Guild Wars 2

Solstice.1097:

here is the imbalance between condi and glass in a nutshell:

damage
condi and glass builds can output roughly equal DPS

mitigation
glass damage mitigated by by blocks, dodges, LOS blind, invulnerability i.e. endure pain
condi damage mitigated by condi removal skills. depends on class but fairly equal in mitigation options

survivability
condi builds have extremely high survivability
glass builds cannot
and here is the issue.

A full condi bomb build shouldn’t be able to also have 3k+ armor and 25k+ health and still be so effective

Damage-
Full glass builds will do more damage and quicker, they just die fast so they don’t get to do it for long
Condition builds take time to build up damage and it can be removed

Mitigation-
Conditions are mitigated by EVERYTHING that glass damage is mitigated by(Condition needs to land to be applied) AND can still be removed.

Survivability
Condi builds have high survivability because they need it in order to do their damage
Glass builds give up survivability in order to get high upfront damage to kill their enemies quickly.

A power survivability build is going to be able to achieve high damage(not as high as glass) and just as much survivability as a condition build. The problem is that people want to run berserker builds and when they can’t kill the enemy in a single burst and have no condition removal they die.

Do some math and you’ll see that conditions aren’t all they are cracked up to be. In order for my condition necro build(1800 condition just to be sure) to match my power necro at say 3k dps you’ll need a constant stack of 16 bleeds, poison, and burning. I’d love it if someone started doing DPS tests between condition builds, power builds, and berserker builds.

I wish more people would learn that there are builds in between full condition and full bersekers.

I’m confused. Is the OP implying that come tomorrow when you can buy levels in PvP that it is a bad thing? Or it in some way cheapens accomplishing this? Because that’s the pot calling the kettle black. Using a lvl 20 booster and crafting to 80 is just buying a level 80. There is no more skill/dedication involved in doing that than there is grinding out the 90k glory and 12g to buy 60 Tomes of Knowledge and just stashing it in your bank and using the bank item.

If the point of this is to get level 80 strictly via the tutorial zone then that was not accomplished because things granted outside the tutorial were needed. If the point was just to get level 80 inside the tutorial then that is a much lesser feat and was certainly accomplished, but holds no more meaning now than it will once you can buy tomes of knowledge.

MyCondolences.8172:

Going by the replies in this thread no one should be playing thief.
Everything a thief can do, another class can do it better.

Anyways, despite what people say, I’m still going to try out this build and see how it goes. At the moment i have no reason to play thief when i can go /godmode on Warrior and do more DPS and have more sustain then thief. In context of PvE thiefs are the jack of all trades, master of none, they can do a little bit of everything but always worse then someone else. I’m hoping to take advantage of this and make an interesting build that’s fun to play and brings something to the table. At the end of the day, if it fails, my thief will be no worse off then it is now.

The thief does do one thing really well and that is be annoying. A good thief is going to reset the fight at the first sign of danger leaving the opposing player wanting to break his keyboard. This is purely because of stealth and I’d honestly say that mesmers are now way better at it since they have the further annoyance of clones/phantasms and destroy people while doing it.

When I heard they were doing new heals I was really hoping to do a new thief build, but this heal is just absolute trash. It requires too many traits to even approach the other new heals. The necro one is just so much better considering it has a lower cooldown than our traited skelk venom, gives group utility without a trait, has a passive heal, and increases dps. It’s not even a close comparison and I can’t figure out how the devs thought it was balanced. If they are trying to balance based on venomshare then that just shows how inadequate their balancing team truly is. Venoms are already subpar considering their effects are short lived, weak, get wasted on evades/blocks, small share radius, and have large cooldowns considering all this. I’m not going to drop 60pts on a venom build so I can waste a spot in a group attempting to share venoms when I can just hop on another character and do the same stuff better and not waste 60pts doing it.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

It should be per-hit as normal venom notation shows the per-hit effect, not total. Even so, I still feel like you guys got the short end of the stick this time around. Well, no. You guys had the stick yanked out of your hands once you had a good hold, ripping your palms open this time around.

Also, as a side note for dealing with necros running the new signet: unless something changes between now and patch, they won’t have a direct heal. To take them down, hit harder, not faster and deny them hits on you once they activate it. You have the ability to avoid getting hit for five seconds, even after the incoming nerfs.

Alternatively, just dodge the activation. 3/4 sec isn’t impossible to dodge once you know the animation. Then you have the next 16 seconds minimum to have your fun on a heal-less target.

While the necro heal has it’s own issues(not working while in DS, can be dodged, Marked target can dodge once marked) you forget that each hit on them is going to trigger the passive. While hitting them harder helps negate that heal it also negates a portion of your DPS. On top of your DPS being lowered you’re also taking extra damage all while the necro is still pouring on the damage. I’m curious to see if a siphoning build is possible now on necros now because that could make things worse. I really want a thief healing build to be possible too but skelk venom is just so terrible and Signet of Malice just doesn’t have much to pair up with to overcome our squishiness.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Builds will rise and fall, but celestial gear will always be equally as bad no matter what your build. So the safest bet is to build a whole set of ascended celestial gear. Then no matter what happens to your build your gear will still be just as effective.

You’re being serious? Celestial gear is some of the best in the game for everything you can’t berserker-cheese and is extremely useful for a ton of specs. All around stat builds are nothing to sneeze at.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

spoj.9672:

http://www.gw2db.com/skills/23579-signet-of-vampirism

Hmm looks worryingly weak.

Assuming this is accurate, does anyone else see something missing from this skill? And I mean completely-not-even-there?

There is no self-heal on the active. Yay necros for getting the only healing skill that doesn’t directly heal us..

Take a look at the thief new heal skelk venom that one is worse than the necro’s. So no the necro’s aren’t getting the only healing skill that doesn’t directly heal the user. In fact I don’t believe the warriors will either since it requires them to get hit to heal. The engineer one only heals after 4s or the engineer takes fatal damage. So at least 3 other classes have a heal that doesn’t directly heal them on use and a few others have conditions that need to be met in order for their skills to heal.

MyCondolences.8172:

stof.9341:

Well, the heal can remain blockable and missable. If it means it heals more than all the other heals we have currently.

For a longer CD, even when using a trait, it sure deserves some advantage. The instant cast isn’t advantage enough when Withdraw does it too.

Its going to need to heal for 1k a tick without leeching venoms for it to be any good, even then it will need to be traited. 5×1k=5k heal which is still less then HiS. Or in a venomshare would only be 1k more health then Antitoxin spray.
Although traited would be a 1.4×6(8.4k)hp group heal which i think would be appropiate consider the 60point investment.

Just going to point out that the new necro signet heal will do the group heal untraited, so zero investment :P. Oh and did I mention the necro one will also do damage to the target since it is lifesteal? Venomshare also has a small radius that you’re not going to be super worried about when you’re in the middle of combat and need a heal. Basically you need 60 points to make the new heal mediocre compared to the other new heals. It does have some group utility via that we drastically need but the investment to get it vs other traits is just too much.

stale.9785:

Ignoring the “nerf warriors/pls don’t nerf warriors” bits, since it’s a round-and-round argument, the HP difference is the single biggest obstacle in the game in terms of class balance.

The different classes have essentially the same damage potential, but vastly different abilities in terms of survival. For example, glass warrior vs glass ranger or glass ele – they’re going to do roughly the same damage, but the ranger and ele are both going to be free kills.

The classes should have all had the same base HP, with the difference in survival being through armour (armour doesn’t count nearly enough in this game for damage mitigation) and endurance (heavies should have a penalty to endurance regen, mediums should have “base” regen, light armour classes should get extra. For the reasoning here, YOU try doing acrobatics in a bathrobe, then try the same thing wearing an 80lb backpack.) The fact that one single boon counts for more protection than the highest armour stacking available is an absolute fail.

Since there is zero indication that Anet is going to address this, the best we can hope for is some other form of balancing the classes. Unfortunately, the ONLY balance concern that Anet observes involves the 5v5 capture-the-node pvp mode. So long as one class can’t control two nodes, “balancing” will be non-existent.

EDIT: glass ranger will, of course, do less damage – they have the lowest DPS of any class because of a fail mechanic – the basic point still stands though.

The only problem with making armor the survivability measure is that condition damage bypasses it. This would just amplify the already condition heavy PvP. The options I see then are making toughness reduce condition damage(crits too), reducing the amount of condition spam, or creating a new defensive stat that resists conditions. Honestly the whole stat system needs an overhaul to make defense scale as well as power/precision/crit damage and even condition dmg/condition duration. I also think they need to make attacks/conditions scale more based on your power/condition damage to further differentiate builds and make it so conditions on a zerker build do incredibly low damage and vice versa on a condition build.

You are correct though! ArenaNet will never even approach fixing the problem. It takes them months to make even the smallest bad changes, a year to make small good changes, so it will take them decades to make large good changes. Seriously ArenaNet you need to hire some more devs for balancing or at least hold a discussion with players about what needs addressed. No more of this purely SPvP balancing either, PvE and WvW players want some balance too.

Zach.3264:

I’ve been playing for some time now, but I’ve never managed to get my head round why classes have different base health pools?

Take for example..

On my Ele I can get the same stats and output roughly the same damage as my Necromancer. Though, my Necro has much, much more health.

Can anyone please explain why there is a difference in health pools?

I’ve mained a Warrior for a while and recently moved on to playing Mesmer and Guardian a lot. I’ve been playing a relatively tanky build on my Guardian and only recently decided to try get some DPS going. When I traited full zerk I was shocked to see that I only had around 10,000 health. My Warrior has the same stats, does better damage (and more efficiently) and still has around 20,000 health.

Why on earth?..

