Guild Wars 2

the whole stacking affair and the game mechanics that encourage it suck, but it is no way worse or more boring than one guy beating some monsters toe and shouting “Boss, yo mama!” from time to time, some dudes standing on the side going pew pew and some more guys standing back bashing the bosses heel – while one dude even further back goes wooosh – wooosh every 3 seconds. Seriously, every of your posts tells how you dislike every core mechanic of GW2 and how you´d rather have those of other existing games. Why don´t you just give it up and move on instead of trying to force GW2 into your mold?

Theundersigned.4761:

Isn’t the obsession with maturity a good sign that we’re immature?

No. And if I needed justification for considering the story writing god awful, I´d bring up my literature M.A. – hope that is enough for your academic entry level of criticizing the game. Though I don´t make a big fuzz about the whole story thing, just your post is really off the mark. I can consider a car or whatever product unfitting, even though I cannot build a car myself.

Beldin.5498:

cesmode.4257:

Watch a WoW, Rift, or Wildstar raid. Those are real raids…doing the dance.

I hope we never get that crap here. If anything can drive me from the game than its that because i never ever will play some of these progression oriented MMO anymore.

it is not crap, it just is different from GW2. I enjoy both types of games. Just because you dislike it does not make it “crap”.

Mai Trin temporary dungeon, first time. Last man standing in the golem/laser room (yes, yes, I know, stack at the corner, but remember, it was new then). I equipped bomb kit and ran Benny Hill style, dropped bombs behind me for like 10 minutes – or it least felt like it – till the golems dropped – close to heart attack most of the time.

Sube Dai.8496:

uknortherner.2670:

Sube Dai.8496:

Living story was a colossal failure, even in revenue terms.

Presumably you have data to back up this “fact”?

Obviously I don’t but the gem store items available during LS were only available to a limited amount of players, for a limited amount of time.

Those items could/should have been available to any player when they have the time to play that content.

yes, limited editions and temporary sales are completely unsuccesful or unheard of in any other business…

please no, this game does not need to become that motley crew assortment of One Piece style characters that TERA has become.

or maybe Australia? Geez, the things people make a fuzz about. Anet is an american company, they speak English and probably identified that as “American”. If you are such a great European, then go the whole way, don´t play an american game. Pffff… This forum is really beginning to make me hate mankind.

whenever I read those posts, I just cannot understand. Unless they changed the leveling xp dramatically since start. GW2 rewards everything with xp, possibly sneezing. Unless you forcefully seek out zones over level, there should be no problem at all with keeping up.

Arrion.2185:

Yes. Let us go back to our individual servers where the lowbie zones are void of life, leaving the new players without anyone to help them when they have questions to ask, and their friends, if any are in the game, are not online to ask. Lets go back to the barren empty cities on the lower population servers, and over crowded maps we get put into queue for, because you want to be a selfish little brat and worry about your own gear.

I personally like the way it is now. And if your guild, provided you have one, is not active almost around the clock, then perhaps you should look into joining a guild that is so you can call on them. It’s not as if the guilds aren’t VERY actively recruiting now.

yes, funnily enough, that whole “3 people scenario” pretty much describes the former reality of the lesser populated servers apart from peak times. Instead of changing maps and broadcasting (and what is that with the whole randomness? Actually, that is exactly what is gone now and bosses have a fixed schedule, right?), OP could have easily switched to another map instance.

not worth it at all in bare, cold numbers, but I would never want to miss my tools and the silly lil´ copper eating machine again, especially in zerg style farm events. It really depends on you, the prices in GW2´s cash store are comparatively very high (you´d get nice stuff that would really affect your gameplay for that kind of money in most other microtransaction games I know). I wouldn´t even notice 12 bucks at the end of a month, could be totally different for you (student, teenager etc.).

Bah, there is no such thing as “too big” when it comes to burninating!

RavenClaw.4608:

timmyf.1490:

Rauderi.8706:

CCAB is also level 45 food. >.>
Might be worth it if it’s cheap on the Trading Post by then, but sub-40, I’ll roll with a Loaf of Bread and Maintenance Oil.

Especially since MF is a placebo~

Ha, I don’t know about placebo, but 18% isn’t a lot. Just remember that 10% gold find means it pays for itself if you can earn 6.5 silver / 45m from monster kills. (Or 8 silver/hour). And offers more experience.

But its only for killing mobs, if I eat some food and traveling the map to finish it to 100%, I’m not fighting 24/7, because I travel, do vistats, do POI’s and more.

