Guild Wars 2

Upgrading to the Intel486 DX servers really seemed to help.

Remove. The. Godkitten . AOE. Cap.

It is such an unbelievably large skill crutch for 95% of the wvw population right now.

Yes, you’re right actually. What is true though is that unless you are continuously attacking for the duration of the fight, the damage output benefit will be less than 10%. Also as you edited above, it’s on average. It’s hard to quantify the exact benefit without making a bunch of assumptions.

Either way, in most situations I would speculate it provides less of an average damage buff than even some of the lower-level traits that increase damage of weapons based on certain conditions AND reduce cooldowns of said weapons, or traits such as DotE. These all being averages, of course.

The overall point though is that I don’t think the inherent benefit of having the 10% increased attack speed and devoting 30 points in arms is worth sacrificing whatever else is currently being built for mace offhands (and axe offhands are borderline non-viable right now). Sword offhand condi-specs may see benefit from it, but only because they may be 30 in arms anyway for sigil of earth procs and bleeds from crits via precise strikes minor trait + Attack of Opportunity minor trait synergy, and don’t see huge benefit from furious currently.

For non-PvE (because anything is viable in PvE):

More than half the damage from rifle comes from volley by itself, in addition to autoattacks, so using the new strength line trait and going tanky will still sacrifice a lot of damage potential that rifle currently has.

Furthermore, you would get more mileage by going 30 in disc and slapping on a new sigil of intelligence for the guaranteed crit on weapon swap + 2 more crits following the burst skill use.

If you’re running rifle your main damage mitigation should be based on kiting with help from GS, not facetanking damage. You have the range with rifle to force people to overextend in trying to kill you…take advantage of it by kiting away and forcing them to either further extend into your teammates to try and damage you in melee or range, or attempt to disengage and take damage from your ranged rifle damage as they do so (usually with volley as you pursue them to keep them in range).

I would not advocate using the new trait with rifle based on the currently-available information.

(con’t)
Defense: Rousing Resilience – Gain toughness when you break out of a stun. The amount of toughness gained is up to 1000, based on your level and lasts for 4 seconds.

1) If this ONLY applies to stuns and not other forms of CC such as dazes, fears, knockdowns, blowouts, etc. then it is not likely a good choice. You could possibly use it in lieu of EP for a 2nd stability (both balanced stance and dolyak signet) as a sort of poor man’s invuln, relying on the increase in toughness to act as your damage mitigating factor while gaining the benefit of stability.
2) Also realize the diminishing returns on toughness. A warrior who is going 30 in defense will already have relatively high toughness, and an extra 1000 toughness, although seems good on paper, provides only protection-boon equivalent damage mitigation for 4 seconds. For a grandmaster trait…
3) The fact you have to actually get stunned first is a big turn-off for me. Often times I use my stun breakers “preemptively” in fights (especially dolyak sig or balanced stance) to provide stab BEFORE I initiate a big hit, largely because even in the split second it takes to react to being stunned by popping the appropriate stunbreaker, I’ve already taken large damage. Furthermore, if I’m channeling an ability like 100b on a downed clump in wvw, I certainly DONT want to get interrupted/stunned while doing it. Using preemptive stability/stunbreakers to accomplish large damage/initiations negates the use of this trait.
4) NOTE: This trait would be much improved if the 1000 toughness was applied simply by USING a stunbreaker. This would solve both the issue of the skill not being applied in cases of CC use that are not classified strictly as a “stun” while also allowing you to use it per-emptively upon initiating into a large group of enemies.

Tactics: Phalanx Strength – When you grant yourself might, grant it to nearby allies as well. 6s of might is granted each time this trait triggers. (It works with blast finishers)

1) If this trait does not have an ICD it actually has a chance to be relatively powerful when mixed into large groups of players (i.e. blobs and zergs). It would allow a group to upkeep 25 or near 25 stacks of might throughout a fight simply by stacking a few phalanx wars who are blasting fields and casting FGJ on traited shortened CD. Do not underestimate the utility of this skill when mixed into larger groups. If anything, I think this trait has the potential to be the most gamechanging of all the new traits for war, especially with the potential of boon-duration and might-duration increasing runes, but we need to wait and see on the details before we can really evaluate this trait.

Discipline: Brawler’s Recovery – Remove blindness when you swap weapons.
1) As discussed above, has some synergy with weapon swapping into burst or other high-damage skills, especially with sigil of intel procs. Whether it is worth taking over burst mastery or heightened focus (the latter of course assuming no sigil of intel on weapons) remains to be seen, based on rune/sigil changes and any other balancing changes that may occur. Having a grandmaster trait that removes one blind on weapon swap seems a bit weak, considering how quickly blinds can be re-applied especially in melee, and I would suggest a temporary blind immunity be attached to this trait (i.e. Remove blindness when you swap weapons and prevents you from being blinded for 2 seconds). This would allow for weapon swaps out of GS or sword/x into things like earthshakers, even into blind fields, while allowing you to hold onto berserker’s stance CD, making it a very powerful grandmaster trait. Opposing players would still have all their other methods of damage mitigation to counter the telegraphed burst, such as dodges, evades, invulns, teleports, etc, maintaining its balance.

Steelo.4597:

Didn’t know there is something like an effective rifle warrior build tbh.

