Guild Wars 2

Agreed. The original post summarizes the specializations well.

This is the worst meta so far. Way too much burst, crazy condition stacks, while some specs have crazy amount of evades, blocks, invulnerability and/or crazy healing. Basically it is also pay-to-win, since all the top teams rely on revenant or the elite specifications, meaning that without HoT expansion you cannot have a highly competitive team build. Arenanet’s original statement was the elite speciazations would bring something different to the table, but not be more powerful than the original specilizations, but this simply isn’t true, except for warrior’s berserker (which doesn’t see much play outside gunflame/rifle one trick pony).

The trait change in June 2015 already was already a huge buff to some professions, like mesmer. I hope Arenanet will now tone down this power creep. It would also nice if they would slightly buff warrior sustain to make it viable support profession again, besides being hit-and-run bruiser.

I have been a huge fan of the art direction of Guild Wars 1 and the original content of Guild Wars 2 when it was released. This is one the key reasons why I am coming back to the game. The Art is just so GOOD!

I found Dry Top be a very dull looking, ugly place with annoying particle effects, like the sand storm. Now Heart of the Storms seems to go further with this direction. I found it way too gloomy, way too much verticality, pretty much everything just looked ugly to me and I got zero aesthetic pleasure from it. I know some players will disagree.

Almost all the new maps after the launch of GW2 have been far worse than the original content. Example of bad map design + Art: Edge of the Mists, Ruins area in Borderlands, Dry Top and Court Yard (pvp map).

I hope the future updates will bring something more in the direction of the original maps, which feel much more natural, like places which could exist with snow topped mountains, hills, forest, rivers and so on.

1. scaling creatures, new and more difficult NPCs and unique bosses at each objective
- No need. This is NOT pve. You already have too much of this in Living Story. Please don’t make WvWvW more into pve-like experience.

2. Increased emphasis on verticality
Please no. This was one of the big design mistakes of the EotM map and Skyhammer, which is the least favorite spvp map.

3. More chokepoints
While every map needs a good balance of open places, some hills, cliffs, water and chokepoints, EotM has way too many chokepoints. Please use current Eternal Battlegrounds as your standard of map design, not EotM.

4. A much shorter match time
This could be considered, but I feel that EotM completely lacks the community aspect of the game and rapidly changing opponents make guild rivalries from opposing servers more difficult. EotM is nothing but just a big karma train and eventually it will get very boring, just like the ruins of power first had players, because of the achievements attached to it. When the novelty runs out, what then? WvWvW should be designed better to cater guilds and EotM is simple going to the wrong direction with that.

5. Destructible terrain
Doesn’t seem to add much.

Few things to add: I think the added new game mechanisms (player based buffs) and traps, turrets etc were BAD in EotM and I wish to see none of them outside that map. Rule of design: Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS), but keep refining the existing rules to perfection. A chess wouldn’t become a better game by adding more pieces and chokepoints to the board.

I solo roam regularly, using whatever profession I want. I most often just flip the supply camps, but sometimes solo attack enemy keeps and towers (killing guards is the easy part, building a ram alone takes a it of time). Of course a snipe a dolyak or enemy sentry if I can or capture the bloodlust for our server. Providing scouting information is perhaps the most vital role though. Since I am a PPT focused player, I am not much into dueling.

I am most often on my engineer. I play hybrid power rifle with 3 kits. My build is good all-rounder, not optimal for anything, but very versatile for almost any situation. I have never seen any solo roaming engineer using same build. Enemy engineers are rare and those rare engis I see are almost all running with healing turret + pistol/shield, usually condition spamming bunkers. Sometimes I meet a static discharge (SD) rifle engi, but those run in small groups or in zergs.

Almost all enemy solo roamers are thieves (D/P and P/D being currently most popular, but S/D, S/P and P/P are quite common as well) with mesmers (usually PU mesmer) and warriors (always using greatsword mobility build, or sword/sword + longbow condition) come distant second. I feel pity against the solo roaming rangers as they are so easy kills, but in small groups a zerker LB ranger is dangerous indeed. Necromancers used to be pain in the kitten and I would still consider a condimancer as a hard counter against condi engi (necro should win assuming equal skill level), but power rifle has good chances against any necromancers. All the solo roaming elementalists are bunkers and fights against them tend to be long, unless you get the burst through at start.

Recently meditation guardians have become increasingly popular in roaming. Some are using the perma burn build, which does really good DPS and still has mobility. But still solo roaming guardians are rare as hen’s teeth.

Like others have pointed: WvWvW is not fair. I do not see anything evil in running for help or fleeing back to own keep or tower, but I really despise ganking groups. By ganking groups I mean small teams, who e.g. flip a sentry and then stealth nearby to gank enemy solo roamers in group. All these deserve to be trampled by a zerg. So if somebody ganks me by a group, I almost invariably will tell their location in map chat and TeamSpeak and soon I am collecting loot bags from their corpses. A very good tactic is to act as bait and lure enemy into your larger group. Works pretty much every time. Those who play ambush tactic, deserve to taste their own medicine. Luring also works very well against enemy zergs. Nothing is better than to lure entire enemy group 30+ into unfavorable terrain and have own zerg stacked into small pile, so they look like a smaller group or hide behind a corner and veil in.

Certain professions and builds are inherently stronger in 1 vs 1 than others. If you are running for example a perplexity engineer/thief/mesmer/etc or PU mesmer, mobility warrior, P/D thief or some other cheese build, do NOT fool yourself. You do NOT necessarily have better skills if you can beat most others in 1 vs 1. Most people who enter WvWvW are not even geared for 1 vs 1, but have built their character for large scale battles. You win because of the build, not because of your skills.

Many people might think solo roaming is dead in top tiers. But at least here in EU tier 1, there is often very little players on the map during morning and closer to noon. There is almost nothing else than small scale roaming at those hours.

It is essential that a solo player is able to capture a normal camp. Outside the busy prime the number of players per map can be very low even in the top tiers of EU. Now imagine if are the lonely guy on the map and the objectives are upgraded like the original poster suggests, you cannot get anything done! Solo roaming should not be punished. A great game mode caters many different gaming styles.

Most players have trouble soloing a fully upgraded camp, unless they use a build like this (which is made for this role):
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Thief_-_Solo_Camp_Flipper

And I am sure majority of the players never solo a tower or a keep. The time window to do this in top tiers is usually very small. You have to be able to kill all the NPCs in less than 1 minute. I have often failed to capture a tower with 1-3 players, because the enemy forces have come there.

I don’t think you will find so many threads in this forum about solo roaming being too powerful in this game mode, but almost everybody agree that zerging is too prevalent. We often have massive blobs which mow over any objective, defended or not. A blob of 50+ players can very quickly flip the entire map and if the defenders have much less players, they can just use some siege disablers and supply traps, drain supplies etc. to slow them a bit, but in about 20 minutes is gone. This is highly irritating especially if you spent many gold pieces to upgrade and siege these locations. And of course players do this as it is the most rewarding way to play WvWvW (I don’t count EotM as WvWvW). Currently WvWvW is often border hopping flipping as much as possible in one map and then hopping to another to gain maximum of points.

I have suggested:
Capture camp/tower/keep/castle events are scaled to the amount of enemy players just like the pve events are. Extra archers will spawn to defend the objectives if a very large enemy force comes there (the very large could be 5+ for a camp, 10+ for a tower, 30+ for a keep and 50+ for Stonemist. The extra NPCs do not drop any loot and vanish if the location is still not captured after 3 minutes. This is to avoid EotM style of farming. The camp/tower/keep lord could be scaled in amount of hit points to make it harder to kill by a large enemy force. This would balance the population imbalance issues and make off-time (aka “night” capping) more time consuming and difficult.

There is just one thing which I would want to see a bit harder for a solo player:
killing a dolyak

A dolyak with guards should be either completely immune damage or take just 1/3 damage (thus you need to kill the guard and scout escorting it first). Because in its current state, the NPC guards are completely useless. You just spam damage to the dolyak and both of these guards vanish as well.

Good ideas and bad ideas. Great that we are finally informed (at least in some way) in advance and a specific date!

I am of course curious about the new scoring, but since the information is not yet out, I won’t comment it.

