Nice video, but I’m a bit surprised by your build and gear choices.
Mug really isn’t that great a trait anymore after it can’t crit and while I can understand getting it for the extra Power, I’m not sure it’s worth it.
It would seem like 50% more speed during stealth might be more valuable.
I also don’t understand choosing Divinity Runes considering how poorly “all stats” perform for Thieves. Surely Ruby Orbs would be a better choice. Same Crit-Damage and much more Power and Precision for a fraction of the price.
We chewed through this topic over a year ago in what was then called “the night-capping debate”.
The scoring system is crap……and I think it’s slowly beginning to sink in.
Yes, having score scale according to current player activity would help, but it wouldn’t address some of the more fundamental issues.
Well I haven’t used one effectively ever…and neither have I been hit by one.
I guess they were introduced to counter some perma-stealth Thieves hiding in Keeps forever to revive dead Mesmers.
This tactic needed a counter…but that’s really it.
I’d argue that removing an enemy player from the game for 2-5 minutes is more valuable than a few extra points here and there.
It varies, but in general the population is quite healthy.
However GW2 hasn’t really had an MMO come and challenge it yet, which most other MMOs couldn’t claim.
It will be another 6 months before TESO and Wildstar really put GW2’s longevity to the test.
TESO will have WvW that is 100 times larger than that of GW2 and Wildstar seems to be adopting much of GW2’s combat design choices.
So I imagine both will be taking a significant bite out of GW2’s population.
Despite getting a little worked up you do raise some valid concerns
In fact I concur with all that you’ve said.
The thing is even if we did “focus” on Vitality we would only gain roughly 2k more health. And that really doesn’t help much considering how much damage and pressure you need to give up in the process.
With the amount of splash damage and AI minions running around you can drop dead within seconds without even being targeted. It’s a joke really.
I have no idea how ANet intended to balance things between one class having 40.000 effective health and high Toughness and the other having 15.000 health and low Toughness.
They should really normalize HP a bit more so they can focus on getting other things right.
I don’t think a change like that is really warranted.
However there is a problem with Weakness being so kitten abundant.
I mean Weakness, which is quite powerful now, seems to be tacked on to every auto-attack chain and even every PvE mob running around in this game. It’s ridiculous really..
I dont mind warriors. I mean they are OP. But at least they die and are less lame than things like spirit of renewal and s/d evasion
A Warrior that decides he does not want to die and leg it instead…won’t die…even if he’s at 10% HP.
And yes, they are overpowered, and yes, Hammer-stun-spam does actually deal significant damage against anything that is not a Warrior, Guardian or some other Boon-spam build.
Underwater Combat is a mixed bag.
Environmentally it’s interesting, now that the mob density underwater has been somewhat reduced. In the early days it was nigh impossible to get anywhere underwater because of the insane mob-density and rapid respawn timer.
Abilities are interesting, or at least on some classes. I find the Mesmer to be quite cool underwater but the Thief is just downright boring.
The biggest problem though is just how unbalanced it is. I’ve been involved in 3v1 underwater that simply would not end because some classes just can’t be killed underwater.
Downed-state has the same problem of being downright imbalanced underwater and makes killing someone really tedious.
64-bit and Direct X 11 client would do a lot for this game. Good multi-core support would be appreciated as well.
I use food 90% of the time in WvW since it’s such a great asset.
I generally don’t think much about the Bloodlust buff since it doesn’t really affect my play-style.
Guard Leech is something I pick up along the way. It’s easy to gain and easy to lose so no point in investing too much into it.
I think this helped a bit, but not nearly as much as I was hoping.
Thanks anyway.
Btw. my PC also takes a long time to turn off (despite booting within 20 seconds). Could those issues be somehow related?
I was just thinking of a way we might be able to reward those individuals in WvW who really contribute a lot without getting adequate rewards.
I’m talking about the Mesmers that will hide in a keep for 30 minutes or the Treb-guys who keep Stormmist open at every moment. The guys who spend hours on watch to report incomings and those who spend real gold on upgrading our fortifications.
