Guild Wars 2

My general favorite profession to pick on: COMMANDERS.

See how well a mindless zerg does when there is no more blue icon to tell them how to play, or to lead them into a fight.

Other than you and your team displaying extraordinarily bad play, I don’t see an issue here in your video.

Next time plug a Hammer in, don’t randomly smash auto-attack, and hide in a camps corner. I have killed plenty Thieves who thought stealth made them safe.

If you at least had shown a video of a true proper perma-stealth Thief with Blinding Powder, preventing you from capping it for minutes while staying practically permanently invisible, I might have agreed with you, but I just cannot take your posting seriously.

Commander Badges should be a reward out of WvW in some way, that reflect experience and time spend in World vs. World, not a reward for being rich. Being rich demonstrates time spent OUTSIDE of World vs World. And ultimately World vs. World is the main reason we have that Commanders Badge anyway, and it’s the only use case currently.

I don’t have a problem with not being able to afford one, but with too many incompetent people, or downright PvE people coming into World vs. World with their prestige badge, and causing real harm by pulling people around just because they have that blue icon up.

It should be a privilege to be earned not to be bought. Granted, even as a World vs. World event it does not mean you are a good and experienced Commander but it certainly counts for a lot more than somebody who spend 300 hours in Cursed Shore, or in front of the trading post, or just has a big wallet.

I have no suggestions for details on how it should or could be revamped, but rather am curious whether other people share my feeling here, that it should be changed into that direction.

It’s really sad, that the first two major special events (first being halloween, second one introducing the first major content upgrade) don’t work right off the bat.

Halloween instance was bugged for the first hour or so, blueballing everybody that was excited about it, and now this is a pure lagfest of extremes.

ArenaNet should take a close look at their current direction, and consider being more careful in the future. These exact things is what can cause MMORPGs with high potential such as GW2 iteself to just die off, and be remembered as one of those “MMORPGs showing promise”

First off, thanks for all your responses. You guys are amazing at staying constructively, and giving me a few views here.

SHAKA ZULU.3128”

I’ve been playing a guardian since day 1 on my server and it is hard to feel powerful, I agree. I’ve tried many, many things too, and was starting to just get annoyed with how useless I felt. But within the last few weeks I’ve really had a great time going more melee with a hammer/gs. I am surprising myself at how much more mobile the hammer is than what I originally thought. Switching between that as gs you always have a gap closer on hand, along with hammer 3 and 5 which locks players down. It does not take me very long to down anyone with this load out, most hits aside from the first 2 swipes in gs/hammer 1 are 800-1100 damage.
Right now I run Cleric’s armor with Dolyak runes, half berserker jewelry for hard hitting and half toughness/vit specced jewelry (forget what it is called). I like to engage huuuuuge groups and can at least down ~3 in a go, but more importantly tenderize the front line for the stronger to sweep up. I use Save Yourselves + Contemplation of Purity after a few seconds (so the condition damage/boon strippers are tapped out before I engage these skills) to be in boon city for a few more hits before falling back to recuperate with Renewed Focus. We are very symbiotic with small parties because we can switch to support on a dime and let others take over after meleeing some foos, just don’t expect to go it alone and get anything done. And as far as I’ve played, not like you mentioned this but oh well, you’ll have to accept always being the Gandalf of your group. Just think “fly you fools!” as your group gets away and you face the music because let’s be real, we couldn’t outrun a rock.
TL;DR: we are meat tenderizers and Gandalf.
As an aside, I do have the most fun running with a mesmer or shout warrior, as that has been quite the trio of survivability in my experience. Sorry if this wasn’t helpful, just came at the right time as I was switching some stuff up after facing your same problem

This I must say has been the most helpful posting here.

I guess all your responses explain my feeling here. Going on a ranged/aoe trip with Staff/Scepter+Focus was not as useful as I thought it was. I must have been really spoiled with easy gap closer and killing power, with very decent AoE ranged attacks. So the key really lies in the pure Melee form.

So I shall look into getting used more to Hammer/GS and see how I can integrate them into my build, and only throw on a Staff if I’m defending behind a gate.

Howdy everybody.

Before you reply, please note this is highly WvW specific, due to it’s in no way applicable to sPvP.

To start off, I have a 80 Thief and 80 Necromancer as well, and I just finished my Guardian leveling session, geared him out and stuffed him into WvW.

I tried out all the weapons, but felt like I couldn’t actually do any reliable damage. No matter which build I tried, I felt just like a mule for Wall of Reflection. Scepter never hits anything that moves (Smite is fine though), Greatsword/Mace/Sword are borderline useless for damage application purposes in mobile fights (which most in WvW are) because either you lack a gap closer, or an immobilize/cripple or the range (Greatswords Whirl just misses once stuff starts moving).

So that only left me with Staff as my main weapon, with terrible range, the orb skill basically like the scepter auto attack always misses mobile targets too, empower putting you into one place for a long time, leaving you with a somewhat situational line of warding (the inability to move while casting makes this dangerous to use in many situations), a so-so swiftness buff and a short range AoE attack that cannot even hit on walls.

But ok, so I learned to stick with that attack, but the hits just feel lackluster.

In PvE it’s all great, since mobs will just stand in front of me and take my beating. But in WvW if the bulk of my damage misses just because the player is moving, it’s not fun.

Note: I tried traiting in most variations, and I use full Beserker gear (survivability is not an issue, because my Thief play has more than trained me to know when to engage, and how to dodge).

So fine, damage is something Guardians seem like incapable of dishing out in WvW. That is completely fine by me, but the only real utilities we have to offer are shouts and consecrations. And they feel somewhat situational, and they all incur far too much standing around.

I mean the way it feels, all that I can be useful for is throwing down wall of reflection every now and then. Maybe a shout build could do more for the team, but I’d like a bit more Hybrid.

I currently use a 0/20/10/20/20 build, designed to balance consecrations, improve my tank a bit, while trying to increase my damage potential as much as possible.

Consecrations aside, it really feels to me like Warriors are just like a better version of Guardians in WvW (2 complete invulnerabilities, cap closers, cripples, damage, burst, shouts) with just less healing.

So, is this just what the Guardian is? Or have I not fully understood how to utilize Guardians properly? What possible focuses or roles could I have as a Guardian, and what weapon sets/skill/traits would synergize with such roles?

Or do I just want to re-roll Mesmer?

You can see a lot of cultural armor wearers. And the gold is not that hard to come by.

If you are willing to invest time (actual experience or business background is not needed, you just need to do it – buying low and selling high is a simple concept), TPing can get you a metric crapton of gold in notime. That is arguably the most profitable venture in GW2 hands down.

But even without the TP, daily Ori farming can easily net you upwards 10g a day for very little time invested. And just the passive income you get from most PvE content or even just plain WvW is just an additional bonus. You just have to make sure to salvage the right stuff, know what to vendor, and possibly craft resources if it makes sense to do so.

Just give it some thought, and maybe just jump into the cold water – I promise you won’t regret it.

Let’s face it, doing what most other MMORPGs that employ free trials (namely disabling chat, removing trading – here it would be disabling item sending via mail, and possibly TP) would block you out of the economy and prevent you from advertising any kind of RMT.

However, the problems I do see are with the actual game content, meaning sPVP and WvW, and just mere server resources.

Most servers are decently populated already, leading to Queues on WvW and popular zones like LA. Free trials would mean a massive influx of additional players, costing server resources, while not getting any additional revenue to provide for more hardware to actually deal with that.

The sPvP problem (people could be playing sPvP for all eternity without buying GW2) or WvW problem (same difference – condition necromancers whether they are level 1 or 80 in full exotics, through their condition control alone can have full effect no matter what for example) could be solved by simply blocking that content as well.

So I just see money + available hardware resources as the main issue. A trial does not create revenue – it’s actually a deficit. Yes, you could argue that free trials ultimately lead to more buyers, but you’ll always have a lot more trialees who will either cost you money on buying additional server resources, or waste the pre-existing server resources.

And until we come at a point where we have numerous servers with low population, I don’t see trials happening.

Splitting skills eventually leads to bad game design.

