Guild Wars 2

Hey dude, I don’t play Necro like … at all, but I think I could give some tips on versing a Mesmer.

The thing to remember is that not every Mesmer that uses stealth is a PU Mesmer, and nearly every Mesmer has a vulnerability to condition damage. Even if you’re not specced for conditions, poison HURTS and the rest of the conditions will often cause a bit of panic in your opponent. When fighting a Mes, one of the best things you can do is look at the weapon they’re wielding before deciding to engage.

Greatsword – They’re intending on keeping you away at range since the closer you are, the less damage the GS does. The main burst comes from a combination of Mirror Blade, Shatter, and MindSpike (essentially you’ll see them unceremoniously pitch their GS at you which does damage/summons a clone next you and then spike it into the floor + Shatter for a nutty wombo-combo burst) If you can dodge that, then all they have left is spamming autoattacks at range, summoning a phantasm and they’re vulnerable.

The other thing to keep in mind is the GS phantasm is one of the most deadly phantasms we have, when you see the Mesmer summon (raising the greatsword to the sky) try to jumpdodge (jump + V) the initial hit, and kill it before it has another chance to strike.

Scepter – They’re likely a PU Mesmer. Their main source of damage will come from Torment via scepter’s counter attack. If you have minions, let the minions do the work, unblockable wells work well too. Like most mesmer, PU Mesmer are much more vulnerable to condition damage than power damage. If you can manage to kite the clones and cleanse the torment they won’t be able to kill you.

Sword – If they’re wielding a sword, they’re going to try and shatterburst you. This means that they have to get into melee range to do damage, and that’s where you’ll excel. Don’t be afraid to drop marks on yourself or near you, rather than trying to catch the Mesmer with them. Make it nigh impossible for them to approach and when they do, if you can dodge the Illusionary Leap, you can render most of their burst useless.

Stealth – Yeah, stealth sucks but it has a couple noteable weaknesses. For one, stealth does NOT mean invulnerability: Wells, Marks, Life Siphon can still give away the Mesmer’s position or eff them up.
For another Mesmer stealth only lasts 3 seconds (4 if using PU). Counting down the time really helps predicting when the Mesmer is going to attack and when to dodge.
Oh.. and most mesmer only carry 2 forms of stealth. Only one is a stunbreak, and the other is either an Elite (5 second mass invis) or attatched the the Torch.

Pistol/Sword/GS Phantasms Kill them! Kill them asap!

• It helps to remember that Mesmer tend to usually only carry 3 stunbreaks at max.

• Decoy/Blink are staples of most Mesmers, and as a result every 15 seconds or so we have some form of escape. Try to bait these out before going for a heavy hit.

• Mesmers are extremely dodge-happy; we have to be in order to produce the clones we need for damage/defense. A good Mesmer is never gonna be easy to takedown, but a single dodge takes 10 seconds to recharge (5 with Vigor) so if you see a Mesmer dodge twice in 10 seconds then they’re vulnerable. Lifeblast our culo.

… Ah man. I am such a traitor.

So here’s what I would like:

8v8ish PvP inspired by Guild Wars 1 and Magic the Gathering. I prefered Hall of Heroes, but I’m open to GvG style.

When I, and all the other GW1 fans pleaded for this, arenanet often explained that they wanted a highly spectatable game so they could be an AAA esport.

That’s how we got only 1 game mode, downed state, small teams, etc.

Now it’s been two and a half years… and twitch tv doesn’t seem like it’s in love, or ever will be. We’re just friends with it. I’m pretty sure a lot of people on this forum understand what that means — it’s time to move on with your life, try something else. Maybe years from now you’ll meet again and get a fresh start, but if you just linger and keep trying… it’s never going to happen.

So I propose we try all that stuff all your fans asked for and that you claimed would be in launch, resulting in a huge number of preorders.

It’s not that big a deal, Blizzard admitted they’d made a mistake with D3, changed their direction, and look at them now! They got like 60% more viewers than you do on twitch! They didn’t even design their game with spectation in mind!

Anyways that’s what I would like from an expansion: what I asked for and was promised the first time around. I’d even cautiously await the reviews after launch, and, based on those, likely become a continued customer of anet.

