Guild Wars 2

zastari.1730:

Please just take a kittening page from DAoC and put something like Darkness Falls in for the server that has the most PPT. That was the best solution; it was figured out a while ago; there’s no reason to keep trying to do something different.

This.

For those who never played DAOC, Darkness Falls was a huge dungeon that connected all 3 realms, where the centre connecting area (“the diamond loop”) consisted of densely-packed hard mobs. Only 1 realm at a time could access it at one time, effectively the leading PVP realm. It contained a good portion of the hardest and most rewarding PVE content in the game.

DAOC’s Darkness Falls was a masterstroke on multiple levels.

• it provided a tangible reward for leading
• it drew people out of the winning side, thereby re-balancing the power level
• it effectively created a PVP “dynamic event”: the new owners of DF rush the spawn area of the former owners to clear them out of the instance. Some of my best memories of DAOC were of rushing the opposing side’s DF and cleaning up PVE groups deep in the dungeon.
• it offered, all in the one dungeon, low-level PVE, high-level PVE, as well as solo, group and zerg PVP.

No, the circle sucks. Just needs to be less opaque and it would be fine.

worst spec so far is an understatement, it’s the worst spec so far by far.

it’s a carbon copy of an existing role/playstyle, overloads are crap, shouts are crap, traits are crap, elite is crap, warhorn is boring. Even the animations are crap.

Orion Templar.4589:

Bogdanus Magnus.8143:

Or maybe they should give us an option to disable both the effects and the sound; that way everyboy is happy.

I really want this option. The visual effect bothers me, but not as much as the “organ” music that goes with an active facet bothers me. I typically have the player instrument volume slider down to zero to disable the organ music, but then I miss the other instrument sounds that I do want to hear. I’d love to see an option to specifically disable/enable the Herald ground effect and accompanying sound.

Yep, this irritates the kitten out of me and a bunch of others as well, as evidenced by other threads complaining about the herald “drone”. It’s irritating as kitten and makes me not want to play the game.

Irritated me so much I stopped playing herald. My new spec only uses Facet of Nature for the boons.

well, the vote for (2+1)(1+ 2) BLs stands at 69.7% after normalising for the 7.2% undecided, which is a clear majority, but just shy of the (rather extreme) 75%.

As is evident in this thread, I think this poll was poorly constructed in that people who hate either alpine or desert would be split between the 2+1 and rotation options, when I strongly believe that what most people would really like to see is 3 distinct BL maps.

Like others here, if we end up with a 3 month rotation of Desert then I’ll be taking another long break from the game, as WVW is the only reason I play this game and I strongly dislike Desert as it’s too easy for sides to avoid each other, too much running to get anywhere, extremely irritating terrain restrictions. I hope Anet remove Desert from WVW completely and re-purpose it as a PVE map.

Also, why isn’t Edge of the Mists on the table as a BL map?

TBH though, I think all of Anet’s WVW maps are poorly conceived. They all try too hard to create arbitrary obstacles and pre-thought siege locations. The original DAOC WVW maps where all 3 sides had unique and interesting geography was so so much better. Even a flat plain with randomly-generated keep/tower locations would have been better than alpine/desert.

So yeah, I’d really like to see another poll that explicitly mentions 3 distinct BL maps as an option, I’m willing to bet $$ this is what most players really want.

Designing a jack-of-all-trades class has failed in every game it’s been tried and quite frankly they should have known better. Inevitably, these classes are either 1) weak to the point of being disparaged and shunned by other players, or 2) totally overpowered.

eg: WOW druid at release was jack-of-all-trades and widely denigrated as useless, 1 year later completely reworked to allow deep specialisation in melee dps OR ranged dps OR heals OR tanking while retaining low-level competency in all 4.

GW2 is much the same and is suffering the same fate. Ele is even more poorly designed due to being locked out of their versatility by base 16sec CD (hence why you see virtually every PVP/WVW player speccing into 20-30 arcane just to play the class at a baseline level).

