Do you know how long it takes to get 100 pips each week?
If I was only getting 4 pips the whole time (highly unlikely for a veteran player) that’s just over 2 hours a week. If I was only in WvW that much, I’d consider that a week off anyway.
To be fair, a lower skilled player could pretty easily buy a carry through raids too.
Im glad theres new content but they released way to quickly
This is pretty funny.
I didn’t think “water support ele” was a thing.
That’s a ridiculous thing to say when McKenna has just given you information two posts up.
Maybe it’s not as prompt as you’d like, but you sure as hell didn’t have to figure that out for yourself.
Well played. But I don’t think Rick is technically female
Did anyone else notice that WvW players get a new glider skin? I guess it goes with the extra stacks of might on the mesmer phantasms!
Aside from that, this is looking OK, but I would rather the weekly rewards be based on your performance compared with the rest of your own server, instead of having to win skirmishes against a bandwagon server.
@ all saying it’s my fault because of my build:
You are surely one of those players having such a Mesmer character, looking around in WvW for single players and run after them to kill them to get your hand full of XP. Great job done, really.My PvP rank is 6, my WvW rank is 47. You know why? Because I don’t care for PvP or WvW, I’m a PvE player. But more often it seems to be much easier to do one of the WvW dailys to complete three daily quests to get the gold. This is the only reason my WvW rank is 47 (this and once completing a reward track for the final chest).
You know what I do, when I see an enemy who is close to the spot where e.g. I’m waiting for the Veteran creature? Nothing, as long as he also doesn’t do anything. More often I had moments, where I waited for a Veteran with an enemy close by and when the creature appeared, we killed it together and parted ways afterwards without killing each other (or in this case probably only me), even so we hit each other some during the fight.
So yes, there are players who aren’t killing a WvW noob like me on sight. Thanks to those players. To all others: Have fun at your life which consists of making the game bad for the few players who aren’t spending dozens of hours a day of optimizing their build.
As someone who actually plays a power shatter mesmer exactly like that -
Fighting a Dragonhunter is a risky prospect for me, especially 1v2. If I have to fight you I’m going to try to down you as fast as possible because otherwise I can expect to be downed instead pretty quickly. You will usually have as much average DPS as me, if not more, and you can heal far faster than I can. I’ll also run out of blocks faster – I only have 3, and 2 of them are on 40-second cooldowns.
My one advantage is that my burst is enormous (if it all hits), so I need to take that advantage.
Generally though, I don’t attack low-ranked players like you, unless you attack first, or you’re attacking an objective that I’m trying to defend (so never veteran creatures). With the exception of alt accounts for experienced players, those fights aren’t fun and don’t achieve anything – I learn nothing, and you learn nothing.
Perhaps, but FFXIV has 5 to 10x more armor sets than GW2, they’re more varied, they’re about the same quality, and they’re 99% obtainable in-game without cash shop. That’s thanks to having relatively similar body shapes on all races.
Given that “nobody” plays Charr and Asuras in GW2 anyway, I consider that having so many widely different races at the detriment of customization and cosmetics was a HUGE mistake on Arenanet’s part, and I wouldn’t be surprised to catch a few devs say that they regret it off the record. The game is supposed to reward with cosmetics, and armor sets are the most important customization option for most people, but the devs themselves say that it’s too hard for them to pump as many as in the first game due to having so many different races. That super varied set of races holds back the rewards system, which is a huge problem in a MMO. I’d go as far as to say that they should have gone with only humans like in GW1. I mean everyone plays humans, big humans (norn) or green humans (sylvari) so why put the effort?
Of course that doesn’t mean that I disagree with your point about GW2 having more varied races than most other MMOs, I’m just saying that the cost was not worth it in my opinion.
It may have made the customization more difficult, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d have designed the races differently in hindsight. But there’s a couple counterpoints to that.
- GW2 is the only major game that I can think of that’s actually done heavily customizable player races that aren’t just reskinned humans. It’s an example to the rest of the industry in that sense, and if I ever have to move on from GW2 I’m going to miss that badly.
- Despite that potential, they’re not putting that much effort into customizing new assets for the non-humanoid races. NPC clothes and armour look markedly different for each race, at least in the cities. What’s available for players, on the other hand, rarely fits the racial themes for asura or charr and most of the new armours and outfits are just stretched to fit. So I’d argue asura and charr don’t cause any significant problems with releasing new skins, because they’re simply not putting in much effort to adapt them to those races.
I think the extra expenditure is going to come in two places – the writers have to create a few more unique lines, and likewise for the translators.
Unless they add more dialogue per character, the voice actors will still do the same number of lines each, they just won’t be identical to each other with a different voice anymore.
