Guild Wars 2

Ah yes, nothing cries HUMILIATION like a 35k backstab crit

But honestly, I even though I run a backstab build in sPvP I can never seem to bother to scroll through miles of combat text to find the backstab crit. I’m sure I’ve had some 5-digit hits but nothing above the usual 12-15k.

I play a Thief and occasionally, in both PvE and PvP, I’ll use an attack like Cloak and Dagger that should turn me invisible. However the game doesn’t render my character invisible.

I still get the “can’t go invisible for another 3 seconds” debuff and I think I also get the Stealth boon. But as said, the game doesn’t render my character invisible. I’m not sure if the game actually registers me as invisible or how I’m rendered for other people. This is purely from a player POV.

Cloak and Dagger is the most common offender although I have seen it happen with Shadow Refuge and the Stealth Heal as well.

And before you ask, no this doesn’t have anything to do with the “you can’t stealth for another 3 seconds debuff”.

There generally seem to be rendering issues with Stealth both when it comes to rendering players coming out of Stealth and, as in my case, people going into Stealth.

That’s not the only problem with the Set.

I use Daggerstorm as my ultimate and the 6-piece procc doesn’t trigger until about 4-5 second into the Daggerstorm instead of triggering instantly. By that time the Daggerstorm is over and most of the boons fairly useless.

Something is definitely very unresponsive about this set-bonus.

In general I think it’s fine. But the extremes go a bit far on both ends.

A Bunker Guardian for example is too hard to kill while maintaining acceptable damage while Thief glass-cannon Backstab builds can practically kill any “normal” spec within about 3 seconds.

This thread made me giggle and smirk just from reading.

SILENCE! That’s my way of making moneyZzzzz!!!

Except so is everyone else.

It just leaves a huge rift between players who are willing to put their brain on hiatus and farm Orr like a Bot and those who are actually playing the game in a “natural” and diverse way.

What good is having twice as much money than before if you’re paying twice the price for goods?

Downed state…

- great in PvE
- fine in WvW
- kittens in sPvP

and this is coming form a Thief who has one of the most OP downed-states.

I’d wouldn’t be half as bad if the execute animation was twice as quick but NOOO, it’s just a bane on the game. I mean I’ve already seen teams that try to keep you “downed” rather than letting you respawn.

Based on the discussion about Diminishing Returns on Karma and Loot it’s quite apparent that ANet doesn’t like their players excessively farming specific events for extended periods of time.

But then why were these events (mainly the Cursed Shore “base defense” ones) made to be so incredibly “farmable”?

I mean they reset what? Every 15 minutes and spawn hundreds of mobs that die with little/no effort. Perfect for easy loot. The real kicker is though that we have multiple of these practically next to each other so it’s easy to rotate between them for maximum loot and Karma.

And then there’s the other question. If you don’t want people to constantly farm Orr, then why are events elsewhere so less lucrative?

Why do I get about 30% less Karma for an event I do elsewhere? If they don’t want us farming Orr like Bots, then why tax us for going elsewhere?

Why have Events on a 15 minute timer in the first place? Who needs such a constant spam of Events? It just makes everything feel so inconsequential if it’s repeated ad nauseam.

If you want people to farm less, make it less farmable (ergo, more engaging).

Yes, the general mob density and insane respawn rate make all Orr zones really annoying in general. That’s why everyone just seems to hang about the same 3-4 events and only venture out on search for Orichcalium.

In terms of encounter design, on a scale of 1 to 10, I’d mark the dragon fights as follows.

The Shatterer – 3 out of 10 – Pretty animations, visually impressive but no threat whatsoever to players.

Tequatl the Sunless – 5 out of 10 – There are quite a few mechanics here but none of them seem to have a major impact on the fight. It’s like ANet wanted to make the fight seem complex without actually being challenging.

Claw of Jormag – 7 out of 10 – Now we’re getting there. Jormag is a clear step up from the other dragon fights. Especially when fighting him with less than 40 people it can actually be quite…challenging. There’s a lot of stuff going on although it’s not always clear how they affect each other.

Overall however the Dragon encounters all share the same problem in that they don’t scale well with player numbers.

The fights can seem pretty epic with up to 30 players….but after that they just turn into mindless zerg-fests followed by loot-pinatas. I also feel that the Dragon encounters shouldn’t simply be put on a timer and repeated every 3 hours but rather be a reward for completing all the DE in certain zone.

Ok, there’s definitely something fishy going on with the game since yesterday.

The lag seems to have disappeared but now the game is crashing constantly, especially in “stressful” environments like Dragon fights or WvW Sieges.

I’ve had a total of 4 total freeze-ups today that required me to Ctrl+Alt+Delete and close the game (it had stopped running). None of which I had previously.

