Guild Wars 2

Maybe it should then be something like “In each legend, gain a significant amount of stat for another legend”? As in, Ventari could for example give Power, Jalis could give Healing, etc?

Sviel.7493:

If everyone wants to not be in Tier 1, the problem is likely something to do with Tier 1. That is, the population difference must be so large that people cannot enjoy the game in that tier.

That isn’t an issue with 1u1d.

Exactly this. The problem is in the way the WvW match-up itself works, not the matching system used.

The problem with the GW1 system was actually that it went overboard. It was cool while it were ~80 skills per class, later on with hundreds the lines between classes (once you included the dual-spec) blurred so much that it all felt samey.

It wasn’t a bad system, but very unconvential and – IMO – scaled badly as more things got added. The idea of having a “one only” elite spec seems smarter to me than the “one only” elite skills, of which nearly all were simply upgraded normal skills in any case.

Vitali.5039:

In PvP it’s for Demon/Centaur build
this is one of those builds

Does this build generally want access to runspeed somewhere? As in, do you then use a Rune with +25% runspeed? Or would you try to add Invocation for WvW situations to add runspeed on energy use?

InsaneQR.7412:

Yeah because of this kitten resummon mechanic it actually has not a real CD. Its just drop the bomb and resummon.
After 10 energy is up again you can activate it again.

It’s 15 energy total though because you need to re-summon the tablet then move it back onto the point. Unless the Revenant does it in melee but then it’s a bit tricky because they’re in Legendary Rubbish Presence ( :P ) and need to be in melee with it. Might as well just shoot them until they down, finish them, then cap the point.

I’ll be honest, the rewards were never why I played WvW to begin with.

Though I have 3 things I’d change:

• I’d reduce the difference in gain between newer accounts and veteran accounts, simply because new players will otherwise get demotivated by the endless grind.
• Tickets should be a stable tickets/pip, or maybe even frontloaded (Wood slightly better than later chests, etc, but only slightly so) to not overly promote excessive binge grinding every week.
• (radical thought) I’d remove pips as a system or reward tracks, and merge them into a single system. Because in the end, they both directly depend on the participation and hence in the end award the exact same gameplay. Yes there are a lot of detailed differences but nothing which cannot be merged IMO, and I’d just merge them to remove the complexity of having two entirely separate systems stapled on top of each other. In other words, Ticket Reward Track.

However, much as I think the endless grind turns players away, I personally don’t mind “Far Out There”-rewards. They’re nice as long term goals.

Lorgus.6148:

Hey Devilmonk! Looks like you’re enjoying the New Player Experience™ added by anet in a recent patch

You see, anet recieved frequent reports that showed players often had difficulties understanding difficult concepts such as weapon swapping, utilitiy slots, downed combat, class features and other complicated processes such as breathing and walking at the same time.

So the solution was to gate each of those horribly difficult concept at artificial levels. Looks like you haven’t unlocked weapon swapping yet! But don’t worry, if it weren’t for Anet locking that content away from you, you might have gotten lost, scared and confused and chocked to death on your own saliva or something.

So you should be thankful you can’t swap weapons yet, heavens knows what a chore it can be doing such a difficult task almost daily!

I wish I could upvote this multiple times.

This is both funny and very sad at the same time. You forgot some take on the lost non-combat features of newcomer zones though. You know, actual standalone features compared to other MMORPGs. They were obviously evil and deserved to be purged!

While we’re at it, the amount of healing modifiers we have and their high percentages is staggering.

It’s like Ventari heals for naught at all before you take the… is it 4 traits? And they each give 20%-25% extra healing power, plus there’s another 15% from a minor trait in Salvation.

It’s a bit annoying. I’d rather have more healing power in the baseline so taking traits other than the simple “Here, have +20% healing output” ones feels better.

I mean, some are interesting. Better healing after swapping a legend for example wants you to use the non-Ventari legend, too. I get that. But there’s ones like the Grandmaster one which just exists to fix the otherwise meh healing power scaling on our heals, and those I’d rather see removed entirely and replaced.

Example for the last part:

Selfless Amplification → Salvation by Force
While invoking Ventari, gain significant Power, Precision, Ferocity, Condition Damage and Expertise based on your Healing Power.
Healing Power to offensive stats: 25%.

