Guild Wars 2

i just watched the stream and my mouth dropped open when i heard someone say warriors are weak to conditions. WTH? warriors deal with conditions better than any other class in the game. not just through stance, cleansing ire, dogged march, shake it off passive+active, but also through high passive regen.

GW2 has a severe lack of skill depth IMO.

The lack of a resource system and a big reduction in the number of conditional effects (onConditionGained, onConditionRemoved, and the like) plus fixed weapon skills and ineffectual traits makes GW2’s skill system a mere shadow of the first game.

I can only hope the spectacular failure of sPVP is the lightning rod that kickstarts some major changes but i’m not holding my breath.

Don’t use focus for starters.

Olvendred.3027:

Stop thinking of GW2 like other MMO’s. You don’t feel like doing your daily? Then don’t.

You have to grind dailies, it’s the only way to get ascended gear… noone likes being weaker than everyone else, get real.

Viking Jorun.5413:

He’s clearly delusional.

It’s cute some of you guys still think of Ele as an apex predator, but it’s not. I played a roaming D/D exclusively in its glory day but now I have little-no trouble with them on any of my other classes – the rotation is very predictable, the moves are all very telegraphed, and worst of all, they’re slow and very weak vs CC.

Price is too high for an expac, and it doesn’t even include a character slot for the new class being added. That’s just appalling IMO.

Also Tempest sucks. Anet’s unwillingness to change it despite it being hated by nearly everyone ticks me right off as well.

Quality & customer appeasement are a distant backseat to extracting $$$.

Please fix the bug where i need to spend 30 points in arcane and 15+ in water just the make the class tolerable to play. Making signets and glyphs even worth considering over cantrips would also be nice.

support was buffed for Ele, but staff Ele was already good at support, and who wants to be pidgeonholed into only playing support on a staff Ele anyway?

conjure skills were buffed (again) yet the problem has always been how clunky they are to use so while conjures might see some novelty use for a while it’s difficult to see them as a serious utility slot choice. Also hard to see trading 20 skills for 5 as a good trade.

Vayne.8563:

Interesting list. I agree with three of them, but I disagree that the downed state adds nothing to the game. A lot of times, I actually used the downed state as part of my strategy. I know I’m going to go down at a certain point and I position myself in such a way where I can rally. I find fighting back from the brink more exciting than just dying.

I find fighting back from a sliver of health left to be far far more exciting and rewarding than rallying because someone tagged with AOE died 900m away. In games without downed state, you would still try to die in a position where your teammates could rez you, there just wouldn’t be these farcical rallies.

Also, skill capturing was annoying, one of the reasons that Anet sold skill unlock packs. Not everyone liked running around the world to get a skill

I agree – it would have been a good thing to monetise. I really miss the way mobs would use player skills on you when fighting, it made earning the skill so much more rewarding.

All of the things you listed can be achieved with other utilities that don’t require you to give up 20 skills for 5. IMO you’re crazy.

Anet got greedy and now they are paying the price:
http://beta.xfire.com/games/gw2

There’s no doubts about which direction this game is heading.

kitten , turning off auto-attack is not the solution. you still self-root/lose control of your character during the 3rd skill in the chain.

The loss of control is even worse when playing with high network latency, eg: playing from Australia.

When playing from australia, using sword, with or without auto-attack enabled, my character is close to unplayable. The controls are so unresponsive I might as well be watching a youtube clip of someone else playing my character.

It’s totally kittened and it kittens me right off that this piece of kitten coding/design was allowed to pass QA, let along the fact that kitten all has been done to improve the situation in 2.5 years.

Adastra.9821:

Laken.4056:

Uhg. Ok I am sorry but this needs to be said.

Firstly, elementalist is not your typical MMO style mage. I honestly consider it a battle mage of sorts. You will never get away playing a single element as an elementalist. Its just not how the class works. In order to successfully play ele you need to learn to swap and use your combo barriers. If yo want a single element mage; go play rift or wow.

