Guild Wars 2

I dunno, I think the problem is stealth itself, and this thread just discuss one situation that it is a problem.

I have come around to the idea that once you come out of stealth, that you should have a specified amount of time that you are under the reveal effect, preventing back to back spamming or chaining of stealth. The problem with that is the fact that they would need to rebalance Mesmer/thief, to adjust for that.

TexZero.7910:

Narrrz.7532:

But if it works, and more importantly, if you enjoy playing it, it is by definition a good build.

Thank you for getting the picture.

It’s not about forcing your playstyle onto others either by demanding a core gameplay change.

Instead look to play with like minded players and you wont find any problems with you daily routines.

I’d have to say i DO want to see a core gameplay change; i want healing power as a stat gone, and folded into traits and other attributes.

How long has the Queensdale champ train been gone? So why post this thread now?

That train was toxic, so happy it was removed, though they really need to buff the Oakheart/Troll etc, they are soooooo weak now it’s a joke.

Condition builds are not in general superior than power builds, even in 1vs1. Sometimes condis are superior, sometimes power is better. It just depends on the specific builds of both opponents.
Nerfing (damaging) condis in general would nerf all condibuilds, making powerbuilds superior everywhere – the opposite of balance and build diversity.

If a build is op, just look a its traits and skills and nerf those things, that make the build op. Don’t nerf everything else.

It’s charity – giving them a free bag.

SkullProX.7083:

…I always try to interfere when i see a GvG…

raises eyebrow

If they’re just having fun and doing their own thing, why does it involve you as to what they’re doing?

Aetrion.8295:

If healing and HP is merged there is no more need to strike a balance between offense/defense/support because defense and support will simply be the same thing.

You would be right if there was a means to directly improve how much you support by just making said support better…In other games, you just take a heal skill that heals for more but sacrifice taking skills that do more damage. Or you allocate resources so you have a skill that improves team defenses more but allocate less resources to offense making them less efficient (having longer cooldowns or costing more energy to cast or something).

In GW2, it’s hard to make healing power worth its sacrifice because just loading on healing power doesn’t make you support. You have to take utilities, weapons, traits and sometimes runes to be able to support and yet very few aspects of the game back a “healing support” playstyle. It’d be different if healing power made my 6-slot skill recharge faster and castable on allies but it doesn’t. Nor does it even make the boons I offer more potent.

Basically what I’m saying is, healing as support is niche at best. You can hardly focus on it and even if you do, you have to generate the situation where it will make the biggest difference (instead of using other mitigation + your own heal). I won’t say no to keeping Healing Power the same but just making it stronger, but if it doesn’t do much else, that still doesn’t change its niche status.

Heck, even if Healing Power was rolled into Vit, the combo would be niche status, but at least you can make a healer that won’t die as easily to a time burst and has some resources left to allocate to offense.

Make condi cleanse skills dependant on Healing Power. Balance around it.

Carighan.6758:

Honestly I feel just a significant buff to Regeneration could do the trick here + give most classes a way or another to apply it via baseline skills, weapons or traits. And I don’t mean to self only.

Only classes with some significant other healing form outside of regeneration (Engineers come to mind) could go without easy access to it.

And mind you, by “significant” I mean that at 2k Healing Power, I should be healing… I dunno… 3k+ per second? Probably. I mean I built the char around it, let it be powerful. Conditions and direct damage are powerful if built around it, too.

I was much more a fan of having Regen stack intensity instead of duration. Yeah, it’d probably require lowering the base heal and increasing the HealPow coefficient, but that would make Regen a solid counter to some of the condition spam out there.

LOL! When I worked in applications hosting the “simple” solution was ALWAYS to throw more hardware at the problem. That doesn’t fix the software though :p

Agree to OP, why need separate head piece stats for above and underwater?

+1 to that. Aquatic breathers are obsolete, and I think that this is rather a strange upgrade to spend resources on. I’d prefer it if my breathers just copy the stats of my helm instead.

The game has previously made a huge shift away from underwater combat with the removal of Raid on the Capricorn in PvP, and the large lakes in the WvW Borderlands. Black Lion Weapon skins don’t support any of the three underwater weapons. Also, seeing as we’re moving on further inland with HoT, I doubt there will be much underwater combat aside from random ponds or secret tunnels.

Ascended breathers are absolutely pointless at this moment.

TheBlackLeech.9360:

I would much rather see Anet finish off what they started with under water content versus your suggestion of having them remove it and its aspects further from the game.