Of course I’m biased, but I think it’d be worth the extra expenditure. Without the multiple playable races in GW2, I would have left within the first year after release. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask for each race to reclaim its unique perspective from the level 1-30 storyline.
Find a way to kill a raid boss with this, video it and post it on Reddit.
It’ll be nerfed within two weeks
Looking at the price on the TP, I have to conclude there are plenty of carrots, and the real problem is that there aren’t enough recipes.
Did you seriously just suggest allowing people to duel in raids?
Yeah, after the opening chapters of the personal story, race does just become cosmetic. Unfortunately the armour designs help to remove the distinction between races even more.
I’ve long since stopped noticing the more minor continuity issues with playing a charr. I play Ash legion as well, and when I think about it the story is riddled with them.
- The three orders – Forgal treats you like a fresh recruit, despite having a lifelong military background. Tybalt’s idea of spying is an embarrassment and realistically he’d be the one following directions of an Ash expert. Sieran’s failure to respect authority would be so objectionable to a charr that she wouldn’t be working with one past the first mission.
- Rytlock would not be assigning Iron or Ash soldiers to any of the orders. That’d be the job of their respective tribunes. Ash would expect intel in return – yet we never hear from Desertgrave again. For 4 years.
- After defeating Zhaitan, you’d figure a charr would report back to their legion before running around the countryside chasing Scarlet’s minions. It’s practically like the legions forgot our characters exist.
- Ditto after Mordremoth. And Caudecus (this one would be particularly important given the treaty).
I’d have to go through the personal story line-by-line to find all the places where the dialogue doesn’t sound right for a charr, so I won’t do that here. Let’s just say that the last episode had too many… for anyone familiar with charr lore, the reason is obvious.
I don’t think retconning past problems away makes any sense from a business perspective, but I’d like to hope that ANet can throw in the odd branch here and there in future just to give the character more grounding in its world.
(edited by Ben K.6238)
Those are game mechanics. I’m pretty sure GW2 mesmers are more capable of illusions than GW1 mesmers. It was said that casting an illusion as large as the Eye of the North (building) made Koro Sagewind, a very powerful mesmer in her time, go blind for a week, and in GW2 you have Queen Jennah making an entire Kralkatorrik illusion while simultaneously petrifying and making everyone look like Branded to save them without a scoff (at least without any side-effect we know of)
Lore-wise, yes, but this thread is about player characters.
There is without doubt a problem with pet balancing – there are too many pets that don’t contribute anything useful to many builds, and some don’t contribute to any at all. When was the last time you saw anyone use a boar pet, for example?
I am guessing it’ll provide a pretty drastic play-style change for Mesmers in order to avoid the issues with missing out on all that great Chrono stuff.
IMO will either provide a very offensive non-shatter based playstyle, that is only slightly augmented by shatters, or perhaps a very trickster oriented control-focused playstyle like the GW1 Mesmer, or maybe as someone said above a very Phantasm oriented playstyle.
I think the latter would be problematic as it would be perceived as being passive and “PvE in PvP” that most people loathe, so unless they come up with some really nifty stuff on that front my bet is on a strong Power-based offensive playstyle, or a very strong/annoying trickster/debuffer/interrupter.
I’m inclined to guess trickster, as we already get plenty of burst out of Chronomancer, but it’s a bit short on the debuff and sustain areas.
I’d be quite keen on seeing some phantasms that actually act like hexes, corrupting enchantments or reversing their effects.
I’m thinking of Ineptitude in GW1… a phantasm that corrupts stability, turning a knockdown into an AoE knockdown and then shattering after one trigger.
Something else that just came to mind today would be Illusion of Weakness – downing yourself to 75% downed state, giving you the ability to absorb an incoming burst and cast Illusionary Rogue, for up to 10 seconds or until cancelled.
Another thing that might fit with the theme is using the F5 to swap between phantasms, taking on their appearance and some aspect of their abilities. Could be a GW2 incarnation of Illusionary Weaponry.
Mirror Blade + shatter alone takes care of most generic mobs. Not sure I’d be so keen on burning all my cooldowns and the weapon swap as well just to take care of trash.
I’ve been playing around with sword offhand, and it seems to have potential – mainly because the cooldowns are so short, particularly on the block.
The downed state also immobilizes you and allows you to be 1-shot from stealth, if we’re considering that part of normal gameplay. The only place I know of where it can be beneficial to stay downed as long as possible is water combat with a mesmer, because that phantasm hits like a truck.
(Actually, I wouldn’t mind having an Illusion of Weakness counterpart to Illusion of Life, if only because it could briefly give access to that phantasm… now that would be a risky move.)
