Guild Wars 2

I would aslo add 4. Lower map cap by 10 (at least on EB) to reduce skill lag when all 3 servers meet. Other than that it might be interesting to see the result of this. Just bring it before 2018 :P

World linking is, imo, more like a solution to the deficit of active players on several servers rather than balancing population all around.

If you expect a long term balance and the rumoured PPT rework – more pts during evening active hours, less during nights (not sure if it’s already in game or not or if it’s being worked on – I’m not playing much), well… There are prolly gonna be 1 or 2 more expansions to the game in some future 2-3 years, but honestly after already 4 years, I doubt Anet would spend resources to really polish this problem. Maybe GW3 someday with a different system, guild alliances or something…

Tempest AoE Heal + Elite are kinda useful too compared with selfish or not so good standard Ele heal/elites.

Maybe it’s some guys from this kitteny ESL sticking their noses into the game telling blabla it has to be all visible. Then make it visible in pvp or some effects slider

I know there is a lot of clutter going on on bosses too, but what I see is that most problematic is the area where skill is hitting boss (in raid for example) and the very end of animations from many players put on top of each other makes the boss look like a christmas tree, all covered by white shiny effects making it unable to see what action he is gonna perform. Maybe just reduce that ‘end-effect’ of skills and leave ‘mid-effect’ like projectiles or other things be as they were? Plox.

I’ll try to give you quick overview on what you might want to look at.

1. Your gear. Check what kind of items are you using. There are several different tiers – white, blue, green, rare (yellow), exotic (orange), ascended (pink), legendary (purple). The higher tier the better stats, except for ascended=legendary stats (just better looks for legendarys in most cases + you can change stats at any time). Since you are new to the game you should aim for at least rare (yellow), but preferably exotic (orange) type of equipment.

2. The stats – these are points like power, precision, toughness, vitality and so on. When you press H and then choose 1st option on the list you will see panel with your character, on left and bottom right you have your gear, on top right are your stats. Take a while to see what is what there. Optimally if you are having problems you might want to balance it out and not go full berserker like many guides state, but to add some toughness, vitality, maybe healing power too (depending on the build).

3. Hero points and utility skills (also trait unlocks). When you level up, explore and gather Hero Point from the map you gain these “Hero Points” – it’s the points that are used to unlock utility skills and traits for your character. Press H and then select 3rd tab on character screen to see how many points you have and what you can unlock. I think at lvl 80 you should be able to unlock most if not all of the stuff there.
Utility skills are the skills on right side of your HP bad (big red thingy in the middle). There you have Heal skill (most often 6 on keyboard), 3x utility skills – these are most often longer cooldown skills that you use in certain situation, for example Lighting Flash when you want to teleport to some place or get out quickly from dangerous spot. Last on the right is your Elite skill – most often very long cooldown, but usually strong skill depending on class, not gonna go into details here. As elementalist you might want to unlock utility skills groups such as Cantrips, Conjures, Signets. Glyphs and Arcane are more situational and not such useful in most situations imo, but as you gain experience you will figure out what you need and when. The rest of your hero points you can use to unlock Trait lines (more below).

4. The traits – these are kind of additional ‘abilities’ that your character have in GW2. To see your traits you press H and go to 2nd tab on the left. There you see a grey’ish field on the right if you have nothing selected. You can pick 3 trait lines, in each line you can choose 3 major traits that you think will be useful the most in your gameplay style/content. Some of them are passive like dmg modifiers, some of them affect your skills for example Fire trait line can reduce cooldowns on your Fire skills or make the fire fields last longer and so on. Take some time to read the tooltips and you will have an idea of what might be useful for you. Also you can check some guides, but these most often recommend the most squishy damage oriented setups that might be a little too hard for new players resulting in often deaths.
My personal advice would be to go with Air or Fire, Water, Arcane trait lines for start. When you see ppl telling you top, top, mid or 3 2 3 it means the choice of traits in the each line. For example Fire 3 2 3 would mean you pick Fire line and choose the bottom trait in first part, mid in 2nd part, bottom in 3rd part.