This would be more interesting. You still would do terrible damage overall, but you’d not be entirely toothless when cornered, and it’d be interesting for raid-healers to take, too.

ArthurDent.9538:

Well shiro does absolutely nothing to boost power, so there really is not a power based legend, while there is already a condi based legend.

True, Shiro works perfectly fine for condi DPS.

I think before something with F2-per-legend, my favorite approach would instead be to remove it.

Then, add significant and very influential passive effects to just “being in” a presence/legend. The idea being that the “role switching” is more useful, as you got some of the stats and passive need-to-haves covered.
Lastly, remove power from traits accordingly to keep overall power similar.

The big upside would be that instead of further differentiating the legends first, they’d move closer together by allowing you to pick 2 “roles” and swap between them.

Passive gains:

Shiro

• Power
• Precision
• Crits ignore toughness/defenses

Mallyx

• Condition Damage
• Condition duration, more if current condition duration is very low.
• Autoattacks cause Torment, but on a Procs-Per-Minute basis, meaning weapon speed doesn’t matter.

Jalis

• Toughness
• Vitality
• Gain 1 stack of Stability after being CCed.

Ventari

• Healing Power
• Autoattacks generate 1 healing orb on a PPM-basis, the same orbs staff AA also generates.
• Attacks against friendly players (or you) below 25% HP around you have a chance (with a short cooldown) to generate you energy.

Glint

• Small amount of all stats except Concentration
• Significant amount of Concentration
• In a small radius around you, incoming (not outgoing!) boon duration is increased while enemies suffer reduced incoming boon duration.

Intentionally haven’t mentioned numbers because I would have no clue where to place them (it depends a lot on how much power the devs would be willing to remove from traits so they can be added to the legends), but the rough idea is that if I have say, healing gear, and am in Ventari, and I get jumped in WvW on the backline and someone tries to CC me, I can swap to Jalis and be quite decent at facetanking the damage, so long as I am in Jalis legend.
But in turn, comparing other classes, a bigger portion of my healing power I had in Ventari was based on the passive effects of that legend. Meaning I lost a significant portion of healing power despite being specced for it the moment I swapped out.

The same would apply to any other setup. A power DD could swap to Mallyx and be not great, but “ok” at dealing condi damage for a bit. Their power damage output ofc tanks the moment they swap over. These two would be the most difficult to balance as ideally both a DoT DPS swapping to Shiro and a DD DPS swapping to Mallyx would keep their DPS output (as a number), just the composition of said damage would shift significantly.

It’s easier for the Ventari / Jalix / Glint swaps, because those have more specialized intents.

Clear Black.9206:

Hate to burst your bubble son, but the game is 5 years old now. They arent going to put this much effort into redesigning the way the loot system works just make a few people happy. I think most are fine with it.

Well, never to give up hope! DAoC reworked it’s Necromancer entirely what? 16 years down the line?

Though to be fair, problematic as the old design was, I liked it conceptually.

apharma.3741:

Unintended vs intended interactions. Like it or not the devs did intend mesmers to be able to make 5 people invulnerable for 1s, I doubt they intended CS to make you immune to fall damage though.

Heh, but I have a feeling they didn’t originally intend for us to have the share-Distortion and Distortion-on-signet interaction.

Much like I’ve been thinking the whole “share perma Quickness” wasn’t originally intended design. They just “got lucky”, and then focused on it. A lot of interactions between skills and multiple traits don’t feel like they were intentionally designed that way tbh.

Sly.9518:

And again another player wanting to get rewards for not playing WvW lol wanting rewards while logged out even……

If it is unintended that rewards can still be earned from participation “ticking down”, then the change was still the wrong fix as it again changes something rather unrelated to that (the mechanic is still the exact same, you let participation tick down for 2 more ticks while you AFK at spawn).

If that was supposed to be fixed, then participation need merely be changed so that it resets to 0 each “tick”, and has to be re-earned for it. Done.

My suggestion was based on keeping the current system and removing the utterly aggressive participation decay by removing the clunky way the decaying participation rewards in the first place. If the rewards were given without encouraging players to idle at the spawn, they’d clear the map (because frankly, why wouldn’t they, we’re all lazy animals by design). Problem solved. Yet they still get the rewards already earned, without having to waste map spots.