Just thought I would leave this here. After arguing with my guild leader for quite a while, we went in and verified that the following order is how boons are removed with WOC and corrupt boon – every time. (taken from a reddit post and corrected where it was wrong)

Well of Corruption/Corrupt Boon

1st protection
2nd swiftness
3rd regeneration
4th retaliation
5th fury
6th might
7th vigor
8th aegis
Last stability

So if you thought you were every going to pull stability off a guardian after he casts “save yourself” then stability, its not a matter of being lucky, its basically impossible.

Wrong or right, it is certainly something to keep in mind if. Casting corrupt boon to remove stability is only going to work if they have less than 5 buffs.

I recently decided it was time to spec a new class out and jump into some hotjoins and try it out. It’s been horrid.

In the last few days playing between 6 to 10 games I’ve had ONE game where it could have gone either way in a 4vs5. The rest end up 5 Vs 2, 3 or, if you’re lucky 4 people, plus teamstacked. Not infrequently one of the losing team stays at spawn and waits for the timer for the purposes of getting their three daily maps.

You can’t learn a new class if you’re being ganked by 2 to 5 players at spawn.

I’m sure it’s been raised before but could ArenaNet consider one or more of the following:

- Remove playing 3 rounds from the daily rotation so people don’t just idle for the hell of it. This incentive to pvp is no longer required now that we have reward tracks.

- Once a player has joined the game – if they enter spectate then have them forfeit ALL bonus glory rewards at the end of the match.

- If you enter spectate after joining a team have the player forfeit reward track progress for the match.

True, there may be a slight inconvenience to players in the above, but those of us who care about PVP surely would prefer this? It removes all the benefits of team stacking (unless you’re absolutely adamant that you can’t be on the losing team even if you lose your rewards – fair game to you if that’s your preference!)

I had also considered a cooldown timer on being able to re-join, but that feels more intrusive to the game than the above suggestions.
________________________________________________

Spectate is for:

1. Watching and learning from other players
2. Being away for an extended period of time and allowing others to fill your spot

It is NOT for auto-balancing so you can join the winning team.

I’d welcome thoughts or other ideas from anyone out there!

Hi, Bhawb and me did some testing to find out the exact priorities of boon removal for every skill we have (well except that minion thingy but who has teh nerve to test that and also, who uses it?)

Corrupt Boon:
Highest 5:
Protection, Fury, Swiftness, Might, Regeneration

afterwards: Vigor>Aegis>Stability>Retaliation

Well of Corruption:
Protection>Swiftness>Regeneration>Retaliation>Fury>Might>Vigor>Aegis>Stability

Path of Corruption:

Highest 2:
Protection, Swiftness

Afterwards:
Retaliation>Regeneration>Fury>Might>Vigor>Aegis>Stability

Axe #3:
Will be blocked by Aegis
Swiftness>Stability>Protection>Regeneration>Might>Retaliation>Fury>Vigor

Focus #5:
Will remove Aegis AND 3 other Boons, however behaves irregulary and does neitehr follow a set order nor removes according to application. Further extensive testing series would be required or maybe some insight from a dev.

I think this goes along with a larger issue, lack of ability to move around the ui. It would be nice to actually be able to move parts of the ui around freely instead of either one or two options or no options in most cases.

Is there a reason this hasn’t been implemented?

Some players, especially bad ones, will find a way to blame the team’s failures on others while avoiding responsibility for themselves. It’s like a bully, they take it out on others.

The other day I was called a noob along with another teammate for retaking our home point by a guy who was getting farmed off point. I’ve had a guy call the whole team noobs while he claimed to be fighting 3 people on skyhammer alone, when there were at least 3 enemies on the rest of the map holding their points. I’ve had a player I really respected throw a hissy because his teammates died – he wasn’t sure why, but somehow missed the warrior who came up from the other side of the point that swung the team fight.

It happens, and it is really difficult to avoid. I’m no elite player but if be willing to talk in game if you want to add me.

yeah 5guage covered a lot of important facets.

I’ll just emphasize/elaborate a little more on things I find particularly important, especially since most of my matches are solo or yolo Q.

Taking into account that you’re running a medi guard for home pt here are some tips, and all advice is, of course, situational and may not always be optimal, but its up to you to make those decisions in-game.

-Before the match starts analyze the enemy comp—do they have anyone who can stealth to sneak decaps?
-Do they have anyone notorious for going for decaps?
-Do they have strong mobility?

Now once you’ve analyzed them keep the stealthed classes in mind. If they have 1 thief it’s very easy to keep tabs on him because the other team—solo Q o rnot—will most likely be relying on him to decap and generally won’t pressure far otherwise, unless they wipe you at mid.

So after you cap home, where is the thief? No one else really matters. Is he at the mid fight? Is he downed? Dead?

-If he’s at the mid fight, great, go pressure mid scoping him out. Medi eats thieves for breakfast and make it your job to shut him down, res allies and cleave as much as possible.

—>In this situation the only realistic person to decap you is far pt. So on your way to hunt the thief try and establish where far pt went. Is he coming mid? Crossing to home? Staying far?

Let’s examine the generic and likely paths.

1) Far pt stays far, gg you win mid, 5v4 and secure 2 points. You will rotate home to see how the enemy rotates and repeat your opening rotation.

2) Far pt goes mid. You have 2 good options. A) Stay mid to help win the 5v5. B ) Get the advantage mid (1 kill or a couple downed bodies) and make sure your team looks stable enough to secure victory from there and procceed to decap far if the thief is dead/down or begin rotating home. As a medi guard I would only recommend going far if you have no one realistically better to decap. This is a point of contention since many would make strong arguments that you shouldn’t pressure far if you have home and won a 5v5 mid. I believe if you time it right it you have a good amount of time to decap, and begin running home. Also, it slows the pace at which you win mid, meaning people will be bleeding out, dying at even further times apart which will create an imbalance in their respawns so they don’t immediately regroup to push as a team.

3) Enemy far pt will run to your home pt. Now you have 3 likely decisions to make:
a) burst with everything in 5-10seconds mid, then run to decap far.
b) run back home to 1v1 him
c) stay mid if your team is just STRUGGLING to survive the 5v4 because if you leave and your team loses the 5-1v4 then you’re in a horrible position. It’s better (in my opinion) to win the 5v4 and lose home/far and then have the option to rotate 3-4 people home fast to win it back.

I put abc in this last scenario in the generic, likely response that I would want my home pt to react.

Now for some elaboration on general tactics. After you cap home, regardless of where you go, see how aggressive the other team is. Your primary focus in the game is to be USEFUL, and not necessarily using home to limit yourself. If you trade home for far and from there can be useful, more power to you.

Some teams won’t even bother checking your home because they’ll assume someone’s watching it like a hawk. I think it’s fairly rare that you’ll find an ultra agressive decapper that can successfully sneak away many times. However, if you do encounter this, and it’s so bad that it’s hurting your team, there are very very rare situations where you have home pt defender pretty much “puppy-dog” camp home and you make that decision at your discretion and ignore whatever anyone else says to you.

However, you must realize, as long as deaths are not an issue, every second you are alone at home pt, your team is theoretically outnumbered somewhere else. Don’t be the reason your team loses an outnumbered fight. It doesn’t mean that you should be in THAT fight, but understand that the trade-off should outweigh the cost of you not being there.

It sounds like you genuinely want to learn, and are rightfully frustrated by this. I appreciate how genuine you are approaching the subject, since many people are often too frustrated to seek a sincere reply.

I like your attitude so if you ever want to play and talk more about it on Skype/TS let me know.

Rotations are important as you said. However complaining that your team didn’t have warriors/guardians like the other team is a completely valid complaint as those classes make rotations way easier.

Basically, if you don’t have those classes and you make one small mistake in rotation (its solo queue this will happen every single game) bad things will happen. I’ve had teams over commit to a home point and make it back to mid in time because we had a warrior there rather than a necro or mesmer.

I don’t mind the changes to either classes, I do wish Ranger Wolves get their CC reduced.

Still though, the problem with Rangers and Engineers still isn’t being addressed. Attention balance team: tweaking numbers so they can do more is not going to help this.

Rangers don’t lack damage, they lack BURST

Engineers were kings in the last meta for all the wrong reasons, now they are underpowered, for all the wrong reasons. They don’t have enough mechanics, they are too spam-happy, their skills reward spamming and their traits reward spamming.

At some point the balance team needs to step back and understand they need to build a new base for Guild Wars 2 combat design. Until that day comes, Guild Wars 2 will never reach e-sport status with just number tweaking.

Normalize player model sizes in SPvP. Make Norns/Charr a bit smaller, Asuras a lot bigger, etc.

By far the simplest solution.

I really hope they will put a new game mode like a conquest mode,i’m so tired of the same 1v1,2v2,3v3 and 5v5 arenas,guild vs guild and so on.

I think the main problem with complexity is it doesn’t leave much room for extremely clutch plays. If you watch LoL, you’ll see someone Flash through an Ashe arrow to win a 1v1 that snowballs into an Inhibitor push. In Guild Wars you’ll see two people whacking at each other and dodging periodically. It’s hard to have clutch moments like in LoL.

GW2 will never become an e-sport. Even WoW struggles to be an e-sport because MMos are not really made to be an e sport, unlike MOBAs, they scream e-sport.

WoW e-sports are 2v2 and 3v3. Very limited compared to LoL 5v5 map with objectives and such, also easier to follow similar to a football match.

Regarding GW2, I watched half a match before I gave up. Watching a particle spam gets old really fast. As someone mentioned, even the casters have a hard time keeping up with whats going on and are just yelling things they notice through the particle spam.

Evan Lesh.3295:

I consider this a different problem than the readability of Asura animations. Yes, they could be fixed in the same way with many of the solutions the players have suggested. However, all melee attacks hit outside the visible animation for all races. That specific problem is not easy to solve because it is a product of us trying to create fluid combat.

Asura animations specifically, above any other problems with melee create new problems. If 4/5 races have animations that are “good-enough”, and 1/5 does not, then it isn’t something inherit to the entire design of the game, it is obvious that one specific thing is causing issues.

I can understand if melee simply looks a bit different than it acts. But when I’m in PvP and a large burst of fire is coming at me, yet noticeably stopping a distance from my model and not touching my character at all (or even very close), I should expect to not be affected by it. However this is not the case. Lets be honest here, this wouldn’t fly in PvE if a boss’s red circle was actually half of the size it needed to be, so even if you were a full body width outside of it you would die anyway, so why is this allowed in PvP?

Norn/Charr mesmers is a huge issue too, in that they clutter up everything. Need an option where everyone is a human of normal size.

Evan Lesh.3295:

I understand the scale issues; just making sure there weren’t some misconceptions flying around. Most melee attacks have pretty large hit areas to make the game feel better with latency. I believe they’re bigger than the animations show for every race/scale. Especially to the sides.

I can’t think of a way to fix this off the top of my head without plastering ground decals all over the place or somehow making streak effects better show the attack arc. Any other ideas?

THIS is very proof that they don’t read any suggestions we post, i know out of my head quite few i saw on this forums over the year at least…HOW COULD YOU MISS IT?

So, making booblehead(which involved seeing only part of the body as huge + extra animations) wasn’t an issue….

Adding option to see asuras in human size is, eh? Howwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww??

Evan Lesh.3295:

I can’t think of a way to fix this off the top of my head without plastering ground decals all over the place or somehow making streak effects better show the attack arc. Any other ideas?

I can’t believe you are actually saying this. So this means that after almost 2 years, one of the biggest problems of GW2 PVP hasn’t even crossed the devs’ minds. It’s an easy fix, give the players the option to normalize models of every race to human size. Should have been fixed 1 week into beta. No wonder this game isn’t going esports

Shockwave.1230:

Is Guild Wars 2 PvP too complicated to be consumable by the the mass esport audience?

There’s the whole build aspect of the game, which requires a lot of analysis and reanalyzing as you go in order to put together an effective build.

• Guild Wars 2 has a lot of systems players need to understand in order to create an effective attribute setup.

• While you’re crafting your attribute setup you must also consider what weapons play to those strengths.

• Additionally you need to consider what 5 slot skills play to the strengths of your attribute setup.

• You also need to figure out what traits make the most sense in your build. You must also consider the impact trait lines have on attributes.

• Finally you have to figure out what runes and sigils make the most sense to run.

