Guild Wars 2

PopeUrban.2578:

sunnypsyop.3025:

While I agree with others who have posted here saying “block, report and move on” it still makes me wonder how ANet hasn’t managed to shut down PvPBank on its own. God knows they could afford the lawyers to go after these gold spammers. It’s a malicious attack on ANet’s profits and customers, I can’t understand why they haven’t been able to get that site shut down. Perhaps it’s some kind of legal issue with where the spammers are located.

It is in fact a legal issue.

Most gold selling sites operate from locations in asia where it is completely legal to run such a business. Such is the case with pvpbank, and thus ANET has no legal grounds to raise a case. This is why virutally every online has spammers. For the spammers, it’s often the only job they can get (and it still doesn’t pay all that much) and socially they often don’t understand the hate directed at their profession, so there’s no ‘guilt factor’ to push people away from those jobs.

This to most extents.

I recall some legal action taken by the folks who ran Runescape some years ago in targeting bots, and they won.

That said, I imagine the costs of doing so are immense and in the case of ANet probably aren’t costing them much business; after all, each spam account runs the cost of their game, and is likely terminated pretty quickly.

A third party can’t sue for what gets said in-game, except for maybe a few edge cases where the logs may be usable for some kind of additional evidence. The Terms of Use outlines this pretty clearly in order to protect ANet from being dragged into such a lawsuit.

Paulytnz.7619:

DeceiverX.8361:

Sniper thief is about the worst possible balance decision they could make for the class, though. It’d have game-wide consequences if balanced just even within the confines of the next batch of elites. It’s just too strong.

Yea, it fits conceptually, but it’s not even remotely possible to balance reasonably well without giving other professions mechanics which invalidate all other existing builds. That’s unreasonable just for the additions to one class.

Rifle in that case is either sustained damage with no stealth and no burst or a control-oriented weapon with low damage. I can safely say any sniping ability with even close to a 2.0 coefficient is game-breaking for the thief at 1200-1500 range with stealth capacity.

Usually when we take an elite line we have to sacrifice something. If it’s done right it could just be that stealth is not needed when using a rifle. They have to find new ways for people to play thief, needing stealth in almost every build pigeon holes people too much and gives the class very little variety. Rifle or not Thief needs a long range option to help balance out all the classes. As for stealth that may or may not need to be taken in to consideration. I think Thief has a few issues at the moment with regards to stealth, one is its one of the only other ways for Thief to heal himself. Maybe if Anet addressed that, stealth may not be needed so much in builds and variety could be more possible.

Besides all that look how they added a long range option to guardian and not making it too over powered (as in not so much so better than Ranger, yes I still prefer a ranger LB over Guardian), the same could/should be done for thief.

Oh, I agree completely that the thief should have, and to a fair extent, needs a 1200 range weapon.

That said, sniping from stealth is a huge problem. High coefficients on the thief are dangerous, as the post above mine demonstrates. The 1200 range advantage and huge mobility and crazy damage modifiers the thief has access to is something I don’t think that can be reasonably balanced if the rifle is designed for substantial damage.

I’ve rigged a suggestion which attempts to really shake up the way the thief plays, and am always looking for more feedback (see signature).

Tman.6349:

Oh plz! Whatever! Don’t even pretend like crit Killshots from stealth, at 1200 range, would be close to broken. It’s not even like Thief has the highest crit damage modifiers in the game either.

Even as a diehard thief, it blows my mind that some people are willing to suggest that the sniper concept is reasonable and could even be remotely balanced.

With some of the recent changes such as adjustments to Lead Attacks and other game-wide balancing efforts made, I will be updating this topic in the near future when I have more time. There are a few immediate concerns without delving too deep:

LA providing condition damage might require some adjustments ti vuln or poison stack application.

Initiative adjustment through the mechanics of LA may require some tuning for abilities focused on restoration and constant depletion of initiative, as the changes to LA provoke some balance concerns from Wicked Abandon yielding what is almost a permanently maintainable ~45% damage bonus.

littlemunster.1059:

Sartharina.3542:

Clearly, the reason why BG and DB are teaming up against TC is because it takes two long-standing Tier 1 servers to even have a hope of taking us down! =D

No such thing. I see TC and DB double teaming against BG.

Admittedly, last night I did intentionally pull DB’s blob from Anz while squirreling into BG’s blob from behind towards dredge while TC and BG were engaged. DB wiped BG’s backline and then we just pushed to roll everyone

As far as coordinated alliances, I don’t really think there’s much. That said, having both blobs sandwich us and not fight each other for the cap while ranging lord was pretty lame and I can understand some people claiming collusion.

Sniper thief is about the worst possible balance decision they could make for the class, though. It’d have game-wide consequences if balanced just even within the confines of the next batch of elites. It’s just too strong.

Yea, it fits conceptually, but it’s not even remotely possible to balance reasonably well without giving other professions mechanics which invalidate all other existing builds. That’s unreasonable just for the additions to one class.

Rifle in that case is either sustained damage with no stealth and no burst or a control-oriented weapon with low damage. I can safely say any sniping ability with even close to a 2.0 coefficient is game-breaking for the thief at 1200-1500 range with stealth capacity.

Unload hits harder than PW and is cheaper on init, sorry to say.

Staff provides better combo burst and D/P is more reliable in sustained pressure.

Powercreep is just super real.

Josh XT.6053:

When I was a kid and wanted a video game, I mowed my neighbors lawns for money. Sure you won’t get it RIGHT NOW, you’ll have to work for it. If anything, ANet is teaching you to work for things you want.