Hope it helps, a bit wall of text, but I tried to explain the most important things. Some general tips:
As an elementalist who uses staff you should pay attention to position yourself well, most often you will be kiting (trying to keep distance between you and enemy while keep doing dmg on him).
This game has boon (buffs) and condition (debuffs) system. Boons are yellow icons near your HP/utility skill bar and they boost your character abilities. Conditions are red icons that display in the same area as boons, these are negative effects that are supposed to give you troubles. With time you will see which ones have what effects.

dancingmonkey.4902:

Atoss.1056:

My only problem was the ‘time’ of the day, because most ppl are busy during day time and have free evenings, that’s all.

What do you base this claim on? Who are “most people”? Why would they have free evenings and not free days, on a weekend? What metric are you using to claim and state what the other 5,999,999,999 people in the world do?

As I see it, this is a common theme in this thread that is problematic. Too many posters disingenuously claiming to tell us what people whom they know nothing about, in places they have never been, are thinking, feeling, or wanting.

I base it on my opinion that most WvW players are people ranging from school students to working ppl, who spend their weekdays from morning to afternoon in school/work and evenings at gaming/other.
Why I think it’s correct or close to truth? “Where are your queues during middle of day then?” Now is your time to acknowledge it and realize “Oh he might be right”…
I’m sure Anet has even more data about player activity during 24hrs and every day of the week.
No idea where you take these 5ninenineninenineninenine999nine numbers from, but it just makes you look even more funny and points out that you are really mad or disappointed. I understand you though.
I don’t read every topic or every post, but your claim about ‘too many posters disingenuously claiming to tell us what people whom they know nothing about, in places they have never been, are thinking, feeling, or wanting’ maybe comes because ‘there simply is more ppl willing to accept the changes’ than you might think.

I only state how it looks from my point of view. If you decide to go out, well, it’s your choice. My only problem was the ‘time’ of the day, because most ppl are busy during day time and have free evenings, that’s all. If they really have to change the day, so be it, but at least it’s at some ‘standard’ hours.
Maybe some day it comes back to Friday, it was/is the best time.

Samis.1750:

Since the advent of the megaservers, in my opinion there’s really only 2 strong communities left in GW2 – WvWers and the RPers (both which took a small hit with the megaservers).

I still remember guesting to ‘enemy’ server Lion’s Arch just to /laugh or /threaten at them or just chat with ppl around (Deso did to Vizu and probably many other servers too). It was good show of how the servers looked that time, each server had their own Lion’s Arch map where you would meet face to face the guys you normally fight on the WvW maps – you hear a guy in teamspeak “Guy’s I’m in Vizunah Lions Arch and here is this guy …..!!!” and then you see your server mates come with help to ‘fight’ them again xD – funny stuff
It really was some kind of force that was making you motivated to play PPT as well, you could call reinforcements from your ‘home base’ and so on. I wish it could come back some day, at least “Server based LA” map.
I know that most of the ppl I see in LA are from my server, but it’s not the same as in the past, if you played you know what I mean

/offtopic_end

I’m happy about time change back to evenings. Thanks.

As for Friday or Saturday, don’t think it will change ‘that’ much, just wait and see it guys.

Please Anet – consider an EU reset time more closely to evening – 17:00 to 20:00 is all acceptable. I don’t understand why the decision to put it in middle of day when many ppl rest after Friday/sleep longer/go out to have some family/lovers time or simply do house works because ‘work from Monday to Friday’. I can understand the idea behind moving it to Saturday from Friday, but such early hours are not gonna suit many ppl – mostly working adults.
Once again, please consider moving the time closer to evenings.

A trait that gives quickness while overloading could be nice, to speed it up. Maybe one of adept or master tier? Give a choice between overload fast or overload with stability or protection?

Too bad we still lag in WvW when the map caps are around 90-100 by what it looks like :/
I really liked it when we had lower capacitys.