The combat itself involves variable/dynamic effects. Conditions, Crowd Control, Specific skill effects, Trait/rune/sigil effects. The magnitude and duration of these effects is also variable.

Again the question I’m posing is…

Is Guild Wars 2 PvP too complicated to be consumable by the the mass esport audience?

Complexity is not the problem, gameplay is the problem, GW2 is way too spamy and has way too much crap flying around to be tactical, it becomes an uninteresting button mashing mess.

Think about it this game lunched almost 2 years ago, has remained about the same and pvp was dead 6 months in after lunch. This being the successor of THE pvp MMO.

Fights are simply too fast paced, too boiled down to who gets the most APM, tactics get way to much of a second seat, the only time you see tactics is in WvW ironically because its the one time you might run into 1v1 or 2v1 situations, the rest is a mess of flying colors. Take lol, it has 4 character skills and it has become the most played game in the world. GW1 had 8 and was one of the most successful pvp mmos of its time. GW2 has 16 minimum and has failed miserably, notice a trend there?.

First of all, I believe that GvG concept is pretty covered in GW2 by WvW and this is a solid reason to not implement that type of PvP.
However, I feel lack of something like HA in sPvP.
Current sPvP is too… stale, there is no progression completely. Solo Q, Team Q, Hotjoin represent same concept of single match and it is the only concept we have.
Earlier we had some tourney with steps, but they were removed for some reason and we get nothing in return.
It seems strange for me that after 7 years of developement we have only “Single match – Conquest”

Somebody please help us.

When we moved into our new house I was very excited. It seemed like a nice house, a new place where I could finally show my potential.

But something’s wrong with mother.

She locked me and all my siblings in the addict one day. She told us to stay here and be good kids. All we had was each other, and our beloved pets we brought with us.

Everyday she would bring us cookies that we split among each other. What ever crumbs we had leftover we feed to our cat and dog. That’s when we noticed something strange. Our pets started going mad! They just stared at us not moving an inch. Then just repeatedly ran into the wall until they died.

My smaller siblings started to get ill. THE COOKIES WERE POISONED!
They really needed help, I had to break open that door.

I tried using all of my power, but it had no effect on the reinforced doors.

And everyone’s conditions just kept getting worse.

Everyday I watched as my loved ones wander around our attic. Hearing the sounds of them fall over repeatedly, having no stability to keep them up. If only i ran away in time. It would be better to live on the streets as a common thief or brute, anything but this.

But it’s to late for that. Everything is getting darker..wait why is no one moving!? O they must be sleeping..

I’m tired too, I should r es t a bit..when i wa ke up everythi….ng will be okay everyone,
Im just go nna cllose my eyyes for a whi. . .l…… . ..

With Well of Power you could have cleansed the poison and break your stun. Its l2p.

Darnis.4056:

Lordrosicky.5813:

To be honest if they fixed the bug and allowed you to be healed (with regen etc) for your health pool whilst in death shroud it would be fine.

This is not a Bug, Necros would be Ridic OP if this went through.

You’re right and wrong at the same time, which is why there is such a catch-22 with a Necro.

If you study the design of a Necro, it’s main flaw in design is relying on LF for almost 100% of its defensiveness/survivability.

As a result, nothing is an easier kill when a Necro has little to no LF.

People tend to forget how easily they kill low LF necros in just a few seconds (warriors and thieves even faster). Instead, they remember the times when they are facing a 100% LF necro who has all the various fears off cooldown available.

This huge delta in survivability creates a totally different impression about Necros from players (and apparently developers).

Here are the main problems:

A Necro starts with ZERO LF and there are no passive traits or out-of-combat ways to generate it other than a ridiculous pre-match ritual that obviously wasn’t intended.

A Necro has zero access to vigor, evades, invuln, stealth, block, and other types of defenses that mitigate 100% of incoming damage whether you are facing 1 or 100 foes.

Even with 100% LF, a necro has virtually ZERO defense or escapability against large numbers of people because LF gets eaten up instantly when zerged.

Since other professions have access to defenses that mitigate 100% damage and/or escapability, you have an imbalance that is just an inherent flaw in design.

It would be nice to know how much LF the developers assume a Necro has when balancing them in 1v1 scenarios. How about their survivability in 1v2 compared to other classes? How long they can survive or escape 1v10 compared to others?

Once you realize the inherent weakness in survivability and escapability compared to other classes, it’s almost IMPERATIVE that a Necro be OP in 1v1 to offset the discrepancy in almost every other scenario.

Personally, I would fix the Necros lack of survivability/escapability versus making them OP in 1v1 to offset their weaknesses in other areas. However, that option was presented to ANET and they chose Dhumfire instead (which ironically now is virtually extinct).

Was just having a conversation in Lion’s Arch about the lack of variety in GW2 tPvP and decided to write it on the forums for feedback and more input. I used to play a lot of GvG in GW1 and I have been disappointed with the lack of attention that tPvP has received relative to the great PvE content in this game. There are business reasons for this, and there are a multitude of logistical reasons for this, and perhaps some reasons I won’t know of or understand as a player. I get this, but I wanted to offer a suggestion for another tPvP mode.

Capture the Flag
The logic of the mode is simple. Find the flag, capture it and earn points. There are a few different implementations of this kind of logic, and I will go over each in turn and why I think some modes are better than others for Guild Wars 2.

Classic Capture
This mode is simple and familiar. Capture the flag at some point on the map and run it home to score a point. This is exactly what Aspect Arena was. This mode was fun, but actually isn’t all that different from Conquest in the eye of the player. The goal isn’t to PvP necessarily, but rather; the goal is to score points. Players are merely inconveniences, better avoided than taken head on. Akin to trash mobs in dungeons, we would rather skip fights to score points (or get loot). This makes for an interesting and dynamic game, but the focus is on mobility and being able to outposition your opponent. There is some value and fun in this style of play, but a vital element of player incentive is missing, imo: incentive to go on the offensive and blow some people up. This could be solved with point weight balancing, but it is largely a min/max calculation of mutual exclusion: one way of playing the game will always yield more points – either running and scoring points or killing players.

King of the Hill
This mode is a bit less “capture the flag” and more “capture the node.” It is, technically, more appropriately called a King of the Hill mode. The idea is similar to the current Conquest set up with 3 nodes on a map, but the catch is only one of those nodes is active and available for capture at a given time. Holding this node scores points. After a certain amount of points scored or time elapsed (whichever one is sooner), the active node moves. This mode, I think, has a bit more of what I’m looking for. Because there is only one active node, teams are forced to engage and fight over it. Now, I know this isn’t completely new and novel, as teams right now do sometimes get into slugfests in Conquest, but a king of the hill mode would incentive players to build for it. Another twist on this mode could be that instead of having only one node active, have all three, but have one node be worth much more. This would have the same effect, because one node would be more valuable. The point is to force players to fight each other.

King of a Hill
This mode is a twist on the mode above, wherein the node in question is actually an object that you must hold for a certain amount of time. Once this time is up, it becomes the “hill” area that must be defended. This could be accomplished with some sort of buff mechanic that stacks over time. Here I’m thinking of something like the new LS2 achievement mechanic, where you acquire a “buff” that stacks itself to 25 and then spawns a hill. Once the hill area is spawned, you will be unable to move it. Should the defending team lose the node, a new “hill” object is spawned on the map shortly thereafter, and a new race for the mobile hill begins. This mode, however, would seem at outright to privilege defensive builds, and it may be that the capture mechanics for nodes would need some attention. I think, in this mode, a capture mechanic similar to the one found in Guild Wars would be better so that a single bunker guardian, for example, wouldn’t be able to block capture. In this way, it may be necessary (though I haven’t thought it out completely, so bare with me) that each member of the offensive team be worth x1.5 or x2 of what the defensive team would be worth in terms of capture contribution.

Control Points
This mode will be familiar to Team Fortress 2 players. Linear Conquest. Start off with 5 points on a map (or even more), and teams must secure points to move forward into enemy territory. I think 7 would be ideal, because it would allow for a “checkpoint” node on each side, but this can be tuned based on how difficult the points are to capture, etc. Push all the way to your enemy’s side to win. This way, there are no “points” to deal with. Again, this mode forces engagement.

Thoughts? Feedback? Suggestions? Tell me I’m bad?

Does this mean that bird is no longer the word? Kappa