If we get to nominate the next god of war I’m choosing Canach.
Could go horribly wrong, or horribly right. Exactly what you’d want from the Tyrian Ares.
Deus Ex Machina does not literally mean god in a machine. The Literal Latin translation is a Machine from or of the Gods.
Other way around. God from outside the system. Machine of the gods would be machina deorum, I believe.
Balthazar was more of a deus in machina.
(edited by Ben K.6238)
Well, they could start by reducing baseline healing so that you get very limited effect from most heals and Regeneration if you don’t have any points in healing power.
It’s all very well avoiding the trinity, but if you focus entirely on DPS, you shouldn’t get full damage mitigation and healing for free. That’s how you ruin game balance.
Not so sure about player characters in general, but there’s little doubt the GW1 Mesmer was far more powerful than it is in GW2. Backfire + Visions of Regret would kill another caster after two spells. You’d need a ridiculous number of confusion stacks to approach the same effect in GW2.
And then there’s Diversion (next skill disabled for over a minute), Empathy (a bit like Retaliation but 10x as powerful), and the list goes on.
(edited by Ben K.6238)
It’s affecting my 1060 in the new zone as well – bottom right corner under the map is showing vertical bars.
Now that we have 5…
1. Ember Bay. Long time since we’d been to the Ring of Fire, and I love the atmosphere and map design of this one. Actually enjoyed the jumping puzzle too, though it wasn’t clear enough where to go.
2. Lake Doric. The towns were a lot of fun to play in, it was an open map that still had hidden surprises in it, and the meta-events were interesting. Wish there’d been more water though.
3. Bitterfrost Frontier. The forest was nice, but the map never really grew on me.
4. Bloodstone Fen. Just too small for my liking. I’d much rather have had it feel like the Maguuma rather than some otherwordly disaster zone.
5. Draconis Mons. The map is beautiful but unfortunately it’s horrible to play. Ranged aggro all over the place, very tricky to navigate. Some of the bosses are poor – fighting the wyverns on a character without stability is 15 minutes I’d rather have back. And the jumping puzzle, which would normally be my favourite bit, was ruined by a navigation-by-skill idea that should have been left behind in Dry Top.
No thanks. This puzzle was awful, entirely because of the oakheart tether that’s eerily similar to the skill that ruined most of the jumping puzzles on Dry Top. It’s laggy and more often than not you get obstructed by something that should never have been in your path.
I usually like jumping puzzles, but I never did those ones again, and this is even worse.
I tend to play Ash Legion charr, so there’s less to work with as their home city is off the map at this stage.
Actually, having zero day-to-day contact with the legion causes a bit of dissonance when I think about it.
Yes, you can get your cap stolen by a third team. The cap progress reverses while the defender is exclusively holding the ring, and it advances while one of the attacking servers exclusively holds it. If there’s more than one server in the ring, it doesn’t move.
Just curiosity here, but if YOU could redesign WvWvW from the ground up (i.e. throw out 100% of what currently exists), how would your vision of a “perfect” WvWvW work?
This has been a really interesting thread to read. Thanks for opening it!
As Subversion pointed out, you really can’t get a working WvW system unless players are encouraged to spread out. There’s always factors pulling them together – guilds for example – so to make it work you have to start by breaking one of GW2’s core tenets: that you should always be happy to see another player.
There may be a few ways to resolve it. My thought is that you should have to compete with other players on your server for the best rewards. This could be done using leaderboards – e.g. the one who kills the most unique enemy players each week gets an entire reward track for free. These leaderboards would be per-server, which means you have the best chance of winning the reward on a lower-populated server.
There’d be a few different leaderboards for weekly rewards, of course, for both individual players and guilds, and they’d need to be carefully selected so that sabotaging your own server, or trading points with players from another server, would not be convenient ways of getting ahead. But as a motivation for players to spread out rather than bandwagon, it seems viable to me.
The second thing that needs to be fixed is class / gameplay balance. Presently we’ve got a few builds that can do far too much damage, and a few that can absorb far too much damage, to the point where if you’re not using something that’s blatantly OP you can’t compete unless you’re very, very good.
The offensive damage potential just needs a bit of tweaking to bring the high-end numbers into line. We shouldn’t be seeing any skills doing more than 10,000 damage in one hit unless the target is naked. Condition stacks should be capped against players.
Defensively, the main problem is healing – if you’ve specced nothing into healing power, you should get very little healing as a result. If you want crazy regen, you should have to sacrifice all of your offensive power.