There is, but it is much more synergistic with a coordinated team that can cover for some of its weaknesses like vulnerability to either CC chain or condi bombing (i.e. pocket support providing secondary stab or condi cleanse).

In that case it is an extremely useful build for applying extraordinary pressure on single (or multiple targets with crack shot) at range.

My opinions for wvw:

Disclaimer: Considering that Anet had stated that pretty much every sigil and rune in the game is getting an overhaul, speculating on specific builds given that the entire game might change based on these rune and sigil changes seems a bit pointless at this stage. Nevertheless…

Strength: Burst Precision – Burst skills have an increased chance to critically hit ( Chance: 100%)

Obviously some possible use in creating hugely bunker builds that rely heavily on burst damage. Eviscerate and Hammer earthshaker come to immediate mind. Rifle killshot seems good in theory but at least half damage and most utility-burning/dodge-burning use of rifle comes from volley (volley with 100% crit chance and 120%+ crit damage with high power will hit for upwards of 11-12k, as much as the killshot…it also tracks stealthed targets, penetrates with crack shot, triggers on-crit sigils and has a very low CD). Simply volleying a target has huge utility because it forces the target to use defensive CDs or dodges to avoid taking huge damage, both of which then act to set-up a killshot for later.

My first impression of this trait is that it is in direct competition with a number of other possible setups. Hypothetically, people have been discussing the 30/0/20/0/20 build. However, what would seem more effective in almost any scenario is running 10/0/30/0/30 or 20/0/20/0/30 with sigils(s) of intelligence and remove blindness on weapon swap. This would:

1) Achieve the same effect as running the burst precision trait, except also provide 2 more guaranteed crits beyond the burst skill crit;
2) It’s not limited to burst skills, and can be applied to other high-damage abilities like Arcing Arrow.
3) Allow for greater crit damage by freeing up 10 points to place into the discipline line. With 100% crit chance, every point of crit damage dramatically outweighs power. Would also allow one to take the below Brawler’s recovery, clearing blindness on weapon swap before setting up a large burst like earthshaker or evis;
4) Prevent you from having to go deep in the strength tree, in lieu of 30 in defense or another line of choice (such as 10 in tactics for immobs to set-up sigil of intel-procced large damage skills).

Arms: Dual Wield Agility- Your attack speed is increased by 10% when wielding a sword, axe or mace in your offhand.

1) 10% attack speed does not equate to 10% increased damage. This would only be true if 100% of attacks hit their target. In fact, it’s much lower than this as not all attacks hit the intended target.
2) The only use I possibly see for this is for a sword offhand build that may already go 30 in disciple for bleed procs off sigils and doesn’t currently benefit much from Furious. Otherwise, axe offhand needs a major overhaul to be even viable, and builds using mace offhand don’t usually go deep in the arms tree, and this grandmaster trait doesn’t provide enough benefit to warrant going 30 deep in the tree to reap its benefit (at the sacrifice of something else, like defense or disc).

(con’t)

In conjunction with reworking weapon skills and utilities to give certain ones more purpose and diversify the role of the warrior, it should be done such that the skill floor AND ceiling of the class is raised. Thus, the warrior should have builds that are less effective to lesser-skilled players and more effective for higher-skilled players. This would help alleviate concerns of players who feel the warrior is too effective in the hands of players who do not really understand what they are doing while simultaneously answering some of the concerns of more skilled warriors concerning our difficulty dealing with certain builds or situations.

I’d like to end with a thought that I’ve had for a long time concerning the general balancing strategy by Anet, in particular with their goal of trying to balance interactions between classes and builds in PvE, WvW and sPvP situations simultaneously. I would argue that it is entirely impossible to balance these three aspects of the game simultaneously. What is ideal and optimal in a situation where your enemy simply stands and facetanks damage without intelligent use of abilities will never, ever be balanced in a situation where your opponent is not only reacting, but anticipating, what you will do next. Thus, I would encourage the dev team that, if they are serious about balancing this game in the long term, they need to separate out their balancing decisions completely and entirely between PvE, WvW and sPvP. It may be more work upfront in balancing three separate game modes, but it will prevent this “seasawing” balancing where one aspect of a class is OP in, for example PvE, but UP in elements of WvW and sPvP.

Comments, thoughts and ideas are of course welcome.

TL;DR/Summary: Useless or inferior warrior weapon and utility skills need to be reworked, with specific purposes for their inclusion in mind. Warrior skill floor and ceiling need to both be increased. PvE, WvW and sPvP balancing changes need to always be partitioned if achievement of long-term class balance is desired.

(con’t)

This, however, illustrates one of the main issues currently facing the warrior: it can accomplish a number of different roles with very little build diversity. It can be a glass DPS burster, a massive tank, or a well-rounded DPS and frontline unit with essentially the same weapon sets, usually (but not exclusively) including a hammer. Increasing build diversity for the simple sake of increasing build diversity is not the solution, but rather increasing the uniqueness of the weapons available to the warrior, as well as the utilities available to the warrior, so that the warrior can fill a greater number of more specialized roles IS the solution. Example: Currently mainhand mace is basically a single-target version of hammer as previously it was valued over hammer in 1v1 situations because of its low cast-time skullcrack. With the new animation, hammer is better in almost every situation due to its multiple CCs, high burst damage especially when paired with high crit dmg, and AoE nature. Likewise, offhand mace suffers from being inferior to hammer as well offering a ranged knockdown but a generally useless 4 skill. Mainhand axe is another example of a weapon that is meant as a high-damage, single target weapon, but falls short of achieving this goal because too much reliance is placed on landing the eviscerate, as well as having comparable damage to a hammer stun chain without its AoE or CC utility.

