Guild Wars 2

elderan.2638:

Have you guys noticed a drop in players? JQueue is no longer, since I only get queues on reset and even then it was instant into a BL 4 hours after reset. I’m starting to think its maybe not just on JQ but for the game in general, people moving on to other games maybe? Thoughts?

It isn’t just you, Tier 1 was just the least hit due to a constant influx of players in lower brackets transferring to them. The HoD, ET, and IoJ transfers also helped mask it. However Tier 1 is now susceptible since the populations in lower tiers has already been tapped.

WvW is getting boring. The maps are too small so zergs can cover too much. Having the 3 borderland maps the exact same is good for balance but makes them boring quickly. Player damage is another factor with there being far too much AOE and that AOE hits hard. This adds up to zergs getting wiped out too quickly so battles are from point to point instead of slowly progressing forward/backward. Am I the only one that wants long extended battles with tons of siege needed to take a tower let alone a garrison?

Heck I feel they need to add mine fields(anyone that’s played RFOnline knows what I’m talking about!), placeable walls/gates(spend time walling in that supply camp), class specific roles(thiefs can go steal supply from enemy keeps, engineers can build keep turrets, warriors can put up buff banners, necromancers can add minions that patrol, rangers provide an eagle “radar” system that pings when enemies are near, etc. The WvW just needs a lot more depth than just get supply and zerg stuff. A well fortified garrison should be an absolute nightmare for a zerg. I could go on but seems like a waste of time.

kidbs.8920:

@Rhino
Put on your bigboy pants (if you have any) and welcome to tier 1. You consider being in the lead during a few days when seasonal PvE events were occurring and hacks were rampant as “crushing” your opponents? You don’t realize that mid-week scores mean nothing. Grats on being in the lead for 2 days only to lose it all in the end.

I’m sorry that SBI and JQ don’t mindlessly start attacking each other in a total free-for-all of non-strategic idiocy like you are wanting. WvW is like a sea of sharks… when something is bleeding all of the sharks will home in the prey.

I think some of you guys never got a chance to fight against real adversity due to being and up and coming bandwagon server, so you didn’t get the necessary experience to handle T1. It’s easy to ride the zerg over outmanned lower tier servers and pound your chest, but you didn’t get much experience from it in the end.

BG was in the lead for 4 out of 7 days, I wouldn’t say that was merely a few days. Hacks/exploits were rampant on all sides, still are, just some sides whined a lot more about it on the forums. PvE was going on for all servers, you’re trying to tell me that SBI decided to PvE from Friday to Tuesday and then decided to skip the rest of the event? Sorry but the Halloween thing impacted servers equally. SBI was getting beat pretty good for 4 days.

As for real adversity, I think SBI are the ones that haven’t fought against adversity. Judging by last weeks reaction you’ve never had to deal with orb hackings or other tactics. You’re initial reaction was to hit the forums and stop playing. Blackgate on the other hand had dealt with hacks before and those tactics are almost standard in lower brackets. Now you will stand literally right next to JQ as long as BG loses something. So while in more than a few cases BG is getting 2v1ed, SBI is 1v1/2, yep real adversity there! Seems to me the only adversity you guys have dealt with is not having a big enough mindless zerg to go against HoD.

I’m all for tactics and 2v1 is a good tactic when someone is clearly dominating. However the current situation where SBI and JQ will cooperate and 2v1 the lowest server is poor sportsmanship. You can claim it’s tactics all you want but SBI should be going after JQ stuff to insure their lead and JQ should be after SBI stuff to close the gap. I know there is no formal alliance and 2v1’s happen on all sides, but you show me an instance were BG is blatantly helping the opposing servers by either guarding them, standing around near them, or otherwise and I’ll be the first to say it’s pretty lame.

Cover Girl.2580:

Two weeks ago.. when we were doing JQ vs IOJ vs SBI, all we heard was “OMG BlackGate is coming.. you guys have to be on the lookout for BlackGate! they are a monster! they got all HOD’s bandwagons! you cant beat them! OMG they just beat the other guys by 500k points.”
Now I’m pretty certain JQ’s leaders and players heard the same.
Enter BG to T-1. They roar in like a hurricane and immediately dominate with these incredibly brilliant new tactics that neither SBI or JQ had ever seen before. Then the bragging started. ‘BeastGate son! you cant beat us we just beat both of you 1v2, you guys suck cant nothing stop BeastGate! oh they have been demoralized and given up we thought this was t-1 why arent we getting any challenge yawn."
So, seeing this, and hearing these taunts, what would JQ and SBI’s next move be? To avoid BG? or give them a proper welcoming? Like some of the other posters point out, at SBI, we use some pretty set strategies in who gets attacked and who gets left alone. If theres a map that is 70 red, 20 blue and 10 green… we will leave the blue and go for the red unless blue attacks us.. then we drive blue off the map and focus on red again. We are in for the win, and if that means letting the 3d place team cap the first place holdings, it’s kind of a brilliant move don’t ya think? I mean first place will always be attacked first.
Good luck this week guys… Remember, don’t shoot all of your bullets during the opening salvo.

Why do SBCry and JQQ players keep forgetting what they did? BG did dominate for the first few days, but the constant crying took its toll. “BG are all hackers”, “Hackgate”, and “they are using an exploitative tactics!”. Players from your servers filled the forums with these comments, getting many a thread closed, and at the very same time where given advantages by their own hackers/exploiters.

It is incredibly demoralizing to know that if you win “you’ve only won because of hacks” according to other servers because they continually whined about how your server hacks even though theirs does as well. A lot of people quit doing WvW at that point because what’s the point if you’re known as a hacker. Some guilds flat out transferred. Since from Tuesday→Friday BG was lucky to have a queue for any map.

BG took a big player hit because of the hackers and forum crying. While I hope it doesn’t happen, I think JQ and SBI will reap what they sow. Hackers will be spotted on their servers and the same will fate will befall them. I believe JQ has already been caught with the latest exploited keep garrison take, oh I’m sorry how is it trying to be played off? A phantom mesmer that stayed inside the garrison for 4+ hours?

As for 2v1, while I don’t think it’s a full on server alliance there are definite cases of SBI/JQ ignoring JQ/SBI or even helping them when there is no logical reason for it. It’s a legit tactic however it is really poor sportsmanship at this point.

I play a thief as my main and anyone who says the stealth/backstab builds are balanced are just wrong. Stealth should have never been in the game in an offensive capacity, it is far too hard to balance. The thief class already has the initiative mechanic that is hard to balance and throwing stealth on top of that just makes it exponentially harder.

