Guild Wars 2

Justin ODell.9517:

Sorry guys. This change had to be pushed back due to a bug, and will not be included in the next PvP drop.

I hope to have the problem resolved and include this fix in the following drop.

That’s ok, thank you for being honest and upfront.

kaotiktheory.8942:

Still not convinced this is random. Whenever me and my friends start pvp, and I mean EVERY TIME… The first map is always Skyhammer, then Foefire, then Khylo. We usually just stick around for 3 maps for the daily.

This only happens when we join a server with 0 players. The only way around it is if we join a server with players in it already (but then we risk not all of us getting in).

9/10 you got me there.

Unfortunately, I haven’t seen the (official) channel admins care much about the channel. There are only a couple of dedicated streamers keeping it alive at this point, which makes me very sad.

Guts just explained a few things on stream:

Feline Grace
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Feline_Grace
Dodging returns some of the endurance used.
User recovers 15% endurance after dodging, effectively lowering the cost dodging to 35% endurance.

This makes the thief effectively be able to dodge 3 times with a full endurance.

Withdraw
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Withdraw

Heal with 3/4 sec evade, 15 second cooldown, aaand…

Vigorous Recovery
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Vigorous_Recovery
Gain vigor when using a healing skill.
Vigor granted lasts 8 seconds.

…it grants 8 seconds of Vigor.
Which is even more powerful on an S/D thief, since full endurance = 3 dodges as opposed to 2.

Signet of Agility
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Signet_of_Agility

And if you run out of dodges, you use signet of agility, refill all your endurance and suddenly you have 3 more dodges.

I know ANet wants the thief to be the best dodging class thematically, but it can’t have both dodges, damage, and boon steal in one spec.

If these things get somehow nerfed S/D thief should be fine.
Perhaps a rework for Feline Grace (the minor trait) would fix most of the problems.

It has been said numerous times by top players that S/D thieves need a nerf to evasion, not boon steal. Quite the opposite actually, boon hate is good and needed.

I really don’t know what was ANet thinking with this one, it’s a good thing these changes aren’t final and they are still taking feedback.

So if anyone from ANet is reading this, please nerf S/D thief evasion but leave the boon removal as it is.

Atiar.5469:

Just stay safe in the knowledge you are uber 1337 pro.

Na, yeah no-one plays hot join seriously. Try soloq. 5v5 no autobalance

This. You are a side effect of a big problem in sPvP. People think hotjoins are the meat of PvP and take it seriously, as opposed to using it for practice and trying out new builds. Not to blame you though, since they are presented as such.

Go to the Tournament Master or open up the PvP tab, and press join solo arena or w/e it says, and you will be queued for a real match. People can enter or leave it mid-fight or change skills and traits. When you win or lose your rating changes and you get matched with different opponents appropriately, and there is a leaderboard which you climb by improving your rating.

That’s a good idea, but the problem with it is the spectators still won’t be able to see the health easily. IMO we should just have a UI element with the hp of the two guild lords somewhere.

If you try to bind About Face to Mouse 3, it simply doesn’t work.

My guess on why would be, About Face doesn’t work in general while you’re pressing Mouse 1 or Mouse 2, since these affect the camera. Maybe the game thinks Mouse 3 does too so it doesn’t do the About Face animation.

This bug is here from the start and it’s very annoying, About Face is a keybind that fits perfectly to mouse 3.

theonewhoknocks.8641:

None, because it still doesn’t have any lower quality options.

They only way to get lower quality options is to get partnered with twitch.

And for this to happen they need more viewers, more followers, more views etc etc so help them out by spreading news about the channel and watching it, and you’ll get lower quality options.

ahuba.6430:

nothing except warriors are now good

As you can see though, forums haven’t changed.

Ok so in the last 5 weeks:

Features:

- Solo Queue (called “Solo Arena”) – it’s a really good addition, though it has it’s share of problems.
If you’re just starting out or have low rating, you’ll be encountering an uncomfortable amount of 4v5, leavers, afkers etc.
Matchmaking isn’t perfect and the population isn’t really big, which in turn doesn’t always give you good competitive matches.
And about balance and cheese builds, I’ll touch on that later.
Though all in all, Solo Queue is one of the best things that PvP got in last few months (IMO), and I and many others enjoy playing it a lot.