However, rather than just fiddling with numbers on these generally unused weapon sets, I would advise the devs to rethink and redesign these weapons all-together, with some sort of purpose in mind not just for the weapon overall, but each individual skill in the weapon. Let’s be honest, not all weapon skills are created equal (even when considering niche roles). Axe 2 providing low damage and low vulnerability stacks? It’s a wasted skill that provides generally nothing useful in any particular situation. Thus, the first solution to improving the warrior in general is reworking weapon sets and skills to give each a thoughtful purpose for accomplishing some meaningful task in the game.

This can obviously also be extended to utilities and elites. Rework useless utilities like “On my mark!” and Kick that no one ever uses because of its inferior utility in comparison to something like Berserkers Stance or Endure Pain. Not all utilities (and certainly elites) are created equal, and some just have no business being in the same set of options as the others because they are almost entirely inferior to another choice that has identical cost (1 utility or elite slot).

In line with this suggestion to rework the weapon and utility skills, however, we need to consider another point that has been brought up by both warriors and non-warriors alike. Let’s first define some terms: A skill floor is the “entry level” or “minimum level” amount of skill that a particular class or build needs to be viable for play. In this case, we’ll define that as being able to contribute in a fight without being downed within X seconds. A skill ceiling is the limitations of the class that can be achieved through the ideals of “perfect play”. In reality, the skill ceiling is never reached because no one can play any class perfectly, but it can be approached given enough experience, knowledge and time with the game, in general, and a class, in particular. The warrior is a very forgiving class for a new and generally unskilled player to use. It has base high toughness and vit, allowing for the player to make mistakes without being punished to the extent that they are downed (in contrast to a class like ele or ranger), and the straightforward “does damage” skills make it relatively easy for a player to figure out when in general they should be using what skills. Thus, the warrior has a very low skill floor, which I would argue is currently the lowest in the game. It is extremely easy and forgiving to make a banner regen tank warrior and sit on a point while facetanking most damage.

The skill ceiling for a warrior is dependent on build. Glass rifle gs builds have the potential to have high skill ceilings based on their extreme burst, high mobility yet fragile nature, but the build is generally dependent on having supporting teammates to help peel. The more common builds, such as tanky condi war or tanky ham + mobility war both have generally lower skill ceilings than most other classes, such as thief and mes. Just as the straightforward weapon and utility skills make the class easy for new players, they can be a hindrance to more skilled players when facing classes that can teleport, stealth, shield, apply auras, blinds, etc, and especially when considering the highly-telegraphed animations of the warrior’s abilities. Yes, the warrior can build for good damage with good survivability, but when played at the absolute upper tiers, can be outplayed with good management of utilities such as blind, block, aegis, dodge, teleport, etc.

Note: This post was intended to comprehensively express my personal opinions regarding the current state of the warrior and how it can be improved on in future patches. I have included a TL;DR portion/summary at the end of this post to highlight the main points

To begin, for those who don’t know me, I’ve played exclusively warrior since release and have mainly focused on PvP aspects of the game, primarily WvW but recently moreso sPvP. I have about 3,000 hours logged on my warrior. However, I hope that you judge my ideas more on the merits of the ideas themselves than any amount of gaming experience that I bring to the table. This experience is what has led to my below conclusions concerning my favorite gw2 class.

There is one fact that I would like to establish within the roles of class balance that I do not intend in the least to be elitist, but has been my experience in helping developers in other games balance classes/units etc. This has included games such as World of Tanks and World in Conflict. You cannot balance a game with the lowest, or even average, “common denominator”-skilled player in mind. This is because what is balanced and even viable for play at a lower skill level where players are highly inefficient in their decisions to use CDs and routinely are in poor position for their role is necessarily imbalanced when players learn to optimize their builds and skill usage while exploiting advantages that they discover while striving to achieve success at the highest level of play. Furthermore, there is always opportunity for a currently unskilled player to become a skilled player through self-improvement and time, whereas skilled players do not become unskilled players (or if they do after taking a long break they quickly become skilled after spending minimum time with the game). Thus, although input from all levels of play should be listened to, a heavy weight should be placed on players who have mastered their class and understand the intricacies of their role and the roles of every other class in the game.

To begin, we need to establish in general the purpose of the warrior class. In an MMO, if a class does not have a unique purpose that differentiates itself from other classes within that MMO, in particular if it is inferior to another class in every regard, it is viewed as “underpowered” and usually not played. Likewise, if a particular class is viewed as having more diversity in roles, or a greater range of roles for which it can fill, then it is typically comparatively viewed as “overpowered”.

