening, or another evade.

A full staff 5 burst takes around 20% of the enemies health if fully connected. Combined with weapon swap hyro sigil burst and equilibrium just from one legend swap still deals a ton of damage, and accomplished within the matter of 2 seconds.

If a fully connecting staff burst takes 20 percent of enemy health, that’s terrible.

The problem is that there are so many ice and fire themed sets in the game that they are having to add these odd flourishes to distinguish them.

Maybe next time avoid that theme and go for something else?

Reminds me of the Warcraft “jiggly dwarven boobs” nerf incident. Or perhaps Tracer’s bootygate.

Lets be proud of our posteriors and the art team that crafted them!

I think the message I took away from the patch was “we made staff for thieves….revenants shouldn’t be using it”.

Maybe this isn’t a nerf to revenant, its a nerf to skill and skilled players?

If revenant is seen as the tricky class to master and effective in the hands of a good player, perhaps this is an attempt to prune off the best players and make a level playing field for casual pvp?

Apparently a 50 percent reduction is only “slightly” lessening an ability’s damage.

GG arenanet on removing revenants from pvp as well as raiding. What actually are they meant to be used for again?

Precursor crafting is a system whereby you can pay more gold and use even more time on the process than before.

You are paying for inconvenience, basically.

I avoid desert border if I can, but tonight the group commander ordered us all to go there, so I thought “well, it cant be that bad, just this once”.

Just getting from our main keep to the air keep meant that we needed a diploma in navigation. We lost a third of the group just getting there. We then fought for about a minute and kicked out the intruders. After that we spent a good five minutes lost in the air keep trying to work out where the broken walls were.

And then, to really drive the point home, the commander told us all to move out in teamspeak and we all immediately almost fell to our deaths just trying to go towards the exit and finding that we had ended up over some massive drop. Luckily the commander saw it and stopped in time, but from his voice on teamspeak he was pretty shocked by this and it completely broke his train of concentration.

The enemy on this awful borderland is the terrain. It is confusing, full of twists and turns and contains massive drops, many of which are actually inside keeps and structures. Why is it that we can easily die just trying to navigate from one keep gate to another? This map was clearly made for gliders and so long as it doesn’t have them, it will just be a torturous experience to play on it. So we try very hard not to.

Well, the trend seems to be that we get one “silly” legendary of each type and one “serious” (like the flameseeker prophecies and shooshadoo, or the pistols etc).

Considering that we have not one, but two and a half “serious” greatswords, then its highly likely that our next greatsword will be silly.

I don’t mind, myself. We already have a lot more options as greatsword users, and a silly one may be a welcome option.

Exactly that, I am trying to find a “norn way” to continue the story. I find it a bit sad that only the Asura are allowed to find ways to defeat the elder dragons, especially when the mythology the norns are based on (Nordic), includes many examples of single heroes taking on monsters that are way beyond the ken of mortal men.

The current assumption is that, should the norns follow braham on a crusade, that they will all surely die. I feel that does them a great disservice. It also speaks poorly for the spirits of the wild. It is true that the Norns fled from Jormag once, but it may well be that the spirits, such as owl, had a greater plan in mind and that possible new nature spirits (Minotaur, Rabbit) and other factors could make the Norn into quite a fighting force. The potential that a consumed spirit has actually taken refuge inside the dragon after being swallowed means that there could be a norn hidden ace.

It would be nice if the norns and spirits were able to handle it.

Well, its about the future of the living story, with the battle against Jormag. As we cant just outright kill an elder dragon, we tend to rely on some sort of sneaky takedown method, ie trahearne’s backdoor, or other shenanigans.

My bet is that Owl and her release will be a significant part of the coming story. I mean, the dragon ate her and I can see her either being a frozen villain of some sort, waiting to be redeemed or perhaps lending us further assistance in the battle itself. Maybe we will start hearing the owl, or otherwise get some signs.

Regardless, if Jormag does die, in theory, the owl should just pop out, so it would make a lot of sense to introduce that element in the living story before it just happens.

So, the mighty spirit of Owl is apparently trapped inside the Elder Dragon of Ice. It got me thinking, is owl playing a long game and is waiting to asplode the dragon from the inside? Is Owl going to be our Trahearne for the next dragon fight, waiting to open a weak spot for us to exploit?

I give mad props to this awesome bird – its like that moment in “men in black” where the hero gets eaten only to blow up the confused giant bug. I always knew owls were awesome, but this, if it happens, would be pretty cool.

OriOri.8724:

Just making charged quartz tradeable would solve the problem of limited availability.

Yup, I would be happy with that too.

