Guild Wars 2

DusK.3849:

Yeah, I know what the graph looks like; just like any other MMO post-release. What a twist!

But seriously, this:

The “good, then those who enjoy the game will get to enjoy it more” argument is hollow. This is an MMO, you need a big playerbase and that means that you have to please different kinds of people.

I find hilarious. GW2’s Metacritic user score hasn’t moved from it’s 8.3 spot since release. This might be a hard idea for you to grasp, but there are far more people enjoying the game at any given moment than there are people so frustrated with the game that they feel the need to come onto the forum and post pages about how “terrible” it is, or how it’s “dying”.

Crazy, I know. But whatcha gonna do?

That same argument was used for WAR, AoC, SWTOR, Secret World, etc. It doesn’t hold any more water than this game being shut down in 2 months.

The fact is that the bots are out of control and ArenaNet needs to hire some people to just ban them. Every major event in ORR has 5-6 bots there. Every spot to get high demand crafting materials has 15+ bots there. I ran acrossed a bot farm yesterday right outside Yak’s Bend waypoint in frostgorge with 15 bots all standing on top of eachother spamming skills and looting.

The wait and ban approach only makes paying customers feel like ArenaNet is doing nothing; which if the bots on my server are any indication, they aren’t. I’ve seen the same bot guild for almost a month now, I reported them then and I report them now. If they are banning then they need to hire some part time staff to help out because it isn’t fast enough. The economy is already tanked, the bots are running rampant, and the only people being punished are the actual real players. Boggles my mind.

CrystalKnight.3619:

no one said leave and not comeback you zone out of wvw for a minute and return.

and actions affect other players. “i do w.e i like even if it breaks the economy” isn’t the way to play any game. There has to be limits to keep a game steady.

That does not fix the DR mechanism, I’ve tried it.

The economy is already broken. There are very few items that are worth more than NPC price. I vendor all blues and greens, they aren’t worth anything to anyone.

In Orr I can do the events at pertinent 2 times each before hitting the loot DR. That means I can play for 30minutes. I can do the temple of grenth 1 time before hitting DR. That’s ~15 minutes, faster if we fail on stage 2. I was hitting the karma/xp DR while leveling. This system is crippling REAL players.

This is just the same thing that Blizzard did with Diablo 3. They forcefully limit how and when players can get loot to stop bots, it never goes well for the regular players. I propose a new system! When reported for botting enough times then the DR system can kick in. OR even better yet, when reported enough times for botting a GM shows up, checks, and bans them. If I had GM powers I could clear the entire endgame zones of bots in about 30 minutes.

Ashane.3520:

To sum that up:

BG had oceanic players last week. They got wtfwrecked by Crystal Desert. They then simply gave up.

GoM has never had oceanic players, got wtfwrecked by Crystal Desert.

This week:

BG wrecks while we sleep, does not give up. GoM/Yak’s do not have a strong Oceanic presence, give up.

Pretty much. BG at primetime isn’t what won them the match, that’s for sure.

I just want to say that there is some hypocrisy in what Matt is saying. They want everyones time to be equal, yet that is not the case. Currently the night cappers time is worth more than those spending hours to capture 1 tower or keep. They are being punished because they can’t play 24/7 or didn’t have a large oceanic population roll on their server.

I fully understand not wanting to punish players because of the time of day that they play, but that is exactly what the current system does and the reason there is so much unrest on the forums. It needs changed soon or the damage will be irreparable.

The scoring system needs overhauled. It needs to reward points based on how difficult an objective was to take(IE if they defend it again and again then it is worth more when captured), points need rewarded for successfully defending, kills should give tiny fractions of points that add up, killing siege equipment should give points, etc. Basically a system where if there is no one to defend then it isn’t a complete blow out. There are flaws with this system but it at the very least is better than the current system.

Don’t forget the complete lack of stat diversity so players can get a set of gear that suits their build. If I want a set of WvW gear I need to not only farm the badges to get it, I also need to farm another exotic set(dungeon, karma, or crafted) with the stats I want then transmute the WvW skin.

I used to worry about badges but now I realize there is no point. Even if I had the badges I still need to farm PvE to get exotic pieces with the stats I want. It gets even worse when you try to have multiple builds.

meloncash.6798:

Wait, people are complaining about other servers capping points while their server is asleep? Pathetic, this is war bro.

This isn’t war, it is a game. Games are meant to be fun last time I checked.

If the stance they are going for is that this is war then I expect the following:

1. PermaDeath- once you die you’re done with WvW FOREVER, no resets next week. In real war you only die once so I expect the same.

2. Instantkills- Catapults, ballista, trebuchets, etc. In a real war people can’t take dozens of hits, go down, then rally. No, they die.

3. Supply goes down for almost every action. Players need to eat/drink, siege engines need ammo, workers need fed, etc.

4. REAL time cycles. When it’s 3 AM on a NA server it needs to be pitch black and players need to use torches to see anything. In a real war darkness is a major problem, mastering the darkness can give you a major advantage, but it can also be a huge disadvantage.

Are you starting to see the idiocy in saying this is war? Implement the above and see how quickittenhe night cappers are complaining on the forums because 2-3 people with siege engines killed them.

This is a game above everything else and it should be fun for everyone. If ArenaNet’s stance is truly that night capping is fine then they’ve made their biggest mistake, one that will eventually cost them a lot of WvW players. How ArenaNet came up with so many good changes to the MMO themepark and then failed at this issue is a mystery.

nerva.7940:

except that the biggest endgame piece for GW2, WvW, is working more or less perfectly and people are eating it up like dessert.

oh and GW2 doesnt have a countdown until funds run out. the game was and is mad profitable as b2p/rmt. the countdown to doom is getting old fast, so stop it.

in terms of content, what you’re getting: a dynamic event content live team, upcoming xpacs, and an entire tpvp package for esports (replays, maps, balancing, etc.). this is what’s confirmed.

