Guild Wars 2

Lifelike.5862:

It’s kind of shocking how selfish this class is.

TBH it isn’t shocking to me at all. It’s normal for engineer. Anet has always given engineer poor group support and hard-to-synergize traits and skills.

Strider Pj.2193:

(if BG truly is so big that it only has to spam ‘1’ as was the poster’s premie) then they would be receiving the outnumbered buff thus allowing them to put gain BG players in Pips.

You’re right! BG truly is that big. We were getting outnumbered buff quite often even on reset night. Helps a lot with pips.

Strider Pj.2193:

BG will bleed players off it.

They don’t really though. This is just a wishful sentiment. The WvW playerbase that transfers servers the most is “organizers”. BG opening last was basically the result of FOUR GUILDS moving off that server. A large number pugs and PvE fairweathers remained because they don’t really have any reason to transfer. Once BG opened it regained organizers and then the patch brought some other organizers back to the game mode who were already on BG but not counting towards the WvW population.

This is why some veteran players make calls for WvW teams to be organized around guilds.

Kaizoku.1298:

However once you spec into holosmith, you will no longer have access to orbital strike and other F5 skills.

There’s still the mystery of the Orbital Strike animation from Aurora Peachy’s vod: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nflQFIFnpVo

My wild guess is there’s some change to the Siege Rounds trait in Explosives line.

Anthony.7630:

Oh and when you’re in photo forge kit stance thingy i believe you cant use 1-9 skills only use f1-f4 skills.

Not exactly. PF skills replace your weapon 1-5 skills. Skills 6-10 and toolbelt F1-F4 are still available immediately unless you have a kit slotted which then has a 6 second cooldown.

Anthony.7630:

I think while you are in photon forge stance, you passively generate heat per second, and your f1 f2 f3 f4 skills are photon forge skills.

Close. The heat generators are the Photon Forge skills that replace your weapon skills, not the toolbelt skills. Each PF skill shows a “Heat gained” percentage.

santenal.1054:

Chaba.5410:

santenal.1054:

If I understand it correctly, everytime you activate “Photon Forge” you can’t reach your weapon set or use kits for the next 6 seconds, locking you out of lots of survivability skills. I hope this doesn’t turn out to be too risky to play.

If you watch Bog Otter’s stream, there’s nothing like that when he activates Photon Forge. It replaces your weapon skills with a different set of weapon skills and you can’t deactivate Photon Forge for a bit. Maybe that’s what you’re thinking of. You can still use all your other skills. I doubt very much you couldn’t use kits.

If you read the “Engage Photon Forge” tooltip under the “Utility Skills + toolbelt” (from the screenshots) it says “Disables use of kits for a short duration” (6s) .

The 6 second recharge cooldown (the “you can’t deactivate Photon forge for a bit” thing you see after “Bog Otter” activate’s “Engage Photon Forge”) on the “Deactivate Photon Forge” tooltip is what makes me think that you are not able to reach your weapon set for 6 seconds. The “drop bundle” icon that appears is greyed out so you have to use your F5 skill to deactivate the mode.

Ah I see. I spent so much time getting the screenshots done and organized that I haven’t been able to squint at them all in-depth yet.

I guess its a bit of a fair trade-off for access to PF and is perhaps an attempt to create opportunity costs for the standard engi fallback on kits. There’s plenty of other skills able to be used as long as you have them slotted. The greater concern is the cooldowns on those other skills, unless other classes are also getting longer cooldown skills equally.

It does make some sense to have WvW on its own with regards to development because then resources are devoted to it specifically. If it were put on a schedule forced to coincide with PvE content releases, there’s a greater chance of WvW changes being considered lower priority than something else and not getting worked on. We saw that I think with HoT where Desert BL was released basically unchanged and still buggy after all the feedback from the betas.

It just looks awkward because whenever there is some hype for something new in a different part of the game, people expect all parts of the game to have something new at the same time.

kurtosis.9526:

Regarding Burning traits, I wonder which will be the meta in Grand Master, Vent Exhaust (AoE Burning on dodge) or Photonic Blasting Module (Overheating now blasts its direct damage to nearby foes and no longer at the player).

Probably will depend upon which will recharge faster, endurance or the overheating, and provide better dps. Energy sigils perhaps? Heh.

santenal.1054:

If I understand it correctly, everytime you activate “Photon Forge” you can’t reach your weapon set or use kits for the next 6 seconds, locking you out of lots of survivability skills. I hope this doesn’t turn out to be too risky to play.

