Guild Wars 2

It’s still too easy to take a tower. Siege needs to be buffed more I think.

Golems are already kind of overpowered…

Remove the need for a target when casting smoke screen.

This is a small change, but i think it would make the engineer much more fun to play considering you can use it to stealth. I think it would make the mechanic much more fun when you can have an on use stealth which doesn’t require you to be in the middle of a fight.

I know you can use the smoke bomb, but it’s just too slow when you want to escape, also i dont like bombs.

You’re reading this while at work…

when you don’t have a single story mode done on 4 80s….

If you remove the party invites, you’d have to add some other mean of communication . The people I play against aren’t my enemies, they are just my opponents in a game and I want to talk to the people that I play with. I have made many good friends from the opposing servers thanks to this party invite freature. In fact, think I have more WvW friends from other servers than my own.
Removing this feature would make the already very shallow WvW experience even more monotonic and mindless.

Also, trolls keep trolling anyway and this party invite feature isn’t even a very good trolling tool. They could achieve the same effect using a VOIP or video streaming anyway. Hell, they could even use a third party addon such as gw2mov.

Sweet, I’m on pace to get everything done in 15 years.

Real WvWers don’t care.

Let the kittenstorm begin.

The big thing I have been hoping for is a fix to turrets so I can get back to sPVP.

Turrets are STILL NOT FIXED!!!

DuckDuckBOOM.4097:

Terrahero.9358:

Useless changes are useless.
Meanwhile:

-Warrior gets buffs and polish to skills to be allround better off.
-Thief gets moar Torment, and nothing done about perma-stealth crap.
-Ranger gets a bunch of really good changes, much needed sure.
-Necro’s getting buffed, because moar Deathshroud. And larger Marks!
-Mesmer gets two clear buffs.
-Guardian is getting buffs.

Engineer and Ele get kitten all. I was scrolling down the list and saw Ele and Engi and was like “ow, minor bug fixes.. holy crap these are guardian notes? And these are the Necro buffs!? And Mesmer? kitten me, its buffs all round!”

Necromancer:
Damage taken while in death shroud will now overflow to the necromancer’s health pool if the damage taken is greater than the remaining life force.
Greater Marks: This trait has been moved to the Master tier.
Terror: Reduced the damage by 17%. Fixed a bug so this trait now checks for the torment condition as well.

The “buffs” you are talking about are to compensate for those nerfs. The first one especially, is a huge nerf to necros. Before, 1% life force could “eat” a 20k eviscerate and the necro would be fine. Now the necro is brought down or close to death.

The wall of guardian text? Two buffs to a crappy trait/utility. Everything else is just text/animation corrections to all of the symbols so it just looks like a lot.

Just because there is a lot of text doesn’t mean its a buff. Or a buff to a good build. The grass is not greener over there.

It means plenty of development time went into these professions regardless, and they did come out better for it.

Where as very little development went into Engineer, Elementalist and Mesmer. But atleast Mesmer got 2 buffs for it.
Engineer is just some token changes, because an empty list would look silly.

All the while Engineer has a kitten ton of broken and bugged stuff. Even if they didnt want to buff engineer, which i think we all know must trigger some allergic reaction, they could look into the myriad of very broken skills and traits.

No effort was sadly made. The glue bomb got frakin hotfixed but Turrets overcharge, and Turret damage in general, has been broken for weeks now.
Not to mention the stuff that has been around since launch, like Mortar skills bugging out and firing regular Shells instead of the special type, while still giving full cooldown on the special types.
A fairly big bug that greatly, negatively, impacts the performance of an Elite that is already kitten to begin with.

There is plenty of stuff that couldve been done for Engineers, but looking at these lists its obvious that yet again Engineer was a bottom priority.

The rank should give you the ability to slap the yaks so they move faster.

I thought it was obvious.

Turrets that work?

I would like if there was a frostthrower – an ice-based, defensive version of the flamethrower. Maybe even via traits (it could add that functionality to the flamethrower, making it so you can swap the functionality via the toolbelt). The autoattack could chill, the second attack could shoot a frozen ball that shatters on impact (dealing a strong single hit on impact and some lesser damage via aoe), the third attack could be the same as air blast (but since it shoots cold air, it would extend chill), the fourth attack could make you place an ice wall that blocks passage with a little ice field (let’s say, 4s duration) that melts into a water field (2s). And the last attack, well, dunno…maybe it could shoot the refrigerator liquid around in a sort of player-centered AoE, creating a poddle that damages enemies while they stay there.
Assuming it was implemented with the “toggle” method i mentioned above, juggernaut’s effect may be different as well when the frostthrower is toggled up. It could give 2s protection every 5s, for example, to emphatize the defensive nature of the weapon.
The cooldowns would be indipendent for the two weapons, but since you toggle them via the toolbelt you would still have to wait for it to be charged up.

PLEASE READ THE ACTUAL SUGGESTION BEFORE COMMENTING, NOT JUST THE THREAD TITLE

This is a slightly gargantuan post. If you want to get right to the meat of it, scroll down to the second post.

The number one reason I see people leaving, time and time again, is stale play. We’ve had the same maps, seige, matchups and mechanics since the game launched. And while what we have is excellent, one of the most unique and interesting game modes I’ve ever played, once you’ve been doing it for 2-3 months you tend to have seen it all. By now, anyone who’s been playing WvW regularly since Christmas knows exactly what treb placements can reach where, where all the sneaky cata spots are, where ballistas will work and where they won’t, and good spots for arrow carts. I remember the first time I saw catapults on the little ledge hitting the water-wall of Bay and thinking “OMG, that’s genius”. That was back in November or December. By now, it’s simply another thing on the list of spots to check when Bay gets contested.

For whatever reason, it appears ANet are unwilling or unable to create new maps, which would be the best way to resolve this. However, they have shown that they’re willing to add other things to WvW to spice things up a little. The addition of breakout events and WXP ranks/abilites are proof of this.

This is compounded by the change to the server ranking/matchups. Previously, even if you thought you’d done it all, you might still decide to put the effort in “for the server”. If you wanted to see your server climb a tier, or get/avoid a certain matchup, or simply grind a rival into the dust, then you might decide to make the extra effort to stay up late defending that waypoint in an enemy Hills or scouting garrison watergate. Now, with random matchups, it kinda feels all the more pointless. Why should I stay up escorting dolyaks to a keep and watching watergate, when in all likelhood it’ll get zerged down by some insomniac guild half an hour after I log out? Anyone who’s been around WvW for several matchups knows that server rankings are largely a simple measure of population and coverage. Organisation and skill do come into it a little bit, but population and coverage can completely over-ride it.

For example, my server (Gandara) in tier 5 has the guilds and commanders to compete on even(ish) terms with tier 2/3 servers during primetime and late evening. However we have no presence during mornings and early afternoons, and that’s why we’re in tier 5 instead of tier 3. Likewise, lately we’ve been matched against servers from tier 8, and while we’ve been stomping them on points for 20 hours per day, there were times during the week when they were able to put us on the back-foot.

Now this suggestion isn’t trying to fix population imbalances or night-capping. However, it will try to adress the problem of lack of purpose. Before, server ranking points were a back-ground curiosity used to ensure fair matchups. Now, apparently, server points are actually what we’re supposed to be fighting for.

Getting stomped in your matchup by a server 4 tiers above you? Unable to even move out of spawn? Don’t worry, you’re still gaining server rating!!

Unsuprisingly, this doesn’t cut it for alot of people. We want even and interesting fights and seiges, not the chance to see a number go up once a week.

The other reason people (rage)quit is the omni-presence of zergs. I don’t think anything will ever completely remove zergs, it’s human nature to group up and stay together, particularly when we feel unsure of ourselves or threatened. However, the problem as I see it is that zergs don’t just offer shelter for the new/cowardly/lazy. They are also by far the most effective way of taking objectives and gaining server points, loot, WXP and karma. This has gotten to the point where the game looks more like “musical keeps”. Nobody bothers defending or upgrading anything, not just because its boring/expensive, but because its actually less efficient to try and defend a point than it is to move on and take another objective as quickly as possible.

So, this suggestion aims to address these three reasons; stale play, no reasons to compete, and no reasons to defend instead of PvD.

Okay, I’ll stop rambling and cut to it.

Introduce objectives/achievements/events for servers to strive for, on hourly, daily and weekly timescales. Achieving these goals rewards server points as well as the usual wxp/loot/karma, and possibly special extras (possibly in the form of unique abilites/buffs for a short period, special/free siege, bonus supply, etc)

It is important to note that these objectives/events will be ONLY PvP. I am not suggesting PvE content. You achieve these objectives by fighting enemy players, not NPCs.

So, for example:

Small Scale Objective:

Hold the Temple of Storms for 2 hours. Reward: 500 server points, and deploy a team of Quaggans to all camps on the map.

Ensure 10 Dolyaks reach Briar tower before time is up. Reward: 100 server points, 200 extra supply in Briar.

Make sure no Dolyaks reach enemy Hills for 1 hour. Reward: 50 server points, WXP Rank Chest.

Medium/Guild Scale Objective:

Take Cragtop on enemy borderland within 2 hours. Reward: 500 server points, full tower supply.

Leading on to->

Hold Cragtop on enemy borderland for 6 hours. Reward: 2000 server points and a WXP Rank Chest.

Kill 10,000 enemy players in 2 hours. Reward: 1000 server points, WXP Rank Chest.

Escort a Dolyak-Train from Spawn to Centaur camp. Reward: 500 server points, WXP Rank Chest.

Large Scale / Server Objective:

Take enemy Garrison. Reward: 1000 server points, full keep supply.

Leading on to ->

Establish a waypoint in enemy Garrison. Reward: 10,000 server points. Grand Chest.

Hold Stonemist for 48 hours. Reward: 10,000 server points. WXP Rank Chest.

Hold all camps on every map for a full tick (15 mins). Reward: 5,000 server points, WXP Rank Chest.

These objectives/events wouldn’t always be “on”. Only 1 of each scale would be “on” at a time, and sometimes none at all. Also, they would scale with the relative ranking of servers. So if your server is 3 tiers above the other 2 servers in your matchup, then you’d have to hold Stonemist for 72 hours, while the other servers would only have to hold it for 12 hours.

Also, the objectives your server has would be known to the enemy, and they would have a “counter objective” and a reward for that. So, from the example above, if your server has the objective to take Cragtop within the next 2 hours then the enemy will have the objective to hold Cragtop for 2 hours. If they fail that, and you take the tower, they will then have the objective to take it from you before you complete your objective to hold it for 6 hours.

Perhaps, if ANet are feeling super-creative, these objectives could even be woven into a sort of “Living Story”, except instead of NPCs and Tyria, we have Player Invaders and Servers. Think along the lines of the Balthazar Temple event chain.

Crucially, these objectives award server points on completion. This means that it actually becomes worthwhile defending places. As it is now, there is no point bunkering down in an enemy Cragtop and defending it all evening, because they will just ignore you and go take the rest of the map. However, if you can earn some serious points for your server, as many as you would get from PvDing the rest of the map, then it becomes worthwhile to defend it. Also, if the enemy can gain some serious points by taking Cragtop away from you, then they might actually attempt it instead of just ignoring you and zerging everything else.

Hopefully this will stop the joke that is musical keeps. Hopefully it will create more interesting fights as well. As things are, people run around in a PvD zerg, the commander looking for a tower to take that won’t take too long. If it looks like it’ll take more than half an hour, generally they don’t bother and will go searching for an easier target. This leads to huge amounts of PvD, and only occasional clashes of zergs either by accident or when a commander mis-calculates how long it’ll take to get into a keep before the enemy zerg arrives. This isn’t the epic seige warfare we want in WvW. We want to see entire batteries of trebuchets pounding a tower, seiges that take over an hour to complete, with the tide of battle ebbing and flowing, both sides gritting their teeth and refusing to let the enemy keep that tower. As it is now, this just doesn’t happen.

Hopefully this will add a sense of purpose, and a reason to defend objectives. As I said at the start, its been many many months since I stayed up late watching over a tower upgrading, because it just isn’t worth it either in terms of personal gain or server (points) gain. If, on the other hand, my server would gain some serious points and I would get a nice shiny chest because I stayed up another hour to make sure the objective completes, that would be much more of an incentive.

Now, these are just examples of what the objectives/events might look like. I don’t want to get too hung up on the details. I’ll point it out again though, that these events are PvP events. I just know that someone is gonna post something about how we don’t need more PvE in WvW. That person hasn’t read what I’ve written and is an kitten .

PS. I realise the chance of a player suggestion being implemented is less than zero. But I can dream can’t I?

erm there is this amazing program called ts3………

That is all. Carry on.

Developer Questionnaire: pvp focused edition

1) It’s a commonly held belief that Kits are balanced the way they are (weaker than the vast majority of weapon sets) due to the fact that we can have access to four at once. When Engineers put kits in utility slots they give up crucial abilities such as breaking stuns and clearing conditions+. Without the ability to equip a second weapon, kits are essential to our damage so it’s logical to assume we need at least one in every build++.

Keelin.5781:

It’s also worth mentioning that a decent number of kits actually require you to trait for them , for them to be effective imo. In that sense i don’t think we’re as versatile as the devs make us out to be. Keep in mind that this versatility is why they made our actual weapons worse than real weapons (this was said by a dev in ye olde times).

Q: Have you or would you ever consider giving significant buffs to kits to bring them up to the power level of regular weapons in exchange for only allowing us to choose 1 or 2 kits as our primary and/or secondary weapon?

• +I am aware that Elixir Gun provides both a stun break and a condition cleanse, but this is one kit out of 5 weapon kits.
• ++I am also aware of kit-less builds having some success but these builds are very narrowly focused and abuse the stat stacking, food, and buffs available in PVE and WvW modes only.

2) Turrets have many problems and bugs that are preventing them from seeing use. These problems also cause unintended uses such as Rifle Turret being taken only for its toolbelt ability in Static Discharge builds and Healing Turret being overcharged and then immediately detonated or picked up rather than left in play. Bad AI, overcharge bugs, low armor/health, low damage, low rate of fire, susceptibility to area damage, coupled with long cooldowns make them currently a poor choice for most modes and styles of play.

Q: Are there any plans to make turrets either more sturdy and therefore a more persistent and reliable source of damage or more powerful to compensate for their frailty and long cooldowns—or will you continue to strive for a balanced approach to turret design?

Q: Are there plans to fix Turret bugs in the near future (within the next month)? If not, why are these bugs such a low priority given that turrets represent 27% of our available slot skills?

3) The June 25th update included trait updates, but Turret related traits were completely ignored.

Q: Are there plans to consolidate, improve, or move Turret related traits, and would you consider a trait to lower all turret cooldowns?

4) It is popular opinion that while a change was needed to Elixir R the changes made were too drastic. Both removing the stun break and adding a cast time seem very harsh in combination.

Q: Would you consider removing the cast time, or adding the stun break back, but into the tool belt skill? Why or why not?

cont…

One in particular game element seems to have been skipped over when Signets received their numeric buff effectively doubling their effectiveness a patch or two ago, and that one would be Reinforced Shield. This trait was once scaled directly against the attribute gain granted by the Warrior’s Dolyak Signet in terms of toughness granted at maximum level. However this is no longer the case and renders the option, as good as it may be, improperly balanced within the meta numbers game. As numerical fixes are relatively easy to do for the development team I imagine something could be done about this is the next round of patches. Here’s what it looks like:

Current: +90 toughness while holding a shield…
Adjustment: +180 toughness while holding a shield… OR Grants a bonus to toughness = 2 x (10 + level) while holding a shield…

I genuinely cannot think of a single reason why this shouldn’t be implemented. Anyone out there have any insight or convincing arguments that might enlighten me as to why they should keep Reinforced Shield at +90?

Xirin.8593:

Deniara Devious.3948:

my suggestion make stealthed players appear semi-transparent to their enemies

I don’t understand why people keep suggesting this. Kind-of-visible is still visible.

Stealth is mitigation via avoidance by virtue of not being visible (although you still take damage while not visible). If a shadow/shimmer/whatever existed, there would be no avoidance. A lot of players are bad but they aren’t THAT bad. Well, maybe some.

The word stealth is not same as invisibility. Currently stealth lacks hard counters, besides those clumsy anti-stealth traps, which are indeed very rare. I have also roamed as thief in WvWvW. Did I ever trigger such trap? Nope. If chat with those who play thief as their main, none lists those traps as their biggest concern as they are rare.

Instead of shooting my idea down with an opinion, I think it is the only viable fix to this problem, because:

1. Every powerful game mechanism requires either a readily accessible hard counter (traps are not that) or should be made very scarce (thief can chain stealth using combo fields and re enter stealth after 3 s of revealed). Otherwise it will be abused in a game-breaking way.

2. Adding anti-stealth skills and traits e.g. see invisibility, would require redesigning all 8 professions. Way too much work.

3. Anti-stealth traps are really bad. Denying stealth form a profession which more or less relies on it, is not fair. I am for removing such traps from the game. With my suggestion all the traits and features related to stealth would still function as they are. Thief could have better damage, faster movement speed, healing, condition removal, faster initiative gain etc. from stealth. And you couldn’t target a stealthed player.

4. The program code to render stealth like this is already there. Just render stealthed players to their enemies like they appear to their team mates. Thus minimal amount of programming as well. If Arenanet has some more programming resources this effect could be gradual e.g. every second staying in stealth gradually increase the alpha channel value of stealthed player. In other words the longer you stay in stealth, the more visible your character is rendered.

Great fights so far on SFR BL. Both Elona and Piken had groups inside our Garrison but after a very long fight we managed to keep it, big props to SPRT and FG (very impressive as always), to CoN who cancelled their GvG to come help, to OSC and to all the pugs who helped! Shame about the skill lag tho :P

It feels like everything turret related is again totally borked! Is noone even testing the changes you guys are making before releasing them? Its more than a YEAR now and I can’t remember a day where I wanted to go for a turret build and everything worked like it should.

Since last patch every overcharge is in his own way bugged!

Rifle Turret with +Turret Range Trait"
- Overcharge does NOT give 50% faster firing rate + it totally bugs (=does not shoot at all) when you click it in the “wrong” moment. Shoots up to ~1400ft.

Rifle Turret without “+Turret Range Trait”
If you activate overcharge it suddenly is able to shoot up to 1400 ft perfectly fine with overcharge and shoots correctly 50% faster like it should do WITH trait lol

I dont even want to start with what the other 3 turrets do/shoulddo lol… madness!

I rarely see anything else bug thiefs,necros and mesmers in a sPvP match anymore, I guess I speak for a lot when I say it wouldnt hurt to give us at least the abilities we should have had since day 1 in order to not make the setup in these matches even worse…

Phineas Poe.3018:

Because of its mechanic as a Quickness skill, drinking it removes Endurance and cuts its regeneration by 50%, meaning you may break your stun, but your mobility is just as poor. And with the change to Stabilized Armor, why would you want to drink Elixir U and take 25% extra damage when you take 20% less while stunned? Or even 53% with Protection Injection? It just never makes sense to use it, and I see almost no one with it equipped in WvW or sPvP. The only time I ever personally use it is in PvE, and that’s for its projectile wall in Toss Elixir U.

(WvW/sPvP)

You are rationalizing that the negative side effects are the reason that players aren’t using Elixir U. IE: Why destroy my endurance and be in just as bad a situation? Why take 25% more damage when I’d be doing better sitting in the stun with 20% less damage? ETC.

Phineas Poe.3018:

I understand that for Warriors, Frenzy is a stunbreaker. It’s a skill that works similarly. But it doesn’t crush your Endurance pool, so it’s still a pretty good choice. So I’d like to see one of two things happen.

Although I consider the Engineer Elixir U’s negative side effects to be the worst, because it takes another reaction to re-formulate your strategy on the fly, in reality, these negative side effects are just as crippling to the other classes. In every single way, just as bad. That’s why you see these skills on a massive WvW/sPvP decline.

But beside all of these details around the negative side effects, the real reason why these skills aren’t taken is that there’s no justifiable reward.

Look at the Engineer profession – what mechanics could possibly take advantage of a temporary quickness to actually make a difference in effectiveness? The correct answer is auto-attack spam. That’s really the only thing, profession wide, that synergizes with quickness properly – Unfortunately, Engineers have some of the most feeble auto-attacks in-game due to the class mechanics compensating Engineers in other ways.

Giving Engineers a quickness utility is about as appropriate as giving Mesmers a temporary buff to their healing stat of 1,000, or giving guardians a buff to their condition damage by 1,000. If there’s just no way for the profession to harness the ability, it’s quite pointless, despite being fairly balanced, cross-profession.

Engineers need for this ability to actually synergize with a burst combo – right now, a common stance is that the utility lies in reviving and stomping. Unfortunately, this perceived utility is completely meaningless at this stage in the WvW / sPvP meta – you can’t survive a stomp, especially with the negative side-effects, and quickness stomping still has a delay at the end of animation so that the time saved you end up peeing away. If you thought surviving a stomp was bad, wait till you try to survive a revive.

Phineas Poe.3018:

1. Remove the stunbreaker on Elixir U and move it to another skill.
2. Keep the stunbreaker on Elixir U, but remove the Endurance penalty.

Response to #1 – If the stunbreaker was swapped to something else, Elixir U would be so pillaged & spent, that it would resemble a veteran prostitute. Every other quickness utility is a stunbreak, cross-profession. You’re basically saying: ok ‘kitten it’, I’d rather the already better stunbreaks get better. But to be honest, I feel like none of these utilities, cross-profession, should be stunbreaks – just use the budget to make the darn ability better! You 100% need a 2nd stunbreak anyways!

Response to #2 – Just checking, you realize that all of the side-effects are mutually exclusive? You mean remove the endurance drain from the ‘pool’ of options so you either take 25% more damage or cannot be healed? Uhh. Another change that would affect a total of.. not a darn thing.

Elixir U needs a re-purpose. And coincidentally enough all of the other quickness abilities need a little nudge, so It’d be a perfect time to make a pass.

What do you guys think?

It blows my mind how Anet doesn’t find these bugs an issue. That’s 5 utilities that are currently unusable because of this patch. If shouts suddenly didn’t work on a guardian, people would be freaking out and Anet would make a hotfix within a day or 2. It makes me sad that I can’t enjoy playing how I want because Anet refuses to fix these MAJOR issues :/