Guild Wars 2

Eponet.4829:

Shout Warrior is their own dedicated healer.

Hahahahahaha… A guardian output more healing than a shout warrior by simply dodging. Anet nerfed shout warriors to the ground. The signet still does the heavy work.

Anyway, the AI already sort of prioritize high hp/toughness classes. Its just that people never even let the “tanks” hit them once, because zerker ranged will go in guns blazing not a care in the world.

They would have to redesign everything in the game so that dps cant beat things, which would be pointless.

I prefer encounter specific mechanics.

Its been a debate in the past? We’ve known precursors can drop pretty much anywhere, yes including WvW.

Why not guild siege golems? I mean really, what is the reason?

You can store guild catas in the inventory but not golems… You should never loose anything by making a mistake. I remember I took out a golem once and I could only build it or drop it. Didnt even need one lol. Had to run to the nearest camp with it in hands (and then a 50 man zerg rolled over me 20 meters outside).

Could at least make it so that if you cancel a guild golem, its returned to the guild…

… Why? The Necro himself can still cleave just as good regardless of skilling minions or not. The only skills that add “cleave” is wells – which has other flaws compared to minions. MM is in a good place for its specific purpose, single target/small groups. You dont want to make something good at everything, or you end up with an Elementalist. And nobody like Elementalists.

What exactly do you mean by staying alive for solo PvE? A bog standard zerker necro with offensive traits will kill pretty much anything without loosing any hp. Well except champion bosses. Or did you plan to solo Arah or something?

Visit metabattle.com for builds.

Only for those with HoT afaik.

I always run my Nomad healer in large zergs and have pretty much the same skills as this (I generally use staff/hammer and judge intervention to make up for the inability to leap though). Healing really is underestimated. A few of them in a zerg and the efficiency is vastly improved (you can pretty much equal a strong 5 person AoE heal skill every 10 second or so). In particular, its an excellent commander support build if your frontline is comparably smaller than the backline.

Unfortunetly, it absolutely suck small scale, lol.

I am using a GTX980Ti and have no problems at all with Win10Pro. It runs all the games I’ve thrown at it so far. Currently I only have two “problems” in GW2: the sound crackle upon launching the game and it crashing upon exiting the game. I suspect the crackle is either a GW2 specific or DirectX issue. Havent noticed it in any other game. The crashing upon exiting is something that has been there for Win7Pro as well. Was introduced many patches ago.

Otherwise its the “normal” DCs/lag/etc that Anet introduces as bonus features in each patch, especially for WvW.

Do note that if you are using Win10, do not use the default Nvidia driver that come preinstalled. Its pretty much broken and incomplete. You have to reinstall from Nvidia directly.

Bubi.5237:

Can you please explain to me how will you make 5 man teams from 3-4 man premades?

Magic!

Also possibly matching 3v3 or 5v5 (screw 4v4, no one need them).

Dadov.2736:

So what will get veteran players ? I bought this game at it’s launch and i have supported it since then and now when it is free to play for new players why can’t veteran players get the expansion for free ?

Because its… I dont know… an expansion?

Anyway, the only real mistake here is why Anet didnt announce this in combination with HoT pre-order. Because it make perfect sense to have shuffled around the design of the game packages back then. You get a new somewhat crippled GW2 f2p version or you can buy HoT which include the expansion and full GW2 (which would have had better “value” instead of being included “for free”).

Introducing this long after HoT preorders is kind of a curveball.

kdaddy.5431:

Ummmm im sorry but alot of people came on here when solo que was dying showing the insane que times. Bringing back solo que solves nothing.

If I recall correctly that was more because sPvP was boring as hell for anyone not hardcore into it… Reward tracks has made it alot more interesting to play for casual players.

If they dont want to make solo queue then tbh I think they should simply make the next best thing and split queues by their own definition of a premade – non-premades in one queue (1-2 players) and premades in a second queue (3-5 players).

But knowing how much they suck up to sPvP peeps it wouldnt surprise me if we see solo queue soon, lol.

Aerial Melodies.4938:

A free account cannot transfer even if all characters are deleted. A few redditors tested this. I would assume the level 60 lockdown is per character, so if you delete your level 60, you’re back at square one and unable to enter.

At level 60 its unlocked for the account, says so in the restrictions page. So you’re probably not back to square one.

No doubt we will see f2p spies, but it’ll take a week or so before it start to become visible.

1 server should be enough. Its not like people live in Australia anyway? Mostly just koalas, kangaroos and Crocodile Dundee afaik. NZ is just hobbits and orcs.

JHoax.6812:

ANet….NetA…..NetA scarfe….

3 A…

Half-life 3 confirmed.

Brigantia.5746:

So they actually changed it to sound like this atrocity on PURPOSE??? I thought this was a mistake it’s not permanent right?

Not even a single line comment so they must have done it on purpose, so it obviously is permanent.

The only other option is that they have no idea they even changed it themselves. That can happen, right? Maybe the GW2 source code has become sentient. Children always like fart noises.

I still dont care but I find it amusing that everyone deny it… yet the new armor also has a rather impractical “visor” that is obviously inspired by ornamental Christian church windows.

LET THE CONSPIRACY THOUGHTS BEGIN!

So they give the outfit to all existing GW2 accounts as a special boon… Then its supposed to be available later? What was the point then? I think the outfit should remain locked with old accounts. Same reason why all the HoM awards arent available in the gemstore.

Well selling weapons in the gemstore promote murder but you dont hear us complaining about it.

Zietlogik.6208:

The mouse will depend more on your hand size and ease of access to side buttons

Yeah… Personally I grew out of Logitech mice. They are simply too small. Back in my younger days I wore through like 5 various MX5xx and G5 variants, lol. Nowadays I can only use bigger palm mice. Trying out a mouse in a store is always a good idea.

With a good color and armor scheme you can demoralize your opponent.

Or make them laugh their kitten s off.

Either way, they are distracted.

If the Naga died in 3 months you should still have warranty for it…

Razer mice are nice, but the quality can be really iffy (keyboards really arent any better)… Buttons/wheel usually get wonky long before cables though.

If Naga is your style, there’s really not that many other options now. Pretty much got Logitech and no names. Well perhaps Mad Catz but their shape is wierd.

I wish Steelseries would make another mouse like the WoW Cataclysm. Excellent palm shape and perfect thumb buttons layout without overwhelming you. kittenty finishing though (it wore off). Or Qpad stepping up and making an MMO variant of their mouse (pretty much the same base as the old WoW Cata mouse). Or Func making an MMO variant of the kitten near perfectly shaped MS-3.

So many options, so much lost potential, sigh.

Yeah he make good arguments.

The only problem is that you dont want to split up the sPvP community too much. 2-4 man team is a real grayzone and I have no idea how we could solve that. Lets face it, sometimes you just want to fight with a friend.

The best compromise I suppose is to simply add solo queue (1 player only) and slap together current unranked and ranked 1-5 man queue into one giant ranked queue. Unranked has always been pointless anyway, we got custom servers for that. Truly competetive teams should get their own queue and rankings (5 man only).

Legendary food with +-80% condi duration.

What, how could that possibly go wrong?!

Bonobo.1470:

Bot farmers usually create hundreds of accounts. In f2p they have no loss when 80% gets caught, they still make a nice profit out of the remaining characters that slip through. When you charge 10 euro’s for an account, they lose money everytime an account gets caught, which makes it less interesting for them.

But that only means that bot farmers never tried to begin with. As I said, either way Anet get more cash once cash need to flow out of a f2p account.

Tbh I am not too woried about that anyway. GW2 has decent enough reporting tools and Anet should easily be able to keep a closer eye on f2p accounts. If HoT make the new zones the “endgame” replacing Silverwastes/Orr, f2p PvE will be a non-issue as no one will even care if there are farmers there.

If they wanted a trial, it would have been a trial. Obviously they didnt want that. What’s done is done. No amount of forum posts is going to change it. In general, the restrictions are harsh enough to make people want to buy the game, especially once HoT is relased.

Fargath.5104:

Bots,bots,bots,bots,bots…..bots,bots and also gold farms, cheats and hacks. This is what we get in time when the game becomes free, becouse this game is perfect for bots, there is only one thing that protect us from that and that is price for game… This is most stupid and cruel thing you could done to your clients…
Please dont do this!!! You can make trial version and lower price for original game to 10 euro…but please dont make this game Free to bot

But… how do you bot PvE, given the restrictions? Someone earlier suggested that bot farmers get 100K gold (lol!), then buy HoT and sell the account for tons of money.

Uhm… If you have to buy the game anyway to somehow funnel the money out of the f2p account, you might as well by the game before and bot farm 10 times as good with no restrictions. And that is no different from what you could do pre f2p. Either way Anet get cash.

I really dont see the issue with these f2p accounts in PvE and sPvP. They are pointless as bot accounts. At worst, they will be ad characters for gold sellers.

WvW is another matter though, thats the only area where I fear f2p may do as much harm as it does good.

Not once has it apparently occured to Anet that stomping is an attack and thus should reveal the player. Its been 3 years now. So yeah, not going to be fixed. Working as indeeded. Just like permastealth.

Makes no sense, since extended parties has been possible in sPvP since before the game was even released. They never added that to WvW. These raids will change nothing for WvW.

I honestly dont see why we have to overthink it. You want “a minimum of 2 buffers”… lolwut? What is this, release day Arah? Unless the raids are insanely hard or the eqvivalent of a level 250 fractal, you wont need anything but another player. And your average Necro is good enough at being that. Not the most ideal player perhaps, but they excel against larger mob groups, which we hopefully will see much of in raids. If raids require being split up against strong mobs the Necro is also one of the tankiest dpsers (hell even a MM Necro is usefull there).

Also I have little doubt that hardcore raids will be just 10 Guardians. Perma quickness ftw.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Mortifer.2946:

Sorry I was so sceptic. I have just created the F2P account and it looks like everything will be fine. No bot spamming, no gold selling, no changes to major things in trading post. I really like it. The restriction for free players are not restricting them from enjoying all the aspects of the game…. and if they want to join the community, they can either level up their ranks and levels, or buy the game.

Bravo ArenaNet.

I just shared this post with the team. Thank you for looking at this objectively and for sharing your thoughts. As one of our team said, “We really did think about this a lot.”

Did the team think about WvW at all, like trolling or spying from f2p accounts? Or was it just PvE/PvP related?

Just curious.

Otherwise, the restrictions seem reasonable.

lordkrall.7241:

Dawdler.8521:

Well, no limitations on WvW.

Expect upper tier spying/sabotage to become 100x worse.

Just… ugh…

How is required to level to 60 no limitations? Not to mention the fact that they can’t use map-chat, nor whisper more often than once every 30 seconds?

That’s not a limitation, lol. It’ll just take them a week or two of lazy playing before they enter WvW.

Real limitations would be:
- Unable to take supply
- Cant order upgrades
- Cant build siege
- No visible commander tags

At least that would stop the most trolling and AFK spying by f2p accounts. They could still flood a border and prevent gameplay, but I suppose that type of behaviour is impossible to stop unless you simply dont allow f2p accounts in WvW.

Well, no limitations on WvW.

Expect upper tier spying/sabotage to become 100x worse.

Just… ugh…

And once again, as long as we can convert gold→gems, it doesnt matter.

If it require gemstore items, its still just a gold cost. Like building any other legendary.

100 point “Eager to fight!” bonus at the end of a round.

Simple.

Agent Noun.7350:

The datamined free trial information is not relevant.

Perhaps.

But this part is still very much relevant:

In order to keep the Free Trial enjoyable for everyone, we’ve placed some restrictions on what characters on Trial accounts can do. For example, to minimize gold spamming, Trial characters can only whisper and send mail to people who have added them to their Friends list. Map chat, sales on the Trading Post, Gems, and WvW battlegrounds (excluding the Edge of the Mists) are also restricted.

So… what has changed since then? They dont want the game to be enjoyable for everyone anymore? If Anet would drop this bomb without any restrictions at all they are basicly saying kitten you to everyone (and themselves).

sPvP is the one area in the game that might actually gain something from f2p with few ill effects. PvE doesnt need it and WvW would probably get choked by it (so many spies).

Well except that you would be bombarded by a million gold sellers as soon as you enter the mists.

Its not PvE, but we did 2 man roaming with MM Necros. Not so easy to test minions when most people run away

Against zergs it obviously sucks, but their behaviour is definetly vastly improved, they actually attack things.

Pretty much any class can solo a keep. The time consuming part is getting in. Builds depend on the class used but generally you want either heavy AoE such as well Necro or other strong ranged single target like Ranger. Guards/lord arent really that hard, but even a single knockdown can ruin your day when there is 5 more on you in melee.

That said, you arent really meant to solo keeps. Just 2 players will turn “no success” into “no challenge”

What does a “buttload” more character slots mean? If you bought HoT you should have 1-2 extra slots and multiple beta slots (I have 4 of them).

If you got them otherwise well enjoy them I suppose.

Yunielesca.2850:

It’s not a trial account, look at the video on youtube, it’s the leaked trailer for the announcement, and it says a “limitless adventure”

Yes because ads always speak the absolute truth.

I see that as just an ad for Guild Wars 2. Then at the end, it adds “Your journey begins” and “Play for free”. IE you can play for free and begin the journey into all those fancy features they just noted about. Guild Wars 2 features. Keyword here is begin (please pay us money to see the rest!). So the trailer doesnt actually mean anything unless it had stated specifically that all this we just showed you is free.

The restrictions noted on the first page make it sound like a demo (sort of like WoW free to play up to 60, which is a demo compared to max level). I would be fine with that.

However…

play all of World vs. World. Trial accounts may participate in World vs. World but cannot enter the Eternal Battlegrounds or Borderlands maps.

Does not compute! head explodes from the oxymoron

Agent Noun.7350:

It’s full free-to-play for the base game, including WvW.

How can it be full?

Create 100 accounts, park every character by mining nodes… GG, see you later economy.

Not to mention the dailies. People could earn hundreds of gold every day just logging onto accounts, lol.

Just ship it all off to your main account.

These “free” accounts in WvW would kill it. Yes, in EoTM too. The amount of griefing being done by people with multiple accounts would be a thousand times worse than now. I seriously hope this isnt supposed to be their “solution” to population issues.

I’d rather see HoT-less GW2 up for $10 on Steam. It’d sell like hotcakes.

For some reason I get the feeling that the community is always the last to know about changes like this. Anet has a tendancy to throw curveballs in our faces.

Anyway, somewhat limited PvE only accounts as a “demo”… Ok fine, we can work with that. Free accounts across the game, such as in WvW? It would kill it. Imagine the griefing between servers. Just create 50 accounts and GG you own a border.

But the worst part of all, which often comes to mind with Anet changes (like the warhorn sound, which seems to be intential since they dont deny it) is… why? Why on earth would GW2 need free 2 play accounts? If this is a precursor to a p2w gemstore I would be very disappointed.

Lets see videos with 5 MM necros doing dungeon paths, lol.

Since the Mesmer was able to get as much speed as all the other classes (including those without signets) when the curtain stacked speed, Anet decided not to let it stack with anything else. This was done years ago.

Dont try to understand it, your head will explode.

As long as we can convert gold->gems its still “free”. All it take is ingame time getting that gold.

Anet has probably the best gemstore system I know of – it encourage player to play the game (which we all want) and it obviously make enough people willing to pay real cash as well because GW2 earnings has always been decent. There is no p2w mechanics in it, just conveniance. We are happy and Anet are happy. Its literally a win-win situation, which given the current p2w or pay 50 bucks for game that has 1/3rd its content kitten bucks dlc on release day gaming climate. Its really amazing if you think about it. Granted, the price of HoT put a slight dent into that impression but it wasnt that bad. Luckily Anet listens to its community, unlike many other devs. Well, most of the time, at least when it comes to PvE.

Arminius.7052:

Say one of the lower tier servers were to get ‘coverage’ in the off hours (even slightly). Would that move them up in tiers that much or are the top Tier servers guilds that much stronger? I wouldn’t mind doing like Jethro said and fixing up / reinforcing / defending forts and taking it more serious but didn’t want to join the other servers and can’t get on.

Oh it would move them up alright. In about… a year or so. The way glicko works is basicly showering “good” servers with so much points you cant dethrone them even if you win a matchup while at the same time digging “bad” servers into kitten so deep they cant get out of. Thats why many people just sigh and give up low tiers.

This is why I always advocate a migration upwards rather than down. Leave the lower tier in the hole. Have fun instead. You dont have go to top tier, just pick any server thats high or above. Maybe it sound harsh to people dedicated to low tier servers, but its just the reality of the tier system and the natural progression of the server populations. Maybe someday the top tier servers become low tier… I would still recommed the same unless the entire WvW system change.

The patch messed something up when large numbers are nearby. It may even be specific effects that cause it. In the FSP vs Gandara vs Deso matchup I have noticed a tendancy to mass crash/dc when facing Deso blobs, for some reason. Could be coincidence of course, lol.

Either way, the patch broke things.

Logged in, see if todays patches did anything to fix the warhorn. Still sounds awfull. I’ll stick to my guardian then and stay away from people. Not that much different from normal, but still.

Guess no word from Anet means we’re going to have to live with this? :/