Even if they wanted to take time for a complete rework or an actual fix for rendering it properly they need a bandaid fix in the meantime. Make revealed last 3 seconds longer, make it apply on any stealth. Increase the thiefs base health to compensate for the survivability lost. Make damaging a stealthed thief break stealth. Lower backstabs damage. Just something to bring stealth back into line with other classes damage/survivability.

Even if it gets fixed, it’s still a horrible trait. They don’t do a whole lot of damage, are very slow, and can work against you in PvP due to bouncing attacks. I like the staff skills and I don’t want a pet, so for the love of grenth don’t force one on me.

/rant
That’s been my major issue with their skill point system to begin with though. I HATE being forced to take certain stat points because that’s where say staff traits are. I hate getting minor traits that are absolutely useless for my build but due to the trait line I have to take them. On some of my characters I put 30 points in a line just for the stats and might not gain any use out of the traits. The whole trait system needs overhauled. The previous system was better where you could pick what minor/major traits you wanted, however I’d remove the stat points and make them their own system. So you pick major/minor traits then you pick what stats you want. Heaven forbid we are able to pair up 300 condition damage, 30% condition duration, 300 vitality, and 300 toughness. Instead we get power, condition duration, toughness, boon duration, etc. Of course then we just need ArenaNet to balance the stats…
/end rant

In all honesty, probably. I just did my 4th class to 80 and 90% of zones were dead on Blackgate. Most of the time I was alone and might see 3-4 people pass by. If there was an event getting 3-4 other people was incredibly rare, usually I was alone or there was 1 other person.

At least with the Orbs gone and the turtle formation out in the open we can hopefully have less whining next week. I think what killed a lot of the morale on BG was hacks and crying about turtling. I mean if we won it wouldn’t have been recognized as a real win due to those issues. Not to mention that those issues made BG the target of a lot of 2 vs 1 due to the other servers anger at the hacks/tactics.

Props to SBI for bringing it back. Next week should be a lot funner with less hacks, no hurricane, and Halloween gone.

@Catrenna

People want a new armor designer because 90% of the armor in the game looks similar. I mean as a medium armor wearer I have a choice of trenchcoat, trenchcoat, trenchcoat, or trenchcoat. There is a reason the people go for the CoF gear and that is because it is visibily noticeable. I’m sure the current designers went for a more “realistic” approach, but people want noticeable gear and that requires some unrealistic design.

Arquin.1349:

Slap yourself in first person mode, adjust the darkness of the night to pitchdark and add creepy ambient sounds and THEN get pulled by a hundred risen.

Straits of Devastation is the only zone that needs tweaks to mob density. The other two are fine.

No, there are definitely parts of cursed shore and Malchor’s leap that need mob density lowered. The major difference between SoD and the other two is there is no set “path”. In Malchor’s and Cursed Shore there is a road to follow and for the most part that road is fairly clear of mobs but get off of that road and the mob density can be just as bad. SoD is annoying but there are definitely parts of Cursed shore/Malchor’s that I hate more. One such spot is the place behind Jofast’s camp when Ori spawns up there. I must get 12+ mobs following when I run through there and if those stupid juggernaut bows immobilize I’m lucky to not die.

I believe open grouping was at the very least started in Warhammer online. Rift invasions were alright but they got stale very quickly and felt very detached from the world. Invasions have been in a lot of other MMO’s though, including SWG. Ahhh how I miss the Nightsister invasions.

If you’re set on just grinding 1 event chain-

Kessex Hills Bridge+LT’s+boss- 15-35(mob level is 25)
Harathi Hinterlands Northern Centaur Event- 35-55?(mob level maxes at 46 but boss is 43)
Sparkflyfen Teq area Krait+undead gorge- 55-70?(mobs levels are ~66)
Pentinent+Shelters+jofast- 70-80(Mobs are 80+, usually 83/84)

Those are the main ones that I’ve found people doing. You can always toss in crafting to kill a few levels as well. Each profession from 0-400 is worth 10 levels. So if you don’t want to grind Harathi Hinterlands from 45-55 you can just take cooking to 400 or cooking+tailoring to 200.

Also what skills your class has can help determine what level mobs you can kill. In most cases you need to be within 9 levels of the mob to be able to tag it. However, a warrior with a greatsword can tag things outside that range. Same is true for a guardian I believe. Engineers can also go way outside that range via Turrets. Turrets don’t have the same level restrictions that cause misses/immunes so they can hit mobs way above your level. At 45 I could use turrets on level 83’s and tag them solo.

On my engineer I did:

Kessex-15-25
Harathi- 25-45
Sparkfly/orr(as DR hits)-45-60(current level)

Vayra.3290:

AoE cap is there for a reason. If it was not there I could kill 20+ people before they even realized they were under attack.
To give an example from a different game that did not have AoE cap on release (WAR); I was standing a little out of the way during a keep attack and the enemy had a full warband (24 people) standing on the battlements. I killed all of them on my own without taking a single hit from any of them. Or another example; me, another sorc, 2 chosen knights and 2 disciples of khaine held a lord’s room against 40 people and killed them all at once when they were rushing us. Even with AoE caps you could kill ridiculous amounts of people with a relatively small warband.

If you were to remove that cap in this game, you would create so much QQ only the Shiverpeaks would be left above sea level after one day of zergs dying to a small organised group.

Pretty much this. Every choke point would be camped by a handful of AOE classes that could stop a huge group of people cold. I played WAR and the BW AOEing was insane even in a scenario it was so stupid. That was a big part of what drove people off, trying to take a keep with a few BW/Sorcs guarding it was impossible, even more so if they had the engi/magus grabs that warped everyone to one spot.

Getting rid of the AOE cap would be the worst thing to happen to this game. If they did that then AOE would need a 10x reduction in damage at least or much smaller radius’s to the point where they aren’t really AOE. Otherwise you would have a few AoE classes that could defend against a giant zerg. A single necromancer could cripple an entire army with an 8k+ bleed and 2-3 necromancers could just flat out kill an army.

I’d rather have hard to kill stacks of people than fights were a handful of AOE classes kill an army.

Yeah I will give props to JQ, they at least keep fighting, Keep on fighting JQ and show everyone what a T1 server is really like. SBCry on the otherhand just want to sit on the forums and blame a hacker BG can’t control and tactics they can’t adapt to. It’s not even like BG has the 3 orb buff all day so there is a major stat gap or that stacking doesn’t have counter-tactics.

If stacking is an “illegal” tactic then so are mesmer bombs. Stacking uses the game mechanics to limit AOE damage, where mesmer bombs use the games culling issues to make your zerg invisible. In fact of the two tactics the mesmer bomb is far closer to exploiting, but hey since both JQ and SBI use it it’s just fine…

As for BG orb hacking, we’ve had our orbs hacked too. It sucks, but hackers are on all our servers. You can’t blame an entire server for it. I find it funny that people try to blame an entire server when their own server is reaping benefits from hackers as well. Do exactly what BG does, screenshot/video, report, and tell ArenaNet to fix it. Any more than that and you’re a hypocrite because you’re benefiting from hackers as well.

Red Falcon.8257:

And Engis deal 20k burst AoE with nades.
And Warrior deal 20k burst with Killshot+Volley.
The list goes on…

Simply put, the game isn’t balanced around WvW, nor around 1v1, and will never be.
You can’t balance a class around what damage it does with 25 stacks of power, 25 might, orbs, guild buffs…

/thread

Engi will end up taking damage to do that and probably die.
Warrior will end up taking damage to do that and probably die.
The thief can do that, survive, and repeat it even while 5 enemies are around.

We aren’t balancing around 25 stacks of anything. The thief class has very high burst and does it while stealthed so he takes very little if any damage. Stealth is the problem here, frankly it needs removed.

Don’t get me wrong, ALL BURST NEEDS NERFED. The thief’s burst though would be fine if they actually had to risk something to do it. My main is an 80 thief, stealth is far too powerful for the burst we can do.

@Katsumoto
The reason most don’t use thieves is because they are trying to accomplish a different goal. The goal of their matches is capture/hold points, thus bunker builds are the meta because they do that very well. A thief is great at roaming but having to stay in that tiny area to hold a point means AOE’s will kill them in short order. So while in the killing/surviving department Thieves are insane, they aren’t really great at holding points which is all that matters in SPvP.

@Talesslaser

All I can say is that IoJ and SBI never really got to see the results of the transfers, they happened on a Thursday I believe. If I remember correctly though, on the last day(friday) with less than an hour before transfers blackgate had 3 orbs and over 1/2 the map, where normally SBI was dominating. Maybe SBI was phoning it in at the end?

Blackgate could compete with IoJ before transfers so I think Blackgate can safely compete in Tier 1. Will Blackgate dominate though? I doubt it, but who wants that? It’s far funner when all 3 worlds are competitively close.

Dual.8953:

This is thief hate is devolving into straight up prejudice.
Soon it won’t matter what they do to thieves, they could nerf them to unusability and people would still rail on them.

This is what happens when you add a stealth/burst class to a MMO. It ALWAYS happens and is a TERRIBLE design decision. ArenaNet should have never given the thief class stealth, instead the class should have been based around short range teleports and evasion. Stealth is and always will be unbalance-able. It gives a huge boost to survivability, allows first strike capability, and catches the enemy unaware.

Shadowstalker.9627:

Four people decide to go into a star bucks at the same time. They get wedge in because they can’t all fit through the door way. Each says “It’s not my fault other people decided to get a coffee here at the same time as I did.” So they all stand there not letting each other through and blocking the door for everyone else. Would be simple for them to step back and each go through one at a time, but they would rather just stand there and claim “it’s not my fault”.

I keep hearing that in this discussion. It’s not my fault everyone went to blackgate. (Or other over populated server of your choice.) And no it’s not, what is your fault is your choice not to do something about it. Everyone is yelling for Anet to sort it out. Instead how about some people just choose to move to an under populated server instead. We could balance this out ourselves if we chose to.

But I think most will not. What we need is people to take personal responsibility for their choices and their server community and over all game community. This is not just Anet’s fault, it’s all of our fault.

Players cannot really fix this themselves because that would involve coordinating hundreds if not thousands of guilds and many thousands of players. Even then if people were to do this and the populations spread out, people will still bandwagon to the winning team. The fact is that there are only really 4 major WvW servers. There is a HUGE gap between #4 and everything below #5. Eventually this will be whittled down to just 3 major servers and hopefully tier 1 will be a nice fight. However, I suspect that eventually one of those 3 will get more bandwagon players and dominate.

This is well and truly ANet’s fault. They didn’t, still don’t, have rules attached to transfers to stop people from bandwagoning. The easiest solution there is you cannot transfer to a server your home server is currently fighting or fought last week. Another is just make it so you cannot WvW for a week after a transfer. There needed to be something in place to stop the massive fluctuations in population and there wasn’t and still isn’t. Then you have the Oceanic debacle, there needed to be oceanic servers even if they were only marked oceanic and hosted in NA. The oceanic night capping is what caused the massive fluctuations to begin with. Finally, their scoring system in WvW just doesn’t work at actually scoring a battle. Things like kills, siege equipment destroyed, keep defenses, orb takes, upgraded keep takes, etc all need to be factored in.

The truth of the matter is that ArenaNet really messed up with their transfer systems. It is too late at this point for them to fix it so the only thing they can do is let server populations equalize. The result of this equalization is that most WvW players will be on one of the top 3 servers. The question at this point is which 3 servers will it be, since there seems to be 4 tier 1 servers. Will IoJ exodus to JQ, SBI, Blackgate? Maybe it will be SBI that splits apart. Perhaps Blackgate will face JQ/SBI and get absolutely demolished causing people trying to get a bandwagon ride to the top to transfer to other tier 1 servers. A long shot would be another HoD style exodus in an attempt to raise another server to tier 1. Who knows!

Dan.7386:

Oh ya, btw, when we had a guy on Yak’s Bend hack an orb, we immediatly gave it back. I don’t recall GoM doing that.

Umm in the exact same match when the GoM hacker stole all orbs, not a day or 2 later did a Yak’s Bend hacker steal orbs as well. You never once gave them back. It’s only after you guys saw what happens when a server gets labeled as a hacking server(the label you guys applied) that you started giving orbs back.

