Guild Wars 2

I created a ranger today and insta-80d him with an experience scroll and tomes. I already had some ascended armor pieces and trinks ready for him. Thing is, while he does use LB and the range/dmg/attack speed increase/cd decrease for LB, he’s not a power ranger. The LB has a lot of utility because of its high range, but if that gap gets closed it can get really deadly, really fast. I run a combination of knight’s, assassin, and berserker for armor, soldier weapons, and captain’s/knight’s trinkets. So, yes, high crit chance, fairly high power, but not glass. I also don’t use GS — I prefer s/wh so I can blast my own heals, and the sword for the evades, cripples, and poison. Signet of Stone and Entangle are pretty much necessities (as well as the decreased CD on Entangle), but the whole idea of a Ranger is to keep my distance and if I can’t, use as many evades and movement impeding skills as possible to widen the gap again. Lightning Reflexes and Spike Trap/Muddy Terrain are also great, but I’m still having trouble with condi clears and stability — shame that Signet of the Wild isn’t also a stun breaker.

Generally my utility layout is Healing Spring, Lightning Reflexes, Signet of Stone, and still trying to decide on Signet of the Wild/Spike Trap/Muddy terrain for the third. Entangle generally runs in my elite but Rampage as One is pretty great aside from its prohibitively long CD.

Yes, it’s only been one day. Yes, I’m still learning. But I’ve put over 10 hours in on my wife’s Ranger and I think I can work out a build I’m comfortable with in a week or so.

That said, I think that even with the build I run it feels too powerful. Read the Wind just doesn’t need to exist and the channel activates far too fast on Rapid Fire. Every single skill on the LB is insanely useful and has a relatively short CD. Rapid Fire will out-burst my power Warrior’s HB any day, and I can do it from 1200 range and still keep moving. It just doesn’t seem right.

The condi shatter build doesn’t lack damage to make these runes a good option, and speed is one of the mesmer weakness.

I find traveler, speed or focus+rune that gives +%swiftness mandatory for any roaming build, not just condi shatter. Bringing something else might make you a little better in duels or outnumbered fights, but just that, and the speed you lose can really mean being chased and killed, not having time to take that camp before the tick is over, not being able to defend any structure…

I don’t use the servers public TS due to a lot of kids yelling at each other, arguing over who knows more and complaining about a couple of 1 push uplevels…

For me the choice is: Listen to kids whine or listen to music.

Guild raids on a private TS is another story.

Dude you’ve got 4 sentries in EB. Chill.

Oh the fsp hacker went to sfr to continue?

It sure is helpful at allowing groups to take structures with absolutely no competition from the enemy servers. But my small havoc/roaming squad finds this all very boring and lifeless.

I guess the removal of white swords is enjoyable for people who play for PPT and/or karma/wxp trains. But it’s pretty horrible for those of us that love interacting with enemy servers.

Mitch the Fish.1947:

With the white swords gone the smaller guilds in all of Tier 1 now have a chance to show just how useful they can be. Instead of forcing servers to blob up in order to defend then now have to spread out which makes the game much more fair for all size groups to both attack and defend. Personally my guild is a havoc guild and now we have the capability to not only attack waypointed structures but if the scouts are not paying attaention we regularly capture them. Scouts now actually have to pay attaention to all the sneakier places for siege units to be placed instead of just semi-afk and wait for swords to pop then start looking. That being said ArenaNet should definately work out a reward system of some kind for those who ACTIVELY scout and find havoc teams being sneaky.

This was working already before. More small groups atttacking different object at same time were more effective ppt wise, then one big group. This update just made caps easy, but for the prize of less fights. For me personally PvDing the objects w/o any rezistance is just boring. I play WvW mainly for the fights, specially epic fights for keeps.

Stronger servers won’t let you cap keeps anyway, since they see wp being contested. It’s the other way around, stronger servers will keep your stuff wooden all day long, since you can’t even see them coming and call for help unless you have army of scouts watching every destroyeable wall and gate of each struckture. Enjoy your small caps while you lose your entire home map. This update favors PvE part of WvW, but who the hell likes that?

Already bored senseless with having to check every single gate/wall everytime a keep/tower is contested. GG Anet you just made the people who actually pay and play WvW completely alienated from the game mode. Anyone else stopped spending gold on upgrades? Well it won’t be a gold sink for me anymore.

Saving a camp is now impossible without several scouts in the camp. Small havoc and roaming groups can go for hours without finding a fight.

You have catered to the people who blob up in a guild for 2 hours each night and couldn’t give 2 kittens about PPT in any form. If the intention is to completely kill the game mode then you only have 1 thing left to do, give the guilds a proper arena to challenge each other. WvW will then be a ghost town and I’m sure you can turn some of those expensive servers off or use them for your next big eSport/(FAIL) event.

You have an engine that lends itself well to a large scale MOBA and fail completely to utilise it and insist on these ridiculous 5 v 5 arenas. Have you seen how much some other completely F2P games make? LoL now has 64 million regular players? Do you not want some of that pie?

Time to perhaps do things like a basic player vote on changes? This way you won’t feel inclined to play WvW with a guild and listen only to their ideas.

Personally I don’t think it’s gone far enough. If the goal was to disorient the average player, they should remove the overworld map and mini-map as well.

On a serious note: The change is overall bad. Most players are disoriented without the swords, and it’s difficult to gauge who is winning because of PPK. Killing players can be more war score than PPT, but it’s a fairly invisible system to keep track of. Your team could be doing fine, but the other team could be benefiting from feeding off of the third. It’s hard to gauge who is currently more powerful on the map because of this, and this is a bad thing for anything except the most organized of players.

Flippityfloppityflippityfloppity.

Well, at least I get rewards for scouting and defending, amirite?

As a PPT defender on a low tier server, this change isn’t just a game breaker, it’s a game ender.

Removing white swords promotes all of the worst aspects of WvW: boring tower sitting and PvDoor. Yes, it gives havoc groups a chance of taking structures, but they’ll likely be PvDooring in doing so. On the other hand, if servers want to prevent enemy havoc groups from PvDooring, they need to have scouts tower sit, which is just as bad, if not worse.

All in all, removing white swords discourages fights, especially for roamers, who rely on white swords to see where enemies are or use white swords to draw enemies to themselves.

Maskaganda.2043:

It’s a very bad change and a step in the wrong direction.

My main concern is that in EU servers, outside of primetime, it’s already very hard to find good fights, especially in the borderlands.

The removal of white swords will obviously worsen it as stuff will be capped without warning.
Most of the times I play outside primetime me or my small group are the only ones from my server on that bl. It is impossible to “scout” for enemies who already outnumber you on 8 or 10 different possible locations, it’s already hard enough getting there with the swords giving us some warning, finding the enemies blindly will be very hard, not to mention incredibly boring.

I don’t really care much for ppt, the only reason I play wvw is to have some fun fights. WvW will likely be dead for 19h a day now, unless you still care about the score.

then there’s also everything Lord Kuru said.

So much this. White swords are so important for bringing players together for fun fights.

World vs. World: Sneak Attack? Since when have any of the best tales of WvW been about a group of people who took a T3 structure with no enemy defence?

We’re putting the band back together

I LISTEN TO THEIR SCREAMS AND THE LAMENTATION OF THEIR WOMEN.

coglin.1867:

What do we do to tend to trolls or spies who are burning supplies by building rams in the middle of no where near supply locations?

We’ve already had a reply, though I think it was John who also made a thread after S3 where he asked about how to limit this.

Bottom line though will be is that they cannot control the way a player plays the game. If a player wants to join a server to disrupt it, they can. (Although this ruins the game for that server the most and technically violates the first Rule of Conduct).

This behaviour is something we will unfortunately be stuck with.

Michael Henninger.7451:

I rarely crawl out of it’s darkness for I find new things out here and I frighten easily.

Oh no!
Well at least I didnt have to go and get Chris to get you to post on here and get an infraction doing so :P

Michael Henninger.7451:

so you must use the in-game reporting tool. .

Great! So I’ll just click on the invisible unclickable Unknown player and report them using the in-game reporting tool under the options for hacking……..oh wait.

So, theoretically, I can cheat as long as I want to if people don’t see me?
So basically, those people who used hacks to get under the map (invisible) and attacked the players were never banned? I could never target them.

OS and the memories of the “good” ol’ times…

I will still be running 4/4/0/0/6 maim condi shatter with or without any of these changes. Changes which I imagine wont really happen anyway based on anets history. If something changes awesome but if not meh im still gunna play mez.

Once again some of the Mes community manages to nerf us all and gets nothing decent in return. Despite people calling PU cheese and overpowered here, the one irreplaceable thing it did was give you a good fighting chance against thieves running acrobat, backstab/heartseeker if you’re built for power. Now when we get bursted down in 3 hits we can rest in the knowledge that our class is “more” balanced. We ask for out of combat swift and we get a 1 in 5 chance if running PU and cloak, as a response.

I’m really excited to see which servers end up with the most coverage and players.
It’s hard to tell right now, everyone’s looking at each other wondering right now. You can feel the anticipation as players hover their cursors over the gem purchase tab.

Once the announcements are made by the big WvW guilds it’ll be a scramble to get to the servers they are moving to. I cant tell you how excited I am to see that!

Based on the previous tournament, let’s hope that the lower tiers can learn from server X that just because they are currently in bronze and put in the same amount of effort that allowed server X to dominate silver league! Man I was so excited seeing server X, the underdog of silver league, putting all that effort to push down veteran silver league WvW guilds.

I am so excited I cannot wait to see how this tournament plays out.
Oh btw I’m on Blackgate [smug smile]

Pinkamena Diane Pie.8054:

Josh

Gotta hand it to server X who have come up from the bottom of bronze tier and showing the other veteran silver tier servers how to fight

Yes because yet again this wont be due to mass transfer of guilds to other servers, nor the tanking some servers may do again.

Please can we have someone who actually knows what they are talking about and knows the real issues in this mode?! Not someone who’s on blobgate!

P.S. Permanantly banned from posting on your twitch channel for asking about GvG. Thank you for letting us know you care.

Josh was in Anvils Last Stand on AR for two weeks c. 2012, while he was casting for guru. He wasn’t interested in WvW, and couldn’t be bothered to rep the guild or raid with it: just wanted to (barely) see what it was like in the biggest WvW guild on his home server.

He’s still casting and still playing Engi errday, so I doubt his WvW GAF has changed, either.

Don’t be surprised when an sPvP-focused employee behaves as if the WvW leaderboard is meaningful in a Team v. Team sense, rather than its reality as a descending sort on the server list in respect to manpower over time.

Dano.5298:

Will there be any chance a bottom tiered server will get some kind of handicap or balance system so that we don’t loose immediately after the season starts?

My friend you’ve already lost.

I’d propose a driking game with a sip for the words “exciting” and “excited” and a gulp for the sentence “we are happy/content/proud”, but I fear the audience would drop dead drunk in the first 3 minutes…

Josh

Gotta hand it to server X who have come up from the bottom of bronze tier and showing the other veteran silver tier servers how to fight

Yes because yet again this wont be due to mass transfer of guilds to other servers, nor the tanking some servers may do again.

Please can we have someone who actually knows what they are talking about and knows the real issues in this mode?! Not someone who’s on blobgate!

P.S. Permanantly banned from posting on your twitch channel for asking about GvG. Thank you for letting us know you care.

For this update, we’re looking at improving multiple traits, utility skills, weapon skills, and illusions.

Oh hell, this feature patch is coming out in 2016.

Visiroth.5914:

Lord Kuru.3685:

It keeps people like you strung along.

Towards what end? It’s not like they are getting subscription fees while we’re waiting with bated breath for WvW updates. Nor is there the constant introduction of new tiers of gear that we must chase, or even WXP traitlines. There is literally nothing stopping people from taking a break from WvW or even GW2 as a whole, and waiting for updates to return to the game.

Statistics. People not playing the game or following it don’t buy gems. Let’s say on the lowest of low ends that 1% of players buy gems. If they can keep even 10k people baited and waiting for WvW, statistically 100 of them will buy gems. There is also the added social factor, friends will play what their other friends are playing. If they can keep people playing GW2 they can thus have the chance at increasing population and once again gem sales. Then of course we have the word of mouth portion of this. If they say they have stuff coming it calms the playerbase down and lowers the amount of negative word of mouth, however ArenaNet has passed the tipping point of promising this too much and it’s now a negative. You of course can see the effects of this not only here but on other forums.