Great and all you had a suburban upbringing in a wealthy country, but let’s personify the example via city living? Or physical disability preventing such labor-oriented work to be performed (my behavior as a teen was substantially limited to indoor-play from my own disability). There are a lot of reasons why this could be difficult to achieve.

vesica tempestas.1563:

irrelevant, it would be the same decision they made when they bought the original, or any other comparable mmorpg. Lets compare with another market leader – wow; for the same expansion price you got a couple extra skills, a few zones that you consumed in a week never to return, and a few other bits and pieces, while at the same time, all older content become redundant rather than evolved to maintain its relevance. The point is HOT is at the normal price point for an AAA mmorpg, plus there is no sub., plus old content is maintained.

And the lack of subscription and pay-once-and-done model may very well be the reason why they decided to play GW2 instead of WoW. They look at the bill for P2P models and see it as unreasonable, while the low potential cost for GW2 is desirable.

The content is maintained and was maintained because of the massive funding and attention GW2 got for its initial sales. They made enough money off its release to sustain the game for a long time. The cash shop, supported by people who simply just like the game and want to support a studio and don’t mind paying extra, are icing for the most part. Frankly, the low-dependency on the cash shop is part of why GW2 did well for itself to begin with.

Remove dire/perplexity, bring PvE/WvW stats into sPvP. People want skills splits and all these complications. Just balance the game universally since PvE/WvW balance is so much better than sPvP on so many levels in regards to scaling and stat distributions.

Balance largely solved.

Condi mes is only busted in WvW with dire/perplex covering its defenses and massive confusion application. Other gear combos are adequately squishy because power damage is almost doubled relative to sPvP. In sPvP, low incoming damage and still-tanky gear with very powerful defenses make the build fight a little better than it should. This isn’t an issue with the mesmer being OP but other classes not having the damage tools needed to kill it. Same goes for scrapper to a lesser extent (though this is pretty OP).

Which inherently buffs power shatter because it can actually one-shot people with a good MR combo since it gets the power it needs from gear, while its defense options make it really good in duels and small-scale since immunity to damage actually matters when timed properly to win a 1v1 or maybe 1v2 under really skilled play, but not durable enough to hold a point on its own forever given enough team attention due to its cooldown dependencies.

Power is more fun and not as OP. Much more satisfying to play imho. I shelved the condi reaper because as expected, it was too easy, and I wasn’t even running the chillproc meta build and instead played Dhuumfire curses…

Reduced passive procs or evade frames starting just before the stun portion would likely be enough. As it is, the set gets ruined by the multitude of passive CC effects which proc on the first impact but don’t miss, causing the thief to take a 6 init self-inflicted CC with no evade or defenses attached to it, and very low reliability.

Riku.4821:

Mesmer: Axe
Thief: Rifle or Mace
Ranger: Off-hand Sword
Warrior: Unarmed would be nice, but that would require a whole new weapon type.
Guardian: Rifle
Engineer: Mace/Torch
Revenant: Greatsword/Torch
Elementalist: Main-hand Sword
Necromancer: Torch

To be honest, I don’t know if this whole new weapon for each spec will be consistent. How many more weapons can each profession equally get? Warriors can use almost everything by now.

A I’m surprised they’re not working on implementing new kinds. ANet shown it has the resources to pump out regular skins really fast with the Black Lion skins. Making a few new weapon types and distributing them across a few professions and making a retroactive set of skins in a logical way only makes sense.

The crossbow is a weapon which for all intents and purposes should be in GW2, and would make tons of sense on the engineer, warrior and thief, which are running out of reasonable options and in the case of the thief, has a ranged deficiency while needing to uphold the capacity for stealth, which the rifle doesn’t uphold very well, unless focused on the revealed mechanic like my proposal (See signature).

Frankly, I imagine a crossbow working nicely on any profession except maybe the necromancer and revenant for thematic reasons.

Obviously things can’t go overboard, as a lot of weapons are similar in nature and could simply be released as skins (even a crossbow could be made as a rifle skin). That said, some subdiversity here would be nice.

They’re going to continue with the specialization weapon thing, though. Otherwise they’re likely either power-creeping profession playstyles which already exist, or not doing enough to justify using the line. The new weapon, and subsequently, specializations, are a big part of expansion pack sales.

Fixing the forum bug (see previous post).

Josh XT.6053:

If people spent even a 10th of the time they spent complaining about having to spend $50 on the expansion, they could make $50 IRL to just do it lol…

Jobs typically don’t let you decide to take paid overtime. In some nations, currency is very weak to the U.S. dollar. Not to mention that a large number of players are in their teenage/college years.

For example, if I said that you needed to spend $250 for the expansion because your nation’s economy was weaker than the one selling the expansion, would you conclude that a reasonable price? Would you have concluded that a reasonable price when you were in high school/college?

Ayrilana.1396:

Please don’t use insults/ad hominem attacks because I disagree with you.

Do you have any source to back up your claim that those who would not buy the expansion are the players that make the most purchases from the gemstore? Or did you make that up?

Yes, there’s nothing wrong with not finding value for yourself in purchasing the expansion.

Sign me up for the legacy servers. Before HoT, I think I was in several hundred if not a thousand dollars deep. I’ve since halted purchases because the game state is not worth supporting at this time.

I bought HoT when I saw the reaper initially, and expected high-quality content to come, despite concerns over the scale (there isn’t that much) when so much detail is put in vertical design which people will often either fall past or ignore. I wasn’t expecting to get screwed over by the guild issues, which affected my small community WvW guild, which declared its last straw after the Desert(ed) BL introduction. Several of these players have also spent several hundreds gem purchases.

I suggest you look into the Runescape 3 crisis as for a recent and much larger example of how this isn’t an uncommon ideology, either. An entire re-write of the engine, reworked combat, stats, leveling, skills, and the likes, and they lost well over 90% of their paying population because people liked the old stuff better.

So much, in fact, they made legacy servers which ran a the game and its data as it was several years prior if people linked to the legacy servers (so thousands of hours of progress lost), and yet, these servers were successful.

Scipion.7548:

Other games have added levels when they release xpacs so we can’t really complain about elites. There will always be new stuff to entice players to buy xpacs.

It is not the same problem. Personnaly, I’m totally ok with the fact that a HoT player has advantages. The problem for me is the fact I have HoT but I like more my “core class” than my elit spec, but I’m forced to play my elite spec because it is far more efficient …
Core class should be equal to elite. Anet should search something else to force to buy HoT, because it also hurts HoT players.

This right here.

Unfortunately I’ve done my fair share of discussion, and guilds which left to fight have no intention of coming back due to the costs associated with transferring guilds, which now a large portion of people on the server would never want to fight alongside considering they’ve been billed as traitors and the likes, so these guilds would need to fund their own moves.

Not necessary, OP.

Marauder/Valk offsets this nicely. We have great damage output as well.

Daredevil is a conceptually overpowered concept; compared DD to core thief and the gap is absolutely massive. When I play my daredevil-built thief, I can surf 30-man enemy blobs with 14k health alone. The defenses here are wildly busted. Core thief, however, there’s barely enough sustain for a 1v1.

Nerf DD’s spammy evades via cutting CV’s heal substantially or its endurance regen, bump the cooldown on BD to 25s, buff core thief burst condition cleansing potential (this is carried by DD), and remove a large number of passives from the game, buff others’ active defenses, and the thief is in a much better combat spot while upping the skill ceiling on other professions.

Sad part is the server just started rebounding after the exodus which sent it to T2. There was only one pugmander left.

Closed raids and lost presence from the influx of people invading just means we’re further in the red once they leave.

DeWolfe.2174:

EremiteAngel.9765:

lets play fair?
we finally got back into T1…

Welcome to becoming the most hated server in game! Enjoy the title….

I know I played on an alt account for a little while just to serve of some whomp’n on TC too. If there was open movement in the matches, trust me there would be a whole lot more players jumping to get into the match. Especially when TC has Dev’s on their side.

Also, maybe you shouldn’t have made that thread calling out the guild who left TC to get away from the “stackers”. Here, lemme just quote you:
"TC guilds that left for DB/FA are going to be facing one of the meanest war machines gracing the battlefields.

Prepare yourselves."

I’d say they were prepared very well….

Unfortunately the people unfamiliar with the collateral of stacking in regards to reputation and its consequences as a server community seem to be making the decisions to promote the stacking on our server.

TC lost itself the day we got invaded by T1 guilds. When they leave (and they will) we’re down every guild from our core + the new forces and with a Tarnished (ha) reputation for being a bandwagon server.

It’s sad to be fighting on the same server as the people who crashed my original server community bragging in map chat about the very same crashing they did (SoR).

Flying trees lmao.

Could even be a faulty DNS server. Again, ISP stuff, though.

Pretty much to get DDoS’ed you have to almost deliberately give out your information and a reason for people to want to use it with malicious intent. If that’s honestly the case, you’ve likely done goofed in life somewhere and probably deserved it. Still deserves contact with the ISP since ANet cannot do anything; there’s no such thing as a targeted DDoS through a server to a remote user using conventional methods; you’d need to inject network code into the server’s routines (I.E., almost if not literally impossible) to force this to happen. Anything else, and ANet has quite literally no control over it. So call your ISP.

If you’re absolutely and totally 100% sure you’re getting DDoS’ed through ANet’s servers, have personally run diagnostics to prove it, and base your claims with years’ experience in network engineering, IT services, or Computer Science, your attacker literally has the entirety of most of the internet’s information, including the ability to change and modify such (I.E., bank accounts, stock trading and investment, etc.) at their disposal, in which case, call the FBI and relevant authorities to come investigate the single most dangerous individual on the planet lol.

Get rid of dire perplexity and the problem is largely gone. It’s just this stat allocation and rune set that are totally game-breaking.

I’d be down for inverse scaling towards the number of allies and direct for the number of enemies while also reducing the scaling effect radius such that fights happening in the distance do not affect the rate at which a lord dies; it should be based on the number of people actively fighting in the area of the lord.

Sird.4536:

hmsgoddess.3869:

Sird.4536:

hmsgoddess.3869:

It would be considered unfair to some players and create a headache of backlash. IF people still want the Desert maps how about one week we are all on desert next week we are all on alpine. Or at least the match-up teams all have same maps and no one knows what map they are getting each week but the 3 teams in a match are all the same.

The problem is this.

Anet have said that everytime they bring in a new map to WvW the match up resets. So you have reset on Friday and then another reset on Tuesday when the maps are introduced. The only solution is moving reset to Tuesday which nobody wants.

That’s not a problem if you do reset on Friday Nights new maps in at the time of reset. That’s not hard.

You must be new to how Anet work.

This is why we’re in a beta. Software patches are always put out in the middle of the week because if they break anything, they can be fixed by the end of the week.

Weekend or late-week releases are frowned upon in all industries of software development for this reason. They want to do tuesday patches while writing and testing new features. Maybe when things are all finished, the maps will alternate on a weekly basis during the Friday reset.