Ummm WvW isn’t working perfectly. It works better than RvR did in WAR but it still has a bunch of issues. A lot of people are getting fed up with the night capping issue (whether you believe it is an issue or not does not matter) and either transferring or quitting. Class balance disparity(although BW’s in WAR were worse). Invisible enemies. Snowballing. Objectives being taken way too fast(<3 minutes for a fully upgraded keep?).

You better believe GW2 has a countdown just like any other MMO. Sorry, but they still need to pay ongoing salaries and development costs. They are planning to do this by cash shop sales, but if players continue to stop playing they won’t be selling anything. The issues I mentioned in WvW are just one part of this. With upgrades/siege costing a good bit of money, some use gems. If people quit WvW then they won’t be buying gems to turn into gold and ArenaNet will not be making money.

What this game currently needs is some good fun battlegrounds with different gamemodes where people use their persistent gear and earn rewards they can use on their persistent characters. It also needs dueling(how this wasn’t in the game at launch boggles my mind). EPIC dynamic event chains that lead to a raid boss(Metrica fire elemental :P) that also stay as far away from ORR as possible. They need to also add a ton more exotic sets with different stats, there shouldn’t be exotics used just for skins because they have stats no one wants(I’m looking at you WvW).

Cls.9346:

No idea whats going on there but looks fun

There is a centaur camp in WvWvW borderlands maps that botters use to farm levels/loot. The number of botters is quite ridiculous and it seems this Necro had enough and took it upon himself to kill them all. Every enemy in that video except maybe 3-4 are bots. The real players actually move around in non-linear paths, dodge, use skills, actually target the enemy player, etc.

Initiative is by far the most restricting mechanic in the game. You say it forces you to make tactical decisions, which it does, but it also forces things on you. If you’re not using skills your damage plummets, this puts us well below most classes in terms of sustained damage. If you use your initiative you’re not going to have enough most of the time to use your escape skill. Other classes with weapon swapping can be constantly using skills with maybe 1-2 second waiting periods between skills. Not to mention we are almost forced to pick up initiative traits just to make our base mechanic okay. Last time I did the math in beta the thief has 3-4x more downtime between skills(after the burst is used which is like another class using 1-5) than other classes.

Initiative is also really hard to balance, as is evident from the current state of PvP. It creates a ton of burst which is hard to defend against, but it also impacts our sustain. What balances our sustain can overpower our burst and what balances our burst can cripple our sustain.

I also support this!

Orr is by far my least favorite zone. It feels like events have absolutely zero impact. If you take a temple it is still surrounded by scores of mobs that attack as soon as you’re 15ft away from the karma vendor. The mobs are incredibly annoying(not hard), and by the cursed shore the coral/risen sea floor art is just monotonous.

Spoilers ahead….I think

None of the Temple/cathedral events are very epic. I mean I’d except limitations of the game engine, BUT then I look at Claw of Jormag and ask what happened? Use some over the top effects, HUGE spells, HUGE mobs, tons of cannon fodder enemies. The events should be hard to complete and the rewards should reflect that. The current chests are just awful even with a full MF set, MF guild buff, and MF food. Create a baseline bland skinned exotic set I can get from chests.

Cursed Shore should pick up after Treehearn(sp?) has cleansed the heart of orr and life is beginning to return. Zhaitan’s forces are trying to claw back territory and spread death once again. This would have given room for a change of scenery(lush green oh how I’ve missed you) and given the feeling of events having an impact as things turn from deathly brown to lively green as you take/lose things.

Malchor’s leap should take place after the cathedral is taken and zhaitan’s source of minions is stopped. This should effectively cut the mob density from here on out, unless the risen control the temple.

SoD needs more of a beach landing/invading feeling. The risen use boats, where are ours? Instead we swim a crossed the strait. We have airships and boats, make use of them! Being able to get into a boat or airship and pelt tons of risen would be a nice break and add some epicness.

The camp invasions in all 3 zones need reworked. First of all, camps should be attacked in a certain order. If there are 4 camps with camp 4 being the closest to zhaitan, then camp 4 should be the one getting attacked. The basic premise is that if we have camp 4 we’ve “cleared” all the land up to that point. So unless there is some secret tunnel the risen would have been spotted and killed by our occupying forces. This doesn’t mean you can’t throw a few wrenches into the mix though! Perhaps Zhaitan(or one of his dragon minions like in the story mode) just nukes a camp effectively cutting off the camps that come after it, leaving them to get attacked from both sides.

The risen should get stronger and stronger each time they fail to take a camp. This will force the events to push in a different direction. Also adding in different directions. Maybe one time the risen take a camp and just go after the next camp, another time they take the camp and try to obtain a powerful artiiact like the cauldron. Basically, have the risen trying to actually accomplish strategic objectives instead of just taking and holding a camp.

NoizeMaker.8367:

Mesmer Portals + stealth + Zerg = Tactic.

Your confusing getting owned by Tatics with a rendering problem on the servers side.

Please oh lord stop reporting false accusations.

You clearly don’t understand the issue.

Mesmer Portals + Stealth + Zerg = Tactic

Mesmer Portals + Taking advantage of Rendering issue + Zerg = Exploit

The people using the mesmer portals in this case are exploiting the culling system that is a known issue. Taking advantage of a unintended game mechanic for an unfair advantage…what does that sound like again? OH! An exploit. If there wasn’t a culling issue these people porting through would be slaughtered, the only reason it works is because they can kill while completely invisible. This isn’t a case of stealth either because 1-2 seconds after using an ability in stealth you appear on the enemy screens. This is a case of an entire zerg being killed and only some names being visibile, it is a culling issue and those guilds are exploiting it.

I’d love to see mesmer portals be used for this purpose in the future when rendering is fixed/prioritized better. Currently though, it gives a huge advantage to those exploiting it and it needs to be stopped.

Condition damage needs buffed. Direct damage is just far superior currently in any fight, PvE or PvP.

Critical chance and critical damage stats give direct damage a huge damage increase as you stack both. Condition damage only scales linearly. The only thing condition damage has that can compete is condition duration but that is only available through sigils and trait bonuses.

It doesn’t even take much math. If a warrior can do EASILY 12k on a single 100b(not even including any bleeds they apply from the crits), that’s 106 ticks of bleeds at 1400 condition damage, basically 10 stacks of bleeds for 10 seconds, or 20 stacks for 5 seconds. The only thing even close to that is burning effects and you would need 6 stacks of 3 second duration burns. Now this doesn’t account for damage done from skills that apply burns/bleeds/etc, but you get a sense of the disparity between condition damage and direct damage.

On top of the huge damage gap, condition damage can be simply nullified. In a best case scenario an easy way to bring condition damage on par with crit/cit damage would be condition duration, but since the longer the duration the easier to remove, it doesn’t entirely solve the problem. There are so many condition removal abilities, combos, traits, sigils, etc that keeping condition damage up is difficult. Where is the sigil that lets me nullify 1 direct damage attack every 10s like the condition removal one.

The long and short of it is that condition damage needs a buff. It needs to do more damage than crit/crit damage over a sustained longer period to make up for the fact that it is so easily removed. Currently, that is not the case. That or crit/crit damage needs to be brought down to a reasonable level so the TTK increases and condition builds can actually have time to stack conditions. I’d love to also see condition duration added as a stat option on gear instead of just sigils/traits.

I’d say one of the top 3 WvW servers(HoD, SBI,ET). If ArenaNet doesn’t do anything everyone will end up on those 3 anyway :P.

Davion.8754:

OP might work 9-5 mon-fri but NA does not close down at 5pm, its 24/7 just live WvWvW is, get owned or do something about it that doesnt punish the entire playerbase for being at work or sleeping during “your” primetime

How does it punish the entire playerbase? Currently the problem is that 3/4 or more of the playerbase is punished by the night capping.

Also if you’re asleep during the NA primetime your server isn’t going to lose everything because the majority of the NA population is online to defend. When the OP is asleep, he loses everything because most of the NA population is asleep.

I understand the oceanic players don’t want to be punished for something they can’t control. However, they also need to realize that NA players ARE currently being punished due to the oceanic presence. While a better scoring system that awards points based on difficulty of capping/defending is the best solution, another stop gap is to just make 3 oceanic servers and then limit point gain outside of each timezones respective prime times.

To the people saying recruit people from different time zones, do you realize those player pools are limited? The reason there isn’t an oceanic server is due to their not being being enough oceanic players to warrant specific servers for them. Then there is the fact that players want to play with other people when they get on, not a ghost town. That means the oceanic players will congregate together on a few servers. How in the world do you convince players to transfer to your server because no one is online?

The ship has sailed there. If your server doesn’t have an oceanic presence now, it most likely never will. So the people telling others to just recruit more are basically saying that there is absolutely nothing they can do. That does not sound like a solution to me.

NA servers should have their WvW determined in the NA prime time. The EU servers should be determined by the EU primetime. Oceanic players should get their own server or two, as well as any other large populations out there that are forced to play on EU/NA. An easy solution is to just simply weight the point gain by the player populations at that time. If prime time is 100%, then 5 am when only 5% of the population is on it should only reward 5% of the points. But this is just a bandaid, in reality the scoring system needs a complete rework to award points based on the difficulty of a capture. If a keep is well defended and takes 10 hours of non-stop combat to finally capture, then it should be worth far more than a completely undefended keep at 4am.

Going to say your flesh wurm situation is highly unlikely. You see flesh wurms do not attack unless you attack, I am 100% certain about it. They might attack if they are hit, but they die really fast if a mob is beating on them. They also teleport with you if you use a WP. It is more likely you killed a mob along the way that counted towards an event and got gold that way, I’ve done that myself.

As for getting golds, the problem isn’t at random small events with a few people doing them, where you’re minions/flash wurm got you gold. It is at the bigger events(usually kill champion) where getting a gold becomes a huge competition. Go do Harathi Hinterlands meta centaur event. The final boss is always a toss up for my necromancer DD or not. My warrior on the other hand gets gold every time. Thief it depends on DD or condition spec/gear. I’ve had my level 80 condition thief get silver in that event even though I was D/D, using heartseeker(pre-nerf), and on the boss the entire fight.

The problem is the contribution system. It only accounts for damage done and enemies killed(kills being determined by damage done :P). So spending the fight rezzing people, removing their conditions, buffing, etc does not get you gold, yet is integral to the event succeeding. Condition damage restrictions keep them from doing enough damage to meet the gold contribution level(determined by damage done). Even if a condition specced class uses DD abilities they are still lacking in damage done due to DD spec classes setting the average damage done so high.

It is not just a matter of using some DD abilities for condition specs and letting everyone die to do some DD isn’t a good option for those that want to do support. The problem is the contribution system and it needs fixed.

Yes, Necromancers can in fact do this much damage given the same situation. You need to understand that this actually took a bit to setup. He is using a stolen item for the 2nd spin and getting it took a few steals given the randomness of that mechanic. On top of that they are using(exploiting?) the games character model loading mechanic, which basically means for the first 2-3 seconds no one has any clue what is attacking them.The first spin only hits for 4k-6k and the second spin is the one that actually hits 8k. Even together that’s 14k. Also take a look at that thiefs health, if anyone had actually

For a necro you use Blood is power and epidemic, boom 8k+ bleed on a ton of people. Lay down mark of blood that’s another 3k+ bleed. Switch into DS and do life siphon and now you’re doing a bunch more damage, equaling out to around what that thief was doing. Toss in a well of suffering and all your other marks and you can do a ton of AOE damage. You might not do it as quick, but you have more survivability and it is a combo you can pull off a lot more often and with very little setup. I did it last night when defending a tower and just decimated enemy forces. Love seeing Blood is power spread out to everyone :P.

