Guild Wars 2

A good, color-coded, always-visible combat log.

I just want to say that its a myth that females hate the revealing armor. Actually, for many of us, its our preference. We like looking cute, sexy or whatever. The ones who flame it are mostly a vocal group who get offended at gender stereotypes, and has nothing to do with the actual armors itself.

That said, I support this option, because I think being able to either embrace or break out of gender stereotypes (or, stick to a gender stereotype other than your own) is somenone’s right, and one of the core rights that we receive in MMOs given that we are hidden behind a virtual avatar.

I don’t understand why people keep asking for this when GW2 still looks better than most of the other MMOs, especially in HoT, LS3 and PoF.

There’s like two other MMOs out of thousands that beat it graphics wise, that’s it. And those games require subscriptions every month which means that, obviously, the developers are going to have more income to throw at everything than a freemium/B2P game such as Guild Wars 2.

Say it with me: GW2 is not an FPS.

That said I do wish that more functionality from SweetFX was implemented in the game so we don’t have to use third party tools for enhancements.

eleshazar.6902:

Title pretty much says it all. This megaserver made guild missions a nightmare and unfun. We couldn’t get our guild into one map, and spent all of our time trying to taxi people into the same instance.

People hate this change, and it is ruining game experiences/communities, and you guys still don’t make a comment. Great PR this is….

It is holidays right now, most of ANet staff are probably not at work.

I haven’t even noticed this button yet despite hearing about it, so it must not be that giant and that obnoxious as everyone makes it sound.

If you think what they have introduced in the last 1.5 years is “amazing” you must not’ve played any other game with an expansion, ever.

The standard MMO fare is to add an entire new continent each year. For reference, there is only a single continent in GW2 so far – Tyria, so adding another continent would be virtually doubling the game’s PvE content.

They’ve done almost nothing besides waste large amounts of time and resources on temporary content that new players don’t know about and can never play.

Guild Wars 2 is a good game, it always will be, because it has an excellent core design (besides the obvious issues from the Berserker meta and zerg mechanics). But to be honest its like… stuck in groundhog day or something.

ShinjoNaomi.1896:

Careful… pointing out good things about the game… rather then endlessly screaming about every single possible mistake in thread after thread (which is just as often more an opinion then anything else…) will likely get you told something along the lines of ‘NOTHING GOOD EVER COMES FROM PRAISING A GAME!’ by the usual crowd of people around here…

And this post is somehow supposed to be better than such posts, how? I mean, you derailed a thread just to complain about other people.

Besides, I see plenty of praising on these forums, nearly every day a thread pops up praising ArenaNet for what a good job they have done on this game. In fact, I believe that if you fish a little deeper you will find that most complaints against the game are in fact because they keep messing with things that were highly praised.

This game is well loved by the community and always was. If it wasn’t, they wouldn’t be here and instead they would be off playing some other game.

I’m just sayin’.

Just what we needed, more removed content and more gaping plot holes.

As if the game wasn’t packed full of them already.

Naevius.3185:

I’d love to know how you can be sure a player is a bot.

Its very easy to recognise bots once you know what to look for.

They have certain behavoral patterns. The most common ones are:
- Never playing with any ally
- Not resurrecting NPCs or players
- Running away from Champions the instant they come in range
- Attacking invulnerable or obstructed mobs indefinitely
- Not jumping over obsticles or getting stuck
- Running bearbow Ranger or minion Necro

These are just a few of the obvious signs. Of course, you don’t report someone based upon just a few of these signs, you only report when you see them all. Otherwise, you risk tagging perfectly good players as bots.

Furthermore, ANet has 100% ability to verify bots, because bots will always execute actions in a certain way, for example they will not try to complete heart quests, and all of their chat (which is logged) will come off as either spam or nonsense.

There’s little risk of a legit player getting banned even if you accidentally report them because ANet carefully verifies the information beforehand.

But you still shouldn’t report unless you are absolutely sure.

I really wish people would stop spamming about how its a server merge without understanding the technology at all or why it is implemented.

Try actually playing an Ele. In most of those roles, they die in one hit.

This problem went away when I set my audio quality slider to highest. The fastest setting seems to limit the number of simultaneous voices, so if two voices overlap then one of them will not be played resulting in a speech bubble only.

Could barely do Claw of Jormag yesterday, everyone kept getting disconnected by the server because the hardware couldn’t handle it.

The Claw died while in the wrong phase and left ice spikes everywhere. Nobody could really figure out that it was done besides the chest. The server had just become so lagged to heck that the players were completely out of sync.