WvWvW definitely needs better rewards and what we will get soon sounds good, except I think ascended gear should have been bought by gold and badges alone. Now to keep accessories strictly laurels + 50 ectos punishes severely those players who play multiple characters (once again a sign that Arenanet hates diversity). Also I am pretty sure many players already brought their amulet + rings with the laurels, yet now just got a slap on their face learning that badges won’t help acquiring their ascended accessories. Yet another thing to increase player irritation and promote grinding. Please make badges count to get ascended accessories.

Unfortunately once again nothing to make the outmanned buff more useful. Please smart developers please tell me how to fight against 20 with just 2? Or even against 10 with just 3-5 on your side? Why do you reward numbers, coverage and blobbing?

Still no words about fixing stealth. The traps were just bad idea, like I explained in the thief nerf thread.

Still nothing to tone down the overpowered siege weapon traits and arrow cart damage. What is the logic that you get only + 1% / 2% / 3% vs mercenaries, but already two 1st Arrow Cart WXP traits give you hugely increased range and damage, which affects enemy players as well. This is simply beyond my reasoning. Just sitting on AC, clicking 1, 2 or 3 and yawning have been the WXP + loot bags ever. Very efficient to farm WXP, badges + loot, but where is the skill!?

We have had too much power creep, so please do targeted nerfs.

Some traits since the June 2015 trait rework are still overpowered and some are underpowered, but the biggest offenders are the HoT elite specifications and revenants. Tone them down. If one weapon/skill does a lot of damage, it shouldn’t do lots of CC or utility at same time. At the same time some underused skills and traits could use a small buff (easiest is reduction of CD/ICD).

Warrior needs some added sustain, which could be easily done by reverting warhorn nerfs, adding 200 to shout base heal or reducing “To the Limit!” untraited cooldown to 25 seconds, giving warriors a sorely needed burst heal.

Truly stupid and sad change indeed. Luckily I have used proof heroics to 3 of main characters full masteries and guardian is 90%+ full.

This least needs more soul bound stuff. My expanded bank + bags are already full of this. This game needs easier way to play alts, not discourage playing your alts.

One important notice: experience points are still utterly useless in WvWvW. You cannot use them to unlock any masteries. Thus I have just 6 masteries so far, because I don’t enjoy pve much and I haven’t completed any of the new pve maps. I wish I could use my WvWvW earned experience for either Tyria or HoT masteries (designated by players or give some jugs of liquid exp).

Profession Selection Guide (Part 2)

Continuing from above message

Thief
Melee damage: ***
Ranged damage: **
Area damage: *
Support: *
Survivability: **
Mobility: ***
Beginner friendly: ***
Weapon of Choice: Dual daggers, shortbow
Essential utility skills: Shadow Refuge, Signet of Shadows, Caltrops, Shadowstep

Thief offers one of the highest burst damage in the game, while at same time being able to become invisible (stealthed) at will. Thief can also do short ranged teleports (shadowstep). Thieves are often squishy, but this is more than offset by their amazing ability to get away. The combination of fast high damage burst, extremely mobility and stealth, makes thieves the most hated profession in the game.

Why should you play a Thief? If you want to surprise kill your opponent fast and then get away easily

Elementalist
Melee damage: **
Ranged damage: ***
Area damage: ***
Support: **
Survivability: **
Mobility: ***
Beginner friendly: **
Weapon of Choice: Dual daggers, Staff
Essential utility skills: Glyph of Lesser Elementals, Mist Form, Signet of Air, Cleansing Wave

Elementalist is perhaps the closest to the traditional mage / wizard. It can change between the four elements (air, earth, fire, water) at will, giving it more versatility than any other profession. Elementalist is the master of area damage. It has great mobility and durability. It can also heal and buffs its allies and summon elementals to attack its enemies.

Why should you play an Elementalist? You want to blast your foes, heal your allies and move fast like a lightning

Mesmer
Melee damage: **
Ranged damage: **
Area damage: *
Support: ***
Survivability: ***
Mobility: **
Beginner friendly: **
Weapon of Choice: Greatsword, Sword, Focus
Essential utility skills: Signet of Illusions, Portal, Veil, Decoy

Mesmer is the master of illusions. It can confuse its foes and avoid damage, by swapping places with a clone, which looks like itself. The illusions automatically attack enemies, until destroyed. Destroying the illusions can great a powerful spike. Despite being a light armor profession, mesmer is great at soloing group events. Mesmer has perhaps the two most powerful elite skills in the game: Time warp and mass invisibility, which grant quickness and stealth to its allies. Mesmer’s portal skill is essential in the current meta.

Why should you play a Mesmer? You want to confuse your enemies and let them attack your clones instead of you

Necromancer
Melee damage: **
Ranged damage: **
Area damage: ***
Support: **
Survivability: ***
Mobility: **
Beginner friendly: **
Weapon of Choice: Staff, dagger
Essential utility skills: Signet of the Locust, Plague Signet, Epidemic, Spectral Grasp

Necromancer is the master of conditions and undead. It has the ability to summon undead allies aka minions, but they are rather weak and many necromancers don’t use them. Necromancer has the unique ability to enter a state called death shroud. It is basically another health pool. Having two big health pools and ability to drain life from its foes gives necromancer great survivability.

Why should you play a Necromancer? You want to be different and make your foes run away in fear and suffer

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I will probably update this guide if there are big changes to the professions and skills.

Please bear in mind that English is not my native language. And I don’t claim to know everything about the game. Comments and questions are welcome!

Even though this is just a comic relief, I think there is a lot of truth about it.

I have worked as game designer and programmer and I am still teaching game design. Few of the key principles of designing MMORPG, fighting and action game skills and mechanics:

1. Each well-rounded skill should do one thing well e.g. damage, utility or defense, maximum 2 from that list and that should be countered with heavy cost (mana, energy, sacrificing own life force etc) and/or long cooldown. E.g. a well-rounded defense skill only provides defenses and does no damage or does very little damage and offers no utility. If skill does two things well at same time it should never have a relatively cheap cost or cooldown.

2. Each powerful game mechanism requires a hard counter counter e.g. direct damage can be blocked, evaded or fire damage can be countered with complete fire immunity or partial fire resistance. The most problematic powerful game mechanics are invisibility and stealth, which some wise game designers leave out of their games. Invisibility could have “see invisibility” or “invisibility purge” or they must be balanced with extreme rarity and very heavy cost. Teleport could have a counter skill which prevents teleports happening or foils them (forcing random wrong target). Both teleportation and invisibility often allow to skip game content and can create very cheap and annoying tactics in pvp. Imagine how bad CS:GO would be with group stealth and teleports.

3. Fully passive mechanics should be clearly weaker than any of the active ones, more like secondary things.

(DISCLAIMER: This is far from a complete list)

It is very easy to break these rules and invent too powerful skills for your favorite professions. In general almost every game of this type starts to suffer from skill and trait inflation aka power creep. Year 2015 was very bad for Guild Wars 2 as the power creep was massive, first with June 2015 trait rework and later with HoT. Almost all got tons of power creep except the warrior.

Bubi.5237:

kill a Veteran/Get a Ruin…

I know those dailies still exist, but they cannot be completed on the existing maps. Killing a veteran at the new borderlands doesn’t count for the daily. And the ruins of power are gone for good (that is one of my favorite changes).

Arenanet should just remove those broken WvWvW dailies, which can no longer be completed.

I agree with the OP. 3k thoughness is a lot, yet you still need to be afraid that out of stealth somebody comes and does about 22k damage in a second. Now imagine a player, who is new to pvp, tries hotjoin. After getting instagibbed several times this new player will either never try pvp again, thus leading to a small player base. Or this new player will also reroll into a thief or mesmer, leading to a boring meta where few professions being abundant.

But these kind of complaints have been on this forum already since day one. Yet, the developers have done nothing to address these problems. I think they still live in a fantasy land and think this is going to be e-sports. Almost complete lack of rewards and small player base spells “failure as an e-sports”. Game balancing is difficult, but adding rewards is easy (doing daily/laurels will not be enough, give pvp players unique weapon skins and Black Lion Keys).

Based on State of the Game interview, I predict the following things will happen with the next update:
1. Mug will be either reworked or its damage will be nerfed by 30% or so.
2. 3-4 s revealed after each stealth.
3. Many weapons and utility skills be buffed
4. Engineer’s kit refinement will be reworked and damage greatly nerfed.
5. Nothing else will be done to the burst damage.