Based on my experience in the game, the warrior’s main purpose or niche, as it currently stands, is to provide a balanced medium between CC, damage and utility, depending on build. For example, certain builds like pure glass cannon rifle have the ability to do tremendous damage in melee and at range, but is typically reliant on other players to peel or support such a build considering the lack of CC available to these builds and their generally more squishy nature with lack of low CD survival skills like stealth. Other builds, like banner regen hambow or condi war in spvp focus on massive survivability over all else in order to hold a particular point in spvp, even against outnumbered odds, until more damage-focused teammates can arrive to eliminate the threat to the point. Similarly in wvw, hammer + mobility weapon is a common choice for warriors because it is a highly-versatile build that can be built for both survivability and reasonably good damage, and scales well with groups of people and against hitting blobs of enemies, which is a common occurrence in wvw given the state of the game and presence of AoE cap. It can also be paired with banners or utility skills that support teammates.

SpecterMAT.7306:

I think Jihm you see this topic differently than what it is.

I agree the game still needs a lots of balance. But seeing my profession running 1 build makes my heart in pain.

This is exactly my sentiment too. We have access to nearly every weapon in the game, yet the number of viable weapon sets, and furthermore builds with those weapon sets, are so limited that it calls into question why the other weapons even exist.

My solution: The skill ceiling AND floor of the weapon sets and utilities of the class need to be increased, separating skilled players from unskilled players within the class further, and the weapon sets need to be reworked and, in general, buffed, with attention and FOCUS on a niche role for each weapon. Right now we have a lot of weapons that are completely inferior to other weapons in terms of DPS, CC and utility. Also, to further diversify the class, each weapon should have power, hybrid or condi-focused options available to them, rather than having certain weapons that are “power only” or “condi only”.

The issue that has been pointed out before many times is that the warrior is the easiest class to just pick up as an unskilled player and perform at a level that isn’t complete rallybait, like what would happen if that same player was with a thief or ele. The skill ceiling, though, is also relatively low given the limited options Wars have available in terms of weapon sets, telegraphed abilities, and generally boring utilities that either “prevent X type of damage”, “Give X boon(s)”, or “remove (x) conditions”. The only interesting utilities like Frenzy aren’t even unique to the class and rarely chosen since they are relatively situational and/or a liability in certain situations.

TL:DR Buff useless warrior weapon sets while reworking the class to be more difficult to play effectively.

Honestly I hated the concept of centralizing everything into one tiny place. I like my MMOs to feel like there are specialized towns and areas for different things, not huge major cities that are abandoned save for a few people trying to do their living story. Why spend so much time on making DR look as beautiful as it does if your intention was to cram everyone into a place 1/5th the size of it by consolidating literally every service possible?

The current state of elites is that for many classes there is a single “primary” elite that synergizes well with most or all of the builds associated with that class (i.e. SoR and RF). There are then a number of “secondary” elites that are rarely, if ever used, primarily because their cooldowns are so long and their impact factor is not dramatically higher than their shorter-CD competitors (i.e. hounds of balthazar, mistfire wolf, guard books, rampage, most racial elites, etc.) , or they are some gimmicky or unreliable skill (i.e. Elixer X, mortar, racial elites) that can become a liability in a fight. Elites should be powerful abilities that have the potential to change the outcome of the battle.

Furthermore, builds in this game could benefit from further definition besides "heals, does AoE damage, does single target damage, does condi damage) to specific roles that certain classes can perform (anti-stealth for ranger with proposed elite changes, massive AoE damage with elementalist elite, etc). One thing this game is beginning to suffer from is lack of build diversity, in particular with pvp/wvw. Addition of these new elites could go a long way to introducing new and exciting niches that future builds, supported by these proposed new elites, could then fill.

Bumping this.

First, I think it worthwhile to point out that irrespective of the game, and even genre, there are individuals who enjoy playing particular roles (DPS, Tank, Support) and will tailor their builds to these roles whether the game has a specific, defined class for them or not. Supports in this game are currently viable and Anet supported because specialization down a support line provides much more healing and condi clear than any individual player can provide him/herself. The support role exists in this game and will continue to exist…what remains is trying to further define the role as something other than a heal/condi-clear/boon dispensing bot, and increase the personal reward/utility of the support role in general.

In line with achieving these goals, the changes suggested by the OP and Potato give support players powerful, potential battle-changing abilities with “boon amplification” via the proposed Support Power mechanism. Additionally, it allows for unique abilities that are not possible via other, less specialized builds. For example, most classes have a way in which to provide themselves with swiftness. The only factor that modifies swiftness currently is boon duration, and thus the only way for supports to actually provide boon utility that surpasses the quality of that provided by non-supports is through stacking boon duration. These proposed changes modify boons in such a way as to allow supports to gives something truly unique to their teammates that can dramatically change the outcome of any particular fight.

This expands the niche that supports currently fill from simply healing, handing out longer-duration boons, condi-clearing and CC to a more dramatic force-multiplier that can spike the damage or survivability of their teammates depending on what the group needs. My favorite of the above suggestions is that concerning swiftness, where a support could “supercharge” their group for a small duration to allow for chasing down a group, or quickly disengage. These types of temporary “overcharges” of buffs are a truly unique idea that would add a whole new layer of depth to gameplay, and in the process make both the game, in general, and the support role, in particular, more enjoyable to play.

The absolute last thing WvW needs is more WPs.

No.

EotM is hands-down more fun than WvW in almost every imaginable way and is a glimpse into how normal WvW should have been implemented in the first place.