The aforementioned UFO soundbug is occurring a lot more frequently too, especially is busy situations.

Considering the decent performance previously this is an odd development that I hope gets some attention.

It’s what I do at level 80.

A martial arts Monk would be cool.

But more akin to Diablo III than Guild Wars 1.

I’m inclined to agree with the OP.

Originally I had a huge respect for explorable modes. But after doing them at level 80 with a bunch of people who were familiar with their classes they just didn’t seem all that threatening.

I mean mean we’d literally kill every boss with the first try, even if the entire group was there for the first time. This is a PuG, no voice com, nothing.

Sure, bosses have massive amounts of HP, often making the fights tedious and boring, but that doesn’t make them challenging. Neither do various one-shot mechanics that tend to gib you instantly…especially as melee.

Overall it’s the lack of mechanics and encounter complexity that makes things easy. The same reason why the dragon encounters are so incredibly dull.

let me see if I understand this, it bothers you because someone chooses to play a game the way they want to and not to your opinionated liking? My suggestion is go find a single player game or try the real world with real people until you can you can fathom the fact that nice people respect others points of views even if they don’t align with their own.

I never said I was vocal about my dislike. In fact I questioned by own beliefs due to the popularity of the build.

However, Singets are passive and even their on-use effects tend to have limited group utility. I expect everyone to alter their spec and abilities when entering a dungeon with a group.

Solo play is different than group play and I expect everyone to adapt to that. 5 Singet Warriors are notorious for not doing that. That’s simply an observation.

Whenever I see a Warrior with 5 passive Singets join our group I frown a little. Over the past weeks I’ve grown a little disdain to these people as they seem to remind me of Retribution Paladins in WoW. Not so much the class, but the play-style and reputation.

Their preferred weapon of choice is…who’d have guessed, the Greatsword for max. PWNAGE!!!11. As a 2nd weapons set….Dual Axes… preferably, but they never change anyway.

“A ranged weapon…..in dungeons? Say what? Do I look like a Ranger to you?” seems a popular line of thinking amongst this particular breed of Warriors.

Now my question is, how effective is a 5 Singet build really, especially in terms of group support and survivability? I know Warriors benefit more of Singets than most other classes so there seems to be at least some merit to these builds. I’m just not convinced they’re the best choice for dungeons runs.

Is it right to stereotype these types of Warriors or do they deserve more credit?

PS: I’ve seen both Warriors I have to rezz ever 2nd fight with this build as well as fairly capable ones, hence my question.

I’m not sure what happened with last night’s maintenance but the game seems a lot less stable today.

Other than the occasional disconnects and the reoccurring “sound looping” bug (aka. UFO landing soundbug) I haven’t had too many technical difficulties with the game.

However today I experienced two total freezes of the game during the Jormag’s Claw encounter and then once again shorty after on the character loading screen. The game simply wouldn’t react to any input.

Then I’ve had two disconnects, due to some sort of game error (didn’t write down the error code) and the game, for some reason, seem to be lagging a lot more than usual, especially considering it’s the early afternoon and not even peak hours yet.

This is coming from a player on the German Server Abbadon’s Mouth. Not sure how this is reflected elsewhere.

Details: Win 7 -64 bit up to date, T-Online ADSL (3Mbit), Intel i5-3450, Radeon HD 7850,

More than anything they need to make the scoring system more flexible. When one team comes out with a 100% lead after the first round of night-capping no wonder people give up.

The scoring system needs to reflect current player acivity, making PvP more valuable than PvD.

Then they also need to find a way that actually gives losers a real chance to catch up. The further behind you are, the more points you current keeps are worth etc.

More than anything I’d like the 4 Battleground to be merged into one. It just feels to disjointed with the current break-down.

Scorpion Wire might do what I intend for it to do about one out of 5 times, tops.

Mostly it won’t work properly at all and sometimes it will only pull an enemy half-way or simply make them stumble.

It really needs to be looked at because eventhough it’s quite powerful in WvW…you can’t have unreliable abilities like that.

Because it’s no just a WvW issues. It’s highly unreliable in PvE as well.

I’d say it’s required for anything except sPvP. Mobility and AoE are what define the short-Bow, both of which tend to shine more in PvE and WvW than sPvP.

I think the popularity of Short-Bows also has to do with the lackluster appeal of akimbo Pistols, the only other “pure” ranged option we have.

And another developer post that proves Anet simply DOES NOT UNDERSTAND the issues with night-capping.

I can’t fathom that even after close to 800 posts on this topic they are still oblivious to the actual concerns.

I keep repeating myself but it seems like ANet just doesn’t get it.