The health and armor differences are simply and purely poor design and balance. Some will try and point to mobility, defense, range, etc but the simple fact is that those are not good things to balance on. Balancing upon those requires certain trait/weapon/gear setups leaving all other builds underpowered due to having to make up for those stats.

It’s an incredibly bad skill and if it makes it to live will only prove that the devs have no idea how to balance anything. If you look at the necromancer new heal it heals and deals damage passively even if only a small amount where skelk venom does nothing. On activation it heals the same amount as skelk venom, also does damage, and doesn’t have charges that get wasted. The marked target heals everyone that hits them, so a built in venom share without worrying about range. Then just to top it off the necro heal is on a 20s cd vs skelk venoms kitten

in order for Skelk venom to begin to even compete with the necro’s new heal they need to get at least 3 traits(Leeching venoms, Venomous Aura, quick venom) and even then it’s still not as good. That of course assumes that the necro doesn’t pick up signet mastery that is nearly equal to quick venom and venomous strength combined.

mtpelion.4562:

Draknar.5748:

mtpelion.4562:

I think that the steal function needs to be completely redesigned and the stealth access needs to be equal for all medium armor classes (either less for thieves, more for rangers/engineers, or a combination of more and less).

Thief survival should come from evades, not stealth.

And then we would be having a forum discussion on how Thieves have too many evades and its impossible to land an attack.

Timing evades requires player skill, especially against human opponents. Plus you can still see them which prevents them from simply resetting the fight if you gain the upper hand.

There will always be people who dislike a change, but people complaining about how they got outplayed by a guy who effectively timed evades shouldn’t be used as a reason to prevent good changes.

Ummm you don’t really need to time your evades on a thief. You can get huge duration vigor and a trait that returns a portion of endurance on dodge that basically allows you to constantly dodge. You can then combine those with other evades(skill and utility), stealth, and blinds that make you incredibly annoying to land a hit on let alone kill. They aren’t a huge threat but if you’re not careful they will kill you via attrition. The thief class is just incredibly gimmicky and as those gimmicks get nerfed they aren’t be compensated with tools/buffs that allow them to compete without those gimmicks.

The problem is that the thief class will never be balanced. There are just too many bad design choices made in their base design. Initiative is a huge one since it’s hard to balance burst vs sustain when there are no cooldowns. You can see ArenaNet trying to fix this one in the next patch(still won’t fix the flaws with the system), something that was brought up in BETA and they ignored(my suggestion back then since a complete rework wasn’t possible is just removing initiative traits). Stealth is obviously another huge one, IMO I think stealth needs removed and more teleports added. That way thieves will be jumping around and hard to pin down but not invisible. Stealing is still an incredibly poor mechanic when compared to other classes that are defined by their class skill(s). I always thought venoms or traps would have been a far better class mechanic and just relegated steal as a utility. I could go on but there isn’t much of a point. ArenaNet takes forever to make small changes let alone a class rework.

tolunart.2095:

Calae.1738:

Actually there is a problem. A big problem which will probably impact the health of the game in the not too distance future.
.

The problem exists only in your mind and your opinion. People who play multiple characters in an MMO (myself included – sixteen slots) realize that it will take longer to fully equip every character they have. Most of them don’t even care about that, they may have different toons for different purposes, such as a main outfitted for raids/pvp or whatever, a secondary character to gear up after the first is done, and other specialized alts to try out different storylines or play styles.

It will always be easier to manage one character than two or three – or ten or twelve.

There is most certainly a problem. While I fully understand it will take longer to gear up my alt characters(8 level 80’s), it should not take me the better part of a year to gear up just a few of them in just 1 spec. I want to be able to use multiple specs even if only on a few of them. Each class balance patch can drastically alter builds and with that the need for a new spec and new gear. I currently have 4 main characters(guardian=PvE, Thief/Mesmer/Necro= WvW) and I won’t even be attempting to farm for ascended because there is no point if I can’t get all my characters to an equal power level and play the way I want to play. Unless they add a decent way of obtaining ascended gear I simply won’t be playing much, where if it was more accessible I would be playing multiple characters and putting together multiple builds as well as obtaining the skins that I want.

This isn’t a made up problem, when you put the carrot too far out of reach people stop chasing it. The thing that attracted a lot of people to this game was easy to obtain max stats and hard to obtain skins, they’ve already driven off a lot of people by not following up on it.

Slim.3024:

I guess mini is not pressing his heal skill better then?

People keep claiming the 400 HP/s the warrior’s healing skill offers is too strong to overcome, though when two warriors die to one or whatever and they all use the same passive healing signet, one can’t just argue that the player made the difference, without having to realize that the healing signet is not the problem.

400 HP/s is a huge hurtle to overcome for most classes/builds. The fact that 2 warriors couldn’t take out one only shows that either the solo warrior was exceptional and had a better build or that the other two were terrible and had worse builds.

Healing signet isn’t the problem but it is a part of it. Warriors get too much for too little. It’s not just that healing signet warriors have great survivability, it’s that they get that alongside max health, max armor, great damage, control, condi-removal, etc. No other class has access to such a large constant heal for doing absolutely nothing. It simply isn’t balanced and either it needs nerfed or other healing skills need buffed, the same goes for a lot of warrior skills/abilities vs other classes. I’d love to make a vampire necro that heals for more than 50hp a hit so here is hoping they increase all other classes healing!

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

Much the same as blocks/evade/protection/immunity all negate physical damage there is no series or combo that can be used to negate conditions apart from cleansing..even then they’re applied gain from casual auto attacking.

Everything you listed except protection all negate conditions from being applied unless it is a skill that specifically says it cannot be blocked. Remember that a condition being applied is equal to a direct damage hit. What you want is blocks/evades/immunity to remove/negate already applied conditions, to give you an idea why that’s wrong, it would be the same as blocks/evades/immunity healing the last direct damage attack you took. If the condition is already applied you should count it’s damage as already done unless you have a cure. If you want to push the protection front then you need to compare that to condition removals. Protection is only available to a few classes in certain builds where condition removal is available to all classes and easily accessible. Protection only mitigates 33% damage where condition removal can negate 90%+ of a conditions damage as well as some removing all conditions.

SFShinigami.2015:

JQ did not buy MERC… some gold was given to help get them over.

We did not buy 3 EU guilds…we helped anyone who didn’t have enough.

Prior to the run up to the season JQ was the weakest of the three servers. We had nothing between PST->OCX, had at best equal footing during SEA, maybe a little more if we were lucky that day, nothing between SEA->an hour or two into NA which is a VERY large time period. Our NA could queue 1-2 maps + EB with stragglers on the 3rd and we almost blew a huge lead in a match against TC because we had nobody during weekdays. Following the period we finally gained some new guilds, we had the most even matchup this game has seen and it was glorious. Everyone had equal fights and the winner was more or less chosen by who played map politics better and for once, not who had the best coverage. If you cannot see why the transfering of each one of these guilds was a good thing for JQ and T1 then perhaps you need some new glasses.

Before IRON left, JQ could squeek through EU because SoR/BG kept each other busy. Now the only sizable force during EU is BG. BG also still has the largest during pre-OCX/OCX and temporarily the Russian time zone. No matter what you think you know, JQ does not have the same coverage of BG. Our SEA guys were staying up extremely late and our NA guys were getting on early to try and cover the ~7 hours between normal SEA and when our NA gets on and we did not queue maps at all during the week when people have jobs and lives. We managed to hold garrison the entire BG matchup but that was about it. I played a couple times during that time zone and there was a huge BG blob on each map and no 3rd force to help distract it.

JQs transfer guilds from the time SF and SBI friends + PRX joined the server until our first guild showed up in August, a period of about 8 months were ZERO. Omen came and left, some EMP left, Zombieland joined us and then disbanded, Agg visited briefly, we lost WARD/Aco, the SBI friends guilds all merged more or less into SF. That adds up to a net loss in terms of player numbers while the other two servers continued to grow. Sure JQ was larger at the begining, but the other two passed us eventually.

So please, go ahead and rant about how JQ “bought” guilds. All that means is that you are saying you want to be able to PvDoor all day and do not want fair competition and fun fights because thats what JQ “buying” guilds has given this T1 matchup, or at least relatively close to it, with the unfortunate troubles SoR is dealing with. Having lived through similar circumstances, I do not wish that on anybody.

Perhaps you didn’t get a copy of the JQ/SOR memo that was sent to BG. If you help a guild transferring to your server with transfer costs, be it 1g or 10000g, you are “buying” them. So even though JQ helped more guilds with transfer costs, BG is known for “buying” the win since they helped 1 guild with some costs. JQ/SoR are equally as guilty when it comes to “buying” guilds, it’s convenient that people forgot the weeks leading up to season 1. I don’t blame the servers as that’s what needed to be done to compete and go for the win. The people I have issue with are the ones on those servers crying foul even though their server is guilty of doing the same.

angelpaladin.7921:

BobbyT.7192:

Pay 2 win would be paying for an ascended weapon, fancy skin or not. To most, getting BIS gear would be considered end game.

That’s just it the way GW2 was designed there is no BiS gear. The game is not so much about gear as it is looks.

Example. I can be level 80 go into a dungon with a group with out any gear on. We can beat the place we just have to time skills and dodges correctly. There are people who solo Arah PT2 Gear is not the focus of this game.

Umm there is most certainly BiS gear, it’s the best gear that you can get. For most slots it is ascended. As for your examples, that does not mean that gear isn’t a huge factor. If you go naked into any dungeon you’re probably going to die a whole lot, the run is going to take absurdly long. There are some dungeon paths that lend to soloing and others not so much. This is the same in every MMO. Even in Vanilla WoW, known for it’s gear treadmill, there were dungeons that you could run with a naked group or solo. There were raid bosses that could be soloed if you had the time. That however does not mean that gear isn’t a major aspect of the game.