Why shouldn’t it pull away people? If people enjoy it more than WvW then I say “Mission Accomplished”.

Qaelyn.7612:

I can’t help but notice some rather disturbingly lopsided scores…Mag/SBI/BP matchup….

BP has no business being in the same match-up as Mag due to coverage differences, and SBI just had a max exodus of guilds off their (once again) bandwagoned server and are in ranking freefall.

So no, that match-up has nothing to do with EotM.

Also, have you ever thought that maybe EotM is how WvW should function and is in general more fun than normal WvW?

1) No WPs to insta-defend a keep/castle;

2) Spaced out objectives and scaled NPCs giving small teams a purpose;

3) Interesting objectives that offer fun and unique incentives for capturing them;

4) Pooling of servers that helps diminish the amount of time any particular side is outnumbered, making battle and match outcomes less dependent on pure coverage

I don’t know about you, but I log in to play this game to have fun, not to hardcore PPT for some perceived sense of accomplishment when in reality the outcome of the match was determined regardless of whether I actually logged in at all.

Yes we had 3 members of our guild have this happen to them yesterday. Only solution was for them to WP when out of combat.

The problem seems to be when the statue is destroyed, you fall directly down and clip through walls while falling, but when on the ground the walls are once again unclippable and you become stuck inside the statuary.

Dondagora.9645:

deathTouch.9706:

Sages.3496:

deathTouch.9706:

Sages.3496:

Everyone stop raging about The Edge of the Mists map being down, you dont know how hard anet is truely working on it and should give them credit for even trying. they do not have to do so at all. it will be up when it is up, stop crying about it.

And yet in my profession, no matter “how hard you try”, at the end of the day if you have a bad outcome that was entirely preventable on your part, you are usually on the receiving end of a 6-7 figure lawsuit.

We are consumers of a product who have paid, and continue to pay, hard-earned money for working and functional content. The release success rate of these pieces of content are unacceptably low, usually causing high degrees of collateral damage to other aspects of the game, and simply represent rushed timelines in the interest of maximizing quarterly earnings.

I’m tired of being abused by company executives who are banking on this bizarre notion in gaming that completely unusable content is somehow acceptable as long as “it’s eventually fixed”.

Look buddy, if you have a problem with it, fix it yourself or just let them do it as best they can. Anet has been hard at work on alot of content, they do not have to put out another living story and they could just shut down GW2 entirely if they felt like it.

Fix it myself? Are you unaware as to how a basic economy is designed to function?

Let me clarify. I don’t care how hard they work, I care about results. I work 8-12 hour workdays with periodic 20-30 hour overnight calls for which I am paid to do my job well and obtain good results. Working hard is a basic prerequisite to obtaining consistently good results, not the end metric by which I am assessed. I then use this money that I earn in part to pay Anet with the expectation that they will do their job well.

The 2nd half of this agreement is consistently failing. This is not an isolated incident, it is yet another chain in a repeat of incidents that has happened with every major content update, since and including, release.

You paid for what you got; Guild Wars 2. Now, they’re giving you free extra content with even a monthly fee. Even expansions for most games have to be bought. But not here. If their gifts to us aren’t working properly at first, it isn’t our place to say that we’re not getting what we paid for. We already got that. We should try to be supportive of the efforts ANet put into Guild Wars 2 to keep us interested instead of leaving the game to die, which would simply be giving us what we paid for until we got bored and left on our own. Be thankful for the Living Story and ANet’s hard work instead of giving nonconstructive criticism that does nothing to further the situation.

The living story content and accompanying microtransaction content actually nets companies more per player, on average, than a subscription-based service, which is why almost every major publisher has incorporated microtransactions into their payment schemes. I’d be happy to pull the literature and studies that were done on that if you want.

So I’m not sure why you think this content is “free” or are “gifts”. In fact it’s done because executives at NCsoft have figured out it’s the most efficient way possible to extract money out of the playerbase, mainly because people are unable or unwilling to track how much money they spend on microtransactions on a monthly or yearly basis compared to a recurring subscription.

Sages.3496:

deathTouch.9706:

Sages.3496:

Everyone stop raging about The Edge of the Mists map being down, you dont know how hard anet is truely working on it and should give them credit for even trying. they do not have to do so at all. it will be up when it is up, stop crying about it.

And yet in my profession, no matter “how hard you try”, at the end of the day if you have a bad outcome that was entirely preventable on your part, you are usually on the receiving end of a 6-7 figure lawsuit.

We are consumers of a product who have paid, and continue to pay, hard-earned money for working and functional content. The release success rate of these pieces of content are unacceptably low, usually causing high degrees of collateral damage to other aspects of the game, and simply represent rushed timelines in the interest of maximizing quarterly earnings.

I’m tired of being abused by company executives who are banking on this bizarre notion in gaming that completely unusable content is somehow acceptable as long as “it’s eventually fixed”.

Look buddy, if you have a problem with it, fix it yourself or just let them do it as best they can. Anet has been hard at work on alot of content, they do not have to put out another living story and they could just shut down GW2 entirely if they felt like it.

Fix it myself? Are you unaware as to how a basic economy is designed to function?