#1-#4 are all good, but #5 is still lacking and thus we will never reach e-sports.

The developers have a very thick skull. They fail to understand that excessive fast burst leads to very static boring meta where almost everybody plays either a bunker or a glass cannon. Almost nobody plays balanced. The problem is even worse in WvWvW, because it allows consumables, more variety in gear, ascended gear and thus you can have even 104% crit damage.

Balanced is dead. Hail to bad game design!

Lucifer.7289:

Community issues factor in why people are not playing the new borderlands. Most WvW players from 2014-present are mostly pve focused players. Let’s be honest none of you people want to break the mindless, non skill “zerg” meta.

Desert Borderlands promote splitting your brainless zerg into smaller groups in order to progress. Which means you have to use your brain and have knowledge of your class and how to react when outnumbered or in a smaller group fight vs being brainless sheep mashing your head on the keyboard in a large zerg.

Desert Borderlands would be great if certain features were re-worked, rest is up to the WvW community to learn to adapt. I hear all this BS from Wvw players on how competitive they are yet they refuse to adept and fight in non zerg environments, just shows how non competitive people in WVW really are.

This is dishonest and disrespectful towards the player base. Your analysis that majority of the 2014-present player base being pve oriented maybe holds true for your server, but not for servers like Desolation. I can see that the same old core players, which have been on Desolation (some might have been on other servers but came back) are still there, while some simply quit the game entirely (don’t play pve or spvp anymore either). I am talking about hard core gamers, who play for Points per Tick or do WvWvW zerging and roaming every single day. The only big difference is that most of the players now migrated to EBG, because that is the only map worth playing which remains. I personally used to play on home borderland before HoT. I very rarely commanded or played on EBG. Now I am a EBG player as there is simply way too little action on the borderlands.

The two EU servers which are probably best adapted to the new maps are Desolation and Baruch Bay. At Desolation we use split team tactics, at least when I am playing. Nevertheless it doesn’t change the fact that the new Desert borderland maps are unsuited for WvWvW and no small changes will fix this issue. The old maps made much more sense both defense and attack wise and it too less time from A to B, meaning faster paced overall, which is what most players like (the new maps are a bit slower to flip objectives and travel). The new keeps are way too big. The old Alpine borderlands had much more fun fights and epic defenses, even 3-way fights.

Most WvWvW players wanted a simple map, with no gimmicks and they asked for less pve. And more balanced match ups. What did Arenanet give us? More imbalanced match ups. More gimmicks, like turn yourself into fiery hound, become invisible in blowing sand or take no falling damage, more pve (all those shrines, which are very easy to solo, but so boring… sighs). Of course the core player base feels alienated.

I don’t understand why so many players repeat the mantra “get better”. If there is loss of 200 points or more, then it is not because of just one player making a mistake or two. Especially when it happens repeatedly in a very long streak.

There is more and more evidence the current match making is broken. If you had a high MMR before Season 2 and got winning streaks, the game will more likely give you good team players. But if your MMR was low and you were unlucky enough to have a long loss streak at the start of Season 1, you are pretty much stuck in a downwards spiral unless you team up with others. Solo queuers who end up in this situation are screwed until the match making algorithm is changed or MMR is reset. Now I wish Arenanet would offer players a chance to reset their MMR. I know several would even pay gems to do that!

There is simply a limit how much a single player can carry. If you see your team mates constantly dying like flies, you can still lose despite not dying yourself, holding and capturing points. You cannot stop your team mates fighting off point and doing other unwise things. And when this happens again and again, your team mates generally just get worse and worse and wins become even more impossible. Forcing players to team up will also lead to diminished player base, so I see that Arenanet has only things to lose here.

Blow out matches are way too common. (in my experience only 20 % of the matches are even e.g. 400-500 or so and the vast majority like 70% are blow outs). Blowout matches are not fun any competitively minded player: what is the fun of winning 500-100 or losing 100-500? And when the fun is gone, the players leave.

I really hope Arenanet addresses this problem very soon. They need to do something in the middle of this season, because already several players quit and more will continue quit.

EU hasn’t had full server for a long while. We have just 2 servers, which are very high: Baruch Bay (BB) and Seafarer’s Rest (SFR). All the other gold servers are “high” population and others are medium.

“high” is also becoming a joke. Yesterday evening just 2 h after reset, we had just 5-10 players on EB and the borderlands even more dead. Desolation used to be tier #1 server.

Arenanet should quickly remove banners and give us the original Alpine borderland back. The more they wait, the more players leave the game.

The patch was bad for pvp. Really not much things changed what many players were wishing, besides the UI changes e.g. the new condition tick visualization is better.

Warrior got even slightly stronger (the sigil nerf wasn’t warrior specific). Necromancer was also buffed. And obviously rangers were so rare in pvp that they also needed a buff.

Warrior has always been king of pve with guardian. Yet every single patch buffs them in all game modes. Hammer + sword/warhorn shout warrior has been the meta in WvWvW since Autumn 2012. In fact some commanders openly wish that they would have all their players running warriors to win easier. Now that got buffed.

That all makes so much “sense”.

It seems Arenanet doesn’t want this game to be skill based at all, rather more just a casual game, accessible for all. Like the WvWvW lead wrote in forums “WvWvW isn’t supposed to be balanced at all”. So I guess it applies to tpvp/spvp as well

The activation time of skills gets reduced, cooldowns get reduced, AoE radius get larger so that even a person with bad mouse aim and no anticipation skills has a good chance of landing them. Allowing more easier, beginner friendly spam.

In classic game design it should be “high risk and high reward vs. low risk and low reward”. Things really appear upside down in this game. If I spam my damage skills and miss, where is the risk? If stealthed person tries to hit an opponent true block, he doesn’t get revealed. Where is the risk?

Powerful game mechanisms should be made very scarce (rare) or have a hard counter easily accessible for all. Teleportation (shadowstepping) still has no hard counter. Even ancient pen & paper role-playing games like D&D have anti-magic field and dimensional anchor, anti-teleporation field. Stealth makes a character invisible to enemies, but not immune to damage. Thus is should be actually called invisibility, but also see invisibility and invisibility purge. Now it finally got one hard counter (Sic’ Em), but other professions don’t have access to it. Two very badly designed game mechanisms. Granted the small size of pvp maps and the nature of contesting the points, which doesn’t work stealthed, makes this too less powerful in pvp, but extremely powerful in WvWvW.

Classic MMORPGs have both energy/mana and skill cooldown for a good reason. 7 out of 8 professions in GW2 only have the skill cooldown. Thus you can spam your skills as soon as they are free from cooldown without any penalty at all. You don’t lose any energy/mana. Thief weapon skills have no cooldown, but have initiative, allowing potentially even more abuse, by enabling to spam the same powerful skill several times in a row until initiative runs out. Dodging + evading is also a form of spam.

In general a skill should do either:
1) one powerful thing
2) two semi powerful things

E.g. well designed skill does a lot of damage, but nothing else e.g. kill shot (warrior’s rifle burst skill) or net shot (engi rifle #2), which does only 2 second immobilize, but no damage at all. Both skills are easy to dodge and kite, thus allowing smart counter play.

Badly designed skills do 2 or more things at same time e.g.
body shot (damage, invulnerability stacks + now immobilize)
putrid mark (high damage ranged aoe, transfers all conditions from allies to foes, which itself is very powerful alone)

Very high damage skills should have slow activation time and clearly telegraphed animation to make avoiding them easier, while very quick attacks and most auto attacks should do low damage. A well designed skill in that sense is churning earth (ele dagger 5).

High damage output and powerful healing should require player to do lots of interaction. Now AI can do the damage for you (ranger spirits, mesmer phantasms, necromancer minions). But where is the skill? Several professions have very powerful passive heals (warrior, guardian) and even passive condition removal (guardian, ranger). Instead we should have more skills like engineer’s medkit, which really requires the engineer to spend most of time healing if he wants to take every ounce of the healing out of it.

Logically the professions with the highest armor and health should have the least mobility and then vice versa for low health and armor. Yet in GW2 warrior has highest mobility (rivaled only by thief, but thief needs to sacrifice all initiative to keep up with perma swiftness sword/warhorn + greatsword warrior).

Maybe I am a too demanding customer? Maybe I think things too much, but all this really hurts my logic and sense of fairness.