Don’t know if certain amount of yak is needed. During test noone was really putting pressure to snipe yaks or prevent enemy having camps while main force attacks the keep, but during real gameplay it will most likely happen. When defenders use up the supply for repairs/siege they will see that they need yaks as well. Just my opinion.

What if I’m member of that guild who claimed something, but atm I represent some other. Counts as being on the map still?

Maybe we could have a button to [Unclaim] or after claiming it changes to the other version, for example guild members play for certain hours, but then some other guild plays in different hours, they could take over…

Just found 1 more video I recorded today.

It’s about Fps drop when facing Earth Keep (garrison) from north. I walked around a bit trying to see why it happens, but it was like this every time (when looking towards garri from north). When we get close or fight inside it’s just fine, normal Fps.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuBOf5mANv4 – when looking any other direction it’s 50+ but when facing towards the keep it goes to 25+/-.

WvW is both fights + tactics.

September 2nd test

Some bugs/problems found or other suggestions.

1. Banners – they are strong with good skills, especially Turtle and Dragon banners.

- Centaur one might be a bit lacking compared to the other 2, but maybe in hands of roamers, camp defenders or condi build player it would work better, I didn’t play condi build so can’t tell how well it would work vs other players. The skill #5 on Centaur banner transforms the player into rampaging centaur, but it doesn’t add any stats boost which is a bit troublesome – but again I was just playing on squishy elementalist, so it might be different for other tanky classes. The knockbacks are nice and not in too big area, additional effects to choose are fine too, cripple, blind and the last one that I forgot atm. A little defensive stat boost would be welcome though.

- Turtle banner provides really nice defensive utilities, protection on auto attack is very nice/strong to support your allies. Other skills fit in really nice as well.

- Dragon banner seems pretty good as the offensive one. On berserker build with lot of dmg modifiers I was able to hit players with skill #5 for around 8-9k and that coupled with standing in the fire field which gives quickness can bring real devastation in choke points. Maybe it would need a little toning down, 10-20%. Hard to say because it depends on what build the player is using, tanky guardian commander would probably have less lower numbers. Skill #3 didn’t have information about what range it works in in the tooltip – seems like around 600 range.

The common problem with banners is that they do not share cooldown when used by different players. This leads to situation: A uses banner #5, drops banner, B pick up banner, use #5 and drops it, C pick up banner …. For such situation it really need to have global cooldowns for all players, not just cooldown per player. If it couldn’t be done, because it’s upgrade thingy taken from keep/tower, maybe it should not be allowed to drop it – ofc would have to inform the player in tooltip about it or something.’

Another problem is that the banners, just like other ‘spawned’ weapons like conjures from ele or warrior banners – can be picked up while using golem. Here is a short video to present it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw-JVi8iqqE

2. Guild claiming & tactics

I have little suggestion, if it can be done ofc. The panel with all info about structure could also show how much supply is in there – for ally only view. http://i.imgur.com/06B6xTO.jpg Just a nice feature to have, but if it can’t be implemented in some way it’s fine as it is atm as well. We will just have to ask in map chat or go there to check.

About tactics, some icons might be a little confusing for new players, especially if they didn’t take a look at guild upgrades in the guild panel, so it could be nice to have a short text descritpion as well. “Supply drop”, “Centaur Banner”, “Invulnerable walls & gates”… http://i.imgur.com/vtZkctp.jpg

Automatic turrets upgrade is very annoying at the gates, for small groups it takes a lot of time and effort/patience to attack keep which has this upgrade slotted. The turrets can’t be destroyed and attack quite often, every attack deals quite high dmg and knock-back. Maybe the interval between attacks could be a little higher, or the dmg lower/no certain knock-back on every attack. At least they can be blocked, but for that need to use certain skills from certain classes.