And you know what? Its been happening since I joined the game. Yet despite clear evidence since day one that the servers cannot handle so many players in one place, they continue to add more and more and more zerg content.

Its mind boggling…

Map caps need to be significantly lowered. On top of that, encounters need to be designed less like Tequatl and more like Twisted Marionette, where players are encouraged to separate themselves and reduce the lag.

You’re going to have a really hard time with this game because it has physical dodging which requires you to dodge in a specific direction often. You might get away with just dodging forward a few times, but YMMV.

That said, I highly respect disabled players and urge you to try. So I would suggest that you play something with alot of range so you can spend most of your time from a safe location, possibly Ranger with the longbow range trait (1500 range).

If you prefer more action, try a shout-based Guardian. This way you can buff allies and the buffs will also help keep you alive even if your control is not good. You can just run around in circles spamming staff #1 to attack, its a huge melee AoE that requires no target selected to use. (Shouts do not interrupt attacking.)

It is so effective that it is often used in PvE where staff is called the “loot stick” due to its ability to hit many opponents with little effort.

The Guardian also has alot of condition cleansing and stun breakers so you will be alot less susceptable to being “rooted” (held in place) by an opponent in PvP, which will allow you to make maximum use of your available control.

Nemitri.8172:

If you are so keen on using them, Warriors get the same bonus toughness when reviving someone, so it doubles up. It’s the vitality/boon duration line.

The Warrior also gets an extra 10% revive speed from this tree, so when using the Mercy runes they revive people very fast, like having inverse poison on them.

They are only useful at Tequatl in PVT gear, and maybe PvP.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Hannelore.8153:

What I don’t understand is the decision to make the druid’s staff only have physical damage, when nearly all healing power based sets in the game are centered around condition damage.

There are 12 sets with Healing Power as a stat. There are 4 that also offer the Condition Damage stat, and 5 that offer one or more direct damages stats. Remove Celestial, and the numbers become 11, 3 and 4. This is hardly “nearly all HP based sets.” Cleric and Zealot prefixes are particularly well known, and Cleric’s is one of the most available sets with HP.

Perhaps your issue is that direct damage requires three stats for maximum stat benefits, whereas Condi needs 2 — one of which appears on no HP based sets. Thus, a set which sacrifices a direct damage stat for HP is weaker than one that does not, whereas Condi only sacrifices max stat benefit because there are no sets with Condi, HP and Expertise (in before someone demands such a set).

As to why the decision to go for direct damage on staff? Perhaps it’s because of an ANet desire for variety, with several existing options for heal-other with ready access to conditions. Perhaps it was a balance decision, since on reveal the Druid heals were quite powerful and, as noted, direct damage sacrifices more to stat HP than Condi does.

I don’t count sets that are almost exclusively used in PvE because they are glassy. No one would ever use such a build in PvP or WvW because a healer that dies in five seconds is not of any use to the team whatsoever. It likely won’t fly in raids either. Although you have a very detailed breakdown of the situation, its pointless if your observations fail to take into account practical applications outside of dungeons, fractals and general open-world farming and meta events.

Clerics is not a physical damage set. It has medium power and nothing else. No matter how much of it you equip you will do no almost damage to anything because the Ranger/Druid already have low damage modifiers on their weapons. This is actually something that my original post addressed.

For something to count as a physical damage set it really needs to have either maximum power or combine power with precision and ferocity (e.g zealots), which is something that is rare to find outside of glass combos and mixes.

I understand your point here, and I’m not trying to be antagonistic. But it seems like you just came into this thread trying to tell me how wrong I am without really thinking about the meaning behind what I was trying to say. When I talk about playing a Druid with a healing set on staff, I’m talking about playing it in practical situations, in more than one game mode, and not being a useless healbeam emitter. Again, as my original post points out, that capacity currently comes from the pet, but this varies wildly by pet choice and trait build (presence of pet line).

I don’t think its unrealistic to expect a healer to be able to hold their own and not just be meat when their allies start going down. This is a mistake that almost all games make with dedicated healers, and until now GW2 avoided it by not having them. Sure, you still have your utility skills and weapon swap, but once you do that you’re not working with a dedicated healer anymore, you’re just a Ranger with a few fancy healing spells accessible for a short amount of time by pressing F5.

And if you’re focusing on offensive abilities, that refills very slowly too.

This is just my personal opinion, and no one is required to share it. But I feel like the staff Druid is not in the best place right now. Maybe it was at reveal, or during beta, but from what I’ve heard its been ground into dust since then.