If you watch Bog Otter’s stream, there’s nothing like that when he activates Photon Forge. It replaces your weapon skills with a different set of weapon skills and you can’t deactivate Photon Forge for a bit. Maybe that’s what you’re thinking of. You can still use all your other skills. I doubt very much you couldn’t use kits.

SkyShroud.2865:

Deleting and remaking worlds still the only way to go to balance servers but mehz, people want the gamemode to die instead.

I disagree that it is the only way. The disparity between the calculated WvW population and the actual server population can also be remedied by the removal of accounts from a server if they haven’t counted towards the calculated WvW population after a certain time period, like two months maybe. If they wanted to play WvW again they’d have to pick a new, non-Full world to join (for free, of course). That would have been especially helpful before the June 6th patch brought a flood.

Or in this format that I posted on the other thread.

Skills: http://imgur.com/a/G9FZ2
Traits: http://imgur.com/a/A2kpr

Edit: Your version is missing Photon Wall.

Here’s the screen grabs from Bog Otter’s stream for the skills: http://imgur.com/a/G9FZ2

Of note:
- No tooltip was shown for the util “Photon Wall” so that’s missing.
- Photon Forge mode replaces your weapon skills. I assume it is only one set of PF skills akin to Druid’s Celestial Avatar mode basically but it is possible these skills change depending upon your equipped weapons.

Imgur album of the new traits taken from Bog Otter’s stream: http://imgur.com/a/A2kpr

TIL Bog Otter streams at 720p :feelsbadman:

Will post skills once I can organize them.

Link.6791:

In the aftershow Bogotter revealed that the Holosmith is a high risk/reward POWER glass-canon, with the heatmechanic giving you more dps as heat increase but with a chance that you may explode if too much heat is generated. A new specific heal skill was mentioned as a counter to overheating.

Thanks for the tip. Here’s the link: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/163622236?t=02h24m33s

Acheron.4576:

I just found this video of a Holosmith kicking mechanical kitten

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZyqOq4x8ww

But seriously, has anyone found any gameplay preview video on YouTube or Twitch of Holosmith?

1. Gliding
2. Thermal Tubes
3. Oakheart Essences
4. Spectral Aid

xD

My theory is that the game gives “skill priority” first to whoever has the larger blob (more players take up skill calculation bandwidth faster) and so the client in the smaller group doesn’t get a chance to react, similar to the old culling issue.

As a result, I don’t think the players in the larger group experience the issue while players in the smaller group struggle to understand how players in the larger group can ever play through such lag.

That said, I have a few players in TLC too who only get lag in certain matches against certain servers.

Missy.7356:

This is now about morale since all these posts keep popping up. People play for fun and as it stands its not that much fun.

It’s always been about morale. That’s a key factor in any sort of organization. Morale is easy to have when your server has more than enough population and #winning and you don’t have to do anything for it. Morale is not so easy when you don’t have that. Then it becomes a test of leadership for your guilds and commanders (which, Anet, you must realize at some point that’s a type of work most players aren’t interested in having to do in a game which is why leadership burns out eventually). TC wouldn’t be the first server team to deal with morale issues and I’m surprised the unofficial RP community of Yak Parades seems to be struggling with creative solutions.

What do you mean people feel left out?

Active population is smoothed out over 24/7, not just during one skirmish or two. That’s the effect of longer hours. If 50 people play 6 hours, they’re going to get more (theoretically) from PPT than 300 people playing only 1 hour. Playing longer hours can be a type of winning advantage. So the system says “Full”.

I think what is happening is this basically: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/New-WvW-Pop-Algorithm

This morning I realized what the real flaw is. How many of you “hardcore” WvW players play longer hours than you normally do when you feel your server needs extra help in a match because of being outnumbered? Could you be accidentally over-inflating your active population numbers?

All Matters Fecal.9560:

I must be missing something because I can’t see why people play this mode. I really want to like it and I’m purely a pvp player in all MMOs I play, but this is not PvP…it’s PvE with the (seemingly) annoyance of PvP that slows down your PvE.

A few other MMOs have PvP servers or other faction abilities which allow players to flag up that they are available for PvP in the PvE open world maps. WvW is roughly GW2’s version of that.

Someone posting from their F2P account?