What if the WXP flasks that were dropped in WvW couldn’t be consumed by ourselves? Instead they could be sent to any other player who is currently online and in WvW. They would only exist for an hour or so and would not be tradeable of the trade-post.
These flasks could then be used to reimburse those under-appreciated individuals at any time.
Sure, selfish guilds and people might just pass them among each other or they might be traded directly instead. But at least there’d be a way to reward those who remain otherwise unrewarded.
The idea is actually from SWTOR PvP where you could reward someone after a match who you thought deserved it most. This was done because any scoring system is flawed in the way it measured contribution and this way the community can compensate for that.
He mean class-mixing on the stage where 10 people were already signed into one tournament, i guess. This won’t change queue time but we will not see something like 4 warriors in one team and 4 thieves in another, it will be 2 warriors and 2 thieves in each team.
Exactly,
I assume a game doesn’t begin until 10 people have queued.
Then these players are assigned a team at random.
So instead ob being completely random, make sure the classes are somewhat equally distributed.
If there are other things factored into solo-queue, like MMR, Rank or Win % then that’s another issue.
In solo queue it can be a bit annoying to be grouped with 4 of the same class, while the enemy has none.
I.e. your team has 4 Mesmers, Thieves or Warriors while your opponent has none.
I see no harm in adding certain class-mixing algorithm to solo queue so this doesn’t happen.
If 3 or more of a certain class are in a single game please ensure they are equally distributed across the teams.
95% of Thieves seem to be skinny human females in leather-tight armor anyway.
Anything except that was going to be rare.
Outmanned makes WvW more rewarding.
The problem is it is exceedingly difficult to achieve anything when outmanned. So the buff really doesn’t help.
Outmanned is one of the few buffs that could actually justify a stat-boost because it wouldn’t result in snowballing. But we’ve been saying that since Orbs were still around.
Cooking certainly has more than enough ingredients so as not to require more.
As an “upgrade” I’d suggest food lasts longer than current food. So instead of 30 minutes, “Ascended food” could last 45 or even 60 minutes.
This should address any balance issues caused by the %-based foods that you can’t really make even stronger.
Holy crap this is kind of a big deal!
It’s not as simple as “too easy vs. too difficult”.
It’s about how you design your encounter and mechanics that’s the key here.
It is absolutely possible to design an encounter that is both fair and challenging, and in some cases ANet has succeeded with that. But more often than not they fail.
For example, giving a boss (or a mob) and ability that one shots players is ok, if the attack is adequately telegraphed and there is a solid indication of how it works.
But otherwise it is not ok, especially not if the “one shot” ability is a poorly animated melee attack that is barely visible through all the particle effects.
Blizzard has turned encounter design into an artform and every one of their more recent encounters is thoroughly thought through and fairly designed. You can see this even in the trash mobs that come prior to the boss who will often mirror his abilities, albeit in a weaker form.
I will add however that ANet has made good encounter design hard for themselves by the way they designed classes. Having an ultimate attack be equally threatening to a Warrior with lots of armor and 25.000 HP and a Thief with low armor and 14.000 HP is difficult.
What make is your SSD.
Samsung 830 series 256 GB.
Your CO qualities have little to do with your class.
I’d still vote for Guardian however as they have more support abilities that may need to be timed properly. I.e. you can AoE Stability just when you need it.
Yeah, the Power loss is an issue since Power is by far the best DPS stat in the game.
If all stats were equally potent then it might be more viable but as such only Eles and Guardians really benefits at all from Celestial and it’s suboptimal afaik.
Perma swiftness is great, but I would rather take many other rune sets.. such as: Scavenger, Perplexity(even with no interrupt spam they are great damage), adventurer, or the classic bleed duration mix and match.
I would also much rather use hide in shadows for any build with 30 in SA, just too much benefit there. Although withdraw isnt bad, I just dont think its as good for a stealth build.
Shadow strike is great, it really increases your damage when you stack it with bleeds and poison from steal/spider.