Banners have strong abilities though especially Dragon banner skill 5.
Problem is if 1 person use it then give banner to other person, the new user has no cd on skills so he can spam that skill #5 and give to next user and so on so on. On zerker ele I could do 9k hits, then when I enter the field to get quickness the dmg is getting very high. Imagine ppl rotating the banner like this in choke, who would pass the dmg zone ^^
Needs nerf for the cooldowns.

For ppl who play ‘only’ when there is tag on the map to follow it – it might look empty.
For all the rest who actually does play WvW and know how to play it, not only zerg around – it will be just fine.

This is funny as hell xD

Lag – no thx.

Message Body length must at least be 15.

Aura stacking could be interesting thing to play for sure if other auras, not only frost, would work this way.

[Nec] Necromancers and their leader Jayne.9251

Will we have access to EB map to check out the SM upgrades too or only the new map for now? I know it’s called Desert Borderlants Stress Test, but since we can claim ‘the big castel’ too I was curious.

Thats some great news, glad to see action in the WvW section Just make sure couple other things are fixed from other threads and it’s gonna be really nice start, maybe xD

Are we gonna have access during this beta to all these upgrades from guild claim? And access to EB to check out SM upgrades too maybe?

Basically when I put on the commander tag I cannot invite ppl to party or join them by choosing option in the ‘right click’ menu. I can only join or invite when I manually type the magic formula in the chat /invite or /join, but it’s troublesome when the player name is long or has weird letters from other languages.
When I put tag off the problem disappears though.

I know there are other topics about this matter but me and many other players are honestly tired of this problem.

The map population cap was raised, after it worked FINE for several weeks, resulting in lag back in the game. I don’t know what motives drived this decision, but as we can see it was a wrong move – happens. More and more people are quitting WvW or the game itself because of this issue. Big battle starts somewhere – anyone else on the map has their skills affected, doesn’t matter what are you doing.

During the time when map cap was lowered we had very smooth gameplay with basically no lag even in a big 3 way battles. Now it starts to lag even when it’s just 2 servers fighting each other. Yes – it is mostly EB problem, but it occurs on borderlands just like it did in the past.

So please, can ArenaNet lower the map cap to how it was during the time before last change? Since the permanent solution is impossible to find at the moment (because we know that you are very busy with expansion) this temporary fix would help all the players a lot to enjoy the game as we should be able to.
I speak as a player on EU servers, don’t know how it is on NA side, if it’s fine then you could lower the cap just for EU servers or just for EB.

Any actions or reply will be very appreciated.

Well, if you take lightning rod + tornado it can be fun in certain situations.

On the 2nd tab there will be a list of guild buffs you can have for the objective. http://i.imgur.com/iHl5HEJ.jpg

Lower cap please as it was earlier. It was very comfortable play before the change, but now we are in pain again :/

I liked roaming, lot of space, many different terrain giving you ton of options how to go through the fight.

About ac’s – there are counters to these too, but attacking T3 keep with defenders and siege is gonna be harder and take some longer time, depending on how clever the defenders use their time and sieges.

6. Inner areas of keeps are very large compared to old ones so a duo team of mesmer+thief can have good times hiding there. However it’s called keep for a reason, if you want to keep it you will have to check for such things – prepare stealth traps.
Another thing is that the inner gates are relatively far inside and the road to supply camp is quite long – in case you miss that 5 last supply to finish ram. If there are defenders inside, I think Supply traps will be very effective. Once again, improvements for defenders!

7. The fall dmg traits – I really see a lot of use for them on this map. At some point I just started to use them constantly. A lot of vertical level differences in terrain should allow to use them a lot more often than ever before!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWYl39HMMBU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5ebUaANPJU

8. Other bugs and concerning things – Some stuff I haven’t seen in other threads yet.

- in far NE area there were some Wyvern champions, we had no clue what are they doing there. http://i.imgur.com/IDlAKr0.jpg

- the opposite side was pretty empty, but we found the Quaggans not gonna put spoilers here though

- Gandalf Eagles http://i.imgur.com/mNW0hIN.jpg

- If you fall here by accident you can’t jump out, only waypoint, NE tower stairs/wall http://i.imgur.com/Sm5vAqD.jpg

- Noth exit from Air keep, I thought it’s a nice hiding spot, but when I couldn’t come out I realized it’s just a bug http://i.imgur.com/JlJYZDJ.jpg

- The Shield generator seem pretty strong, especially the large bubble skill #3 that gives immunity to arrowcart fire. 2 of these generators could allow bigger group of attackers to relatively easy block most of projectiles + arrowcart fire, and in that situation the defenders would be left only with trying to get the generators or call bigger forces to defend.