@Sisho

Don’t lump our entire server together as hackers when it was 1-2 people. Do I call Crystal Desert hackers because of the 5+ hackers that I’ve personally had to fight against? That first weekend that’s what we had to keep putting up with. From hackers teleporting in to destroy our siege equipment when your towers/garrison were on the brink of capture, teleporters taking supply depots, high jumpers, perma-invis thiefs(they teleport away while in stealth), and a bunch of others. Why would we toss more and more money away when we can’t keep a trebuchet up for more than 30s before a warrior teleports on top of it, drops 100b, then teleports away.

Hacking is a major issue for ALL servers, you just don’t see it because you’re not suffering from it. Granted the hacker in this case is blatantly obvious, but there are still hackers on every server.

ArenaNet needs to allow other servers to see peoples names and report them. It is very hard to report your own sides players because most of the time you’re not the target of those hacks. At they very least they need to announce to the server who has taken the orb(s) They also need to make it so the orbs cannot be taken unless the place where they are being held is captured.

@ Illushia

1. That’s true and false, basically it depends on the setup. Condition damage only does more damage when direct damage when the direct damage doesn’t crit. That is the huge problem with condition damage; it doesn’t gain any damage from power, crit %, crit damage, vulnerability, or even damage % increase. The only thing that impacts condition damage is condition damage, condition duration, and a few traits.

As soon as direct damage starts critting and that crit damage increased, condition damage falls way behind. Not to mention that condition damage can be completely nullified with via the condition cap in PvE or condition removal in PvP.

2. GS warriors aren’t burst, they are sustained damage, in fact the longer the fight goes the more damage a warrior can do. Using the GS crit grants might trait you can get up to 12+ stacks on yourself.

3. Condition damage is supposed to be the sustained damage, but it isn’t. Thus the OP’s topic.

4. He wasn’t judging the weapons based on one role, he was judging both weapons based on their seperate rolls. His point being that swords which are used for bleeds are no where near as good at their role as a greatsword is at it’s roll(burst). In fact what’s worse is that I’d almost say using greatsword+critbleed sigil+critbleed trait is better at conditions than swords :P

^ Actually, the OP is correct and probably isn’t using a glass cannon build purely because it takes the warrior 3 attacks :P. Seriously, 100B can hit 16k+, killshot 12k+, and those are just 2 skills. My warrior is only 78 in hodge podge leveling gear and I still do 10k 100B, 7k killshot, 4k whirlwind, and 6k on my rifle #2(forgot it’s name).

I run rifle/longbow in WvW zergs and GS/longbow for small group roaming. Just pin the target down(longbow #5), 100b, whirlwind, blade trail, finish. The burst in this game really needs toned down.

Tzash.5748:

Thrumdi.9216:

People are going to deal with it by quitting WvW.

By all means, make WvW hardcore 24/7 worldwide alliances like Eve Online and watch the playerbase top out at 500k max. Can you say niche game?

Or, investigate options for balancing off-peak capping like the Op has suggested.

I’ll take what’s behind door #2.

I’ll take door #3 – server rankings and no kneejerk reactions because people can’t handle losing a single match.

As for people quitting WvW, they’ll do that when a better organised server kicks their tails, regardless of population.

I’ve already addressed server rankings in the original post, but I will repeat myself. THEY DO NOT FIX THE PROBLEM. Eventually and more than likely often, servers will be matched against night capping servers, thus the problem is still there. The entire “wait and see” approach does not work in MMO’s. Players want to know that devs understand the problem and are working on it.

The whole point of this thread was to find a system that allows people to play 24/7 but does not favor capping things when there is zero opposition.

The overall health of this game depends on WvW being fun and competitive. Currently that isn’t the case. Complete domination isn’t fun for either side. People don’t quit or jump ship when they lose, they quit or jump ship when they get completely crushed. The ratio of servers getting completely crushed to having a competitive fun fight is way higher than it should be, thus the scoring system in place is not adequate.

So again I will say; we need to find a system that rewards all players no matter their time zone without allowing complete domination via the off hours.

Elthurien.8356:

The matchmaking system can’t work itself out until transfers are locked. By leaving transfers open they are prolonging the matchup system from doing its intended job. You only need to read the posts on these forums to read of the server exodus’ after they get stomped.

I actually think WARs system could work here because the classes are better balanced.

The ranking system will never fix this issue, transfers disabled or otherwise. If 3 night capping worlds get matched together, 2 of them will lose. At least 1 of those 2 will then be matched up with worlds below them, worlds that don’t night cap. Those worlds will then be stomped into the ground for 2 weeks. Does that sound fixed?

A new scoring system is needed that doesn’t allow night capping to create such a large gap in scores. You can see my suggestions in the link below.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Solution-to-night-capping-point-advantage/first#post176118

Davion.8754:

This game is 24/7, if other people playing during what they consider day/peak time bothers you this much then maybe you should go play something else.

I think you’ve misunderstood why it is 24/7 and the meaning behind it. It is 24/7 so players don’t get left out of content as well as it being persistent. It is not 24/7 so you have to recruit Oceanic and EU players to defend all night. If that were the case then there wouldn’t be EU servers.

Currently players are being left out because it is 24/7 and players like yourself took that as a “we must have WvW queues 24/7 so lets recruit oceanic players”. In a perfect world oceanics would have their own servers and the problem wouldn’t be nearly as bad. The die has been cast though and the limited WvW oceanic population is consolidated. All we can do now is find a system that balances out the major population advantages at night.

Night capping is an issue no matter how you look at it. The people saying just recruit more oceanic/eu players are wrong. There is a finite amount of people from those time zones and want to play with others during their prime time. So they naturally cluster together creating a few 24/7 servers. How is a #12 server going to convince them to move at this point? So telling people to recruit more Oceanic/EU isn’t a solution.

Others think we should just make points stop counting during a certain frame of time. The problem there is that the players playing during that time feel like their contributions are worthless. I can certainly understand that feeling but on the flip side keeping things as they are means that most of the US primetime players feel like their contributions are already worthless. So no solution there.

