Guild Wars 2

I think they are adding WvW golems to sPvP before WTS.

Saiyan.1704:

Picking GW2 as the game of choice isn’t even a question, according to this “recent” post. http://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/2wwl51/aion_or_gw2_for_pvp/
Why even get a subscription game if it’s not all that much better?

Honestly, i’m sure there’s a lot of items the Devs would like to add to the GW2 PvP scene but they don’t have the resources for it. Plain and simple. I say this because I’ve seen plenty of Devs say, “That’s a good idea” or “We have that in the works”… these have been said since launch. We actually see these changes once a year.. if that.
but that GvG we’re getting in the expansion though <3

In an unrealistic Arenanet world, we probably would have received some form of 2v2 or 3v3 arenas as there’s truly no downside to them. More people would come, PvP longer given the game mode diversity, more tournaments, leaderboard competition, extra titles etc etc. That said, it’s whether or not a 3v3 round based gamemode, or mini conquest mode, can be just as balanced as 5v5 conquest. If Stronghold can work, so can a 2v2 or 3v3 gamemode.

I reject the “lack of resources” argument. As money is constantly being thrown around on unpopular tournaments, and supposedly long periods of development time is put into features that are not improvements (leaderboards, queue changes, PvP overhaul for the nth time).

I’d love a duel feature usable anywhere in the world.

Edit: And random arenas.

oZii.2864:

Speedy Conduit – You gain 33% bonus movement speed when overloading an attunement. Similarly to Earthen Proxy, you can also enhance this trait by equipping the Lucid Singularity trait, which heals you every second and reduces the duration of incoming inhibiting conditions by 100%

inb4 “nerf ele sustain bro”

Hope some of these traits might break up some of the dependance on water/arcana, we’ll see.

Worst of the specs I’ve seen so far, at least from the general explanation given (will need to wait to see actual numbers and effects). We are already getting a bad deal here in that we can’t use the new weapon with all of our builds, like most of the other professions can (ex: guardian can toss longbow on any build, as long as it is ‘dragonhunter’, same with the others). We on the other hand will only be able to dagger/warhorn or scepter/warhorn, and of course no swap. As a staff player it is really depressing.

Hell, even engineers have a better deal with their hammer as they can still mix it up with kits and stuff.

“Mesmer is fine, but I almost lost to an engi once. Please do something about this!”

Rarnark.5623:

Celestial, Crusader, and Marauder have more stats overall than the rest of the amulets. Remove the amulet system and replace it with custom stat allocation.

Allow it so people can place stats into any given area (Power, precision, toughness, vitality, ferocity, healing power, condi damage) in increments of 150 stat points without exceeding 1200 points in any given area. I believe this would improve game balance and enhance build diversity.

Exactly what I’ve been thinking thank you Rar. Other option is to fold completely and open the floodgates to have PvE/WvW gear and stats (but still let anyone access the max in spvp). Anyway, the amulet system as it stands is a glaring flaw in the spvp world.

As you say, give everyone a certain amount of points to allocate, and not more than 1200 in a single stat.

Hey remember when we had a PvP system that actually worked pretty well aside from the ‘decaying up’ people. Anxiously awaiting the next ‘off beta test trial season’ kittenery (sarcasm).

I’ve got a better idea, and I think the money people at ArenaNet will like this.

Since you’re forcing so many people to be in one place (or is it not that many people since you always kill PvP?), why not advertise? Rent out advertising space throughout the Heart of the Mists to third parties, and allow them to stream in audio ads and popups to redirect me to their respective products. Just make sure these go away when those queues finally do pop. Also consider giving players achievements and unique PvP bags that they can’t actually open in PvP for viewing certain advertisements each day. This could be the key to e-sports guys.

Or we could go with your idea and just revert things so we can play Guild Wars 2 again, idk.

Edit: 2nd 4v5 for me tonight too. One was with you and now another one. God I love it when these devs make changes from ignorance and are supported by a chorus of equal ignorance.

They are all top players in their professions and have been playing together for a long time. Also the sad state of the infrastructure is probably keeping others from catching up. Nowadays teams will spend much of their time being matched up against pugs/solos instead of getting good practice. Oh and you can’t duel/practice anymore while waiting for queues so gg.

Yeah that is a bit ridiculous. I understand the design intent must have been to prevent trolls from inserting themselves into random groups on LFG constantly to annoy people. But that cooldown is excessive. Honestly I think the thing should be redesigned by having the LFG interface expanded upon a bit. Include a tab where the advertising group can see incoming requests to join, and they can accept or deny them from there.

The current implementation of barging into a LFG party by inviting yourself feels a bit forced. Yes we don’t want to promote elitism, but I think it can be done without treading too far in that direction.

Noticed this today, not bad. Not sure if I would call it an improvement, but still it looks cool. Please fix the skin tone issues people are having in the character select panes though.

Would change the title to indicate this was for the weekly which already happened, not for the monthly final tonight.

Unrelated to many of the comments here: I applaud the use of trait symbols on the character status bar since the update, and I think we need more of this. Sure, we want to elegantly avoid turning the UI into too much of a giant mess like those other games, but it is better to be informed of someone’s traits and passives through those icons or through an animation than not at all.

Just off the top of my head, add the trait icon for Diamond Skin when elementalist’s with Diamond Skin are over 90% hp (same case with Ranger Bark skin), and an icon for elementalists that still have the passive 50% proc for armor of earth, as well as the procs for Cleansing Fire, Arcane Shield, and so on…note I am not singling out elementalists, I am just speaking about what I have more familiarity with.

By making these changes the player and the opponent can make more informed decisions in battle.

You guys aren’t playing the game correctly— see Aurora_Peachy’s stream. The correct way to play Gw2 is to idle dance in Lion’s Arch and buy kitten from the gem store.

Should be a nice diversion from all the other kitten.

This is a good patch, more Heart of the Mists to play. Queues were getting annoying anyway and people were being mean to each other so they removed unranked and ranked PvP.

Collero.7963:

Just to make you guys feel worse, I doubt there will be any kind of balance update til after WTS now. There is no way they’ll change anything 2 weeks before because WTS is so important and by important, I mean an embarrasing joke that should of never happened.

It is hard to be supportive of WTS in light of everything else that has happened. Beginning of December 2014: Removal of Leaderboards (ok testing grindboard w/e), removal of Solo Queue, forced to queue inside Heart of the Mist, and first WTS tournament final in Beijing. That tournament for me coincides with the ruin of PvP.

Now we’re going into our 3rd WTS in this broken system, and haven’t seen any real increase in popularity for PvP, or in twitch viewership (which I think is resulting at least somewhat from the December changes). It is putting the cart way before the horse, or putting the kid on stage at the talent show and he forgot to wear clothes.

Anyway, I hope your prediction of balance delay is wrong, but I have learned well to be disappointed after over 10 years as a Guild Wars player.

As much as I think the ideas in Gw1 were superior in every way, I don’t think we can port this one over unless it is with a different game mode. Matches in Random Arena probably averaged 2-3 minutes, more if it was a good fight, whereas in conquest it is probably 7-10 minutes. I don’t think many people can put up with the same consecutive matches system here with such long games.

The 1-80 “rank” is meaningless, at least in this implementation. Do not confuse it for a leaderboard or ladder rank which ranks players in relation to other players. It is more like an xp grind for PvP.

vorpal.1497:

Mesmers shouldn’t be the boon strip class AND the stunlock class, pick one and voila, the game is fixed. Oh wait what about grena— sound of explosion, followed by silence

No it should also be the portal/stealth class, the support class, the tanky invuln class, the AI clutter class, did I miss anything? Mesmer is fine guys, everyone just got really good at it overnight.

Luckily every profession also has at least one ridiculously tuned build to compete.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Nika looks dreadful. They didn’t even attempt to make her look Canthan which is just sad.

And she looked Canthan in Gw1? Purple hair, blue eyes, wtf does Canthan look like?

In case you haven’t noticed, this game is now a parody of Gw2 PvP, which itself was a parody of Gw1 PvP.

Not a bad idea on the specializations though: the UI looks cool, and in theory the simplification of things sounds good. But once again the pacing and general feel of balance seems way off in PvP. You insta-kill people or you drown them in condis.

Ok how about queuing outside of the lobby? Leaderboards? No? Wow at least we got some kittening mist champions.

Edit: And yes what about TDM? Will courtyard stay in queue with conquest? Or will it just disappear?

Well last night one of our favorite devs was streaming while playing “ranked” (ofc ranked doesn’t mean anything but w/e) with 2 engineers using this trick in his premade. Very professional as usual. On par with the devs teaming up with top players to farm solos and telling us things are fine and removal of SoloQ is justified.

online.1278:

Celtus.8456:

The amulet system is holding PvP back. We either need a lot more amulets, more customization over their stats, or a change to PvE style gearing (and, of course, balance it).