Second, if you are specing into full assault. Yes, you will be squishy beyond reason in pvp. Its the sacrifice for maxing out burst to be so high. Cantrip builds are absolutley superior survivability in this game as an ele. The healing power we are cabable of is nuts. Which really goes back into my first point of attun swapping. Simply swapping to water is a 2.5k heal+another 2k regen. Not counting all the defensive 33% shields we get. You can even spec into an additional arcane shield that auto procs at25%…

Third, do research before making false claims. If I had come to the forums first to check the state on elementalist. I would have never rolled one with the amount of crying on how bad they are. Luckily, I youtubed videos and came upon a player named “excala” who is absolutley amazing. Even gives guides along with high quality WvW and Spvp (non zerg)

Finally, learn your class. Stop being scrubby and constantly crying. Ele does fine when played properly. Its about managing all the stuff you get as an ele and using it at the right times. High skill ceiling is fun, ele is where its at.

You must be new here; here’s a guide by your hero Excala. Class subforums are all about talking about how underpowered the respective class is (except maybe the Guardian subforum).

Your claims would be valid a few months ago. They’re not so much anymore. The cantrip build you mention. That’s ONE build that might have been able to hold out in the current condi meta pre-nerf.

Swapping attunements does indeed bring your survivability up on par with the other classes… if you spec for it. Most people including eles seem to forget they don’t get any healing if they don’t spec for it. The devs agree with you about attunements. That’s 45 points (15 water, 30 arcane) required to survive aside from bursting down your opponent before they can kill you. You also need 1k healing power if you want to heal 2.5k, but unfortunately, you won’t be doing any damage.

The requirement of arcane and/or water outside of full burst builds is a design flaw that hurts the ele’s build diversity and has been brought up constantly since the game was released. You can pretend these problems don’t exist or outright ignore them, but they won’t just go away. I currently just ignore them as my elementalist continues to be my main character since early access, but most people have already rerolled another character.

You should do your research on the state of the elementalist before making outdated claims. While it’s not as bad as a few people make it out to be, we’re not exactly in a great spot either having dropped from taking a top place in a tpvp team composition to having no place.

Well said.

First, I’m not sure that reducing the number of trait points to 14 was a great idea, feels like it takes forever to progress a lowbie alt now – there’s no perceptible progression for 5 whole levels.

Elementalist
New trait “blinding ashes” is good in theory, but in practise the 5sec CD cripples it, due to a lot of random procs on incidental rather than intentional targets. Feels like it should work for AOEs as well (like a smoke field) but on a longer CD.

The application of blind from AOE burns should be deterministic, not random.

Oglaf.1074:

AoE isn’t the problem.

Elementalists are the problem.

Soloing parties full of people with their D/D bunker build.

D/D bunker struggles to kill 1 let alone 5 players, hence “bunker”. If a D/D Ele is killing people he’s not bunker specced and is fairly hard-countered by ranged damage + slows/stuns/roots/poison.

It’s funny to think AOE is judged to be a problem when Ele staff is 19/20 AOE skills and plenty of Eles regard it as crap.

sPVP isn’t fun, it’s as simple as that.

Why isn’t it fun? Downed state, game mode, lack of build options, particle effect spam, condescending developers… Take your pick.

Agree, “We’ll begin regularly adding new skills and traits to the game for each profession to expand your characters and builds" did not happen at all in 2013, unless by “regularly” they meant “once a year”. They threw out most of the core principles of the manifesto too so i’m not surprised.

Committing to a roadmap of development and not sticking to it is never a good idea.

Just need to raise the aoe cap from 5 to 8.

If a 10yo game like daoc could manage with no aoe cap, I’m quite sure it’s possible with today’s hardware, unless their tech and/or design is terrible.

Vix.6730:

ItZMeJRS.9483:

So what will happen to people who don’t buy the expansion pack?

Anet will consider player feedback more seriously.

This x 1000. By buying the expansion you’re basically endorsing Anet’s shady and contemptuous attitude to its customers.

I’d have said the successive nerfs to RTL are what really killed d/d.

I still am of the opinion WVW should have a PVP/PVE dungeon similar to DAOC’s Darkness Falls.

Fade to Black.7042:

I like it. But i have to addmit, it’s too opaque.

Add 50% transparency.