Then we have those that think ranking will fix it. Sorry to say that isn’t the case. Even if 3 night capping servers get matched together for a 2 week period, two of those worlds will lose. That means they will then be put against other servers, servers that don’t have a strong night crew. Waiting for ranking to sort it out still leaves some servers in a hopeless situation at some point and that is what we are trying to avoid.

The problem is that we need a system that doesn’t allow one realm to gain an insurmountable score because of them fighting against no one. The two ideas that I’ve come up with:

Make it so towers/keeps/forts/etc earn bonus points the longer they are held that are then awarded to the world that captures that point. It is like the bonus XP on mobs that haven’t been killed in a long time. Basically the idea is that when a world captures everything overnight they accrue the bonus XP. Once the towers/keeps/etc are retaken the point gap closes. Something in the order of 75% of the total value earned by that point is probably needed. So if a tower is captured at 3am and retaken at 3 pm it will accrue 120 pts, upon capture it will then award 90 points. There are some issues like when it should start getting bonus points, how much, etc. It might sound like devaluing points overnight but in reality it promotes taking what you can hold.

Another idea is completely change the scoring system. Piggyback off the event system and only award points based on taking objectives and defending objectives. So even if the entire map gets taken over night that world only gets the points for capping those objectives 1 time. Possibly make it so upgraded objectives are worth more points. You could also tack on players kills at 1 pt each. The problem here is tweaking the event threshold and disabling free transfers so griefers can’t go out to an enemy keep, spark a repel the invaders, then leave, or just do continual death runs. There is also a problem where this could promote players not attacking since they might just be giving the other realm points.

Other things like a weighted points system could also be used. The points could change value based on the population average of the 3 worlds at that time. The basic idea being that defended objectives should be worth more than undefended.

That’s just a few of my ideas and they are by no means perfect. You’re not going to please 100% of the players, but I think we can at least find a better system that allows both NA, EU, and Oceanic players to contribute without the run away scores that make it feel hopeless.

So I’m doing the Harathi Highland centaur chain along with the Kol Skullsmasher and the barricade camp bomb one. I’m working on my 4th kol kill of the day(did 2 earlier in the day(2pm-ish) and it is 11pm. I had done 2-3 centaur camp runs earlier in the day as well and 3 later at night(about 8pm). I’m currently level 44. On my 4th kol kill of the day I get 121 xp for gold in the event, that was directly after getting ~120 xp for gold in the barricade bomb event.

The centaur one is 4 events by itself and Kol is 3, that’s 7 events. Including the barricade bomb event that’s 9 events. So you’re telling me 9 events isn’t enough diversity to stop the deminishing returns from kicking in? Or the fact that it is 3 different quest chains? The centaur camp itself takes 30minutes from start to finish. With Kol on there you’re looking at 45-60 minutes. Yet I still run into deminishing returns?

What’s worse is the deminishing returns are way too steep. I mean 2k xp to 121 xp? I literally get more for a regular mob kill. This anti-farm stuff has to stop ArenaNet. I get you are trying to keep botters down but you’re hurting legit players. I like the centaur event and that’s why I keep doing it. Tons of centaurs for XP, bags for crafting mats, and combined with other events in the area I don’t have a ton of downtime searching/waiting for events.

Spent 3 hours playing last night. We took a garrison, took a supply camp, defended that garrison, lost supply camp, lost the garrison, retook the garrison, retook supply camp, and we lost the garrison again when I logged off.

I got a grand total of 1 badge of honor. I was getting kills, clearing walls, building siege weapons, and everything in between. This system seriously needs changed.

I always thought they would have a system in place to prevent this sort of thing. Like once you transfer you cannot WvW for a week or something. Currently there is no negative to swapping and people are taking advantage of that. I’d be willing to bet that a good portion of WvW players have already consolidated onto the top 3 servers and until the transfers are disabled they will consolidate even more into the #1 server.

It is a hack. Not a bug or server glitch. Hackers are ruining WvW for a lot of people. Every night I’ve played we have had hackers killing our siege weapons or capping our supply camps.

StarFreeze.3812:

Divinorium.8952:

After cheap tactics lets see again what CD is doing.
http://imgur.com/o4WG5
Well. When Anet take a side, any side, maybe we will try again.
For now GG.

From CD here and I’ve got to say after spending an entire day till 4am fighting I’d say it’s your own fault you guys didn’t defend well enough. As for the tactics at the spawn, you have 3 ways out of every spawn and if you can’t manage to rush one of them then it’s kind of your own fault again. Have your thieves stealth, have your engineers toss elixir B and S together then do supply drops on top of the siege weapons, and have your guardians put up some defense as well with swiftness. We do this all the time to take back heavily camped supply camps. When you work together its amazing what you can accomplish than sitting in spawn complaining about what’s going on.

Yes, because we don’t have a few big night squad guilds it is our fault. As for getting out of spawn, we could but what’s the point? If some of our guys snuck out of base and did take a camp, it would be taken right back and everyone slaughtered. We could spend hours trying to get out of our spawn and retake everything we lost though. Then the next morning the same scenario will play out with a dozen siege weapons pointed at our spawns. So again, what’s the point? On top of that don’t even get me started on the hackers that keep killing our siege weapons.

CD will win the match. Short of a bunch of EU guilds joining blackgate and Gates of Madness, that isn’t going to change. CD will then end up going against higher ranked servers with high night populations.

My issue with this is that it has absolutely zero to do with skill and everything to do with player population. What ArenaNet needs to do is add weighted points based on overall population levels. IE at 9pm and 90% of users are online the objectives are worth more points, then at 4 am when 5% of the users are online the objectives are worth far less. Taking a keep while populations are high should be worth more than taking a completely undefended keep when no one is online.

@inbetween Yeah, we actually crushed CD in your borderlands for a long time last night. We pushed to their garrison but the whole build the gate and split the zerg thing killed us. Once it hit about 1 AM though their night crew kicked in and everyone quit.