Sylvyn.4750:

it’s obvious 1-up 1-down has not been fixed yet

They didn’t say it was. There’s been no patch to live related to a fix so matchmaking on Friday was based on Glicko, as they said we should expect.

Euryon.9248:

The fundamental conflict here is between people who value different things in wvw: “server identity” vs competitiveness/balance. The OP and most of those arguing for breaking the links obviously care much more about server identity than competitive balance, as you can see in most of their arguments posted in favor of breaking links. For the rest of us, esp those who were on bottom-level NA servers before the linking, competitive balance is far more important than any vague sense of “server identity”.

My “server identity” before linking (when I was still on my original server) was “loser”. Our server finished 24th (that’s dead last) every single WvW season. We once got a screenshot of the ENTIRE server wvw community at reset of a whopping 17 people. You could get on and not see another soul for hours. When you got matched up with any of the top 20 or so servers, you’d get run over most of the time you tried to do anything. We got matched up with YB and another bottom-level server once and the majority of the week YB maintained a 650+ warscore (hitting 695 many times). It was a terrible situation for the bottom tier servers unless you liked solo flipping camps all day.

There are actually still imbalances even linked up, which shows you just how disparate the server levels still are. My current server gets destroyed in off hours pretty much every week even with the linkings, but at least we can get enough people to run around and do stuff most of the time. Queues are here at reset but not most of the rest of the week.

As for the notion that we can handle unlinking now because of greater population after pips/legendary was introduced…I’m pretty sure you know that argument is nonsense. You don’t make a major structure change around a temporary phenomenon. The majority of the new players who jumped on when the pip system came on don’t really care about wvw in and of itself, and many of those have already left the game mode since they don’t care to invest that much time in getting the shiny. Once those who do want to stick it out for the shiny get theirs in the next 6-8 months, many will also leave. A few who were new to the mode will stick around past that, but the idea that unlinking will be workable because of the shiny-seekers won’t hold water in the long-term.

The best idea I’ve seen is the one for adding a 5th tier, giving 3 more servers host status, and unlinking 6 servers instead of 3. That would be worth experimenting with to see if some sense of balance can be maintained.

But the absolute last thing I want to see is a repeat of the days when SF steamrolled FC+ET for 3 straight months of yawnfests.

Best post yet on this thread.

Cerby.1069:

It creates less fights? It would make as many fights as it takes away.

If you consider what the OP wrote on its own merits instead of what others’ responses are, you’d see that the OP thinks his idea would lessen waves of zombies coming out near a spawn. It wouldn’t. There would still be waves of zombies because it is near spawn and the only delay would occur initially before the first wave. In other words, this suggestion doesn’t create a reason for players to group up and organize first before trying to push out, which is what OP hopes for: better group organization. Moreover, there is nothing stopping players right now from grouping up to organize better from spawn. Additionally, this would do nothing for organized groups, especially outside of spawn areas. If they lose a fight, they’ll respawn. If they win a fight, they’ll rez their dead.

Same here. Getting connection error.

http://www.mmoserverstatus.com/guild_wars_2

I don’t think that this idea would be a deterrent to waves of zombies at all.

shiri.4257:

The GUILD is your identity. focus on that, you will have fun. server pride? there’s probably only 5 people on each server with server pride and 3 of them don’t login when you’re losing. Exception is Magswag, they have about 7.

Pugging is dead. Long live pugging!

HazyDaisy.4107:

Chaba.5410:

Fun fact: people used to complain on this forum that trebs could be set up at northern towers on Alpine and hit the garrison. That enemy servers would just sit inside there and not come out to fight because they could just treb safely inside.

And in response, home defenders started setting up spawn seige to take down the walls of those towers to force the enemies out. Guess what happened next? Yep, the tower hugging enemies got Anet to veto spawn seige because it was unfair, so to this day enemies can still camp those towers and treb Garri to their hearts content and unless you have a couple of dozen people, there’s very little you can do about it.

Remember when you could treb Bay from Garrison? Good times.

Fridgemomo.3750:

You would have to look at scores in game for correct matchups.

Not sure even the in-game scores could be trusted though. The game was randomly flipping colors on objectives and counting those objectives towards the wrong server’s score.

Fun fact: people used to complain on this forum that trebs could be set up at northern towers on Alpine and hit the garrison. That enemy servers would just sit inside there and not come out to fight because they could just treb safely inside.

CheckPlease.2631:

The only thing I can think of, is ANet “fixed” the scoring for the skirmishes that had those ghost maps, and it didn’t reflect in the scoring.