I’m not asking them to get rid of underwater combat. I do like it.

However, none of the rest of our armor or trinkets change when underwater. Why do we have to slot an extra piece for headgear? There aren’t any mechanics unique to underwater helms: it doesn’t help you breathe, it doesn’t change anything about the fight (except for currently: we have to manage a 7th rune and lose some stats).

tl;dr the game already treats it like a skin now. Let’s just make it official and then ANet can focus on the things that make underwater combat interesting.

Me entire time playing GW2 and still to this day: could not care less about aquatic headgear.

It’s like the base foundations of a house that HAD plans to be built but instead were left to rot and rust for years on end.

• useless, confusing gear slot
• the game has little to no GOOD underwater content save for HoTW dungeon
• I can literally sit underwater for ages and not die without an aquabreather so why do they exist in the first place?
• aqua breather skins… Sounds like cash grab USELESS mail carrier skins 2.0 seriously why bother.. ANET removed water content in some starter zone maps. They stopped releasing water weapon BLTC skins too a while back.

As woopty doo aesthetics goes ok sure whatever but at the end of the day… It’s so pointless having anything to do with aqua breathers. And of course, naturally, ANet decides to pull the King daddy of all moves by “introducing ascended aquatic headgear” when there’s soooo many things that need tending to or polished up in regards to the current aquatic headgear available.

I agree that GW2 needs a MASSIVE A.I. overhaul.

Guhracie.3419:

Stop talking about the manifesto like it applies to this game. It doesn’t. It’s not a thing anymore.

Well, I still hope after 3 years that it is just due to NCSoft forcing GW2 to be released too early and then team having to deal with more urgent matters ignoring the less important… maybe it is stupid… but there are some updates to the game that indicate that the manifesto was intended to be true. Especially that the first zone in HoT was considerably better than what we have now. Far from perfect still… but… who knows…

Also I have nothing against casual games. Let the Guild Wars 2 be a game for everyone. What we have currently is not casual, it is broken. If the intention of designers was to make creatures non-existing they could have removed them. There is no point in their existence now. They serve no purpose but only hinder “casual” players that would like to admire the view.

[Dynamic Events]

I know that Arena Net experiments with event system and new maps added in Living Story and HoT maps are different then core maps. However I’m a big fan of the idea that I can visit any place in the game and have fun, not just the “newest map”.

• Updates – Event system is easily expandable. It was advertised that the maps could change in the future. New content could be added to them. It happened for some maps, allright. But the amount of new events over the course of 3 years is disappointing.
• Quality – Most of the events on most of maps look like they were added quickly due to “OMG release is next month? We have no events yet, let’s add them quickly. Copy-Paste, Copy-Paste, Copy-Paste.” As you remember most of them were not working anyway. It was a big disappointment but I waited hoping for a fix after the release. I’m afraid that I’m still waiting. Recent HoT beta was not encouraging, having the same event problems that the core game had 3 years ago.
• Amount of events – it is too low. For the size of the maps the amount of things that could be happening is large. Also in order for the events to not be repeatable the events should be on a longer timer. This means more events to fill the time-gaps.
• Lore-breaking events – events repeat. Sometimes this makes sense lore-wise (event to gather food-> food is eaten so you need to gather it again) But more often than not it makes no sense.
• Event chains depending on player success. – I liked that the world might go “darker” when players fail events, however due to extremely easy events this leads to most of the content never displaying.
• Event difficulty and scaling – Since there is reward even when players fail an event it should happen sometimes. Also I hoped that scaling problem will be solved now that we are 3 years after the game has released. While there were some updates to end-game events, the rest of the events were not touched.

Possible Solutions

• One of the teams working on balancing and updating the old content. Finishing the unfinished events lore-wise. I understand this is not priority but the quality of content delivered was not exactly on the level it should be at release. Sorry…
• When the event has some effect on the world (and it always should) it should never just “reset” if it does not makes sense lore-wise. Instead some other events should lead to the situation repeating itself. The ‘reset’ should be done gradually. For example if ice statue of Norn in the Grawl cave near Hoelbrak starting area melts, it should be visible gradually. It shouldn’t just dissapear.
• When event ends, there should be an indication to players that finished it (that could be turned off via options menu) where player can go to experience the follow-up. (multiple in case of many follow-ups)
• Add new events to old zones. They don’t have to have something in common with some living story. These can be a simple events or a development of a map’s lore. In queensdale, bandits could discover more ways to disrupt villagers. The swamp is quite empty during the “waiting for Behemoth” period. When centaurs are under control, there is also not much going on around Beetletun. Maybe the lady that recovers destroyed grape vines could finally convince Caduceus to rebuild the vineyard? Or maybe waterworks might want to clean the pipes of slime creatures? What about the asura that has his lab on the hill?
• As for difficulty it depends on creatures and if the issues for them are solved then the difficulty of events could be adjusted. Also some fixes in game mechanics are needed first, like making sure that players power does not increase exponentially while they are standing in same spot. (Due to combo fields, aoe limit and insta-stand-ups).
• Redesign core game champions to use the same mechanics as HoT champions