Everyone has their preferences I guess, and this setup clearly works for you, was a great vid.
Cant agree that hide in shadows is better then withdraw on p/d build. Even without centaur runes. When traited withdraw lets u reach close to perma vigor. More evades = more survivability, more caltrops laying around + it cleans chilled, cripple and most important immobilise, what lets you get out of those sticky situations when ppl try and lock u in.
Yes, but assuming you have the Condition removal trait the Hide in Shadows will remove 2 of any conditions that might affect you, including immobilize. It also allows you to stealth without a target which can be quite useful running Dagger offhand.
PS: When comparing the two heals you should also account for the Regeneration you get from HiS and the 4 seconds of Shadow Rejuvenation.
As I see it, both have their pros and cons and can be a viable choice either way. And that’s the way it should be.
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)
ANet designed GW2 to run on hardware from 5 years ago, except it doesn’t.
Now we’re stuck with a game that lacks DX 11 support, 64-bit optimization, Multi-core optimization and utilizing more than 3.5 GB of memory.
It’s quite sad really for a PC-only title. Even cross-platform games are seeing more optimization than that.
I have a fairly modern PC.
An i5-3470 CPU,
an AMD HD 7850 2GB
an a 250 GB SSD on which I have installed everything.
Now my problem is that despite having decent FPS and an SSD, my load times are significantly longer than those of other players. This is most notable when the Commander calls for a Borderlands switch in WvW and you’re stuck on a load-screen for 30 seconds and can see this massive trail of people who have all zoned in faster than you.
And it makes me wonder why. Why does GW2 have such lengthy load-times even on an SSD? No other game I have installed even comes close.
Is there anything I an do to improve things because it doesn’t seem right.
I am constantly Alt + Tabbing while playing GW2. But whenever I use a waypoint I make sure to walk an additional 10 yeards because that waypoint sound-effect is really annoying.
It’s most annoying in tPvP when you have to wait 2 minutes for a match to begin and have that obnoxious sound going on on the background.
Could we maybe find something a little more subtle to replace it?
I can’t fathom how you can live through so much splash damage flying around.
I run with significantly more HP than you but in any situation involving more than 3 players my HP drops insanely fast simply due to massive amounts of untargeted splash damage flying around.
Those boons you get from your group mate and the fact that he tanks a lot of the damage probably helps.
The problem isn’t that Tequatl is challenging.
The problem is that the whole world-boss mechanics haven’t adapted.
Put Tequatl in a raid-instance and he would be fine. But in the open world, with random people, battling the annoying overflow system, for crappy rewards.
No thanks.
Now you could fix some of these problems without nerfing the actual fight. Having him spawn on a fixed timer, maybe even just 1-2 a day would certainly help make him feel more special and worthwhile. But farming him with randoms after waiting 90 minutes…..yeah but no thanks.
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)
The problem with Windows 8 is that it was entirely designed around what suited Microsoft and not what suited users. Windows 8.1 looks to rectify some of that.
The Thief is probably the class that would be least affected by such a change. After all Initiative is shared across all weapon-sets so switching wouldn’t really give an ability advantage and would be entirely situational.
Currently I’m undecided if it would make the game more skillful.
On one hand it eliminates the “commitment” you make to a weapon when switching, even if it is only for 10 seconds.
On the other hand the cooldown system really dumbs down the “weapon switch decision” because cooldowns dictate when to switch anyway.
every patch since the game was launched has been followed by players claiming some kind of secretive, evil nerf of ecto salvage rates.
every single one of them.
This is true.
Iirc the Ecto-rate has always been 0.8 Ectos per item, or 8 Ectos for 10 salvages.
I hate the RNG component of salvaging too but don’t think the rate has changed much.
This was to be expected.
I participated in my servers first kill two days after the patch but haven’t cared about Tequatl since.
The fight is challenging and that’s good, but not when you are forced to do him with random people, often not even from your realm.