Yeah this would be a nice halfway position. personally I find the ground effect and the audible drone super annoying to the point i stopped logging in.

downed state is the main reason why i don’t PVP in this game. that’s how much I hate it.

if you play badly and lose 100% of your HP you should die, or if you take somedown to 0% of their HP they should die, you should not be forced to play some ridiculous tic-tac-toe mini-game that bears no resemblance to the game’s combat.

aaron.4317:

Downed state doesnt counter spike builds, it counters smaller forces that out play you.

This is exactly why it is so ridiculous to have downed state in WVW — it grossly favours the larger, not more skilled, group, and trivialises keep attacks/defenses so that an attacking force can just keep rezzing and hitting your door.

It should be removed in PVP or rezzing should break on direct damage. Defeated players should be unrezzable 20 seconds after being ‘defeated’.

Sarision.6347:

I would like it to affect both the pet and the Ranger, so I don’t have to rely on the signet.

yeah there’s really a suite of things that stand out to me on ranger relative to my other classes:

• untraited pet is too slow
• pets are very generic, basically no differences other than F2 skill
• signets only affecting pet is really bad, should affect ranger by default and GM trait should make it both.
• traps are in the wrong trait line, and should be 900 range when traited
• sword #1 is really broken

I predict the buffs will do nothing because the problem lies in how clunky they are to use, not the skills per se.

The other problem is survival utilities are mandatory, and conjures offer no survivability at all (with exception of FGS mobility).

It’s just a badly-designed class.

Given how it’s been 8 months since and many skills/traits/builds are still crap and need work I’d love to know how they can justify something as involved and resource-consuming as super adventure box.

Fenrir.5493:

tigirius.9014:

Trust me warriors don’t need buffs of any kind. They need nerfs especially in PVE.

Most hilarious quote ever.

Oh please. Everyone knows warriors are OP in PVE, that’s why all the PVE farmer groups run 4 of them.

fire #4, fire #5, water #4, and air #4 are all very lacklustre.

I’ve always thought water #4 should be a 600 leap with a chill.

Focus needs a mobility skill.

Aerathnor.8305:

Absent Minded.5821:

If we had faster pets and birds that could scale walls instead of flying up the stairs I would be sooo happy.

Rangers sending birds to take out enemy AC’s… Finally a place in WvW!

+1

Aside from rangers gaining some WVW usefulness/uniqueness, it would be good for ACs/siege to have more counterplay anyways (over and above simply counter-sieging).

Yes, WVW should have a show, and it should be called “Bend Over”.

juno.1840:

Maybe you guys should actually try diamond skin because you pretty much sound like you haven’t.

I used it last night in zerg fights and it was awesome. I was immune to fear, immobilize, cripple. I just walked through various necro marks without issue. Pop a stability and barriers/stun become a non-threat as well.

Even in 5-on-many fights it was good. I felt rather epic on my D/D aura-share ele. It doesn’t make you invincible (that would be broken), however it definitely provides advantages that are worthy of a 30pt trait.

That being said, you still need condi removal after you drop below 90% as part of the response to get back above 90%. That why I still prefer ether renewal when I do see conditions appear.

I did try it and I don’t believe you. 10% HP is gone within a second or 2 of any engagement I was involved in, at which point the trait does zero. Btw, you can roll through necro marks to pop them without taking damage already, you don’t need to waste 30 trait points for it.

The whole concept is bad: 100% immunity above 90% then 100% useless below it.

Your suggestions are kinda OP IMO.

Things I agree on:

• dragon’s tooth requires changing, it’s pretty much designed to be frustrating to use in present incarnation. Designing for frustration is never a good strategy. Retune it to hit more reliably and reduce the damage as needed. Same with shatterstone.
• sceptre fire #1 and water #1 could be retuned a little as well.
• focus needs a fair amount of love. The fire field (fire #4) could for e.g. cause burning for 4+sec instead of 1, possibly cripple for 1sec as well. A fire field that causes 1sec of burning (~320dmg) is pretty kitten underpowered.
• focus air #4 (swirling winds) became useless when it stopped destroying siege projectiles (IMO a poor decision), especially when earth #4 is a reflect on short CD. Air #4 could perhaps cause 3-4x stacks of confusion, a condition otherwise unavailable to Eles, in addition to current effect. Might make some kind of ?/F condi Ele viable.
• Focus water #4 is also kinda underwhelming, a low dmg single target chill. IMO rework this skill entirely into a movement skill, e.g. a 600 range leap, like burning speed but with a chill trail effect. More than anything focus needs to provide a mobility option comparable to ride the lightning or dagger will almost always be the better option.