That’s possible! There was incorrect score being given when objectives were flipping colors too.

A friend sent me 2 guild catapult blueprints which looked odd because the blueprint icon is blue instead of gold. These blueprints are cursed! When I tried to deploy one, it went back into my inventory and I got returned to my weapon skills.

When I wiki them, it goes to https://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Guild_Catapult_Blueprints_ Item code [&AgJ/UgAA]

My friend said he bought them from a guild trader though IIRC and the in-game text says they take 40 supply to build, not 25 like the wiki says. Regardless of where he obtained them from, I guess these never got whatever the changes were to siege deployment.

Djamonja.6453:

Does Anet have any comment on why 1 up 1 down didn’t work correctly for tier 4 —> tier 3 this past reset?

I’m not sure the Anet dev is looking at replies to this topic since the topic question was answered. A new thread might be in order to specifically ask about DB and bring better visibility to the issue. I thought DB won too and should have moved up.

Phineas Poe.3018:

I have nothing against being linked with Borlis Pass, but the idea that Sea of Sorrows is left “full” because of it is pretty absurd; the combined population of Borlis Pass and Sea of Sorrows is not enough to help the server climb out of T4.

Huh? Most host servers went Full status with the flood of players due to the June 6th patch. Host server population status is not determined by the linked servers. Where did this idea come from?

Server population is determined by active participation of accounts on that server in WvW. Most host servers, including SoS, have been previously Full or Very High before the population calculation was changed and server links introduced so they have a large potential population of PvE players that can fill their WvW quotas if those players start playing WvW again.

atheria.2837:

you can’t understand it from our point of view but we can from yours having been on both sides.

Don’t assume. I’ve been playing on an account on a linked server too. Moreover, I don’t think you are speaking for players on linked servers either. Borlis Pass when they were in last place T8 before server links (back when you were on a stacked YB) was a ghost town outside of NA Prime hours. I appreciate you are all for team pride, but there’s a larger issue with regards to total playing population being willfully ignored.

Svarty.8019:

Chaba.5410:

xiiliea.9356:

Maybe even the size of Jade Quarry + Fort Aspenwood if we are to stand any chance against Blackgate.

The queues would be horrendous especially during NA Prime.

If you read my post, you’ll see that I prioritise [huge queues and fair matches] over [no queues for one server and queues for another and imbalanced matches].

That doesn’t change the fact that queues would be horrendous in xiiliea’s suggested pairing.

But addressing your comment, queues do not equate to fair matches. I’m going to put a stop to that assumption right now. WvW is not an sPvP match where the system attempts to match an even number of players by skill. Having equal numbers creates only a fair chance under the combat system, which is why people ask about balance. In WvW all skill and experience levels are thrown together and you don’t get a choice. If competitive-minded players really had their way the system would be more like sPvP where both numbers and skill are balanced. All heavy queues result in is commanders and guilds logging out for the night when they disconnect in a fight and can’t get back in.

xiiliea.9356:

Maybe even the size of Jade Quarry + Fort Aspenwood if we are to stand any chance against Blackgate.

The queues would be horrendous especially during NA Prime.

atheria.2837:

We would be a lower tier but a winner in our tier, so why can’t we prove it.

There really isn’t anything to prove in a system where population and coverage determines wins and losses.

I noticed that if an objective is the wrong color, you can claim it for a guild and it will change to the correct color. Also, after taking a camp and claiming it, it turned to the wrong color a few seconds later. Unclaiming the camp made it return to the correct color.

Yes, it does seem to affect scoring.

Read patch notes. When relinks happen, match-making falls back on Glicko then it is back to 1u1d.

morrolan.9608:

Some more feedback. Its probably been said already but how do anet justify T3 armour taking far longer than legendary armour to acquire when its just ascended, albeit good looking ascended armor.

I suspect it is related to the PvP system.

Seconded!

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/QoL-show-queue-size-of-map-you-are-on/first#post6610626

Amaimon.7823:

Chaba.5410:

Amaimon.7823:

if you’re not rank 3000 by now, there’s no way in seven realms of oblivion and the gazing abyss behind it that you can complete the wooden chest in one week.

No need for the hyperbole. I finished Silver on an account with rank 780 in 6-8 hours of WvW by getting either 3 pips per tick (2 for rank, 1 for third place) or 8 with outnumbered buff.