That’s all. I have to say the map is beautiful and nicely optimized as well, I have much nicer fps compared to other maps on the same settings, it only dropped a bit couple of times near Earth keep when we watched it from south, but other than that it was pretty smooth even in bigger fights. I wasn’t part of any big 3-way fights though.

Hey, thx for inviting. Here some thoughts/pictures from my testing time.

1. The supply spots in keeps are kinda invisible, at least in Air keep when you try to defend the inner gates, I don’t think I saw a supply depot nearby. There was 1 near POI, but that’s on the outer region of keep. If I remember right there are 3 only near each of the outer gates. I think one near lord room would be nice too – the area there offers kinda equal distance to both inner gates. Also some icons on minimap (at least after zooming in) to help locate them would be nice, or if we could see them from a bit further distance through the textures? Dunno which one is better choice.

2. The shrines. They have nice mechanics giving strong abilities that are really worth to control and I think it will be worth to have some squads dedicated to keeping control of them – especially Air keep shrines – you don’t want to jump down and then see that enemy took the shrine and you are gonna splat on the ground Maybe it needs some deactivation time, for example the “buff” icon starts blinking after enemy took 1 of the 3 and you have that couple seconds to notice “I better get out of lava” or “I shouln’t jump now”.
They could also have some tooltip description about the effects, some new players might not know it from the start. http://i.imgur.com/9WF8PSO.jpg “If your world control 1…2…3… shrines then you gain x,y,z effects”.
The guards at shrines are pretty easy to kill solo and they don’t do much dmg.

3. Keep gates were kinda confusing to find at start unless we zoom in the mini map and take a look at it to notice the structures, but with time we can get use to it. Similiar for the walls, not that easy to spot untill you get to the place.
http://i.imgur.com/KpVtZo5.jpg
At Fire keep the map wasn’t zooming for the underground levels.
http://i.imgur.com/BNkUxUC.jpg

4. The guards. This is troublesome, depending on how many ppl are attacking. Larger groups should have no problems because they will just streamroll through any guards, but when its a small group, not to mention if they have no ranged classes they might have a problem, especially at Fire keep, the Charred Fleshreavers. It feels weird when we attacked the ones on ground and they use taunt ability all at the same time. The ones at top walls bombing us all the time as well.
At one gate there were 3, at other there were 4 of them.
http://imgur.com/pGZvv2n,pfpvHnS#0
Also the locations seemed to differ depending on the keep. In Fire or Earth keep they have rather good placements causing most if not all of the guards on higher levels to attack the intruders, but later in Air keep the tengu guards were a bit far away in some places and didn’t seem to care that keep is under attack :P
http://i.imgur.com/lzuTkaF.jpg

5. The lords – they seem really nice made, thought a bit strong for small groups especially if defenders show up at last minute, the lord will very likely be a deciding factor in who wins the fight. We even managed to kill several larger groups when they ‘tunnel vision’ at lord and ignored the attackers – bad habits from other maps. Good job on these. Btw, isn’t Fire Keep lord named after Tirzah? :P http://i.imgur.com/jp2rZUf.jpg

Nice vid Menaka, the treb spot especially, it reminds the spot near Vale camp where you can treb Bay, but at least Bay can have waypoint and it’s waaaay easier to get to the camp and counter attack.

Yes it’s certainly minis! If enemy zerg has 60 ppl but we have only 30 cuz all of them use minis!

