Guild Wars 2

Just to throw the OP a bone…

I played this game since launch (on and off) and I find that a lot of the stat combinations are either sub-optimal or downright abysmal:

Optimal:

• Berserker: all round good for every kind of activity
• Knight: tankier version of berserker, still very good
• Celestial: another all-rounder, useful because more stat points compared to other set-ups
• Dire: probably the best condition build
• Rabid: 2nd best condition build (in my opinion)
• Sentinel: if you’re a WvW commander, else it’s bad

Sub-optimal:

• Soldier: cause berserker has more damage, and the extra vitality and toughness don’t really change a lot in most PvP situations, and are useless in PvE. Good for people who suck at their class, i.e. noobs.
• Valkyrie: vitality is a no-go for most classes because warrior, necro, ranger, engi, mesmer base HP are quite good; classes that have lower vitality still can use it such as guard, ele, thief (though the latter are better off with either celestial and berserk)
• Carrion: while not as good as dire or rabid (power on a condition build isn’t optimal), it’s still possible to run this “ok”.
• Settler: an “ok” condition stat for people who like healing, worse than the ones above though. I never use this without switching some dire or rabid in.

Abysmal:

• Every possible other stat combo

Personally I would opt for ascended items that don’t have stat boosts, but allow out-of-combat switching of stats. At the moment they seem like a forced grind and I oppose this kind of action.

This must be one of the most constructive threads I have read in a long long while on the WvW forums. Great contributions from all of you.

Hope Malkom and others in his situation can use this to their advantage!

Hate: grinding aspects, farming, “gold = everything”
Like: lore, races, classes, some great AI

Hey ben, The Old Boys on Gandara will gladly have you with them. I’m sure you’re not a noob. :P See you in-game!

Lol. I’m ok with open world pvp… but no dropping of items. That’s archaic.

What I’d like to know is this. Are you (ArenaNet) actually interested in ‘fixing’ these problems?

I’m sure a lot of people know things that would fix the big problems called imbalance and blobs, PvDoor and coverage wars, and a lot of people did post suggestions, so you shouldn’t have any problem fixing it (apart from coding it and so on).

I’d only like to know if you are considering the previous as big problems or if you are actually ok with them and think they are part of the game, so I (and others) know if it’s still worth playing, or if the only option is moving to another game for decent PvP.

Hooray for farmers and tp flippers. Please remove it from WvW or find an acceptable way of acquiring it.

Gear treadmill inc….

Seriously though… GEAR TIERS MAKE NO DIFFERENCE.

This is what it comes down to:
- tier 1 has numbers
- shiny new monsters are introduced that have higher numbers than you!
- you grind tier 2 with bigger numbers, you feel like a boss
- shiny new monsters with even more numbers are introduced!
- you grind tier 3 gear with… more numbers, you can now kill the shiny new monsters but you get bored after a day.

Repeat this sequence and add more numbers. Before you know we all have 15k power and deal the same damage as before, because guess what… the mobs have gained more numbers too.

You only THINK you are making progress to “getting stronger”, but in fact a math-loving economist is eating your brains.

Dr II Evil.9326:

HoT is following the expansion philosophy of the GW1 expansions. Paid moderate content up front followed by additional rounds of free content. The cycle then repeats for the next expansion.

Well we don’t know the price/content ratio. If they charge $50 for an expansion with 1/10 of the original game… i’m gonna pass.

Again… don’t blame the players, blame arenanet for making bosses and mobs so lacking.

BurrTheKing.8571:

All buffs are going to do is perpetuate the cycle of the game getting easier.

I’m a fan of making Guild Cities (where all players of one guild can build their house) and Guild Wars. More guild activities are a serious must in this game.

ArchonWing.9480:

But I would like to ask you sincerely to consider how valuable the WvW populace is. We* are not locusts that have endless demands, complaining over a lack of new content, devouring any new content, and considering the cycle while leaving behind a wake of boring and soulcrushing grinds for the rest of us. If you show me an actual WvW regular that will bash Arenanet because Living Story 45 isn’t out in 2 weeks yet after 44 and there aren’t any new outfits this week, I’ll pay you a copper. Because you know, constantly spitting out “novel” content isn’t actually a reasonable demand. Making sure your content actually works on the other hand, I think is. Seriously, when people go “oh my god, there’s no new content”, I respond with “What the hell do you even want? Can you even be happy?” And then I understood why treadmills are created.

As long as the game mode is fine, and there are conflicts to be had, it’ll be fine. That’s how WvW basically survived for 3 years on pretty much minimal content changes. And there’s certainly many other players that are not WvW’ers that are also willing to stay with you because they sincerely enjoy the content and not off to some race to be a special snowflake.

I completely agree with this. WvW is a very special game mode and the players who play it are more than dedicated to the game. They don’t play for loot, they don’t play for shinies. They play for one reason only: the raw action and challenges that come through fighting against other players.

I can say truthfully that I have never played a game with such a fantastic large scale PvP format, and I still love it, like I am sure most WvW players do. Most of the WvW players have been throwing themselves into Eternal Battlegrounds and the borders for years now. They saw little to no changes in content, yet they stayed and kept playing there.

All we ask for is a stable PvP environment with a little bit of depth. The rest we, the players, have always provided ourselves. We have organised in guilds, in server communities, cooperated with eachother to fight the enemy. We created different playstyles and roles, be it commander, scout, roamer, pug, guild raider. Existing content has been used by players in very creative ways. We have even been fighting over things that were not even intended to be fought over, think about the hills at Overlook keep, the ruins at Valley. Think of the Guild vs. Guild scene that existed for so long without any framework provided by ArenaNet, think of the frequent friendly duels and skirmishes between players from opposing servers.

If anything the message to you, ArenaNet, should be that World vs. World is a game mode that must be cherished, along with it’s players.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi All,

I wanted to comment about the incident that happened recently in-game, surrounding some negative community interaction from a member of the ArenaNet staff.

Simply put a big mistake was made by one of our employees, for which he is both very upset and sorry. He allowed his personal feelings to affect his interactions in-game whilst representing ArenaNet, and this is absolutely unacceptable.

Like all players, we are human, and all have our opinions on the game. However these opinions should never disrupt other player’s enjoyment of the things they love. On top of this we have worked very hard to create a community that is respectful to one another, and for this behavior to have occurred while a developer is representing ArenaNet is doubly saddening.

We all cherish the opportunity to play with the community, and we absolutely rely on you all for in game feedback, and personally I hope that this incident does not hamper what has so far been an amazing relationship and opportunity for us all.

I would therefore like to sincerely apologize for this behavior on behalf of our staff member. We are taking steps to address the incident and for his part, he is very sorry for behaving in the manner in which he did.

Regarding Guild game play, please understand it is extremely important to us, and an area we are paying a great deal of attention to, so please do be patient with the developers who work tirelessly on making WvW the very best it can be, they have a great deal of respect for you all, and value your collaboration in pushing this pioneering mode forward. Also please note this member of staff is not on the WvW team.

Finally, World vs. World is a free-for-all battle. Our expectation of staff is that they should be playing, and enjoying the game like everyone else, and not being disruptive or disrespectful to others.

And in this spirit I hope we can move forward, and continue, what has up to this point, been a great community/developer relationship. One that I know our team massively values and loves.

Thank you all for your time and i hope you have a lovely weekend,

ChrisW

Simply put, developer is ‘sincerely’ sorry and Anet as a company does not approve. Guild play such as GvG is still a something Anet cares about.

Alright, does this mean you are working on a solution for more organised/balanced/tactical combat?

Phase 2? What was phase 1? :P

LOL>? There are people with too many tomes of knowledge? How do you get so many wtf. The most tomes I ever had at one point is 10 and I just used them on my current character… Pls make tomes of knowledge easier to get.

Asmodeus.5782:

The open world challenge is dead.

Very much looks like it…

Thumbs up so this thread isn’t lost. Vote it up people. Show Anet who’s in power.

ophidic.1279:

Shelledfade.6435:

The game is supposed to be FUN, not a GRIND.

You shouldn’t even realize that you’re grinding while playing.

This though, this is just dumb.

I put 200g down into crafting to try to get a dusk in the mystic forge and never got one, then they go ahead and increase the crafting cap to 500.

That’s basically 150 hours of completely wasted time spent in the game. I left this game for 2-3 months and I think I’m gonna leave permanently if this is the direction the game is going in.

Why should I put more time in this game if my time is being wasted playing it. Give me an answer ANET.

If the grind isn’t fun then you’re playing it wrong.

Anet encourages playing it wrong (aka. grinding). They have shown that with every update. Grinding is the only way to get anything at all in this game.

Ithilwen, I watched your video. I am by no means a top active player (I only logged in a few times to PvP in season 2), but you really need to work on some things. In that commentary thread, BeepBoopBop gave you a very clear and correct indication.

BeepBoopBop.5403:

Not finished watching, I’ll update this comment as I go.

1. Rebind your keys. Personally, the right side of my skill bar is bound as 6, q, e, z, x.

2. You take a little too long to make decisions. See 5:40.

3. You aren’t pressuring enough. This is actually a decent summary of the whole video.

4. Learn to use Portal.

5. WAYYY too slow rotations. Use Staff 2 while facing backwards or even Blink to get places faster, please.

6. Using Staff 2 wrong many times…it’s really putting you in places where you are making it hard for yourself to pressure the enemy.

7. 6:50…you just shattered two of your higher CD shatters with no clones.

8. 12:20 Why are you going far??? Look at the points, you can win if you just all hold home.

9. 5:10 What is up with that? Your teammate nearly got stomped while you almost failed to pressure enough while you had 1) shatters ready and 2) distortion for safe stomp ready.

I agree with what Beep says. I do not play PvP a lot these days, but there are some major things you really need to work on (based on my viewing 6 minutes of your video).
1. Doing nothing: I see you just standing still while your team is fighting. It’s okay to back out of a fight when you’re sure you can’t win it (that’s when you go cap or contest another point). It’s NOT okay to simply stand there pondering what to do.
2. Skill clicking: please stop skill clicking, your reaction time is slowed by that. Also use tab-targetting if possible, or call targets for your team to focus using ctrl+click, while still fighting at the same time.
3. Pressuring: linked to your doing nothing and skill clicking, you just do not damage your foes sufficiently. Several times in that short video, it’s like you just tag in for the kill but you’re not really helping out a whole lot. In general, you’re just not offensive enough.

Now, please don’t take this too hard. If your reflexes are slow or you have a hard time using all your skills through keybinds, that’s not your fault, but sadly it will hold you down in PvP.

On a side note: it does not give anyone a right to flame you. Please just ignore people who say “kill yourself”.

Junkpile.7439:

Have maximum stats.

+1 right he is

I don’t play elementalist in WvW anymore, won’t play it after this nerf for sure.

• You rely on might-stacking for getting damage
• Your damage (with might) is the same than a warrior with 20+k HP and 3k armour
• You have access to a very low number of blocks/damage mitigation compared to other classes and have no stealth like thieves, mesmers, rangers and engineers.
• Your health and armour are very low, unless you go total bunker, which makes your damage redundant.
• The only really succesful trait set-up is something along the lines of 0-0-4-4-6. Running 6 in Arcane is pretty much a must, other options aren’t viable.

Well looks like my transferring options have suddenly become a lot better. Thanks guys! Maybe now I will be able to experience a vivid wvw experience!

I’m pretty sure GvG will not come:
When asked about GvG, Flannum confirmed what Jon Peters has stated in a previous interview that Guild Wars 2 would not have Guild vs Guild PvP.
No, that’s one thing that is a pretty big departure. The reason we didn’t want to do it is that even in guild vs. guild in Guild Wars 1, we found that what we had to do is create a lot of systems to circumvent that. It was just really hard to get that many people all from the same guild on at any given time.
What we’ve said instead is that our guilds are going to be about building social networks, and if there is a group of people that are the hardcore PvP guys they’re all going to be in the same guild anyway so that’s OK. And they’re going to register as a team, and be known as the team from a specific guild and build up a reputation. And then that gives them the flexibility that if they want to have a top team along with a team 2 and team 3, they can do that kind of thing. So we wanted to disassociate the two things.
[http://lorehound.com/news/more-guild-wars-2-pvp-talk-no-gvg-re-confirmed/]

About guild halls:
“What are the plans for expanding guild features? Guild Halls, calendars and things like that.
Someday there will be Guild Halls but it’s not something that is actively being worked on. Will expand on guild features down the road as well”
[http://www.guildwars2guru.com/news/870-mmorpg-interview-with-colin-johanson/]

Sorry to dissapoint you guys, but it looks like we’re not going to get this content anytime soon.

Keep it on top! We need this.

Takato.4976:

I always check if he posted something else at another place. Work of art.

Too unique to post more of it. He only came once… and went away. :P
So dramatic! <3

DevonCarver.5370:

Orion is correct, you will need to have done enough damage to the gate to get credit for the achievement.

Again you are totally forgetting uplevels… I’ve been playing this game (and WvW) since the open beta and I love playing alts. What’s the fun in specializing in one class? It’s a lot better for you and your team if you can bring up different classes, with equal skill. I have leveled a level 80: 1 engineer, 2 warriors, 1 mesmer, 1 guardian, 1 elementalist, 1 thief. I didn’t level necromancer or ranger so far.

Anyways, I think people who have a certain number of level 80s and are an adept in WvW shouldn’t be forced the “uplevel way” (aka. You are so weak a level 80 can one-hit you). For that matter I think uplevels are a joke, instead seperate WvW and PvE gear and make uplevels level 80 in WvW, with traits and armour.

Stop making WvW alt-unfriendly.

Ferum Flamebender.5910:

“How about this! Let’s add a bow to the engineer profession!
Because a bow with some bomb arrows or time shift shafts would be awesome to use!”

Come on guys! Everyone thinks their class needs more weapons. The engineer forum has seen bladesaw, hammer, torch, mace, bows, minigun and dredge sound gun threads about why this weapon perfectly fits the engineer.

Every weapon actually could fit every profession. Rifles to the necroes with a steampunky style like ‘being a witch hunter’ would fit it. As would sword fit an engineer with a elixer charged shaft to speed up the reflexes (quickness?) of the wielder.

For every weapon we can find a reason why it ‘perfectly fits’ our own class..

Add a crossbow with sapper bombs in it!

IVIUIEI.9631:

Meglobob.8620:

2 new bosses, 1 permanent, 1 temporary, a list of achievements to do.

Nothing other than living story till April.

That means no new:-

Quality of life stuff.
Nothing for PvP.
Nothing for WvW.

Plenty of Scarlet thou…

Nooooooooooooo……. it’s not true…… There has to be more.

By your answer, you sound surprised!
“Mission accomplished.” High five all around the dev table.

Am I only one who thought this was real until they read through the thread? xD

Shriketalon.1937:

Greetings and salutations.

I come to you today with a comment about the Living Story’s direction, though I know those are in abundance these days. What I’d like to do is hopefully a bit different. I would like to describe what the game would need to do in order to smoothly transition back to the war against the dragons. At present, that is impossible due to an incompatibility between players starting the Personal Story and those who have finished it, and conundrum which can be solved in a single sentence.

To make the Living Story flourish, the Pact must be destroyed.

…Bit of an attention getter, I hope. Allow me to spell on the argument; why the personal story has impersonal problems, what the living story is currently doing wrong, how to fix the two to the benefit of both, and what the results could be for an entire year’s worth of content. I can be a bit overly verbose, so I’ve condensed them into four JPG files for easier reading. Feel free to skip through it if it drags on, but please scroll through the NextYear file to consider what the Living Story could become.

Here we go. The Time Capsule method.

Woah. Awesome.

I’d play living story if it was like this.

Amazing!

Agrees:
1- alliances and only one guild or
2- multiple guilds + multiple guild chats + being able to represent all at the same time
3- multiple guilds + multiple guild chats + being able to see when a player last represented

I’m in favor of the first option. Screw representing.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/gf-left-me-coz-of-ladderboard/page/4#post3390924

My concern: zerg fest everywhere. Please tell me this won’t be the case… or I need a new game.

I think they should actually implement something to make it possible to contact the enemy and make an alliance, upon which players become “purple” names, or neutral for you: this means you won’t actually hit them, unless you specifically target them. This also means you can talk with them. I think these alliances shouldn’t be server-bound, but guild-bound.

Personally, I think we should just ignore the meta.

I am a total alt-aholic and as such I play nearly every class with varying success, but most importantly I LIKE to do it.

OP, if you like this spec, DO IT! I tried something completely different on my warrior last week: Axe/mace with Mace/Axe. Most people seemed so ignorant of what maces can do that I killed several “Meta” players. On top, I didn’t run the passive build with stances and signets, but went all offensive with movement skills.

My advice: don’t run the meta, because it’s just what everyone runs and it will ruin your fun, instead play your own style and your own build and just rock all those self-assured meta players. :p

For ordinary quests that might be true, but a lot of games manage to bring more random variation in their “quests”. Solving puzzles, intriguing story elements, climbing, undercover missions, venturing, criminality and so much more.

In Guild Wars 2, the story is rather bleak for most zones, and hearts really don’t give you the feel of an immersive world, rather they make it way too structured and unimpressive and are much like dailies in that respect. Dynamic events are not really as adventurous and epic as I would wish them either.

killcannon.2576:

Rym.1469:

Your first point kinda made me think about basic idea of communism and Central-controlled economy. You know what? It failed

Communism has only failed on the large scale. Communism is still doing great on the small to medium scale. Matter of fact, it’s the only thing that keeps capitalism running.

To add, it only failed because the “central controllers” were corrupt. Since the central controllers here are one gaming company that already got a large chunk of it’s income through selling their game and gets the other part through gems (=/= gold). I think your analogy is far off (@Rym).

I’ll try this patch, but if it is as grindy as the rest of the patches, I’m quitting again.

Anyone else thought the music horribly out of place? It sounded like it was made to predict the end of the world… and all I see is a stupid wurm and an even more pathetic giant watchknight. O_O

WHAT IS THIS?!

hedix.1986:

bri.2359:

Too bad if you have a job in the EU and want to daily do the mega-boss events.
Here are the new spawn times (all CEST):

18:00 Karka Queen
19:00 Tequatl
20:00 Evolved Jungle Wurm

Then nothing until the next day …

18:00 many still at work or on their way home
19:00 same as above or recently arrived home
20:00 having dinner

Given the time required for organising events like the Wurm, these events will be out-of-reach for many during the week,

THIS. The ultimate problem with restricting timers on megabosses. It really, really saddens me.
Anet, please understand that not everyone plays all day long. As with the community aspect, you are removing player’s choice and that verges on uninstalling.

Please lower the timers to a recycle of 1 hour before the events restart… That way everyone gets a chance.

No donari, not about female, but about male :P This is a “We want…” instead of a “We do not want…”
Oh yer, sure, as long as it stays decent

Razor.9872:

Don’t forget that new elite specializations will be introduced in the future. In theory, they should be just as powerful as the current ones are now. On paper, build diversity should increase as more of those are introduced.

And how long will that take? They said they’re working on the next expansion, but how long till that comes out? 1 year? 1 year a half? Meanwhile we’re stuck with this crappy balance and a few meta builds while the rest is nearly trash level when you compare to the meta builds.

Thanks for the effort to write up, but here’s a link to quick build editors.

http://www.gw2skills.net/editor

http://intothemists.com/calc/

phiplayer.2865:

I find this thread funny with all the haters trying to mock the game as hard as they can.

And i find this funny too, because of people (mostly haters) aske anet to show off their big numbers. And now, when we got the answer, people:
-don’t believe them,
-think those are advertisments,
- that they are too small,
- that even with alive, healthy, think that community of this game is dead.

You know what i’m going to tell you ?

You are wasting your time, dear hater. Go do something for christ sake, by posting in this thread you didn’t gain anything. And if you think that your efforts damaged, somehow, GW2, you are totally wrong.

In response to this comment, the only thing I can do is sigh.

Criticism is something developers are supposed to learn from and should be grateful for. It means there are people who care enough about their game, that they are willing to spend time to shout out what they like/dislike/think should be improved. There isn’t a single comment out there that is completely made up out of negative criticism, they always state what might be a good solution to the problem, which in turn should – theoretically – help the developers.

I’d also like to add that if you think this isn’t an advertisement on Anets part, you are terribly naive.

I think this actually is what the warrior does. Nothing new here, sorry.

Tabletop RNG? :O

Svarty.8019:

How it should be: The more you have, the less extra you get.

How it is: The more you have, the more you get.

Huzzah for reversed logics of reward. Because normally: the harder, the more rewarding BUT …:

• Premise 1: The more people you have, the easier
• Premise 2: The more people you have, the more rewarding
• Conclusion: The easier, the more rewarding

WvW doesn’t follow a regular reward scheme, and therefore fails.

kitten the RNG, I don’t even bother trying to get these items cause the chance you get one (after blasting all your money) is 0,0000000001%