Guild Wars 2

Feanor.2358:

PookieDaWombat.6209:

Honestly, adding more/proper boons to enemies aren’t going to make them “zomg the insta death” to lower level players. In fact it might make them consider their choice of skills a little more, or traits, etc that allow for boon strip and condi cleanse, etc. OP does have a point that once you reach a certain level, the mobs do become a little easy to faceroll without much thought to gear or even personal skill. Sure it could take a while but most times when doing a map open or something, or even a HP in core tyria I find myself literally running in a circle around an enemy with my 1 set to auto while I drink my coffee. I only ever use the other skills if I want to practice a combo or something like that, but usually its just a kiting game.

There’s a problem with that. The game already has places where you need to think about your build. Instanced content, pvp modes, specific achievements. Open world serves as a kind of sandbox, which allows you to “play your way”. This is even true for HoT zones. All they require you to do is step away from the red circles or lines. Sometimes it might help you if you can break out of immob, but even without it you can generally play with anything you want. I don’t think that should change, tbh.

See, and there lies the rub. I’ve seen no shortage of DPS meter threads lately where someone inevitably brings up player skill levels. I’m all for play your way, but i should not be able to run a literal circle around a mob in a level 70-80 zone with letting my auto attack kill them. Sure I can kill them faster, but the point here is I don’t HAVE to. Might hit my heal on occasion if they manage to land a hit. Might hit a daze on them or a knockback if they get too close, but that does nothing for me as a player. I’m sorry, but what you simply say as “get out of the red circle” is over simplifying the fights in HoT maps. You have to do way more than that to survive there and there are a lot of players coming from core Tyria maps that have developed very bad habits, don’t do many instanced things because their skill level is too low and they get kicked by meter users and then go to a HoT map and get wrecked by pocket raptors and a few mordrem guards.

I’m not saying ramp up the enemies in QD, but if you’re in frostgorge or fireheart or even blazeridge, you should be more concerned about knowing your skills and build options and not just rolling over anything with some hodge podge of gear that makes no sense together while smashing 1 on your keyboard. It might even make trying to get level appropriate gear more more rewarding for the players as they level as opposed to “oh, this one has numbers that are a little bigger than what i’m wearing right now so sure I’ll wear it because ultimately it doesn’t matter”.

Honestly, adding more/proper boons to enemies aren’t going to make them “zomg the insta death” to lower level players. In fact it might make them consider their choice of skills a little more, or traits, etc that allow for boon strip and condi cleanse, etc. OP does have a point that once you reach a certain level, the mobs do become a little easy to faceroll without much thought to gear or even personal skill. Sure it could take a while but most times when doing a map open or something, or even a HP in core tyria I find myself literally running in a circle around an enemy with my 1 set to auto while I drink my coffee. I only ever use the other skills if I want to practice a combo or something like that, but usually its just a kiting game.

ANet went with Elite Specs for profession development. They’re not going to throw that all down the Mystic Toilet to put in dual classing such as was in the original GW. Given the time between balance passes and the complaints that that is too much time, I don’t think the player base has the patience for exponentially more build options — which could of course cause exponentially more balance issues.

Pensadora.9478:

And I would point out that not one person has yet to argue that this gamemode is balanced nor competitive in its current state.

You need to let this go. WvW was never meant to be balanced. The devs themselves have said this many times over the past four years.

They could always make it so siege can damage itself with it’s own blast. Catas at point blank range would kill themselves.

DemonSeed.3528:

Hehe so there is a benefit to keeping that coin stuck on the keyboard after all :P

“Active and engaging game play” :P

Hehe so there is a benefit to keeping that coin stuck on the keyboard after all :P

All NA servers are hosted in Texas, while all EU servers are hosted in Frankfurt, Germany.

Open a command prompt (cmd.exe) and enter the following commands:

ping auth1.101.arenanetworks.com
ping auth2.101.arenanetworks.com

Compare the times. NA is auth1, EU is auth2. If you want to actually test it, create a new free account.

Cranium rats from Planescape, I think.