So when its the best time to eat, and what is the best food I should buy concerning the money/xp I get from it, I mean not expensive food that gives bad xp boost.

it does not matter, food – beside the sought after few lvl 80 recipes – is so cheap you won´t even notice it. Have it running all the time. I don´t think there is an xp difference in any kind of food (could be wrong though). What to choose: that really is up to you and your build.

Larenc.1269:

LoreChief.8391:

Zerging is human nature. It is how wars are won, how battle are won, how fights are won. The more people you have the better. The game emulates life in that regard.

So your telling me that if I went out picked a fight with a bunch of wonnabe tough guys and end up beating them by myself I’m breaking the law of nature? Forget that crap.

The weak, The stupid, The lazy, The worthless zerg by nature NOT the people who stand out. Look back at human history. Thousands of people have stood over the peek. Simple really some people are better then others at different things. Over all tho most of the general people are useless in their own right. Why do you think half the world can barely use a computer[besides lack of funds] For example my father/sis cant do anything with a computer yet my brother/myself are great using one even able to make programs. Its all in genetics whether a person will be good at something or not, and 9 outa 10 times people follow a crowd instead of doing what they want to do.

Like the OP said zerging takes out all the fun out of the game thats why i’ve been asking for a hard mode that would get rid of the zerging. Cause the people who zerg wont be able to handle the harder setting.

marvelous. Let´s forget all the flaws in there which I will ascribe to some teenage misunderstanding of history, biology and sociology for a moment – and my unwillingness to even consider some forum tough guy could beat up even one, let alone a group of street thugs: In a setting where zerging/mass combat is possible, of cause even strong types would benefit and use it to their advantage, one hero + 1000 scrubs > one hero.

in fact, transfer fees are more justified now than they ever were.

Hexi.9148:

Hello,

I just purchased GW2. I played GW1 for a long time, so I have a few questions about this game and maybe you can help me clarify some of the confusion.

1) Which character should I play? I am deciding between Necro and Warrior. I really liked Necro in GW1 for the lots of ways to play it, but it seems to me that it’s a little bit different in GW2? I am not looking for the easiest profession. The fact that there are too many warriors (at least I heard) puts me off of playing warrior a little bit.

2) As I said, in GW1, there were tons of builds and specific combinations for farming, running, speed clears, different arenas, etc. Does this exist in GW2 too?

3) What’s the situation with population? Are there a lot of people playing? The thing that confuses me is that there are almost no videos on YouTube and when there are, they have very low view count. Again, there were tons of videos how to do something in GW1.

Thank you

Best advise: The sooner you forget about GW1, the more fun you will have. If you play the game as a comparison to the former, you will be very unhappy, it is very, very different (not insinuating any of the two is superior, that comes down to your personal taste).

Stooperdale.3560:

“No failure should get you more than a success, yet GW2 encourages that in many events. People are getting heat for completing stuff all over the place. And no, nerfing champs and events even further is not the answer – this whole madness is actually a result of the horrid reward system in the first place.”

I think you need to be even more specific in your complaint. Your original post isn’t going to get noticed if it is seen as “It’s all rubbish so fix it all, now!” I think a lot of your ire surrounds loot changes in the past that were uneven and unbalancing. These problems were not there in the first place! Making more knee jerk changes now are going to cause even more problems. Let’s be specific:

- Players complained that they didn’t get karma for a wide range of activities. It was then given away (in bottles) for all activities and players amassed millions of karma. People complain that gold is too important and that is partly due to karma getting broken as a currency.
- Players complained that champions had poor loot so purses were added to champions. Because champions were already in the game world with no balance for this type of loot, rewards were immediately imbalanced. Raid groups killed unscaled group mobs (champions) rapidly for loot. The players who shouted abuse at each other for killing champion mobs were always outside the design intent. It’s much better for the game to rebalance with players returning to an Orrian event/champion train, with scaling, in end game war zones.
- Players complained that world bosses gave no real loot so rares were added to world boss events. This meant that players watched for event times and went from one event to the next in sequence and killed them with auto-shot. This wasn’t good gaming but players always seem happy with bad gaming and good loot.
- Players complained about overflow problems so megaservers were introduced to equalize gameplay and add more population to zones. This meant event times were standardized and new problems are arising all the time.

Anyway, I’m sure you’re getting the theme here. The more that GW2 drifts away from the original design the more complications and problems are introduced. The rewards system has been broken, is broken, will still be broken, but just asking for a blanket rewrite with no offered solutions isn’t going to get us anywhere. The basic reward principle, that anyone who participates gets a full reward, still holds true and it is players who push this to the limits and then complain when other players cause them problems.