Leveling in this game is extremely easy. It has a linear (not exponential) levelling curve, meaning that every level is roughly equal in difficulty to the last because the XP rewards for everything go up even on the low level maps or when downscaled. Furthermore, eveyrthing in this game gives XP, so you can level any way that you like.

Please, if you think GW2 is hard to level in, don’t ever play any other MMO where you actually have to grind for your levels. You will want to enter a mental institution after killing something like 1,000 mobs for a single level in Everquest-style games…

P.S. You can level via WvW, Living Story or Champ trains if you prefer it fast. You can also eat food and utility consumeables for 15% bonus XP, get 30% more bonus XP from the laurel merchants daily, and get 50% bonus XP from boosters, and that’s not even counting guild banners or guild-wide boosts.

By the way, the story is non-linear. Its not possible to complete “every aspect” of it, unless you have three characters each of all five races. It forks off at many places especially in the early stories, and even two or three times during Trahearne’s Personal Story (most notably when the Pale Tree asks you what you are afraid of). Only about 40% of the PS stays the same across all characters, and only near the end.

• Your server choice is mostly for WvW.
• It can later be changed if you pay gems or delete all characters.
• All characters must exist on the same server for each game purchase.
• You can guest to other servers for PvE content.
• Soon megaserver technology will be added and guesting will not be needed.

The absolute easist class is a ranger for one reason: Range. The range on the longbow (1500) is enough to outrange even the Inquest Golem Mark II. You don’t even have to stand on the crates, just on the stairs, and press stability sometimes.

They can pretty much just stand back and kill every boss this way. But if you just want pure survival so you can facetank it at melee, PVT heavy is good.

Aiglos.2907:

I dislike many of the new changes to leveling… but you know, the free boosters, kits and random pieces of equipment are pretty cool. We never had those before, so I think that there are positive aspects to these changes

Don’t know what game you play but we definitely did get free boosters, etc. before. Some people have entire banks of them from level-ups, PS, and dailies.

Its unfortunately but games will never stop having sex-oriented locks on customisation. Yes, it makes absolutely no sense that two people with the exact same head shape can’t have the exact same hairstyle because their sex differs, but we have to keep those gender roles separate right?

Let’s just ignore the fact that most of the male spellcasters in this game wear dresses, or that most Human males in this game look feminine anyway, ArenaNet was very much a fan of pretty boys in their design it seems.

If you think this is frustrating imagine not being able to wear nice-looking feminine armors on Asura because it doesn’t fit with the lore, having to struggle with outfits, then have them turn around and make Super Saiyan Charr. :c

Double standards are the best standards!

Too bad they forgot about Gold and Silver Ore. Still stockpiling mine. :p

All other materials seem mostly “fixed” now.

People still don’t realize that ArenaNet abandoned working on the core game to create the expansion. You didn’t really think we’d still be getting updates, did you?

The only updates we get in the coming months will be because of HoT, because MMOs can’t include content in expansions without also backporting them to the core game otherwise you get client synchronization issues (essentially missing data) in areas where the two content sets overlap. Its a simple as that.

(The only alternative would be to run separate servers for HoT.)

If they could I’m sure they would save absolutely everything for the expansion and then say that its because we asked for an expansion for so long that they had to completely change their development model to deliver it to us.

Companies always prioritize making money and conserving money.

Anyway, all of this should come as no suprise seeing as how the frequency and duration of “breaks” in the last years have gone up exponentially.

I wouldn’t be shocked if there is no living world season 3. :P

Avoid playing it for now, not only is it chopped up and makes no sense, but something is horribly wrong with the difficulty.. Some missions chop you up and spit you out even if you are already a fully traited lv80 with Exotics, while on the other hand some of the biggest bosses die in 20 seconds – faster than they can even speak – even if you are on-level for the mission and wearing the crappiest gear and build.

ANet needs some time to completely rethink it. Here’s hoping they actually do …

Why is it that people who have been playing the game for a long time expect new content to be added just for them, even though new players join every day who will take a few months to be in a full set of T3 cultural?

I understand you get bored, but the simple truth is content in MMOs are built for new players, not old ones, otherwise they can’t retain anyone to begin with, and lose long-term market power. Thats why most of the newest armor skins so far are in the gem store, its the easiest way to get a good look when you’ve just come to the game, all you have to do is open your wallet. And it benefits Anet at the same time, too…

The Tengu and the Dominion of Winds /sarcasm.