Absconditus.6804:

Why not at some point go over World vs. World and rather make it a Faction vs. Faction system where players sign up with factions such as the Kurzick, Luxons and a third faction, and the server portion of WvW is phased out? Will there be potential landslides, yes; but that’s already happening.

IMO if they had the current server instancing at launch this is probably what we would have.

Sadly this isn’t very feasible at the moment. You can see how people get their jimmies rustled at ideas to balance the current server system. I can’t imagine the backlash if they hinted they may do away with servers all together. People have spent a lot of time and gold over the years manipulating server pops, I mean “building communities”.

MRA.4758:

Asking Anet to delete WvW servers is nothing else than asking Anet to delete the communities that have been forged over the past years. This is the closest possible thing I can image to asking the game mode to commit suicide.

My 2 copper.

~MRA

Well we need new game mode because this casual mess doesn’t work.

The real problem is the gameplay is broken since the pre-hot changes.

It wasn’t just about server population back then. A well coordinated guild of 15 could take out a pug blob of 40, because skillful play mattered.

Now everyone just spam their kitten and win no matter how terrible they are, simply because they have more players.

It frustrated the best players, and they left with their GvG guilds buddies. What was left were the players who mostly cares about rewards instead of the fights.

Real problem is that WvW is one big mess where players do what they want and play how they want. It’s not really competitive when some tryhards with their meta battle builds fight against raid geared pip farmers.

Tiawal.2351:

Serenity.6135:

There is no such thing as population balance because people are not static constructs. Players take breaks, do not all play at the same time, for the same amount of time, leave the game etc. You cannot have actual population balance in a game mode that is based on having 24/7 matches, it is not hard to understand. In PvP it is possible of course because you have small teams in set matches with short timers. WvW is an entirely different creature. There will always be imbalance because it is the nature of this content, plain and simple.

You are missing the point here: it’s not about making it equal, but not having unsurpassable differences, and that is beyond just player numbers: it’s time zone coverage and quality of the players or groups too.

These have to be achieved by systems in place, that are simply missing: rating the value of each and everyone, keeping that rating updated, distributing it evenly. Long term realm loyalty rewards for loyal players and even higher, but short term rewards for those who volunteer in going where they are needed – just like PvP rewards, when you are asked to switch to the other team. There has to be systems in place for all these.

Otherwise is a complete failure. Why do it when the “winner” is already decided? There is no fun playing this way, beyond a certain point, and that is until finding out that “it’s nothing here, move on”. That’s why players do GvG instead, because the fight system is fun, but since the rest is not, this can’t last for long.

There has to be a better way, unless the target of this product are new players only. This could have been more fun than anything in GW2, but was anything but fun (except the somehow even fights), and was even more frustrating because of the lack of explanation; that what is this game mode? I thought this was a competitive game mode:
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/competitive-play/

But it isn’t. Again, not because all sides aren’t having the same “rating”, but because the rating difference is so huge that there is no competition at all. Can this be solved? Are the problems unsurmountable, because varied reasons? If not, let us know, so we can move on. Thank You!

I never said “equal” I said the idea of population balance is not possible regardless of what change is made because of the concept of WvW being a 24/7 game mode, balance is simply not possible. Short sighted ideas like blowing up servers and hoping for a better outcome might make some people feel better but will do absolutely nothing to fix the issue.

It might make more sense to focus on stabilizing server populations by shortening the time between links to one month to decrease the amount of bandwagoning, changing the way transfers work in terms of imposing limits and changes to costs, giving more reasons for players to stay on their current server etc.

Serenity.6135:

There is no such thing as population balance because people are not static constructs. Players take breaks, do not all play at the same time, for the same amount of time, leave the game etc. You cannot have actual population balance in a game mode that is based on having 24/7 matches, it is not hard to understand. In PvP it is possible of course because you have small teams in set matches with short timers. WvW is an entirely different creature. There will always be imbalance because it is the nature of this content, plain and simple.