That said, I really hope they don’t. My guild won’t play DBL’s and came back as an entire guild just because Alpine has returned, with promises to leave again for as long as DBL’s are around.

I’d rather have no new content where the existing content is high quality than poorly-implemented new content.

Silverkey.2078:

Well my take on this is:

• build diversity on mesmer is pathetic. But then again, it is essentially the case for all professions. HoT power creep has increased the gap between meta and non-meta. Before, I always pretty much played my own build, sometimes miles away from the meta role (like bunker mesmer pre-HoT) while still feeling I was contributing to my team as long as I was smart about it. Now the best I can do is a variation of the meta build or I feel like I am useless.
• In particular, we just don’t have good support anymore. We have never been good at healing, boons are flying around easily already (or there is a necro which would make you regret it) and alacrity does not feel strong enough to invest in it. CC and portal is pretty much the best support we can do. This makes me sad as I like play support roles and I thought that alacrity and quickness are a really unique take on this role.
• I feel like we have too much blocks and evades, so much that just rotating through your cooldown without taking into account what the enemy is doing will keep you alive just well. Same thing with shatters, instead of trying to read the opponent to land a good shatter, you can just shatter every 2 or 3 seconds and the enemy will die eventually. So in summary, I find the condi mesmer plain and tasteless and I moved away from chronomancer.
  
  So for me this is Super Sayian Sad State. But chrono is meta, so we are happy! right Azukas?

Nailed it. This is why I stopped playing sPvP. WvW is way more balanced from a sheer numbers perpsective, despite some totally broken gear combinations like dire + perplexity.

The class design is flawed on a few principles, and has very binary representation. Largely gone are the principles of rewarding skilled play and demoting facerolling. HoT’s powercreep has enabled some builds to quite literally be playable with no concern with the enemy’s actions whatsoever and still in all likelihood win a fight.

Diversity is a problem game-wide for sPvP. I’d probably put the mesmer’s as second-worst behind thief, only because it has more usable traits and overall in sPvP can function in more scenarios.

Toys already provide massive amounts of combat utility. Hiding weapons alone is enough to cause engaging such players to require extra steps of caution or simply not bother engaging them on the basis that I may not have inclinations as to what builds they may be running until it’s too late.

dank.3680:

DeceiverX.8361:

dank.3680:

DeceiverX.8361:

I took enemy-BL hills yesterday with a group of six people against a garbage-tier 30-man blob during NA prime. That was extremely satisfying, and pretty much literally impossible to do in the DBL’s.

So you did a PVDOOR backcap.. How engaging… Such PVP.

You probably don’t know the feeling as I imagine you’re one of those Mag players who rides on the server’s reputation of skilled play while pretending to have skill with “roaming” with 15 people camping solo players from enemy spawns. Fighting outnumbered, partially wiping, and still taking an objective is quite engaging, as the task of staying alive and coordinating people itself is quite difficult and involves a lot of strategy to maintain people up or make sacrifices, diversions, etc. on the fly.

I like to fight when outnumbered. It’s much more stimulating than pressing 1 in the backline of a blob or facerolling the keyboard on most meta roaming classes/builds in 1v1 encounters.

Yeah imagine fantasy all you like buddy. The majority of my 7000+ hours in wvw is solo or 1-5 man play.

So keep on talking about kitten you don’t know.

Seeing as almost all instances of when I saw the XOXO tag in my recent matchup fighting Mag were in groups of at least ten people, and the only person I did see from the guild running alone was a chronomancer who was probably the single worst mesmer I’ve ever seen, I don’t really think it’s too far-fetched.

Particularly when you’re so defensive over being as awesome as you say you are or that my stance has no merit to make an argument over what is fun when opinions and perceptions of fun itself are subjective.

Who am I, though, to make such disillusioned assertions when the penultimate factor in deciding relevance of perception and experience should come from the number of hours spent playing a game.

The isolation of build concepts into specific lines to a point where one has little reason to run anything but a very strict set of traits for a very specific optimized build path while also redacting existing builds and nerfing currently weak ones makes me innately disagree with the design philosophy of the OP’s post.

Further, I am going to have to agree with Kodama; these changes, especially the ones made to stealth and SA, are just unfun and completely overdone in terms of the sheer amount of power readily available.

I know there are those who disagree with me and want permanently-stealthed, insta-gibbing edgy-cool shadowmaster assassin that can take a beating play styles, but these are simply not good design ideologies to follow in a balanced game with what is a desirably balanced and skill-oriented PvP system. I see the above violating these principles fairly blatantly.

Rather than compartmentalizing entire builds into single trait lines, more universal effects need some overal between then. Analysis of uneven power distribution needs to be made to determine the cause of why it exists and alter traits and weapons accordingly.

I believe the thief is numerically the best-designed and balanced profession. The scaling-oriented play rewards build investment and enables a better balance state as a whole.

dank.3680:

DeceiverX.8361:

I took enemy-BL hills yesterday with a group of six people against a garbage-tier 30-man blob during NA prime. That was extremely satisfying, and pretty much literally impossible to do in the DBL’s.

So you did a PVDOOR backcap.. How engaging… Such PVP.

You probably don’t know the feeling as I imagine you’re one of those Mag players who rides on the server’s reputation of skilled play while pretending to have skill with “roaming” with 15 people camping solo players from enemy spawns. Fighting outnumbered, partially wiping, and still taking an objective is quite engaging, as the task of staying alive and coordinating people itself is quite difficult and involves a lot of strategy to maintain people up or make sacrifices, diversions, etc. on the fly.