Solve those two issues, and I’d be happy with the WvW maps as they are, no further changes necessary. Since we’re asking about perfect though, I’ll bring in another two things that would just add some variety.
- 3-way PvP dungeons. Bring the Fissure of Woe and Underworld back, but with 10-player or 5-player groups queueing. First to kill the final boss gets the reward, and gives their server a boost. No respawn – if your team can’t res you for 5 minutes you’re out.
- Guild castles. Once a day you can attack or defend them in GvGs. Winning guild gets a reward for the guild and participating players, and the castles count towards PPT.
Bah I think they need to actually enhance smc…mobe the Lord up and make more floors….harder to defend / kill stealthrts but equally harder to take if you got to fight floor by floor. I say 5 floors instead of current 3. Put Lord on like 4th. Make siege hit Lord from 5th and 3rd so both sides can run siege.
It was on the second floor at launch, but they moved the lord to the bottom floor because arrow carts on the third floor gave the defender too much of an advantage.
I don’t think they’d be as strong today as you can mimic blink straight to the third floor and portal a zerg onto the siege, all while invisible. With that counterplay available there might be a case for moving it back.
I wonder if that map is the Ullen River?
They may choose to provide legendary armour for the other game modes at some point. Until then, I’m not going to worry about content in games I don’t play!
Yeah that’s true, like I said it was just basic idea of what it could be. It would obviously need to be worked out how to deal with the whole time issue. I just think there is way more potential for WvW. I know the way it works now might satisfy a lot of people. But for me, it’s just not very involved and doesn’t encourage small groups or even solo play.
Sure you can roam around scoring kills, but the people doing that are essentially just trying to work their PvP skills outside of the actual PvP mode. They’re not there so much to actually get their server to win. So I think there is room to improve on that and give people who actually enjoy that type of play a reason to do so. Eliminating enemy players or destroying camps actually has an impact.
Preaching to the choir there! I think if you had server leaderboards for who’d contributed most in a certain area each week, with bonus rewards associated, there’d be a bit more interest in it. Unfortunately you can’t reward too much on whether the server wins, as most players have no agency over that outcome.
Good on them. There’s a few devs on YB by the way.
See, this is the ignorance that I’m talking about in my previous thread.
Sorry, I don’t make a habit of reading your posts.
EotM was created to be an overflow map…
Yes. This, and the entire rest of your post, is actually completely irrelevant to my point. In case you’ve never played there, EotM is not particularly famed for having a map design that’s great for WvW gameplay. It looks interesting, and has some interesting ideas, but the design shows more understanding of how to make players fall off cliffs than how to give them a good gameplay experience. (It came out about the same time as Skyhammer… I think it was a phase.)
Don’t get me wrong, knocking people off cliffs can be fun, but it’s never become popular amongst people looking for a good battle, even when their regular match was a blowout.
DBL is a slightly different scenario because it is actually rooted in player feedback from the CDIs. Barricades for example were a clear attempt at trying to give towers control over nearby territory; the spacing of the towers so you couldn’t siege keeps from them, and vice versa, was a similar response that all the AFK treb heroes now perceive as a step in the wrong direction.
If they’d run open betas and polled players, they would have seen that DBL wasn’t going to be such a hit long before it was released. Polls aren’t great at telling you how to fix something, but they’re not bad for showing you whether it’s working.
I think this idea has merit but does need an answer to the reset night lord rush which is guaranteed to be a problem every reset.
No, knocking out the server for the match isn’t going to be viable, but you can treat it like a football goal. The field resets but the score has changed.
I’d certainly play that, but it is vulnerable to the same population issues as the existing WvW so I’m not sure it’s solved much yet.
They could drop polls completely and go back to the old state of relying on selected individuals for feedback, but that system gave us EotM and DBL.
There’s limitations to what you can learn from feedback for every way of collecting it, so it’s better to use as many as practical.
Even on a completely flat map, people would still be avoiding each other. DBL just makes it really easy.
If seeking out a fight was actually beneficial no matter whether you were outnumbered or not, DBL would work better. As it is, there are some compromises at the moment that I don’t think have worked for anyone concerned.
Originally, the plan behind the barricades was to make holding ground mean something. If you take the southern towers on ABL, it gives you little real advantage. The southwest tower allows you to treb a small part of outer Bay, and the southeast tower only allows you to be trebbed from Hills – not particularly helpful.
It’s only once you get to the northern towers that you can seriously pressure a keep with them, and by the time you’re that far up the map and can hold the towers long enough to build trebs in them, you’ve got numerical superiority anyway and don’t need the help of the towers.