You are missing the point here: it’s not about making it equal, but not having unsurpassable differences, and that is beyond just player numbers: it’s time zone coverage and quality of the players or groups too.

These have to be achieved by systems in place, that are simply missing: rating the value of each and everyone, keeping that rating updated, distributing it evenly. Long term realm loyalty rewards for loyal players and even higher, but short term rewards for those who volunteer in going where they are needed – just like PvP rewards, when you are asked to switch to the other team. There has to be systems in place for all these.

Otherwise is a complete failure. Why do it when the “winner” is already decided? There is no fun playing this way, beyond a certain point, and that is until finding out that “it’s nothing here, move on”. That’s why players do GvG instead, because the fight system is fun, but since the rest is not, this can’t last for long.

There has to be a better way, unless the target of this product are new players only. This could have been more fun than anything in GW2, but was anything but fun (except the somehow even fights), and was even more frustrating because of the lack of explanation; that what is this game mode? I thought this was a competitive game mode:
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/competitive-play/

But it isn’t. Again, not because all sides aren’t having the same “rating”, but because the rating difference is so huge that there is no competition at all. Can this be solved? Are the problems unsurmountable, because varied reasons? If not, let us know, so we can move on. Thank You!

There is no such thing as population balance because people are not static constructs. Players take breaks, do not all play at the same time, for the same amount of time, leave the game etc. You cannot have actual population balance in a game mode that is based on having 24/7 matches, it is not hard to understand. In PvP it is possible of course because you have small teams in set matches with short timers. WvW is an entirely different creature. There will always be imbalance because it is the nature of this content, plain and simple.

If Guild Wars 2 has one glaring problem, it’s the current Itemization System. There are currently a variety of Stats which are incredibly confusing. Not only are they confusing, they are also redundant – people will select the best combination of Stats at any given moment. This means that the vast majority of Stats are irrelevant. The current Guild Wars 2 Stats system creates the following issues:

1. Players have to regear if they want to try a different build. If you have Power oriented gear, you will need to buy a whole new wardrobe if you want to try a condition oriented spec. This puts up a large wall for those who want to try new play styles. This is not fun or necessary. Having this wall adds nothing to the player experience. One of GW1’s strengths was its flexibilities. It was possible to try out any build in the game at any time (provided the skills were unlocked). There was not an itemization wall that locked certain players out of certain builds or content.

2. It is incredibly confusing for new players to the game or a given class. New players have to figure out what they mean, and what the most optimal stats will be for them. Furthermore, as they try out new weapons they will likely find that their gear does not support these weapons – so they stick with their current weapons and miss out on a lot of content.

3. It is incredibly difficult to balance. The plethora of Stats mean that the Devs must balance every stat combination to make sure that none or too powerful. This creates an unnecessary QAQC burden (which costs Anet real money…).

4. “The illusion of choice.” Players are going to go to metabattle and pick the best stats. Having a large variety for them to choose from just wastes Development Time.

There are a variety of solutions. Any of these would improve the itemization and make the game more fun to experienced players (who can more freely try out different builds) and new players (who will not feel overwhelmed or kitten).

1. Remove all “Stats” on items and have them all scale based on gear quality. This will make QAQC/balancing easier. It will also make it much easier for players to change builds to try out new things.

2. Have stats “selectable” in PVE just like they are in PVP. In a town, I should be able to select “stats” just like I would in PVP – using the same Prefixes. The game will them calculate what my actual stats are given the quality of my equipment.

ANet, I know that you guys work really hard and that you love your game. This QoL improvement would make the game a lot more enjoyable, and would not take a massive amount of programming effort. Furthermore, this will make the game much stickier and habit-forming to those of us who have been bitten by the GW2 bug.

If you implement an easier way to change builds (from power to condi, for example), you’ll get a lot less ‘hate’ from players on the Forums every time you release a balance patch. To be honest, the last balance patch almost made me quit the game. I play a Power Warrior, and I am no longer able to raid. I have no Vipers equipment, and I feel like I have been unnecessarily excluded from the Raid community through no fault of my own.

