Guild Wars 2

1. Empathic Bond: This trait is really poorly designed and implemented. It’s annoying to me as a ranger that I can’t clear when I want to, and it’s annoying to people I fight that their condis are removed randomly and automatically! It’s also annoying to my poor pet which takes all my condis up its rear.

Solution: Change this trait to remove conditions upon pet swap, possibly move it to the beastmastery trait line.

2. Reaper’s Protection: It’s just flat out annoying to be feared for 3 seconds because you landed a good CC on a necromancer.

Solution: ? Possibly gain life force when CCed, would have to be tested

3. Incendiary Powder: I’m sorry, this trait needs to go. Engineer’s most damaging condition on a completely undodgeable, random proc is not skillful.

Solution: Remove incendiary powder as a trait, give Engineers compensation with things like more condi clear, better autoattacks, lowered cooldowns on elixirs, etc. This would help solve engineers hardcountering thieves but being hardcountered by necros.

4. Renewing Stamina: Arenanet needs to decide whether eles should have: permanent vigor, high protection up time, good condi removal, or high passive healing. Because at the moment they have all 4. They have already nerfed other classes access to vigor, and now would be the perfect time to nerf eles vigor, as the class is currently a bit overtuned.

Solution: Maybe give vigor on using an arcane skill (?), or change this trait to something else entirely.

We’ve been taking this performance issue very seriously and have spent the last few weeks trying to isolate the various causes you guys are experiencing.

Performance is very tricky because there are so many variables as to why the game could be running poorly, especially if it used to run fine. It hasn’t been affecting everybody and some of the folks experiencing issues have found them to be due to outside forces such as poor hardware cooling. We know this is a real issue from the things you guys have posted here and have been trying to find the root of the problem. Simply put, it’s been taking time to identify what the issues could be and trying to reproduce them in-house has proven quite elusive.

We’ve identified a number of serious issues some of which were introduced into the 9/9 build and have code changes on the way to address them. We don’t expect it to fix everyone’s performance problems but we certainly hope it will help the majority of you on this thread. I will follow up when the code changes go live and hope that you guys will report back as to whether they are making a difference or not.

I want to give props to you guys for helping each other out and providing helpful insight into this problem. I know it can be really frustrating, it is for us too so please bear with us. We sincerely want to make your playing experience the best we can.

rojak.1894:

Thank you very much for responding Chad! I’m glad it’s being worked on. Any idea if code fixes might go live in the next feature patch or when Living Story comes back?

We are shooting for the next non-hotfix release.

Arenanet has to remove all armorsets and outfits that show even the tiniest amount of skin on human females and make new – fully covering – sets, because the playerbase cannot handle the obscene sexualization. Charr, sylvari and asura are fine, norn… are also ok, since they are resistant to cold and that explains everything.

I’m seeing about 1 power ranger per match. Just because someone is playing ranger doesn’t mean they’re power LB.

I am seeing 3 times as many engies.

Dirame.8521:

I feel it all comes down to one thing. The game isn’t new anymore. The new car smell is wearing off.

New expansion would fix that. Just saying Anet, just saying.

The new car smell has been gone for over a year. Remember before PAX? “Oh yeah we’ll fix it all AFTER PAX because we don’t want to change the meta and screw the pro teams over.”

Bullkitten it was. Nothing changed, it never has and never will. It always comes down to one thing-

PVE has gem store sales. PVP has no monetary value. GG ESPORTS.

Well, some players who quit have tried many times to give their inputs on the game, only to see nothing happen… Knowledge and time is wasted, especially consindering we have:

• Stale metas (they take too long to “evolve”)
• Limited Build variety
• Unbeatable comps (take this with a grain of salt)
• Passives being intergral parts of builds
• A single gamemode (thus limiting build variety even more)
• A toxic community (huge egos everywhere)
• 4v5’s on a regular basis with no tell when this will end
• Skyhammer
• No incentives for “lower tiered” teams to play once you got most rewards
• Following from that, lower tiered teams get “no chance” of getting anything from the current tournaments
• Spirit Watch
• Confusing for new players
• Confusing to watch
• And probably some more stuff I left out…

If you got the titles you wanted, and some Heroes Armour if it pleases you, then there is no reason to really stay. Unless you convinced yourself and your buddies to become really good in a short time-span, without any of them getting burnt out, this gamemode has little to offer… Whether this is going to chance soon™, no one can tell, so why not move on?
I log in, do my daily in SPvP or WvWvW and head straight back to GW1 to help people fill their HoM (or myself if it pleases me) – and frankly, this is what the game aims for anyway…