Maybe we should get some screenshots of a yak’s bend player hacking an orb and plaster them all over the forums so we can kill Yak’s bend like you guys killed GoM. THAT would be some much deserved vengeance.

takatsu.9416:

I don’t agree with allowing rewards for low levels bc u can’t possibly contribute enough. I just solo hiked all the way to Orr with my level 30 bc I was wanting a fun challenge an see if it’s possible. Lol it was with some careful slow waiting and observing etc. yess u get one shot if ur not careful hahaha was fun though. But I try to hit a mob and I get immune notices. LOL. Bc u can’t possibly do enough damage to actually overcome the toughness and armor of these high level mobs… I don’t see how u can even get loot or drops or anything at all… You have to be doing thousands of damage in order to actually get ur hits in. O.O

Also there’s frostgorge sound for level 70-80 it’s not only Orr but I do hope to see more exciting things happening around the world that makes players feel like they belong and are contributing to the world and new maps, new difficult events and bosses and places to explore which I’m sure we’ll get ESP with the Halloween content coming up.

You get loot by grouping with friends or even a loot group willing to let you join. As long as you hit the mob with a spell(0 dmg glancing is enough) and a group member does enough damage to “tag” the mob you also get loot/xp. This is why people run loot groups in orr because sometimes trying to tag the mobs solo is incredibly hard for certain builds/classes.

Frostgorge doesn’t have enough events running in decently timed chains. The only event worth doing there is Claw of Jormag but with a 3 hour timer it’s not something you’re going to be able to level/grind on.

@bantapoo This has absolutely nothing to do with botting. The botters don’t care about leveling fast, they already level fast. What they want is loot and money, both of which can be earned outside of the event system. If they are a power leveling service then it’s as easy as having a lvl 80 bot(or 3) run events in lower level zones. Again they can already get loot at level 2 in cursed shore as long as they have a group, which they almost always run in a pack.

The root of the problem is that the dynamic event system falls a bit flat when there is not enough people to do the events. Scaling was supposed to be the solution but from what I’ve seen, most events don’t scale to 1 player. I mean 1 person vs 5 mobs per wave is really tough. You either find the one event chain people/bots are doing or you’re stuck trying to solo events. Hence why I wanted to go to Orr. Orr is a terrible zone and I hate it, but at least people are doing events.

Even if they made 80+ loot drop from all mobs for a level 80 character and low level events reward max karma/xp, the same event chains that people are running now would be run. The reason they are being run is speed/efficiency/ease. The kessex hills chain has little downtime so it is speedy and efficient, with enough people it is also easy. Pentinent is the same, those 2 events happen often and there are branches that help fill downtime. Zones need a major changes to create better event flow, 80’s need an incentive to do other zones, and the event notification system needs beefed up so players know whats running in the zone.

@Coglin- The only rewards to reap are 1. Event xp/karma which scales to level so no major reward there. 2. Loot which I can already get(I had 2g before reaching level 6).

@imbalancedhero- Easily! Get to lions arch, head south into bloodtide, from there you just swim the whole way down to sparkfly avoiding the inquest(they have ranged attacks). Sparkfly is a bit tougher, you can easily get 1/2 way down the zone but you need to get by some kraits or hyleks; I had a friend help me from here on out. Once into Straits you swim very carefully to the other side. Now I took the north beach but the spawn rate and mob density there is insane. Once through the tunnel you’ll hit drakes which are easy to avoid and maybe 3-4 mobs until you hit the portal(unless that event is going on!). Malchor’s Leap is cake, just head north into the water and swim the entire way around. Drakes on the beach are easy to avoid and just climp up the cliff into the outpost, from there its a short run to the portal. Cursed shore is just 3-4 mob kills to the first outpost, then maybe another 2 until pentinent.

@Ghoest- I have 3 level 80’s, I didn’t fail at leveling. The problem is that I’ve done leveling when there were plenty of people around doing events and it’s fun. Now though there is no one around and it’s a long arduous path. Perhaps if I was new and didn’t already do the storyline or heart quests leveling wouldn’t be as bad. I have done both though and I don’t want to do them all again.

@rloder- there aren’t significant gains to be had there that bots already can’t do. If a bot wants to power level a character then they can create a power leveling group with other bots and complete events, not to mention they can grind 24/7 so they can be 80 in about 2-3 days. The problem is that real players can’t find enough other real players to complete events. That leads to them being stuck in the same zone for a few days trying to grind through events, usually solo but sometimes with 1-2 other people.

@AnthonyOrdon- While it would be awesome if other zones were populated, they aren’t. There is very little you can do at this point to populate them due to the lack of a reason to go back(karma rewards). Perhaps if you combined all NA servers PvE players into the same map it might be more populated but even then I’d hazard a guess that most maps would only have a handful of people doing them at any given time.

FYI, I ended up going to kessex hills and doing the bridge/LT’s/Champion run dozens of times. I started at level 15 and I’m now 26. That seems to be the only event chain that people are doing, all other zones are pretty much desolate. If I couldn’t find an event with people running it I would have just stopped trying to level this character. My plan is to get to 35 on this event chain(kill me now!) then see if lots of people are still running the Harathi centaur meta event. If they are running it then I can get to 45 there and hopefully be high enough level to get event credit in Orr.

It truly is bland and unappealing. The only piece I even want is CoF helm, but I doubt I’ll put in the time just for that.

There is so much they could do with medium amor and yet 90% of the time we get a trench coat. At least heavy/light armor has some skins that drastic change a players look, ours all look the same except.

As I’ve found it, if you get XP and loot from event mobs you get credit for the event. This is the exact reason I came up with a 9 level difference. I couldn’t tag mobs that were 10+ levels higher and thus got no XP or loot so no contribution to the event.

The issue here is probably just a flat level difference where no event rewards will be given. I’d hazzard a guess at probably 40 levels since I have seen lvl 40 bots in orr leveling up.

My point is that if I can survive, get mob credit(xp+loot), then I should be able to get event credit. Being level 4 in an 80 zone might make no sense but that’s where the people are. I’m lucky at level 16 if even 2 other people are doing an event with me, the result is a lot of deaths and frustration.

Slot machines are actually programmed to pay out 90% of the money put in though.

If I want to take a level 2 to Orr and do events then let me. To even tag a mob you need a group of friends, the XP scales to level so it isn’t power leveling, and yet even then you will never get credit for the event because of some restriction on event completion. You still get tons of loot so that isn’t the issue either.

All of the lower zones on my server have very few players, as I’m sure most servers do. I already have 3 level 80’s so I’ve done pretty much everything. All I want is to level where events aren’t a huge pain to complete.

Now on my 2nd and 3rd toons I’ve figured out that for the most part while solo you can only get credit for mobs 9 levels above you. I leveled both those toons by doing events 9 level above me so that I could do the faster/funner event chains. However I doubt thats even possible anymore due to the lack of players. So I took it upon myself to see if help from friends would allow me to do events people are actually running.

Now I’ve already taken a level 4(you hit 4 getting there) toon to Cursed Shore. You can get XP & loot from a loot group, however you cannot get credit for the events. I’ve also gone back at level 14 as I thought maybe it was a issue with doing damage, at level 4 you do 0 damage glancing. I was able to do damage at 14 yet was still not able to get credit. Why ArenaNet?

TLDR: I can get loot and XP from mobs in Orr at level 4, why can’t I get event credit?!

Badge rates definitely need to go up. The gear looks awful and doesn’t have better stats but takes 10x as long to acquire than dungeon gear or even karma gear. Actually badges need to just be rewarded per kill and per successful event. The tech is already ingame to reward tokens to your bag so why don’t they just do that in WvW.

I’d vote for bigger maps as well. Currently a zerg can cover way too much of the map. I mean if the zerg is defending a keep on the other side of the map they should not be able to make it to another keep that is being zerged.

Necromancers are not that great in WvW. Perhaps in smaller group warfare they can actually shine but in zergs and 1v1 they are not a huge threat.

Marks- First off their damage isn’t that great vs their cooldown time. The trait line you need to go down to get them bigger has counter-productive traits(jagged horror) and useless ones(more toughness with minions). The area denial is minimal at best. All you need is 1 person to dodge into them to mitigate it for everyone else. A elemental firestorm or Ranger arrow storm(sorry I don’t know the names!) is far better at Area denial.

Wells- 900 range. That is truly killer in a zerg vs zerg. Getting that close usually means death no matter how tanky you are.

BoP+Epidemic- Against any decent zerg this is useless. It gets removed right away via AOE’s and combo fields.

Fear- It’s 1 second, 2 if you spec for it. It helps but it isn’t going to break a zerg.

DS- Nice for survivability.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done the whole stack marks+wells+DS into an enemy zerg and come out alive with piles of loot; BUT that does not happen often and even less now with everyone building burst. Even with DS most burst builds can take you out in 5s or less.

I have an 80 necro, thief, and warrior. The necro just isn’t that great. They have some utility but utility doesn’t win battles. I’ve done a ton of WvW on my necro, it was meant to be my WvW too, but I just find it lacking. The class just doesn’t bring much to the table. Conditions are currently not scaling as well as the burst stats, so it’s only natural that a condition class isn’t going to be doing as well.

@Judas

I play a thief and understand them just fine. There are very few builds and classes that can beat a thief in 1v1. The only 2 things that I fear on my thief are mesmers and another thief. All the rest are canon fodder that I can drop in seconds.

Sorry, but the thief is currently OP for a few reasons: quickness, 150% signet, initiative, and stealth. Stealth is fine when it works like it should but the rendering lag makes it more powerful(too much survivability) than it should be. Quickness flat out needs removed from the game. Initiative is incredibly hard to balance for burst and sustained damage, the initiative traits need removed to make this easier since a complete rework isn’t feasible anymore(should have listened in beta!).

The other huge issue is crit and % crit damage. The amount of both of these you can stack is ludicrous. If they at the very least halved the amounts of this on gear it would help reign in the stupid amounts of burst. I personally feel that it should be a trade off between either power, crit, or % crit damage. You can keep the values the same but just make it so that you can’t get all 3 stats on the same piece of gear. Doing this would really bring the “OP” Builds back into line and other builds like condition damage would be a bit more viable.

@Thor Rising

You cannot put 20 bleeds on 40 targets. There is an AOE cap at 5 enemies, so even if you do stack 20+ bleeds on a target you’re only ever putting those bleeds on 6 targets via epidemic.

The problem with the thief class is 2 fold:

1. Initiative- This system makes it incredibly hard to balance the class. ArenaNet was informed in beta that this would cause major issues. If a thief is using initiative traits they can get a whole lot of burst, if they aren’t then they are actually underpowered. Bottomline here is that the system needs redone OR at the very least a bandaid fix is removing initiative traits and giving a fixed initiative regen.

2. Stealth- As everyone knows the rendering issues make this near an exploit. They either need to fix the rendering issues OR design around them. Increase the revealed debuff time.

The problem with the current combat system is 2 fold as well:

1. Crit/% Crit damage- These are so easily stackable and because of that create such huge amounts of burst. Both of these could easily be brought down by 50% and still provide stupid amounts of burst or they could make sure it is a choice between power or precision or crit dmg. That way we would have builds that have high power and crit but no crit dmg and builds that have low power but high crit and crit damage.

2. Quickness- This just amplifies the previous problems. It either needs removed from the game or have it’s effects cut in half.

Combine all of the above and you have a high crit/crit dmg thief using quickness(haste), and a spammable high damage attack all while going unseen due to stealth rendering issues. Yes it is OP and it needs fixed. It isn’t the only build that needs fixed either.

On another topic…the base health differences for classes needs wiped out. I mean another class shouldn’t have nearly double(80%) the health of another. The armor needs changed as well. There is zero justification for classes getting heavy armor vs light. A warrior has the most burst/sustained damage for both ranged and melee yet has the most health and armor. It isn’t like there are tanks either since almost all classes have melee builds available to them. Make heavy/med/light armor available to all classes with pros/cons attached to them. Perhaps a full set of heavy reduces damage by 10%, med increases run speed by 10%, and light increases range by 10%; not great but you get the idea.

If only we could take 1/2 the forum mods and make them GM’s to ban bots…

LEGION.5834:

I’m a recent GoM ship jumper, and I’ll tell you why. It wasn’t just the terrible WvW experience. (and yes it was bad. Too many casual WvW players means its a ghost town when we start to loose.) The minute anyone had a reasonable order 3 other people would start kittening and infighting. Commanders just led huge zerg tours on the map with no real point. As soon as we capped something the zerg would leave it totally undefended and un upgraded. And worst of all, you are instantly branded a cheater with a bullseye on your back.

The plain old PvE experience is terrible also. The chat is so infantile and offensive its probably the worst I have seen on any MMO I have played. I can’t tell you how many times I just closed the chat window because I was tired of people spamming LFG for X dungeaon. And not the normal once every 5 minutes or so I see on my new server. It was like 15 times copy pasted in a row back to back. The map chat was like reading a bad thread from 4chan.

The chinese gold sellers OWN the server. Chat is constantly spammed with gold sellers and I usually got 1-5 spam emails per night. The Botting was so ridiculous certain areas were just covered in bots. And the skill points were CONSTANTLY BROKEN like 5 seconds after reset. I’m not sure if people did it on purpose or just trolling.