Arisal.9740:

I love the addition of ascended because exotics were WAY too easy. And yes I love guild wars 1 too but common you have to have something to shoot for progression wise.

Guild wars 1 just didn’t have gear progression it had skill progression. 1200 skills anyone?

No exotics were not too easy to obtain. There were 5 ways to get exotics. 1. Karma grind 2. Dungeon grind 3. Craft 4. WvW 5. gold grind.

Karma grinding was incredibly long and boring. Remember that Karma Jugs weren’t in for like 2 months so it was purely events. At 400 karma an event, 5 minutes per event, and you’re looking at ~9 hours per item. That’s 54 hours for 6 pieces of armor and does not include the weapon, runes, trinkets, rings, amulet, or sigils. Karma jugs made it more viable since 1 jug was worth about an hour of farming. If you were smart and saved karma from 1-80 you might have enough karma for 1 item. All of this assuming that karma sets had the stats you wanted and weren’t broken at the time.

Dungeons gave ~5 tokens per boss and 15 for a path completion. That means ~25-30 per run if I remember correctly. That meant a full set of gear(~2400 tokens) would require 80 runs. At around an hour a run the math is easy, 80 hours for a single set of armor and again that doesn’t include runes, sigils, trinkets, rings, and amulet. Now they made it better with 60 tokens for a first run so that cuts it down to 40 hours for a set of armor/weapons. Of course this assumes that the stats you want are in a dungeon being run and that dungeon takes an hour to complete. Some dungeons are faster and some are longer. Remember that you’re not in full exotics trying to farm this stuff either so it’s no the speed runs we have now.

Crafting was arguably the easiest, but required a lot of time(gated) and mat farming for the stats you might want(not all mats dropped from pentinent/shelter farming :P). This meant farming Orichalcum and ancient wood which we all know are time gated. So while they were easier to farm as far as time spent than karma/dungeons they were time gated.

Gold farming was the fastest route. Remember when 2g an hour was really good? You could expect to pay 3g-5g per exotic. Figure 14 items(6 armor, 2 rings, 2 trinkets, 1 amulet, 2 1hands, 1 2hand) at 4g is 56g. Just figure another 15g for runes/sigils(could be more or less depending on what you wanted). And we are looking at ~70g. At 2g an hour that’s 35 hours, 3g is 23.

WvW was a complete joke to try and get gear. Unless you ran a large organized group there was simply no way to farm enough badges to get a set of gear in a timely manner. This seriously wasn’t even an option.

Now I know what you’re thinking! Combine the methods! Just assuming 2g an hour farming orr for gold/karma you would still need to farm for 29 hours making 54g and enough karma for 3 pieces of gear. If we factor in karma jugs(1 per day) and 2 hour grinding session per day that’s still ~27 hours. The money you make doing dungeons is probably enough to pay for the accessories/sigils/runes. I won’t even include crafting into the equation simply because I don’t have data on how often the mats dropped at farming spots.

20+ hours of pure farming is not something most people consider “easy” and certainly not fun. 40 runs of a single dungeon is more than I probably did on all the vanilla WoW endgame 5-10man dungeons combined for a full set of items. Remember this is all for a single set of items for a single build on 1 character. Most need 2-3 sets of armor for different things(WvW, Events, Dungeons). Then you have those that like alts for specific things. 20+ hours does not constitute “easy” to obtain max stats and that’s what this game was supposed to be. Easy to obtain max stats and hard to obtain skins.

Iason Evan.3806:

The bummer is that they first said ascended stuff was for fractals. Then they went back on that and said that ascended was always supposed to be in the game but didn’t make the launch. If it had been in from day 1, and ended up being the absolute ceiling for gear, no one would have cared. It’s just that two different things were said about it, and it got released over time. Apparently carrots in this game need to be more treadmill like in this game than they were in GW1.

Even if Ascended armor was in the game at launch in it’s current form there would have been a HUGE backlash. Easy to obtain max stats and hard to obtain skins was a big selling point for the game and having the grind-a-thon ascended in at launch would have caused players to pull out their pitchforks and lynch ArenaNet, which happened anyway when Ascended was put in. Perhaps you forgot the outcry about dungeon tokens at launch? If I remember correctly you would get something like 5 tokens per boss and 15 daily dungeon path completion bonus. 60-80 runs of a single dungeon is more than a bit excessive for a full set of gear, of course they made it ever so slightly better and it’s now only 30-40 runs…

Rant
People didn’t leave this game because there was no vertical progression, they left because of the grind. Having an even bigger grind in at launch would have just hastened people leaving. Now I know some people will say that getting exotic isn’t a grind, but it really is. The landscape when you hit 80 at launch was A. Grind karma to get a karma set and hope the temple wasn’t bugged/impossible to complete B. Grind mats to craft the exotics but you’re timegated by their respawn time C. 60-80 dungeon runs assume the stats you wanted were on a dungeon being run a lot D. a ridiculous amount of Badges of Honor. What made everything worse is that there was never a chance at cool loot with every boss kill/event/etc, it was a long slog of small gains. ArenaNet still suffers from this poor reward system, players need a constant chance at good rewards. As bad as my luck is at RNG systems at least there was excitement on a boss kill that something awesome I could use would drop, and almost always something awesome dropped that someone in the group could use.
/rant

Ascended needs either removed or brought down to manageable levels so a wide range of people can enjoy it from casuals to people with 8 alts. Then they need to add unique good drops to events and bosses. Make each temple/dungeon boss able to drop parts of their set and have them drop ascended(if left in) with a decent drop rate(not to be confused with teqs droprate). At least then people would feel like they could login and get some cool loot, instead it’s login and grind out another 2% of the materials towards ascended.

Andele.1306:

Distaste.4801:

They don’t want healing to be powerful, that is why most healing skills in the game scale horribly. That’s actually one of the biggest problems with class balance in this game is that they are so afraid of healing and mitigation being powerful alternatives. You should be able to build a 75% mitigation build that takes huge hits and still keeps on ticking. Healing should be powerful and thus make poison a real counter. The whole class/balance system is a complete mess from start to finish. Given a day to revamp the game I’d make all armor available to each class with certain tradeoffs for each one. Make the base health the same for every class. Then make armor/toughness mitigate more, healing power scaling to match power, and % crit and % crit damage nerfed down to reasonable levels.

You mean thats why every dedicated heal is at a 1:1 ratio, heals on aa have a 0.2 ratio (which if i may add is a lot for on auto attacks), why our dear Transfusion and the following: Geyser, Water Trident, Empower, Cleansing Wave, Shadow Refuge, Super Elixir are all over a 0.8: ratio (DK DC about other professions traits tbf).
Yeah no heals scale just as well as just power does, the only broken scaling in game is crit to crit damage since they had the wonderful idea that it should be additive.

You do realize that a lot of attacks are at a 1.0 ratio or higher right(100b is 4.4, Necro dagger #2 is 2.2)? You mention the auto-attack having a .2 ratio but neglect that most attacks power scaling is .3 or greater, with the vast majority being greater. Even at the base level healing power doesn’t scale nearly as well, if it did you should be seeing equal values, instead the dedicated heal is at a 1.0 and on a 15-20s cooldown where weapon skills with much lower cooldowns can have 1.2 or greater scaling before even including modifiers.

Heals cannot be modified by any other means besides healing power, at least that I know of. Power gains use of % damage increases, certain conditions stack, both gain a bonus from might, and then there is crit, crit damage, and condition duration. Regen doesn’t stack except duration so it will never compete with bleeds even though it scales better (.05 vs .125), it scales slightly better than poison(.1 vs .125) but when you account for the 33% heal reduction it’s worse, lastly it doesn’t have the scaling of burning (.125 vs .25) so it can’t compete there.

If healing power doesn’t scale as well as power at the base level and doesn’t have modifiers how does it scale well again? Yes there are a few, emphasis on the few, skills that scale decently but that’s also why I said “most” don’t scale well. On the whole there are a ton more damage skills that scale better to power or inflict more conditions than the few decent heals can heal.

Cribbage.2056:

lordkrall.7241:

Visiroth.5914:

Because the intention is for population to balance itself.

A dynamic cap is the only way for there to be truly balanced matchups. But ANet has already vetoed this idea, so I don’t know what the point of bringing it up over and over is.

But it won’t balance itself.
It will simply make people stop playing.
It is most likely impossible to get every single server to have around the same amount of WvW-players, and as such a dynamic cap will always hurt at least one side.

Are you saying that offered the following 3 options:

1) Play fair (i.e. fun) WvW with a very long queue on the server you are on now

2) Free transfer for you whole guild, including influence to a low population server, where you would also get fair (i.e. fun) WvW due to dynamic pop cap

3) Stop playing

You would choose option 3?

Your question is not really “why should people on a high pop server be penalised?” It is “why should people on a high pop server be given the motive and means to move?” and the answer is BECAUSE WE NEED BALANCED SERVERS.

Only people who stubbornly believe the game should be fixed for them, without them needing to contribute, will defend the right to stay on a server with a population that puts other servers at a disadvantage.

You refuse to see the gigantic negatives of a system like that.

1. People will then AFK to not lose their spot due to long queues, this once again fuels imbalance. That is not fun. OR the opposing side leaves a map to prevent the other side from fielding enough to retake things, not fun. Leaving a map also punishes the other server by making people wait even longer for a queue. Losing the match? Stop queuing and at least frustrate your opponents!

2. You’re guild will still be subject to the dynamic caps and half your guild might be locked out for most of the night, that is not fun. Not to mention that some people like playing WvW with lots of other people on the map, so low pop maps aren’t fun for them.

3. Considering long queues you won’t be able to play and having guildies locked out due to low pop cap, neither of which is fun, this isn’t a far out option.

Placing dynamic population caps just opens the game up for more exploiting/cheap tactics. This ultimately punishes more players and that’s generally not a good thing for a game to do. If the dynamic cap route is even remotely being considered then WvW might as well just be scrapped and a new AV style 40v40v40 battleground created.

Andele.1306:

kailin.4905:

I welcome anyone at anet to explain to me how a 35-40 hp siphon is supposed to equal any amount of sustain particularly when we cant heal in DS, have no evade type ability to counter 1 shot abilities in pve, and many of our utilities hurt us to use. Right now we necros have to jump through hoops and watch little green bars that we waste essential trait slots just to fill up to get the sustain other classes get simply by speccing a certain trait line.

I think that devs just dont want to force people into “having to take blood magic” or the more realistic option of them being clueless what to do with necro after they crapped their pants from what we caused during beta.

They don’t want healing to be powerful, that is why most healing skills in the game scale horribly. That’s actually one of the biggest problems with class balance in this game is that they are so afraid of healing and mitigation being powerful alternatives. You should be able to build a 75% mitigation build that takes huge hits and still keeps on ticking. Healing should be powerful and thus make poison a real counter. The whole class/balance system is a complete mess from start to finish. Given a day to revamp the game I’d make all armor available to each class with certain tradeoffs for each one. Make the base health the same for every class. Then make armor/toughness mitigate more, healing power scaling to match power, and % crit and % crit damage nerfed down to reasonable levels.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Distaste.4801:

My suggestion, since a complete condition system revamp will never be done, is just make a new trait and condition. Call the trait infection and make it a combo like condition where applying poison converts bleeds into infected wounds that does their combined damage (.15 condition damage+ (1.5*level)+6.5). This way we have access to a new condition that allows us to apply pressure but not quite the “burst” of burning, unless you let them stack up of course. You can further balance it so that 1 poison will convert up to X bleeds. This will also help in PvE where bleeds cap quickly and condition builds drop by the wayside.

This may solve the problem with the bleed cap, but there’s also the vulnerability cap. If we’re going to introduce even more conditions to the game, maybe we should make sure conditions them selves work correctly first. One of the biggest issues right now, is that it doesn’t hold a candle to DPS. It doesn’t scale right, partially due to the condition cap, but also due to bosses being resistant to conditions.

This has made our condition-focused class extremely unpopular in PVE, because the game favors DPS over condition damage (and that is a bad thing, it dumbs the game down). I think the two should be on equal footing if we want to have any spot in dungeon parties and restore some semblance of balance to the game.

If you read my first sentence in that paragraph I allude to there needing to be a complete condition overhaul. It will never happen because we are too far along. I mean people have been complaining about the condition caps since the game released and there has been nothing done at all. I’m not sure if ArenaNet is just incredibly unwilling to make major changes to the game in an attempt to make it better OR if they just don’t have the man power(money) to actually do it. Just judging by all the updates until now I am leaning towards them just having an incredibly small team.

Until the condition system gets overhauled conditions in PvE will always be second class. The best we can hope for are some new conditions that at least allow us some more breathing room before hitting the stupid caps.

Moving Dhumfire to DS is just a bad move and at only 2s duration it’s incredibly paltry for a grandmaster trait. Even at 100% more condition duration you’re looking at ~2600 dmg IF it doesn’t get removed or dodged. Popping into DS will be a huge telegraph that burning is coming and that it’s time to dodge away. If we are to balance this with warrior logic(100b telegraph= huge damage) then the trait should apply a 10k-15k burn. Last bit was sarcasm by the way :P.

We already have way too many traits that rely on DS and DS simply isn’t that cohesive to the class. The class as a whole isn’t even cohesive either so there is that. I think we need to spend more time making more viable builds(siphoning, DD, DS, Minions, tanks, conditions and all hybrids inbetween) than trying to nerf current specs down so players don’t have to have condition removal.

My suggestion, since a complete condition system revamp will never be done, is just make a new trait and condition. Call the trait infection and make it a combo like condition where applying poison converts bleeds into infected wounds that does their combined damage (.15 condition damage+ (1.5*level)+6.5). This way we have access to a new condition that allows us to apply pressure but not quite the “burst” of burning, unless you let them stack up of course. You can further balance it so that 1 poison will convert up to X bleeds. This will also help in PvE where bleeds cap quickly and condition builds drop by the wayside.

Slushey.8236:

Firstly, I think the suggestion you put forward in the second paragraph has some value to it. In all honestly, it’s probably amongst the most effective that I’ve seen presented in this thread.

However, your first paragraph is completely and utterly ignorant. While it is true that NA is pretty much the only time zone which can queue all four maps, that doesn’t make the job of OC, SEA and EU any easier. During OC prime every single map in tier 1 WvW has some has a force on every map (roughly 20 – 40 people each). Fighting two other servers with roughly equal numbers is still just as much as a challenge, especially considering the room in each map for a second force to hop over and outnumber you with double the people. Not to mention the fact that when this happens and keeps on other borderlands get hit we have to swiftly move around to assist while still being agile enough to hold down our own assigned map. If anything, I would argue that the work put in by OC, SEA and EU is far more than NA which consistently has enough numbers on all four maps to hold down their territory and enough people to spare to sit down to scout.

There really isn’t much of a debate here, it is far harder to score points during NA primetime than any other time of the day. The exact population imbalance that you describe is exactly why this thread is here. When an enemy has double the numbers than you have it is EASY for them to win. While I’m sure there are timezones where there are even matchups and things aren’t exactly roses and pie, right now BG has 60% of everything. Perhaps the BG crew is having a hard time against the 1-2 SoR players though…Let’s ask JQ and their 75% of everything or Fort Aspenwood’s 94%. The point is that right now 6 out of 8 matchups have a server that is that is dominating the maps and having an EASY time. Are you really going to sit back and tell me these points are as hard fought over as the NA primetime points? They simply aren’t and yet they are worth more towards winning, that’s my problem with the whole thing.

The system is bad, we knew that from the very start when ArenaNet didn’t open servers for other timezones and HoD stacked for nightcapping. The question now is how can we reward points based on the effort required to obtain them in order to keep things fair. Personally I’m on board with a combination of points weighted by population/dominance and combining all servers for a 3 way fight. If server combinations per side shift every week then people won’t flock to the winning side/server. If we can include the EU servers into this combination then the “nightcapping” will become a much less prevalent problem and everyone will have plenty of competition.

Necromancer:
For the necromancer, we felt that a few traits and skills were too powerful, while others were lacking in efficacy. We brought down some of the raw DPS conditions that necromancer enjoys, while also maintaining their pressure and sustain elements. The necromancer’s mobility will remain where it is currently, as we want the Necromancers to be focused on sustaining themselves through death shroud, siphoning health, and slowing down their opponent’s ability to act.

You want necros to be focused on sustaining themselves but don’t give them the tools to do it. Siphoning health is an absolute joke and the changes made last patch were an absolute waste of your time for putting them in and our time for having to read them and figure out you accomplished absolutely nothing. Deathshroud is good for some extra health but its pretty much a once time use, it honestly doesn’t provide much sustain. What makes things worse is that while in DS we can’t heal or gain any siphoned life. So our sustain is limited to entirely to whatever our DS is at the start of the fight+our life pool, basically not much sustain at all. Increase our siphons to a decent amount and allow us to heal while in DS. Until then we aren’t getting anything in return for our complete lack of mobility, especially when you compare it to warriors who get just about everything with no tradeoffs. As for slowing down opponents, the only reason to slow down an opponent is because you can’t beat them. If you can’t beat the opponent and have no mobility, that means death. The tradeoff of 4s-10s of slowing an enemy down and dieing doesn’t sound like a fair trade when the alternative is not slowing them down and living to fight again.

Mark of Blood- why on earth would you nerf staff and a 33% nerf at that. A condition build already loses tons of damage on the auto-attack that’s slower than molasses and Putrid Mark. Unless they get Terror the reaper’s mark is incredibly poor damage. That leaves Chillblains which is 20s cooldown and only a 6s poison, which lack damage. So the only real source of damage on the staff for condition builds is Mark of blood, which you just nerfed by 33%, it doesn’t make sense at all unless you’re trying to nerf our overall condition damage brought to you by a certain grandmaster trait. Which of course makes the change all the more nonsensical.

Reanimator- For the love of all that is holy just remove this trait. It was never good and it will never be good for most builds. It might be good for minion build so make it a trait you can choose. Literally any other trait can take it’s place and be better. Necro’s told you they hated it when the game released, even when you said it was working right and we had to prove it wasn’t. It doesn’t help in a 1v1 because you don’t get it until you win, doesn’t help much when it is up due to poor AI that plagues all pets, and dies quickly. Unless you plan on removing the health decay and improving AI these things will be sup-par to pretty much any trait we have.

On the whole, STOP being anti-condition. Conditions already do less damage than DD, can be completely removed, and can still be dodged. I see people complaining about condition spam but do they not see the converse of that? Direct damage is spammed all the time and besides Dodge or protection can’t have 90% of their damage negated. If you start putting in “immune to conditions” traits/abilities then you need to make sure you put those in for direct damage as well. Give necromancer the opposing trait to the new Ele’s, Immune to direct damage while above 90% health.

Thief:
One of the issues we are working on for thieves this patch is the dependence on the traits which boost initiative. We did this by shaving a significant amount of initiative gain from these traits while simultaneously boosting the generic rate of initiative gain by 33%.

You were informed IN BETA about initiative traits being far too important. They need completely removed otherwise you will never be able to balance the skills. You’re either going to balance the skills based on base regen, which means they will be OP with more regen or you will balance them with traits in mind making the traits a must have or you’re underpowered. Even now that they are nerfed they will still be used because they are a straight increase to thief dps.

