Guild Wars 2

Trying to look at things objectively, it seems that perhaps the largest criticism against a damage/utility meter is the unavoidable toxicity that would arrive with its introdution.

Would players perhaps feel more comfortable if damage measurements were not viewable by anyone outside of your guild/friend list. That way it’s unlikely to be abused in a restrictive manner (Assuming you’ve chosen your friends wisely!), yet can still be utilised as a useful means of pinpointing where improvements can be made.

Eirdyne.9843:

In general I look at anyone and anything that asks me to use a DPS meter as the same thing as saying a liar, a cheat, and a sloth riding on everyone else’s coattails.

I fully agree and yet this is my main reason for advocating the introdution of some kind of damage meter. We’re fed so much information that leads to class / build bias, that at the end of the day trying to ask a guildmate about their damage quickly boils down to “I’ve read that your current weapon/class/build isn’t very good, and I have a sneaky suspicion that you’re not pulling your weight here, could we have a quick chat?”. Which is a horrible thing to say to anyone without any real evidence to back it up.

SteepledHat.1345:

Coming from games like WoW and FFXIV… you barely have rotation in GW2. Why the heck do you need a dps meter?

It’s very class & build specific, but certain builds are incredibly reliant on good rotations in order to keep up the damage.

FFXIV was awesome in that it highlights a good option for you to combo into, with very little that can go wrong if you simply follow which buttons light up. GW2 feels a little less intuitive as mostly every skill on your bar is a DPS loss, and the next best skill for you to use may not even be visible (It might be on your other weapon/kit/attunement) so you have to keep something of a mental note about when the skill will be off cooldown. There’s loads of room for error basically.

DresdenAllblack.1249:

More of a problem than a solution.

Go in with guildies/player you know. Ask them what their dps is.

The problem is; very few players actually know their true DPS.

I estimate my damage using champion risen giants / bosses in Arah which I know the HP values of. However I can almost assure you that my DPS against the Vale Guardian is lower due to environmental reasons. It’s difficult to maintain a good Viper’s Engineer rotation with AOE’s everywhere.

This is something that I’d love to see implemented with some measure of control.

Raids differ from fractals and dungeons in that there is a baseline average group DPS that must be met in order to have any chance at success. For the Vale Guardian this appears to be reasonably low at around 5-6k DPS (Accounting for phase changes). However for the later bosses the required DPS seems to have risen considerably.

Now if I’m leading a raid, and notice that it’s taking too long for us to reach the second phase (For Vale Guardian I expect phase 1 to be over at around 6:00-6:30 on the timer) then I’m put in the awkward spot of trying to establish exactly where the problem lies.

Having a DPS meter that’s visible to the raid leader, that perhaps only shows members of the same guild would be hugely beneficial as it would allow me to discuss individually with the person and decide how best for them to improve. If they aren’t willing to improve or don’t want to change how they play then I will feel no guilt in politely asking them to step down from the group.

Right now I’m having to make the same difficult decisions, but based on pure conjecture and my own bias instead of actual data which leaves me and the person involved feeling horrible about the whole thing.

IrisTheCasual.3742:

Lupi’s bubble is fixed. (Yay!)

Are you sure about this? Soloed him just now and his bubble seemed to be in its usual inaccurate state.

Especially nice job for doing it without an energy sigil, impressive stuff.

These glitches are new, and it’s highly likely that they will be patched out soon, especially given the response to the ranger call of the wild exploit.

I’m not a fan of the old FGS rush, but it was around long enough to become commonplace. As of now these new glitches represent a waste of time for record validators if they could be patched at any moment.

dboylolz.3916:

AnariiUK.7409:

Nice use of the aura sharing trait, didn’t know that it worked for magnetic aura!

Your sentence sounds incredibly stupid when you include the name of the skill.

Aha yes it does, but given the state of tooltips it still wouldn’t surprise me.

Also I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work with certain Aura’s (Fire Aura via leaps etc).

Nice use of the aura sharing trait, didn’t know that it worked for magnetic aura!

krixis.9538:

so your in WvW or SPVP and u meet this warrior who is able to outrun u and put insanse distance between themselves and you. and you are unable to catch up because swiftness causes their mobility skills to have 50% increase in distance traveld.

and now we know why it was nerfed.

nothing worse then some 1 able to escape combat at any time they like with no way any 1 can catch up or stop them.

now imagine your caught in a fight u know u cant win. but u cant escape cos you are slow / crippled and your mobility skills now let u move half the distance. o noes u cant escape anymore.

if u cant understand this don’t bother playing PVP u will just end up whining about something else that’s changes.

Aren’t your points here just two sides of the same coin? Like you’ve said yourself, the counterplay to a class with high mobility used to be cripples and chill. This counterplay doesn’t exist anymore, the warrior is able to disengage regardless of their current ailments.

From a PvE perspective the change just slows down general movement, making numerous skills feel sluggish or not worth casting. There are still issues with landing lag on numerous skills (Savage leap, FGS #4, Ride the lightning) and skills like burning retreat cause severe rubberbanding if the ping exceeds ~100ms. Additionally as Miku pointed out, I’m yet to find an out of map jump that isn’t possible after the changes. Perhaps the better approach would be to correctly flag required PvE events such that it’s not beneficial to skip large segments of a dungeon; that means it’s still fun for people to explore but you don’t have ridiculous half-path skips such as Arah path 4.

The new JP was done very well in that you need to collect the key pieces as you progress, meaning it’s not beneficial to just mountain goat up to the final chest; however mesmer portals still remain an issue.

Looking forward to it, the last trio tournament highlighted some really interesting strategies that I didn’t think were doable 3-man (E.g Andal corner stacking in HoTW P2). I also love the 3-man format, the combat in GW2 really shines with 1-3 players.

Best of luck to all teams that enter!

Wow, I heard slow was causing chaos but didn’t expect this!

Ran P2/3 solo last night, and staff Ele DPS just seems insanely high now; even when running 6/6/0/0/6 instead of 6/6/0/6/0 so I didn’t have the water modifier. It doesn’t help that linecasting has been indirectly buffed with the new ground targeting options.

Having another think about this, I’m worried that clearing the route to a guild hall will be a one-time endeavor; aside from doing it with different guilds of course. I can’t see them committing a large amount of development to something most guilds will probably steamroll through on day one.

I think I’m with Brazil on this one, it’s not entitlement; it’s just looking at a product and weighing the value of it against the cost. Given the current information, HoT is set to offer close to nothing that interests me. I think if they had something big like raids to announce, surely we would have heard about it before they opened the pre-orders, so that chance to blow my mind is dwindling thin.

Guild halls look great, Elite specializations look great, the new map(s?) look(s)…… ok. Regardless it’s incredibly difficult to justify a 50 dollar advance payment on this when we’re forced to speculate with peanuts for information.

Very interesting, hopefully you’re correct.

Personally I saw ~10 players running into a huge fractal like portal with the subtext “Adventure together” and my eyes lit up as I was sure this would be their implementation of guild raids. Then my head hit the desk as I realized that it’s just a glorified waypoint system for guild missions.

Very very nice kill! Shame about the IB#4 cancel at 2:48, not much you can do in that situation.

It’s still quite fun on warrior, you’ve tempted me to try it with missile deflection now! However I do feel the fight lost much of its appeal following the changes; autoattack aside the complete lack of pressure from his phase 3 attacks feels off and it’s almost beneficial to jump around like a madman trying to bait out his bubble. It used to be that you could sacrifice your defensive abilities (Stamina signet, riposte etc) and run the max DPS build, leading to some interesting moments. Now there’s less flexibility, and I feel shoehorned into running certain skill setups just to avoid the barrage of autoattacks.

Also I can’t for the life of me figure out how to reliably solo him with D/F elementalist anymore, does anyone have any advice here? (Not using energy sigils currently). Renewing stamina, magnetic wave and swirling winds are great, however earth CD makes using ring of earth tricky.

I’ve always done dungeons purely for fun, I never have and likely never will care about gold or achievement points. Provided there’s still something for me to learn or optimize within a certain path, I’m more than happy to run it multiple times a day.

If this thread is in response to recent topics regarding instanced content in Heart of Thorns then I’d imagine it’s pointless to try and gauge the general interest of dungeons. Arenanet likely has the numbers and will design content that suits their vision of the game. If the expansion rolls out with nothing new for me to enjoy then I’ll happily switch to a game that’s more in line with my interests.

Cyninja.2954:

rapthorne.7345:

Easy solution: Bosses do not spawn until every mob leading up to the boss has been killed.

Making dungeons take 10 minutes longer for full berserker, and 20 minutes or more for non zerker.

I’m sure that will go well.

If AI remains the same then it will likely be an even larger difference. One example being the first corridor in CoE, a deep-pull with zerker gear clears the whole room in around a minute. On the flip-side I’ve seen non-optimal groups taking upwards of 10 minutes in there.