If you start splitting them, you’ll in a worst case scenario effectively double the skills you have to maintain and balance in their respective area. If you however tailor PvE content to be similar to PvP (in that mobs dodge like players, use the same conditions and lots of similar skills), it not only reduces managing the skillset you have to design, balance and maintain to only one, but it also creates a more linear learning curve, in that PvE experience to some degree carries into PvP and the other way around, because your skills are the same and the enemies are the same – at least to some degree.

So essentially making PvP and PvE alike has so many advantages over differentiating between those two and creating different mechanics (leading to completely different metagames) for each.

Hi everybody.

I have the Mad Memoires: Complete Edition back item, and I have been trying to put in jewels and gemstones, without much success however (tier 1 jewels/gemstones seem to work)

My feeling is, that since it has no level restrictions, it would only allow such upgrades that don’t have a level restriction either (I guess to make sure people don’t run around at lv1 with lv65 jewels in their gear). Can somebody confirm/deny/correct this?

Thanks,
norc

Removing send gold option will not make it any harder really. As long as there is a way to transfer gold in any way, gold sellers will use it. While I agree that it would be possible to flag fishy TP sales, the same could be said about gold mails. Or people would start sending the gold through items, that the recipient can then resell. It’s not very complicated.

This thought-of solution seems more like a desperate wishful thinking.

The interesting thing is that these botters, assuming ANet does indeed ban a lot of them on a regular basis, seem to be able to afford so many GW2 keys. Based on the prices of some of the sellers, they would have to make 100-200 gold per account – and sell it – to actually make a profit. (Scammers we do not care about, since they do not have an effect on the economy, or spam places with bots)

Now the way to fight this is to find ways to identify them before they make that much gold in the first place, otherwise they will just keep making new accounts over and over again, or related to that, make it harder for them to accumulate gold in a short amount of time, increasing the chance that they will get banned before they get enough gold for sale to pay for that banned account.

:Edit:
And it’s quite possible to use the TP in that manner. There’s plenty of items with no sale offers on the TP, so you can dictate the price on those. And it still leaves the send items via mail, that could then by the person be resold for the gold in the end. Whether or not it slightly reduces gold sellers income is of no consequence, they will still be making money.

:Edit2:
In fact, going to the roots of these problems might actually be even better. Find out where those accounts come from. Who is selling them. Enforce phone activation (you have internet, you have a phone), suddenly the whole thing of creating a throw-away-bot-farm-account can be identified, tracked and dealt with much more easily.

Solution simple.

Force a queue to prevent one side from being mass flooded. Not only would that help counter general outmanned, but it also solves the cross timezone problem.

US just cannot get past the EU queue at EU nighttime, since the other worlds are too empty. Bam.

Add some small buffer, since small differences in numbers are totally fine.

ALL PROBLEMS GONE!

It would also:

Give an incentive to transfer to less populated servers to get more involved into WvWvW rather than being stuck in Queue at all times because you joined the stomping server with the highest cross timezone population.

Discourages transfers to highly populated cross timezone servers for pure WvWvW since you would have high Queue times always.

→ Combined: It would even things out.

That was easy.

Unofficial RP server as well! You made my decision for me. Thank for your positive feedback. :-)

Howdy everybody.

After a few bumps, I finally managed to get my hands on GW2, awaited the painfully long download to install it, but was quite surprised to find myself not being able to decide which server I should be starting out at.

Ok, so I’m stuck at the server selection. Why? I don’t want to lock myself into a national-biased server, as I prefer English as a main form of communication. Though since I do live in Germany, EU – I’m too worried about real-time latency and possibly bad timezone placement for logging to the NA servers. And I still prefer English over German as the main language.

Normally this would not be an issue if I wasn’t completely locked to a server right from the get-go, so this definitely seens something to be improved on (maybe a grace period during which a fresh account can freely switch servers to pick one to his liking, without having the feeling to be completely disappointed by ending by a badly mismatched unofficial community on the server.

And last not but least, I don’t want to end up in a crowded server where I end up more times playing on an overflow shard, than on the actual server itself. A nice international primarily English-focused community with a European server is what I’m looking for. Based on some websites, Piken’s Square might fit that description, but I’d like to get some feedback to see whether I’m on the right track here, or whether I should rather consider another server.

Thanks a lot everybody, and eagerly awaiting your responses!
norc