Bring back thief’s 1200 ranged clusterbomb. Every class should have access to a 1200 range attack for WvW and the thief being as squishy as they are can’t fight on the front lines due to a lack of max range attack.

Raven.9603:

Tinoosh.5386:

DPS spammers SHOULD deserve to be punished for spamming ruthlessly just to spike someone down, and this condition provides the caster some protection against these glass cannon spikers.

My two cents.

Players who do damage should be punished for doing damage? Everyone does damage. Confusion as originally implemented was a nice counter mechanic that briefly shut someone down from attacking. Confusion post-perplexity is a near permanent condition applied by players that choose to abuse the runes lack of cd.

there are a few problems with current meta:
1. Condition application far and away outpaces condition removal, even on the classes best at removal.
2. The most damaging conditions in the game have been made incredibly accessible (dhuumfire and perplexity).
3. Stuns available to warriors far and away outpace stun breaks, even on the classes best at stability / stun-breaking.
4. Warrior health regen without gearing for healing exceeds the health regen of classes that do gear for healing.

I could go on about the broken state of just about every class at the moment, but those are the biggies for wvw/pvp imbalace right now. Nerfing perplexity runes to a 20sec cd goes a long way towards fixing the first 2 issues and making the 3rd and 4th issues less severe (as mace warriors typically run either melandrus or perplexity).

1. Yes condition application outpaces removal just like direct damage outpaces dodging. Conditions can not only be completely removed they can also be dodged, converted, and completely negated(warrior). Why should one damage type be subject to all of these and not the other? You’re not complaining about not being able to negate 90% of a 10k backstab so why would you do expect the same for conditions?

Slushey.8236:

DevonCarver.5370:

I think there is something to the idea of PPT being higher during certain times of day, but it has sort of the opposite problem.

[Before I begin, I want to point out that the game currently lacks Oceanic and South-East Asian server options, so players from these regions are forced to play on either a North American or European server and therefore shouldn’t be penalised in their efforts because they have no other options.]

As an Oceanic WvW player on a North American server, I know that servers struggle to pull numbers during the Oceanic (OC), South-East Asian (SEA) and European (EU) time zones in contrast to the North American (NA) time slot. However, the WvW-focused guilds online during OC, SEA and EU slots put in just as much effort as the NA guilds do. Penalising these time slots not only devalues the effort players put in, but also reduces the desire to put in hours for a time zone which barely helps the servers war score.

I do, however, see the problem in a server stacking a specific time zone. Up until recently Blackgate severely lacked in the EU slot compared to Sanctum of Rall who had previously gained several large European guilds which dominated tier 1 during the EU hours. Part of overcoming this has been trying to find new WvW players who could fill our time zone.

All servers lack population during certain hours, but I believe part of being a WvW community is aiming to grow your WvW player base all times of the day, not just NA. This might be recruiting guilds from others servers, or simply organising for a PvE guild on your own server to join you in WvW occasionally.

This idea of reducing PPT during certain hours also raises the issue of unofficial OC and SEA servers. Servers such as Sea of Sorrows, Fort Aspenwood and Isle of Janthir are rich in OC players but lack NA coverage, yet are based on a NA server. If the PPT gained during the OC slot was reduced, they could put in the same amount of hours as NA on their opposing server and still loose because their time and effort isn’t worth as much. The same would apply to Jade Quarry which has a large SEA player base and a smaller NA coverage, so they would be at a major disadvantage despite the dedicated and skilled players on the server.

All in all, I don’t believe reducing the PPT rate during selected times of the day is a good idea at all, as the efforts of OC and SEA players would be neglected, and I’m sure EU players would go back to EU servers where their hard work could be more effective.

The problem is that some timezones do not work anywhere near as hard as NA primetime, yet they determine the match. Are you really trying to say that those timezones where pretty much no map has a queue and things aren’t well defended is equal to NA primetime where nearly every map has a queue and everything is well defended? Sorry, but I don’t think the effort the timezones put in is near what NA primetime has to put in. Sure you put in the same amount of time, but there is a whole lot less stress and tactics involved.

What needs to be incorporated is scaling points based on population. Meaning that if you’re taking things while a map is completely queued for all sides it is worth a lot more than when a map has 20 people on one side and maybe 5 on the other two. It doesn’t discriminated against any timezone but it emphasizes the difficulty and effort required to do so when you’re actually fighting an opponent. There would obviously be a baseline value so contributions when matchups are lopsided are still worth something but not high enough to solely determine the winner of the match.

Problem: Population is the major determining factor in any WvW matchup and causes some less than fun matchups with zero chance of winning.

Solution? There is no simple solution here. Whatever gets done will require a lot of work, which is why these systems should be well thought out to start with.

My proposed “fix” is just do away with server vs server matchups. There are very few matchups where the 3 servers involved all have an equal shot at winning when the match starts. There simply isn’t enough servers or people playing to create a fair tiered matchup like the one implemented; So it’s time to just trash that system.

No longer will it be 1 server on each side, but 8 servers per side or even better is 17 per side IF the technology in place allows EU servers to connect to NA servers. The servers will be matched by unique number of WvW participants, duration of play, time of play(late night etc), and server contribution. Each week everything will be tallied up and servers assigned to new sides. With this system each week you have a chance at winning and timezone coverage imbalances minimized.

The downside to this system is going to be queues and lag. The solution there is more maps and different game mechanics to spread out players. Basically there will be 6 new maps designated as supply maps. These maps will be be the new locations for supply resources(current supply camps should be turned into something else), which will be split into mineral, wood, and food. Wood and mineral for siege and defenses and food for NPC’s. The new supply camps will no longer generate supply in given intervals, they will need to be harvested by NPC’s or by players. Players will also be able to haul larger amounts of supply but are a bit slower and cannot attack while carrying it. Siege weapons will now take supply to fire.

Each supply map will have another map that is a direct conflict(battle between 2 adjacent sides) map(frontline) that connects to EBG. Supply maps will then also have another map connected to them(Backlines) that connects to the side not in the direct conflict. All backlines maps will be connected to all other backlines maps as well. Example being Red and greens supply maps will be connected by red/green Frontlines but if blue wants a piece of the action they can storm through the EBG portal located somewhere between Red and green. OR blue can go through their own supply camp into the backlines that connects to red or greens supply camp. Borderlands will be changed so that the enemy sides need to actually push into them and build a waypoint, of course points on an enemy borderland will be worth a lot more since they will be harder to assault.

The idea is that supply should be very powerful and the thing being most fought over. By making the supply chains longer there is more that needs protected and that in turn forces the population to spread out in order to do so. With supply originating on another map you now not only need to protect that map from capture, destruction, or pillaging. Since borderlands are connected directly to supply maps it will be easier to keep them stocked with supply and thus easier to defend. EBG will be harder to assault/defend since you will need to get supply through either at least a borderland or a frontline.

All said and done this would add 12 maps(6 supply, 3 frontlines, 3 backlines), each side would then have 6 maps they can queue for and more if their side is able to build a waypoint in a zone they don’t have direct access to(other frontline matchups, backlines, or supply maps). I’m hoping that the combination of more tech being dedicated to WvW and 16 total maps that it will alleviate the queue and lag issue.

I’m sure there are plenty of things that still need worked/fleshed out but it’s an idea at least.

Beyonce.3207:

I don’t normally post, but in the past 7 days I’ve seen some incredibly dirty things being played that ruins the whole spirit of who is a “better server”.

In the week prior to this so-called Season 1, JQ beat BG by a definite margin, to the point of embarrassment.

This week, I saw daily 2v1 fights against our server. Double our numbers in a 24/hr clogged-up situation where our real fighting guilds could not get in or change locations because of the achievement process that Anet decided to introduce for this Season.

We fought with mostly PVE militia eager to get their achievement points.

Once you open the floodgates of PVE into the realm of PVP, you break the true PVP champions of each server from doing what they do best.

I know Anet is trying to please everyone. Sure, I got my Veteran of the Mist title and my key in the first week endlessly focusing not on my server objectives but my own. And I’ve been playing WvW since day one of GW2 launch.

Something is really screwed with this ‘Season’ concept. I pity those true PVP folks like ATM and GE and MERC who give their life for this game with brilliant fighting coordinate for server glory, only to be cut at their knees by the flood of PVE newbies clogging up their vital resource lines.

BG and SOR, u may have won this round. But you deserve zero respect for what you did to us. Phui.

First off, Welcome to Tier 1! The reason JQ beat BG/SOR in the pre-season matchup is because they weren’t really trying, no sense wearing yourself out before the season starts. The PvE achievement hunters equally impact all servers, you guys couldn’t field all your WvW players and neither could BG or SOR. It’s not like you got the short end of the stick there.

As for any “dirty things” you’ve seen, guess what? That happens to all servers. Hackers taking your stuff? Happens to everyone, iirc there was a post specifically in this thread somewhere about a JQ mesmer hacker/exploiter putting up portals into untouched towers. 2v1? Well it happens to all servers, all servers got 2v1ed to some extent this match, JQ just got most of it due to your easy schedule in the coming weeks. It’s not underhanded, it’s just what had to happen for any other server to even have a chance at winning. If you have issues with 2v1 then I’d suggest leaving Tier 1 because it happens everyday, in fact it is the exact reason there are 3 servers battling it out.

Shifu.4321:

You must not have played World of Warcraft

Just going to point out that the reason that screen is cluttered is because the person using the mods didn’t take time to make it all into a clean UI. It’s entirely self-inflicted because absolutely everything on that screen is able to be configured a much cleaner manner. Just off the top of my head he doesn’t need the party UI up if he is using the raid grids. The bag/settings UI could be completely turned off because they can be added to the bar mod at the top. There are much cleaner action bar mods that take out a lot of the space and can be resized and reformed. You can take out he xp bar and eagle end caps. There is/was a buff mod that again removed the spaces inbetween and allowed resizing and reformatting.