Now I’m sure people are going to say “But EVERY server has those problems”. And I will say, yes its true, BUT GoM has it WAY WORSE than a lot.
Suffice to say, I’m way happier on my new server. I’ve been there a week and haven’t got even a single gold spam email.

GOM isn’t way worse in any of those aspects. I didn’t have any issue in PvE with spam or map chat. The WvW was certainly bad but honestly it’s mostly due to all of the more serious WvW players jumping ship in the last few weeks. The one thing that irked me the most in WvW was the one commander leading a garrison assualt, breaking a gate down, then leaving to defend a tower we could easily re-take after the garrison. Of course the assault failed then they(commanders guild) blamed everyone else. That happened twice actually.

I’ve been on a few servers over the past week and none are worse for really anything. Bots are rampant on all servers. Map chat is generally fine. Gold seller emails really depend on how often you go to lionsguard(pretty sure the bot scans the area for people to send mails to). As much as I think GOM is a sinking ship as far as WvW goes, otherwise it is a fine server.

Sami.1560:

Just so you know, Warriors have such high direct damage numbers because – with the exception of the Longbow burst ability – they are unable to apply damage any other way. No traps/marks/wells/etc to apply additional damage on top of the normal abilities. All Warrior damage is loaded into the skill you’re using at that exact moment, which is why things like 100 blades, kill shot, eviscerate, etc do so much damage.

Also, you’ve now learned a valuable lesson when fighting Warriors 1v1. If he has a rifle and is kneeling, dodge the shot or interrupt the cast. As a necro, you also have the option of popping Deathshroud to absorb the hit (oh woe is necro with their two life bars…).

You found the 1 thing ranged warriors are good at in WvW – single target nukes when adrenaline is up (it actually quite hard to build it with the rifle). I’ll happily trade that for 3 ground-targetted wells

There should be more strategy involved, no one should be getting one or two or even three shot in this game.

The strategy is to pay attention and see the 2 second cast time (which has a distinctive animation and prevents the Warrior from moving) and take appropriate action to deal with it. Not to stand there and expect to take it on the chin with a squishy class.

You’re trying to say that warriors should do that damage because they don’t have traps or wells? You get plenty of awesome utility skills. The big difference between the warrior and other classes is that a warrior can actually boon stack with their utilities where other classes condition stack. Personally, I’d rather boon stack because boon removal is far rarer than condition removal. Wells/traps sound nice but they are not that great and in no way make up for a warrior 1 shotting people. I’ll agree that warriors could use some more flavor in utilities, but again it does not mean they should be 1 shotting people.

Also you’ve completely missed warrior condition builds. Warriors are probably the best class at keeping bleeds stacked on a target, toss in some burning from the longbown and you make other “condition” classes jealous.

You’re absolutely right, that necro should have known that if he didn’t have DS up(it takes FAR longer to charge up than adrenaline) he should just be 2-3 shot. As I stated in my previous post dodging or interupting is not always an option. A good warrior waits for the 2nd or 3rd dodge to killshot. The warrior can also immoblize the target so dodging isn’t possible. The warrior can also use frenzy to cast that killshot so fast you don’t see the animation. You’re trying to justify insane damage because it can be avoided, SO CAN ALL OTHER DAMAGE. Does that mean all abilities should do 12k damage in berserker’s gear? That necromancer mark of blood should do a 10k bleed because it can be avoided right?

I would happily give you 3 ground targeted wells for the single target damage warriors have. Go actually play a necromancer and say you want wells. They are easily avoided, don’t do a lot of damage(longbow arcing arrow does more), provide moderate utility, and you need to be specced into targetable wells, which only has a range of 900. You’re also very wrong about warriors role in WvW. Warriors have a very wide range of things they are good at. They have great AOE with the longbow, are awesome at catching runners(aimed shot/pinned down, bolas), GS is great for capturing camps/killing dolyaks, banners are AWESOME for bolstering zergs/defending keeps.

As for strategy, as I listed above there are ways for warriors to completely remove any chance of dodging. Now that I think about it, even if killshot misses it just goes on cooldown for a few seconds, but the adrenaline stays full. Even if someone uses their dodges on killshot it will be off cooldown before their endurance is refilled and the killshot will land. No damage in this game should do that much damage or be an instant kill if it isn’t avoided.

There needs to be more strategy involved. A fight should last 20+ seconds, if you’re not avoiding the bigger damage attacks your health should be brought down by attrition, not by a single burst. The sooner ArenaNet brings burst down to a reasonable level the better off the game will be. I actually look forward to the day where having poison applied to a certain enemy build is necessary to kill him. Until then the game will continue to boil down to 2-3s burst fights.

Abrexus.2910:

I’m just curious after reading Jon’s reply and those of others.

Are bots that sophisticated that they can complete event chains now? The reason I ask is Jon states that “farmers = GOOD”, so unless bots are able to complete event chains I don’t understand why the DR system penalizes those of us who participate in events.

The problem is there is absolutely NOTHING ArenaNet can do to stop the bots except ban them. Well there is one or two things but from a playing behavior standpoint there is nothing. Bots can be programmed to get around the DR. The only reason they aren’t right now is because normal players can’t even get around DR so neither can bots. The only thing that would stop a bot would probably be some sort of captcha/human test that pops up.

If they make it so DR doesn’t impact those doing multiple event chains, bots will start doing event chains. I’ve already seen a bot that does event chains. All they do is teleport along the the dynamic event path. So for the Harathi centaurs the bot teleports from the the first attacked camp, up the road, into the main centaur base, and the whole way through to the skillpoint. That covers the whole chain and they are killing things along the way.

Need to relog to reset DR? Bots can do that
Need to kill different mobs in different zones? Bots can do that!
Need to only play so many hours? Bots can do that(but wont).

Seriously, ArenaNet can attempt to tune their DR system but it will almost always impact real players. They need to think of another plan soon because bots are out of control. Send a GM around to pentinent path on every server and you could easily ban hundreds of bots in a few hours. Repeat with all the other hotspots, they have(should have) software that monitors player hotspots.

Pretty sure this is just another one of ArenaNet’s brilliant DR systems that punishes normal players. Basically if you mine so many nodes it starts increasing the respawn times. So if you mine say 10 nodes in 10 hours(5 every 5 hours) it will then reduce the spawn rate of 3 of the nodes leaving you 2 that respawn in 5 hours and 3 that respawn in 10. Obviously more nodes means longer respawn times.