The obvious solution is the approach blizzard took – allow players to specialise in one aspect/role at the expense of others, eg: speccing 30 fire passively reduces fire attunement CD to 5sec, something along those lines, or actively through Fresh Air-like talents in each elemental line.

Sporks.4395:

20/30/0/10/10 full zerk. Make them rally.

Fixed that for you.

I agree… I’d like to OS expanded into a full PVP/PVE dungeon similar to how Darkness Falls was in DAOC (the model on which WVW was based).

I fully support GVG, but IMO it’s ultimately better if GVG remains a part of overall WVW rather than a side-game.

“Our goal is to ensure we have a proper progression for players from exotic up to legendary without a massive jump in reward between the two.”

Exotic and Legendary items have the same stats. There is no “jump”.

This is a gear grind, pure and simple. They have deliberately deceived players in order to incite players to buy gems. I would like my money back.

Sliekery.7862:

I don’t think there is any thing “wrong” with the game. People just expect to much.

GW1 had an amazing depth to skills, skill interactions, and consequently, to build depth and player choices. To me this was the game’s #1 appeal.

This game has very little depth by comparison, and very few real choices — all GW2 skills basically differ only by dmg coefficient, cooldown, and animation – conditional effects are rare and traits across the board are really underwhelming on most classes.

It’s reasonable to expect a sequel to have similar mechanics to the original game, but this is not the case here. At all.

You only need to look at the spectacular failure of sPVP and the ultra slow place of improvement in this game to realise there is something very wrong with this game.

Number #1 on my wish list for WVW would be a Darkness Falls (DAOC)-like dungeon in WVW, accessed from the regular game world, which has entrances on all 3 WVW servers but only 1 server is allowed access to it at a time. Access can be obtained by WVW objectives only, eg: whichever server holds the most of (SM + borderkeep garrisons). When ownership changes hands, it becomes a hotbed of PVP as the new owners clean out the old.

The important thing is to populate it with high-end PVE content/rewards, and keep it PVP-enabled so there is risk.

Karizee.8076:

Anyone who played the finale event for the Lost Shores patch knows the game is exploding in popularity. So many people everywhere!!

Lots in LA, dead everywhere else.

vesica tempestas.1563:

typical example : wow – compulsary $120 a year + expansion costs just to be allowed to logon to the server, if you dont pay, you fall behind the power curve.

GW2 $0-anything you want + expansion cost.

GW2 is 99% gem shop updates, 1% player updates. skill/trait balancing is bottom of the barrel priority.

WOW is almost all player content & skills/talents are better and more regularly balanced.

Ansultares.1567:

Astralporing.1957:

Making everyone be equally miserable is definitely not fine.

Ah, the joys of socialism.

Scandinavian countries are socialist and consistently rank in the world’s top 10 most livable and most developed countries in the world with the happiest people. Stop watching Faux News.

Back on topic… I think it’s skills, not classes per se, that need the most balancing. Skills like 100b, kill shot, CnD-mug-BS, triple-shatter-BF-while-invulnerable that take 50%+ of full char HP in 1-2 button presses shouldn’t be in any PVP MMO worth a kitten

signed.

I often feel like i’m fighting the UI more than the game. It’s one of the worst UIs of any game. Other things I hate:

• not being able to rearrange the UI
• the small size and placement of boons/conditions
• having to look at opposite extremes of the screen to see my vs my enemy’s health (obvious UEX/design fail)
• the personal story BS obscuring a large chunk of the screen
• modal windows that block windows below them instead of coming to front
• the many pointless dialogue windows that require manual closing
• search filters in the auction house that don’t work (>12months after release)
  i could go on…

ronpierce.2760:

To those saying downed state is in replace of healers, that is incorrect. Everyone has self heals and evades in replace of healers. It patches that role nicely. And if downed state was out of the game they’d take measures to increase the games ttk in both pvp and pve. Mobs would hit for less so you’d be able to sustain yourself with your heals better, while the risks would be in the mechanics, not 10k auto swings and instant death abilities. In pvp self heals already work just fine in replace of healers. Self heal + anytype of support build keeps people alive. Healers would put it over the top and no one would ever die. Downed state is NOT in replace of healers, it’s just their “interesting” mechanic that isn’t so interesting and causes Very bad drawbacks across the ENTIRE game.

While I agree with everything you said, I think the main reason DS was put in the game was so they could try to sell finishers.

Whenever I have spoken to friends I PVP with in other games, downed state/rally is always cited as the #1 turnoff along with how visually messy/spammy the combat looks.

Combined with the legions of threads and posts since beta about the problems with DS, I can only wonder what this game could have been if it didn’t have downed state shackling it down. Downed state was a self-fulfilling prophecy for the state of the game’s PVP.

Argol Vazin.3061:

you know what sarcasm is right, and you understand that it is not a DPS thing, we aren’t asking for DPS you clod. we are asking for a new role

doesn’t even have to be a new role, just has to look and feel different than what we’ve already been playing for the past 3 years.

Tempest is just a re-skinned D/D Ele.

Buffing the numbers doesn’t change the fact that the design is not what we hoped for and almost every Ele here disliked it after trying it during BWE1.

I could summarise why sPVP has completely tanked: it’s boring.

Lack of choice in builds, unoriginal format, flow-destroying down-state, amongst other detractions.

The Great Al.2546:

With the proposed changes to Heat Sync I can’t think of a single reason to take warhorn over OH dagger or focus.

I can’t think of a reason to take tempest at all. It offers nothing we don’t already have. Even worse, anet have almost completely ignored our feedback and is still only twiddling with numbers.

If staff #2 were something decent I think staff would be bearable. The AA dmg is still a bit low IMHO.

Gallrvaghn.4921:

Has anybody theory-crafted a Conjure Build-Staff support type ele yet? I’ve read they’re gonna be buffed next patch. Will possibly be the new flavor sauce for ele. Who knows. I mean, I myself didn’t believe Ranger Spirits were gonna have they’re shining moment not until I saw with my own eyes the mess it caused.

Noone’s going to take conjures seriously for PVP while they continue to be so clunky to use, and while Ele is so desperately tied to cantrips for survivability, or arcanes for burst.

The problem with conjures is they lockout 20 skills and give you 5 new skills, which aren’t very compelling anyway.

Losing a utility slot so you can trade in 20 skills for 5 is a pretty bad deal.

I doubt I would use them even if they didn’t use up a utility slot.

ColinJohanson.2394:

We’re trying something very unique and different with Gw2 […] and constantly adjusting as we see the outcomes and find ways to innovate on what a true online world experience can be.

IMO it’s not worth it. It’s expensive in terms of resources and isn’t particularly engaging. Emergent, player-driven gameplay is the only way to achieve a truly living story in a game. There is more of a living story going on in each of the 50-odd constellations of EVE than in the whole of GW2, and that content is created by players for free.

Obviously the ship has sailed on what kind of game GW2 is, but IMO there is plenty of scope for experimentation with emergent gameplay within the WVW format. After all, it is the dynamic, unpredictable nature of WVW (RVR) that drives its core appeal.

I think the low-access, long-duration stealth of other games has worked out much better than the frequent-access, short-duration model used in this game.

I don’t think the changes listed will change much:

• 20+ arcane is still required for playability
• 15+ water is still required for survivability
• glyphs still suck (cast too slow, elemental is weak)
• conjures still suck (terrible, just terrible)
• EA is still a fair bit better than any of the GM traits
• staff still has 19/20 AOE skills
• sceptre still laden with crappy skills: DT, SS, fire #1, water #1

I can see S/D and signets being a little better, but survivability will be an issue.

Re-distributing the stun breakers is good and overdue, but the glyph ought to be instant or it’s useless. Also, GoEH is typically cast before an encounter not during.

More than anything, I would’ve expected to see trait changes that reduced the dependence of Ele on attunement CD reduction from arcane and dependence on 15+ water for sustain and condition removal, eg: Earth 30 = reset fire and earth attunements on using a signet, Air 30 = reset air and water attunements on using a glyph.

digiowl.9620:

Draknar.5748:

digiowl.9620:

I just wish. The only way for an elementalist player to keep up with the DPS rat race is to constantly swap atunements.

