Guild Wars 2

I would just like Anet to acknowledge the problem for now.

All they need is /resign from GW1. That would solve your problem.

My money is on the build templates. I will be surprised if they don’t have it implemented within the next 6 weeks.

Tier A:
+Necro
+Thief
=Guardian
=Ranger
-Engineer
Tier B:
+Elementalist
=Warrior
-Mesmer

From what I could tell, most common is guardian/necro/thief/ranger + X, where X is engi/guard/necro/ranger/ele.

Base map: Foefire

Win condition: kill enemy lord or lord with highest power when time expires
Primary objective: drain enemy lord’s power over time through holding capture points (low enough to be able to kill the lord)
Secondary objective: capture the Orb of Power for a power shift

Time limit: 20 minutes
Respawn time: 5 seconds + 2 seconds for every minute elapsed in the match (max of 43 seconds during last minute if match goes full duration)

Lords: start the match with 750 power. Power increases Lord (and npc’s) hp and damage, as well as unique buffs when above 250 and 500 power. The idea is that the lord should pretty much be impossible to kill above 500 power, and pretty difficult above 250 power. 250 power should be at current level (as in Foefire now) and 150 power should be how it was pre-buff. 0 power should be a 1-hit kill.

Capture points: captured points will drain enemy lord’s power by a rate of 1 per 2 seconds for the first 10 minutes and 2 per 2 seconds for the last 10 minutes.

Orb of Power: spawns at middle capture point every 5 minutes (first spawn is 5 minutes into match). The team that is able to return the orb to their base will drain enemy lord of 50 power, add 50 power to their lord, respawn any dead NPC’s, repair gates, expel any enemy players from your base, and grant a +150 stat boost for 2 minutes.

Half of dogged march trait (regen) is wasted since it doesn’t stack with banner regen (which should have 100% uptime). I would probably take shield master in its place.

You might want to consider swapping berserker for signet of stamina. You already have signet trait reducing the cooldown, and the passive would give you more dodges. Personal preference on this one probably.

The problem is that sound effect is even longer than the recharge of the cannon…

With the buff to berserker stance, what do you think about changing adept traits to 25% stance and 25% speed (and swapping signets dolyak/stamina for berserker/balanced)? 10 seconds of condition application immunity seems pretty strong.

Add a new discipline grandmaster trait: “Allows all attacks to hit while blinded and below 75% health. Also, replaces greatsword skin with a lightsaber.”

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-sF-Cx;0VKFO0Y4ZKVQ0;9;6JTJ;408-48A39-UVk6C;1ZF18ZF183Nf

I’ve been running a variation of this off and on for a couple months. I’m not the best pvp’er (75th percentile), but I have fun with this and thought I’d share it and maybe get some critique.

It has a lot of aoe condi removal (2 per 16 sec with warhorn and 3 per 25 sec with shouts) and personal condi removal (mending and ire).

As far as survivability, the defense banner has about 98% uptime, so I have constant regeneration (reapplied every few sec if stolen/ripped) for myself and allies nearby. I will often line up my cleanses so that warhorn will convert vulnerability or burning (into protection or aegis). Weakness has close to 40% uptime (when not cleansed) to help mitigate physical dmg. High vigor uptime and energy sigils provide plenty of endurance for dodges.

The build also has some decent control with mace stun/daze, shield stun, sword cripple/immob and banner knockback. I am a little lacking in stability requiring elite banner #2 (gives close to 4 sec stability on 10 sec cd). I took mobile strikes to be able to get back on point quickly (not having to cleanse immob first) with sword 2, shield 4 or banner 4. The damage output is garbage. I just focus on staying alive until teammates arrive.

One trait variation I sometimes use is swapping shield master for dogged march and inspiring banners for vigorous shouts (if team will have a lot of regen uptime already).

Do you have a link to your turret build?