Nobody cares if night-capping is fun or not. It may be, it may not be. Hell I play a lot at night too and have plenty of fun sometimes.

But all that doesn’t excuse the scoring advantage you get for doing so.

I have yet to hear a single argument against either:

1. Scaling the WvW score according to the current number of active players.

2. Or rewarding player kills with a +1 to the score so actual PvP is rewarded, rather that purely Players vs. Doors.
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None of those suggestion have ever been counter-argued and even as a night-active player I wouldn’t be opposed to them.

And yet ANet just still spouts out the same BS again and again.

Yes, for a PvP game actual PvP in WvW is surprisingly unrewarding.

I believe awarding player kills would be a very seamless and intuitive way to make populated hours more meaningful than unpopulated ones.

Remove repair costs, add waypoint costs.

Nothing changes but people will QQ less.

…on the other hand Conditions still deal damage when disengaged.

I believe conception wise both Condition and Critical Strikes builds are viable. One has high, immediate burst; the other has damage over time, even when disengaged.

However the maths and scaling between the two is off, with Critical Strikes scaling much better overall than Condition based builds.

Yes, I agree Quickness is an issue.

1. For one, stuff like Assassins Singet “only” add 50% more damage to the next ability. Obviously somebody thought 200% damage was too much.

2. Quickness increases your DPS by 100%, which considering the nature of PvP, can be far more important than simply high damage. After all, a quick attack is much easier to get off than a slow, lengthy animation.

3. The downsides of Quickness…aka the loss of all Endurance…aren’t really an effective counter-mechanism.
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Solution: sPvP is already bursty enough. capping Haste at a 50% speed bonus while limiting the downsides would probably do overall balancing some good.

Cross-Atlantic ping would add at least 100ms to your current latency….more if you’re from the West Coast.

As for queues, there’s little to worry about considering the time disparity.

This is essentially what the whole night-capping debate was campaigning for.

A scoring mechanism to account for current player activity.

Well played for sure but not very classy.

+Excellent dodging and combat movement
+Creative build (Pistol/Dagger is the least popular atm)
+You win by outlasting rather than bursting
+You win 2 or even 3v1 at times.

Not classy because
-You’re ganking people during the jumping puzzle
-You insult your enemies
-Fighting mostly bad players…backpeddlers….PvEers etc.
-Limited use of skills. You mainly auto-attack with the occasional Cloak and Dagger. Probably the most effective way to play this build but not very impressive.

That’s my opinion anyway.

I think the following:

1. They should replace repair costs with waypoint costs. Both are roughly ideintical in rare gear but repair bills in PvP deter many.

2. You can already buy Siege weapons with badges which are still pretty thought after, so people rarely use that option. But if they’d drop more consistently they might be a real alternative.

3. There should be a way to group-fund castle upgrades. Either via the introduction of guild taxes or some sort of WvW pot…in which say…all players contribute their grey loot to cover upgrade investments. It’s not fair that such costs should be covered by an individual.

This is what is going to happen inevitably anyway.

So far the outcome of WvW is decided by night-cappers, not by the hundreds of people who fight during the day. So a few weeks from now, all the top servers will be the ones with heavy night activity.

I think the Toughness + Vitality gear is especially useful in WvW, but not so much in sPvP, Chaos, Zergs and large scale fights are what define WvW in most PvP cases. There’s a lot of unpredictable damage flying around and avoiding it can be near impossible at times. On the other hand you rarely fight people 1v1 so damage isn’t nearly as important.

That’s what makes Toughness + Vitality gear good in WvW. I wouldn’t say it make it good in sPvP though.

It happened to me twice today that a Thief attacked me while invisible. I didn’t know wtf was happening since I myself play a Thief.

This also wasn’t in a hectic or zergy situation so I’m not sure why it would be affected by player culling. I have a pretty beasty computer too so I’m not sure what it is.

metaphorm.6904:

really…you don’t say…there’s some continuity between “rogue” archetype classes in fantasy RPG’s. never would have figured.

What’s this? Sarcasm on the internet?

Someone call the cyber police.

Aren’t you guys already like miles ahead of both your competitors thanks to your night-capping skills?

I bet if they removed the repair costs and instead made waypoints cost something then less people would complain although nothing really changes.

Yes, Thieves probably have the fastest active travelling speed but you’ll have to spam Inflitrator’s Arrow constantly. I think other classes can reach comparable travelling speeds via passive buffs alone. They might be a better choice.

I was doing the Kol fight yesterday, which is a very lengthy DE event in which you can easily alt + tab while autoshotting as long as you stay on maxed ranged.

Anyway, during that encounter I noticed that auto-shot would sometimes turn off, despite the target still being in effective range. I was getting annoyed at this until I realized it was connected with the range indicator under the skills (they have a little red bar if a target is out of range).