Tequatl requires leadership, preparation and coordination and that’s not something you will find on a regular basis.
Now ANet can say “we’re fine if Tequatl is only killed once or twice per week” but that means a huge amount of frustration for every other player.
It should also only count your past 50-100 games. Mistakes need not last forever.
I played a lot yesterday and didn’t get an abnormal amount of Skyhammer overall.
But once I did get my first Skyhammer I got it 4 consecutive times.
Maybe there’s something odd about the algorithm that increases the chance if you’ve already had Skyhammer.
I dislike the focus on “Living Story” updates while the rest of the core game is left stagnant for so long.
Game-play and mechanics have not evolved at all since release. Game-play is getting stale very quickly.
I also dislike that GW2 PvE is essentially a gigantic farm-fest. Farming Karma, farming Champions, farming achievements. There is no correlation between challenge and reward.
I dislike the shallow and inconsequential nature of WvW that due to limited map-sizes feels more akin to Battlefield 4 with 500 players than actual RvR combat.
I was a huge fan of GW2 before it released and admit that it kept most of its promises. But ultimately it’s just too shallow, game-play too simple and the core game too farmy to really retain me. I’ll gladly leave this game behind once I find something better.
I do not understand the logic behind Infusions and Agony Resistance.
No other aspect of the game forces me to sacrifice efficiency in one area in order to progress in the other.
I enjoy all aspects of the game, and my infusions should benefit me in all content. And the +5 Power infusions do all that. But in picking those I am automatically limiting how far I can progress into the Fractals.
And I must ask why? Ascended gear isn’t exactly easily replaced.
Why must I chose between having generally beneficial stats or being able to do another 10 levels of Fractals? Why would you make me chose to exclude myself from a certain type of content?
I mean the funny part is that AR doesn’t affect any other type of content so you could have easily added it to ALL infusions without it impacting the game. So this was a deliberate choice. And I would like to know the reasoning.
I don’t think I have ever fought a server that has such a high coverage and endless stream of players than Piken Square.
I mean they just keep coming and coming. You’ve just reported a 60 man zerg inc….and then you see there are still at least 40 players trailing behind it.
Conceptually the scoring system works in WvW. It’s objectively fair and makes sense although it has some practical imbalances (like exasperating the importance of night-capping).
But a score system doesn’t just exist to tell you who won, it should also add excitement and drama into a game. And this is where the GW2 score system falls short.
Of all the WvW matches I have played in the last months, none was close. In fact the dominating force is generally decided within the first 24 hours after reset and rarely changes after that.
Coverage is really all that matters in WvW and you can argue that that’s ok, but if you want people to care about the score, there need to be more ways to have a comeback.
I don’t have a concrete example at hand but I’m sure we could come up with something better if we tried.
On a similar note, the WvW point system only rewards holding stuff (and since the most recent patch, also finishing) while the personal rewards (Karma, WXP, Gold) only reward conquering stuff. If both of these reward structures worked hand in hand, rather than oppose each other then that would be better for the game.
If you don’t want to play with random players, don’t queue solo.
That doesn’t really make sense at all. Even if he was playing with similarly ranked players they would be random. What is the point of leaderboards then if everything is suppossed to be random? Why have rating at? Seriously we were sold a bill of goods by A-net don’t knee jerk defend them even if that wasn’t your intention its basically a defense of soloq saying don’t expect anything from it.
Because the nature of random numbers is that given a large enough sample size, every random element will be equally distributed.
So for every game you win because of a 5 vs. 4, you will statistically also lose one because of 4 vs. 5.
I’m not saying solo-queue is great, but it functions as advertised. Any additional parameters you’d add to the queue would just increase the wait-times. And additional wait-times just exasperate the issue because it just causes less people to queue.
If you don’t want to play with random players, don’t queue solo.
Yeah, it’s funny how it’s not in rated group tournaments but remains in the solo-queue.
The map is terrible and shows a complete lack of understanding for competitive PvP.
If you don’t expect serious players to endulge in it, why must the rest?