Mesmer is still broken in spvp and WvWvW roaming for multiple reasons:

Mantra of distraction + confounding suggestions allows to do 1200 range stun every 5 seconds. The trait is brokenly overpowered. Mesmer has a lot of access to daze and this trait now turns every daze into 1.25 s stun.

Prismatic Understanding + The pledge traits allow mesmer to have very high stealth uptime. Mesmer can do damage from stealth without getting revealed using illusions, reset a fight or set up a burst.

Blink is 30 s (24 s traited) 1200 range teleport + stunbreak, which can be used both offensively and defensively and giving mobility.

Distortion gives invulnerability and unlike most other invulnerabilities it allows mesmer to use her skills at same time.

I do not mind mesmers having a lot of defenses, powerful burst and good in combat mobility, but having several of them in one build is certainly too much, leaving very little for counter play.

I could go on.

The amount of buffing to the other professions won’t fix the actual problem:

Neither stealth or teleport have any hard counters. Even table-top RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder RPG offer hard counters to them: see invisibility, true seeing, invisibility purge, teleport anchor, anti-magic field. For some crazy reason Anet designed both mesmers and thieves have the superb ways avoid getting by enemy (stealth, teleporting, short range teleports away, replaced by clones etc). In most other MMORPGs you cannot enter stealth during combat and any damage during stealth or damage over time (bleeding, burning, poison) reveals you from stealth. This is the only sensible way.

Stunbreaks are very important pvp. Both thief and mesmer have the highest amount of stunbreak skills in the game (6 total for both profession, vs just 2 stun break skills for ranger). And some of those stubreaks have almost no cooldown e.g. shadow return from thief sword skill #2.

Thief and mesmer have the best down states in the game, together with the elementalist. Able to move considerably during downed state and enter stealth during downed state are big NO-NOs, unless all professions would have equal ability. Stomping someone during stealth should not be possible as the downed opponent cannot even attack against such stomper.

Dual dagger elementalists are also very common in both pvp and WvWvW. Superb mobility and survivability is very powerful combination. The 4th most popular profession seems to be the bunker guardian, an obvious counter to extreme burst damage (bunkers wouldn’t make so much sense without so overpowered burst, it would make more sense to play a balanced build).

So the overpowered and easy top 3 is: 1. thief, 2. mesmer and 3. D/D elementalist

The Anet developers seriously underestimated the importance of mobility. Classes with extreme mobility and free “get away” cards (stealth and teleportation) should NOT have very fast deadly burst. Having such combination leads to static boring meta: glass cannons vs bunkers. No profession should have the ability for extremely fast and easy burst to death. The problem is exemplified in WvWvW where a huge map makes the escape way too easily and allows these problem professions to run a glass cannon without much risks compared to the reward. A good thief, mesmer or D/D elementalist can always get away, unless the enemy is able to predict all its actions.

The reason why tournament plays have other professions as well is that people playing those other professions don’t like to play cheap simple professions and have higher skill to compensate the unfair advantage (and take advantage of the naivety of the simplistic play of the overpowered professions). The reason why thieves don’t completely dominate the top pvp is because most thief players have low skill (some thief players are really good, but let’s be honest: this profession screaming attention for young kids to do “ownage”). Also points cannot be captured during stealth and thieves have very little utility to offer to their team.

People who want fast and easy points flock to the overpowered choices.

Please see very educational videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u55vHURPQSw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-KMOc_y7xo
Illustrating that the same problem also exists in WoW, with lots of example fights, underlining how broken the game mechanisms and builds are. WoW finally nerfed the things.

I know I am going to be flamed for this message, but just watch the videos first. And I hope somebody would make similar “naked thief” in pvp and WvWvW videos.

Lexander.4579:

elite specs were designed to make people buy HoT, thats all

^^ this ^^

My main is an engineer, so I will put my comments:

Agreed on furnigate (elixir gun #3) should remove at least one condition from engineer. Currently engineer really lacks ways to remove conditions, unless you take cleaning formula 409 (20 level master level trait) and elixirs. Users medkit and healing turret are left with less options to remove conditions. Medkit skill #4, drop antidote, removes just 1 condition, despite the tool says that is removes conditions (plural). Drop antidote is pretty much useless if you are immobilized as you it doesn’t self-consume it until you move over it.

What I would like to add: elixir gun #2 (elixir F) is a very quirky slow-traveling projectile. Even if the enemy is moving away from you in straight line and not dodging, it misses 80% of the time, making it a very bad skill to slow down anything. The projectile speed should be increased. Currently elixir gun #1 is weak when it comes to damage, maybe slightly increase its direct damage.

Increasing the radius of ALL grenade skills to 200 would make the kit too powerful. But grenade skill #3 (flash grenade) does so little damage it could increased to 200 radius. Same of grenade skill #5 (poison grenade) could also be buffed to 200 radius, as it has so long cooldown (25 second).

I think the arch of the grenades is fine. I find their slow speed and lack of damage from grenade skill #1, being the biggest problem. Grenades are extremely easy to dodge from long distance. Basically you can only hit immobile targets from >900 range. In fact grenades are most powerful at very close range (closer than melee range). The 1500 range (with grenadier grandmaster) trait is more or less theoretical, except underwater where grenades really shine. This is true despite the short fuse trait is still bugged underwater: short fuse should reduce the cooldown of all explosive skills by 20%, but it doesn’t do anything underwater, which is a real pity.

If you a fully specced grenadier, you don’t want to use the harpoon gun underwater, as its auto attack has so slow firing rate (1 s), except for harpoon gun #3 (retreating grapple), which is very useful as you can use it as an interrupt as well. Harpoon gun #5 (net wall) has way too long cooldown (25 s), does no damage and misses almost all the time (no effect at all). I agree that the harpoon gun projectiles travel kitten slow and are extremely easy to avoid even without any dodging.

Slick shoes and rocket shoes are fine, except:
rocket shoes still don’t work underwater and inflicts self knockdown (thus rifle #4, overcharged shot is better choice, half the cooldown)
slick shoes has 60 s cooldown, which is a bit too long. Many other engineer utility skills suffer from the same problem. I think those engineer utility skills which have 60 s cooldown, should be reduced to 45 s. They are still less powerful utilities than e.g. the mesmer has (portal, veil).

Julie Yann.5379:

I believe this issue with warrior mobility stems from WvW. The problem is not the warriors, it’s the ridiculously OP combo of dogged march, melandru, and -condition food (mainly the food). It’s makes us almost immune to CC which should not be. Combine that with mobility from GS and yes you can escape any situation. If Anet is serious about balancing professions they should start by removing foods and oils/stones from WvW.

BTW the runaway warrior build is built just for that. You can really kill anything but an NPC with that build.

Not being able to kill PCs with Great Sword is a commonly spread misinformation in these forums. Warrior’s GS allows to chase down fleeing opponents in low health / having skills in cooldown. Crazy mobility + ranged cripple (with leg specialist cripple is also 1 s immobilized). Only another warrior or thief built for mobility and having full initiative pool can escape a GS warrior. That is the reason it is by far the most common roaming spec after various thief builds. And it is becoming more popular in zerg fights as well.

In group fights GS can be a monster. I have seen even very experienced player in a tanky build (and experience playing all professions many hundreds hours) repeatedly melt against enemy GS warrior after being CCed. *100 blades will eat you, if you are stunned and immobilized. You can use another weapon to do the CC and in group setting this becomes easier. Warrior has hard CC with under 10 second cooldown e.g. earthshaker and in any zerg fight the amount of CC is ridiculous. At the same time most of the stun breakers of this game are on a long cooldown and many professions have very limited access to stability.

Warrior can invest less points to thoughness and vitality than most professions as it already has high base stats for both. Basically the combination of high armor + health is like having more ability points. Warrior also has access to several immunities e.g. berserker’s stance, endure pain, balanced stance/dolyak signet. Hammer + GS combination is efficient in zerg fights. Basically high base health + heavy armor + very high mobility + several immunities + massive burst and damage + tons of CC in one build.