My main issue is the stupid hackers that keep blowing up our siege equipment. There is a teleporting warrior and thief that target our siege stuff. It’s really hard to siege anything when your stuff gets blown up in under 5 minutes. We ended up having 10-15 people trying(unsuccessfully) to keep the siege equipment up but no amount of AOE and tab spam could stop them.

Mesket.5728:

They should NOT fix the token prices until they fix CoF.

Wouldnt it be stupid to let everyone wear exotic lvl 80 armor for a few 15 mins runs?

The game is out there for near a month, you want to have your end game armor completed just now???

if you are tired of running CoF over and over then its nothing but your own fault. There are many other dungeons with many other possible ways to do,… go out and have fun and stop being a loot addict.

I don’t expect to get my awesome skinned gear in a month, BUT I do expect to be rewarded. You know if you got at least a generic skinned but top tier statted item I’d be fine with that. This game wasn’t supposed to be about grinding to get the best stats, it was supposed to be about side-grades and cosmetic skins. Currently it takes about 12 hours per armor piece of karma gear, way more than that for WvWvW, and a ton of gold to get anything top statted on the TP.

Heaven forbid you want 2 sets of gear for different builds. I don’t care about the skins, if someone wants to grind 100+ hours for a certain armor skin then that’s fine. I do care about stats. ArenaNet did not stick to their philosophy; that is on them, not me.

Eliteseraph.4970:

Total Barrage is correct. As a thief player myself, I can assure you that as long as he’s landing his attack that gives him stealth, he can restealth just about every 3 seconds as long as there’s targets to hit and initiative to burn. Combine that with the heal that also stealths, and the potential for a stealth ability through stealing, not to mention utility skills, a thief can stealth VERY often in optimal situations.

The only drawback is the “Revealed” debuff, which lasts 3 seconds.

A thief can also stealth then do the execute animation, which doesn’t reveal the thief until it completes(counts as an attack). A thief also gets a special attack from stealth, based on their primary weapon.

With so little information, it’s hard to tell exactly what the OP saw. But this doesn’t sound like a hack or exploit, it’s sounds like a thief knowing his class and playing like a champ, and the OP not understanding how thieves work.

I don’t know about the inability to click on him, but that could have been lag. Try using tab to target enemies instead. Also, a thief being in stealth does NOT make him invulnerable. Use AOE attacks around the area you think he’s at. You can even swing melee weapons in their general direction. Again, as a thief player, let me assure you that I have been hit AND killed while in stealth by lucky guesses with these kinds of attacks.

I have a thief and this isn’t a case of the stealth build. We had the same thing happen and we had 10+ people AOEng everything in sight(elementalist rain of fire, necromancer marks, warrior fire arrow, etc) and no one was hitting him. Stealth does not prevent you from taking damage so where did he go? When increased radius necromancer marks don’t explode until the thief is already at the center of them(his target was always siege equipment) something is fishy.

The thief is using a teleport hack+ C&D. The stealth masks the teleport and the enemy players just think he stealthed. In reality the thief is miles away waiting to do another C&D.

They need to just skip the entire badge idea all together. The idea that people need to stop killing to loot a bag for their reward is insane, many a time have I lost my loot simply because I didn’t see the bag drop or I died. Not to mention their drop rate is terrible. I killed 150+ people last night over the span of 5 hours and I got a grand total of 29. It is easily faster to grind the karma for exotics. In around 12 hours you can have the karma for 1 exotic piece where in WvW at even 6 badges an hour you’re only a 1/4 of the way to a piece. Equal playtime should yield equal rewards and it is paramount in WvW that gear be accessible due to it being a huge factor in PvP.

Just reward “honor” for anything that gives xp like player kills, events, upgrading(not gathering) and add a lot more events to the map. There should be more events in WvW, in a stalemate you’re literally beating your head against the wall for very little xp. Make events for blowing up the oil, catapults, door, etc. Heck even make chunks of land events like the island inbetween the borderland two bottom world spawns. This will give most players goals and motivate them, maybe they can’t take the tower but at least they will get xp for destroying the oil.

Already re-rolled, working on my warrior now since it seems like ArenaNet is going to take the round-about way to figuring out some classes/builds are clearly better than the rest. Warrior already destroys my necromancer and he is only at level 32. Better AOE, better melee, better traits, and almost no bugs. I have yet to figure out a warriors weakness because so far they have everything. When I see necro doing 12k damage on a single target with death shroud like a warriors kill shot can, then I might come back. Until then the necro is shelved.

The idea that people haven’t played the Necromancer enough to have mastered DS is absolute rubbish. Sorry, but there are plenty of skilled players that have smashed their heads against the necro class and all that has come of it is a mediocre class that almost always has an uphill battle.

My first class to 80 was a thief. As much as they touted it as being a complex class it is very simple. My 2nd class to 80 was a Necromancer, I loved the idea of AOE dots. My 3rd class I’m not working on is a warrior. I can unequivocally say that my warrior is leagues ahead of a necromancer. In PvE he does far more damage with a single skill than my necro could with 5. In WvW my warrior does even more damage than my necro, has a better long range single target weapon, has a better melee range weapons, and has better AOE’s. Then just to kick the necro when he is down, most of necromancers damage can be completely negated with condition removal, more than a bit of which is AOE. Where are all the abilities and combos that can completely negate ALL direct damage?

Until the game is balanced for all builds this will remain an issue. Burst builds and the classes that use them will become more and more popular until the game becomes a big round of who can burst first. I believe the warrior population has already skyrocketed as 75% of the classes I see while leveling are warriors.

Might be an exploit, but I’d guess at a hack. Just spitballing, but it could be a hack that teleports the user to his targets location and then teleports him back. The running back and forth is the server coping with the teleport.