So basically, and to summarize:

• Either reward the remaining rewards due to participation independent of whether one is in WvW or even logged in, removing the incentive to idle at spawn.
• Or remove the ability to have “ticking down participation” to begin with by making people earn each tick, comparable to the new outnumbered pip bonus.

Either fixes the underlying issue, without having to resolve to overly aggressive decay timers for multiple WvW tasks.

I’m sorry if the misunderstanding was based on poor wording though – English isn’t my mother tongue.

Rhiannon.1726:

Are you sitting in a keep for 10+ min waiting for the enemy? Seriously?

First of all, yes. This happens frequently. Also a lot of moving around in potential reaction to an enemy zerg, but not actually meeting them, for quite a long time sometimes.

But more importantly, why do you think it was 10 minutes remaining at the start? Only a handful of things give 10 minutes.

Sly.9518:

This actively forces players to be participating in the gamemode. And if you are worried about refreshing siege guess what while goin between objectives players can detour through a tower/keep and refresh since it doesn’t take more than 2 minutes to refresh siege in almost every objective. Again only Leechers are affected by this change

No. That’s what I thought when I read the patchnotes, and it’s totally not how it plays out ingame. Just traversing to the commander back after a wipe means you lost your participation again already, especially on DBL.

The problem is not so much that it cannot be worked around (don’t die, zerg zerg zerg, play it like EotM Karma Train, and you’re golden and will sit at T6 100% of the time getting maximum income), easy even. The problem is that it is the entirely wrong solution to an entirely unrelated issue.

Also, as someone else said, why do something so utterly complicated? :’(
Is there a list somewhere ingame telling you what tags you for participation how long? No.
Is there a buff on you showing how long you got to go in your participation clock? No.

How is a newcomer ever to understand this mess?

Why not just… I don’t know… cash out the rewards on leaving WvW? But in return you get an X minutes debuff preventing you from getting participation again? So you cannot gain extra rewards?

Or even simpler (from a player perspective), continue giving rewards after leaving, even if offline. That is to say, rewards just “tick down”, if you logged out and stay out you’ll have them on logging back in. But if you do log in early, you still got partial participation and only lost some of the items.

Sarrs.4831:

It’s really not hard at non-peak hours. Capture camps. If you can’t capture camps, you need to learn to play.

Isn’t a camp only 2 minutes?

phokus.8934:

Why not go with a simpler and better solution and get rid of the bonus pips to Outnumbered maps but reward bonus pips for continued participation on a map?

Because the two things are entirely unrelated? Outnumbered realms have a hard enough time as it is, even with the bonus pips.

Vavume.8065:

L2p issue.

Literally I guess, “learn to play at peak hours”? :P

Vavume.8065:

The changes are fine, deal with it.

Did you read the post right above yours?
And yeah they are fine. I bet they noticed that people played less PvE, which in turn lowered gemstore sales because PvEers spend more, so they are driving people out of WvW quickly. And hey, it works!

meltdown.5870:

decay means people get their fat kitten going and have more fights and more activity

But that’s the thing, you assume you never stop fighting. However there are downtimes, say you wipe an enemy zerg at Fire Keep, and they run back. By the time they’ve come back, half your zerg is close to losing their participation. If the enemy now doesn’t commit yet, you’re screwed: People will leave the siege to try attack enemies in the crazy rush to keep their timer going.

Nevermind building siege, refreshing siege, scouting or checking keeps: Nope, no longer doing that. Need more participation.

Bern.9613:

I understand “adjusting” the decay timer for participation but wow, can’t even get from one camp to another without losing a tier. If you wait for a timer, rip pips. It’s decays far too fast. There I said it.

Yeah, there’s two ways of playing WvW now:

• Join a zerg, keep fighting fighting fighting without ever taking a break.
• Join a zerg, keep fighting fighting fighting without ever taking a break.

Taking a keep? Takes too long. Scouting? Lost participation. Refreshing siege? Haha, nope.

Bunter.3795:

The only problem now is you’ll have trolls map hopping just before the tick to make everyone loses the outmanned buff and then map to a different borderland. The change just makes it easier to maintain the outmanned buff but it’s now easier to grief.

To be fair, griefers should be punished instead of the system worsened to account for them. If someone does this repeatedly, they should just get a ban, period.