Like many others have commented Cleansing ire is too good as it is. Hammer and longbow burst skills are another problem. Earthshaker is 600 leap (mobility), 240 radius (huge) 2 second AoE stun + blast finisher = way too much in one skill with under 10 s cooldown. There is no AoE stun in this game with so small cool down. Static field is 40 s cool down. That is why this “hammer stun” (= earth shaker) has been dominating the WvWvW zerg meta since Autumn 2012. The skill itself doesn’t do that much damage, but it provides the CC for the ally elementalists land their meteor showers and other area damage, plus the necros also do massive damage with their wells and strip boons e.g. stability. The main reason why many quit WvWvW is that meta has always been the same. Warrior was never weak in WvWvW. It was the top of the meta already in Autumn 2012, together with Guardians. Yet Arenanet kept buffing these two professions to the point that more than half of almost any organized zerg is guardians and warriors. Elementalist is still not overpowered in small scale setting, despite having both the best DPS and burst in this game, but those come at the expense of survivability. Necromancers have a true weakness: lack of mobility and vulnerability against hard CC. Mesmers are needed for their powerful utilities (portal, veil, time stop etc) and have always been one of the best professions in 1 vs 1, but lack AoE damage. Rangers and engineers have never been part of WvWvW meta.

Combustive shot is 1000 s range, direct damage + burn, 4 s fire field and 240 radius.

My suggestion to balance these issues are:
1. Increase the cooldown of some warrior mobility skills (rush, whirlwind attack which is also an evade, and savage leap) or reduce their range by 33%. Or make them always require a target. Warrior should have ability to close in, but not the ability disengage/reset any fight it wants.
2. Decrease the area of combustive shot and earth shaker to 120 radius in pvp/WvWvW.
3. Missing a burst skill should deplete adrenaline
4. Split cleansing ire into two traits: 20 master trait, gaining adrenaline when being hit and 30 GM trait to cleanse 1 condition per bar of adrenaline (currently cleansing ire is better than most GM traits available for other professions)

Alternative way to balance cleansing ire + burst skills: Increase the cooldown of burst skills. Points spent in discipline line would still reduce this cooldown (and with fast hands being so good, most warriors invest at least 15 in this trait line any case).

gennyt.3428:

I’m sure new guilds are being formed(or consolidated!), new commanders are being trained, TS servers are being utilized and PvE players being persuaded on other dying servers so this advice isn’t really ground breaking, and it doesn’t really solve some of the serious problems with this game mode. And obviously, people playing through the pain in hopes of sporadic “short moments of glory” isn’t sustainable because servers wouldn’t have this mass exodus problem, and I can’t say I blame them.

I am not claiming the current system is good. The winner is determined by coverage. The server with the superior coverage wins.

Everybody knows that the outmanned “buff” is joke. Breakout event won’t help you on enemy borderlands when an enemy force which is many times larger than you spawn camps you. Trust me. I have been there. Many times I have put on my commander tag when pretty much everybody else has rage quit. When our own borderlands have just me and 2 up leveled characters. Enemy is controlling the entire map and moves in a huge blob.

Desolation probably lost 1500-2500 hard core WvWvW players in a period of 1 month and after that dreadful month several guilds probably even quit the entire game. If this is not mass exodus, then what? Almost everybody was saying Desolation is dead. But the miracle happened and we survived.

I think several things should be implemented:

1. The outmanned buff should be separated to several levels of severity, which grant defensive buffs to the weaker side (more health and thoughness to NPCs, structures and players) and also have an additional clause taking into consideration of total number of players in all 4 maps (to prevent a server from leaving 3 maps empty to enjoy outmanned buff there and total steal rolling one map). This would also partially make night capping less effective.

2. Reduce the number of players who can enter a WvWvW map per side, but when a player enters a queue she/he is given choice to fight as a mercenary for the outmanned side on a completely different side. This would also reduce lag on stacked servers.

3. People are obviously moving to winning servers (aka band wagoning). Thus the transfer cost should be based on WvWvW track record and not world population:
cheapest transfer cost = those servers who haven’t won a match up in 3 months
medium transfer cost = those servers who have won a single match up in 3 months
highest transfer cost = those servers who have won several match ups in 3 months

They should make this happen as soon as possible. Time gating is easy, because you can always make the ascended gear to require laurels, which are time gated. One can also keep the spvp-alike requirement to have 500 in related crafting.

Here are examples with suggested prices:
armor piece 400 proofs of heroics + 5 laurels + 5 gold
1-handed weapon 200 proofs + 3 laurels + 3 gold
2-handed weapon 400 proofs + 5 laurels + 5 gold
back piece 2000 proofs + 30 laurels + 50 gold
(of course all with user selectable stats)

Fractal materials should also be made available via WvWvW currencies, because they are needed for ring infusions:
Vial of Condensed Mists Essence = 50 proofs
Glob of Coagulated Mists Essence = 250 proofs
Shard of Crystallized Mists Essence = 1250 proofs

Proofs come slowly, so essentially these are come slower than playing fractals.

Alternatively 10 badges could be converted to 1 proof, meaning that 1000 badges would be worth of 100 proofs.

WvWvW needs rewards which are closer to the level of other game modes. Make this happen, Arenanet!

Even though Visunah Square has been our “dear” enemy for many months in tier #1, I very much respect the hard work Troma has done. His message speaks wise words. We definitely need much better communication with the WvWvW plaeyr base. I have several times suggested State of the Game (SotG) for WvWvW here in these forums. WvWvW has much larger player base than pvp, still you manage to find time for those tpvp interviews.

Big changes (e.g. the Arrowcart changes, free transfers) should be discussed with the players before putting them in action.

@yaseer.2309: Seems like jumping puzzle will be big action soon for haters of bloodlust.

—

Yet another epic game design from Arenanet, it seems.

I do NOT like jumping puzzles. I do NOT want to enter any area via any sort of jumping puzzle, even if I need to just walk in there. And why people should enter EB first to make it clog with queues and postpone GvGs?

Just remove all the stat buffs and give us open large scale fighting area, readily accessible outside WvWvW, via B menu.

Arenanet game design philosophy in a nutshell:
“We are smarter than all our players. Screw previous experience in Game Design, any background is good for a game designer. Here is some game mode, which divides players and many don’t like: Let’s force that to everybody. Game is supposed to be imbalanced. The more imbalanced large scale pvp becomes, the more fun it is for the winner and for us. Good, that most players transfer to the winning servers. More gem cash for us. Hmm, there seems to be too much versatility in this game. Let’s give players all the incentives just to play one character in one way, we define the right way. Amen”

Rotate the old maps back and measure which is more popular. A good game is designed to provide endless fun for its players, not to cater the developer’s own ambitions.

Sigil and rune changes are good, but a lot of underused runes and sigils would need attention.

The amulet changes are really bad. This will delete a lot of builds from the game and lead to less diversity. Marauder was already the most common amulet with celestial. Now we will see probably even more marauder + mercenary amulet using blocking, evades, traits and boons as their defense, just like we have already witnessed with builds like the marauder scrapper hammer engineer.

L Step.8659:

Driver sniping, pirate ships, and venomshare guilds are what will kill GvG, it’s a player created game mode, but people who want to win at the cost of everyone having fun and getting better are the bigger problem than Arenanet. Guilds should strive to get better, not run gimicky tactics to win.

It is the task of the developers of the game to tweak the balance so that gimmicky cheese builds get nerfed to a reasonable level. You cannot expect players not to use the exploits or easy mode builds. Of course big part of the players will do anything which gives them easy rewards and wins. If the designers are ignorant of these, then they should do their best to contact the player base and fix these issues as soon as possible. e.g. I could show Arenanet devs some very “interesting” places where one can place siege yet those locations siege should not work.

I noticed that especially on certain enemy servers most of the players (I mean both roaming and zerging) are using the current feature of the month builds. For example in roaming perplexity runes are still going strong and multiple thief teams are very common, followed by multiple mesmers.

The pirate ship meta certainly isn’t less or more fun than old melee train. 3/4 of the core is the same, just more ranged. Both metas can be countered by spreading around and then clumping in from all directions if there is enough open space. This assumes the attacker has tons of ranged players. What is most problematic is that the is simply zero disadvantage to blobbing. The bigger your blob is, the more likely you are to win. Zone wide (70+) pirate ship blob surely wins over 25 man zerg. Enemy groups of 20 or more players should always be rendered on the maps, so that enemy can see their movements, encouraging them to split up if they want to go unnoticed. Also events and camp/tower/keep/castle lords should scale up to the number of enemy players.