- Permanent finishers – finishers aren’t stupid consumables any more. From now on you simply unlock them and active them in the hero panel (H). You unlock the usual ones from ranking up (rabbit -> deer -> dolly …) and some others from the gem store (cow, spectre …).

- Effect reduction/LoD – there’s an option you can toggle in graphic settings called something along the lines of “Effects LoD”, it should be reducing the effect spam we all dislike. I personally haven’t noticed any difference with it’s introduction.

Also, you can find out more about that yourself at http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Releases

Balance:

There practically hasn’t been any balance changes, and the first balance change is coming on October 1st.

Spirit rangers, Necros and S/D thieves are still considered OP, and something that may surprise you considering what you wrote, Warrios are also considered OP. Main reasons people cite are an overabundance of CC + sigil of paralyzation bug which results in huge CC chains, and Healing Signet regeneration (~400hp/s).

Guardians are the same as always, Engineer’s are considered a good class but needing a lot more skill to play efficiently than your momentary FotM. Eles and Mesmers are considered to be the worst, but not nearly as Warriors were for example a few months ago. Eles generally go berserker with fresh air and often Scepter/Focus as the weapon set at the moment (made popular by Denshee I believe).

All in all, meta is considered to be unfun due to the large amounts of low skill floor/ceiling builds and condi spam, but every profession can be played with reasonable success.

ESports:

PAX has happened a week and a half ago, spoilersthe finals weren't very fun, both due to the cluster-kitteny meta and the fact that CC (the European team) destroyed Sync (NA team) with 3-0 in matches. The only one that was close was the last one. I hope that's gonna be a lesson for gw2 tournies in the future, we wanna see the 2 BEST teams fight, not the best NA and best EU team. Realistically, the real finals were CC vs TC in the EU qualifiers. On top of that, the finals were really hard to follow with 3 (!) spirit rangers, necros and general spam. We had a warrior in CC's team, and he did really well..

ESL Opening cup is going OK, though it has fairly bad viewership due to it being stretched out (2 matches every few days? something like that), lack of advertisement (I never find out about when it’s going on), and bad rewards (ESL premium?) not bringing any top teams and competition. BLU is doing a great job shoutcasting though, he’s improved a lot and the production value seem really nice.

http://www.esl.eu/eu/guildwars2/news/228411/

MLG tournament is rumored to be coming up soon, but people who know about it aren’t allowed to talk if I understood correctly.

Romek.4201:

1. Ostrich Eggs (cant understand why he has so low viewercount on his own channel – he is just cool)

He has a relatively low viewcount because his typical stream time is 2am in central europe, so EU pretty much goes to sleep. Other than that, he’s really popular.

Stof.9584:

Caed is pro. Denshee FM radio. Shout-outs to depressing CmC.

Denshee best music multiverse.

Denshee (+ Vanish of course), Countless, Arken, Ostrich, there are a lot of amazing streamers there.

Also:

alcopaul.2156:

So who is your favorite?

I personally like Ostrich Eggs because of the kick kitten music playlist (which if ill guess his age based on the music, he’s about in his early-mid 30s (correct me if im wrong, OE)) and his voice that goes from super low to falsetto at times.

Ostrich is 20, he said it on stream, I was surprised since I also thought he was older based on the music.

4v5 doesn’t only happen to you, it happens to the opposing team too so in the long run it doesn’t affect your rating. Play more matches and get a bit higher up in rating, you won’t really find people who don’t enter queues or leave games there.

Not saying 4v5 isn’t a problem and they shouldn’t fix it, but saying it’s the reason high level players are on the bottoms of the leaderboards is a lie.

Uhh, I was under the impression that Josh Davis (=Grouch) was helping the sPvP team?

Allie Murdock.8152:

Hi.

Still here, sort of. My family is in town and the fact is, my mother is quite demanding of my time (sorry if you’re reading this mum, I loves you).

The invitational is tomorrow. After that, I’ll be able to spend a bit more time on the forums. Also, I’ll talk to some devs about getting on here. Keep in mind though, any time that they spend posting on the forums takes away from the time that they are implementing. More posting = less features.

Hug it out

Keep in mind Allie, there should be a balance here. It’s much easier to wait 1 month for a feature if you know it’s coming, then 2 weeks if you don’t know when it will come.

I’m sure taking 15 min off work won’t hit their productivity so much, yet those 15 min will take them far on the forums.

<3

Just wanted to say I had a really fun night yesterday, props to both Kodash and Riverside for good fights!

apoko.5246:

MRA.4758:

Contiguous.1345:

Rivercart – It’s become so accepted that some people probably aren’t aware it’s not actually their name.

This is actually kind of funny. I just wish it would be more true than legend … (While you may still find the aforementioned carts, I oh-so-often miss the players manning them. :/ )

Also, I disagree, Piken is by no means without a chance in this match-up. Just look at the chart at MoS, and you will see that all three servers actually perform on kind of the same level when at full strength during prime time.

Colly.4073:

And what else did you expect? There is putting up a brave fight and there is Urinating against the wind.

As someone who had the fate to fight Viz four times in the past 7 weeks (as well as Elona, Baruch, SFR, and other stronger servers), I can report that there is actually a lot of fun in a match-up even if you are doomed to end up on the loosing side. Put your efforts into achieving small victories, and I guarantee you that they will taste much sweeter when achieved against such strong opponents. Also, after they have already taken everything from you, they cannot punish you anymore if you trash something that they hold dear.

So, as the saying (almost) goes: “The only loosing move is not to play.”

~MRA

I looked at this and thought what a load of BULL. I am sorry but Picken is getting smaller by the week there are several reasons for this but getting the kitten kicked out of you week after week be some overpopulated server is not fun and when you try and upgrade your side to have it rolled over with a blink of an eye is not fun, we do not want it easy but we need to have someo kind of a chance and facing server with much higher population is not going to help the matter.

As you will have seen this week there has been little fight back from picken because people are fed up with it.

This match up bull needs to be looked at, as it is grossly unfair for med servers to face nearly full severs it seems that you want easy mtches a side to kick around well all that will happen is more people leave the lower severs.

As far as i can see there are 3 different server med, high and very high so who in the right mind thought it would be good to have a med server vs a high and very high which has happened several times.

Maybe stop letting people outside EU playing on EU servers, I dont know what the answer is but anything has to be better than this.

What? In terms of nightcapping, we’ve been nightcapped before, and it’s nothing new.

And in terms of population, we are medium populated, but our WvW community is perfectly fine number wise, and I’ve been having a lot of fun this matchup.

On the topic of that, the pop-up should make a loud sound the first time it pops and you should be able to hear it while alt-tabbed, just like Dota 2 does it.

It would probably reduce the number of 4v5s by quite a few since a part of them are probably people missing the queue pop.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Game_release

Go through these, you’ll see what you missed. In short, SoloQ/TeamQ with ELO rating and leaderboards and Custom Arenas with Spectator mode are the most important.

Tournaments have been organized and the first official GW2 tourny is happening at PAX at the end of this month I believe with a prize pool of $10 000.

No, it’s percentile, eg. if your percentile is 90% that means you’re better than 90% of the players.

You get on the leaderboard by getting in the top 1000, which is I guess around 98% on EU.

Evan Lesh.3295:

This is the same issue we have with earning glory and rank points. Revamping the way this works will be part of our rewards restructuring.

Any hint on when that’s coming (roughly)?

Hotjoin is definitely the cancer of sPvP and it encourages horrible behaviour.

In addition to suggested changes, split credit for capping a point among those capping it (i.e. 10 glory for capping a point solo, 2 glory each for 5 people capping it) or something similar.

This should hopefully discourage mindless zerging a bit more and promote splits, as opposed to 5 people capturing one node.

This is actually a really good question. Why isn’t it a simple 25% damage reduction or something?

It would be great if a dev could elaborate on that.

GankSinatra.2653:

aydenunited.5729:

Short answer:

Balance the game around fighting/tPvP is about map control.

You can’t balance “completely” around the two. Add in a refusal to separate PvE from PvP on a greater scale the difference gets even bigger.

That said, even with all that, it’s still ten times more balanced than WoW ever was, which is saying something considering how long the two have been around respectively.

WoW has never claimed to be a pvp game. It had a crapload more skills and abilities as well. Take that into account and the goal that ANET set for themselves in terms of build diversity and no, this game isnt really all that balanced. Its just that each class can spam (aoe) skills here, nobody feels left behind as much.

I have never played WoW, how balanced is the game? Are all classes represented almost equally? How much different builds does each class have that are viable in high level pvp?

I’m not 100% sure what OP is trying to say, but I believe rallying is timer + distance based, and it may need some tweaks since there were some serious cases of WTF rallies.

That sounds like a pretty god idea actually.

Even better would be, long term, if they brought back a way to get gems from PvP. Some kind of bi-daily/weekly tournies or something.

Diage.6451:

Mainly, the discussion that even went into Anet was more as an example to illustrate how the concept works. Discussing what Anet has done in regards to this would be an interesting corollary that would be massive if fully written out (but don’t worry, I could, just no one would ever read it lol.)

Why not go into what you would do different then?

I think a constructive post like that would be a really good read.

Interesting idea for a post, but it’s a bit short isn’t it?

I’d like to see analysed what ANet did right, what they did wrong, and how would you change it, going by your points:

- Team focused combat
- A sense of development
- A rewarding combat experience
- Room to truly define a unique play style
- A dramatic combat experience with a sense of drama that can develop as the game goes on.

and

“I would do everything within my power to make certain that crossing the realms from pve to pvp did not change how I intimately interact and feel about the game.”

etc.

josh.7390:

One of the biggest issues is, that you get more rank with braindead hotzerg then with tournaments. Another problem is imho, that you get rank anyway. It doesnt matter if you play good or bad, if you help your team or not. In GW1 the rank meant something (not talking about the last 3 years, but the first 3), because you actually had to WIN to get rank and the more matches you won (in a row), the harder the enemies got. Parallel you also received more fame (rankpoints), when you won many matches in a row… I dont unterstand why Anet didnt take this system into GW2…^^

+1, agree with this, I was just stating that time-wise max rank took a long time in gw1.

But as you said, rank actually meant that you won X matches in a competitive tournament setting, and not that you just played hotjoins a lot.

I’m pretty sure they said they will be reworking the reward system.

Though gw1 did have something similar with the hero title, the first player to reach max rank reached it after a few years of dedicated playing.

shadows wolf.6928:

well it has been a little while is it time to come back yet?

You might wanna tell us what exactly are you looking for. We do have matchmatking/leaderboards, Custom Arenas and Spectator mode, but still no solo-queue or a satisfying reward system.

Balance is ok, and will be even better with this patch in a few days if the leaked notes are true. The balance problems at the moment are Warrior and Necro being underpowered, build diversity is very low (1-2 viable builds per class), and some slight OPness of specific builds.

The new patch (supposedly) buffs Warriors and Necros, tones down some OP builds, and tries to bring in some build diversity. It will probably solve in some part the first two problems, but I don’t have my hopes up for the thrid (build diversity).

All in all, if you’re a high-end player with a team things are looking pretty good, the Custom Arenas and Spectator mode have resulted in some fun tournies being organized.

They’re mostly fun to watch but have some problems – the clusterkitten of particle effects makes it difficult to understand what is going on, and the casters aren’t very good yet honestly (with the exception of Grouch I’d say). The dev’s said they’re working on a solution to particle effects, and the casters should be getting better, but I wouldn’t expect either any time soon.

However if you’re mostly a solo player, an update which brings in the solo/team queue split and some more satisfying rewards will probably be the one that matters most to you.

+1, Dota 2 has this and it works great, when the Accept/Ready pop up comes up, you hear a very distinct sound even if you alt-tabbed out of the game.

I’m genuinely surprised we don’t have this yet, since 4v5s are a very frustrating experience and this isn’t such a huge feature, I imagine LeshSoFresh would be able to code it up in a couple of days or a week tops.

1) Split queues (ranked solo/duo queue, ranked team queue, unranked queue for any number of people)

IMO all three of these are very necessary, including the unranked queue for playing with you newbie friends or playing new classes/builds etc.

2) Voice commands

This should come with the solo/duo queue. Unlike LoL/Dota, Guild Wars 2 is practically impossible to play well with only chat for communication.

You should be able to open up a voice menu with a hotkey, then press 1-9 or something else for a specific voice command like “I’m coming mid!” or “2 incoming to close!”.

3) Quality of life/Polish

Including but not limited to:

A PvP Equipment panel, allowing the creation of PvP items from a simple menu instead of “buying” them for free from vendors. Ideally the PvP skin locker would be integrated with this.

Skill/trait/equipment templates you can save and switch from and to easily on the fly.

A checkbox for right-click targeting.

A refined reward system, with the Glory vendors having a more diverse inventory. Make it possible to get some skins which are PvE-only atm (the big ones being Legendaries).

Integrate Leaderboards into the game, perhaps into the PvP menu.

Make hotjoins reward glory only on the end on the match, depending on how well your team did (your score – enemy score for example). Current rewards only encourage glory farming which is exactly the opposite of playing for the benefit of your team (eg. capping an empty point with 3 people).

Also, make HotM as glorious as Great Temple of Balthazar once was (and still is I guess). Not 100% necessary but would be really cool. At the moment it’s a very dark and colorless place, especially if you play with post-processing turned on.

IGN: Hrkljus
Main Profession: Elementalist
Alternate Professions: Necromancer
Account name: hrkljus.1243
Practice Availablity: No strict schedule
Current PvP rank (Not Leaderboard): 22
Level of Desire: Casual Play
NA or EU: EU

Also noticed it doesn’t work.

If I noticed correctly it works in HotM but doesn’t actually work inside games.

Nettle.9025:

Seems most are fairly happy with this patch, warrior changes were not enough, and also that Anet needs to get on top of a solo queue now.

I think this summarizes the situation fairly well.

Definitely agree, +1

Meglobob.8620:

So basically atm there’s NO POINT WHATSOEVER in doing PvP…

I hate to break it to you, but you may be playing sPvP for the wrong reasons.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Yeah, we’ve heard about this. Investigating.

What about us who need one more win or a bit more rank points for their monthly (and it’s ending in a few hours)? :O

Think about the children.

gwawer.9805:

That’s pretty weird considering arena net is an American company in the game is more heavily advertised in America. Also studies show that Americans are more lazy and tend to do sedentary activities like sitting in front of their computers playing video games so it really surprises me that there are more Europeans playing. Or maybe that is just right for S PVP because Americans tend to lose patience when strategy is involved and so most Americans who have attention disorders have left the S PVP already.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves with stereotypes and generalization I’m pretty sure we’re equally lazy/impatient when it comes to some things here across the Atlantic too.

+1, have been experiencing lag in sPvP a lot, and also the same is obviously true for WvW in a much larger way.

Apolo.5942:

ahuba.6430:

Apolo.5942:

Also, who would they sell to? pvp is almost dead.

no its not, pvp right now is in its healthier state of the past ~~5 months

And that is a good thing precisely how?

Dude do you just sit at home all they and complain on the forums?

Luthan.5236:

Isn’t there still the problem that it sometimes does not even show all your team mates at map and ui(health bar and stuff at the top left) if they are too far away? They first should fix this.

IIRC they said this should be fixed with the spectator mode coming out.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Nord.5360:

My infamous orange beanie cost like $6.00, and it definitely fends off sharks.

Grouch where’d you get it?

Grouch answer this man.

IMO glory acquisition should be changed before glory becomes anything remotely serious, otherwise it’s just gonna reward hotjoin heroes for zerging instead of tournament PvP.

SwickHobo.5096:

its gonna match the ques take twice as long, maybe even longer.

Played like 10 games yesterday, ranging from solo/duo/trio to premade queue, most of them popped instantly and those that didn’t popped within the minute.

And with CA and Spectator Mode even more people are gonna be coming to sPvP over the next few weeks. Therefore I see absolutely no reason not to split queues into solo/duo, premade and unranked.

Even if that will mean once in a while waiting 5-10 minutes for queue’s to pop the games will be a superior experience, and all the players that don’t wanna queue w/o a premade or with a newbie friend are going to get a way to do that while preserving their rating. And this should hopefully bring the PvP experience up a level and get more people to play.

Oblivion.8307:

I did this with 30ish dyes and got 3 white and a midnight fire dye, nearly 30g. Luck of the draw i guess.

proof – http://i.imgur.com/nX1TnuO.jpg

Wow dude which god did you sacrifice your firstborn to? :O

Questions:

1) After shipping Custom Arenas and Spectator mode, what features have top priority now?

2) Will we be seeing split queues (solo-duo/premade), and if yes, are they a priority at the moment?

3) We already know that some polish in PvP is planned (build templates, setting up gear in an easier way then going from merchant to merchant “buying” free items etc.), what priority does that general polish take?

Back in GW1 they had Observer mode where you could view rated GvG matches, battles in HoH and such with a delay, no reason not to have them in GW2 too, it’ll just take time I assume.

From a programming standpoint spectating with a delay may be related to replays, so we may get these two features together.