Please consider this implementation ANet. Any Development Time allocated to this will be offset by much greater player retention and spending.

Thank-you for reading.

dace.8019:

The only way to get a Gift of Battle (required for Legendary crafting) is via a WvW reward track.

Please change this, preferably by adding an additional method that can be done by playing exclusively PvE content; be that fractals, open world, dailies, achievements, crafting, dungeons, world bosses – whatever works.

Why would this be a good thing for the game? Why do you think ANet changed the requirements for the GoB more than once, each time making it less convenient for those who are strictly PvE?

I think it actually works well / as intended by having it as a WvW reward track. In that I’m a PvE player, 95% of the time I’m doing open world stuff.

But recently I decided to get a Gift of Battle, dreading the thought going into WvW as I was expecting it to be toxic and stressful, however I discovered two things.

1) It’s actually quite easy to get, it seems you get stuff toward your reward track for pretty much anything you do. Following a zerg with boosters makes it a lot quicker though.

2) By about halfway through the reward track you start to discover that actually WvW isn’t as scary or as hostile as it first seems, and you can learn quite a lot about WvW just by following a good comm around and paying attention to what’s going on.

In my case I actually ended up enjoying it, and when I get time will still go back and play in WvW from time to time. A mode which until now I’d ignored.

Now of course not everyone will enjoy the mode, but if you try and do the whole reward track with the mindset that you’ll always hate it then, it will never be fun. But if you try and pick up/learn a bit about WvW while you’re doing it, then the time flies by a lot quicker and you’ll have the Gift of Battle before you realise it.

I can also see a bit of logic having things for legendary weapons split across different modes, in that it means a player crafting a legendary gets experience in various areas of the game, in theory making them a better all round player.

I don’t like it either – but it’s better than having to do full WvW map completion, which is what it used to take to obtain.

As inconvenient as it is for us PvE only folks, it’s less fair for the people that do PvP/WvW only having to do map completion for those Gifts.

So until they do something that makes both sides happy I don’t see this changing.

Donari.5237:

You don’t even need a timer. Find out when it is just once. Is it half past an odd hour or half past an even hour? Whichever it is in your time zone, it will be like that for a very long time, until there is a time change like Daylight Savings. Is it up at 1:30 for you? Then every day it will be up at 1:30, 3:30, 5:30, etc. If you ever forget when it’s up, check a timer any time you like during the day, then you’ll know it’s every two hours from the next scheduled time.

Shouldn’t be that difficult to provide this kind of information within the game. It’s a mid-tier QoL I would like.

Not that time-tracking isn’t my biggest complaint with Dragon Stand. And I don’t mind using the wiki so much. /wiki et and, bam, full listing of what’s going on, so I can plan. And super thanks to the wiki folks to built that tracker.

Vayne.8563:

Egrimm Van Horstmann.7921:

Ashantara.8731

Yes that had already been brought up. And yes got my Dark Harvester in my first LFG through there. I still think Anet should provide a tooltip about LFG for DS so players that go there hoping to get started on the area aren’t put off by the lack of people.

It’s more than that. I teach this game to a lot of people because the game does a terrible job of teaching itself. This is truly one of the most bewildering things about this game to me.

There’s no built in timer, so you have to go to an external site, but how do the most causal players find out about this? The looking for group tool is hidden in the second tab of the friend’s list. There’s no real indication that you need it, and many people coming from other games probably think it’s only for dungeons and raids.

Neither break bars nor combo fields have any real tutorial, in spite of the fact that breaking the bar is so important during end game

This game does a very poor job of explaining itself. That’s why I work hard to explain the basics to as many people as I can reach, but it shouldn’t be up to people like me

I agree the game really should do a much better job of teaching new players about LFG, and probably should find some way to make LFG more prominent, maybe have it on it’s own icon at the top, separate from friends/social, and it should probably explain in there somewhere about how map instances work / how to join instances, as things like that you do only find out from other players or forums etc.