The thing is, I could still hit the target for damage (using a Short-bow) another 3-4 yeards beyond the effective range indicated by the game. I haven’t yet checked this on other abilities but it seems like the range indicators are off.

Time stamp: Monday morning 5AM

But honestly, I’ve said all I have to say about this topic. ANet has responded but not decided on a course of action yet. If they don’t chose to act in some way then I will just stop caring about WvW because at that point it becomes nothing but a farce.

Cool data collection,

btw. shouldn’t it suffice to subtract 39 Warriors from that sample to make it somewhat representative?

Anyway, the discrepancy between Necromancers reputed performance and the actual performance shows an interesting element in MMOs.

The more popular a class, the more likely it is to perform “average” in larger samples. Unpopular classes will on average, fair better than more powerful classes because they tend to be played by more dedicated players rather than rerollers.

Honestly, I don’t see any huge imbalances at the moment. Just various different builds that seem op at first glance. 2 Weeks ago just about everyone in sPvP was running glass cannon builds. Now I’ve seen tank builds become increasingly popular making life a lot harder for classes like Thieves that typically fair very well vs. other glass cannons.

As far as I see it there are two tiers in PvP currently. The “good” classes (Guardian, Mesmer and Thief) and the “average” classes (Ranger, Necromancer, Elementalist). Engineers and Warriors are somewhere between good and average, depending on players and build.

At least that’s my take on it.

If you could buy any graphics card for a PC which one would you buy and why?

I’m not sure if you are serious or trolling but do you not do ANY research before spending 3000 dollars?

In that case you deserve what you’re getting.

Normal people buy a Geforce GTX 660/660 Ti/670/680 or an AMD Radeon HD 7850/7870/7950/7970 for anywhere between 180 and 450 USD, depending on their budget and system specs.

I feel I should add that this seems to be proximity based.

As in…I can stand in the same area for minutes without being attacked yet still “in combat”, yet when I do move on eventually combat will end.

This has been happening quite a lot as of recent. I seem to get stuck “in combat” for extended periods of time even after mobs have stopped chasing me. I can stand around idle for 5+ minutes without being engaged by a mob and still be considered “in combat”

I have a feeling, since I play a Thief, that it might be somehow connected to the use of Stealth in that aggro doesn’t reset properly.

This needs to be looked at.

It mainly occurs while travelling cross country where you tend to ignore most mobs. It has happened in dungeons too iirc but far less frequently.

Yes, on the surface Thieves may seem very simple. Or at least you can play them that way. If you spec accordingly you can get away with spamming a special move + auto attack.

But once you get over the fact that yes, you can effectively spam Heartseeker, there’s a lot of other things going on about the class. I don’t think Thieves are any less complex than other classes. They just go further with a simplistic play-style.

Honestly I don’t believe half of the claims of “Realms xyz allied against us”.

I know it may seem like that at times, especially if you are the dominating force, but without proof I’m skeptical. I think it’s just something people tell themselves to feel better.

You mean some kind of API? It would be great if 3rd party software could at least draw information directly from the game.

It does seem a little unfair that the Mesmer has this amazing, tactical utility spell no other class can remotely compete with.

It seems odd for Mesmers to be such game-changers where everyone else has a very comparabale tool-set.

I must say I lol’d at the video. The guy is pretty dedicated I’ll give him that.

But hey, “all is fair in love and war” or at least, according to ANet.

Anyway, stuff like this will probably end once free server transfers end. I expect it to happen by the end of next month.

First of all, is this about PvP or PvE? Because it makes a big difference.

Dagger/Dagger damage evolves around Backstab and Heartseeker which are both situational abilities. They deal very high single-target damage, especially if they crit but require a little setup.

Sword/Pistols main source of damage is Pistol Whip, which stuns the opponent briefly and then commences to slash them repeatedly for a lot of damage. The best thing is, Sword slahes hit everything within a frontal cone. So it’s great AoE damage too. However since the Pistol Whip animation takes about 1-2 seconds to play, it leaves the Thief quite vulnurable in PvP and targets are prone to evade the attacks.

This is why I’ve found Sword/Pistol to be a great combo for soloing and PvE, but much prefer the dynamics of Dagger/Dagger for PvP.

Based on the Thieves I’ve seen in sPvP, most seem to agree.

As for numbers, I’d say Sword/Pistol definatly does more damage in PvE, especially when you can hit multiple targets at once. I think it can also get away with worse gear, less focused on damage stats.

Dagger/Dagger requires high crits and a very damage-focused build in order to compete with Sword/Pistol. This works better in PvP than it does in PvE.