1. Stored builds for players (amulet, runes, sigils, weapons & trait allocation)
2. Improved training grounds (maybe even an NPC based conquest match a la the Zaishen Challenge to help new players learn the game mode)
3. Functioning ready button
4. Unranked Queues (hot join does not function as a feeder game-mode to solo and team queue, rather it works like a rewards farm. Not a good place to learn much about the only ranked game-mode in game, atm. And probably a big turn-off to spvp for new players who hop in to one those matches thinking it is the logical starting point)
5. Minimum Game Requirement to appear on leaderboards
6. Improved rewards for wins while on leaderboards
7. Extend class based titles for tournament wins (“X Champion” titles)
8. In-game notification of major tournaments (Here’s a good example)
9. Dragon rank rewards based title (a reward track with unique rewards that unlocks for players who reach r80)
10. New game mode(s)
11. Teleport Skill bugs (fixing some pathing issues on teleport and movement skills as well as the latency rubber-banding issues on these skills)
12. Reduce effectiveness of passive play (AI builds, rune of the nightmare, etc.)
13. Improve the overall quality of the Dragon Finisher
14. Skill queue toggle switch (allow players to choose if they want skills to queue)
15. Additional data in spvp menu (add more historical data from matches for players to review, here is a rough example)

Ok, lets face it: the dream of “esports,” though long dead, will never be achieved with the current client and ANet’s sorry excuse for tournament advertising.

If instead we had a client that inherently promoted events, they would all get much much more exposure and the scene would actually grow.

http://imgur.com/K8Kazdg

Edit: to clarify, this is what I think character select should look like.
Nobody gives a crap about the medals and achievements; not even PvE nerds.

And please, why not add chat window in character select? Sometimes we want to idle or AFK but still be reachable by our gw2 buddies without having to render all the engis spamming nades in our face while we’re trying to watch netflix.

something that was never alive can not be dead. – some uberwise long dead chinese dude (probably)

By Useless i mean e.g. items whose sole purpose is to double click em. like
1) Luck – could be simply added to your account if you salvage
2) Dungeon bags ( those who reward you with cash and dungeon tokens)
3) cash bags
4) Account bound Collectible Items. E.g. spoons.
5) even Champion bags (the collection doesn’t work anyway, and you could be finally happy again if a steel chest droped^^)
All those items’ drop pool can simply be added to the chest/Mob that dropped it

Then some fractal related useless crap, whose sole purpose is to get sold/deleted…
6) Remove rings from EVERY (also PvP, WvW) drop pool if your fractal level is above 40, i actually don’t care if it gets replaced by something or not because getting a ring on 40+ fractals is always depressing (i actually do prefer nothing to a ring xD)
7) Fractal skins if you’ve already unlocked them.

It might still be that i forgot to list some useless items, but the concept should be clear^^

At the very least, Anet, it is time that you made a clear declaration that either we will at some point in the future be able to do something with these rings, or we won’t. This is the least you can do for those of use who have loyally played your ‘top-end’ content for close to two years and assembled one or two bank tabs of rings. Let us know, for once and for all, to keep or not to keep.
p.s. and also prove you actually read and respond to forums would be nice.

Sizer.2654:

sometimes because of que casting it takes longer for your abiltiies to activate normally.

This isn’t the only thing that contributes to the problem… Subsequent abilities have seemingly slow activations because the skill queue waits for the after-cast delay, before activating the next ability. Whereas, if you were to ignore the skill queue, you can manually interrupt the after-cast of a skill after the useful frames have finished casting.

The skill queue is just a bad gameplay mechanic which should’ve never been put into the game in the first place. After-cast delays are just as stupid. They both need to be reworked or deleted all together.

DoYourBestBear.6810:

Sizer.2654:

i spam the ability

I think I found your issues with being successful in GW2.

If you’ve never pressed a skill to have it not work, even when not lagging, and had to press it a second time, count yourself lucky. Others however, might not be so lucky. Would it hurt you if they were given an option which helps them out with this? If not, there’s no reason to be sarky!

I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve pressed infiltrator’s return thinking "I’ll avoid that" and "I’m fine, fight is going ok" to find myself getting owned because the skill I pressed never activated. Consequently, other times like those "oh ****" moments I find myself press it once... nope.. press it again, and suddenly I return, and then strike right back into their burst. Of course, it’s not the opponent’s burst that kills ultimately, it’s the much deadlier combination of queue cast and slight lag. I’ve never bothered to complain much about queue casting because after practice I’m now usually able to avoid the problems it can cause.