I like to fight when outnumbered. It’s much more stimulating than pressing 1 in the backline of a blob or facerolling the keyboard on most meta roaming classes/builds in 1v1 encounters.

My guild came back to play WvW yesterday with the BL’s restored.
BL queues were larger than EBG’s for a while.

If DBL’s come back, they said they’ll leave again for as long as they’re back.

I prefer to keep my guild around than (not) participate on a dead set of maps.

I’m just seeing a bunch of PVD 15-man gank groups running around upset they now have to deal with competition to control a BL, both from larger guilds which they can’t just siege-bunker against, and against small havoc groups that dodge their faceroll fighting tactics entirely and manage PPT better than them.

I took enemy-BL hills yesterday with a group of six people against a garbage-tier 30-man blob during NA prime. That was extremely satisfying, and pretty much literally impossible to do in the DBL’s.

Orange, Black, White, and either very harsh neon green or very dark hunter green (as to create contrast for those with common Red/Green colorblindness to terrain and the red tag.

Instant fine so long as it’s not usable during the effects of CC.

It used to be a stunbreak/CC-usable, and as people have mentioned above, it was wildly OP. That said, the long animation really does suck.

Reverence.6915:

Terrahero.9358:

The drama and sheer exegeration in this thread. “If anet doesnt let me contribute 10x more because i play at night it means they think i am subhuman”.

What the actual kitten?

Nightcapping has been issue since day one, no time slot has more impact on determining the winner than the night slot. Adressing this issue to lessen the overwhelming impact of a few players during off-hours should’ve been done years ago.

Nightcapping is not going to be worthless, however you simply should not be the “Kingmakers” of WvW. Where all that matters is your work and everyone else is irrelevant.
Because that is the reality here that these nightbabies seem to ignore. Right now and for the past 3,5 years it has been the people playing during the day and prime time who have been made, to put it in your words “subhuman”. Because that 4k lead we etch out over the course of an evening of battle is dust in the wind compared to the 30k nightcapping wins back knocking down undefended keeps.

Depends if you’re in NA or EU. “Night capping” hasn’t been as much of an issue in NA compared to EU because NA has a greater diversity of players, except in the lower tiers before the mergers. Nowadays it shouldn’t be an issue at all except for the fairweather problem.

EU’s got a bit more centralized time coverage since it operates in the middle of the spectrum; you have people several hours ahead in OCX to cover daytime, then EU prime, and then NA prime, which when it ends, leads back into OCX. There are few NA players on EU servers as well, since NA has its own servers, meaning the flow of control becomes fairly interrupted by EU’s prime.

NA servers are OCX = off-hours, EU = off-hours, and then NA. Since our EU populations are also pretty low for the inverse of the above, OCX’s control extends to what’s essentially 17 consecutive hours before NA prime.

The flow of control isn’t changing, and that’s something people are seriously overlooking. OCX still gets what’s effectively a 17 hour advantage in this situation on NA. They can take keeps and block progress just as much as they do now, and ultimately, things like having upgraded keeps/towers is what tips NA prime into going one way or another in most competitive matchups.

It’s literally just the score. If one server’s NA-native presence is so much better than another’s as to offset the points gained in off-hours, the server, for all intents and purposes, is dead on NA. It might having a thriving OCX community, and it’d be great to just give them their own servers as to not need to reduce off-hours ticking, but that’s an idealistic solution which would only work if non-OCX players didn’t invade those servers to “night-cap” for OCX for PPT dominance.

People taking offense to the term “night-capping” is kind of silly. Really, the regions are 14-17 hours apart for NA and 8-11 hours apart for EU. For all intents and purposes, coming from anyone in or anything based on NA or EU (which NA servers are), this is night-capping, because that’s just how clocks work if the person talking speaks from referring to their time as daytime. It’s literally getting offended by people’s different time zones and using their own as reference to night/day.

And by your example above, tell me why those 20 people with effectively no competition should have as significant of an impact on scoring as they do based solely on population coverage as compared to the primetime hours which have 100 people fighting on both sides and another 50 more queued waiting for two and a half hours just to play, where sometimes, progress doesn’t even get made.

Mind you, these servers are also advertised for their corresponding time zones/global locations. I get that there are no oceanic servers, and frankly, I support the notion that players abroad without servers for their region/timezone should have a place to call home.

That said, it’d be like if a huge group of NA stacked hypothetical oceanic servers to dominate WvW in off hours. Now no matter how hard you try or how successful you are during your nation’s primetime, your efforts are invalidated entirely because of factors beyond your control and stacking done by other people. This has literally happened in the other regions and has led to destruction of many server communities. Put simply, it is a problem from a community point of view.

People are overreacting to this. Yes, the percentage of points to the total score by off-hours groups will decrease, however that doesn’t mean that off-hours guilds and players will have less importance to the overall matchup or reason to play. Holding an enemy keep overnight and sieging structures to make them paper will lead to big point gains later on. In essence, the huge points may not happen during off-hours, but a good presence in these off-hours will still enable for huge point gains later on for your server if they also have the numbers to back their OCX coverage. In essence, good coverage in one time zone won’t carry a server.

This encourages servers to have good presence in off-hours to disadvantage the enemy and also at server primetime to maintain those leads from off-hours for points, or try to regain the lost turf when able to not be hit by the point-bat.

Ogre.3124:

Maguuma has more kills than both Blackgate and TC

Unless things changed dramatically on Friday, TC had a better KDR than Mag in the DB/TC/Mag matchup.