It made it annoying to WvW, tbh.

I mean, even if you don’t care much about the rewards themselves, you feel hounded by that timer, constantly threatening you if you don’t rush,rush,rush to the next camp, next dolyak, next keep, next zergfight.

It does a very good job in reducing the already inexistent queue times on non-top-realms, though. >.>

Crazy.6029:

This is bad Anet, probably looked good in theory, but its bad in practical setting. Pls fix Rip roaming til fixed.

If it were only roaming, honestly I’d say find another way to reward that. But the thing is, this also flat-out ruined Siege / Defense / Scouting, unless you have a zerg sharing you participation.

Which is all nice and fine but they only have 9 slots.

So what I would say should happen is any of these;

• Revert the entire change. Ideally now, until a better change has been found.
• Find a way to ""tag" participation for something such as refreshing siege or scouting, maybe figure out “amount of inputs vs time spent” in such a setting.
• Make the timer be additive, with a maximum of ~15 minutes.

Other than the window maybe being able to benefit from being ~20% larger, I really like this UI change. Is nice.

GWMO.4785:

Not with that attitude no.. Chrono is basically a support class. Why say no for UW support? Why shouldn’t we care about UW abilities….

Because ANet doesn’t care, either. So there’s not really a point to suggesting it, they’ve been ripping out underwater left and right and center and avoiding it wherever they could.

They handle it a bit like dungeons, yeah it still exists in “legacy content”, but dev-wise it’s off the table, no matter how large it might be.

Desperate Decoy
When you take damage while below 50% health, you gain the Desperate Decoy effect for 6 seconds:

• F4 comes off CD
• F4 also stealthes for 3 seconds
• F4 also spawns a clone if you currently have an enemy targeted
• <some> internal CD

Vicious.3042:

so if player A afk on map 1 (outnumbered) for 60 minutes, but then jump into action zerg on map 2, the next 59 minutes he will get outnumbered pips because he akitten in map 1 longer? nice, This idea I can get behind. :v

Honestly though it makes sense because you did spend time on the outnumbered map.

Also if you AFK, you don’t get any pips.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Changes to how the outnumbered bonus is acquired is coming in the next release.

Yaaay! Finally no more reasons not to bandwagon onto the instant-win servers for maximum pip farming! Let the gem cashflow roll in once again!

I’m sorry for being so cynical, but unless this change means increasing the outnumbered pip-bonus, this is probably a Bad Thing™. I mean, we already have massive bandwagoning to the winning servers because for one, winning is kinda enjoyable more than being spawncamped 90% of the time, and two, it makes pip-farming worlds easier, nevermind increasing your XP to farm pips even faster.

And since it is very easy to think of a commercial reason to not touch this bandwagoning problem since your company inherently wants people to transfer around, it’s difficult not to see this is yet another move to enable this imbalance.

Again, sorry for being cynical about this, but this seems… foreboding.

Trise.2865:

When I see a player fighting a “trash” mob, I don’t think “Oh, that player must be testing a new build, I’d better leave him/her alone.”

I think, “Oh, that player is farming for experience or materials. I know I hate farming, so if I blast it with them, it shortens their farming time and I get some XP/mats too! It’s a win/win!”

Also, I get the same mats without them losing out on anything because this is Guild Wars 2 and they did loot/tags smarter than other MMOs.

I mean if someone wants to test a new build, just do so in an instance.

I honestly have no idea where the devs stand in regards to Underwater content. I have a feeling that they genuinely forgot about it, and every so often one is surprised when he gets told that a player is… gasp … under water! Because the system automatically filed it as a bug or a wallhack or something.

So it promptly gets fixed and more water removed.

At this point, and since we’re probably headed to beep, I suspect we won’t see water again for a very long time. Until GW3 or something.

Shaman.4513:

from 4.5k to 1.4k, that’s like a nerf of 300%

Erm, 300% would be -13,5k damage. It’s actually a ~70% reduction.

Osi.3504:

The PvP is condition spam, I find this type of play style horrible and passive while other play styles like berserker which take far more calculated effort are harmed.

How so? You spam damaging abilities either way, berserker does the damage upfront, conditions take X seconds to do it. Can be blocked / dodged just the same.