I have been excited about this new specialization patch, but it really exposed how flawed the amulet system is. For example, elementalists post-patch have 11,645 hp if they don’t use +vit amulet or runes (and I think guardian is the same? though they have +vit trait), this feels very limiting. I understand you want the game to be simple and I like that, but I think the amulet system is one of the least polished parts of PvP right now.

I personally juat want that anet just give us all 1200+(900*2)=3000 points where we can freely put into any attribute we want to develop, rather than current amulet systrm. But it should not allow putting no more than 1200 point into one attribute though. Becuz if we can put all 3000 points into power, people might die by just one hit. Lol

It is more likely previous GW1 style.

Your idea sounds good too. I hate talking about Gw1 so much because nobody knows what I’m talking about and just thinks I’m crazy haha. The smaller, more controlled numbers in Gw1 were a great foundation for balance. But here they decide kitten it we want to appeal to “those other mmo players”…let us have 80 levels, hp varying by tens of thousands, damage numbers all over the place, RNG, procs, crits, hey we’re building a great game here boys…

The amulet system is holding PvP back. We either need a lot more amulets, more customization over their stats, or a change to PvE style gearing (and, of course, balance it).

I have been excited about this new specialization patch, but it really exposed how flawed the amulet system is. For example, elementalists post-patch have 11,645 hp if they don’t use +vit amulet or runes (and I think guardian is the same? though they have +vit trait), this feels very limiting. I understand you want the game to be simple and I like that, but I think the amulet system is one of the least polished parts of PvP right now.

The changes are refreshing. I wouldn’t call it balance yet, but the previous game became quite boring and we had too many tournaments of the same thing.

Shoutout to ArenaNet, 6 months of the infrastructure in PvP being absolutely kittened. Do you guys even care? Or is there something that you “can’t talk about until it is ready”? And will that be before or after the Iceberg melts?

Despite all of the nice (and some not nice) changes with today’s patch, we still need to spend half of our time in this lobby.

Guild halls yes, but also from open world, pvp custom servers/hotjoins (if hotjoin still exists), and WvW. I would rather not compromise on this. We did just fine with these freedoms before the December 2014 patch, and that was even before the “ready check” that would not create a match until all 10 players were ready.

So what if people are loading maps a bit longer and we need to wait? Either kick them from the queue because their load is so long (a burden they should accept when they queue up and move about at their own discretion), or increase the window of opportunity for people to accept queue. I speak for everyone (yes, really) when I say we need queuing freedom to return for PvP to flourish more. If you disagree, I assume you have short queue times (many PvPers need to wait 7-8+ minutes per queue), or you don’t play very much.

Please, for the health of the game.

I like the emphasis on guilds finally, curious to see how it will play out. Curious though, how will the system determine whether you are queued as a ‘guild team’? Will the 3+ players need to represent the guild at the time of queuing? Or will just being on the guild roster work sufficiently? Or will it be at match start and not time of queuing?

Mainly I am concerned that people will stop repping guild if they load into a match and see they are up against a team of better players or one that they expect to lose to. So, hoping that teams are designated as “guild teams” at the moment of queuing, rather than later.

The game needs to be broken to get better. Just hope they work fast in the future to address the fallout from these changes.

Oh my god guys I bought the core game 3 years ago for $60.00 and had thousands of hours of entertainment!! Where is my refund now that the core game is “free” for new customers!!?!?! I demand justice!!! Reporting to the BBB and calling up my congressman right now!

Really though, you whiners are pathetic. I expected HoT to be $40-50, and they settled on $50. So what. Get a kittening job or wait for the price to drop. Meanwhile enjoy getting kittened by players with elite specs and missing out on Maguuma and the other stuff.

I bet most of the whiners will end up buying the expac within 1-2 months of it releasing anyway. There are no other good mmorpg now, and Gw2 has been and still is well worth the value. Back in the day people paid $50 for trash games all the time. Nowadays people want everything free or cheap, else they will riot. And we expect more from every game…

Edit: The only valid complaints I can see are that there is no character slot bonus by default, and that they did not give a release date.

Multiple disconnects and map loading takes much longer since yesterday’s patch. NA EST

Maybe they will tease it out, but not necessarily. Remember this is for the “core specializations” (rework of existing traitlines and stuff), they already previewed this stuff weeks ago.