[PvE Balance]

In this section I intend to post videos of skills or profession mechanics that are both powerfull and easy to pull off. The tricks that make otherwise hard or impossible encounters very easy. While these skills might be balanced in PvP it is something entirely different in PvE where opponents have serious limitations. It might not mean that skill or profession is broken. Maybe the fault is in the encounter design. Anyway I’m posting this here because I still hope that there will be a time when Guild Wars 2 will have meaningful PvE over entire game content, not just the newest zone.

[Thief]

• Pistol 5: Black Powder. – What I do not like here is that it doesn’t require reactive play. My plan for the encounter was: 5555555555 and it worked. Notice how in first encounter I completely ignored what the creature did. I could have interrupted the healing signet but I didn’t have to. Notice how in second encounter I also ignored what the creature did. Actually blind disabled the healing for the Monk. I did not have trait for the skill, but I can imagine a Thief that specializes in perma blind is even better. I’m sure the skill can be used to turn off many more encounters throughout the game.
  SOLUTION: Split for PvE, change functionality of the skill or improve AI so that creatures step out from the cloud.
  SEVERITY: Very High. The fact that it was not fixed 1 day after the game release is for me very disturbing.

Hi,

I’m big fan of Guild Wars and I’m playing since Guild Wars Prophecies. I was very excited about open world content for Guild Wars 2. Dynamic world, events instead of quests, players grouping naturally without a need for party, incentive to play with others etc. Unfortunately I was very dissapointed on release (and I’ll explain why below) and to this day I’m logging in from time to time and checking if maybe there were some patches or updates to remedy the issues. While there were some changes the issues remained. So I decided to make a list of problems how I see them and what possible solutions there might be. The reason I care is that I think that Guild Wars 2 has by far the best open-world experience from the mmos I played. It just misses the few important details…

[Combat]

• Movement. Players can move AND execute skills. Positioning is important. How creatures are dealing with it? Here are encounters with Melee monster and with Ranged monster:
  Carrion Devourer
  Tamini Archer
  As you can see the creatures have problems with hitting players. It was not hard to kill a Devourer using melee weapon without getting hit once. It is even easier to kite him with ranged weapon. This is the core problem with Guild Wars 2. No matter how much ArenaNet developers try to make the creature challenging, the players will be able to counter, by simply walking (which is easily done). Here is another video showing this extends to better designed and harder creatures:
  Risen Putrifier
  Here the creature was upgraded during the 3 years of game release. It has bigger range (or i was lagging.) This is poor solution to the problem as what you see is not what you get The skill animation should indicate what the range of the skill is. Additionally the creature got a ranged attack that puts an immobilize on you. Better, but I was still able to mitigate a lot of damage by walking.
• DPS and Health. I recorded a video where I have no armor and common-white rarity level 80 weapon. I stand still so that I can receive the damage the creatures are supposed to deal. I decided to only use auto attack. Also I have chosen Elementalist because he has lowest toughness and lowest health pool of any profession. It has also quite weak auto attacks compared to other professions. Anyway here are results:
  No equpment tests
  So… The results are that an average Guild Wars 2 creature is designed to be on equal level with most squishy profession in the game, given that player wears no equipment and uses only auto attack while standing still.
• Creature design. Creatures have very poor set of skills. Also the AI is very poor. Let’s take an examples from my videos:
  How creatures are designed:
  Carrion Devourer according to wiki it has 2 attacks that do knockdown. The problem here was that they do not work. Tail Swipe is executed while being still and works only against players that do not move (which is not very realistic.) Tunnel has the same problem. But even if the two skills were working there is not much the creature can do after it succesfully knocks player down. On this level it is a great opportunity to teach new players what is stability and what is Stun Break or evade. The problem is that new players will not even notice because the creature will either die before doing anything or will miss due to player accidentally moving away. Or when it knocks down it still will not do anything and the player will not feel the need to counter that in any way.
  How creatures could be designed:
  Continuing with the example of Carrion Devourer:
  Attack speed is too low.
  Remove Tail Swipe
  Slash should be executed while moving.
  Slash should be used when player is near. Since the creature is slow, when player moves to avoid the Slash damage the creature should use Tunnel.
  Tunnel -> creature should be faster when tunelling and should hit. The attack should be unblockable and should track the target. While evading will still be possible, now players will either evade or put stability. Otherwise they are knocked down. This skill should do small or 0 damage. The knock down should last 5 seconds. This is to give new players the opportunity to use Stun Breaker. New players might not notice the 1s knockdown or might not feel encouraged to use the stun break.
  Devour -> charged skill. Devourer should start charging it as soon as it knocks down player. The charge time should be about 3.5-4 seconds. So that when the knocked down player does nothing and nobody interrupts the creature, the creature hits. The hit should take about 50% of average player health and apply 2 stacks of bleed for enough time that the player is put near death if he does not remove the conditions. This way new player will actually learn the game mechanics.
  BTW: It would be MUCH easier if you knew that lvl 10 player will have x life and y toughness. Now when you design it in a way that warrior looses 50% of HP it is likely that the ability will one-shot an elementalist. Maybe in lower level PvE areas creatures could have certain attacks that are working like agony in fractals and takes a % of health instead of just dealing damage. Devour could be such a skill. The number of bleeds could also be dependent on player HP.
  Anyway, the idea is that every player is still able to beat the creature 1vs1. Even on first attempt. After all it is level 10 creature. But experience makes player dealing with that particular creature better. Finally the player will not loose much hp in this fight but will be forced to actually counter the creature mechanics in some way.