Honestly if I had to rebalance conditions, it’d be a very big undertaking because I’d want to tackle the root cause: the lack of identity of DoTs compared to DDs in GW2, and as a result, the lack of use to build class/spec identity.

Key points:

• Reduce spammability of conditions.
• Massively increase impact and reduce availability of cleansing in turn (in other words if you counter it it’s not coming back soon but if you don’t, it hurts significantly, but it’s a single stack only unless multiple players are attacking you).
• DoTs do low DPS compared to power damage, but given their cast-times, do very high total damage if left to “tick out”.
• Each class is assigned 1-3 identities they can spec for. For example, maybe a Warrior flat out cannot go DoT-centric, being such a power fantasy and usually shown running in with two 2H-swords raised high. They might do DoT damage, but it’d scale off of their power and be supplementary only. Other classes might always be majorly based on condition damage as their output, even when speccing for more direct damage. (basically shifting from 15% to 50% power damage).
• Conditions scale off of power. No more separate stat.
• No more Expertise. If you want your DoTs to last longer you have specific per-class traits for that. DoTs really ought to be balanced baseline, which means things making you do more damage just affect DoTs.

MF probably works, but keep two things in mind:

• Bags. There’s a reason most loot is in bags, this way ANet got out of the hellhole they dug with magic find, because bags are rarely affected by MF.
• The drop chances are so miniscule to begin with, making it x1,2 isn’t going to be much. You’re looking at 0,000012% chance of a drop instead of 0,00001%

On paper, DoTs (Damage over Time) are very easy to balance versus DDs (Direct Damage):

• A DD-centric character deals superior DPS. That is, damage-per-second. If they attack you for 20 seconds they’ll do more damage to you than a DoT-centric character does in 20 seconds, all other things being equal.
• A DoT-centric character deals superior DPC. Damage-per-casttime. That is, if a DoT-centric character attacks you with 5 skills, then you wait for all damage to tick out, they’ll have done more damage to you than a DD character with 5 attacks.

So in other words, a DoT-attacker will do less DPS, but on the plusside doesn’t have to attack all the time. And as the DD character loses the ability to stay on target, the DoT character will pull ahead. Ofc, if they can stay on target, they’ll win out because of higher total DPS.

TheBravery.9615:

Add exotic equipement / ascended equipement / legendary equipment / superior sigil drops that are untradeable and have something unique about them. Like a piece of equipment that only has one stat, or have an uncommon ability (e.g. increased damage vs a certain pve mob – by the way, those sigils should be deleted as well)

This makes no sense.
So you want them to add an untradeable superior sigil which, say, givens 10% increased damage when attacking, say, Centaurs?
And at the same time, delete this: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Superior_Sigil_of_Centaur_Slaying ?

Vayne.8563:

I don’t like it. Legendary weapons are already too easy to get by a long shot. Not thinking that making it easier to get them would somehow make this game better. Legendaries are there for people to work on something after they’ve done everything else.

This. Even as a rather casual player, Legendary Weapons (I have Kamohoali’i Kotaki and now H.O.P.E.) are pretty easy and quick to acquire.

There’s no need to further trivialize them IMO.

vove.2768:

Thank god for that. In pvp underwater battle is horribly inbalanced and in pve it is horribly annoying.

Honestly PvP itself is so imbalanced, it hardly makes a difference any more. And meh, I liked PvE underwater combat due to the added complexity of 360° combat, there’s a lot of design space to make truly terrifying content areas with, since underwater restricts you so much.

Honestly, it’s simple: You buy Foefire from the gem store.

Waiting for balance changes is – IMO – pretty pointless.

Given the scarcity and individual small size of balance change patches, we can safely assume that the manpower dedicated to rebalancing is, at best, marginal. In other words by and large ANet cannot balance the game, as the game will change faster from meta shifts, expansions and unintended side effects of previous balance changes (or bugs) than they can keep up with balancing.

And I’d hate for development to slow down simply because they want to wait for balance, not a good option either.

Mavis.1463:

Yup, the story is pretty bad overall, I don’t blame her.
The core game is also really mediocre. If you can get past all the flaws, it’s an okay-ish time sink.

Well said.

Keep things in perspective, the game is essentially free beyond the initial purchase. That’s quite different from most MMORPGs, which either cost monthly or are sold to you piece by piece via microtransactions.

Hrm, difficult again, so many nice maps.