Let me clarify. I don’t care how hard they work, I care about results. I work 8-12 hour workdays with periodic 20-30 hour overnight calls for which I am paid to do my job well and obtain good results. Working hard is a basic prerequisite to obtaining consistently good results, not the end metric by which I am assessed. I then use this money that I earn in part to pay Anet with the expectation that they will do their job well.

The 2nd half of this agreement is consistently failing. This is not an isolated incident, it is yet another chain in a repeat of incidents that has happened with every major content update, since and including, release.

Sages.3496:

Everyone stop raging about The Edge of the Mists map being down, you dont know how hard anet is truely working on it and should give them credit for even trying. they do not have to do so at all. it will be up when it is up, stop crying about it.

And yet in my profession, no matter “how hard you try”, at the end of the day if you have a bad outcome that was entirely preventable on your part, you are usually on the receiving end of a 6-7 figure lawsuit.

We are paying consumers of a product for which we should expect working and functional content on the stated date of release, especially if significant time was specifically allocated for “extensive testing”. The release success rate of these pieces of content are unacceptably low, usually also cause high degrees of collateral damage to other aspects of the game, and simply represent rushed timelines in the interest of maximizing quarterly earnings.

I’m tired of being abused by company executives who are banking on this bizarre notion in gaming that completely unusable content is somehow acceptable as long as “it’s eventually fixed”.

Anet is just following the 2014 general guidelines to being a good game developer: take inordinate amounts of time to supposedly “test” something then release said content in a state that is so broken it not only prevents people from accessing it, but spills over into the entirety of the game by, for example, preventing them from even logging into the game in general.

At first I was enraged that more PvE trash content was being introduced into my PvP and I’d have to deal with a massive influx of rallybait on my team.

Then I realized I get to camp PvE objectives and curbstomp people who have no idea how to actually play this game for days/weeks on end while spamming /laugh and jumping on their bodies.

Now I think this patch is going to be great!

Josh Davis.6015:

Very apt timing for this thread to appear as I’ve recently been enlisted by the WvW team.

What does this mean for you guys? I’ll be working closely with Devon and crew to act as the liaison between our development team and you – raising community concerns with the team, finding answers, being the good/bad guy, and whatever else!

For those wondering, I play engineer, I prefer to roam, I’m currently on JQ, and yes, I take bribes in the form of cookies.

Well you sure got your work cut out for you.

HippoLogic.2519:

Tongku.5326:

Cynz.9437:

Tongku.5326:

Cynz.9437:

Dear YB, i have a following questions:

- why are you so rude to people from own server who are trying to get upgrades up in keeps?
- why do you refuse to help those people?

Past 2 weeks i spent trying to get upgrades up and sieg up our keep/towers in EB.

When i asked for help to defend camp since we need supplies ppl were simply rude to me for simple reason: i ordered upgrade on camp instead of building omega because frankly we had 5 ppl, upgrading our corner was more important imo, than going on suicidal mission with 1 omega.

Other time, i said in map chat YB needs more big guilds and not many many roaming guilds or small guilds need to group up or we won’t be able to defend out stuff. Guess what? I got rained with rude messages, i got called all possible things, once again i had to solo upgrade towers to t3 with all sieg because people refused to help and defend.

People might disagree with me, i might disagree with someone but i am not gonna refuse help to defend own keeps/towers just because i have personal issues with person.

I have been in quite few servers, this is first time i experienced such rudeness from own server when i spent my own gold/karma and sieg to help our defense.

Having faced YB for a few weeks, a lot of us have experienced the unwilingness and/or overall inability of that server to fight. All the server as a whole seems to do is run away and hop onto arrow carts. I hvae seen maybe 2 guilds total that actually fight and they only come on or together for a short time during NA prime, rest is as described.

So has it occured to you that perhaps people on your server are trying to change that to become a better server and you doing what you are doing are enforcing what they are trying to change ?

Maybe your team mates want to get away from a “run-away and arrowcart” image that your server has created for itself ?

it is hard to come out when we don’t even have 10 ppl on map vs sbi full map zerg

when i learned how to one shot 80 people, i will play more aggressive

That is funny, considering the number of times our 20-25 man group had the YB map blobs scatter and run from us, even groups of 40ish YB players ran from our 15 mans ….

One particular instance came to mind when we had like 25 people and we were faced with not 1, but 2 YB guilds of 30-40, and instead of fighting they decided to build “creeping open-field arrowcarts” on us. Of course once we veiled and took out out of 5+ of the ACs their map blob ran away. And when I mean map blob, I do mean map blob, meaning vast majority, if not all players on a qued map.

So far in this game I have played against every single server in the lower half, and about half of the servers in upper half (mag, FA, SBI, TC, YB) and YB stands out in this regard by far.

I will pay you to come to YB for one week and for your return plus pay you 5 gold every time yaks has a queue in EB only stipulation is that SE and One cannot be on the map at the same time that is how sure I am that we do not queue up EB.

YB never has queues and always needs their patented flash built creeping open field siege.

On top of this YB players are terrible at anything but flash building siege against opponents they outnumber 3:1.

Here’s an example from just a few hours ago:

Background: YB response force of ~6ish FoW and 3ish PUGs fail to hold a fully-upgraded NN camp and wipe on us while we pull their guards. They attempt to re-take the camp with 9-10 people for as long as it takes us to complete 3 upgrades on their NN camp and start the 4th.

Picture 1: YB flash builds a superior AC against 3 of us and attempts to retake the camp. Their assault force wipes against us yet again.

Picture 2: Absent from picture 1 are very sneaky thieves who cleverly use terrain to try and conceal their flanking maneuvers on us in the camp.

Picture 3: After failing to retake the camp again after pulling and killing guards and supervisor into AC range and assaulting with 10-12 people yet again, they then flash build a superior ballista on top of the stairs.

They then try to assault the camp AGAIN and wipe AGAIN despite having both superior AC and superior ballista support.

At this point, they have to call in a 2nd commander who brings 10-15 more people from another BL to clear this camp despite originally outnumbering us 3:1 and having both superior AC and superior ballista support.

Total time to clear NN from 3 people = about 40 minutes.

So for the love of God stay off YB unless you are terrible at this game.

AoN’s new tactic is to teabag players they kill with Ursan tonic /cry spam.

Discuss.

Aberrant.6749:

Jaxs.5830:

Aberrant.6749:

Jaxs.5830:

Aberrant.6749:

@ Aon ppl using that reindeer tonic on TCBL tonight to run away… is it really worth the 30 or 60s? Seems like a huge waste to me.

If you bought them at that price maybe not, but ultimately what else do I have to buy?

Just sell them and buy gems or food or “skype” time with a cute lady or something…

When I see some one do it I’m like… nice… I just made them waste gold over their pride. Best victory possible.

Has nothing to do with pride, everything to do with being able to stay in the fight and keep fighting. When you run a small synergy based group, losing someone is a large chunk of your effectiveness. Spend enough time kitting out blobbing baddies, rather not waste more on regrouping.

As i said I do not need gold or gems, I have 4 freezers full of meat, and my wife wouldn’t like me skyping cute ladies. Gold, in a game that is floundering about waiting for the next game to kill it, is not all that valuable.

But in at least 2 cases tonight there wasn’t anyone else alive… and the person WP-ed right after they got ooc… can’t think of any good reason other than pride

I’ve bought what i estimate to be over 90% of the global supply of the tonics, and most of them were for 6s or less months ago.

I still have 2k liquid gold and a bank full of assets, so yeah, spending that money to save us time/stacks is actually worth it in my opinion.

Anyway, back to this match-up, I’m looking forward to kiting around GODS hammer trains for 10-15 minutes and then turning on them with 1:2 – 1:3 odds, wiping them, then spamming /laugh as they lay on the ground wondering why their mass guard/war AOE train just got exploded.

Nickthemoonwolf.1485:

deathTouch.9706:

Nickthemoonwolf.1485:

All nasty hate and spite aside, tonight was fun.
Good fights tonight on MagBL~

@deathtouch, that minimap says you had more than 8.

AoN ran 8 tonight, the other dots are part of the PUG zerg.

I’m surprised you guys had fun, but to each their own I guess.

You missed the rest of the night then. All the fights leading up to the capture of hills and the ones afterwards with TG were quite fun.

If you couldent tell though, we were more focused on that PUG zerg than you. No one is saying you had more than 8 or that you didnt do whatever you were trying to do, but it was MOSTLY the zerg doing the work in this particular case.

Ah that clears up why you allowed us to repeatedly flank you and destroy your backline.

Nickthemoonwolf.1485:

All nasty hate and spite aside, tonight was fun.
Good fights tonight on MagBL~

@deathtouch, that minimap says you had more than 8.

AoN ran 8 tonight, the other dots are part of the PUG zerg.

I’m surprised you guys had fun, but to each their own I guess.

Question to TC: How many 45 man “skill groups” does it take to break out of spawn against an 8 man roaming group and a Mag PUG group?

Answer: More than the player numbers cap on the server allows.

Elxdark.9702:

easy animation for an easy class.

Because thief is a really hard class to play right?

That’s why all you see in obsidian sanctum are thieves and PU mesmers, because clearly they are the most difficult classes to play and perform well with.

Epic.3950:

but a condition bomb takes less than a quarter of a second to cast and can kill you if you dont have a full clear.

Not to mention its damage can be increased by putting points in a single stat versus 3 separate stats.

AdsSal.6405:

To all the TC/Mag blobbing about during oceanic today, I wish you a Happy New Year now, since I’ll be out having fun tomorrow night, in the real world, with my friends.

Enjoy your parents basement, and don’t be scared about the loud noises at midnight.

I’ll make sure to personally forward your happy new year wishes to our 3 oceanic players.

I didn’t play reset at all buy I’m guessing TC blobbed up into a huge queue zerg in multiple BLs and tried to overwhelm everyone with huge numbers, and FA ran around trying to imitate that strat but generally failed with it. Mag ran around with roaming groups trolling both TC and FA at the same time, hopefully letting TC or FA do the work of getting the door down on a tower/keep then jamming them from behind and taking it for themselves, afterwards spamming laugh, throwing rams, etc. Also some NN action pulling queue blobs to protect the camp from 4-5 people.

Then TC had a good 5-6 hours of uncontested PvD to take the lead and declare themselves the best server of the match-up.

Throw in a few “roaming” TC/FA guilds that use mostly PVT as their standard of gear and you got yourselves a typical TC/FA/Mag reset night.

I main warrior in WvW for AoN and have run sword/shield + Hammer since the day final thrust was released.

It does not need to be buffed. I can spike most targets from just below 50% to zero running my gear setup provided it crits.

It’s on a decently short CD and can hit multiple targets.

Any buff to it would make it OP imo.

The Story of Langor’s Gulch.

8 men sandwich a 50-60 man TC zerg between 20ish FA holding a T3 tower and wipe the entire zerg from behind.

Then run into the tower and kill the 20 FA inside. Then cap the tower for Mag.

Then hold the tower against 30-40 man FA zerg 3 times in a row and wipe them completely everytime.

AoN and Rage would like to say, welcome to Mag roamers. We can PPT too, there just has to be a zerg(s) to wipe to motivate us.

And no, this isn’t an overexaggeration and I hope one of our guildees or Rage were recording.

How to troll TC:

Go NN on TC BL with 4 people.

Kill 10 man FA group trying to take NN (they were half uplevels so w/e, just saving them time with the waypoint).

Push into fully upgraded NN camp w/ 2 ACs, 2 ballistas in camp and 2 ballistas on stairs.

Fight 5-6 TC + guards pulling them around corners to avoid Ballista fire. Kill TC players and most guards.

Kill players on ACs and camp Ballistas while LOSing stair ballistas with walls and well.

Kill new influx of random TC players.

Pull 60 man TC blob from citadel. Kite 60 man TC blob to skritt with no losses. Laugh IRL as our full support mesmer kills a warrior glued to her by dragging him off a ledge. Kill random TC stragglers who obviously weren’t on mumble.

Run back to NN.

Kill 2 new ACs in the camp.

Pull guards and random TC (again).

Kill guards, stack behind well.

Watch as TC players on ballistas fail to get off ballistas and let us cap fully upgraded NN with 4 people.

/laugh 20 times. WP home.

Please stick to RP/ERP TC. Holy kitten.

UltraHiDef.4809:

Jaxs.5830:

UltraHiDef.4809:

Jaxs.5830:

UltraHiDef.4809:

Maguuma fights open field? Lol. I remember wiping Mag guilds pre-league 15 vs. 40+ though. You stopped fighting after that in oceanic time zone now.

Is that why you tanked to silver?

Yes, I was afraid you’d cry me to death.

Valid fear, I cry a lot. Hallmark commercials… need a box of tissues.

Nah, you just need better guilds.

Anyone hear/see of this guy’s guilds listed? Seems like a whole lot of hot air (which I appreciate given how cold it is where I live).

Oozo.7856:

Jaxs.5830:

dreztina.4820:

Winkin.1490:

dreztina.4820:

I know there aren’t any roamers on FA, but didn’t a roaming guild transfer to TC a while back? Was that Oozo’s guild?

You’re probably thinking of Good Fights. Pretty sure AD is on EBay still.

Ah, I really should have remembered that. I blame it on GF never posting in matchup threads.

Most of the good GF stayed and joined AD, they are a shell of a guild now.

I think only Amins stayed behind and joined us on EB. The Orb debacle really hit GF hard since I think for most of them the only thing that was keeping them in the game were the organized windmill GvGs.

The only thing keeping GF in the game were perplexity runes without ICD.

Tricare.2946:

[BURN] you’re pretty good at the 10v1 but no so much when it’s against a few more.

Even with my horrible guardian skills, all you guys could do was run away.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BpRk4AF1vw

ROFL @ 1:38, now I know how to play necro xirin.

Winkin.1490:

Tricare.2946:

[BURN] you’re pretty good at the 10v1 but no so much when it’s against a few more.

Even with my horrible guardian skills, all you guys could do was run away.

Wait, there were only 6 Mag there (3 AoN, 3 VR)?

My favorite was their Thief that literally spammed 2 at me at full health. Twice.

I was there in spirit, so 7.

Was nice to see OTG out trying hard. Hope you guys had fun tonight and thanks for not backing down from the fights!

-AoN Hammer War

So if we roll YB and SBI again are we going to use this thread or will we need a new one?

Or will this thread get locked before the reset, requiring us to start a 5th SBI-Mag-YB thread post-reset?

Im confused why the last matchup thread got locked, can someone please elaborate?

If there isn’t an explicit retelling of the ERP that happened after this pic was taken then don’t post this kitten.

Mag starting to farm mods like a bad YB SM push.

Mission accomplished fellow Maguumans.

I propose 2v1ing SBI for the rest of the week just to kitten with them and see if we can get this thread to 2,000 posts.

Whadda ya say YB?

So, despite SBI being one of the heaviest-bandwagoned, PPT-striving servers in North America, they still can’t seem to outscore the server that is least-motivated toward PPT in North America?

How bad does your WvW population have to be to pull that one off?

iAmTheDuke.6201:

death to bandwagons!

For the umpteenth time, I’m not transferring to SBI!

Snafu.7412:

Tachii.3506:

StealthSnake.9134:

Dat doubleteam

Lol.

Abys I don’t know how many more people you need to push a pug mag group. We’ll make it easier for you next time and bring uplevels.

We had about 30 people.

30 guild group with KWBH won’t push a pug zerg, that’s legit. We’ll come naked next time.

Next time we face Abys I’ll make sure to run naked and only run with offhand shield.

As long as we stack might properly I think I can burst them down with repeated shield bashes.