I hear you, Hap. And it was nice you were commanding short time on Deso BL this reset. Unfortunately no good fights, enemy outnumbers us greatly. Thus Desolation is no longer “very high” population server, but only “high”. The only “very high” servers in EU are: Baruch Bay, Jade Sea and Seafarer’s Rest.

The best thing Arenanet could do is give us the original maps back and revert many of the changes e.g. get rid of banners and auto upgrades (supply & human interaction should be required).

I simply don’t think that will happen. Instead they will be force feeding us that abomination called desert borderland and think that gimmicks like those banners make the game mode more “fun”. They think “let’s just give more time, players will adjust” and they are too blind to see that the player base is bleeding badly and many moved to other games.

Excellent post. I hope you will not be banned for speaking the truth.

Aury.1367:

They drop alot by guards (NPCs), havent seen any Spike drop from a player yet even though we farm all day long.

^^ this ^^

I don’t zerg that much, but I flip a lot of camps, attack towers / keeps alone or in small group. And the legendary spikes come plenty.

Simple answer: Guild Wars 2 lacks dedicated healers and has excessive burst. Many attackers have ability to cause massive (>20000) damage in just 2 seconds onto anything less than a full bunker. And if you cannot survive, you are a dead weight to your team.

Adding dedicated healers would need a complete rehaul of the system, so the only sensible choice to fix this issue is to reduce the amount of burst damage. I would say the amount of overall damage is okay, but the burst needs nerf. The problem is even worse in WvWvW, which allows consumables and 104% crit damage gear.

Simply NO.

Commander tag has its uses in pve as well. Just come to Desolation to see how complex events like wurm or Tequatl are run.

The general problem is not that we have too many people with their commander tag on, but almost nobody wants to tag up in a WvWvW match where the opponent outnumbers you. 10k badges or not, this won’t change the thing. There is no extra reward for being a commander. There is no useful commander UI. Being a commander is hard work without any pay, besides the praise if you succeed.

Warrior is one of the top professions in pve. Very easy to profession to begin and level with and can be used for all sorts of pve content. Very much wanted in dungeons, but also good for solo roaming. But most pve content (besides soloing some of those Orr group events etc) is so easy, one can do that with any profession.

Hammer + sword/warhorn warriors are the meta in top tier WvWvW, aka the melee / pain train together with the guardians. Those shouts and banners are useful when you have a really large group around you. But warriors are unforgivable when it comes to solo roaming. In other words if warrior ends up in a fight he wants to get out, he will struggle to get out e.g. compared to thief, which has similar level of dps and burst, but can disengage much easier. To put it short: warriors excel in big fights, but not as solo roamers in WvWvW, due thief doing that role so much better.

Warrior is problematic in tpvp. Hman has showed warrior can be used effectively there and his warrior certainly wasn’t the weakest link, but the biggest problem is lack of sustainability. Big hit point pool nor high armor won’t help against multiple conditions. Warrior doesn’t have any easy access to protection and I think that is actually intended and should be kept so.

I would still urge the developers be very careful in buffing the warrior. By giving warrior a lot more survivability could push it easily over the top. Maybe while at same time tweaking some weaker warrior traits and survivability skills (e.g. upping the healing signet), they could slightly tone down the burst damage. Yes, I am talking about a tiny nerf to 100blades, eviscerate (but just to damage, make it path better!) and so on. If warrior would have similar sustainability to guardian and still be able to dish the old 100 blades with stun/immobilize lock that could be devastating, especially in spvp. So perhaps do some tpvp/spvp related tweaks only: slightly tone down the burst damage, while increasing warrior’s survivability a bit.

Teknotronic.8263:

So I tried to do this quest 6 times last night (stopped after 3, repaired equipment and started over)

Things I noticed;

If you wipe and choose “restart from checkpoint” you run back into the courtyard and all the NPC’s are still dead, yet the mobs are still in full force. So restarting from checkpoint is almost entirely useless.

I didn’t notice this the first 3 attempts, but when I came back fresh on the 4th attempt I had all NPC’s alive and well, huge group of us run into the courtyard and were doing good, taking out a couple groups of mobs. Then all at once (with no red circle notification anywhere) ALL of us instant down. All the named NPC’s and non named NPC’s my character (mesmer) and my girlfriends character (guardian) instantly dead and had maybe half a second of downed time before finished off.

So I checked the combat log. Hit by Unknown with Explode for 6000+ damage. Couple more of the same thing in a row, all of them in the thousands.

Restarted from checkpoint, went back in fought for a bit and kaboom dead again. Same Unknown/explode/tons of damage thing going on.

So maybe the mob level isn’t the main problem? Anyone else notice this?

I think those are caused by Risen Plague Carriers. Those fat undead run towards the enemy and then explode doing huge nearby AoE damage. You better kill them from distance or dodge roll.

That is why I used the Spirit of Nature to mass revive all NPCs. Warrior has a similar elite skill, Battle Standard, but it has longer cooldown. Unfortunately mesmer nor guardian have anything like that. For that mission I would recommend the mesmer to go with as many clones/phantasms as possible (use traits to get skill cooldown to minimum, I was also running 3 signets to get max health and max boons). Constantly detonate your illusions and summon more. That is how I did it. There is a tanky build my mesmer is using and I did that mission with her. By the way I use: staff, sword/torch, mass invisibility as elite (torch #4, prestige, also gives stealth and then explodes AoE, blinding and burning all nearby foes, very good with sword against mobs)

I hope this helps!

Celestial shoutbow warrior and celestial rifle engineer basically got pushed out of the meta (nerfs to sustain, yet same time the burst dmg was buffed). Celestial elementalist is still very much viable and overpowered, but besides that there isn’t many hybrid builds.

It is natural if a hybrid/celestial is more or less dead, then most players either go burst/dps or full bunker. My prediction is that with current traits and skills most top teams will run 2-3 bunkers (bunker guardian and elementalist, might also try bunker engineer) and 2-3 burst (mesmer + thief). 1 burst stun lock warrior e.g. using hammer/GS is meta. All the burst professions will use marauder or zerker amulet. In unranked spvp marauder/zerker clearly is the flavor of the week!

For months people were complaining that so many used the celestial amulet. Now we have the same situation that a lot of players use the same amulet, but it just has a different name and stats. In other words: diversity didn’t change much.

BurrTheKing.8571:

Now for the most obvious counter, STUN BREAKERS AND STABILITY!

You may have noticed that Arenanet has shuffled stun break skills for many professions. In general moving the stun break away from most widely used skills and moving them to some more or less useless skills. For some professions it is difficult to make an efficient build with more than 1 stun breaker. (warriors who get defensive could take both “shake it off” and endure pain or balanced stance as stun breakers).

I have spent more time playing on engineer and warrior than any other profession. Currently engineers have zero stun breaks on a low cooldown:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stun_break

The access to stability is very much limited on many professions e.g. thieves can only get it either via runes (e.g. 6x Lyssa + using elite) or using daggerstorm elite. Engineers have rumble, which gives 1 s stability. And that comes with thumper turret. I can imagine how “viable” that is with WvWvW. Yes, I know mortar also gives stability, but it requires you to stand with the mortar immobile, which would be a death wish against a stun lock warrior.

Now of course it is possible to equip and trait almost any profession to counter this particular build, but seriously doing that would make those builds pretty subpar against many other builds.

WvWvW is my main arena and I am worried about the recent changes. Mesmer’s signet of domination now also gives 3 s stun from 1200 range (+ 1 s from signet of paralyzation). Now imagine a roaming team of 1 mesmer, 1 stun lock warrior and a thief. That would spell instant death against pretty much any solo roamer. Stunlocked 8 s and bursted to death.

An honest analysis of this should include:
- mace stun lock burst can occur roughly once per 10 seconds
- most stun break skills have a 40-60 s cooldown

This is an example of a game design flaw. Since day one Guild Wars 2 has had excessive burst (go to WvWvW and see how much dmg you can do with full stack, consumables + ascended gear, killing is not a problem, not even >3k armor won’t help you). Yet for so strange reason Arenanet developers keep adding more burst to this game e.g. recent changes to necromancer, allowing condition burst.

I think 3 s stun is a bit too long and ALL 3 second stuns (for all professions) should be reduced to 2 seconds. Also 100 blades should be moved to be the burst skill of greatsword, as has been suggested already many times. This would still allow skull crack + 100 blades combo as it is possible to use signet of fury to refill adrenaline to full. Thus the combo would become: skull crack + signet of fury + 100 blades. But signet of fury has 24 s cooldown traited, thus this combo could be performed only once per 24 seconds.