I think it is rather clear what I am aiming at. And I do not have to offer a solution. I am no game designer, I have no qualifications as a game designer, I don´t get a paycheck from a game company and I have no intention of starting a liken career. But guess what, there are people with these traits, possibly working at anet.

I absolutely have idea how you can misunderstand what I asked for. No, knee jerk reactions, “hotfixes” and the iron fist are exactly the opposite of what I am asking for.

And “ire”? Give me a break. I don´t really get worked up about a game, there are millions of others if I ever reach breaking point here.

Jack of Tears.9458:

Well, the reason they reward failures is because the dynamic event system can spawn some interesting results if you fail at a task, so success isn’t always the only way to have fun in the game. But, yeah, like any MMO what ends up happening is people figure out where the biggest payout comes from and then pressure other players into doing that instead of just having fun playing the game.

What I hate about the reward system is the pure randomness of it, to the point where I almost never get a useful drop from a major event – seriously, I think maybe once at most twice since release have I ever picked up an item from a boss fight that I could actually use. Every other time I’ve got stuff for other classes and ended up tossing them into the trading post … which, sure – fine – money reward … but I tell ya what, I’d rather have a useful item drop from an event 9 times out of ten than something I have to turn around and sell. I’d rather even have a slightly worse item than what I’m wearing, but what my class could use and looked keen, drop from an event than something I’ve got no use for and have no choice but to sell (or salvage I suppose – yipee!).

yes, that´s one of the problems. Sure, we get some random stuff from time to time, sometimes even a – gasp – exotic. Go, go gadget salvage kit, and on. There is no excitement there, no magic moment of getting something you will value and keep for its own sake (don´t get me started on random ascended boxes in a world with 1 or 2 favourable stat combinations). We more resemble peddlers in here than treasure hunters.

Devata.6589:

I keep repeating myself in multiple threads, now that’s also because it’s what I am annoyed by and so related topics get my attention. So here it go’s again.

Yes the loot system is bad and do you know why?
Almost everything is gold-based. There are not a lot of specific drops from specific places / content. That results in ‘lucky’ drops where many people get items they do not want. But they sell those items and buy what they want. The result is a boring gold-grind. If it’s not gold-grind then it’s often a rush against time what is also not fun.

But why make it this way. Now lets take my default example, mini’s. You can put mini’s in the game. One specific mini can drop from a specific quest or a dynamic event or a dungeon or you create it with crafting or it drops from a specific group of mobs in a specific place.

This means there are reasons to do specific content and people are less likely to get a ‘lucky’ drop they do not want that they then sell. Getting items and farming is more coordinated.

Farming is almost impossible in GW2 and as soon as a way to farm items is found it’s getting patched out in some cases the people who farm it even get a ban.

This of course has everything to do with there income model. It’s not so much B2P where they make money on the game and expansions but the generate most money with gem-sales. So the question is “how do we get people to buy gems”. Well by putting mini’s in the cash-shop in stead of in the world and by making gold very important and then selling gold for gems. It makes the game feel like a job in stead of a game and gems are they cheap way out of that.

That why I want them to be a true B2P game. No cash-shop. Just sell the game and regular expansions. As long as they generate most income with gem-sales we will not see big changes here. This game being B2P and ArenaNet’s name with GW1 being a true B2P game was one of the main attractions for me exactly to not have these sort of cash-shop focus related stuff.

works in other games which have reasonable “rare drops”. they sell cosmetic items, items with perks (yeah, a bit of p2w, who cares), or “fastlanes” to items. Actually, I just started one recently (not a MMORPG) and man, how exciting it is to get that rare, sought after item that was hard to aquire, yet would actually appear from time to time. That made me realize how frustrated I was with GW2. I spend less and less time in here and more in other games. If many players reach that level of frustration, it certainly is not a good business model. I still think GW2 is a beautifuly crafted game that offers a lot of fun, but the frustration level is just so insane.

I think you are overconcerned with the way other people play dungeons – which, quite frankly, is none of your business.

Flytrap.8075:

I’m almost positive that reports do nothing.

wrong. Seen it work (well, of cause I can only assume, but rather strong indicators).

soxx.7861:

Reverence.6915:

I fail to see how this is an issue.

the only reason this is an issue is because ambients do not give any buffs like stacks for a weapon so why should they reveal someone from stealth, especially if the person is trying to run you are more focused on getting away not “ooh hey look a rabbit” its just there and it’s annoying a nice change to it revealing you would be nice to get rid of.

this was really worth being necroed? It does not get you any buffs because they are not real enemies and hence should not qualify for you to get more powerful. And yes, it makes sense to be revealed, I´d be rather on my toes if some poor bunny got his heart pierced right next to me. Seems easy enough to avoid this, no change needed.