Updated through Horo.7395 (147 entries) [more modes has passed solo queue]:
1. Balance/build diversity (aoe, melee hate, cc duration, pet strength, less used classes, more builds viable per class, more stat combinations for builds, less mandatory traits, balance water combat) 56.5%
2. more modes (larger teams, arena, TDM, CTF, GVG, huttball, etc) 51.7%
3. Solo(/duo) queue (split from premade) 50.3%
4. reward system (finishers, titles, make gold, pve stuff, skins, ingame points, salvaging, rank speed, etc) 29.9%
5. improve matchmaking (match better against similarly experienced/skilled players, don’t start matches till full) 12.9%
6. ladder/leaderboard (team/guild ladder, in-game viewable) 10.2%
7. improve HoM lobby and UI for both in-game and lobby (lfg, vendors, joining games, team registration, etc) 9.5%
8. Dueling (HoM, open world) 9.5%
9. skill development (more of them, cues, situational skills, weapon skill options, better combos, more fluid use when moving) 6.8%
10. improve secondary mechanics 6.1%
11. Mid-air skills 5.4%
12. more maps 4.8%
13. alter right click 4.8%
14. bug/exploit fixes 4.1%
15. team oriented combat 4.1%
16. random maps tpvp 4.1%
17. Templates (save/load builds) 4.1%
18. arena net tournaments (automated and/or hosted by them) 3.4%
19. downed state (able to remove in custom) 3.4%
20. spectator (spell effects, separation from actual players, expansion, replahs) 2.7%
21. punish leavers 2.7%
22. voice (commands, voip) 2.0%
23. bigger capture points 1.4%
24. less esport 1.4%
25. general combat (more engaging(?), less spam) 1.4%
26. add npc’s 0.7%
27. hotjoin dedicated maps (you can already do this in custom arena though) 0.7%
28. more water in maps 0.7%
29. f2p kitten .7%
30. remove raid of capricorn 0.7%
31. revert stealth reveal change 0.7%
32. use pve items in kitten .7%
33. camera 0.7%
34. dedicated healing 0.7%
35. more people playing 0.7%

Pyriall.5027:

They’re already working on it as a means to monetize the pvp side. You’ll receive one free template and others will be purchased through the gem process.

Where was this mentioned?

My guess is that they are starting new players out at the 50th percentile, assuming they are average. It would be a much better experience for everyone if they assumed 10% instead.

Zodian.6597:

hmmm… counting by hand I ended up with:
(as of butch.8136 post on page 4)
Dueling= 14
Solo queue = 59
Build diversity= 45
Random map generator for tournies: 9
-those are actual # of entrees, not % based figures.

what app are you using? -I found that simply ctrl+F-ing a word would yield inaccurate results because of quotes/people using the word multiple times in the same post. Going to start counting out rest of the entries now, thanks for the list -it will give me a basis of what to look for.

I counted by hand as well. I did a good deal of combinations for solo queue and balance/diversity though. If anyone made a request that had to deal with balance, I threw it in that category. Maybe balance should be separate from build diversity, but a lot of people had it listed together as one entry, and I can see the logic to considering it together. Also, I ignored any entries that were below #3 (if they had 4 listed, I used first 3). I probably made some mistakes though.

Here’s current breakdown through Erdem (using 127 entries):

1. Balance/build diversity (general balance, aoe, fix melee hate, cc duration, pet strength, buff less used classes, more builds viable per class, more stat combinations for builds, less mandatory traits) 58.27%
2. Solo(/duo) queue (split from premade) 48.82%
3. more modes (arena, TDM, CTF, GVG, huttball, etc) 47.24%
4. reward system (finishers, titles, pve stuff, skins, ingame points, salvaging, etc) 29.92%
5. improve matchmaking 10.24%
6. ladder/leaderboard 10.24%
7. Dueling (HoM, open world) 7.87%
8. improve HoM lobby and interface (lfg, vendors, joining games, etc) 7.87%
9. improve secondary mechanics 6.30%
10. skill development (more of them, cues, situational skills, weapon skill options) 6.30%
11. Mid-air skills 5.51%
12. more maps 5.51%
13. alter right click 5.51%
14. bug/exploit fixes 4.72%
15. team oriented combat 4.72%
16. random maps tpvp 3.94%
17. arena net tournaments (Anet-hosted, automated) 3.94%
18. matches don’t start till full 3.15%
19. downed state (able to remove in custom) 3.15%
20. Templates (save/load builds) 3.15%
21. Improve spectator (spell effects, separation from actual players, expansion to tpvp games, replays) 3.15%

1. Save/Load builds (being able to copy and paste links to others like in GW1 would be win)
2. Make secondary objectives more important on all maps (I think they’re on right track with newer maps)
3. Voice command shortcuts (for pug communication)

It would be interesting to watch if the secondary objective grew in importance as the match went on.

For example:
1) Forest of Niflhel – NPC’s killed grant additional points (and additional stat boost) on for each successive time it is spawned. NPC’s would also become more difficult to kill themselves as well.
2) Legacy of Foefire – Guild lord difficult and reward would scale as length of match progresses. Maybe at the start of a match, a player could solo the lord very quickly for 50 points, or at the 20 minute mark, you would need a full team to take the lord down over a minute period for 200 pts
3) Battle of Khylo – Trebuchet does increased dmg as match goes on (to being able to 1-shot medium armor players at 15 minutes)
4) Temple of Silent Storm – mechanics work fine as is for feeling of escalation
5) Spirit Watch – Start orb capture at 10 pts base (20 with control of point). Add 5 pts base each time orb is captured.

You would also need something in the UI to designate the current power level of these mechanics.

Another recommendation is to use the filter system to get the game type you want. (eg. 8v8, 5 sec respawn)

Draygo.9473:

Nettle.9025:

I wonder if newer players would appreciate a skill usage list in spectate? Put it on the side of the screen for the current spectated player, and make it unobtrusive. Don’t include the auto attack on that list to avoid spam. Add an option to hide it.

technically there is no autoattack skill in gw2. So from a code standpoint excluding a skill is a bit tricky I imagine.

There is an auto-cast feature though. The skill list could show which skill the player has on auto-recast (usually skill 1) and if it is actively recasting.

To add to the list:

-Add an option to show picture in picture for the other capture points. That way you can get a glimpse of what’s going on at the other nodes without taking you away from the bigger fight. (for example, you could set 2 of the eyes to be your pictures-in-picture; you could set it to the other nodes, or to other points of interest, like a fight at treb)
-Show progress bar of capture points on the spectator UI (maybe up top under the node icons)

Was thinking it would be cool if custom arenas gave an option for each team to vote to ban 1 class and/or weapon per side.

For example, you could ban guardian and dagger. Then ele’s would have to use staff or s/f, and thieves would not be able to use flanking strike.

I think we would defintiely need saveable loadouts before trying something like this (to make it easy to meet the weapon requirement with an alternate loadout).

I know this is not an option provided for us yet, but it could be cool to have respawn time scale from 5 sec (at start of match) to much longer (maybe 30ish) by the end of a long match. That way mistakes would be more heavily punished later in the match.

The daily yesterday took about 30-45 minutes. Join in the middle of a map twice and play through the following map. Got both the kills and the captures after a little over two maps. It definitely is an increase in time requirements, but not so much.

What I would like to see is the removal of the 4 unique maps daily and go back to only requiring 4 different achievements for the daily. This way you could finish your daily in as little as 2 tournament matches if you win or any 4 maps if you hot join or have a losing streak in tourneys.

I’ve had fun playing these builds as warrior:

Captain Hammer CC/Healing build:
http://taugrim.com/2012/06/21/guide-to-gw2-captain-hammer-warrior/

Defektive’s Longbow build:
http://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/pvp/pvp/Defektive-s-tPvP-Longbow-GS-Warrior-Build/page/2#post1418061

Dedalus.3065:

If not, then they can always buy their population. Put up a tournament with a big reward and the players will come streaming (hehe) in.

Very true. Both Riot and Valve have shown a willingness to put up $1+ million in tournament prizes. And both of these companies’ games are top 2-3 viewed on Twitch.

I’d like to see ANet do something similar around the 1 year mark. This would give them time to get the rest of features in and polished.

Myrmidian Eudoros.4671:

lol

I don’t want to speculate on what the cost will be specifically, but it will certainly be substantially more than that.

If I were to speculate, my guess would be between 800 and 1600 gems (24-48g) per month. Here’s to hoping it’s less.

bhagwad.4281:

I wonder how much I’ll be willing to pay for a custom arena?

Let’s see. I would think it worthwhile to spend say 10 silver to create a custom arena lasting for a few days.

I hope it’s not much more expensive than that.

I haven’t seen how much it will cost, but I read somewhere that the starter kit would last one month, and you could add time to it with time tokens afterward. And anyone can contribute time tokens to someone’s custom arena. So a whole guild could contribute a little bit of gold (gem conversion) per month to sustain their own arena.

Acandis.3250:

I don’t understand how this works… I don’t see any percentile next to my name other than my win%…

Clarify?

You are in the top 1000. It only shows %-tile if you’re not in the top 1000.

You don’t have to stick to your server anymore with guesting. I play on home server with my guild for pve/wvw, but I guest on anvil rock when doing SPvP (a lot more people there).

Did not know this…

Thanks!

Yes, something simple that will help a lot.

Another simple thing to ease frustration would be not showing instructions for the map every single game.

I’m fine with this addition if said ascended items can only be obtained from skill and not grind. I’m happy to see items that cannot be obtained via TP.

Immediately,
1. Announce there will be a tournament at the one-year anniversary of GW2. $1 million for winner (and probably another $1 million spread among runners up—yes, totally just using same amount Riot used). This will keep the good teams playing now, even though all the core features are not finished yet, so that they can hone their skills to take that prize.
2. Offer sPvP-only edition of GW2 for cheap (<= $20) to further bolster playerbase.

Shortly thereafter, scratch all methods of mathes. Replace with the following:
1. 5v5 hot-join (designed for goofing off, killing a bit of time, testing new builds, helping new players)
-a. Greatly reduced glory rewards.
-b. No penalty for leaving
-c. Minimal matchmaking with hidden ELO.
-d. Add mentor system. Experienced players can volunteer to mentor a new player. They will be rewarded with glory based on feedback from mentoree. Mentoree must be below rank 10
2. solo/duo-queue tournaments (for players without organized teams to progress)
-a. ELO matchmaking with visible rating to other players
-b. Add penalty for leaving
-c. 8-team tournament is okay, but consider increasing to 16 with greater rewards for last round
3. ranked team skirmishes
-a. Single round matches
-b. ELO matchmaking, with rating decay
4. daily team tournaments
-a. 16-team tournament (one during EU prime time, one during NA prime time)
-b. ANet should stream and shoutcast the tournament on Twitch (and hire a couple of great casters)
-c. Participation would be given to those with highest ranked team ratings that sign up for one of the two tournaments (rating decay would force teams to continue to play ranked skirmishes to qualify for daily tournaments)
-d. Top placing teams would receive prizes (cash, gems,etc)
-e. Results in daily tournaments would qualify teams for quarterly/annual tournaments

League of Legends brings up another point. Many people are complaining about a lack of diversity in maps, while LoL has been very popular only 1 map in the competitive scene (3 in total).

Let’s assume that Arenanet finishes implementing the core features required for nurturing the competitive scene.

The $60 cost for the game is still much higher than some of the other competitive games (e.g., LoL being free-to-play). What if arenanet distributed a pvp pack for the game that cost $20. This pack could be played stand alone and would grant the player 2 character slots and access to heart of the mists only. If they then added the full game to their account, they would get to keep the 2 character slots from the pvp pack. This way, spvp/tpvp players could get their friends to join them cheap and they’d have option of joining in the rest of the game later on, for no real penalty.

Hey, there’s even precedent for this: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/PvP_Access_Kit

I agree with Aragiel to some degree. This could definitely cause mesmer portals to be even more of a necessity.

I would think that there should be no difference between having 1 more or 3 more players than your opponents (to discourage portal zerg between two points). I would think 15 sec to neutral and 30 to cap would be good enough when you have numbers advantage on a node.

One thing they could do is give negative one point for every tournament where you are eliminated in the first round (not letting total drop below 0).

This would not solve the problem of two teams with equal skill with one having more points that played more, but it would keep terrible teams that play endlessly and occasionally win from having any points. You would have to finish first at least as often as you finish 5th-8th to stay positive (and would you really want such a team [that can’t meet that ratio] to be competing in the ‘larger’ tournaments?).

A couple recommendations:

1. The buff should divide by number of players for that server across all maps (~667 players).
2. The buff should not apply to fights against mobs. (Bots anyone?)

Great idea OP.

At least with custom arenas, we can do it all ourselves (although spectator at the least would be helpful here—then you don’t have to worry about getting low-res streams from some participants’ PoV).

Reason:
Matches become boring by Monday or Tuesday when one server is running away with the score. Rather than losing servers teaming up, they give up and quit playing. If in-game mechanics are in place to help each side honor a truce, mid-week battles could become more interesting.

Implementation:
When server A score exceeds combined sum of server B & C score, grant server B & C the ability to initiate a cross-server alliance that would:
1) prevent server B & C from attacking one another or their holdings
2) automatically relinquish control of server B holdings in server C territory to server C (and vice versa) (there would be no change on southern most supply camp in borderlands or stonemist castle)
3) any captures of server A holdings would randomly go to server B or C weighted based on how many players from each server were in the capture circle.

Initiation of alliance would require 75% approval from both servers after 6 hours and would last for a fixed duration (option to choose increments of 12 hours) or until either of the following scenarios are met (A. Server A points falls to 67% of combined sum of server B and C—i.e., Server A falls from > 50% of cumulative points to < 40% of cumulative points; B. Either Server B or Server C climbs to within 90% of server A’s score)

Note: This would never force an alliance unless a vast majority of both losing servers wanted to do so.

As of 9am this morning (EST):

What about forever?
-Get rid of the point tally at the top. Replace with a percentage score that rolls based on performance in the past seven days (100% would mean you held everything all the time; 33% meant you held even on average for the past week)
-Make the pve bonuses roll daily based on performance past seven days
-Add an anti-domination mechanic, to make it very difficult for a server to take more than ~66-75% of the points (even with population imbalances)—to encourage fighting all the time (eg, server with over 75% of current points captured gets debuff where other 2 servers do X% higher dmg to them and their ncps/walls and gain X% higher rewards)

ImProVocateur.5189:

No. Winning is about more than a short term victory, or even a single campaign. Winning in this war is about consistent domination.

To that measure I am willing to accept a point system like in tennis. Matches could award set points every 12h – 1 for bronze place, 2 for silver place, 3 for gold place. Let us say 7PM and 7AM EST. I think 12h would be best to accomodate the worldwide peak hours seperately.

One useful way to balance servers is by multiplying the set award by average population for the three servers, or by a challenge rating based upon differences in average population. Population would be saved every minute for each server. Players would see the bronze, silver and gold set points add up instead of one large scary sum. Players would have daily motivation to participate. If a challenge rating is used, then players could view the match difficulty rating. That would help psychologically.

In the event of a tie, the server with the highest difficulty rating for the match would win.

I think this idea is very interesting, and agree that a lot of the downturn in participation wed-fri is psychological. I think this suggestion would need some refining though (although I don’t have any good suggestions, currently).

I’m afraid the 2 week matches will end up far worse than 1 week matches. A lot of servers are giving a good fight on the weekend and giving up by Tuesday after falling way behind on the week days. With a 2 week matchup, they may be discouraged by the time 2nd weekend comes, facing a seemingly insurmountable lead.

I don’t think it’s unfair to reduce point gain for lower activity. Currently, offpeak has to potential to disproportionately affect point gain compared to amount of players utilized.

I would recommend not using a linear scale for the scoring rate though. This would limit the effect of a server logging out en masse to grief dominating side. Something like if all maps full for all 3 servers = 100%, but if all maps full for only 1 server (and other 2 empty) = 66%.

Have 1 match run from Friday 5pm PST to Sunday 5pm PST and another from Sunday 5PM PST to Friday 5PM PST, with weekend rankings separate from weekday rankings.

Another idea when outmanned: Deploy a cattlepult at your spawn that will shoot you to a random location in the zone (that is not directly on top of a capture point). This will make organizing a little difficult but cattlepults are fun and it stops spawn camping.

I don’t think 3 orbs would be nearly strong enough. I was thinking along the lines of 20 orbs of power (+100% hp, +1000 stats, maybe even more) for a server with no capture points at all.

Outside of the top tier match, a sizable portion of the 2nd/3rd place servers are giving up and waiting for next matchup. It’s no fun for anyone when one server owns all the map and spawn camps all the entrances for opposing servers. Massively buffing the current losers would encourage them to play more (everyone likes to be OP) and actually give a fight to the dominating server. So the next time you log in and see server ‘X’ has everything , you think, “Nice, time to go own them for a bit and take back some of our land” instead of “Hmm, hopeless cause—on to something else”