Guild Wars 2

The most recent balance patch is another nail in the coffin of WvW. While in PvP things are SLIGHTLY (and only slightly) more rounded, WvW is a complete and total mess for the following reasons related to the classes:

Elementalist: average player utilizing full aura build takes over 10 people focusing to down. Recently with a 20 man zerg, another commander actually walked away from a tower because nobody could damage the freaking elementalist beyond a quarter of it’s hp. Seems insane, but is incredibly easy to recreate.

Thief: I’m expecting that next patch they will rename this class to Eunuch. Lowest effective armor by far in the game, lowest effective damage overall (yes staff can hit hard…if it hits, but less frequent and for less effect than other classes) even when running the tankiest possible builds. Thief is designed to get in and out of a fight quickly…high risk, high reward…. only now there is no reward. If you’re getting taken out by a thief in WvW, and you’re not playing a thief, something is wrong with your build. (I’m saying this as someone who mains thief). I’ve run both full condi, and full dps… the class has become completely ineffective.

Mesmer: Condi-shatter Mesmer is the winner of this latest patch. With the possible exception of the aura elementalist, an average player can melt just about anything, oftentimes with only their clones being visible. They’ve also got the toughness now, so if you’re playing this class you’re likely a happy camper after latest patch.

Guardian: Traps are back with an annoying vengeance, without having to sacrifice toughness like when they first debutted. While not as clear a winner as some this patch. Still out of touch in WvW.

Ranger: Another one that I haven’t noticed a huge difference in play. They are still pretty much invincible in an underwater fight because their pet heals faster than 3 people can deal damage, but this patch doesn’t appear to have drastically changed their regular m.o.

Revenant: Broken. It doesn’t seem like they actually improved much of anything with revenant… the things that could use improvement they left untouched… so will be interesting to see next patch.

Warrior- currently gets my vote for most busted class. They’ve been put on scout duty because they can go afk until they hear something on that monitor… by then they’ll be at about 50% health… pop their invuln and walk away. Yet they can still oneshot a thief while they are still running their shield protection skill.

Necromancer: Minion master is insane. That is all.

Overall what all this powercreep (for most classes) has led to are these ridiculous zerg battles and siege humps… where your warriors, ele’s and necro’s can’t really kill each other, if they even fight open field. It’s reducing turnover in a game mode that desperately needs life injected into it. In PvP, people build for the most damage in the shortest period of time, in WvW they build nowadays simply to live as long as possible, damage be kitten ed. Anet would do well to examine some of the game-breaking defenses of most the classes, (and while they are at it, examine the classes that have none) and come out with an update sooner than later. WvW currently has gaping wounds, and those little band-aids that you use on a papercut are not going to help it.

Simple solution…. You can only transfer once every 3 months.

No one cares about server pride any more.

All WvW players and WvW guilds want now are fights.

You get more fights in the top tier servers.

So they are moving up to those servers.

Simply put it’s another nail in the coffin of WvW.

babazhook.6805:

Jeknar.6184:

BlaqueFyre.5678:

TexZero.7910:

babazhook.6805:

Orangensaft.7139:

i think it would be ok if applying conditions to an enemy reveals you

but if you then want to stealth again and the enemy has just 1 stack of bleeding that does 1 more tick while you are in stealthed and you would get revealed from that?
that would be nonsense

This would break the skill caltrops and uncatchable. Thief drops caltrops . Thief then Stealths . Enemy runs into caltrops field to reveal thief. If I am fighting a stealth thief and see those little red circles from uncatchable, I am running into them. I will take the bleed in return for a reveal.

In essence you eliminate traps caltrops and uncatchable from stealth thief builds as they become akin to the old last refuge and get thieves killed.

If I was a thief wanting to use stealth I would never select those skills .

Except that you are actively choosing to engage by placing down caltrops/traps. Uncatchable(trait) needs a rework period.

You should be forced to chose the relative safety of stealth, or the attack of opportunity provide from leaving stealth, not both at the same time as that leaves 0 room for counter-play outside of nuke at my feet and cleanse.

As hinted at earlier the problem is how stealth is implemented in the game. It’s silly and far too long lasting in most cases.

Same can be said about all the invulns being thrown around while still being able to damage players.

Nobody can be perma invulnrerable like a thief or mesmer can be perma stealthed. You comparission is silly.

And perma stealth acquired by the thief has nothing to do with caltrops or or uncatchable. The solution is a poor one and ill thought out for a class so relaint on stealth to survive.

Ah, so a thief in perma stealth killing me with traps and condi through steal who doesnt reveal ONE TIME isnt a problem? The stomp in stealth, I havent even seen the thief ONE TIME. Has it nothing to do with it? Seriously?

Durability runes are sub par imo and need a buff.

Condi damage or application should proc a reveal. No class should be able to continually damage a player without proc’ing a reveal. It is a ridiculously stupid mechanic and how condi gets a pass is beyond me.

Mesmers do it, thieves do it, even Ranger pets do it…

Signed, begging for this change since release.