I used to make it my mission to create nice clean UI’s out of all of my mods. Sure it took some time, but you had to do something inbetween raids besides run from the bank to the AH and back again. Even if it was too complicated people would make UI mod packs pre-setup into a nice sleek design.

I would much prefer full UI customization to what we currently have here. There is no real excuse anymore, customizable UI’s have been done at least since 2003 in SWG where you could move/remove/resize/color your UI/Chat however you liked. WoW took it a step further with custom mod and there was a learning curve on what should be possible, but it was a benefit to the game. A lot of the user created mods are now “standard” things players expect in a MMO UI.

The problem with the class balancing in this game has and apparently always will be that they have ZERO balancing formulas. There are similar attacks that do no where near the same damage. There are similar traits where one is adept and does way more than another classes grandmaster. What’s worse is they continue to balance things on the failed SPvP meta and think tooltip changes will heavily impact the game. There is no rhyme or reason to which classes got the most health/armor other than lore…which is terrible balancing to begin with. The game was built on unbalanced mechanics like how direct damage scales vs survivability and condition damage. The entire condition system, especially in PvE, needs an overhaul.

Until ArenaNet actually acknowledges the problem things will never get fixed. They need to just bite the bullet, make big changes, and put more manpower into getting things balanced out. Balancing classes is a huge part of making an MMO and clearly they underestimated it.

SlothBear.9846:

Kill Shot is a highly telegraphed channel. It’s fine.

Warrior ability to shrug off all conditions and dash/charge away while passively regaining all their health and immune to CC is what needs nerfed.

No skill regardless of telegraph should 1 shot anyone, glass cannon, upleveled, or otherwise.

In a 1v1 you’ll be able to see the telegraph and avoid it, but as soon as more people get involved it gets exponentially easier to get it off. Enemies on a wall defending a tower? What are the chances they see the warrior doing killshot in 30+ people? Of course if seeing the telegraph is your point of balance there are tons of skills that should be 1-shotting people all over the place. Pretty much any ability in the game the requires an enemy to sit in it should do 15k damage, but they aren’t balanced for that because that would be stupid…

Balance in this game is an absolute joke because there is no rhyme or reason to most of it. It starts with each classes base health and armor and only gets worse with each ability. Oh your in lower armor in melee range with lower base health, clearly your melee attacks should do less damage than the higher health higher armor classes. You have lower base health lower armor and your ranged attacks STILL do less damage than a higher health higher armor class?! That’s before we even get into telegraphs and hard to land attacks. There is nothing special about Kill Shot that should allow it to do the damage it does. There are plenty of other attacks in the game that are easily avoidable and harder to pull off that don’t do nearly the same damage.

1. Population Imbalance
2. WvW mechanics
3. Rewards

1. Balance
2. Gamemodes
3. Removing the wall between Pve/WvW and SPvP.

You clearly have no idea about which you are talking. First off, conditions are a Primary damage type, I don’t know where you got the idea that they weren’t. The necromancer class is based around them being a primary damage type. Second, Condition damage builds rely on multiple stats just as much as berserker builds. Necromancers want rabid(precision+condition dmg) so they can proc more conditions but that leaves them with only toughness for defense. Conditions also need 2 stats(condition damage+condition duration) to do damage and don’t scale anywhere near as well as a berserker build in terms of outright damage, but aren’t impacted by armor. Then we have the fact that not only is there limited number of conditions that stack in intensity(bleeds, confusion, torment and vulnerability) , but they are also removable. Berserker damage is not removable at all and if you say “dodge” well most condition abilities can be dodged as well.

The problem you’re having is you think a berserker build with no condition removal should survive against an attrition condition build that is made to take out berserkers. If you want to take out condition builds you need to have more health and condition removal. You don’t need a full berserker set to have a strong power build, you don’t do any damage if you’re dead.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Just wanted to jump in and say thanks for keeping things constructive!

The idea right now is to see how the current changes impact the meta, and then do another set of balance in an upcoming patch.

The trait facts were a lot of work, but the clarity they give you guys is VERY good for you. So we wanted to see if that would shake up trait builds at all in order to see how you guys adjusted. Once THAT settles, we want to make balance changes based off the meta at that time. We didn’t want to change all the trait facts and also add in a lot of balance changes on top of it.

We still did a lot of balance stuff, but we were careful not to go overboard with this patch. Just like we learned w/ the Warrior a few updates back, sometimes the meta can undergo drastic changes even if we do VERY little to impact the balance.

We’re planning on doing another round of updates to traits for every class (either changing #‘s, shifting tiers around to make more builds viable, or doing trait reworks), and we also have our eye on a few “apex” builds. But, again we don’t want to shave those too much.

Thanks again for the thoughts and feedback!

Chap + the balance tam

Why are you waiting to see what this does to the meta? In case you’ve missed the vast exodus of SPvPers, the current meta and all meta’s since launch have been terrible. Those meta’s sticking around for long causing players to quit is purely a testament to how slowly you guys make changes to major problems that most players can see day 1 of a patch.

With that said, STOP BALANCING FOR CURRENT META’s. It has not served you well to this date and it won’t serve you well in the future. Not only is it hurting SPvP but it’s completely ruining PvE and WvW. Currently you have very few viable builds per class and given the nature of this game there should/could be a whole lot more. What this game needs is massive changes to skills/abilities/stats/armor that create a lot more builds and variables, AKA Depth. Once you have a system with tons of new viable builds you can finally start fine tuning them, that’s where you guys went wrong. You started trying to fine tune builds on top of a broken system that remains broken to this very day.

Seriously think outside the box you have created and mix things up because what you have isn’t working. Things like making all classes starting health 15k, all classes can wear all armor types but the types have pros/cons. For instance Light armor could increase speed and endurance regen but obviously you take a lot more damage. Medium armor reduces significantly more damage and gives you resistance to conditions but reduces your damage. Heavy armor could reduce damage even further and give you longer boons but at the cost of self healing being a lot less effective; Or maybe armor has encumberance(SWG) so using heavy armor gives you 10k health, medium 15k, and light 20k, of course you’d need to rebalance the armor/toughness stats to scale equally with damage, remember there is a reason that conditions bypass armor! Making your stat allocations a separate system from traits, remove trait lines and just give traits an outright cost(IE grandmaster cost 20). If someone wants to run
3 grandmaster traits that’s fine but they give up 12 adept traits or 6 master traits.

Add more game modes, capture the flag, assault/defend, king of the hill, deathmatch, etc. This will then give all those new builds a place a shine and if they are in tournament rotation will definitely keep any one build/class/comp from being the best. Where bunkers/spikers could be good at conquest, mobility/evasion is better at CTF, and so on for every game mode and map.

I’m not suggesting that all of my ideas are correct or will fix everything, I am merely saying that the current state of the game/balance as well as the direction and pace of your changes is most definitely wrong. The outrage and unrest in what is left of the SPvP playerbase as well as the WvW/PvE playerbases is well warranted and it’s a shame that you still don’t see the problem. The game needs depth, not tooltip fixes.

ShiningSquirrel.3751:

Aberrant.6749:

ShiningSquirrel.3751:

Astral Projections.7320:

Colin johanson did mention it on this video interview with Matt Visual.
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/85152-video-interview-pax-with-colin-johanson/

Oh god no!
Lets just hope he lied about it like they do for so many other things. The day the have open world dueling is the day I uninstall the game and find something else to do.

Umm… why such a harsh negative reaction?

It’s been discussed to death in so many other threads so I am not going to get in to the details again, but suffice it to say the players who insist on doing open world dueling are the worst kind of player in any game and end up ruining any kind of play experience for non pvpers. You can see it now with the costume brawl. They will have a whole map to do their thing in yet they will choose to do it right on top of other players. I play games to have fun and relax. GW has always been able to offer both. Once it no longer does there is no reason to keep playing and no reason to keep it installed.

With a post like this I think you are probably worse than the legions of evil griefing duelers you think exist. What a narrow minded view that you refuse to allow a feature based on a few bad apples. I guess we shouldn’t add any more content like Tequatl because that brings out not only grriefers to sit on turrets but also PvE elitists that harass people just as much if not more. I’ve run into more PvE players that ruin the PvE experience, especially in dungeons here, that clearly we should only develop single player content and instance it. I mean party invites can lead to griefing right? So we shouldn’t have that feature either. I’ve seen plenty of people here complaining about being harassed due to their gear, spec, or class and even worse they were getting kicked from the group right before the final boss/chest. Almost every aspect of any game can be griefed in one way or another, not adding a feature because of the fear a griefer might exploit it is just letting griefers win.

The simple truth here is you refuse to accept that there are solutions to the issues you bring up. Heck those solutions were even in WoW but somehow you refused to use them. If someone is spamming mapchat or duel requests to harass you, /ignore griefername. BOOM no more mapchat spam and all duels are declined. You could also take it 1 step further and just report them for harassment if you really wanted to. ArenaNet can even expand this system and add a decline all duels feature so those that are solely against it don’t ever even have to see the duel request box.

I would LOVE to be able to duel my friends while waiting for a dragon or other event to pop. Plus it would be awesome for helping to work out a new spec. “Join SPvP arena you say”, well the gear/abilities aren’t the same there and it removes me from the game world. “Go to WvW” well this doesn’t solve the issue at all. I want to duel with my friends and discuss the results, so unless you’re footing the bill for constant server transfers this doesn’t solve anything. “Only have dueling in Arena’s” again dueling is something that also helps solve boredom while waiting around for things to happen.