Possible Solution:
1) Upgrading the engine so that creatures in pve better chase players and execute skills while moving that actually hit them. Strafing projectiles should not be possible in PvE. Or creatures should also strafe
2) Introduce the system that increases the raw stats of the creatures the farther they are from “inhabitable” places and patrolled roads. Introduce creature groups in some places of the map. Compose the groups so that they combo with each other. Introduce more healers and rezzers. Introduce chests in such places.
3) Design creatures and group of creatures so that they require reactive play.
4) Overally increase the stats of all creatures in the open-world pve because introducing the ascended gear and new trait system made players more powerfull and accidentally obsoleted the entire game content. Even before ascended the stats were much too lower.

Why it is important:
Because in the long term, the PvE open-world is boring. It has everything it needs to be interesting. The environment is dynamic due to event chains, the area tells some story through it. There are hidden stuff on the maps that give rewards when found. There are jumping puzzles and the maps are amazing looking and quite interesting on themselves. But… my character build is irrelevant. My profession is irrelevant. Creature I’m fighting with is irrelevant. My Gear does not matter much. Because creatures in this game do not fight back. The encounters are boring, and you do not make any interesting choices while fighting nor you have to react to anything. The game became what it was promised it will not be.
Here is the quote from GW2 Manifesto (That can be accessed Here)

Finally, since combat is such a core part of the gameplay of any MMO, we’ve put a lot of emphasis into rethinking combat. So much of traditional MMO combat is rote and repetitive. You execute the same strategy over and over again, just augmented over time with better and better gear. After a while it starts to feel like you’re playing a spreadsheet. Combat needs to be about making creative choices, and it needs to feel immediate, active, and visceral. So we’ve put a huge focus on strengthening our combat, giving the player limitless choices, and providing the thrill and joy of being in combat.

Well it is not true for open-world PvE.

your not getting double teamed, your getting focused because your server happend to be full of arrogant bandwagoners thinking they are the best.
well guess what your getting smashed at the moment.

theres no “deal” between deso and FSP.
but both servers do want you to get off your high horse (not you but the majority of SFR big mouth kids) some people on this server think they are far superior well could have guessed it that one day u get match up against something that has same mind set as desolation.

it might feel as getting double teamed but deso is killing us also(im FSP) and we are killing them also.
you just have priority to get knocked off your high horse by both servers doesnt mean they are holding hands.
choices are made at the start if FSP wanted deso down then u would have deso going after SFR and SFR going after FPS or deso, if u go for deso then deso would be in same situation and felt like getting double teamed also while FSP and SFR didnt even talk to each other

anyway i frankly dont care tbh kitten T3 T8 aslong WvW stops lagging like kitten during prime time i couldnt give a rats kitten in which tier i play i dont play for the PPT like many others do here. i just wanna deffend PvP and cap if i lose something and lost a Tick for that some1 would have to remind me cus i never think about the stupid ticks

Well I was hoping for a constructive conversation on the server lag in T1, but instead “in before moderator locks the thread away from all the trolls”.