Sadrien.3470:

Ogre.3124:

Maguuma has more kills than both Blackgate and TC

That is because DB and TC are both so bad you can 2v1 them naked without an elite spec…..

I won’t deny there are a lot of bad pugs, but anyone from Mag claiming some kind of ultimate superiority in skill is delusional, honestly.

Build 1:

No point in playing D/P unless you’re playing pure power. A condi or hybrid build will get more mileage with D/D with big gains from death blossom.

Drop several pieces of viper gear for Sinister or Carrion if you’re continuing hybrid. the effectiveness of increased condition duration caps out at +100%, so the duration effects from Potent Poison goes entirely to waste; aim for a 3s duration on Dagger Training’s Poison.

Run a stunbreak. Impairing Daggers is pretty terrible because they can be strafed. Run Bandit’s Defense instead.

Lotus Training is also mediocre. Unhindered Combatant will give you a lot better escape potential if you get immobilized (you will), especially since being squishy makes you very susceptible to dying from a single Rapid Fire/Unload/True Shot. This also lets you ditch Traveler Runes from permanent swiftness and move runes to something better.

I think CV is the best heal on the thief right now.

Build 2:

Looks good enough, just get rid of Signet of Shadows for virtually anything else (again I recommend BD as I think it’s the strongest utility in the game, though Infil Signet is also good here for a stunbreak if you need SS for the burst cleanse). You won’t need the passive since UC is permanent swiftness.

All captures you make are still going to affect the end score. Pretending that just because there are less points scored that your value intrinsically declines is quite contrary to the truth.

The server with a stronger off-hours presence will still be better off overall, because accomplishing things like getting and maintaining T3 keeps/towers before and after primetime is what lets primetime do a better job at holding the ppt lead.

Yea, you get fewer points in a given tick, but in all honesty, what does it really matter if what you accomplish is upheld? Does the change actually affect you personally in any way? It won’t change your rewards or relative contribution to other servers at those times. All it does is change how significant of a lead you can get while your opponents are not playing, and it helps alleviate some stacking issues. I see little changing overall.

It’s ignorant to pretend like the efforts of OCX groups are going to be diminished. It just makes NA’s strengths/deficiencies more pronounced.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Skill lag is a perpetual battle. By far the biggest contributors is large scale combat involving high target player skills. Of course high target skills are exactly the preferred skills to use in WvW. This starts to become especially true as skills start activating faster and doing more things on each activation: traits/runes/sigils/food/quickness/alacrity etc. So we continue to make optimizations skills and combat, but there’s no single big offender, it’s a combination of thousands of smaller parts.

Another argument to shut down passive procs and increase cooldowns of extremely powerful abilities is what I’m seeing, which is the opposite of what we’ve been seeing in recent profession design.

Really, though, if this is attributed to proc effects, please, let’s just push to remove them. Big emphasis on restoring high WvW populations to only be redacted by these performance issues as a result of proc effects (which have been scrutinized by the competitive PvP scene for ages) is going to get the game as a whole nowhere fast.

PvP, regardless of context or game mode, should be calculated with cost/benefit to every action and conservation of resources being a big concern, not rolling one’s face across the keyboard watching tons of things happen automatically.

If I had to wager a guess, the stability changes are likely flooding timer requests and taking up a lot of resources. As great as the change is conceptually, it may need refinement if the code’s already been heavily-optimized for performance in this context, or if getting performance here is a problem.

And vice versa. A glass thief can one-shot a glass reaper, and a glass reaper can one-shot a glass thief. And in many instances, having the fine-grain control over builds helps classes deviate away from needing to be fully glassy while retaining damage. I’ve personally one-shotted a few thieves on my ele – something preposterous in sPvP.

If you want to play glassy, you better be ready to avoid taking damage. The only major imbalance I’m aware of in WvW is Dire+Perplexity, which honestly never should have existed to begin with.

As an aside, there’s a ton of flexibility in WvW as a whole, though, where almost anything and everything can work.

I run signet D/D thief with massive success, and that’s widely considered as the least-usable build in the game in sPvP. The stat allocation and diversity lets most things work.

My rankings are for the most part subjective and based on criteria such as consistency, hard counters, mathematical advantages, and lastly, difficulty for any individual player. Everyone has different styles and difficulty becomes very subjective, so I try to keep that one primarily on the build-level.

Overall, WvW balance is by miles better than sPvP, so it often boils down to what you’d rather play rather than what’s “good” in accordance to some optimization based on the confines of certain stat distributions and scaling in accordance to a very strict type of game mode (capture, hold, and don’t die).

There’s definitely cheese and blatantly overpowered things in WvW, but the overall scope of diversity is quite large relative to the rest of the game.

Maybe the shortbow is meant to be a mid-range utility weapon, designed not to be a killing/DPS weapon? I get people want some ranged damage love for what is now a very difficult game of huge ranged burst + passive defenses and CC, but it’s a very slippery slope for the thief to give them substantial damage on a ranged weapon. It’s why I believe if thief should get a rifle, it need not have burst and stealth accessibility attached to it.

I will say, Asrat, that shortbow condi does work nicely, but it’s mostly as a skirmish set. Potent Poison and building poison duration can get each tick to 3-4s, and multiple CG’s can be stacked for their pulses + projectile finishers. Detonated bomb is also 3 stacks of bleed, which on duration, can get reasonably high. It’s no crazy killer set, but it does work.

ESKan.6782:

I didn’t even know you could! Does that mean you can shadowstep in succession without having the skill replaced?

No. It just prevents the teleport back, so it still costs the full initiative to go one-way.

This just helps reduce the need for shortbow in situations where there are a lot of targets in the distance in the direction you want to go.