The people still trying to defend warriors are sad. There is no other class in the game that can do as much damage as a warrior nearly as easily. Even the thief you have 10k-14k health and need to get/stay in melee range. The only things OP on a thief is stealth and that 150% signet. A warrior on the other hand can have 18k health and heavy armor while doing more damage from MAX RANGE.

It’s meant to be dodged? You act like the warriors other skills don’t hit hard as well. Volly on it’s own can do 6k. So you can either save dodge for the killshot and die anyway, or dodge the other damage and die to killshot. Then there is frenzy which makes seeing the killshot animation very hard. Frenzy+Brutal shot+Volley+kill shot means a TON of damage in a few seconds. If the warrior is good they also wait for the 2nd or 3rd dodge depending on the class. Then there are immoblizes, it isn’t like a warrior can use bolas or longbown pin down so you can’t dodge right? But hey saying “just dodge it” means you can always dodge it.

What’s worse is signet of fury means if they come into a fight with full adrenaline they can have a double killshot and a killshot every 15s assuming they don’t cap adrenaline before that.

I have 3 80’s; a warrior, thief, and necromancer. The necromancer is far and away harder to play, has good survivability, and deals less damage; that’s assuming the enemy doesn’t have condition removal of course. The thief can hit very hard and fast but is very squishy and caught of stealth is a free kill. My warrior can take a beating, do tons of damage, and even do that damage from max range. I actually stopped playing my warrior because it is too unbalanced. The only thing that makes me frustrated on a warrior is the reflect walls… kitten things make me kill myself!

mcl.9240:

To be fair, in this week’s match GoM, TC, and SoS were pretty even the first couple of days. And then the hackers on GoM started flying around, stealing orbs.

TC and SoS wouldn’t stand for it, and they independently pummeled GoM relentlessly for it. Fair or not, those hackers taint GoM, and can turn a fun match into a situation where the other two servers start thinking, “You know what? Let’s go get them rather than skirmish with each other, and show them that we’re not going to put up with that sort of nonsense.” There was no formal truce between TC and SoS, nor was there any sort of temporary alliance. Everyone just decided GoM was the target, for obvious reasons.

Even with the hacked stolen orbs and the invulnerable lords, TC and SoS started pulling away from GoM. For whatever reason (and I sincerely hope it was a set of permabans) the hackers on GoM didn’t make a marked reappearance.

So TC and SoS fought it out, and TC pulled ahead and is now in a decisive lead. SoS put up a good fight during NA nighttime (they’re an Oceanic server), but TC also has a decent night crew now, and with GoM so demoralized after the first few days’ events, TC was largely unopposed coming into Tuesday and Wednesday.

…except by a server-hopping guild tagged RUN, which decided to go from TC to SoS in the middle of the match, leaving some members on TC to steal supplies from keeps, enter WvWvW and not play thereby preventing actual TC players from participating, and so on.

TC’s latest struggle is mostly against some underhanded tactics of a fickle guild that likes to server-hop. And still, they have such a commanding lead, the match may as well be over.

Sad, really, because I was looking forward to some WvWvW tonight. Guess I’ll clean the house instead.

To sum up: GoM didn’t lose this week’s match due to lack of population. They lost because they stirred some righteous anger in the members of TC and SoS due to the presence of a few unscrupulous cheaters on GoM, and then because GoM apparently just gave up and stopped queuing.

GOM loses because of population plain and simple. It all started with the first 1 week battle. I believe we were against CD and BG. CD had a large night crew and demolished us as well as blackgate. As soon as that first monday hit and people say CD in control of everything, the transfers started. We lost what night crew we had as they all consolidated on the “night capping” servers. A lot of others transfered as soon as it was apparent you needed night cappers to have a chance at winning. This was the biggest blow to the server.

Then it was BG and YB we faced. With our loss of players very apparent we were still able to handle BG in primetime, but we were no longer filling the maps. BG’s night/day crew was more than enough to sweep the maps and further demoralize the players we still had. The first orb hacking occurance happened in this matchup and the bad press certainly didn’t help morale. A lot more people transferred at this point, leaving us in a pretty sorry state.

Enter TC and SoS. Even on the very first night we didn’t have queues for our maps except for a period of 1 hour at primetime. When our forces were strongest we actually had the lead, but due to our complete lack of night/day crew everything was quickly divided by TC and SoS; that’s been the story since the matchup started. We do alright in primetime but outside of that ~3 hour window we lose everything. It’s purely a population issue and GOM will continue to lose because it’s already too late for the server.

The hacking just makes the population issue worse as no one wants to transfer to a server known for hacking. The problem is that almost every server has hackers. In our matchup with BG/YB, YB hacked orbs as well and BG has teleport hackers blowing up siege equipment. Even TC has hackers as I was chasing a necromancer and upon the first hit he teleported away.

GOM is simply an example of what is to come for most servers but the top 6 or so. Continued losses means people will transfer. No new WvW players means the losses will only get worse causing more transfers. I believe CD and even BG are currently having this issue as well. The server shaming for a single hacker just makes things snowball faster. There is going to be a few servers where WvW matters and the rest are going to be super casual non-competitive servers.

Crit damage is currently better for a few reasons.

As explained in the post above, condition damage only scales linearly while crit damage gets multiplied. It’s a huge oversight in the stat designs and hopefully they fix it.

Condition damage needs to last it’s full duration to do damage. I always have some form of condition removal and most good players will as well. It is so easy to completely negate a condition specced classes damage by having it. Even if reapplied I’ve already got ~5 seconds of doing full damage to them while they have wasted cooldowns and need them to come back up. Even with a 13.8k health pool I’ve never had a condition spec kill me, it’s always DD.

On crit procs offer more damage/variety than anything that has synergy with conditions. I actually run with the sigil of rage and when that thing procs whatever I am hitting drops, it’s even better when I get to spike the enemy in half the time :P. You can apply another bleed, do more single target damage, do AOE damage, etc. The condition duration ones just don’t offer that much more damage. If your DB bleeds are ticking for 100 per stack per second, that’s only 300 extra damage(1s*3 stacks*100). Even if you use 2 of them it’s 600 extra damage. Where the sigil of air will proc every 5s doing 1k+. I’ve also heard that % damage increases do not impact conditions so even sigil of force won’t increase condition damage.

Don’t get me wrong, a condition specced thief can do alright. However with crit damage you do more damage faster, have better sigil options, won’t have your damage completely negated, and don’t really have to worry about the perils of extended fights(running out of escapes/heals or more enemies showing up).