Jayne.9251:

Easiest way to break up a zerg is to have a few suicide into them while they’re stacking, to disable/interrupt the group buffs. Then your team comes in and wipes.

Problem with this is that it requires enough people to do so in the 1st place. So you have to basically blob to take out a blob. When you are in group of 15-20 vs 60-80 (or whatever the map cap is now), you just can’t afford those few suicides.

My idea is to reduce / eliminate a lot of the passive and AOE condi removal and replace is with individual active, more frequently available, condi removal. this will have a huge impact as follows:

1. The larger the blob the more stupid people are in it that deserve to die, they will either not be running or fail to use their active abilities, thus deservingly die/wipe to better skilled smaller groups that use their abilities appropriately.

2. It will help with condi balance in WvW in general, because small scale and 1v1 will be easier to cleanse for classes that have limited access, and be able to do so more frequently if they choose / build for it. While condis will no longer be so limited in large scale engagements due to the above mentioned, large numbers of stupid people that will no longer be able to hide in AOE cleansing spam.

its not a solution, but definetly an improvement.

Remove downed state for a week.

Would be great for roamers facing multiple opponents where finishing can be a kitten and downed state makes them win eventhough they lost
Would be great for lower tier servers that have to deal with double numbers
Etc.

Time Sliced Matches!

For a week the matches will be divided by Time Slices and scored respectively. Two methods for Time Slices have been discussed:

1. Score points for a win each day in a Time Slice. The winner of the match is the server who won the most slices.

2. The better method imho is that each Time Slice will be individually ranked according to their own performance. And then each Time Slice will be matched up with other Time Slices of like population. Therefore giving the same server multiple “mini-matches” per week.

Or better yet do this for a month.

The gear system as it applies to GW2 serves to set the role of your character. Aside from the fact that the game currently really doesn’t leave a lot of room for any role but straight damage in PvE, I think the stat system doesn’t have to be overly complicated at all

All you really need is three stats: Offense, Defense and Support (Give them fancy names if you like) Offense governs your damage/crits, defense sets your HP/resistance, support governs your healing/effects duration.

Different types of gear only have a different ratios of these stats so that people can fine tune their characters to have the proper amount of all of them.

Beyond that gear customization happens through runes, sigils, infusions and so forth. Maybe work on making those a little more balanced.

Having a super complex stat system just isn’t worth it for this game. All gear does is represent your commitment to a certain kind of character build, which always break down into offensive, defensive or support.

Critical hits probably shouldn’t even be a stat. Give them the 5th edition D&D treatment and stop all the bullcrap where you end up with weapons that threaten at 14+ and auto confirm and just make critical hits into actual critical hits again, something that gives you that rare but satisfying lucky hit rather than something you build a whole character around to the point where it’s a fluke if one doesn’t happen. Just make it a 10% thing for everyone.

Having condition and direct damage be separate stats is silly, since all it does is make one or the other be the better choice for any given character. Damage is damage, no point in dividing it into two camps.

I think if you designed a system from the ground up it should be as simple as it possibly can be to get the job done. What’s the job of having different stats currently? To allow people to make more lasting investments into playing a certain aspect of their class by acquiring gear that support that. All classes have offensive, defensive and support aspects, so those are really the only three things that need gear stats so players can get invested.

Elitism isn’t about efficiency as much as it is about patience and tolerance. The necessities bar for most things in the game is really low, so low that much of the “group content” can be soloed. At that point, extra bodies are a convenience, so it is really about how convenient you see other classes as. Necros and Rangers, sadly, aren’t convenient enough.

Part of it has to deal with newbie issues. Due to the nature of the game, a necro or ranger is more likely to be a newbie player that has to be taught. Some people subconsciously adopt this and become bigoted, seeing the entire class as bad.

Good news is, this isn’t as bad as it used to be. It is quite rare to see a “heavy’s only” party, and only slightly less rare to see a “no xxx class”. Right now the big thing is “80s”, which has actually become nearly obsolete with the recent rebalancing of level scaling.