Grayclay.4579:

DeceiverX.8361:

Scrapper is definitely the best. Mesmer is the best duelist where both parties commit. Even then, chrono’s mobility is quite good. I’d probably have to agree that druid comes next, though I think it shines the most in groups of 2 or 3, and then falls flat beyond that point.
Next I’d honestly put D/D ele. Assuming you run remotely durable. There are some builds which are literally unkillable without a 2v1, though opposing sustain might be enough to perpetuate the fight; depends on composition.

I think core warrior and guardian are bottom-of-the-barrel. Too many passive defenses for them to land their essential burst, not enough range/punishing effects, and simply low control compared to most elites.

I’d argue thief stands somewhat in the middle of the list. It’s good, but it really only should be winning deliberate/committed fights to the top-tier dueling professions if it’s either completely kitted out to beat them, or simply there’s a huge skill disparity.

Interesting that you say that, considering the amount of hate D/D ele gets on here. I think its more-so the lack of kill power, because even in sPvP, D/x ele is durable af. Are you talking Power Scrapper? I like ele/mes better thematically, but I’ve seen so many scrappers get away with so much stuff….

Also, interesting that you say core warrior is the worst, considering the poster above you said it’s tied for 2nd best. Was watching a montage earlier with a zerk GS/Rifle doing 13k crits.

The ele (speaking tempest ofc) is so durable that it can sustain through an opponent quite often. I’ve found instances of beefy elementalists whittling down groups of 3 and 4 players playing aggressive builds just enough to slowly down and kill them. Stacking tons of might can compensate nicely for a lack of power, and Air/Fire skills do absolutely crazy amounts of damage.

Scrapper is good no matter what build. Power, condi, nomad’s… it doesn’t matter. It has raw numbers and enough just straight-overpowered defenses with huge damage coefficients to go toe-to-toe with literally anything and win if played within a reasonable skill bracket. I’ve killed a bunch, but I can genuinely tell you the ones I have killed have been both bad players and on the build-side squishier scrappers.

I say core warrior being bottom-picks because even the core Warrior can’t get away with things like Killshot nukes against even remotely competent players unless they run a build like full stances just for the single attack and typically get lucky, and even then they’ve burned everything after going into a fight weak to potentially whiff a very predictable skill. I typically find myself only dying to warriors when I make pretty big missteps or get jumped in an outnumbered situation, where even then most of the problems extend from the other player and not the warrior. The Berserker on the other hand is a very powerful spec which I’d put towards the middle depending on matchup and build. Taunt and chain CC with no windup animation on Gun Flame, and Decapitate ignoring dodges (albeit a bug) make for some difficult encounters. That said, builds like tempest and scrapper with projectile hate and tons of defenses will kill them without issue.

Edit:
Condi Berserker is also absolutely ridiculous, but again, this is berserker-specific.

Tyeme.6589:

…

So, server A has 100% of it’s population playing during the prescribed hours, and server B (who has the exact same total population) has 50% of it’s population play during prescribed hours, and 50% at non-prescribed hours. Server A dominates during “primetime”, but server B comes back each night. Except, the rules are going to change so the night peoples efforts don’t count as much and Sever A gets to win every time because they all play during the prescribed hours?

And this is suppose to improve WvW? Sorry, I just don’t see it. If people don’t like losing their towers and keeps when they are not playing…they can stay up all night and fight it. Punishing people because their normal game time isn’t “primetime” would be poor game management. I think you’ll lose a lot of night people as players.

Okay, so here’s the thing.

If Server A only has an NA crew, under the current implementation, these players are marginalized to server B’s because A’s players’ contributions actually mean less than B’s; all B has to do is do slightly better than break even overall when their combined no-resistance OCX crew takes over, which lets NA slouch and act as a barrier.

If a server has a steamroll OCX and a horrible primetime, they deserve to be in a lower tier because the matches are either more ktrain and/or less competitive where most new players are going to go. This gives a bad spin on WvW into the future and discourages people from joining later on, while encouraging server stacking.

This is a game in which enjoyment should come from playing. If one wants to win, they should relish in playing better, not when their opponent isn’t, which in most cases is often viewed as cheating in most games.

I’d genuinely like to see OCX have its own servers as the best approach, and then this way NOBODY gets to complain about being marginalized.

As far as people staying up later, sorry, but people have work. OCX is 14-17 hours ahead of NA. Assuming OCX prime starts around 7pm OCX, it’s roughly 2-5 AM for NA, meaning that to make a difference, you’re talking people needing to play between the hours of 2 to 5 or 5 to 8 AM. People have commitments like work, which you can’t just “stay up late for” in this case, because for some, this would lead to massive sleep loss/productivity drops which is both unhealthy and bad for the company they work for and/or being constantly late/missing hours, which can snowball to much greater things for obvious reasons.

Scoring needs an adjustment mechanically, via it combining pools of players with similar play times each week, or through reducing the effectiveness of off-hours capping. It’s not like they’re removing OCX’s performance here, either. Even if OCX’s point margins are lowered, over the week, it’s still a substantial sum of points. I’d also mention that all the captures, upgrades, and siege which OCX places can be maintained and can affect the NA prime matchup. A well-defended, fortified keep and maybe even some enemy objectives being controlled upon the leadup to EU and early NA can get a server get ready to snowball hard during prime hours.

Ananeos.4587:

GW1 and the expansions are on steam, why not GW2? It would pull in much more people that way.

Because in all honesty, GW2 has a huge player base and got tons of attention in 2012 such that most people interested in MMO games are aware of its existence.