While personally I was fine with getting used to it, and even sometimes making use of it, it can still be a problem for others. I support the idea of a disable queue cast feature.

the more you (or server) lag the worse que casting is. Especcialy with movement skills or shadowsteps/blinks ;_; It will be nice to have just another tickbox in F11 menu.

as the titel indicates, pls give us an option to disable que casting. Ît has done me 0 good except make me que abilities bymistake and waste intiative. Sometimes my shortbow number 5 ability takes longer then usual to activate cause of server lag that we all have been experiencing and therefore i spam the ability to work faster and end up wasting all intiative ( just one example).

It has its uses in pve for clickers and stuff but in PvP its totally useless and only serves as a disadvantage pls remove !

Steb.2571:

Chaith please, Let’s be real here, Engineer is obscenely broken, regardless of the class it’s fighting against, the only thing that even remotely counters it is a decent terrormancer. When I get bored I roll around on engi in yolo-queue and faceroll with little to no practice.

Let’s play the “How do we know its broken game” All logical reasons aside (because I could make an obscenely large list of reasons), you can simply enter a yoloqueue and see 3+ engi’s per team, and you have your answer.

Arachnid.4062:

Engineer spotted defending his broken class.

^

I’m with steb on this one. When an engineer can hit you with an auto attack that burns you as much as one of its harder to land skill shots (Blowtorch), you know something is wrong. After swapping around between cele, berserker, rabid, carrion, and assassin nades, I can definitely see anyone who players rabid as being carried a lot, especially if you run P/S. Not that they aren’t great players and not that there isn’t a fairly high skill ceiling, but the 1v1, 2v2 potential of that build is really strong while not really being that bad in a team fight either. You can make a few mistakes and survive. Not to mention the pressure you do just by auto attacking is insanity.

Whenever I fight a rabid, balthazar, p/s geomancy nades engi in a 1v1, I basically have to not get hit once and if I do, make a full retreat and come back to try again. My play needs to basically be perfect or I get condi loaded and die. If I get into melee range, I’m an idiot. They’ll swap kits and all of a sudden, I have 3 stacks of bleeding poison and possibly burning on me from nothing. It’s absolutely silly how much this can do with skill that are not hard to land.

Also, saying something dies to mes/thief combo quickly is kinda silly. Everything dies to that fast, even bunkers. That’s what they do. They spike.

As for turret engi, I still think it’s WAY too high of a skill floor. You can carry yourself to a pretty stupid level just by having those down, especially against berserker classes. There have been matches where I’ve run turrets, left the fight to get a popcicle and ate it in my right hand while fighting. It’s easy mode. There are teams that run literally 2 turret engis and then roamers. They take far and home and just rotate like crazy. It’s annoying because if you try to split off some berserker class to take out the one on a far point, the turrets are usually enough pressure to keep the spiking to a minimum so the engi doesn’t die.

I swap to turret/condi engi when I have given up on playing fair.

Turret builds: stack boons and kill your opponents for you? The ultimate passive AI experience

Incendiary powder: So much counter play to the undodgeable 7 second burn from Balth engineers

Crate: The “I win” button

Elixir gun: Permanent weakness on autoattack??? wtf?

Over 1k healing per second… ok

Some degree of passive play is needed in a game where it’s so easy to foil somebody’s pressure by dodging well and rotating defensive abilities.

Technically, its not passive play that’s needed.. as that’s NEVER a good thing (so I agree with you) but there is a need for a small degree of GUARANTEED damage in this game. It unfortunately has a huge correlation with being very passive in it’s application.

No passive burn to gradually ensure the fight ends? Endless fights will be much less fun than AoE fire fields that cover the whole point, or Incendiary Powder, I assure.

Things that I think are just AIDS for the game: Turrets auto-attacking, passive CC fear procs. All other A.I that has auto-attacks goes here.

Why should Marjory and Kasmeer have all the fun? Let’s convince the devs to take a page from Baldur’s Gate 2 and give us some romance! Instead of Living Stories, we could have Loving Stories! Living Loving Stories in a Living Loving World.

Could it be done? Should it be done?

Slubsloop: There’s something in the water! Help!
Character: kitten, Slubsloop, that’s my girlfriend.