And that’s a problem because….you have to try a bit harder? I think most can agree elementalist is a harder class to play than others (such as warrior and guardian)

So what you have to switch attunements on the fly to have decent DPS, I honestly feel that was the whole idea behind elementalists and being unable to switch weapons in combat but rather 4 elemental attunements.

Thing is that you more or less need to dump 20-30 points into arcane to keep up with the joneses, limiting the amount of build flexibility available. End result is that most elementalists are played like thieves in light armor, dual daggers and evasive arcana.

This. All the ranged weapons of Ele do not feel well put together, and/or are just plainly badly-designed, eg: dragon’s tooth, a spell that is designed to miss its target. 19/20 skills on staff are AOE, and the 1/20 skill that is single-target is weak, which makes the weapon really bad for general purpose use, and useless for 1v1.

This is the true reason why you see so many D/D Eles – its really the only good weapon we have.

I think necro got one of the best elite specs, if not the best spec.

It’s good that ranger got a good one too, as they’ve been consistently shafted by inaction on crappy pet implementation for 3 years.

Win win.

More than anything I just want to be freed from 20+ points in arcane. Anything less than 20 arcane feels wrong and plays like crap. IMO rework the bonus.

GW2 takes everything you love about GW1…

…and abandon’s it for a dumbed-down WOW-based talent tree and gear stat-driven progression system.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Likewise, the best only ele builds are is also way too strong

Fixed that for you.

The D/D Ele build is not OP for the simple reason it is hard countered by anything ranged that can reliably apply any/all of immobilise/cripple/chill/poison/knockback/knockdown.

100% agree that there is a critical lack of balance in Ele utlities: cantrips >>> rest >>> conjures. Not sure who thought giving up access to 20 skills to gain access to 5 mediocre skills whilst giving up a utility slot was a good idea but they were wrong.

Azrael.4960:

I play ranger in Australia. Only have middling issues with latency. Sure, it has its problems but I somehow get by…in PVE only

I couldn’t care less about PVE – it plays itself, and in PVP, sword just isn’t viable for me. Losing control of my character is #1 on the list of things i definitely want NOT to happen.

TWMagimay.9057:

@Selo: 5/5 fire aoes, 4/5 water aoes, 3/5 air aoes(and 1 muplitple target skill), 3/5 earth aoes. I’d say that’s a pretty good ratio of aoes to ST, especially for water(the one you’ve only seen autoattack from, dear pro ele). I’d also like to have a look at your crystal ball. You know, the one that tells you what server ppl play on, how much pvp they do, how old they are.

staff:
5/5 fire AOE
5/5 air AOE
3/4 earth AOE
4/5 water AOE

There’s only 2 ST damage skills in Ele staff, and they are both (earth 1, water 1) very low damage.

IMO it’s a terrible design to have an essentially AOE-only weapon on a class with no weapon swapping.

Xecil.2798:

It needs some serious transparency added

This. It’s way too prominent. I’d like to be able to turn it off or tone it right down.

leaving aside the sheer silliness of going invisible in plain sight of an opponent, the ability to chain stealth indefinitely via CnD is really bad design IMO. In WVW for instance you can just CnD a wall inside an enemy keep to stay hidden indefinitely, then go rez a downed mesmer and away you go.

When you can solo WVW keep lords thanks to infinite stealth, something is really broken:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kc7RxKJ1lE

What annoys me most is that the nerfs are based on a game format that less than 1% of the game population is playing. I don’t think they should have nerfed so many things at once either.

Would like to see the general utility/usability of sceptre/focus/staff fixed, because they are crap. Ele trait choices are also the worst of all the classes I play.

Nausicca.6038:

Vayne.8563:

I completely agree with your assessment. But let’s not pretend before HoT there were so many satisfied WvW players by percentage. Many of them walked away over the years for other problems as well. The complaints about the format were endless.

HoT sure didn’t help matters that much is true, but it has major issues long before HoT.