That said I can in some ways see why a lot of things are left to be found out via 3rd party sites/methods. In that a couple of years ago I worked on a game in a phase where we were doing a build to send to a closed group of testers (mixed of all ages/levels/experiences of gamers).

We put controls / UI images with the controls explaining what buttons did / how mechanics worked, this appeared after the title screen so you had to view them. We put a tutorial section in which was a short playable interactive level to teach the controls an mechanics. And yet so much of the feedback we got from people was along the lines of “I didn’t know all of the controls” or “Oh I didn’t realise that mechanic did that”, “That button fires a special? It would have been easier if I’d know that”. So it’s amazing that even with tutorial information plastered in front of peoples faces, most people seem to just simply skip or don’t pay attention to it, then complain about not knowing it. Which from a developer point of view is incredibly frustrating, spending lots of time on creating tutorials / tutorial UI, only to realise that most people will probably ignore it!

Disclaimer: I called this a mini review because I’ve only been playing it for a few days, not because it’s short.

As someone who held out on buying Heart of Thorns until excited enough by Path of Fire to pick up both, I thought I’d say a few things about how Heart of Thorns feels after having avoided it.

I’ll start off by saying I’d give it a thumbs up. I’ll get to the rough spots, but overall it really felt like an evolution of the core elements of Guild Wars 2.

The first thing I did was start up the story in order to unlock the Mastery system. It’s been a long time since I did season two, but I still felt like I was walking in on the aftermath of that devastating finale.

Zones
Verdant Brink is really cool, and I think is the highlight of the expansion. I had a lot of fun exploring as much as I could even without gliding or any other mastery. It’s a great zone that really sells the idea of picking up the pieces of the failed attack, and it’s pretty intuitive to explore. I just finished exploring it and I had a lot of fun. The canopy gave me a little trouble thanks to how the meta effects it, but once I got a hang of it, it was the best part.

Auric Basin is pretty cool, but I have some more issues with it. The waypoints are more annoying in this zone. I traveled down the entire western side of the zone on one character, only to detour to help some players with an event before I got any waypoints, and then found myself stuck in that area because I didn’t have the Exalted mastery to get out, forcing me to travel all that way again.

Tangled Depths is an absolute nightmare. I’ve heard this is not exactly a rare opinion, but I find it a huge shame since Verdant Brink did the same multi-leveled concept so beautifully. I’ve seen a lot of discussion about the map not displaying the layers well, but I think that’s only a symptom. The zone itself is designed less intuitively than anything else in the game. Huge, epic paths that look like they’d go somewhere, just abruptly turn into dead-ends. The map has some really nice areas, but it’s just not fun to traverse.

I only showed up for the tail-end of the meta in Tangled Depths and we pulled it off, but the chat got extremely toxic. I was surprised, as I haven’t seen that level of anger elsewhere in the game, and not even in the other Heart of Thorns maps.

I haven’t done anything in Dragon Stand yet except step inside the zone. I’m not looking forward to it though honestly. It sounds like a really nerve-wracking meta. I like the big bosses, but I hate having so much riding on a fight.

Mastery
The Mastery system is a lot more intuitive than it sounded when I heard it described. It’s a neat little system that really does an interesting progression that doesn’t have the bad parts of an increased level cap while still giving you something to work for. Also, it doesn’t make me feel guilty about playing alts, which this game has always been better about than other MMOs, but occasionally has its moments.

The one concern I have about the Mastery system is going forward. Mastery being divided by area makes sense considering the context of the abilities you unlock through it, but it’s already kind of annoying that I only make progress on the next mastery I need for the Heart of Thorns story while I’m in those zones, and while I’m in the old zones I’m making progress on completely different things. It’s going to feel really weird playing Path of Fire and essentially having Heart of Thorns completely frozen while I’m diving into the new stuff.

Elite Specializations
So far I can’t say much about these. I’ve decided to wait for the Path of Fire one on my main, and I’m still getting a hang of them on the two characters I’ve picked the Heart of Thorns ones for. I’ve never been very good at making builds or decks, so it’s hard for me to really appreciate what new options I might have. Despite things I’ve heard about them really changing the class, they don’t feel that different so far. Berserker feels the most different so far, and only in the fact that it’s super flashy, not that it plays differently.