- Leave Skyhammer in the rotation as an utterly broken map
-Refuse to add the obvious solution for 4v5s (functional readyup button)
-Add standard models to team queue and custom arenas only (???what)
-Leave leaderboards in a broken state that punishes players for playing multiple games per day.

Basically, arenanet doesn’t give a single kitten about your solo queue experience. All of these things could be fixed in one day. ONE day.

Simple:

Add an in-game message for when a pvp tournament has begun or is being streamed. Having the banner on the forum page with links is great, but an in-game message would help to promote pvp and draw in the masses of non-pvp players.

Evan Lesh.3295:

This is a cool idea. I will pitch it to the team. What other things would you see going on this track? They all have a theme leading up to the end goal.

Maybe a bag in the middle of the tree that carries a new gamemode :P.

So I’ve been trying to get better at pvp, and I’ve recently moved from rabbit to wolf in two~three months. My main is guardian as in WvW and PvE, so I’ve learned/watched/played a fair number of matches using meditation build, support/bunker build, and hybrid build. The matches that I usually do are mainly solo Q and hot joins, although I do sometimes join team Q with full guild members.

That said, I really do think there is an immense gap between existing players in PvP playbase and newcomers such as myself. In rabbit and dear rank, I was matched up with people of my rank, and although game lacked any strategies and capturing/fighting in nodes, I still had fun. The problem started when I reached dolyak rank and I was facing shark/phoenix/dragons as my opponents. Now I know that after April patch finisher ranks have lost their prestige to certain extent, but it was still overwhelming for me to handle.

From casually winning/losing game while learning how to utilize PvP tactics such as LoS on rocks/walls, positioning, personal skill combos/etc, I am now matched up with people who are at least decent to excellent in their professions. After losing 10+ matches straight, I’ve lost intrested in PvP for a while and retreated to WvW and Pve. After a month or two, I’ve tried PvP again because of new trek rewards and PvP finishers, and I was able to endure all of Skyhammer, 4v5, 3v5, afkers, people with amazing skills and people with no skills to achieve wolf rank.

The problem I see is that matchmaking system is terrible and it is the main reason why people don’t want to PvP anymore. As an experienced PvE player who can earn 30~40g+ a day just by selling paths and running dungeons/fractals, I personally think lack of reward isn’t the problem. The community toxicity is much lower than what I’ve expected from such competitive players and gameplay itself is very fast paced and exciting. However the problem comes from high learning curves, very short/unnoticeable animations depending on skills/race and the horrible, horrible match making. There is no way that I’d ever want to play against a team of dragons and phoenixes when I am only starting to learn how to read animations and apply my own skill combos, or deal with 4v5/3v5 while receiving meager 300 rank points.

Anet should implement much better making software/program and try to attract more people for PvP since there is almost no unity in this type of gameplay. At least in WvW people are grouped into servers, whereas in PvP even friends and guildmates are prone to fighting each other. A new gameplay mode such as capture the flag/deathmatch/etc can be a short term fix, but anet should do much more than hosting some tournaments because frankly it has lesser viewers than DnT PvE tournament. There should be certain benefits for PvP players such as increase trek progression by 5% in guild upgrade system and/or comprehensive guide made by Anet devs themselves to help newcomers.

As of now I am taking break from PvP once again due to RL reasons and WvW tournament, but I really wish PvP gets some major patch as much as I wish for new dungeons/fractals in PvE. I really hope Anet drops Living World as their main focus and start working on other gameplays that really need fixing and revamping, but I don’t think I will see that until release of gw3. Just my two cents :P

Hello,

So its not secret that this game’s pvp is very underplayed compared to the rest of the game. We’ve seen many attempts to improve sPvP and bring in players, but most have fallen short. That is not to say we saw no improvement, but when compared to the game as a whole the population improvement seems marginal.

Here are some of the reasons why I think conquest fails as a game mode and is probably the worse out of the new one and TDM.

Problems:

1. Poor Meta. The meta that is produced by conquest design isn’t overall entertaining to watch or play. It does have its merits and is fun, as they say it “gets old fast”. The meta seems to be heavily focused on AoEs. Now the design of AoEs would warrent to move out of them, however thanks to conquest design compared to some map designs, the AoEs are often difficult to move out of. This could be because you can’t let the point get decapped. Another reason could be the frequency and size of AoEs being cast its near difficult to try to reduce their effect.

2. Lots of none combat related skills. The biggest thing to this game mode and the thing that decides if games are a win or lose is map awareness (and from that rotation). Rotating heavily relies on a users map awareness. If anyone here has ever played a dota or anything like that, you know that map awareness is something not a lot of people are good at. The ability not to focus in on one thing at a time. Conquest HEAVILY relies on this. So even if you’re the best player in the world in combat, if you’re not rotating well then you could lose a lot of your games. This frustrates a lot of people. This is also why WvW is so popular. WvW is a lot more based on a person’s combat expertise rather than things like rotating and map awareness. I believe this is one of the main reasons people prefer WvW to sPvP.

3. Hard to carry, easy to ruin. Unlike MOBAs where one person could easily carry a team or in WoW, its VERY hard to carry in this game and this game mode. The game mode is one of the primary reasons, but also the downed state. It is also very easy as one person to completely ruin a game. Someone not rotating well, going after a secondary objective at the wrong time, not focusing, etc; these can easily cost you a game

4. Lack of Big Plays. This doesn’t promote big plays. There aren’t many, if any, big plays that can take place with combat; so all of it relies on movement. Movement related big plays are often less entertaining. Not only this but they rarely happen with conquest. The best map it takes place is Temple of the Silent Storm. Legacy of Foefire it can happen, but it requires a team to take a BIG risk. Many of them don’t do it as a result.

5. The Downed State. The Downed State is a lot easier to manage and a lot less noticeable in WvW than it is in sPvP. Many of the people I’ve played with since release and new ones I play with all have gone through similar train of thoughts when it comes to the downed state. First they either started with PvE or WvW and liked it. Then they got in the fence about it after playing WvW mostly. Then after a lengthy period or prolonged sPvP play the begin to dislike the downed state and agree that it has no place in WvW or sPvP. I find it funny that the people I argued with a year and a half ago about the downed state now talk about how much they hate it.

Suggestions to Fix the downed state in sPvP and WvW

1. You can not heal players by “rubbing” them. You must use an ability or defend them and let them rez themselves up

2. You can not rally off of PvE creatures in WvW

So if we’re going to see the new sPvP game mode bring in players and warrant them playing over WvW its going to need to address that stuff. The downed state may not be the most important, but if we dont’ see a increase in the sPVP population it could be a major reason.

The new sPvP game mode needs to

1. Have the ability to see “big” plays without causing a team to sacrifice a ton, so much so that they don’t want to do it

2. Produce a different meta. With conquest fights were often focus on or around points causing the mobility of some classes and the freedom of movement during battle to be lessened.

3. Can one player make a big difference positively? Or just negatively?

If those things aren’t properly addressed I feel that the continued request for a TDM game mode will continue. The TDM has a lot of merits and could add a lot for the game, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Although we can identify many problems, the one that personally bothers me the most is the following: “infodump”.

The game throws way too much information at you at every single moment. Conditions, boons, “random” passive procs, pets, “random” cleaves, particle effects, and skill spamming. There’s always way too many things happening at once, it’s nearly absurd. Throw into that pot the unsatisfying number of key telegraphed skills, because some weapon sets are entirely designed around being powerful with very quick cast times or animations that are too similar to each other.

I’m not a top player, but I have a hard time believing that even the best players can manage so much information at the same time and react strategically to it. For most of the situations, I feel, it’s much wiser to react instinctively, and you only have some “room to breath” when you pick the OP easy-to-play or hard-to-counterplay cheese.

The information this game expects you to be aware at any given time in combat makes more sense to a turn-based RPG, than to a fast paced RPG like this one where you can lost your entire health from a sudden 3-second burst.

Even if the top players can somehow manage this infodump, it still creates a massive skill gate to most of the playerbase, which turns the entire learning experience into a “I don’t even know what the hell killed me, again…”. And no, it’s not only about “L2P”, before someone throws this excuse. If the first impressions (and second, and third) of this game’s combat system is that of a mess, and if you need to study hard and dig deep to even understand what the hell is happening on the screen and on the UI versus each meta build, it won’t motivate many people to keep investing on, when there are other pvp games in the market that are equally complex, possibly deeper, but with much, much clearer gameplay.

The same problem applies to spectators, who can’t even understand what they see.

To me, this is my biggest problem.

I wrote that already before the patch hit life that if they want us to give progress
for stats and traits only every x levels, than they should really remove 75% of the
levels and make lvl 20 max .. so we can again get stats / traits every level, and we
don’t run into this problem, since of cause mobs have also be changed to lvl 1-20.