I liked some of the changes to the warrior profession. Two swords feels more effective now. But I think they went overboard buffing the passive effect of the healing signet too much. It is now almost twice as good compared to what it was without any investment in healing power. It is by far the best passive heal in the game. In fact combined with adrenal health + some healing power I have used it in pve to face tank champions on level 80 areas with ease. No need to dodge. Just sit next to boss with healing signet + adrenal health. The combined healing with mango pie can even counter permanent burning. You can just stand in fire and see your health bar stay up at full health.

Healing signet’s passive heal should be weaker if there is no points in healing power, but scale better with healing power.

The current formula seems to be (for level 80):
392+0.05*healing power / second
with 1500 healing power that would heal 467/s, just 19% better than with 0 healing power

I would suggest this instead:
320+0.1*healing power / second
320/s <- 0 healing power
470/s <- 1500 healing power

The active effect of the healing signet should be increased to promote its active use and its activation time should be reduced to 1/2 second.
Current: 3275 + 0.5*healing power
Suggested: 3400+0.75*healing power

Ungood.3054:

Give Engineers a Tracking Turret that exposes Stealth.

Actually the engineer turrets e.g. the net turret seem to track stealthed opponents. Still turrets are pretty much useless in WvWvW setting, because their hit point pool is so low (e.g. 6k) and their hit box is the size of a barn, thus any AoE or attack destroys them quickly. If you ask me, turrets should have roughly equivalent health and thoughness to ranger pets. Turrets are immobile, self-destruct and their AI is even worse than the ranger pet AI: turrets attack the closest target e.g. a door, even if it is immune to at attack (e.g. net turret attacks the enemy tower doors). Ranger pets offer much more utility, can move, revive you etc.

I did Retribution yesterday with my ranger. I failed the first time, which is funny considering I have done Retribution already 4 times before with other characters. I was considering it to be easy, but clearing the courtyard was ridiculous. I usually consider pve too easy. My first time in Arah exploration mode I was like is this Lupicus supposed to be difficult? Now I experienced the pve hard mode, which was more difficult than soloing the Orr temple group events alone. There was a never ending army of risen. My only area attacks were entangle (elite), barrage from a long bow and then axe in my hand, not fast enough to kill all Risen. The problem was that ALL the NPC allies were dead before the court yard even began and kept dying if I revived them.

I then restarted the mission and chose Spirit of Nature as my elite. I made sure no NPC died before the courtyard part. I used spirit of nature to mass clean the conditions and revive all near by NPCs. I also had signet of renewal, brown bear (F2 skill) and transfer stunned, knocked etc to pet as my condition and CC removal. I was also using potion of undead slaying and foodbuff which gave me regeneration on top of signet of the wild and troll unguent. This made the courtyard part easy. I didn’t die, but thinking about it. Most professions don’t have anything similar to Spirit of Nature, so they are probably stuck there right now.

Ayna Wise, Norn Ranger 73 now
(yes, I did more missions and map areas yesterday to level up, gonna get her to level 80 very soon)

I would like to see the bloodlust gone complete and every borderland map have its middle area reworked into water + island in the middle. Just like the original Alpine borderland had in 2012-2013, but make the central island a bit bigger and be of more importance.

Bloodlust is NOT a good game mechanic at all, because:
- it adds powercreep (we already got too much of it)
- adds to server lag and requires more server resources to calculate
- really does NOT help the weaker side to make comeback vs winners

I agree with this suggestion.

Also the general experience of gliding was hugely disappointing. I have enjoyed flying in many earlier ga,es, including some old home computer games of 1980s and Nintendo 64 games, but here the gliding in HoT just felt meh. I cannot put my finger on it, just the feeling of flying in air was missing.

Please don’t bring Desert BL back anytime soon! I haven’t seen all 4 maps queued for ages, but now it happened on Deso + Vabbi. So numbers are clearly up from Desert BL. The majority of players cast their true vote: they want to play on Alpine instead of Desert BL.

I had much more fun on Alpine borderland in just 1 evening than 7 months combined with Desert borderland. I hope we will not remove Alpine borderland anytime soon. Desert borderland is tactically so badly made map and it often takes too long time to get back into action. Alpine borderland is hectic.

Sin.4130:

You are wrong – the only one EU server with full status was Desolation. SFR was never full until this strange changes. When suddenly fully marked Deso gained lower status.

The old server status calculations were NOT based on WvWvW activity. Surely Deso has a massive pve player base. We have been for a long time #1 pve and #1 spvp in server in EU, but since the introduction of mega servers, this has had no effect.

The only thing which should affect server status is how many active players in has in WvWvW, since that is the only game mode where the server has an effect.

Remove ALL stat buffs from BL bloodlust (Power of the Mists vitality + healing power buffs should also go) from the game and I will come to play WvWvW again and PuG command.

Heezdedjim.8902:

“Server pride” is only a thing because servers are what we have. Other games with single-server universes have just as strong — if anything far stronger — communities. But they’re formed around other anchors like factions or player-made alliances, not an arbitrary set of load-balancing bins (which, after all, only serve to divide, not unite players).

“Servers” are not an integral or even a helpful feature for developing communities. Some sort of stable anchor for identity that will let players form lasting groups is. There could be other mechanics like global factions that would allow that, and that also would decouple the community anchoring elements from the underlying WvW population balancing elements.

As others have pointed out — and SoR’s recent failscade proves — given a choice between “server pride” and just bolting to a server with higher population and better coverage, to avoid the pointy end of the stacking + coverage meta, it is abundantly clear which thing is actually most important to most active WvW players.

It is certainly true that randomly tossing players on the fly into Red v. Blue bins does and would obstruct attempts to maintain stable communities in WvW. It is certainly false that “servers” and “server pride” are the only, the best, or even a very good alternative.

I didn’t mean that server price and guild pride are the only community building aspects. I think what everybody here agrees that a thriving community is essential and this is a crucial thing in the long-term success of this game and probably the most important thing discussed here. Like many others also wrote, EotM is missing the community aspect of the game and it would be very difficult to build in EU due so many languages in any 3-way division. We have much more than 3 major languages here, so 3-way split won’t work that well. Even currently we have: French, German, Spanish and International servers. Russians are so large group, so I think they should need their own language group.

The cultivate communities GW2 should have:
1. As much support from Anet as possible to enable communication between and inside the communities and tools to build your own communities
Shutting down the WvWvW matchup related forums was unfortunate. I wish Arenanet would hire moderator resources to bring them back.

Guild Wars 1 had a guild hall. This was a common meeting ground for all guild members and different guilds have different looks and stats in their guild halls. In GW2 guild is more like just a roster and you can be member of up to 5 guilds at same time. Ability to maintain and hold their own permanent structures in a game world would be a HUGE thing and a superb money sink (wink to Anet: great way to make cash ).

2. Guild vs Guild
Simple map with 1 tower on each side, only few NPCs, mainly the NPC tower lord, room in between for open field battle and couple of alternative routes to enemy tower. Similar to popular GW1 guild-vs-guild mode.

3. Alliances
Ability to form alliances between guilds. Yet another feature borrowed from GW1. Now this could work in EotM as well if the players wouldn’t be just randomly tossed between 3 sides, but based on alliances. I think alliances should be able to exist between guilds on different servers. Alliances could have their own subforums and TeamSpeak/Mumble servers.

Side note (partly offtopic and be removed by moderator):
Server pride can be strong on servers and weak on others. I have been on Blacktide when it was on its glory and had many of the best guilds in EU/world. But Blacktide crushed and burned. After losing its main WvWvW guilds, it could never come back. In fact no server in EU has ever made a major come back without guilds returning to it or getting new guilds from other servers.

As side results of many unfortunate events Desolation has most likely lost more hard core WvWvW players and guilds than other servers in EU. After multiple mass exodus, Desolation is still standing surprisingly strong, despite the fact we are outnumbered on regular basis. Those who stayed are though as nail. Instead of getting outside help, we have tapped to our huge pve base to train new WvWvW players. I remember when my guild had only 4-5 commanders who had been doing commanding in actual WvWvW. Now I think we have around 20 of them and new guilds have spawned. We got several old original guilds which have D in their name e.g. GoD (Gatekeepers of Desolation), GODS (Gods of Desolation). If this is not server pride, what is?