I’m pretty sure I dealt with something similar tonight. We had a thief that would cloak and dagger our siege equipment, then vanish into thin air. Yes, I know it stealths the thief(I have a thief) but with 10+ people AOEing all around with zero hits it was incredibly fishy. He was only ever visible for a split second and was in stealth way longer than 3 seconds. My thoughts are that he used this same hack from the tower wall to target our stuff and the stealth covered his teleport away.

Kodeine.7861:

Move out of the way? Use a CC break skill? Use a snare remove skill?

Seriously, the number of ways 100B can be countered is so freaken easy. You pop any skill that gives you stability when you see a GS warrior running your way and GG. Seriously, there’s not much more to it than that.

Just for the record though it is pretty awesome being on the delivering end of a 100B combo that lands 20k (Even if it’s on a glass cannon) and then weapon swapping to axe and Eviscerate for an additional 10k.

Can it be countered? Sure, but by that reasoning lets give everyone 1 hit kill attacks. As long as they can be dodged it’s balanced right? I don’t think that I can adequately put into words how self-centered and destructive that logic is. Do you realize how hard some builds have to work to even break 10k damage through multiple skills and theirs can be dodged as well? Clearly they need a buff.

Not being able to dodge(either used it up or stunned/rooted) should not be grounds for instant death. That is not an environment where skill is a factor. PvP will soon boil down to super high burst builds where a kill will be determined by who is unlucky enough to have their stun breaks/dodge unavailable.

The high burst in this game needs toned down or other builds brought up(this of course ruins any chance this game has at being an E-Sport). If 100B doesn’t get nerfed then I sincerely hope I see “This necromancer just killed me with bleeds in 4 seconds! I have 20k HP! NERF!” or “I was soloed by a Ranger pet! NERF!”. To which I shall reply “Use a condition remover!” or “Just dodge the pet”. Mark my words; if 100B(as well as some other skills, not just warrior) isn’t nerfed, you’re going to end up begging for nerfs to the other builds.

Necro’s are not the best for tapping in a bigger zerg. More often than not you won’t do enough damage through dot’s to get the tap, my mark of blood only gets to tick 1 time 90% of the time. Any Dynamic event where the mobs are Invulnerable on the run up will trigger your marks and not do damage, unless of course you place them a bit further back to compensate…BUT most of the time the mobs won’t even leave the position they go vulnerable before they are dead.

I’d almost say warriors are the kings of tapping at least in the mob wave department. Longbow+great sword means they can do high DD(the sword spin, 100B, the explosive arrow, sword throw), a huge AOE burn(bow adrenaline move), conal sword basic attack, and that triple arrow thing.

Dosvidaniya.3260:

This is really a problem. While increasing the number of mob spawns adds to the event, after scaling for about 4 people, it needs to switch to HP increases. Normal mobs die way too fast in large groups. It has become the ultimate game of “mob tag.”

Bomber builds have become insanely popular because they are the only way to compete. In addition, you have players ignoring event objectives just to farm the spawns. Go watch a Claw of Jormag fight. You can see over half the players will sit and wait for the adds to spawn because they want the loot. Rather than finish the 5% of the wall to instantly kill them, they are all back at base playing “mob tag.” How else are they going to get lucky and get a Corrupted lodestone? You sure aren’t going to get it off the dragon itself. Objectives are being ignored due to the insane game of “mob tag.”

Also, Champion and Veteran mob HP is stupidly high (at level 80). It can easily take a group of 5 people around 10 minutes to kill one champion which provides the same loot as a normal mob which is vaporized in 10 seconds. This causes a few problems:

1- No one wants to attack the stupid things unless there is nothing else to attack. People don’t want to waste time attacking the giant damage sponge when they can easily get 10 times the loot by hitting the little mobs. Consequently, you have these mobs that one shot players and never die just running around while everyone plays mob tag on the normals. Heaven forbid you find one in the world, because 15 minutes later, you’ll end up with the same loot you could have gotten in 20 seconds. There is absolutely no reason to waste that much time and effort.

2- If you switch targets and the veteran or champion is below ~66% HP, you aren’t getting credit for it. You can’t tag the mob because you’ll never do enough damage to “tag” it. You may spend over a minute attacking the thing, but it isn’t enough to get credit.

Increasing Mob heatlh will help but it won’t solve the main issue, the tagging system does not reward everyone who was involved. What needs to happen is anyone who does the following “tags” the mob and has a chance at loot: A. 1 pt of damage B. Heals or buffs someone who has done 1 pt of damage C. Places a debuff on the enemy or D rezzes a player that took damage from an enemy.

Now some may say that gives too many people loot. To that I say, THAT’S THE POINT. If everyone is getting their fair share of loot then there is no competition. If people are getting loot no matter what they’re doing in an event they will do what they like. Isn’t that the point of ArenaNet’s design? Currently people aren’t helping others because it doesn’t reward them. Why am I going to buff others around me when they are competing against me for loot? Removing that competition promotes a better community and that is what ArenaNet wanted GW2 to be based around.

I want to also ask that you look into the tagging system. Just lowering the threshold for gold/silver will not fix the problem. Currently the tagging system favors high burst AOE’s, which leaves several classes/builds out in the cold. On my necro I sometimes can’t even get credit for a single mob tag. My bleeding/poison marks sometimes only get 1 tick off, other times they don’t even get that. At it’s worse I’ve seen mobs spawn and instantly do the death animation because they died before the server could report the health bar dropping.

HyDraLiNsK.2470:

sorrow.2364:

I don’t know that is tons in your scale, but I suggest you to try out thief/warrior/mesmer/ranger or any other profession and then come here to say again that Necro do tons of damage.

Actually, I use wells too, and I’ve played a mesmer, thief, and necro and necro wins over and over and over again for AoE dps. Have you ever played a necro?

People hear necro and want minions which is cool, but they aren’t viable enough IMO. Wells + traits + Death Shroud = Death.

I can get surrounded by 5 or 6 trash mobs and kill them all with well, well, DS, mega drain.