Issues or not, people WERE playing wvw before HoT. There were three way fights EVERY evening in our borderland. Roaming parties were everywhere. Our server, in NA T4 was pretty active.

Now? New BL are dead. EB has one blob at best, abusing pirate ship and hammer #2 rev BS ( that won’t be fixed with next balance patch, proving again how Anet cares about wvw). Commanders gave up. People looking for fights left wvw. I see more and more wvw’ers in pvp.

Myself, I couldn’t even imagine putting a foot into pvp before HoT. Wvw was my GW2 life, as same as my guild mates and a lot of people I used to play with prior HoT.

Anet ruined it. They didn’t listen to beta testers feedback, they pushed stupid things like automatic upgrades, more pve events, banners kitten, stupid map gimmicks. Balance is out of control.

HoT destroyed WvW.

Yep, I think that much is certain. Participation on the BLs dropped like a stone after HOT. It’s clear Anet doesn’t understand WVW.

A number of good suggestions IMO but some comments:

Staff Ele is already annoying as hell to play because of all the long delays. Not to mention dragon’s tooth and shatterstone on sceptre. Bloody annoying. It’s also a bad model to follow as it widens the gap between PVE and PVP skill effectiveness.

Perhaps a better model to follow for AOE damage (IMO) is to apply a damage falloff to number of targets hit, eg: 1 target hit = 110% base dmg, 2 targets = 100% base, 3 targets = 90%, 4 targets = 80%, 5 targets = 70%. Alternatively, falloff based on distance from geometric centre of AOE as it was in DAOC.

wow, censorship. that is a new low.

have a look at the author’s other articles, he has tons. there’s no way he’d pull his own article unless asked by senior management.

warbignime.4610:

scerevisiae.1972:

WOW provides a lot more content for $50 for starters.

I don’t think there is $50 worth of content, and not providing a character slot for that is effectively a huge “kitten you” to the whole playerbase.

But the main reason I won’t be buying HOT is that I don’t think the content that’s come out in the 2.5 years since release has been any good, so I don’t really see much value in investing any more money into the game when it’s not providing content I’m interested in playing.

It’s that simple.

Since you are no longer intersted in the game. Can I have your stuff?

Reading comprehension is hard I know, but nowhere did I suggest I’d stop playing. I’m just not going to buy HOT.

Cries Of Sorrow.5864:

scerevisiae.1972:

Cries Of Sorrow.5864:

scerevisiae.1972:

Personally I hate being forced to switch, it’s just so limited. I would have liked to have been able to build 1 and 2 element specialists as well as 4 element generalists.

Cause 5 weapon skills isn’t limiting ~.~?

no? every other class has 5 skills per weapon…

with interesting, well-implemented traits, 5 weapon skills could easily be every bit as good/flexible as 20.

*10 in total, 5×2.

every other class has 5 skills per weapon.

5 skills per weapon.

5 skills.

per weapon.

gg.

Vayne.8563:

mjharrison.3209:

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.

You can’t grind dailies. You can do them, but you can’t grind them…because they’re time limited.

The definition of grind is to do the same thing over and over again usually go get experience for leveling. But since daily CAN be done in 20 minutes, and since missing a day only sets you back a day…you really can’t grind them. In other words, as long as it takes you to do the five easiest dailies, that’s the longest you can “grind” for.

If you mean the game encourages people to do dailies daily…well, yeah, that’s sort of the point of them. It’s why they were made so easy.

If dailies are your idea of grind, there’s probably nothing more to say on the matter.

Grind to me is anything you don’t really want to do but are compelled to do due to game design/mechanics. For those of us with limited daily playtime, we’re compelled to grind the daily if we ever hope to keep us with the joneses wrt ascended gear, because (IMO stupidly) progress towards a daily expires daily instead of accumulating until complete.

BTW, most dailies don’t take 20min, a more realistic average would be 45min.

Forgotten Legend.9281:

wow, this thread is more toxic than queensdale champ train map chat… come on guys, be respectful!

Feedback from BWE1 was close to 100% negative; it could hardly have been more negative. Yet here we are with a bunch of purely superficial changes that fail to address any of the key feedback points.

How is it possible to be both passionate about the game and not feel completely kittened off by this response?

downed state is the reason why this game’s PVP has gone nowhere.

Xcom.1926:

The thing is players like progression and players want progression. Leveling is a form of progression. A lot of times what players say they want is not what they actually want.

As has been said many times in this thread, removing levels doesn’t mean removing progression; the progression comes from other places.

I gave the trait a good run too. I found it stupid OP vs condi necros and quite useless everywhere else. It was amusing being able to run over necro marks but definitely not worth 30points in an otherwise crappy tree. Not sure I would spec it if it were an Earth 10 point trait – the Armour of Earth on 50% HP is better.

Personally, I’d rather see it thrown out or reworked into a more worthy GM trait, eg: 33% chance to reflect incoming conditions back to source while attuned to earth.

Another example of something I would spec 30 earth for: apply 1 stack of torment for each stack of bleeding or vulnerability you apply. <- might make condi Ele viable.

Farming Flats.5370:

Axe Necro range is fine …. Ranger axe is also 600. Use a scepter if you want more range.

Ranger axe is 900 actually.

The new poison master works as advertised, but for one critical bug – pets that natively apply poison (such as forest spider, murellow etc) apply regular (unbuffed damage) poison, which blocks the application of the damage-enhanced poison.

This pretty much means you can only use the trait with non-poison-applying pets, which is kind of the opposite to what the trait suggests. Poison applied by swap, rather that by the pet functions as it should.

Repro:

• equip trait
• equip forest spider pet (do not swap to it in battle)
• attack a bad guy
• observe that spider applies 10+ of poison and that its damage sucks as per usual poison, and that applying poison yourself (eg: shortbow #2) does not increase the poison’s damage

I think it’s incredibly lazy to still have the same 3 copies of the 1 BL 18 months after launch… It’s almost like they’ve completely run out of ideas.

Ruins were a total failure and EOTM is a nonstop champ farm – they might as well have made a single-texture 500m x 500m square map.

I think the biggest problem is that anet over design their maps to the extent they end up more like the layout of a pinball game than world geography.

if you don’t think the expac is worth the $60, don’t pre-purchase/buy it.

the only way Anet will change their extortionist pricing/content offering is if people don’t buy it.

personally i’m still disgusted they think they can get away with not including a character slot in an expac that adds a new class in order to squeeze another $10 out of everyone.

Existing players are subsidising new players through the rather huge disparity in the different value offerings to existing and new players ie: for the same price, new players get the entire core game.

OK, no problem, this makes business sense, though it remains to be seen whether these new “welfare players” are subconscious or openly resented by long-term players.

However, what troubles me most as a player, of any game, is the notion that an expansion that adds a new class doesn’t automatically come with an included character slot FOR ALL.

This is just plain common sense for a 3 year-old game where virtually every veteran player will have used all of their character slots a long time ago. It’s not a pre-purchase bonus either – pre-purchasers already get beta/early access, and it’s not like having to buy an extra character slot is optional in most cases either – most veteran players already have all slots filled with characters that have had 100s/1000s of hours invested.

It’s akin to buying a new car and having to pay extra for the wheels. It’s a cheap, cynical way of gouging a few more $$, and contrary to the recent blog post, demonstrates close to zero respect for existing customers. It’s worse than the new car without wheels example because for Anet, character slots cost them almost nothing, just a few extra rows in a bunch of existing database tables.

I think it’s appalling behaviour to be honest, especially when the business model is already based on having veteran players subsidise new players, who get a much better deal for the same amount of money. An expac should come with ALL the facilities for EVERYONE to enjoy all aspects of the expansion out of the box.

Veteran players have just as much right to enjoy all aspects of the expac as others who are paying the same amount of money, and this means being able to create and play a revenant out of the box, just like everybody else, with no hidden extra charges.

Why are vet players who don’t pre-purchase expected to delete one of their characters, with potentially 100s/1000s of hours invested, in order to enjoy the new class that’s part of the expac?

Any which way you spin it, we’re just getting screwed. For being loyal customers.