WvWvW used to be my main game mode. I used to spend many hours every week roaming and PuGmanding on Alpine borderland. I liked it more than Eternal Battlegrounds, because EB is a bit bigger map = takes longer time to travel from one end to another and most importantly EB often has had awful lag, making the game unplayable for me.

Positives first:

Dolyaks are much faster. Sentries are now finally useful. Guild catapult is finally balanced. Ruins of power are gone. I would have wanted to see changes like this with the old maps as well.

The new borderlands look better than I expected. The visuals are great, but it looks like a massive pve dungeon, but not like WvWvW map. The keep lords have interesting mechanics. Maybe to turn the map into a pve map and remove it from WvWvW?

Negatives

The actual game play on the new map is boring as hell. There is now much less things to do as many things run on auto pilot (upgrades, dolyaks don’t need escorting). And there is less human players to fight against.

The new map is also unnecessarily complex, making it confusing both for the newbies and veterans. This is extremely bad news if Arenanet was intending to expand the player base and not shrink it. Now they are alienating the veteran players by removing their favorite map and giving a new map which is too difficult/complex for beginners.

There is simply way too much 3D layered design, verticality and maze-alike things and jumping puzzle alike things. Way too much time is spent traveling from A to B, even with a very mobile character. Even traveling inside a keep or tower takes way too long time and feels like a boring chore.

The keeps and towers don’t feel like real fortifications, instead they feel like they are part of the terrain, which is fine for a pve dungeon, but bad for WvWvW. The portals are almost all very badly designed and you just pop into the other side without knowing what is waiting on the other side.

What made WvWvW great, was the hectic dynamic nature and focus on large scale pvp battles with NPCs playing very little effect. All the time something happening, needing to defend, attack, build siege, order upgrades, drain supplies so that enemy cannot get them. Now the new map everything seem to happen in slow motion and there seems to be more pve (yuck). Capturing a tower takes longer time. Capturing a keep takes longer time. Finding enemies to fight takes a longer time. If you die, you need to spend minutes to get back where you were. This is a truly horrible map for solo roamers.

Defending keeps now becomes impossible as 2 out of 3 keeps has no waypoint and it takes too long time to border hop and call in reinforcements to defend it.

Improvement Ideas

Remove the central oasis event or seriously nerf its power. Now that super Skyplitter thingy destroys the enemy gates and players, making it like 100x times too powerful. Just remove it or maybe leave some pve chest reward thingy in the middle, but don’t make it affect the outcome of the actual fights or defending/attacking keeps.

Give all keeps a waypoint, remove waypoints from the two Southern towers. This is essential for WvWvW tactics and defense.

But even with these fixed, I cannot invent any way to improve the new BL map enough to make it worth playing in the long run.

The only realistic option is to give the players a chance to choose between:
- WvWvW new experience (Desert bl + EB + Obsidian Sanctum+ EotM )
- WvWvW classic (with original Alpine border with the lake instead of ruins + Eternal Battlegrounds + Obsidian Sanctum + no supplies from EotM)

I would of course choose WvWvW classic.

Final note: the WvWvW rewards must be improved to be on the same level as other game modes. Just copy the spvp reward tracks to WvWvW and make them so that about ~2 h normal play completes a track. Now WvWvW is empty, because players can get so much better rewards elsewhere.

Warning: This contains possible spoilers about the end game content

The final mission, Victory or Death, is way too long, lasting about 4 hours. Make it at least 2 hours shorter. And give players a good reward after completing it e.g. an exotic level 80 item which is usable by that character. You can make that item soul bound and make it once per character reward, so it won’t affect the game economy. Now it is very difficult to find a player group who would want to do Victory or Death, because the rewards are so low and almost nobody wants to do it again.

Better yet, make Trahearne do Vizier Khilbron at the end. In other words turn evil.
I personally believe that Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Russian Folktale is the best guide tool to make epic stories. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp

At the end the hero (= player) should be rewarded with either spouse, riches or power, or any combination of any of those three. Yes, get married and get a powerful item + gold or a small castle, building house of his/her own. In Propp’s story model there is a character called False Hero. Trahearne would fit this role perfectly. Trying to steal the credit from the hero.

Here is my reworked version of Victory and Death:

Beginning as it is. But then after defeating the Mouth of Zhaitan, Trahearne suddenly casts a powerful spell, which renders everybody else, but the player hero, helpless.

Trahearne: “Why didn’t the spell work on you? Why are you not helpless like all the others? Is it some strange magic which got imbued to you during our journeys or was it the dream?”
Player: “What are you talking about? What is happening to others?”
Trahearne: “I am sorry, but this is the best way. The dragon would have won at the end anyway…”

Now Zhaitan reveals himself from the shadows.

Trahearne: “Zhaitan promised that I would be the next king of Orr”
Player: “You are insane. Orr is the land of the dead. I should have seen it coming. You were summoning undead. Nobody knew more about Orr than you. How long have you been working with Zhaitan?”

Trahearne: “It doesn’t matter now. All I need to do is kill you to get my final reward”.
(yes, the dialogue should be kept that short and simple).

Then follows an epic duel between Trahearne and player. If the player wins, he gets a chance to possess Caladbolg, Trahearne’s magical sword. The sword is strongly corrupted. The more player uses its powers the more his corruption meter rises. When the corruption reaches 100%, he will be one with Zhaitan. The player can always opt not to use Caladbolg at all and use his/her normal weapons.

A final match between Zhaitan and the player. The final battle location is designed so that the player can use his wits to avoid the dragon’s deadly breath by going behind pillars or running back into temporary safety into so small (dead-end) tunnels where Zhaitan cannot reach him. Zhaitan will summon undead veterans to kill the player if he is hiding too long time. After Zhaitan is defeated all the Risen perish and the player can loot the Dragon. And of course dragons have a huge treasure hoard. Player is given a token of matrimony (one time use, account bound), 2 gold coins and an exotic level 80 weapon of player’s choice.

The token of matrimony can be used once to marry another character if that other character also agrees that. The marriage status is displayed when other players view that character.

Thank you for listening. You are free to use my idea.

Deniara

Simon.3794:

If ranger got their burst on greatsword, No one would be complaining, at all.

The problem is not the damage multiplier, but the 1800 range (longbow hits clearly further than 1500 range if you have eagle eye traited). Unless you have multiple reflects, stealth or shadowsteps most professions do not have much counter play against this. Multiple rangers focus firing on one opponent will down anybody before they can close in without the use of stealth, shadow step, reflect or similar. Just dodging is avoiding only part of the rapid fire burst. LB #4 can be used to gain range and so does GS#3.

While this maybe be fun for rangers now to down the enemy warriors who were treating them like 2nd class citizens, I don’t think this is good for the game balance. The range of all long bow attacks (with eagle eye trait) should be reduced to 1500 (like it reads).

So basically if you haven’t bought the expansion, just don’t play at least not in the competitive level!?

All the old classes are using the new overpowered elite specs. GW2 has truly become pay to win and this will surely (and rightfully) aggravate a lot of players.

I have already posted in another similar thread (NA Pro League meta) that Arenanet should do something about warrior’s sustain. The nerfs to warhorn/shout base heal etc + lack of trait to give +20% boon duration really don’t feel justified in this current meta. NA Pro League at least had several thieves, but neither NA or EU Pro League has any warriors.

Master of Timespace.2548:

Lol. Tell me. When did you last time got beaten by an upscale ? xD

Today.

They come in large numbers and swarm around you like angry wasps.

But seriously as a PuG commander I have never told anybody to stop following or leave me no matter how low level he/she is. I have even had level 2 guardian in my party. Yes, his armor was paper and he had just one weapon with 3 skills, so that was bad. But he wasn’t useless. He could still carry 10 supplies and build stuff as fast as level 80. WvWvW should remain accessible for everybody.

Low level characters can beat level 80s. Just look at these videos:
Ranger 12 solo play in WvWvW http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEF69Fewgmg
Engineer 11 soloing in WvWvW http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQY0cK8KrVk

If you get your low level the optimal gear for his level (which very few people do), the stats actually scale surprisingly well. Stat wise you are pretty much the same, but you are missing traits and skills.