Even veterans are already half down by the time I’m done my w-e-r F1- 4 rotation. (I use qwert instead of 6-0) and that doesn’t include plague as an elite with + cond dmg that rapes mobs by itself. So much AoE damage. And the 20% reduced CD on wells = GG.

I agree with whoever said Necros do huge dmg because they do if you spec them right. Mesmers are weak as kitten vs groups and so are thieves IMO but thieves are great 1v1 of course and so are mesmers. Necros steamroll groups.

Let’s say a mesmer does 4,000 dmg (this is just a toss up estimate – no truth behind it) per rotation on single target

and a Necro does 2,500 dmg PER TARGET a rotation.

Who does more damage?

Thieves are incredibly powerful vs groups. First off you can cluster bomb spam 5 times in a row if you’re using the 15 initiative trait. That is not only a ton of direct damage but also puts on more bleeds than your rotation as well as being faster. Admittedly, you need to be close to the enemies to do this spam, but it is very easy to run in a circle and do this.Death Blossom is just like cluster bomb. It does good direct damage, evades attacks, and applies bleeds to everything in that area, which is surprisingly big. Finally you have death blossom which is just pure fun in huge groups of mobs. I use all of these to AOE on my thief with great success. You would be very surprised at how quickly a thief can take down 5 mobs!

All of the Necro AOE’s except 3 do low direct damage for the price of also applying a condition. The one staff mark does decent direct damage, ds drain, and the well of suffering(iirc). All of which are are fairly long cooldowns(20+ seconds) where a thief can use clusterbomb every 3 seconds or so.

Now which is better is a toss up since different situations call for different AOE. Soloing? Thief. Dynamic events? Thief(DD and low cooldowns is best for tagging mobs). WvW? Necro, thief AoE’s require near melee range and in WvW that means death. Dungeon? Necro, the utility of marks and wells is just awesome.

I can’t speak for mesmers though, but thieves are anything but weak in AOE.

Sneakier.9460:

Lewk.8359:

What is SPAMMABLE on any of those aformentioned classes that will hit for 4.5k a hit and will LEAP YOU to target?

Thats what thief were build around.

You just discover how thiefs were built.

Around Initiative, you can acess and deliver your most powerfull at a cost, that cost is Initiative.

Atm thiefs have less Skills per Minute than any other class unless they trait heavy for it.

Please, find a better excuse

This is exactly why initiative is the worst mechanic in the game. Every single beta I and many others posted about why initiative was a terrible mechanic. It is far too hard to balance. Keep in mind that I was also someone showing that initiative leaves thieves behind in skills per minute.

If the skills hit too hard and are spammable then we have way too much burst. If we regen initiative too fast then we have way too much sustain. If the skills don’t hit hard enough then we have no burst, which many builds need to survive. If the skills don’t hit hard and we don’t have fast regen we have no sustainability, meaning in a group fight we are less than optimal. Now factor in all traits and gear builds; it quickly becomes a case of either being OP or UP.

The bottom line to this whole argument is that if ANY class can kill you in less than 5 seconds it needs fixed. I want tactical skilled gameplay and insta-gib builds are anything but. The entire idea that if you don’t dodge 1 attack you die is stupid, plain and simple. Dodge should be used to gain the upper hand in a battle of attrition. You dodge the big hitting attacks enough then you’re going to win the battle. If you don’t dodge then you take damage. The one that can mitigate the most damage through dodging, CC, healing, etc while damaging the opponent wins.

Is it just me or is the whole 5% of condition damage for bleed and 10% for poison seem really low? Maybe I just don’t understand the formula, it is early, but at 5% it seems far better to just stack any other stat. I mean if 1200 condition damage is only going to net me an extra 60 damage a tick, I am better off just getting something else. Especially with the way the contribution, xp, and loot tagging system works.

With some classes bursting people down in a matter of seconds I think we can safely increase what conditions can do. What’s worse is condition damage has more skills to be completely negated than anything else.

The contribution system is just flat out bad for any fight that involves killing. What’s worse is this system is tied to XP and loot as well. Basically, if you don’t do a certain level of damage you do not get credit; no contribution, no xp, no loot. It doesn’t account for healing, condition removal, rezzing, etc. This rewards burst DPS specs and punishes condition damage specs, support players, and low level players.

If this system stays in place it will cause a huge community issue. People are already starting to not rez or support other people because they want better contribution, loot, or XP. At the defend the outpost events Elementalists reign supreme because their AOE’s are high damage, where other condition based AOE’s don’t get a chance to do enough damage to get loot and sometimes XP. The same is true in WvW, condition specs get lower loot since more often than not they don’t do enough damage before the person dies to hit the loot threshold.

I love doing higher level events and I’ve found that 9 levels is the biggest gap you can reasonably have and still have a chance to get minimum credit. The problem of the system is blatantly obvious at that point though. When I’m dropping heals for people, removing conditions, rezzing, surviving, and still doing some damage I deserve a bronze or more regardless of what level the event is for. The same goes for WvW, when I’m weakening a whole group of people and debuffing them so others can do their burst DPS I deserve credit, but more often than not I get nothing but the flat XP(not even bonus).

Bottom line is that the contribution system needs to include support things like rezzing, removing conditions, healing, debuffing, etc. Everyone that does damage to a mob should get XP have the chance for loot. ArenaNet wanted to make playing with others a good experience so why they included this system is beyond me.

Am I the only one that things the jagged horrors should spawn where the enemy died? I mean if you’re in that trait line you’re probably using a staff and staying ranged. It would be far better if the jagged horror spawned at the enemy location so the thing doesn’t have to travel. This impacts WvW the most since if I’m AOEing on top of or below a wall, I don’t want the horror to spawn at my location since he can’t get to the enemies.

Personally, I think the trait needs to go. All I want is the staff/mark skills, not more pets. I don’t see why pets need to be forced when the trait line covers 2 different things. Make it a trait that benefits both MM and staff users without forcing one on the other. I’d go deeper into that trait tree but I get 2 absolutely useless minor traits(jagged horror and more damage based on minion count)