Looks promising, but they still need to address queuing from outside of the mists.

I don’t like it. I think we should be focused on having more simplified modes (arena, ctf, etc) instead of introducing more complicated modes like this. I think this mode is harder to understand and watch than conquest, and is even less intuitive. Sure it is fun to play and watch the tournament today because it is new (and I enjoy watching people I know playing in a different setting). But will it last? I highly doubt it and I don’t think this will bring us anywhere closer to “e-sports”.

ETA on PvP coming back out of beta? Any smug ArenaNet devs available to comment?

aggelos r.5387:

i think Q from anywhere is not correct heart of the mist is place for the pvp comunity and that will be wrong to loose it. But i think tha they have to put Q from guild halls in HOT

Have you seen map chat? Ever tried forming a group with random players in Heart of the Mist? Are your queue times average 7-8 minutes like mine? I think all of Guild Wars 2 should be for the PvP community, not this single desolate hellhole.

The new queue system does not create a match until all 10 players have clicked the queue popup. So most of the arguments here are incorrect in saying that we need to be locked in HotM to prevent incomplete teams. No reason to keep everyone in Heart of the Mists.

p.s. Many 4v5 or games with leavers become that way after the match has started 5v5.

As mentioned, air attunement is the biggest problem with staff currently. If the devs are to do anything, they should start there.

Benefits:

+Players will learn and get better at PvP (learn mechanics, professions, how to handle different fights in duels)
+Fun
+Different environments to PvP in
+Most mmorpgs have it
+WvW dueling is only available vs. players you cannot talk to (without exploiting the /invite or /block feature to find out who they are), and offers a much smaller pool of players.
+It is already very popular in this game even though it is given no support.

Drawbacks:
-Some people will be upset, claiming it takes away from the environment in PvE or WvW, or that they will be shamed for losing or declining duels
-Competes with Custom Arena sales…haha

I am in favor.

Sounds difficult to do, but I would want something like this. Really miss the Gw1 observer mode (which anyone logged into Gw1 could see recent top pvp matches in GvG and HA…not 20 people or people on twitch). The only argument I can imagine against it here (besides “too much work”) is that they wouldn’t want to lose twitch views. But if you find a way to link in twitch views with a built in system, that is ideal.

More in-game communication methods such as pings and commands would be nice. Right now we only have map drawing/pinging and target calling. Communicating on the map is ineffective because you don’t know which teammate is the one putting those marks on your map…and you need to click over to your map to do them, which is just not practical in the middle of a fight.

Target calling in this game is a mess too, you can call 1 target per team, and it gets constantly overwritten by any other ally on the map (could be a fight far away and separate from your current situation). I hate to bring up Gw1 (no I don’t lol), but we had much more complex targeting there. You could call out all of your abilities, who you were using them on, and you could call out all of your enemies/allies abilities as they were using them.

I know plenty of MOBAs have key commands that give basic callouts in a match that help to coordinate.

tldr: Plenty of room to improve.

A third test season?

A ‘real’ season?

An apology for kittening us for the past 5 months and revert all bad changes?

A post saying “we have some great stuff coming but we can’t talk about it yet”?

What do you guys think?

As long as you get match credit (by getting any points at all), it doesn’t matter. Just do what is needed to win.

Opinion: If everyone used meta, the game’s PvP would be even more boring and disgusting than it already is.

While I thank him for his efforts, I have thought we would be better off if someone wasn’t doing ArenaNet’s job for them (imo it allowed them to slip into inaction more). Still this is seen as another blow to morale here. Do not worry brothers, we will be distracted tomorrow by the guardian blogs, and then in 2 weeks by the “test season 2 findings” iceberg blog.

Gw1 was a fantastic game, but ArenaNet killed it through neglect and stupid patches …which they have seemed determined to do to Gw2 since August 28, 2012 as well.

It is still ok, and worth a play through especially if you want Hall of Monuments points and to see the lore background of this game. I would advise against PvPing there now though.

Agreed, and amused seeing people challenge this.

Edit: And if it isn’t air/fire, it will be some other bullkitten causing 3-4 condis to be applied on random hits through sigils/procs (pretty much all with NO animation until after the damage has been done). There is just so much sloppy design layered upon sloppy design in this game. It is a shame because it is still the best mmorpg out there (in my opinion) and still has so much potential to be an e-sport game.