I honestly don’t think ANet understands the difference between something that is challenging and something that is frustrating.
They seem to think a Boss with twice as much HP is twice as difficult and that having abilities 1-shot you is difficult content.
But it’s not.
Equally they don’t comprehend that having an encounter like the Ooze thingy that isn’t challenging because of it’s mechanics, but rather because of some irritating design errors.
When players are spending a significant amount of time not actually dealing with your encounter mechanics but battling issues surrounding it (like getting Oozes to spawn without them being attacked by Eles) then that’s poor design.
CoF path 3 used to be like that. Get 5 people to stand in a specific place and pull a lever sounds simple enough…and it is with voice-com. But without voice-com it’s terribly stressful and frustrating and so for a long time people simply avoided that path.
Hate on Blizzard all you like but they had encounter design down to an art. Pacing, mechanics, fairness….they had it all right.
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)
With Ascended Armor underway I want to propose a change to the current pre-determined stat-combinations.
Currently there are close to 20 different stat-combos available to players and most play-styles are catered to. Every few months a new stat-combo is added and it just seems to be getting more and more.
With Ascended Armor you have a chance to stop that endless creep of stat-combos by just allowing us to customize our stats to our liking.
Simply add a Gem system that allows you to build whatever stat-combo your like.
Want Power as your primary stat and Toughness and Precision as your secondary? Toss in a Red Gem first, followed by a Brown and a Yellow one.
Want Condition Damage, Healing Power and Vitality? Simply toss in a black gem, followed by a white and a green gem,
This not only makes the game more interesting, it also simplifies it with an intuitive system that is easy to understand and prevents the Devs from having to constantly add numerous new items just to cover all the desired stat combinations.
PS: Should there be certain stat-combos you don’t want to allow for balance reasons (Toughness, Vitality, Healing Power maybe?) then simply don’t allow that combo.
I think the fact that sPvP is all about Conquest really distorts the balance issues a bit.
Thieves for example rely either on Stealth, which sucks for Conquest, or Evade-spam…which can still easily die to AoE and Conditions. Elementalists are in a similar position as they require mobility to survive and can’t just tank on the spot.
I don’t really understand why Mesmers aren’t so popular. They seem to be universally useful for pretty much everything. But maybe all the AoE in the current meta counters them too hard.
I’m just on the process of leveling my second character in a year.
One thing I probably did not notice to the same extent on my first character because the world was a lot more populated, is just how fast mobs respawn.
This isn’t so bad in the open world but once you enter caves or other confined spaces it becomes a real problem.
I was doing Snowden’s Drift today and there were certain caves and areas (like Molengrad) I simply couldn’t move forward into because mobs kept respawning quicker than I was able to kill them.
I remember this being a similar problem in old Orr, but that was fixed a while ago.
I wish the same tuning would be applied to the rest of the world too.
On this note, the same applies to events too, albeit it’s less annoying. But seeing events reset some 5 minutes after completing them really ruins any sense of immersion or impact you might have on the world. I mean wasn’t that the reason to have Dynamic Events in the first place, as opposed to Quests?
Anyway, with no more than a dozen players roaming these areas during off-hours I see no harm in bumping respawn timers for regular mobs up to 2-3 minutes at least, maybe even 5. At least that way an area might remain clear for a moment, allowing you to progress, rather than spawning right on top of you.
No sense.
Warrior is weapon master, thief isn’t.
-5s cd in weapon swap make thieves ridiculously op.And the thief is the stealthy sneaky tricky guy.
How would it be OP? If something it would encourage thieves to play a little
less in the “spamming” manner, and more in a versatile way. And it might encourage
more different weaponset combos, instead of the popular `something´/shortbow.
I agree,
I’d argue that due to Initiative such a trait would be far less potent on a Thief than other classes who actually get a real, tangible benefit from it.
I’m not entirely sure I’d use it myself since Thieves have rather poor cross-weapon synergy but the option would be nice.
Condition Duration should just be a separate stat just like Crit-Damage.