For real though, where do ppl take such stupid ideas from? X_X

Here is lagging again (Rs/Ar/Fsp) on EB in a 2 way fight with 3rd zerg not far away capping a tower x_x

2 greens and 1 blue

We had zerg vs zerg inside EB keep Fsp vs Riverside and it was starting to lag a little already. I guess if all three sides meet it would be lagging harder. For zerging it’s acceptable, but roamers would feel it more.

Test starts tommorow so…

Khan.2374:

You think people haven’t tried that? Search “Blacktide hacker” on Youtube and dozens of videos will come up. I know the posters of several of those videos personally, and yes, they have sent them to exploits@arenanet.com. We know ANet has banned them at least once as they gave us a “public execution” video, but they have multiple accounts and keep on coming back.

Keep reporting and they should keep banning then.

Tonikor.5637:

43mb at 1kb/sec.

i hate my life

Mad cuz bad ^^

Record him, send to anet. Then they should track his original account and ban that one as well.

LoL at all the ppl crying “I can’t bring my friends to my xxxx T1 servur, qq” – if you care so much to play with your friends why don’t you go to lower ranked one and play with them there?

Some servers are hard over-stacked and it’s not hard to see which ones, but insisting to try and get even more ppl there is hilarious. If I was marking servers I would mark some as “Beyond Full”, for real… x_x

I’m kinda ok with Dragon Tooth as it is now, useful for siege destruction :P

Thief is not a big problem I think, but mesmers after last patch can burst you from 100 to 0 pretty easy if you run glassy build ( I do ), especially if you don’t see them coming ( stealth op ).
Maybe if they ever changed stealth so that you see the enemy in range of 200-300 units from you, giving that 1 sec to react to full GS 2-GS 3-F1-F3-F2-MoP – press everything combo… So far you can only stick with zerg/group of ppl or change build to something allowing you to take a hit.

The question is how do you treat a player who has the time to play 12hrs or more per day, and how do you treat 3-4 roamers on opposing server who play 2-3hr per day.

Long time coverage split over many hours vs. peak coverage at evenings.

Add siege skins to cash shop? xD
Don’t know how they would have to implement it though, maybe some item that you apply to your stack of siege and it changes the look this way. With some fancy sieges ppl would feel more ‘personal’ about defending as well maybe?

Maybe it has additional effects beside that cd reduction too?
And for how long it would affect my allies, for example: I cast elite, then thief uses basilisk venom and it is already on 75% cd from the start? Then it could not be stacked that way with let’s say 4 eles use it does not equal basilisk having no cd at all.
Ele A use elite, Ele B use elite but has 75% cd already, Ele C use elite but also has 75% cd, Ele D use elite and as well 75% cd. In meantime previous eles have those couple seconds ticked + they could use other skills in meantime and have their cooldowns reduced also, so we will have to see how long is total cd of the shout.

Mesmer Mimic sounds stronger, but on the other hand it affects only utility skills making 1 to be “wasted” for mimic.

I think it will be very situational for small cooldown skills, can’t rly imagine using it for Glyph of Storms or Renewal, Conjured weapons, mist from or arcane shield. Maybe it will work out well with Atunement Overload or Wh skills, because atm it sounds like “oh nice” but based on what we know I would stick with fgs.

The effect of this elite feels to be really delayed in time, but if you need something right now it doesn’t offer much help imo. Either you have the fight planned or something goes wrong and messes up your “rotation” so that you forget about that reduced cooldown anyway xD

rotten.9753:

Atoss.1056:

I can’t understand why ppl complain when they haven’t even seen the skill set yet. Not to mention why would you want another close range dagger-like weapon… Warhorn seems interesting.

Why would you want another close range dagger-like offhand or another ranged focus-like offhand?

You have not seen the skills yet so you’re just speculating. Focus is very defensive offhand with basically 2 useful range skills, rest are self-cast. Dagger offhand is again very close range weapon. We will see what warhorn brings, but ppl complain without even seeing it. For real, go run a bit or something instead complain complain complain all day…