As long as skills like sandstorm remain, stacking huge amounts of trash together and bursting them down will be trivial.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

In GW1 EoTN, you had many mobs that carried keys to the dungeon, which you had to kill in order to open the door to progress, the exact same thing would work here. No stealthing or running, kill the mobs, get the key, move on.

Interestingly, there are a few cases where something akin to this is utilised. For example, the requirement to kill the abominations before the door to Lupicus opens. It’s not a physical key, but they act like gatekeepers. Unfortunately if they were to randomize the key locations, it would completely destroy the speedrunning community owing to another level of unnecessary RNG.

In reply to the OP; personally I have no issues with skipping as it is now, full-clears can be fun for the first time but after that the killing of trash mobs quickly becomes tedious. That said, an increase in the reward for killing them would certainly convince more people to take the time to do it, however it changes little about how dull most of the trash fights are.

It’s a shame that so many people seem to dismiss the idea of new challenging content at a small-scale, particularly with the reasoning that the dungeon community is a small-proportion of the playerbase. I’d be very interested to see how many people would remain loyal to the idea of Silverwastes chest farm or daily Tequatl runs if they weren’t quite so lucrative for the wallet.

Personally I’d love some more challenging instanced content. For me, dungeons and small-scale PvP are by far the most engaging aspects of the game. Arenanet did an excellent job of utilizing various mechanics such as the combo-fields/finishers, controllable CC and precise movement/evasion that really shine when coupled with smaller scale skirmishes. Sure, there are issues that allow players to avoid the mechanics of fights but encounters can be designed and balanced such that those issues are either non-existant or restricted to only the most organised groups. Despite the analogy to WoW in the OP, I genuinely feel that it’s the active combat that differentiates GW2 in the MMO market.

Some reasonable suggestions in my opinion.

• Perhaps having a checkbox in the options that could autoskip previously watched dungeon cutscenes would be beneficial here. I recall reading that certain unskippable cutscenes (i.e Aetherpath) are for mechanical purposes such as NPC movement, so those would likely remain.

• Path selection could perhaps be made smaller following your vote. It’s surprisingly effective at blocking my entire screen, especially when clearing the first spider room in AC. These dialogue boxes also play havoc with certain ground targeted skills, for example when talking to Hodgins to spawn burrows in AC P1, his chat box often causes eruption to cast in a completely different place to the mouse cursor.

• I’d welcome this change with open arms. I think anyone who Arah’s frequently has accidentally talked to the dungeon NPC while trying to take/place the P3/P4 orbs.

• This makes sense, I often see listings like “P2 – Exp!” in the open world section and this change could help alleviate this. Don’t make it a lock-in choice though, many people list dungeon tours in open world while waiting in AC for example.

Puck.1509:

You’re complaining that there are more premades?? Oh lord save this community! We’re supposed to ENCOURAGE party play. Sheesh how else is this supposed to get more competitive.

Agreed, teamwork and communication are such a large aspect of PvP in this game. If a larger proportion of the playerbase is starting to form pre-made groups then that’s fantastic news.

Also, I’d wager that most premades are not PvP teams. Rather they are guildies that are just doing some daily PvP together with or without TS. I personally queue 5-man with my guild once we’re tired of running dungeons and we’re very often matched with other full guild groups, so the system appears to at least try to match based on group size.

The potential to match solo players with premade groups is something that has been present in many competitive titles (ie Halo 3). I think the important thing to keep in mind is that the system will prioritise balanced matchups based on roster size, the fact that it isn’t working very well may be more a testament to the small PvP population rather than the structure of the matchmaking queues.

Xom.9264:

I have even less respect for the players on ‘top teams’ then I did back in solo queue days. Most of them I found to be average at best when they stepped into solo queue, clearly carried players. Very few held top spots in both team leaderboards and solo queue.

That makes sense, in solo queue you’ve removed one of the largest aspects of competitive play (Communication). All they have left to differentiate themselves from everyday players is their personal ability, and GW2 doesn’t have a particularly high skill ceiling; as evidenced by the hoards of cheesy builds that ran rampant in the solo queue playlist.

As far as I know, Battle Standard is also affected by poison. Which means if you try to revive someone who’s poisoned while in downed state it will only fill ~66% of their HP bar. Not sure of the exact mechanics but that’s usually what causes it to fail, at least in my experience.

Iron man has come to destroy the Shatterer.