Sylosi.6503:

I’m looking for an alt to my mesmer, but after seeing how much more loot my engineer friend gets from DE (especially ones with lots of players) I don’t want another class that is weak at tagging, so is the Necro any good? (specifically as the busier events like the Orr ones)

Or is the inital damage on the AOEs too low (even if power specced) and everything dead before the dots do enough ticks to tag?

Depends on the event and the number of people. Like Pentinent you won’t tag a single mob, they are invulnerable on the run up so marks will be triggered and not do damage. Conditions won’t even have time to tick. On spider side you might get some but again they will die very very quickly and only a few ticks of a condition damage will hit.

Epidemic is nice but 90% of the time the mobs die before it can be used. On events like Grenth it can be useful but for most events it isn’t.

If you want the best AOE tagger then get a greatsword/longbow warrior. Greatsword hits stupidly hard. A single whirlwind is almost always enough to get the tag. The blade trail is good too for getting in some extra damage to insure you’re getting loot. The DD AOE bow shot hits hard enough that you can get most tags, the giant fire AOE allows you to cover a huge area in times when there are tons of mobs. At pentinent you can use 100b if positioned correctly and tag the mobs as they go vulnerable.

If a thief is killing you in 2 seconds then you can kill that thief in 2 seconds as well. In order to do that damage a thief has to go all power, precision, crit damage. The only vitality you might have is from the acrobatics tree, IF you decide to go that way. If you go further into the power tree you’re looking at 11k hp, 13.8k if you go 30 into acrobatics.

Let’s put that into perspective. A DPS warriors killshot can 1 shot you. Most other classes can 2-4 shot you easily. Mesmers absolutely destroy you. Any sort of AOE’s decimate a glass cannon thief. You need to constantly watch your health as you can drop in a second. The glass cannon thief isn’t terribly out of balance given that they take a huge survivability hit to accomplikitten. Now warriors doing 16k+ 100b, 14k+ killshots, 8k+ eviscerates, and mesmers; they could probably use balanced first.

Now I will agree that stealth needs fixed in that lag gives extra stealth the thief shouldn’t have. How they can fix it without breaking a backstab builds viability is the issue. Thief’s have so few decent builds. You’re either burst or condition damage and condition damage due to it’s poor scaling compared to crit/crit damage isn’t that great.

@RamzaBehoulve

I don’t think you recognize the bots then. Go to pentinent waypoint in Orr. Probably half the people you see are bots. Some will teleport around regularly, others will just stand in one place and only attack/teleport when there is a mob/loot. On Gates of Madness there are at least 15 bots there, 24/7, for at least a week. Some I’ve been reporting for 3 weeks. There are videos of 30+ bots farming centaurs in WvW.

It is well known that ArenaNet is either incredibly slow at banning bots or that they are doing nothing currently. If they are trying the whole ban wave thing then it is backfiring because people are getting fed up with bots daily. Some even resort to “If you can’t beat them, join them”.

Sadly the constant hacking by the few as well as night capping has already taken it’s toll on GoM. The WvW population continues to plummet.

I’m honestly curious if it isn’t a hacker from another server that transferred over to make one side the enemy. I mean after the last few weeks it’s already known that hacking orbs will get the benefiting server targeted. So what better strategy to help your server than to hack for the opposing side? Perhaps I’m giving the hackers too much credit since they are stupid enough to risk their accounts for hacking orbs.

choob.4269:

I don’t see why everyone complains about the Oceanic’s piling on one server.
At launch, HoD was one of the lower WvW servers, then the Oceanics decided on HoD eventually pushing us to the top.
In comparison the Oceanic region is MUCH smaller than NA so it’s extremely likely that they’ll all band together and pick a server.

A majority of you just make it sound like the one solution is to have Oceanics kicked out of the NA servers or just shut off WvW during nighttime hours.

As for winning and losing there’s no actual reward so why is everyone so mad about it?
The whole ranking system was put in to properly match servers up. You don’t want a full server like SBI going up against an underpopulated server like Kaineng. WvW is all just for fun, but everyone is turning it into some life-threatening competition. There’s really nothing ANet can do about this, it’s all on the community. Seriously guys, just play for fun, not to win.

In all honesty, I’m from HoD and I really hope we lose someday just to make everyone happy.

The big deal is WvW is competition and people want a CHANCE to win. People realize not everyone can win but when it is a complete blow out after 1 day, there is no chance at winning. Not unless a big off peak guild rolls on their server to save them.

The other major issue is guild claiming. Guilds want to hold on to a keep, upgrade it, and keep it. Currently you cannot do that because as soon as you go to bed it’s gone. What’s the point of sinking gold after gold into a garrison only to find everything on every map has been taken overnight?

The solution is no longer separating regions. The game is live and the damage is done. This is something that ArenaNet should have considered before the release of the game. They say they always planned for it to be 24/7 so how did they not figure out that having certain regions rolling on other regions servers would give a huge advantage? Even if they did realize it would happen they still implemented a scoring system that favors doing that.

The only thing that will mitigate this issue now is a complete scoring overhaul. A new system that grants far more points for taking hard to take objectives than taking completely undefended ones.

GoM simply has ZERO night/morning crew, they all transferred off to stronger servers. After about 1 am we have very few people in WvW. What happened and will continue to hapkitten that SoS has a stronger night crew so they will end up winning. During primetime though Tarnished Coast and GoM will slug it out since SoS isn’t very strong then.

GoM is a dying WvW server at this point. When we can field enough people for a queue to form we do really well, but that happens fewer and farther between. Guess it’s time to find a new server with a night crew.

Uhaen.9876:

Sure thing OP, we’ll just have to balance elementalists in a way conducive to your request — let’s say, by subtracting some of your burn

You aren’t unfamiliar with the law of equivalent exchange are you

That doesn’t hold water here. There is no logical reasoning behind the health they’ve given some classes. Warriors get heavy armor and high health yet also have the best burst and sustain in the game. The elementalist has medicore burst, light armor, and low health.

Unless they are truly going to give classes major advantages for their base health/armor bonuses then it needs to just be a flat rate. Give everyone the same base stats and let them use gear to make their characters unique. Allow everyone to use heavy armor but give it pros and cons. Heavy armor makes you move slower but takes more damage, light armor gives you the most mobility but mitigates very little. FAR more builds would come out then. I imagine a thief with the 25% movement signet and heavy armor!