Except when youre on a skritt server that is just active enough to never have the outnumbered bonus, but inactive enough to always fail, so im cursed with 1 pip per tick, meaning i have to sacrifice my entire working week for getting the wooden chest, and thats just ridiculously disproportionate

Please see this post: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Feedback-Pip-Acquisition-merged/page/16#post6633716

Account in question is on Eredon Terrace which is linked to DB. Most people who have been playing WvW for awhile now are familiar enough with the strong and weak times of their own server and other servers so ask around.

Zephyra.4709:

That and I’d like to see the following implemented:

• WvW XP Enrichment Infusion

Yes! The Experienced Enrichment afaik doesn’t work for WXP.

PabbyGaul.9682:

Chaba.5410:

It’s a good chart showing how WXP rank gain plays into the system.

Just for fun, here’s a screenshot from last night of about an hour of 2nd place gameplay on a silver account with no loyalty pip bonus and the outnumbered buff in EBG (working as intended – hell yes I’ll keep playing when outnumbered).

Almost enough pips for the entire wood track alone.

Average pips / tick = 8.2 ish

If only all ticks could be like that. Heh.

My suggestion for players looking to optimize their pip gain without pouring vast amounts of time into it, learn when your server’s population is lower than the opponent servers for higher chance at outnumbered buff. This was a late night skirmish Pacific time. I didn’t hop around to find the outnumbered buff.

It’s a good chart showing how WXP rank gain plays into the system.

Just for fun, here’s a screenshot from last night of about an hour of 2nd place gameplay on a silver account with no loyalty pip bonus and the outnumbered buff in EBG (working as intended – hell yes I’ll keep playing when outnumbered).

Almost enough pips for the entire wood track alone.

XenesisII.1540:

Go read the thread bigpapasmurf, sounds like you’re trying to get a win over me or something lol.

Chaba wanted to know what Anet was going to do with links since it was expected that populations would go up. So what did they want to do if not lose their link to help FA queues? relink with the lowest server? even though it was expected every single server would get an increase in population? (nevermind there are 5 other single link servers that could warrant them getting the lowest first like YB). Did they think somehow that would fix their queue problem?

I stated that we would need to to wait and see what actions they need to do, because anet would probably need weeks of data to do the appropriate action. Whether that was to adjust links, or map caps since some servers don’t even have links, or even pop caps if a server was full but not really getting queues as much. We all really had no idea how much of a difference the changes would make, how many players would actually play, or how many would actually stick around, not even Anet would know that from just that week.

Now Chaba has changed their tune, they “don’t pretend to know what the best solution is without access to actual data”. Then why did you put up a thread about changing links? and then arguing with me about them needing to collect data to make the appropriate move?

My question hasn’t been answered yet, is FA still experiencing 4 queue nights other than reset? (oh hell you know what I’ll just log into my alt account there and see for myself over the next week). Being full doesn’t mean you experience 4 queues a night, Mag has been full a while and they don’t experience 4 map queues a night, just EBG. Chaba panicked about queues, I’m sure they all want links now because FA losing theirs would probably mean them dropping to T4.

Anet didn’t need to do a knee jerk reaction to the spike in population, when three weeks later it looks like it’s calmed down. Guess what the best solution was? ride it out and three weeks later get proper links redone tomorrow.

I did not change my tune. I take issue with you making speculations then trying to ascribe it to me as if it were something I wrote. Own up to your own thoughts.

I don’t answer the questions of people who go around saying false things about others.

XenesisII.1540:

And you were complaining about queues, FA is locked, what else would you want them to do for FA if not take away the link? That’s the only thing that will clear up your queues.

You don’t know that. That’s extremely simplistic thinking by you. I don’t pretend to know the best solution without access to the actual data. Only Anet knows how full “Full” is.

Moreover, the goal of server links is to provide teams of relatively even strength. I would not write something stupid like “we don’t want a link” contrary to that goal. Link status should always be based on relative strength against other teams. The patch made those outdated.

Here’s the thread in reference for anyone interested: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/June-6-Patch-Server-Links-and-Pops/first

TLDR:
1- Patch was going to spike population averages upwards and make server pairings quickly outdated.
2- Outdated server links can exacerbate the length/size of queues.
3- Long queues are a negative impact on the WvW experience which can hinder player retention.

Here three weeks later the rolling average still increased from what it was two weeks ago – more Very High servers, one less Medium, and an additional Full server: