Guild Wars 2

Well yesterday Desolation HotM had an overflow so I guess they got PvPers to log in the game once again. Mind you team queue had 2 teams in our bracket and solo queue time was around 5-7 mins. I guess that’s good, right?

I won a soloq game once as a mesmer on a team with another mesmer, 2 eles and a thief against a fairly balanced setup with at least 2 warriors. Was top50 also.
No excuses :P

Shockwave.1230:

Allie Murdock.8152:

Countless,

Yes, I did say that. I also said in that post that we are investigating ways that we can get proper metrics to reflect the majority of the playerbase. If you knew the amount of players that actually played PvP in our game, then you would understand why a strawpoll with 300 votes is not sufficient.

That’s not to say that we don’t talk about it internally. We talk about it quite a lot.

If the issue was as simple as me making a strawpoll, I’d do it; but it’s not. A very, very small percentage of our playerbase even visit these forums, let alone vote on a poll.

There’s approximately 17,000 that do Solo Q it seems, getting up to the 94th percentile puts you into the top 1000

No. That means there were approximately 17,000 players who ever played solo queue. Last time I checked my ranking against my friends list I realised around 15 out of 25 already quit and 5 doesn’t do PvP anymore, the other 5 are my team…

silvermember.8941:

why would they spend time making a f2p version that wont interact with the paid version for very little income gain?

Look at it this way: Imagine LoL having a b2p PvE side which also unlocks some skins for the regular Moba if you buy it. Riot would make more or the same amount of money, not changing the game but expanding it. Now GW2 already has PvE so they can just add an account version that does not include PvE and makes some of PvP pay to get, like skins. This would get them more players overall into their PvP, making the already existing players more motivated, bringing in potential customers that downloaded the game for PvP, liked the combat, read the lore and want to engage in the living story. There’s nothing bad about the idea aside from the time and resources invested.

I think this would be a great idea because I used to be part of a very hardcore PvP guild that played f2p games exclusively which is the reason they did not consider GW2 in the first place.

To monetize GW2 PvP without hurting existing players and keeping the game attractive to potential customers they would need to implement a new type of account which is basically a PvP only account.
An example of this:

• 3 empty character slots by default.
• 2 bag slots open on each new character, including starter backpack.
• Access to PvP maps only, including HotM.
• No access to trading post, only Gemstore, however a means to get PvE related items upon spending gems, such as Black Lion chests to give incentive to buy full game.
• No access to gold to gem conversion or higher rates on conversion.
• PvP locker can only hold items up to a certain rank (and include an option to unlock for gems).

These are all to make sure people who bought the game have a huge advantage in terms of convenience, however f2p players have the choice to spend money on the game to make it equally convenient, essentially purchasing only the PvP part of the game.
Other Gemstore additions could include a 1 week WvW pass, where the player could be upleveled with exotic items much like in the EotM beta, with a choice to select stats but cannot unequip – type of gear and weapons and one time trait select. Or just a plain copy of their PvP character which will of course be weaker than regular full ascended item wielders but it would still be fair.
Upon buying the full game the WvW characters would be reset and players would have to start from 0 like normally, only they keep their existing characters amd inventories – or not. Either way it is possible and would be great to have new players.

Matisse.9356:

A tutorial would certainly be a nice addition to get new players started, although I still think that a league system needs to be implemented first to ensure that all players are within a certain skill level in a match.

Maybe this could help to make the pvp community less toxic then it is after 1,5 years into the game.

So many people still don’t understand that leagues can’t be implemented anymore. There are a maximum of 8 teams playing this game at primetime on EU and maybe pugs to make up 2 more teams. Solo arena is always the same 10 guys every game with a 8-10 min wait time for queue to pop.
In other words PvP is dead. Leagues require a healthy player base. Tutorials may help players get into PvP.

On the 18th they will remove all means of gaining additional glory and I also read somewhere that vendors will be gone. So I suspect even if they don’t remove glory it will be useless, besides there is no reason not to spend it now. Just get 20 slot bags for all characters and fill up your PvP locker. Once that’s done use the rest of the glory to craft dyes and open/use/sell them.

This is inaccurate because I know a guy with 10 years of MMO experience and 5000 hours on his warrior whom I can probably beat on my mesmer (about 20 hours) cuz the dude clicks his skills, backpedals and uses keyboard to turn camera…
Also I do believe people can get better even if playing an OP spec for example I can play pwhip thief and still get my kitten handed to me by experienced players. Another example is hambow warriors. When I get them in my soloq game I know I’m gonna have to work overtime because more inexperienced players play OP specs and even if they do well in team fights they will most likely do less damage and deal with pressure much worse than someone with 2k games on a certain less OP class which also kind of proves your point.

Eyia Hellhide.7320:

Only Champion Paragon, because I love playing guardian. Usually bunker, but if we have already bunker in the team I switch to DPS guardian. Actually I have 3 guardians, 1 for every build I use in PvP. Do you think I should seek for help?

Yes, you are clearly mental. 3 guardians is not enough at all. I had 4 lvl80 guardians so far (all races except for treepeople) and I want more. Waiting for money to buy more slots :>

This game is quite well balanced compared to other mediocre low pop mmos. The core isssue in balance comes from the fact that there are no public test realms so players that come up with the “op” builds can do so and these will last a year+ before the next balance patch. The less frequently you update your game the more you should test those additions however ArenaNet seem to have opted for the least frequent, least tested patches achievable, which is interesting considering many people would volunteer or would have volunteered to test patches before they go live.

I am also rank46 but 6/10 Ransacker! I feel I’m blessed by the gods. Anyway I’ll be rank 52 when I get ransacker and don’t think i lt will be fixed before that anyway.

Known people in duel arenas are likely to be eles (Tom, Zuik) shatter mesmers (Coulter) or thieves. Occasionally hambow warriors but those don’t stay long. 1v1 relies on kiting out cooldowns and positioning well a.k.a huggin dat pillar. Cheesy tourney specs are not necessarily cheesy 1v1 specs and those people that win fights on conjure ele or condi guard always make me smile.

DanPowers.1096:

Unless you have a score of 0, you’ve probably contributed something to the team. I pretty much only bunk, and on incredibly rare occasions, the game might end with me only getting 10 points for the mid cap, then bunking the point. There are occasions when getting 0 points is actually helpful to your team, for example: you fight 1v2 or 3 on the far node for the entire game, which allows your 4 teammates to easily crush their 2 or 3 and cap home and mid. Personal score is useless, and I hate that tie games are decided by which team had the highest personal score

As a bunker you shouldn’t just stand on mid. If you play guardian and you only get 10 points a game you are doing something wrong.

So beautiful and true. I wish ANet were more transparent with their stuff.

Jayden Ennok.3687:

I have two accounts: T2 NA and T9 EU so my lag could be affected by the server size as well.

I don’t lag on the EU server (playing from UK).

My NA account is on Sea of Sorrows and most of the time I have a very slight delay, I notice this especially when using keep/tower portals or shortbow teleport or with some thief combos – they don’t connect. On some days or on reset nights it gets a bit laggier and I just don’t play my thief cos of this.

Haven’t noticed the lag with other classes (mesmer/guard), except the keep portal lag.

Erm this is PvP subforum. WvW and PvP are hosted on different servers and population has nothing to do with latency in PvP.

@Cero.5132 – I am not sure if it’s possible to have frequent PvP balance changes due to the limited amount of PvP devs available.

@Uuni.6091 – as mentioned it is my view on the subject and you are right to a certain extent however making a prediction as such that enough people will come back to the game to keep both conquest alive and provide enough players for the new game mode to settle can’t be 100% accurate and therefore making a new game mode qualifies for ANet as taking chances which is not something companies like to do. As for the monetary side this may not be clear but say they have 50 (not even close to accurate) programmers working for the company, 5 of which takes care of PvP. 3 of these deal with maintenance and 2 with bug fixes and every so often they can do work related to balance, but to make this more frequent they’d have to either work overtime or employ more staff, both of which costs money. As for your 3rd point, again I believe it’s a 2 ended sword. On the 1 end they may make insane cash of the influx of players interested in the game after changes or people may find the expensive changes useless and the company looses money.

@garythesnail.8475 – I did say it’s my view only and did not mention anything about not enjoying the game myself, just addressing common concerns. I still like this game a lot otherwise this would be a quit thread.

Maylo.5892:

This happened to me yesterday,

http://www.twitch.tv/maylox/c/3830777

Was not even the first time this happened to me, pulled and stucked alive somewhere right between the glass ground and normal ground, could not move out.

This happens a lot as well. Normally you’d want to send a bug report but mid-game it’s kind of hard to do. I just relog when I get stuck on skyham.

1. Tanky healing guardian focused on support and revival/stomping.
2. DPS guardian with shout spec but more damage / cc orientated build.
3. Power well necromancer as glassy as possible for burst damage.
4. Hammer warrior with warhorn to provide vigor and blasts as well as damage.
5. Staff support / DPS ele to assist the necro with AoE damage and giving water fields.

This setup is fairly mobile with good damage, perma stability and swiftness along with good burst heal and condi removal.

In the last few days (weeks (months)) my enthusiasm towards PvP has slowly faded. This is not a rage / quit thread tho, I still believe GW2 is one of the most balanced MMOs and combat is fluid and looks great… however since I exclusively only play PvP and WvW I can’t speak of PvE population but those 2 game modes are starting to lack players.
I am at a point where in solo queue and team queue I know every single player by their names and most of them I’ve played with or against. If I see a new name I know it’s some rank10 guy who got lost on the ladder.
I can predict a win or loss 30 sec into the game with 90% accuracy and the amount of interesting matches went from 5 a day to 0 or 1.
I’ve heard that ArenaNet saw an increase in PvP population with the last patch; and whereas they did not share any figures I don’t think I saw a Heart of the Mists overflow since forever now.
The forum community seems dissatisfied and while I do not share most of their concerns I also see how main figures quitting the game can cause serious problems.
I believe that the PvP devs are doing their best with what minimal resources they have due to the release of upcoming NCSoft game(s).
There is a constant cry for things promised long ago that are yet unseen and the presence of developers on forums seems at an all time low (can’t blame them tbh) – forum moderators are working overtime to make the forums free of toxicity as well as some game related feedback.

Top 3 things asked by the community and why I think we’ll never see them:

1. New game modes – probably the most requested and also the least likely idea. There is such a little amount of people playing this game now that introducing new game modes would make this game look truly dead.
2. More frequent balance patches – many people say how easy it is to tweak a few numbers to achieve better balance. Those people obviously don’t know the cost of making those updates go live – costs that include server costs, dev payments, working hours, tests and so on which leads to my final point…
3. Better PvP – this in the game’s current state is no longer achievable because it costs money and that is what the game no longer makes enough of off PvP. Ask yourself how much you spent this week on gems and if the answer is 0 (like for me), congratulations, you contributed nothing towards a better PvP. In a business point of view, investing money into PvP is like buying shares in a company – you won’t buy shares in a company that’s about to go bankrupt. Since people that play PvP do not generate enough money to pay for the things they ask for these things won’t be implemented.

Keep in mind this is how I imagine things go. I believe this game had great potential PvP-wise which was met with a lack of attention from the company’s part. Now there is no way to get back to that stage however better days may come. I felt like I needed to share this speculation because ANet shares so little with their players.
Tl;dr: a big wall of text, don’t even bother.

Depends on your connection. From the UK I can play EU and NA no problem but both can have random spikes and ping over 100. If I play from Central EU I get around 20-60 ms ping on EU and 600+ on NA. I’m sure this is also ISP and location specific and VPNs can help.

Solo queue is ranked hotjoin and team queue is now solo queue with a few exceptions. That said I do not like playing on skyhammer as it is tedious but do not care anymore either. If I had to give a reason for the devs to remove or rework it it is the terrible pathing which makes blink abilities useless and therefore you get pulled once as a thief or mesmer on sidenodes your teleport will still put you on the edge of the platform and you still will fall.

Pushing far ruins lives. Do not push far without medical assistance.

This is true to a certain extent, however say I’m the ranger guarding close and see a decap engi coming to me. Depending on map I have multiple options:
Stay on point and laugh because I have a little piece of wood that keeps me on point despite the engi’s best effort to spam cc on me.
Leave the point and:
If there is 4 people of the enemy team fighting over close I can move to mid and tell someone to push far from the midfight or run far myself.
This is just 1 example and there are many more, e.g a 1 0 4 split from the enemy or a push with guardian involved.

I want Legendary Epic Omega Hambow Health Regenerator and Fearsome Amazing Decap-itator.
Maybe even Master Of Pistol Whip Pistol Whip Pistol Whip.

You can interrupt Withdraw the same way you can interrupt any evasive skill. Wardings, Sanctuary and Static Field.

Hey I am rank69, with around 10k skyammer games played and over 50k deaths by falling damage. I think I played a tournament once but I got killed too much and the enemies I tagged wouldn’t jump off so I scored 0 and quit. Hope you invite me so I can farm more for phoenix finisher.

This thread is so deep. Self proclaimed professional and experienced gamers bashing at a company for trash balance, threatening to quit – before logging into the game and abusing the same “broken” mechanics as the ones introduced here.
Why should they (ANet) take you all seriously? This is the community forums. While your cries are loud, they won’t reach the people making the decisions about this game, and more importantly they won’t pay for the changes you want made.
To those of ANet that respond here: idk how you guys can put up with all this. There are some great guys posting here some positive feedback at times but that is rare now.
To the professional gaming community: if you’re so keen on being the best in a competitive game why do you even play this one? It is obvious now that GW2 lost all its potential right around 2 months after release when it became appearant that a game that has to be balanced around 3 game modes and is split in population around those 3 will never have a serious PvP aspect and will have nothing to do with esports for sure.

I played with and against you yesterday! You didn’t do that bad and we won the game when I was with you (the FARming session). Keep playing to the best of your abilities, you wouldn’t like it on the bottom of leaderboards ;/

They can not release the patch notes because there aren’t any yet. I expect the balance patch not to arrive for another 2 months still, meaning they still have a lot of time discussing changes and bringing out the best possible set of changes. I am sure as soon as they’re ready and the patch is finalised they will begin to share information about it, but this will probably not happen for another month or so.
(I tried to be as nice as I could please don’t infract me again…. :/ )

Vuh.1328:

DanyK.3842:

In that case I am confused… how do you dodge the queue?

You wait for the team(s) you don’t want to face to get a game, then you queue up

That wouldn’t work cuz I’d just have to wait out til they leave their game cuz noone else plays this game.
Also why would casuals do that? Yesterday I queued with my WvW guildies for some funzies and we got the team I used to PvP with, knew we’d get stomped when I told the guy on close before the game started that he’ll have thief + warr inc and he ignored it and went afk before capping the point. We did better than I expected (175 – 500) and I was satisfied even tho we played avg 80% vs top50.

In that case I am confused… how do you dodge the queue?

Rubik.7192:

fishball.7204:

All the ‘pro’ teams on NA just pug stomp and avoid each other in queue.

And all the casual teams just queue dodge anyone competent enough to beat them.

:)

“ALL”… so you represent the pro teams in this game? Well sorry for being too casual for you. I doge the queue all day when someone good plays (wth is queue dodge anyway) so yeah, such competition, much esports, wow.

style.6173:

@OP:

You are actually incorrect. GC eles or mesmers can burst done someone else just as quickly as a thief. The main different is that those classes have other specs they can use. You just see a lot of GC thieves because there aren’t any other viable specs at upper levels of play.

You mean to tell me that d/d condition thief is not viable in the current meta? :o

Simon.3794:

Use “kick” to kick some one off broken glkitten in skyhammer, the guy was like nice kick, and i was like This, is, Sparta!!!

Epic post got owned by kittyfilter
Glhfkittens!

Marsares.2053:

sorrow.2364:

Dozer.6057:

Future doesn’t look bright for my Mesmer getting up there

Misha (Metrix) is in position 3 in the leaderboard and plays mesmer for arguably one of the best teams around.

And that’s exactly the problem. You can only be successful as a Mesmer if you’re carried by the rest of an incredibly good team. Whilst Warriors, Guardians and arguably some other classes to a lesser extend actually carry their team.

Misha gets carried by top mesmerising skills and pure asura awesomeness! Through those he carries his team.

#BelieveInKarl #eSports2050

phaeris.7604:

Simple as this.

Put equal skill ele vs equal skill other classes and say who would win.

I bet pretty much everyone but possibly a ranger, would beat the ele.

A ranger with equal skills in PvP would wreck an ele the question really is: if 2 players duel that both play perfectly, 1 is ele and 1 is any other then I believe the ele has just as much chance of winning as the other guy. In retrospect 2 players of low skill level duel; the ele will almost definately loose because it is a high risk high reward class compared to the low or moderate risk / high or medium reward classes that are out there. All in all I believe elementalists have a very high skillfloor due to rotation based gameplay of attunements (which forces you to anticipate skills and react fast) which also means if you pull it off right you can be extremely effective.

In my recent experience (1.5 years ago) I noticed that eles are just way over the top. In team queues the team with more eles wins. The only way to counter 5 eles is to bring 6 eles. Nurf eles pl0x and stop this madness.

This topic is confusing. Probably the OP was flaming a thief from Viz. Bump for added confusion!

Maybe try to get a 3rd stat on your exotic weapons. I haven’t yet seen an exotic item with only 2 stats but toughness would go well with power and vitality. Also try equipping trinkets.

Hell no! One of my most satisfying wins on Foefire was when my team was down in points sth like 370 to 480 and I ran to decap far to keep us in the game but 2 ppl came to stop me so I hambowed them down and win 2v1, then had 2nd person coming to help me so we take the lord down at 2 seconds left of the game and win.

Wow what a great wall of bullkitten. Eles are extremely weak in WvW and FGS is bad in dungeons because AI too stronk and mobs know how to doge.
Don’t even trust this Tyldor guy he ain’t even got 20k achievment points and he only has 151 games won in PvP (150 for title and 1 cuz he can’t even count).
Also everyone knows if you play ele in PvP even if you win you still lose glory, gold, karma, wxp, credit from your visa, your virginity and shares in NCsoft.

Same happens to me when I play my 5signet power engi and a warrior comes and looks at me and I lose health but I fight and fight and he lose health but mending too stronk he heal backup full I can’t heel cuz signet not sup to be used so i passive and passive no love he 100b for 90k (more than half my hp) switch to op axe and leap for 1million dmg all in half a second i cri evritym

To get you started 300×10=3000. Hope I helped. Keep up the Spirit (haha ranger pun).
You get matched with high ranks simply because noone else plays at the time so they have to be matched with you. I’m sure they are just as disappointed as you are even if you play to the best of your abilities everyone likes to blame low ranks. Keep playing and you may find it fun to stomp those sharks with your rabbit finisher.

Communication, being active, experience are 4 words. Hope you count enemies better than that. :P

1v1, 2v2 and 3v3 DeathMatch with leaderboards has been proven so easy to implement and so demanded that the community already started doing it in game.
Right now the top things they need to do:
1. Listen
2. Be open about changes like all successful PvP games.
3. More frequent small changes in balance rather than 1 big patch every 6 months.
4. Listen
5. Ask for more money from NCsoft so that you can make a game 2 years after release that lives up to the potential it had years ago.

infantrydiv.1620:

I’m fairly confident we might start seeing PvP games start rewarding normal experience on completion as it would be the simplest/most streamlined solution

So I’d have to PvP on my low levels to gain exp? Not sure it’s that great of an idea.

Jebro’s guide to beating the AI incoming?

In the near future™.
We’re looking into it™.
Stay tuned™.
- ArenaNet, LLC. and NC Interactive, LLC. All rights reserved.

+1000
Underwater combat is so much fun.
Signed, bunker ranger… :P