What to really expect:
- Expansion level content (one small map, maybe one new skill, armor or weapon skin)
- Lots of dialog in which you have zero choices
- Unskippable everything
- Still broken Personal Story and Zhaitan fight

Skritt! I’m hit!

So basically you want the dungeon rewards for free, while everyone who doesn’t get an endless stream of badges from EOTM farm has to work for it …

I like the gemstore weapon skins. I do not like that they are RNG. As long as there was some reliable way to obtain them, I would support adding even more. Sadly, you currently have to blow a fortune just for one weapon, and that’s bad.

I will probably never use outfits. They don’t work on charr due to stretching and tails, and on asura my toes always stick out. So lazy. So, so very lazy.

Wasn’t the whole point of outfits to not have to be lazy anymore, to make something that would be a quality product with no clipping or other racial issues? I am just confused as to what the whole point of it all was in the end.

To me it just seems like we lost town clothes and didn’t gain anything. You can’t even mix outfits with the special headgear skins like the glasses, which are also available from the gemstore. So its a conflicting “buy this, but not this!” situation.

So you’ve already lost money from RNG and lack of customization, hmm.

As for the pro-gemstore arguments… let me say that the gemstore could be alot more than it currently is without becoming P2W. ArenaNet passes up massive amounts of ideas (e.g bunny ears, other species ears/tails, capes) that people suggest, won’t even return past retired content, and gives no explanation for any of it.

I’ve stopped buying gems… there’s just no point anymore. None of it is really good. The best gemstore items are stuff like bank slots, transmutation charges, etc.

You get gold as a reward for PvP now, which can be used to buy charges.

shadowpass.4236:

i already know about the 1 charge per rank, but 6 pieces of armor is 6 charges every time i want to look different… unless we get charges consistently out of tourney win chests, how would we keep this up?

This is completely false.

You will be able to carry multiple sets of gear the same way PvE/WvW players do, so you only have to transmute once for each unique look that you like, because the stats aren’t even used, you can even use Fine/Masterwork.

Furthermore, you will be able bring in any existing appearance from PvE simply by buying the armors for a few silver off of the TP, and you will be able to gain dungeon skins by playing the respective achivement tracks.

Its going to be even cheaper than it is now to obtain and reuse skins.

The wardrobe only holds your skins, not your armors. You will be able to have as many armors of a unique appearances as you have storage space.

I would prefer that a mix of gear is given, both level 80 and level XX.

Balthazar is very clearly based upon Ares, the God of War. His behavior is the same, his motives are the same, everything about him is the same.

He’s not ripped from some other game just because he’s all firey and stuff.

If you don’t own a small guild then stay out of these threads. Seriously. Stop coming into them and posting when you have no experience on the matter.

You know what it sounds like when people from big guilds come to post in these threads? Its like a kool-aid man bursting through a brick wall and ruining a kids birthday party because he brought tasty kool-aid for them but in doing so trashed all the presents and then wonders why the kids are complaining.

To be honest, I don’t think they care. They made it clear a long time ago that WvW is supposed to be considered a part of PvE, when they kept adding living story to WvW and then eventually integrating the mist war into lore.

There has always been a heavy drive from ANet to play all available game modes, whether you like it or not. Why do you think that some gear in PvE is not easily obtainable but can be had from PvP reward tracks, or that WvW and PvP dailies were added to the system that formerly heavily favored PvE, along with dailies that are irritating and cumbersome to complete in PvE (due to timers, zergs, etc.).

Its probably only going to get worse, because the developers seem to envision GW2 as a single interdependant unit and not as three separate games.

Trixie.7614:

I don’t think it’s worth the effort to redo all the current weapons with the available colors, so I woudn’t hold my breath.

Dye systems just use grayscale textures and then apply the color in a vertex shader. Basically, its all white and then gets tinted the color during gameplay.

It actually requires less effort from the developer, not more. But it would complicate the fact that ANet likes to re-use skins with multiple color schemes (for example, the CM weapons are golden cultural weapons) as rewards.

Redoing all the old weapons would only be an effort because they likely didn’t separate the textures into layers when making them, and/or don’t have the original layered source files such as PSD/XCF etc. anymore. Lack of foresight, basically.

Its a shame to see this now-common feature lacking only in this game while almost every other game on the market since its release has had it.

Mattargul.9235:

Fyrebrand.4859:

Allelya.6830:

Quoting Brother Grimm “running proper builds”

They said we wouldn’t have to worry about cookie cutter builds. That’s all there ever is. It’s this build or you’re bad, get out. Really sick of this mentality and the fact that the game requires it.