That’s where DBL is actually better designed. You want to crack open a keep with trebs, you’ve got to defend them in the open field. ABL you just wedge something into your keyboard to hold down the fire key while you go do something else, because there’s little the other server can ever do to take your treb out. EB has exactly the same problem, but with different objectives involved.
DBL’s barricades were actually brilliant for playing the PPT game, because you didn’t have to worry as much about roamers coming by and flipping your camps while you were dealing with the main threat of enemy zergs. It was prohibitively difficult to get all the way to a north camp without being detected – you had to run around so many barricades and pass at least two sentries close to the defender’s spawn. All the defending server had to scout for was the enemy zergs, which should be much easier.
The problem was, of course, the PPT game is deeply unpopular so all of that was a wash. That way of playing hasn’t been particularly satisfying since launch – the running around smashing things way of playing (whether players or doors) is all that’s lasted.
So DBL was designed for the game ANet wanted WvW to be, not for the game it is now.
If they want it to work, they’ll have to find a way to make their original vision work. I hope they do, because it sounded great back then. Just wondering if I’ll have to wait until GW3 to see it.
There’s no time being spent on maintaining EotM – it hasn’t changed since 2014, so it’s not consuming development resources. It’s just another loose end in WvW at this point.
I’m optimistic that there might be some way to make better use of it in future. So I’d prefer it to stay around, even if I never go there myself.
Because when you delete things from WvW at this point, you’re not going to get them back in any form. At least if it’s still there, there’s motivation to find a use for it.
Every time I play it these days I wonder why as well.
The metagame has always been poor, but the combat used to be alright when you could find remotely even numbers. That’s gone now, so I find myself sticking to PvE most of the time.
There are a few issues I can think of.
If players could submit their own at any time, ANet would have to review each one for inappropriate content. That could add quite a bit of overhead.
They could also periodically request new designs, and select a set number of those each time. However that means peoples’ guild designs get rejected as the rule rather than the exception, and still blows out the list of available emblems to the point that a new UI would be advisable to select between them.
I didn’t particularly mind the challenge mode being somewhere between a hard dungeon and a raid – it is possible for most people to complete but it requires being very careful with builds and gameplay.
But I would prefer having some kind of mechanic to bring players back out of the penalty box, at an expense. Particularly in normal mode.
And it’s always better to be able to re-try achievements without having to restart the instance. Either that or offer repeat attempts the ability to skip to the end, as in the last instance of LS3 episode 3 (except actually working, as that never has).
WvW Someone can tell you better, but I doubt you’ll want it on many power builds. I’m sure there are some good spots you can abuse phase retreat with though, and that phant really stings.
As for PvP Staff has often been in and out of the meta regardless of damage type.
Much the same reason for both – on a power build, staff is mainly a mobility weapon with a bit of random CC attached. Won’t help you much against a thief but it can help keep other melee builds away.
Thief Pistol: Body Shot. The wasted space causes me emotional trauma. I never use it and in situations where you’d actually think it could have use it really doesn’t. Does no damage, very short duration and vulnerable condi doesn’t really give us much team support when its such an easy condi for other classes to stack while actually doing something useful. It’s just a waste of ini and skill slot.
I always wished it was some type of decent damage AoE to make P/P less dependent on Staff/Shortbow to hit more than one enemy since they removed my beloved Ricochet. It’d also be nice if it had a finisher of some sort to make more use of P/P black powder.
It’s not completely useless if you need to keep something away from you perm, a good example could be say those exploding Zombies.
No.
Lol care to expand on that?
Definitely a PvE player. Interrupt on next to no cooldown is incredibly useful for ending fights early. I’ve been on the receiving end of that one a few times.
Powerful Synergy and Health Insurance seem like the contenders to me – first a trait that sounds great until you actually look at what this “synergy” gets you, which is dubious at best, and wastes a grandmaster slot. The second is a trait that makes a useless kit a slightly more powerful useless kit. Can’t imagine why it’s not more popular.
What Powerful Synergy should have done is give you an extra blast finisher with the leap, instead. Then we have a trait that means something.
And Health Insurance… well… nothing to be done there without a rebuild of the healing kit.
(edited by Ben K.6238)
That’s all very well, but isn’t it the players who buy things that ANet needs to keep most of all?
Funny – most of the matchups of the 2-1-1 weeks the only thing I saw that had yet to be determined by Friday was who came last.
I haven’t actually completed the story yet; I just wanted to do map completion first and explore the zone.
I like the map design; it’s full of alcoves, particularly in the buildings, one of which led me to wonder what that crazy old man needed such a deadly basement for. This is a fantastic return to Kryta.
“Go chase your tail.”
Overheard it somewhere in the Brand.