The one thing that bugs me, though, is how many skill points they need. For my main, who has World Completion, it was no problem at all. For my alts, especially my newest one, it felt like the game had raised its level cap. Suddenly these characters I had that were more or less on par with my main, suddenly had to scour the maps for hero challenges in order to try out the new stuff that I wanted them to be defined by going forward. It’s nice that the Heart of Thorns hero challenges give 10 skill points, but this only helps so much. On my newest character, I quickly ran out of challenges that he could easily get to or accomplish without significant assistance. I ended up just spending a whole evening grinding out old skill points one by one.

General
I like the expansion overall. I probably would have been underwhelmed if I had paid the launch price, since I feel the frustration gets too far once you enter Tangled Depths, but there is a lot of great evolution here, and I hope that the rough spots were learning experiences that are improved in Path of Fire.

When I first walked into Verdant Brink, it was magical. I really felt like I had stepped into something new. It might be funny for people who got Heart of Thorns when it was new to hear, but I was legitimately surprised. I’ve been logging in fairly regularly this whole year and doing stuff that’s been around forever and been content with it, but this really opened my eyes to what can be done in the future.

I actually wasn’t that excited about Path of Fire when I bought it, looking at it more from the perspective of “well Nightfall was my favorite campaign and this looks interesting enough for its price”, but now I’m a lot more interested to see where this game can go, not just where it is.

The issue with elite specs is a contradictory one by anet themselves. Now before I get into this I know already the kinda comments i will be getting already saying I’m worng. They never wanted them to be upgrades to the core class, however they clearly were/are clear upgrades to the core classes. The made the elite more powerful then the reagular class. The only ones I see run their core classes anymore are people who don’t own hot, or people who are not level 80. Now this wouldn’t be an issue if the elite spec filled a particular role. Like saying you want to be a support role then you pick an elite spec that centers around that particular. The only problem is that we have to wait another 5 years to get another elite spec before this idea can be made, because they are only going to give us the elite spe with xpacs. So you going to pick the the elite spec over you core class any day of the week.

This won’t stop being an issue till we get a few elite spec release, but the only way thats gonna happen is years years away.

I’ve always wished they’d let us at least let us do that… use any head skin with any outfit since clipping issues would never exist with those parts. GW1 allowed it. Also it would be cool if outfit head skins could be put on armor as well. For example; I really love the mask on the Charr chef outfit and wanted to wear it with his normal armor. (which is T3 racial chest piece one of the few without buttcapes… wish it was for all races)

A night option and choosing between backgrounds would satiate all parties.

I really like the character select screen, but I’ve always wished there were more options. Switching between HoT and PoF screens would be very nice, but if you can. Please let us have better layout options for our characters. It does look very nice for the normal 5 slots or around that number for most of the player base, but it just feels punishing/confusing if you have more then that.

It’s kind of an unfun game of guess how far away the character you’re looking for is.

Personally, I’m a bit tired of white, so I like the new Launcher, and Character Select screen.

Does anyone know what this says.

Two warhorns! I’m just being difficult though lol

This thread again?

Being part of a guild WvW squad isn’t a right. It’s not a guaranteed game feature. It’s something organized by a guild, and it’s the drivers call how they want to organize it.

When I run open, it’s easy to tell who is in ts or discord and who isn’t. WvW is a team game. If you don’t want to play by the team’s rules, the team has a right to tell you you can’t join them. It’s that simple.

To our deaf player, I’ve agreed with you before that requiring a deaf player to join ts is silly. You’d be better off finding a guild that is able to work with you.

But no one is entitled to join a guild squad. No one is entitled to join a pugmander’s squad, either. It’s the commanders call. They are taking on the responsibility for that squad. They get to make that choice. If I’m willing to squad kick guildies who aren’t on tag and paying attention, why on earth would I treat non guildies any differently?

It’s that simple.