gin.7158:

They will probably fix all revenant bugs when the next expansion hits.

that’s the major problem with GW2’s B2P model: once they have your money (ie: you buy the game/expac), they cease to give a kitten about fixing stuff, because it doesn’t directly impact their bottom line, whereas in a subscription game, if they leave stuff broken for 2+ years, people will unsubscribe.

In fact it’s worse than that, in GW2 they are better off not fixing things as it will make people stop playing, which actually saves them money (server time, network bandwidth).

Basically the entire B2P model wants you to buy the game, and buy stuff from the TP or frustrate you into stop playing, until the next expac hits, then repeat the cycle.

That’s why bugs aren’t fixed, and why there are so many skills/traits left to rot.

One of the big “hooks” this game lacks is that it doesn’t have enough depth to make theorycrafting interesting. The lack of the secondary class as well as tightly constrained utility types and weak traits means that builds are really limited in scope. Then only 1-2 of those builds are good enough to be viable in most classes.

GW2 is an order of magnitude simpler and dare i say dumbed-down compared to GW1, it’s not even close. GW2 traits are supposed to be where the complexity comes back in, but in practise, it just doesn’t work, the traits are straight out of the WOW design book and by and large don’t have much of an effect and more importantly, don’t interact much with other traits or skills.

In general, GW2 combat is just too simple. Dodging out of a red circle or exploiting a combo field is not complexity – and despite combo fields being perhaps the only real innovative aspect of GW2 combat, the effect of exploiting a combo field is pretty minimal (water fields being a notable exception).

The fundamental reason that GW2 is too shallow though is simply that the attack surface is too small – there is only health pool and DPS.

GW1 skills costed energy, and managing/denying energy was a major facet of the game. In addition there were enchantments, hexes, as well as conditions, and many more conditional effects based around them – entire builds could be based around conditional effects, eg: prot monks.

Moreover, there’s a severe lack of choice in GW2, again because traits are largely ineffectual, and the fixed nature of weapon skills. It’s pretty boring. At a minimum, traits need major buffs across the board, and a lot more conditional effects added, and we really need to be able to choose our weapon skills, the fixed weapon skill system is a total fail.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Here is the patch note from March 26, 2013:

• Automatic camera rotation while defeated will no longer restart after the camera is moved.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-March-26-2013/first#post1856151

So, I’m confused about why there would be a middle ground. Just re-enable the previous feature that was ‘broken’ in the patch.

this problem still persists. it is extremely irritating.

Nabuko Darayon.9645:

In WvW I can now run a great damage build with Fire/Air/Arcane (can even switch Arcane for Earth or Water) or go with a more melee bunker spec so I don’t think you’ve explored Eles enough (as far as WvW potential goes). Yeah Armor of Earth/Mist Form might seem mandatory but they’re there to give you some baseline protection if things go south. Your damage surely comes from the weapon skills.

You assume too much. I tried no arcane/water, it’s only slightly less damage than no arcane/water, but it’s way less survivable.

Glyphs have now a better synergy with condi builds then they did before which make condi Eles much better (Yes they don’t have to rely on Cantrips sicne they benefit more from Glyphs or Arcane skills).

You lost all credibility with me right there. Burning is pointless in WVW for anything bigger than 5v5. Ele has access to too few condis to sustain reasonable damage in WVW 5+, group condi clears are too numerous and too effective.

Glyphs (and signets and conjures) are as crap as they have ever been.

So I have to reiterate: 2/5 (40%) of our traits are effectively mandatory, and 3/5 (60%) of our utilities are effectively useless. I don’t see how anyone could say Ele is in a good place.

LS is dead, and I’m glad it’s gone. It was a poor content delivery vehicle IMO, the content wasn’t very good and was too short-lived in scope.