The whole game seems to consist of finding out which events to fail or complete or redo for the best rewards. And the players are not to blame, the whole reward system is the most horrible I have ever seen in any game. Farming is something other MMORPG do, in GW2, you scrounge.

No failure should get you more than a success, yet GW2 encourages that in many events. People are getting heat for completing stuff all over the place. And no, nerfing champs and events even further is not the answer – this whole madness is actually a result of the horrid reward system in the first place.

Please devs, take the whole reward system back to the drawing board and come up with something that rewards actually playing the game instead of failfarming events. And again: Nerfing is not the answer, no more champs without loot (“because players will just farm them and ignore the event”), no more pseudo “elite” champs. There must be a better way. If anything is the game breaker for GW2, it is the endless, perpetual tagging, scrounging and disappointment in the reward department.

Nage.1520:

Algreg.3629:

that might be rude behaviour, but you really cannot blame players for this. Events are there to be succeeded in. Yet Anet places trait unlocking behind an event that has to be failed first. Seems like horrid game design to me. Also, as far as I remember, people have every reason to defend the temple because there is a favorite farm area.

Griefing implies intention. If you’re saying pay the 3.5 gold noob, you’re not there to finish the event. You’re there to ruin someone else’s experience. Those people should be run out of the game, not because they’re doing an event, but because they’re so happily ruining the experience of many in the community.

This is just terrible design on ANet’s part. Really bad.

Saying “pay the 3.5 noob” does not imply anything, you can be there doing your thing. I imagine that guy, if he really said that, was being told by OP to stop defending first.

zenleto.6179:

Lishtenbird.2814:

Mitch.4781:

Between this and the toxic chat in Queensdale , I’m seeing some very very poor attitudes from the gw2 community

I would stand my ground and defend the opinion that it is poor game design decisions to blame rather then people who are allowed to play how they want and to grief others by doing so.

Of course you would. Its not Anet being jerks, its players. Nobody is forcing players to be kittens.

people are there playing the game. The game tells them there is an event, “defend the temple” or whatever. People do. Also, if that has not changed, people can get very rare crafting materials as long as the temple stays “open”. So their interest to defend is at least as high as yours having the event fail. You rank trait unlocking higher because you need it. They prefer it the other way around. This is not griefing. Griefing is not “people don´t do the thing I want them to do”. The whole temple events have always been flawed from a game design view (better rewards from failing and redoing events), throwing the new GM traits in there made it only more apparent.

Shadey Dancer.2907:

Algreg.3629:

one achievement high level pve. Among further, 5 very easily achievable pve achievements for low level characters. Ladies and gentlemen, I present you a “dramatic shift”!

First time ever for a daily in Orr, so petty much qualifies—and please lose the attitude, only diminishes any argument presented.

not going to drop my attitude concerning the incessant whining about each and everything around here.

have people been able to complete their daily doing only PvE? yes, easily.
have low level players been able to complete their daily doing only PvE? yes, easily.

Queen Kiearha.9873:

Furocity is crap compared to crit damage.

yes, and that was exactly the point, WAI.

Traveller.7496:

Yes, I too am aware that it’s not hard to get those 5 categories even now. But the point remains: why remove variety and options? The last time they changed the dailies they made a big deal how they wanted to give more options so people wouldn’t have to go out of their way to do a few specific dailies and it wouldn’t feel like a grind. Well now they removed those options again and went back to doing very specific set of dailies. This is what I don’t understand.

I think they reduced the overall AP per day to take off stress for the players. Many see AP farming as a necessary daily chore which will burn them out fast. I think I read some interview with WoW devs they regretted a comparable mechanic that cost them a lot of players apparently.

Misterdeeply.8764:

Astral Projections.7320:

Azure Prower.8701:

You do know you can buy them straight up for 3 gold and 20 skill points each right?

He did say that people were in chat were saying, “just pay gold noob” so I imagine he does know. But some people would like to earn them by playing the game and not by buying them.

Very much this! I also like the challenge to achieve it myself then buying it with gold. Buying it with gold is the easy way out.

getting 3 gold and 20 sp is a greater achievement than “tagging” any event in the game.

that might be rude behaviour, but you really cannot blame players for this. Events are there to be succeeded in. Yet Anet places trait unlocking behind an event that has to be failed first. Seems like horrid game design to me. Also, as far as I remember, people have every reason to defend the temple because there is a favorite farm area.

There is a reasonable logic behind this: If you do not manage to cause enough damage to an enemy, you do not qualify for a reward. While I can agree with this is system on a basic level, it is very quirky. You get party vs. single player, weird scaling of party vs. party. On champs and world bosses, you usually should be able to tag enough. If you don´t manage to do this, chances are loot shouldn´t really be your character´s biggest concern. Tagging in mass events is completely broken though in my opinion. Most players can destroy a group of standard enemies with 2 AOE attacks, it becomes a game of where you are at the very moment mobs spawn and the tenth of a second when to activate your skill. Not a very satisfying system at all.

one achievement high level pve. Among further, 5 very easily achievable pve achievements for low level characters. Ladies and gentlemen, I present you a “dramatic shift”!

engaging “no trinity mode”: verb indicating movement towards a destination, verb describing a popular pastime activity, noun name of a very popular mmorpg, developer synonym of ice storm.

SRG.3607:

You have to understand that, despite what devs are saying, the RNG loot system is buggued in GW2 : there are lucky accounts and unlucky accounts. Magic Find is just added to this base fact, lucky accounts will be even more lucky, unlucky accounts won’t see any differences.

interesting insight. Thank you very much for getting your hands on the source code and player database and checking millions of lines of codes.

Sergoros.4398:

Algreg.3629:

rebalancing is common and most of all necessary in mmorpg. Get used to it or look for another type of game. this will always happen and only warrant for a compensation in the most extreme cases.

So is it fine, if anet would decide to rebalance pvt set and make it into rampage instead? I understand rebalancing, when hey tweak numbers and change skills. Its fine. But when they totally change purpose of a hard-to-craft gear > it is not normal.

berzerker does exactly what it did before. It has the same stats and performs as a setup mainly for damage output – which is exactly the reason you chose it originally. Celestial has always been a jack-of-all-trades set and it still is. No, it is totally normal to have such rebalancings.

you can choose pvp rewards themed according to Tyrian areas/dungeons. Running story dungeons again unlocks them permanently while before they are on rotation (I think).

rebalancing is common and most of all necessary in mmorpg. Get used to it or look for another type of game. this will always happen and only warrant for a compensation in the most extreme cases.

Zok.4956:

Algreg.3629:

As for our countrymen in international groups and maps: EVERY german has english as a first foreign language right after elementary school, the trend is even going younger.

Maybe you should broaden your horizon a little outside of your peer group.

I know of two dozen german players myself who can read a little bit of english but are not fluent enough that they can write in english, so I have to do some translating for them (I am not that good myself). Writing in english takes more time than in the mother tongue. Translating takes time. Typing takes time. In some events there is not enough time for this without beeing killed.

Algreg.3629:

Ignorance is no excuse here, it is just arrogance.

Yes. totally. But this goes both ways.

Greetings.

broaden your horizon rather applies to people not willing to engage a conversation in a language they should know in this case. I am not talking about writing a thesis on the power pattern in Shakespeare´s Tempest here, but the very basic language that is used in a mmorpg. And yes, there are a few schools that choose french first, but that does not change the fact that no German can bypass english lessons at an early age. As for eastern germans – well, that applies to people past a rather high age as of now, english has replaced russian in importance by far and long ago.

I don´t think the scaling was changed, it is just more players now at these events scaling to maximum which we had not seen in a long time.

that would be against the best interest of the players – which is ridiculous. First farming, now traits, beats me why anet keeps designing events where you profit from failing them. And no, nerfing loot and other punishing mechanics are not the answer, rewarding success is.

Name.9625:

Well i am a native german, but i have always stuck to the english speaking servers.
The current possibility of being put onto a german server is very much against my interest and therefor i see it a bit different.
At least for the german speaking part of the community i can say that a lot of them seem to ignore any languages except for german. Even if people group up with them and try to get them to speak english they refuse and ignore it.
It my have been that it was/is the same for french/spanish communities, but i can´t tell because i can´t read those languages.

I second that, the day I will be forced into a german speaking environment by IP is the day I will quit. As for our countrymen in international groups and maps: EVERY german has english as a first foreign language right after elementary school, the trend is even going younger. Ignorance is no excuse here, it is just arrogance.

can you google translate “balance”?