The game requires it? Or some random guy requires it in his LFG dungeon speedrun listing?

I second this question. Lots of builds are viable in that the accomplish a goal, like killing MOB. Running a dungeons with 5 condi necros can get it done. 5 zerker warriors will likely do it faster, but the 5 necros can do it.

So, it’s less the game forcing bland builds, but rather certain parts of the community, isn’kitten

Conditions do not stack beyond certain limits, so five condition necros would clear five times slower than five Berserker warriors. Its okay to extrapolate, but make sure that its at least a comparison that is in the same league.

Yes you can clear any content with any class and any build.

Should you do it ? No. Because after a certain point its not even fun or interesting, its stting at your keyboard watching a boss’s HP go down five times slower than before. It has not made the battle more engaging, the boss still just has a massive HP bar, and players will still be dying in a single hit to undodged attacks.

The problem is not, was not, and never willl be classes or builds. Its the mind-numbing PvE in this game and the fact that no role other than DPS is needed because all content ends in a boss with massive HP bars and one-hit kill abilities.

Speedrunners do it for efficiency. But everyone does it just to get the thing to die while they sit drinking a coffee, chewing gum and pressing 1 repeatedly.

And that’s just dungeons, open world is downright unspeakable.

The whole thing felt like “okay guys, we have six months to produce an entire expansion, lets get to work”, and then smacking a big price tag on it at the end.

They can still fix it, but… patches? No patches.

A simple solution: Use Asura gates like the Southsun Cove gate. That keeps people from just wandering into the area, but ensures they can still get there if they want.

Also give us a permanent gate to Rata Novus from Rata Sum. c:

You do not have an automatic right to participate in a beta event just because you feel like you should have that right. It is a gift from ArenaNet to lucky people, that is all. And trust me, it is far better than the effort that most companies make.

Luck of the draw sucks, but its a part of life. If you think that nobody would like to know about the beta just because you didn’t get in, you’re wrong.

As I posted in that thread, it is unchanged on my newest character. The order is only repaired on my older characters who had already finished the story.

She’s currently at the Arah dungeon phase.

The level 80 maps are mostly group content. In order of solo-friendliness:
Frostgorge Sound > Orr maps > Southsun Cove > Dry Top > Silverwastes

The last few maps are almost completely revolving around group content and cannot really be soloed unless you just want to kill some mobs.

Trust me, don’t complain about this. You will be regretting it later on once you are fairly comfortable with the game, have multiple alts and hate how everything is actually relatively mediocre on the scale of difficulty.

A fully geared and traited level 80 tears through ten mobs in about ten seconds.

There is already a thread on this with plenty of useful replies in there.

Turn on the frame limiter in graphics options, set it to the lowest setting.

Its an MMO, they will always be more CPU intensive than GPU intensive. It doesn’t matter if they upgrade it to DirectX 11 or anything, I’ve wrote long complicated threads on the issue but you can’t get around processing thousands of objects every frame including dozens if not hundreds of players’ logic.

To put this into perspective, the processing load is so high that they have to offload a great deal of computation to the client (making the game vulnerable to cheating), because no server would ever be able to handle it.

Personally, I would love a heavy class that uses water weapons on land.

Spear:
Direct damage, Immoblize, Cripple. Melee but extended range (130->195)
Harpoon Gun:
Pulling and general CC. High range (1200).
Trident:
Conditions, similarly themed to Elementalist. Medium range (900).

The class mechanic could potentially be a mana bar (since no class in GW2 uses one), that would work similarly to a mix between Warrior’s adrenaline, Necro’s life force and Thief’s initiative, allowing the use of four extra skills (F1-F4) only after the bar has been sufficiently filled by using skills 0-9 from the skillbar that inflict CC.

The bar could fill up faster when a CC skill is resisted, for example when dealing with Defiant on bosses or when facing players with Stabilty in PvP, and subsequently the F1-F4 skills would be used to counter and punish CC resistance.

This would be hard to balance, but create a whole new dynamic… unfortunately, it also defines an actual role, which is forbidden in this game. :P

Unfortunately, this map is both amazing and horrible at the same time. Its the most detailed map in the game, with many complex layers. That’s also what makes it frustrating, because by the time you find something (if you can find it), its already gone. The only advice I can give is to spend a long time on the map, learning every nook and cranny, where all the events are located, etc., and to max your masteries. Eventually you become more able to do what you need.

I’m really happy that more attention is being paid to lore in the new expansion..but you forgot to go back and fix the trainwreck that is the lore in HoT.