Baldrick.8967:

So if a zerg comes along and outman you, it is now completely pointless trying to destroy the catapults they put down as you can suicide to damage them but they will keep repairing, meaning it’s now a guaranteed cap for the larger team, and you’re just throwing a loot bag at them.

I guess all those that stood around watching the wall drop rather than trying to kill siege were right after all, there is no point running out and dieing to try and destroy it when it can be repaired so easily.

This is terrible.

I’m amazed that more people do not understand this.

I hope the trial period is very short and people realize how stupid these repair hammers are.

Okay, so serious question from someone who only plays a little bit of WvW: Why does this even matter? If a group has enough supply to repair their siege, they’d have enough supply to just build an entirely new set if they couldn’t repair it and it got destroyed. The only difference is the few extra seconds of uptime it would normally take them to build a new one. Are the windows of engagement that tight in WvW that the few seconds of rebuilding make or break how the fight goes? Or is it a matter of being able to stop them from rebuilding, but not repairing? If you have the damage to bomb them off the build site, couldn’t you also use that to stop them from getting in to repair?

Frankly, I can’t see how it’ significantly different in a large group context how it will be any different from just building new siege very quickly, apart from minor differences (it’ll cost everyone in the zerg money for hammers rather than one person for a blueprint, and it requires everyone in the zerg to be well stocked-up on hammers and be able to open their inventory and use them at a moment’s notice).

I don’t get why you change to these new maps. They look bad, they smell bad, they taste bad, and nobody is playing anymore since you added them.

Everyone just spawn camps their home bls preventing roamers from doing any real damage. When zergs go to fight there they just slosh back and forth in the same spots over and over without gain. And bloodlust is the stupidest thing I’ve seen in wvsw to date. 75% of the land on these new maps aren’t even used for combat! Or has anything to do with wvsw!

There wouldn’t be a queue problem if ANet also got off their duff and fixed it so that we the players physically could NOT “stack servers”…

I’d rather have no new content where the existing content is high quality than poorly-implemented new content.

bu bu but the DBL was superior in every way =\

displacedTitan.6897:

Already bored of the Alpine maps again.

Thank you for pointing this out, now I can point out to some of the trolls that I was right!

I said this, a few times: that subjectively (day, week, month) people would get bored of them because they are too old and plain and wide open and boring!

I was right :P

Already bored of the Alpine maps again.

Thank goodness Esports is drawing sooooo much attention to this game. /sarcasm

Thanks for ruining it for the rest of the community, y’know all the other players that play PvE or WvW. Congratulations on your great “victory”

I’ve never been one to post about a class being OP but lately I’ve been hearing from other players that they are going to sit out of season 3 if Chronomancer isn’t fixed. This idea seems to be trending within the past week.

Why are players saying this?
Mainly I hear them claim: “Chronomancer is knocking too many builds not only out of possible meta but also out of viability in general play, even in unranked”.

People are fed up with balance/viability issues. During season 2 many players left the spvp scene and I have yet to see them come back. This exodus will only continue if some working median of balance isn’t achieved before season 3.

I won’t even toss suggestions on how to fix it because (A) I am not a Mesmer player and (B) I generally play Druid which usually beats a Chronomancer on point anyway so I can’t really identify what the problems are with the Chronomancer. This post was simply to report that these players who are ready to leave spvp in season 3 are just as serious about what they say as the players who did leave during season 2.

I hope they removed bloodlust, such a kitten-poor mechanic.

I’m actually sad the new borderlands are going. I know I’m in the minority, but I actually love them, especially with the new changes. Any chance of keeping them around and just adding the old ones back, too?

All offensive siege tactics need to go. The defensive minded ones like supply and radar are great additions that in some cases encourage fights. The offensive ones that basically OPs an entire maps fighting force needs to be eliminated.

it’s going to be kralkatorrik, to much hints to ignore:

1 threarne dialog
2 glint’s egg
3 revamped shatterer

i wouldn’t mind to leave the dragon storyline aside, but the dragons are so in the lore of gw that we cannot pretend they don’t exist… so it must be it.

about palawa jogo i wouldn’t mind if he wasn’t a villain but a victim asking for help because his land are overrun by dragon minions instead of his own and than turned into a villain after (you can’t left palawa jogo unchecked)

Greetings to the Community!

Would like to share my experience with GW2 PvP so far, ask for guidance in some aspects, hopefully starting a good thread of helpful dialogue. One of the main reasons I joined GW2 was because sPvP is leveled in terms of gear, a simple concept in terms of basic fairplay that is strangely absent in so many games of the genre. I came in before HoTh, did not play for a year or so, and started sPvP a month ago after leveling up a Ranger.

From what I have experienced in this first month, GW2 PvP is extremely hard to grasp for a new player. I have previous experience with MMORPG’s and their PvP, got the basic awareness on what is needed to play it on a good level, and still I am finding myself climbing a very steep mountain.

As a player, I have been running a DPS Ranger build that provides me with some space and mobility to be learning the basic specific stuff. My muscle memory for keys is fairly established, and I’d say I can hold my own with players of similar experience level. However, I am having considerable problems, mainly with the following aspects:
» Too much stuff is happening. The number of meaningful ability effects filling the gameplay at some given moments is overwhelming for a new player, and if you do not know what they mean you can hardly survive for even two seconds.
» Knowing how other classes work is decisive. Since there are many variations to how a class can by configured, the long term accumulation of experience is completely decisive as a factor. Iow, inexperience in how the other classes work and what they do makes it virtually impossible to make any kind of basic stand in the presence of those who do know it.

Those who gained their experience gradually, earning it as the game aged, might not recognize this level of difficulty. However, this represents an almost unsurpassable barrier to new players, one that I suspect very few will have the patience to cross, because being a punching bag in a chaotic and hostile environment is simply neither a pleasant nor a viable way to learn. The matchmaking design could improve this situation, by only putting together players of similar levels of experience, but I suspect the queue times could dangerously suffer with it. The other way to improve it is by decreasing the global level of complexity: skill can still be plenty of a factor without being so heavy of a factor. Some core elite players may dislike it, because their advantage comes from grasping that complexity, but I believe everybody knows what happens to a game and to a Community when there is no basic space for new players to grow and learn.

Coming from all this, a question to the other players… From what I have observed, to reach a good level of skill in GW2 PvP I need to play all the classes, so that I can somehow be able to spot their casting animations and be prepared to deal with their specific abilities (such as reflecting damage for example, something I know it exists, but, after a month of dedication and general research on the subject of PvP, is still completely beyond my awareness during a match). So, considering the amount of classes and abilities involved, I should be looking at something like at least a year of dedication to understand the basics. The question is: am I missing something?

Constructive answers and participation appreciated in advance.

As a new player who has been trying to find his way into GW2 PvP (just opened a thread on this same subject), I fully agree with the OP and with Grimreaper.

Because I like the PvP maps and many of the aspects of the game, I am still here, but trying to learn the basics of sPvP while being punched around is a horrible experience. Imho, the complexity and reaction speed involved make it almost impossible to have any kind of fun or learning beyond the stress and the ignorance on what may be happening.

Whenever I log onto to play PvP these days, it’s just a blowout. Match after match of getting just shredded by coordinated teams of players using the most meta of meta builds they can find. Even when I win, I don’t get that feeling of satisfaction. I generally don’t know why we won, and usually didn’t contribute to the win.

Basically, I love Guild Wars 2. I’m not a fanatical player. I play when I have time, and I tend to stick with PvE, but in most other games, I love PvP, and tend to be able to hold my own. However, I feel like this game’s PvP was hard to understand before Heart of the Thorns, and now it’s just completely beyond me. Nowadays, I log in, and spend most of my time dead. I don’t even get time to figure out my mistakes because most fights end with me blowing up in half second, and I don’t even have time to decipher which of the 10 ridiculous particle effects killed me. Readability is a big issue for me.

I’m willing to invest time into a game, but generally that game has to be fun on some level first. I keep giving this game’s multiplayer a shot, because my friend and I were big fans of Guild Wars 1’s PvP, but we both feel there is no place for the casual player anymore. The point of entry is too high. There’s a mountain of mechanics to go through. The game is blinding fast, and requires incredible reflexes and precise dexterity to hit combos.

If I could log on, and have an even match where I felt my opponents and teammates were at a similar level of experience, I could slowly get into this. Did anybody else really love GW1 PvP, but hasn’t found any enjoyment from 2’s?

I know this is whining, but honestly, I just miss having a Guild Wars like game to play PvP in, and it sorta feels like all of the people of average video game ability have been sorta waysided in favor of this small, dedicated fanbase. Great if you are one of those people, but I wish for the days when Guild Wars was more inclusive, and I feel there is room for both audiences to exist without sacrificing in quality for either group.

Also, advice is always fine. My friend nor I never last long enough to ever figure out anything beyond how to wait for the death timer to come back up.

Why did you let your player “GMs” leak the information on the server combines to Blackgate (where a lot of them are players and run around with their ANet tags on their names, while playing – yes we aren’t blind, we see you guys) well in advance of the combine, so they could rig themselves to be combined with the only server that had any real WvW population in the bottom tier by not doing any PPT during the “statistics” week? This left the real low population server in Tier 1 – Jade Quarry – in a severely disadvantaged position YET AGAIN.

If you were going to do this, why couldn’t you use REAL server population numbers in WvW – and don’t tell me you don’t have them – instead of allowing the cheaters and exploiters to once again come out on top?

You guys should be ashamed of yourselves.

I’m not even going to mention the lack of forethought in server caps which caused 100 person queues five minutes after reset on every BL …

These days in my server matchup the borders were quite active, even with queues at times and it was fun playing in em.
The changes to Desert are in the right direction…I would rather see more changes to keep improving the Desert Borders than go back to Alpines.

Desolation + Vabbi = Debbi