Lalangamena.3694:

136 views and nobody cares?

well, it is a mess for sure, but the thing is: Most of these stat combinations are really unappealing so barely anyone cares.

Uriel.6310:

TooBz.3065:

The game is very casual for 90% of the content. If you want the last 10% you have to be hardcore. It also helps if you have a high tolerance for repetition.

I agree, this game can be picked up by most as 90% of the casual content is just the surface to this game. The problem however is that the last 10% is what we look at as the endgame. Fractals, temple Runs, farming for legendaries, WvW, world bosses. The problem with this is that not everyone who may be casual can participate in these activities due to obligations outside the game, and the 10% seems to be the beef of what takes place Post 80.

Now I cant critique without giving a possible solution but honestly I don’t know of one, I just would at last like to see them consider their other players who dont have time to take part in the last 10%. Leaving casual players out in the cold for the last 10% is not a good way to approach things.

Edit: And although this is not the topic but I guess what makes someone casual/hardcore?… I think all of our definitions of that are different.

The things you mention do not really exclude casuals (let´s stick with the generalization for a moment for the sake of simplification, there are really good casual players) and exactly that is the problem of GW2´s game design.

Anet wants to cater to casuals, that was made quite clear in every marketing they did. So they cannot have casuals feel “left behind”. But how do you do that? You cannot artificially raise the player skill of those people. So the only way is to hinder non-casual and good players. Anet does this with an immensely punishing reward system, time-gating and things like that.

If you consider the effort, skill and time needed for the harder content and check the rewards, they are very, very meagre compared to things like “champ training”. And let´s face it, “hardcore players” (again, a simplification) like a challenge, but humans look for reasonable rewards for their efforts also. Doing fractals for, if you are unlucky, two hours and getting things you´d get from farming easy champions in a quarter of the time is unappealing.

So many, many people flock to those mindless tasks. And “casuals” and bad players have no incentive to improve, why would they? So things get out of hand, economy is flooded with easily attainable wealth, whole sections of the game are ignored because there is no incentive to run them. Then heavy handed measures follow that hit all players, casual and hardcore alike.

Anets superegalitarian casual paradise is really turning into a nightmare (like all similar attempts have turned out in RL or in games). The moment they accept that you just cannot have a good game design if it punishes skill and commitment and rewards bad playing GW2 will massively improve to the benefit of casual and hardcore players alike.

the game is completely aimed to cater to casuals at its core which is the reason for the current heavy handed forced change of economy – which will again not solve the reward/effort issue. It is impossible with the premises at hand – and these are being “the great casual game”.

there are way more races in the game, just not playable ones. If anything, I imagine the number of dragons and their overall nature may be somehow tied to the gods (not relating directly in numbers eg (well, no idea how the great dwarf would fit in), but I have some theory I don´t want to spoil in here).

Personally I don´t care, I don´t artificially divide the game into pvp and pve, I just play Guild Wars 2. But some more choices in daily achievements wouldn´t hurt.

beside the new scheduled WBs now turning many of those chains into absurd endeavours: Errm, the big colourful area with text and directions and stuff on the top right screen seems to be somehow connected to event flows and notifications…

Xae Isareth.1364:

2. I wanna give an example for this. I think when devs talk about balance is pretty much alwats about PvP. The Secret World has a pretty tiny dev team compared to GW2 after Funcom laid off half their staff, and certainly doesn’t have a balancing team (the last balance patch was like a year ago).

Yet PvP in TSW is a lot more balanced and diverse than GW2. How? Because TSW has an extremely open build crafting system with no class restrictions at all, so the complexity of it means that there’s a lot more options open for many different play styles so you don’t end up having a few metabuilds that’s better than everything else. You can have a lot of skills in every class, but each class will still have a pretty much pre-defined play style and attributes, so you end up with a small pool of builds which synergises with that best.

two words: glance tank.

Don´t get me wrong, I really have a soft spot for that game, but pvp balance… gimme a break.

probably the same. things nerfed simply free my gametime to try something else which is a good thing. Already working on 2 promising projects to progress a bit and it is way more fun than FGS train. And a million people in Orr scaling bosses to one shot tactical nukes again has some element of nostalgia at least :P

frankly, I don´t know. The new things are fun and exciting at the moment, the constant reward nerfing though – while I can understand the reasoning behind it, at some point they really have to stop and let people have their toys. Worst reward/effort ratio of any online game I have ever seen. Synchronized boss timers certainly take the element of spontaneity out of world events. But I think this is the field we will see some further experimentation in.