[SPOILERS]
No explanations were ever given for so many things that appeared, especially the elite specialisations, or how Revenants existed before Rytlock (you could simply say that he was just the first HERALD and be done with it).

The best way to handle this would be to add nine NPCs somewhere in HoT (at the center of Tarir would be the best place, plenty of space and lore reasoning), give them a bit of dialog about each subclass, and a tome that unlocks it.

Plus maybe updating some skills and traits to reference Heart of Maguuma.

Diversity is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Omnicron.2467:

Hey everyone!

I stopped playing just before the Heart of Thorns release a few years back and just started playing again.

When I left the four dominant classes for dungeons and raids were: Elementalist, Mesmer, Warrior, & Guardian. Everything else was seen as non competative.

I remember Engineers were ok, but limited to a single build using Grenades to be effective, and hence considered boring.

I see there is a new class, but based on what I read in the Revenant forum section it is not a very good class.

Has anything changed since I stopped playing?
Wat are the classes people use for fractals and raids now?

Thanks

Firstly, no one runs dungeons anymore for the most part. And if you do run them, its only for tokens and you’ll generally pug with any class and any build, speedruns are mostly over because the liquid gold rewards were … liquidated.

Second, what you refer to as raids was most likely fractals, because raids did not exist until halfway into HoT’s lifespan. Fractals are completely different to what you experienced back then, and doing high level fractals depends less on class and build and more about your group composition, teamwork, and attention of the fractal’s mechanics-you’re only likely to get kicked if doing zero DPS or making really bad mistakes like dying over and over. You still find your toxic fractal group but for the most part if you’re running with guildies just do whatever you feel is most effective and adjust it as needed as you go with advice from your group.

The gameplay that you’re referring to is now mostly confined to raids. This is where your character must be in ascended gear (exotics can work, but only in A+ runs), must have the right gear, must have the right build, must be played in a specific rotation, etc. If you want information on what is currently the meta in raids then I recommend joining a raiding guild, as this context is far more complex than dungeons or fractals ever were and needs heavy forethought, and changes with each major balance update which come far more often now.

This means there is no single answer about what class to play in raids, because in the next balance patch it could be completely back to the drawing board.

tl;dr, play what you want, unless you raid. All classes have had heavy changes and every build is at least somewhat effective now after all the fixes to things like conditions, CC (break bars instead of defiance), etc.

WvW:
I played Realm Vs Realm in online games for many years, and it was always my favorite game mode, because it allowed you to do PvP without the fight always simply being determined by who is better. Things happen, the environment changes, other people get involved ,etc. This makes it very interesting ad not “stale” like SPvP.

Howver, RvR as implemented in GW2 is too grand. Other, smaller games tend to be more modest with their implemntation; but ArenaNet seems to think they have 39526526 players in this game mode so they have five(!) huge maps, most of which are empty even on large servers (the zerg just map hops giving the illusion of presence), and every objective is rediculously large and well-defended by upgrades and guards and require siege weapons to break, so conflict from roamers, small guilds and raiding parties is limited exclusively to camps most of the time.

I understand that they’re trying to make it feel like fighting in a huge war, but realistically RvR game modes survive on light conflict/skirmishes. A proper RvR battle is 10-15 people defending a fort against 10-15 other people, with a third side causing trouble — not a huge zerg of fifty people just coming in, blowing everything up for the capture points and then disappearing to another map for the next few hours.

Simplifying this game mode would go a long way to improving it. You don’t want it to be entirely skill-based like SPvP, but you do want it to matter alot more than it does in the current implementation where players are just fodder.

Another thing that bothers me about WvW is inconsistency. Your color keeps changing, your allies keep changing (server linking), your enemies keep changing, even your map keeps changing now with the Borderlands cycling. There’s nothing to adhere to because it’ll be gone in the next competition cycle. In this way, WvW is trying to be too much like SPvP (tournament-ish) and its hurting it.

SPvP:
This game mode seems like its trying to emulate Quake 3: Team Arena, while far from reaching the mark, mainly because it just comes off as lame.

The maps in particular are congested, yet empty, with no powerups or any notable objectives of any sort (this is part of why conquest is so boring) and it feels like they tried to make it “balanced” while also having it look like something out of a MOBA, which is just not a combination that works. If you want action, then you have to build an action game, not a weak Action-FPS-RPG-eSports-hybrid-thing.

SPvP offers absolutely nothing that WvW doesn’t besides fixed gear and a guaranteed oppertunity at fighting other players instead of roaming.