Don’t mind me, just setting out on the 30 day process of crafting a set of Celestial armour by charging some quartz.

We have this issue raised every so often and yet its still with us, for no apparent reason. Here is my hope that, perhaps, someone will notice this time and remove the daft time-sink that is an entire month of delay to make armour that is, apparently, far from overpowered or troublesome.

So, how about letting us make more than one charged quartz a day – pretty please anet?

Well, the problem was that raid content was the only content. Why would we still be doing guild missions when nobody needs the paltry rewards and the exercise lacks challenge or purpose? Guilds are about doing things together and raids should be about a group of people doing a thing together. That just didn’t work out, unfortunately. I would love for there to be a raid that was basically a ten man dungeon, but instead it wasn’t about a group, it was just about the difficulty.

We need social, group experiences in the game and raiding failed spectacularly to fill that slot.

One of the posters put above “just recognize that some content isn’t for you” and I think that is where the problem is to be found. I and a great many other players of GW2 did recognize that raids were not for us…..and that is why there are so few people doing them now.

Back when raids first came about, my guild quickly organised groups to do them. We were a large and diverse guild that had achieved a well developed guildhall and whose membership was a good range of new to older players, of varying levels of MMO experience. We soon encountered the vale guardian and worked out the strategy needed. We got a few “almost kills” and could see where the issues were (mistakes, poor communication, etc).

After a while it became clear that we needed to do some optimising. Anyone who had gear with a WvW focus was running with overly high levels of toughness, for example and certain classes, like strong healing druids or chronomancers, were notably necessary, as well as some dedicated tanks who had the skill and equipment to hold and move the vale guardian to the right spots. This immediately shook a few people loose and much of it was about gear. There were clearly people in the guild who had spare or alternative gear and there were others who had no such access….skill didn’t affect who fell in those categories, it was usually their game area of interest and how much luck they had had on drops. We lost high skill players at that point because they just didn’t meet the wealth curve to alter their equipment.

Then came the time issue and organisation. This shed a few other people, who just couldn’t afford to put in the time needed to cope with an evening of wipes and learning. There were also some people who didn’t out couldn’t use teamspeak and they went out pretty quickly too. It was soon the case that our guild could field a fairly workable raid group one or two nights a week and that was about it.

Time, attrition and slow loss of interest soon meant that our guild couldn’t do it anymore and our guild was pretty large. The elitism barriers went up fast and soon anyone wanting to learn was seen more as an obstacle. Serious raiding members of the guild spent their time outside the guild with their own kind, prizing success over the social ties that the guild had.

The upshot of it is that raiding was the last time our large, Heart of Thorns guild had a reason to chat to one another and an objective to try and achieve. Once we realised that this was beyond us, our entire guild fragmented and raid capable players broke away or were made to feel unwelcome by players who no longer felt kinship with them.

How would I have changed things? I would have made two changes. Firstly, there needed to be a much more forgiving initial raid encounter than the vale guardian was and it should have been much less of an exercise in tanking perfection. We very quickly had to force players into a strict tanking role and most of those with classes capable of doing that either had non suitable equipment or just didn’t enjoy either the pressure or the activity of it.

I would also have added a story mode, with minor or no rewards, just so people could do the raids in a “raid-lite” style. This would let them see the story, learn the mechanics and feel a part of things. As it was, the raids had a very quick roadblock barrier that far too many players were made to feel unwelcome at.

I like raids and I welcome their part in guildwars, but their implementation was a disaster and one that has dealt far too many guilds and social relationships in this game a deathblow and that damage desperately needs to be undone.

Its interesting to see that certain items are already vanishing in large amounts on the trading post. Bay leaves and vials of enchanted water are already being bought up in large amounts and reddit is speculating on if this is the sign, this time around, of some people with fore-knowledge of recipes in the fire isles content.

Similarly, there are reports of those useless slaying sigils (eg plus ten percent damage vs dredge) being snapped up.

It could be speculation, but a heck of a lot of bay leaves are moving – tens of thousands of them and that’s a lot of effort for a mere hunch.

We shouldn’t get junk boosters and other trash items from using a key. Change that and I think people would happily treat themselves to a few keys every so often.

Real money should give shinies….not sadness.

BrotherBelial.3094:

Stop bing a cheap skate, you want something open your wallet if you don’t want use your gold up. Don’t want to spend your gold or real money, get ready to do with out.

ANet need to get payed, you do not need a fair gem to gold ratio.

I think this would be the case if we just used gems for cosmetic items. Unfortunately, though, it costs gems to buy bag slots and those are not even shared across characters.

We really need some improvement to the way character bag slots work, as they are currently unaffordable to anyone who has even a slight interest in trying several characters.