And it still markets aggressively on other huge websites. I’ve been doing things like reading news and have gotten a lot of GW2 ads for HoT.

The 30% cut to all monetary acquisitions probably isn’t enough to justify using it.
Further, GW1 is a dated, not-very-marketable game. Having steam handle the resources and market the game for them lifts some responsibility from ANet and likely will not affect future sales much; if anything, it could be cost-efficient, because then ANet doesn’t need to spend money on download servers which may not be utilized much.

Plus, like many others, I dislike steam, and avoid buying games from the service when possible. If valve ever goes under, I lose access to all games purchased via steam. That’s not really great in my opinion.

Think how differently things would be if classic games by failed studios in the past could no longer be played just because the companies went broke many years ago.

Nocturnal Lunacy.8563:

FogLeg.9354:

Not sure if this is all related.

For example I can solo any camp easily and fast on the Reaper.

Yeah I can too without a prob but it takes at least a min to kill everything and wait for the cap. ive been seeing it done in 15-20 sec. and thats with the 5 or so sec it takes to get to the camp from when Ive seen them. Maybe 30 sec at the most.

If you’re a condi reaper it’ll be slower. Power reaper is probably the best camp-flipper in the game, despite the build’s reasonable/balanced performance against other players.

With LoS and the likes to get the mobs blobbed up, GS5 → GS4 → RS4 is often enough for me to kill everything except the supervisor, and even that usually ends up at about half health. A few seconds later from 25 might, it’s dead. Typically the cap is slow only because the ring takes longer to flip while alone versus more people.

Under the assumption I’ve never seen the enemy, it also depends on the placement of where the fight is occurring, what the score is like, and even things like if the player has been active in map chat reporting enemy movements, defending objectives, etc. The duelists rarely have much to say, and the ones who talk tactics typically aren’t interested in dueling.

Northeast SMC far from the walls is dueling grounds. Rarely have I seen actual sall-scale combat happen here without people pushing towards OW or red keep or back towards smc/durios. Same goes with the recessed area far from smc on the south side.

Anywhere else? Fair game. I recommend most players intent on dueling actually fight behind bravost in the large flat area there. It’s explicitly out of the way to a point where there will not be passers-by from any server for really any reason.

Typically I’ll honor the 1v1 – even if not a deliberate duel – but stay close enough to engage if necessary. If the enemy tries to spike or keeps attacking a downed ally, I’ll interject and kill them. Likewise, I won’t get involved if the enemy goes down and my ally is at good enough health to stomp/finish.

And typically, even in questionable situations where I engage, I let allies take the stomp/finish. If it was a duel I just ruined, the opponent gets the chance to res at my ally’s designation.

Scrapper is definitely the best. Mesmer is the best duelist where both parties commit. Even then, chrono’s mobility is quite good. I’d probably have to agree that druid comes next, though I think it shines the most in groups of 2 or 3, and then falls flat beyond that point.
Next I’d honestly put D/D ele. Assuming you run remotely durable. There are some builds which are literally unkillable without a 2v1, though opposing sustain might be enough to perpetuate the fight; depends on composition.

I think core warrior and guardian are bottom-of-the-barrel. Too many passive defenses for them to land their essential burst, not enough range/punishing effects, and simply low control compared to most elites.

I’d argue thief stands somewhat in the middle of the list. It’s good, but it really only should be winning deliberate/committed fights to the top-tier dueling professions if it’s either completely kitted out to beat them, or simply there’s a huge skill disparity.

For PvE, Staff with DA/CS/DD, Assassin Signet passive, the rest of utilities barely matter. Dump initiative on the boss with Weakening Strike if the boss is fairly large/immobile, and just spam 1 because staff AA has the best DPS available to the thief otherwise.

For sPvP, typically it’s something along the lines ofD/P + Shortbow; DA/Tr/DD; heal = Withdraw/CV, 7 = Shadowstep, 8= Bandit’s Defense/Black Powder, 9 = Signet of Agility, 0 = Impact Strike.

Do remember the thief is incapable of 1v1’ing well in sPvP since the profession is primarily scaling-based and therefore has sub-par capabilities in sPvP where stat pools are so much lower than they are in PvE and WvW. This means that you should be actively avoiding fights to flip uncontested points/decap them except to help an ally in a close fight win, or an ally already winning a fight simply win harder to make the point cap faster. You will not level the playing field well if you attempt to even the numbers of a 2v1 if the classes are built to fight; odds are you’ll get caught in stray fire and die. You’re helpful in braking ties; that’s about it.

D/P is still the meta despite staff being a good pick in the right hands. Nothing beats the utility and safety the set offers in terms of the thief’s options, and it boasts some of the best burst damage available to the thief. Condi D/D is a variant build focused a bit better on fighting potential, but typically it’s ill-advised as playing for moving around is usually more beneficial to the team as a whole, especially since revenant offers near-identical mobility to the thief and can fight much better, so you’ve got competition to worry about in terms of taking uncontested points quickly.

D/D power is strictly terrible in sPvP; condi is better at fights but not as effective +1 in most cases. S/D is better, but still not as good as D/P for a variety of reasons. P/P is situationally extremely powerful, but there is so much projectile hate in the game now that it’s pretty difficult to pull off and very unreliable (plus again, you’re still at an innate disadvantage), S/P is okay, P/D is awful unless in strict duels against people with little cleansing (a solid pick in WvW roaming despite people saying otherwise, however almost all thief builds are viable in WvW since our traits scale to their fullest extent and let the thief not be terrible from a numbers POV).