Balkanwarrior.5132:

Here you go, Shelledfade.6435. I forgot that I had sold back to back Dusks so you get an extra 1.

http://lotsofpictures11.imgur.com/

While I don’t doubt you have gotten precursors, but I can take a guess at how you’ve accomplished this. You got lucky a few times in a row, “exploited” early on, spend all day on BLTP turning goods, or maxed your credit card and got enough money to continue sinking hundreds of gold into making them and basically run the market. That’s the entire problem with this is that a few people control the market in more than a few areas. Some people exploited the rate of precursors early on and made thousands upon thousands allowing them to control the markets. They could buy up everything and set the price at what they wanted with little or no competition. The gaps only widened as ArenaNet nerfed anything worth farming and turned their game into a grinding simulator.

This basically leaves the unlucky, non-super hardcore, non-exploiters, and those not willing to tank their credit rating out in the cold. They have a miniscule chance, not impossible, of getting a precursor by playing the game normally; that is what needs to change. I doubt that ArenaNet will change it anytime soon though because it makes them money.

Everyone keeps talking about how fast zerk warriors die but they die for the exact same reasons that necros die, they probably aren’t the greatest players. Warriors will do more DPS in most situations, but that doesn’t mean all situations. Fractals have a lot of damage that is either incredibly hard to avoid or is outright unavoidable on top of things that don’t just fall over dead and gimmicky fights. In those situations the necro DS is a life saver, utility becomes necessary, and sustained DPS comes into play. However in all other situations, which there are alot, where things die quickly, there is no unavoidable damage, a gimmick isn’t needed, etc; the warrior is simply better.

Of course I’ve been saying this since launch but, the warriors need toned down in damage and given utility(fun) to compensate. That class is so incredibly boring and has pretty much zero fun factor besides burning down mobs in 1-2 attacks.

Zeldain.5710:

Pifil.5193:

Zeldain.5710:

And I don’t think that everyone who just comes along to participate should be entitled to the same chance at the same rewards.

Why not? Because they’re not in the same guild as the guy wearing a commander tag and telling people to do what they were going to do anyway?

PVE in GW2 is not that complex, this new fight is no exception, after one or two tries it’ll be pretty obvious what needs to be done during the stages and any individual who looks around, reacts to changing circumstances and moves to fill a needed role is just as deserving of rewards as a footsoldier from some guild who follows orders.

If that’s the case there’s no point in doing this change to the system.

If you deal with organizing X amount of people to do the work, and deal with the people who aren’t helping (and maybe even hindering) your ability to kill it… why should they have the same chance at the same loot as the group that puts in the effort?

This whole thing will fall flat on its face if there isn’t something to delineate the group that puts forth the effort vs the players who are simply “also there.”

Because everyone there is putting forth effort whether you recognize it or not. The second you start rewarding a group of people over another it creates tension. Why is anyone going to come help another guild kill Teq if they aren’t going to be rewarded the same? The answer is they aren’t, you only need to look at the failed guild missions system. I’d imagine it would go something like Guild A attempts Tequatl, Guild B sits back not helping, Guild A wipes, Guild B comes in and then attempts to “steal” Tequatl. Then the drama, name calling, etc starts….that’s real great for community building!

GW2 is/was supposed to be an all inclusive MMO where everyone could contribute and be rewarded. As soon as you start dolling out rewards/recognition to subsets of the community, the community will then start falling apart. The community as a whole is much more important than certain guilds needing to be recognized to feel superior to others. Go find a sandbox MMO for that type of recognition/loot because this isn’t the game for it.

Demon.5082:

snip

There are more than a few full cleanse removals that remove all conditions and can completely ruin a multiple condition class as well. Every single class has access to multiple conditions, they might not all do damage but they help vs cleansing on top of their already useful effects.

As for conditions being applied 2x-3x faster than cleanses, that’s not imbalanced. You’re looking at mitigating most of another players damage and you want it to be just as fast? If cleanses were as quick as condition application then condition builds would do no damage. In order for conditions to do damage they need time to build up or time to tick. Basically what you’re asking for here when applied to direct damage is for heals to have no cooldown because enemies can just keep reapplying damage.

Even with conditions stacked you’re not dying as fast as direct damage. Sorry, but the time it takes just to apply the bleeds to start hitting as hard as direct damage already takes longer than it takes for direct damage to kill someone. It’s also important to mention that there are only a few conditions that stack in intensity; most only stack in duration, which makes them easier to cleanse.
Lets do some math though with 1400 condition damage!

Bleed 25 stack: ~2825 per second
Burning: 678 per second
Confusion per stack: 175
Poison: 278 per second
Fear+Terror: 1173 per second with another condition on the enemy

None of which hit nearly as hard as direct damage can, unless you don’t think direct damage can crit for 5k. For a necro you need to have all of those conditions(minus confusion) on an enemy to deal anywhere near the burst of direct damage. Of course why anyone would let you stack 25 bleeds, burning, poison, and fear is beyond me.

CC also does impact conditions. Each condition applied is equal to a direct damage attack. If you stop them from attacking they aren’t applying conditions, just like a DD wouldn’t be attacking. This gives you time to cleanse, heal, run, etc. The previous conditions might still be ticking but you need to remember that those are like damage a DD has already done.

Immunities do in fact work vs conditions. However they only work on conditions applied while you are immune. Any conditions applied prior to immunity will still tick, again remember that this ticking damage is damage that a DD would have already done.

As for protection, even with a 33% reduction a 5k crit still does as much damage as a full 25 stack of bleeds. Aegis also blocks condition application and stealth also mitigates conditions because 1. You can’t apply conditions to what you can’t see 2. Again any damage applied via conditions is like damage already done by DD.

Even after looking at the above numbers you think 3-4 conditions every 15s is better than DD that can kill you faster than that? If you want to beat a heavy condition build you need to be a heavy removal build. It’s the same for direct damage, why do you think bunkers are so popular besides the fact that they hold points longer.

There are AOE condition removals and even combo fields that minimize the impact of conditions. If you’re just letting a necro sit back and stack conditions though then you’re team is the problem and not the necro. The same is true if your team clumps up and gets AOEed down by DD.

You need to learn to counter conditions. Conditions are a longer term fight so fight with that in mind. Stun/CC the necro to start so they have already have damage on them before they even get to apply their first condition. Use immunities after that so no conditions get applied, they waste cooldowns, and they still have yet to apply conditions. Then wait a bit before cleansing so they waste more cooldowns. CC as often as possible just like DD to prevent further condition application. If they pop plague then just kite, if they use DS dodge, and don’t run through their spectral wall.

Red Raven.7824:

Nuka Cola.8520:

At first people were crying for burst damage, then CC and now condis… wtf do you want exactly? Be happy necs don’t have 1 million hexes as they once did

That’s a silly thing to ask.

There is clearly an imbalance in how Conditions are applied and the ways to remove them.

Players want balance, that is why we speak out.

You’re entirely right! It is entirely imbalanced that some classes can completely wipe all conditions and entirely mitigate any condition specced classes damage. The exact same should be true with direct damage as well!

The problem here is that people are not seeing both sides to this argument.

Conditions ignore armor but can be completely mitigated by removals. They have limited stacking and have a stat connected to their scaling that isn’t freely available on gear. They do their damage over time and thus allow more healing to occur to mitigate the damage.

Direct damage is mitigated by armor but cannot be completely mitigated. There are no stacking limitations and all stats that boost it are available on gear, all on a single piece in fact and actually scale a lot better. It does it’s damage upfront allowing for very little healing.

BOTH can be dodged and are affected by immunities.

If we look at the above you can see conditions are still behind and people are still asking for nerfs? Then lets nerf all direct damage so it only benefits from 5% of your power, only 1-2 people can do damage to an enemy at a time, and remove crit damage and precision from gear.

Heaven forbid that people have to take conditions into consideration now when creating their build. Yes, you’re going to have to stack removals to take out condition specs but you will dominate them. Of course you’re going to get dominated by direct damage builds but they will be killed off by condition builds. You see this is called balance. I’m not saying it’s entirely balanced at the moment, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Archon.6481:

Let me ask you this: What would a generalist (celestial) do better than a specialist? In what situation would I want someone who uses celestial over someone who specializes in said task?

Why would I take a celestial player over a zerker player when I need dps?
Why would I take a celestial player over a carrion/rabid playerwhen I need a condition damage player?
Why would I take a celestial bunker over a soldier/cleric/knight bunker when I need a bunker?

In a world of specialists, generalists are useless as there is nothing they can do that a specialist cannot do better.

Dead DPS does no DPS
A celestial condition build will do more damage alongside those conditions and lose minimal damage.
A celestial bunker will outdamage a soldier/cleric/knight bunker. A dead enemy does no damage.

In most builds you make use of EVERY stat in celestial. Everyone does damage so power, precision, crit, crit damage are all used. Everyone takekittens so defense and vitality are used. And everyone heals so healing power is used. Almost every single weaponset features conditions so even condition damage is used. That’s actually one of my major complaints on my necromancer, I would love to fully make use of my condition damage with all of my skills but 1/2 of them are either conditions that don’t do damage or they do direct damage.

90% of this game doesn’t require a specialist build. There are a few occasions where specialists are needed(CoF speed runs) and a lot of that comes from poor class balance. If Warriors didn’t do insane base damage, have heavy armor, and have the highest base health the CoF speed runs wouldn’t be possible. In fact in most cases a rounded build will be far better off because you can adapt to all situations should something outside of the plan happen. This is especially the case in WvW and it’s easy to see who specializes because the second they step foot outside that specialization they are canon fodder.

In conclusion, if all you want to do is 1 thing in GW2 and nothing else, celestial gear is bad. However if you like doing multiple dungeons, open world events, WvW, etc; Celestial gear is the better choice.

Traps are a great addition if done correctly. They will actually force zergs to slow down and allow for area denial. That being said I don’t think anti-stealth should be a trap, if anything it should be a class skill. It’s kind of unfair to include a trap that counters 1-2 classes, unless of course you include traps that counter other classes(trap removes heavy armor, traps prevent use of pets, traps prevent element switching, etc).

I really how they make traps worth it though, they need to be a decent radius and a 1 hit and down powerful. Otherwise zergs will just plow straight through them. If they aren’t powerful enough for zergs to worry about then they are useless. I absolutely loved setting landmines in RFOnline, nothing like pushing a zerg back and planting mines to help prevent their rush.

Mirta.5029:

Distaste.4801:

Except this isn’t causing MMO’s to grow up. This is actually causing the exact opposite because by nerfing farming you actually have to farm more. What’s worse is it isn’t even like they have built good game mechanics around the idea of no farming. Nope, instead they just make drops incredibly low and implement diminishing returns.

so instead of stopping farming like you should you decided to farm even harder. “You can’t hit enemies trough the walls” “well maybe if I shoot 300 bullets into a wall I will hit someone, why do you make me waste my bullets you bad company?”. You won’t hit DR if you don’t stay in the same place for 30 minutes. I don’t see why it is that bad.

That’s why this is a terrible system, if you want the item you NEED to farm. Be it karma, crafting mats, money, etc. We aren’t even talking about just diminishing returns either, even without those kicking in some of the materials are absolutely grindtastic. A lot of people will lose interest in the game long before they even get the items, where if ArenaNet made them more attainable they might stay longer. Sure the hardcore players might feel less special because it no longer takes 200 hours of farming for some items, but it’s better for the community as a whole.

Keep in mind that I’m saying this as someone with 8 lvl 80’s, 1000+ hours(haven’t checked it lately), over 1.2 million karma sitting in my bank as jugs, 100+ laurels, etc. The game is far too grindy for normal people(IMO) and the anti-farm policy only contributes to that. The reason I won’t even touch dungeons anymore is it is pure grinding to get tokens to get gear. This is a HUGE step backwards from do a dungeon and at least get decent loot even if it’s not something you can use, especially if you got a token on top of the loot. Now take my opinion with a grain of salt because after just finishing my last lvl 80 I’m pretty much done with the game. Each patch is just more of the same, unrewarding grind.

Jack of Tears.9458:

Im Mudbone.1437:

Why can’t we play the game the way we as individuals feel is fun and not as ANET seems to be preventing us from doing?

Because Anet wants MMOs to grow up and the only way they’ll do that is by taking their medicine; sometimes it’s a bitter pill. They knew when they moved away from the WoW model that there were gonna be people what didn’t like the changes, but you don’t make change by pandering to everyone.

Except this isn’t causing MMO’s to grow up. This is actually causing the exact opposite because by nerfing farming you actually have to farm more. What’s worse is it isn’t even like they have built good game mechanics around the idea of no farming. Nope, instead they just make drops incredibly low and implement diminishing returns. Then just to top off this sad excuse of “progress” they make things require incredibly stupid amounts of hard to farm items. They want MMO’s growing up? Well they sure aren’t doing it in GW2.

nekitten234:

Rama.6439:

You do realize that not every gamer plays 8 hours a day, does not have time to grind and farm, some do have real lives and families and jobs and do like to play casual, this kind of nerfing will drive them away cause they won’t be able to make nothing eventually, and buy nothing from the TP with the way the TP prices go, if things just become more rare the prices just go up, and the casual gamers cant afford that and they just quit. Why play if you can’t earn to even support 1 char, let alone multiple chars, and don’t say for fun, cause struggling in a video game isn’t fun, most people struggle in real life and thats not fun, doubt they want to come on a game and struggle here to.

Sure I do, as I’m one of them (~400hrs played and I’m playing from the start). I never had problems to get my 2 lvl80 geared and to keep others supplied. And I only “boosted” my finance in game selling 500ish gems for gold in total.

Yes, I cannot buy legendary (and I’ll newer do as there is nothing “legendary” in buying them), I don’t have all ascended accessories (just 2 from laurels), and I still don’t have superior runes except on weapons … and I don’t care. I can do any content I want (except high level fractals), be useful in WxWxW and even score some kills in PvP.

If they spend less time (I’m just guessing) trying to please “gimme gimme” crowd and work on more (especially temporary/once-off) content this will be even better game (and it’s great already).

But grind/gold/… is for the separate discussion, not about temporary content.

Okay, so you don’t have superior runes but consider yourself geared out and you had to sell gems for gold just to get there? Does that not set off any alarms in your head? Superior runes of divinity are about 3x a base exotic depending on stats, meaning that 6x of them are 18x more expensive than your armor set. Anyway, the point being that you’re 400+ hours in, no superior runes, and sold gems for gold, can you not see how for casuals that want max stats(which the game was sold on easy to get max stats) and multiple sets of gear that this game is quite grindy.

If the baseline is just being able to participate in the content then that’s fine, but by that reasoning there was no grind in WoW vanilla since I could take a dungeon geared class into a Naxx raid and still be useful. It wouldn’t be optimal but neither is doing a dungeon in GW2 with a level 80 that doesn’t have superior runes. So it’s fine for you that you can do everything, but for others that don’t want to burden their party or realm or those that want max stats/multiple sets of gear you can see how it’s a grind.

As for the gimme gimme crowd, I feel like you don’t realize what a good portion of people actually want. They want the things already in the game fixed. This includes getting new content simply because of the nature of how things are broken. Dungeons are currently terrible risk vs time vs reward. They are monotonous, boring, unimaginative, etc. Even the AC reworks are pretty awful and changed things for the worse. Can you see how frustrated players would be if the temporary dungeon was done better than all the other dungeons combined and it’s only temporary? I mean I could go on, WvW is shallow and needs new content/mechanics to create depth. SPvP is plagued by poor class design/balance that gets worse every patch.

Adding temporary content is fine, IF the base game is solid. The base game isn’t solid though and that’s the reason people are complaining about temporary content.

The mug heal is just dumb, 9/10 times when using steal/mug it’s when you’re full health. The 45s cooldown almost insures you won’t be using again in that fight. The boon steal on it feels tacked on considering we already had that(bountiful theft) and it shares the boons. Mugs damage definitely needed nerfed but this just seems like they have no idea what they’re doing.

The ranger changes come down to the same issues they’ve had since the start, bad pet AI. Doesn’t matter if they do more damage and have more health if they are so easily kited.

TheMightyAltroll.3485:

I explained 6 times that I would support removing last refuge.

I only added in Shadow Refuge so that if Thieves ever get that fix, they could be completely fixed as a package, but people are in denial about their classes and would fight to the death not to have anything nerfed. Even if it meant buffing other aspects.

Just like Elementalists do about D/D. Ever try to stack bleed on a D/D Ele? I thought not.

Shadow refuge isn’t broken. It’s probably one of the easiest things in the game to counter. SR goes up…AOE IT. It’s that simple. The thief is either going to sit in the AOE to get stealth losing most of his life or he will leave and lose stealth. It’s Win/Win. I assume you play a necro so drop a well on it or all of your marks, go plague form and just sit in it, go into death shroud and do the AOE LF leech. Other classes can completely shut it down with knockbacks or pulls. If the thief is going to rez someone then you know EXACTLY where they will be, stealthed or not. Just drop damage on them(protip: if you have a combo on your autoattack you’ll see it flipping through abilities as you hit the thief). Shadow Refuge is only good against people who have no idea how it works or magically think stealth means invulnerable.

Back on topic: Last refuge is a garbage trait that has killed me a few times. I absolutely HATE that minor traits are forced on you, it’s just pouring salt on the wound when they are absolutely useless. I remember the Necromancer re animator trait where the jagged horrors would literally die before they could do anything. They are still terrible but slightly less useless. The whole trait system needs reworked since it is so confining. I know they changed it before release for balancing reasons, but it’s not like they are doing good on the balancing front anyways so they might as well allow a whole lot more builds.

Vayne.8563:

sonicwhip.9052:

Vayne.8563:

sonicwhip.9052:

Zeppelin.6832:

Not enough content? People complain. Too much content? People complain.

I’m not complaining about either, I just feel it is strange they would work so hard on something that would soon be gone.

So do chefs. You go out have a great meal and that’s that. The book you read in a week might have taken the author ten years to write. Most books won’t get read again and again and again.

I don’t know about you but I’m bored with most of the permanent dungeons in the game anyway. I do them with guildies, but after all this time if I never did one of the original dungeons again, I wouldn’t be too sad.

Maybe temporary content isn’t so bad as people might think.

Well you can’t compare an mmo to food cooked by a chef.
this is more like a house…Anet is building house by making a huge room and then taking it down to replace it with another room that will also be taken down.

I don’t really see it that way at all. Anet is decorating a room, and you spend some time in that room and then they’re redecorating.

Content that keeps getting played eventually become stale is my point. By bringing out stuff and bringing out different stuff, they’re doing something most games don’t do. I think that if they can keep doing it (better than they’ve done it so far), then it might be an interesting formula.

At very least, it’s an experiment in the genre.

The problem is the game is far from a good state where they have the luxury of temporary content. Going with the room analogy they are redecorating the room but there are still nails coming out of the drywall, holes in the walls, carpet has stains, etc. The new decorations take your eyes of those imperfections for a second but very quickly you end up asking yourself “why would you spend money decorating the room instead of fixing it first?”

I am absolutely fine with temporary content as long as the game is in a good place, GW2 isn’t. Class balance is an absolute travesty and probably the worst among any AAA mmo that has ever released. The combat is shallow and stale. SPvP is in a dire state and will probably never be an eSport like ANet wanted. WvW needs some serious reworking. I could go on. The basic game systems need serious attention, not more temporary content. What makes it even worse is that almost every additional game mechanic they’ve added have had massive issues/design flaws, it does not give one hope that when they finally do rework base systems that they will get it right.