1. Probably Verdant Brink. The 3D-gameplay is absolutely amazing and this map really makes you hyped for it (which sadly makes AB and TD a bit of a letdown in comparison). Also it’s very very pretty, with multiple consistent areas which work well together with the bridges and vines to separate them visually. On top of that it has a nice overall meta event chain which keeps everything tied together.
2. Metrica Province, pre-newbie-zone changes. So many fun non-combat events, on top of so many super-quirky and -funny elements and hidden gimmicks. Sadly many elements got stripped out when they dumbed down the newbie zones.
3. Silverwastes. One of the very very rare times ANet got “farming” right. Repeatable, continuous, with enough variety but also enough mindless grind to be, well, mindless. A quality I very much desire if I want to go and farm.
4. Dragon’s Stand. Similar to Silverwastes really, this works perfectly fine as an endless grind. More meaty, but the large scope really helps it. The only reason this is below SW is because of the dead time, but to be fair, it makes up for it in sheer prettiness.
5. Bloodstone Fen. This is on here just for the graphics. The gameplay is meh, events wonky, chains too cramped. But the floating debris, the constant fx in the air, this map is preeeeettyyyy.

Honorable mention: old Lion’s Arch, with its pirate atmosphere and shantytown design.

The overall idea of “cosmetic upgrade item” has a lot of long-term potential, however.

Especially with gem store items frequently surpassing legendaries in splendor, maybe upgrade items are the way to go here.

For example:

• A sigil which when applied to a weapon gives the liquid sheen look of the Juggernaut.
• A set of runes which, when applied to armor, make it fold away into town clothes when out of combat (also opens up another inventory slot to equip town clothes in).
• A sigil applied to a ranged weapon which turns the projectiles into plasma like HOPE does.

Episcopos.5206:

Having said that, she did reach lvl 40, but by then i think the enjoyment she was getting out of doing the ‘heart’ events to lvl up was diminishing fast and becoming a bit tedious.

Well it’s a good thing they brought them back now, in repeatable. Because the clear feedback given by the community was that the reason hearts were eh was because they just didn’t feel grindy enough.

So hey, someone had an awesome idea, and made them daily repeatable. Now everything is better. Also it allowed firing a few event designers because less need for event chains.

Hrm, difficult:

1. Lake Doric. Dull, uninspired, doesn’t fit the theme, stupid way to avoid having to do underwater content, and that horrendous farm which tried to fix issues in all the wrong ways.
2. Eternal Battleground. Too cramped, lots of wasted potential, EotM ideas should have been used here instead of there.
3. Ember Bay. Don’t even know where to start with this one, biggest flaw for me is probably that it heralded the rise of the dreaded repeatable our-designers-are-too-busy-and-underpaid-to-make-actual-events hearts.
4. Auric Basin. Pretty, but much of the area seems flawed and rather… boring. I don’t know ,difficult to describe, but both TD and VB are more 3D, more alive, more filled with things.
5. Metrica Province. With the cool newbie things removed, the first half of this zone feels totally broken. You can clearly notice something was ripped out here, even as a newcomer. It’s such a weird idea to do this, when much of the earliest parts were built around quirky asura things.

On a Mesmer only the #2 seems to trigger it. To be fair it looks fun, but the sharks overlap so much it also seems buggy.

Palador.2170:

The problem is that the area is an ideal farm spot, and players will use whatever they can to make an efficient farm out of it.

This so much. The problem wasn’t Engi Turrets, or whatever, the problem was that ANet wanted us to farm, by mass-grinding, but then doing so without going braindead and leaking your jellyfied brain out of your ears seems to be a problem in turn. :<

eozturk.7205:

Well, I’m missing old days where everything was exotic and flexibility on trying different stuffs was easy and didn’t require account bound recipes or sets. However, since Hot introduced the fun of playing wvw combat diminished for me.

I have to concur with the general sentinment tbh. Due to the account-bound nature of HoT stats, changing things around on a whim has become a serious chore.

This was already dead enough outside of Engi farming before, now it’s just not worth even trying.

In fact I’d go as far as saying that ideally we get the farm removed and the area re-used for something actually fun, like a meta-chain resulting in a “Chest of Leather” which you can then select the tier of or something. The idea of a group-only mass-farm clearly didn’t work.