Besides, the only way to get a real living story is the way EVE does it – full sandbox/emergent gameplay.

The obvious options that wasn’t there is “alpine + desert + a 3rd borderland map we will create”.

of course. but where is the detailed info on what you get for $50? currently it’s a PVE zone , 1 class, and the elite specs, most of which haven’t even been announced. That’s it. That doesn’t seem like $50 of content to me at this point.

TBH, I find both the sound and ground texture of herald super annoying.

Now if they just made pets not evaporate within 5 seconds of any zerg v zerg encounter that would be great.

Exedore.6320:

There is nothing wrong with conquest.

No, but clearly, there is something wrong with GW2’s implementation of it. I too have enjoyed it in other games but not in GW2- IMO it’s not fun at all. I am still convinced that it’s downed state that is the underlying cause of spvp’s failure to thrive among the general player population – IMO it just does not work in PVP on any level and fundamentally detracts from the game.

By all means try stuff but the general opinion is that conjures are terrible in pvp/wvw because they’re clunky to use and require you to give up 21 skills to gain 5 mediocre ones.

the lack of viable builds/choices in this gam is IMO this game’s greatest weakness.

Of the class i regularly play, from a WVW roaming/zerging perspective, skills i basically never use or of very limited/situational use:

Ele: glyphs, signets, conjures, elites
Ranger: traps, shouts, spirits
Warrior: (no real complaints)
Thief: traps
Mesmer: (no real complaints)
Necro: minions, signets (except spite)

• Why do we all need to put 20+ points in arcane and 15+ point in water just to meet our minimal expectations of how the class should perform?
• What is the design justification behind making 19/20 skills on staff AOE? playing Ele is an exercise in annoyance because of the frequency i need to switch between weapon sets because they’re all so niche.
• Why are conjures so badly designed and clunky to use?

scerevisiae.1972:

There is nothing more annoying in this game than fighting 1v2, getting one of your opponents downed, and then being unable to do jack kitten while the other casually rezzes his friend and there’s not a kitten thing you can do other than AOE and hope for the best.

On the other hand, that is probably the point of the system: Enforce the effect of numerical superiority.

Usually in MMOs this isn’t immediately obvious because players die “too” fast. Same in GW2, you can get downed really really fast in most situations. To counteract that, the downed system allows the team with the numerical advantage to recover their injured from the surprise attack.

That is pretty much the opposite of what a well-designed game should be aiming for. A smaller, more skilful force should always be able to overcome a larger, disorganised force. DS in this respect is very much an anti-skill feature.

I think there’s quite a few issues with current WVW:

The stacking effect of orbs is too great versus the ease of getting an orb (bad map design)
In DAOC, it was a difficult affair to get an enemy relic, often taking a week of sustained effort whittling down enemy keeps to open relic gates, and system-wide messages were issues when a relic was taken — in WVW it’s far too easy, and most of the time, other players don’t even know it’s happening.

Outmanned
The outmanned “buff” is widely taken by losing teams as time to go PVE farming and/or quit, the complete opposite of its intended effect. Just get rid of it, or change it to be some kind of “Determined” buff that makes NPCs for the outmanned side far tougher.

Supply denial
Once a side loses all its keeps/towers, the losing side has no chance of coming back due to current supply mechanics and the relative ease with which the winning side can protecting the supply camps flanking the losing side’s main keep. The already dominating side has such a massive supply advantage over the losing side(s) that a comeback is just not realistically possible. This is because…

Supply scales linearly with empire size
in the real world, the biggest limitation of empire size was essentially logistics – the difficulty of supplying the front-lines with food, weapons, replacement troops. In WVW, there is no downside to owning the majority of the map as long as you keep your adjoining supply camps capped. A better system would to increase the supply cost of upgrades/siege weapons as a function of distance from your server’s spawn point. Supply dolyaks should also drop a small amount of supply when killed.

Supply exploiting
Every week i see people from other servers cross-realming to use up the supply of their opponent by building siege in completely useless locations just metres from the supply depot in SMC and other difficult-to-take keeps. IOJ did it to CD this week, and ET did it the week before.