Guild Wars 2

sandstrom.5938:

ViolentMuffin.9573:

My 51 stylish norn mesmer. Behold! I hid the mask, because its ugly clipping with his hair.

Oh, that’s the first “not silly looking” mesmer I’ve seen!

“Mesmer eh? Boy am I scared. Are you going to dazzle and daze me with purple butterflies?!”

Smash … stomp … kerpow.

“Seeing things yet?”

… I like the “not your normal flamboyant Mesmer”s, and Charr thieves, and all that. Sylvari that look all badkitten are pretty neat too. Not everything in nature is flowery and bright.

My Norn thief took full ferocity, and I consider more of a thug-archtype than the sneaky assassin-style thief.

I never considered the “Norn honor” thing though, I saw more of a “seek out and challenge yourself” mentality. I mean, hey, the newb intro has you hunting down a trophy. Not seeking a fair fight against an equal opponent … hunting for sport to show off/prove you can kill something big.

I assume if my thief showed up back in Norn-ville, and told stories about how she faced down waves of Risen and won, they’d not ask if she fought fairly and honorably anyway, more of a “how many?! .. … and catapults?! Let me buy you a beer.”

The other day I was talking to a friend about this very thing in Lion’s Arch. We were comparing the different races’ cultures and the overall ‘vibe’ we get from them. From a pure sociological standpoint, barring inherent stereotypes, I felt that things were best stated when … I whistled for a cab and when it drew near, the license plate said “fresh” and it had dice in the mirror.

People like making the cheesy, “watch me faceroll this dude” videos & there is a big immature audience for them, so that is the majority of what you’ll find. Can’t say its much different than the highlight reel “zomg BACKSTAWB” youtubes I’ve seen.

I haven’t tried sPvP yet, but from playing Sword/Pistol in WvW I can tell you … landing Pistol Whip on a good opponent can a challenge if they’re mobile a lot (and who shouldn’t be in this game?) and STICKING a Pistol Whip on a good opponent is extra challenging. It is very easy to duck out of the animation once the tiny stun wears off. I imagine sPvP, with lower numbers of foes and I assume a more tactical style of play, people will have things off cooldown more often to escape easier too.

At the cost of kittening some people off, I’ll say that I feel getting a good death w/ Pistol Whip is harder than heartseeker heavy play simply because HS doesn’t root you like PW does. I haven’t tried a big stealth build yet … I want to for sure … but without the ability to duel friends for practice and feedback I’m a tad disheartened trying it right now.

That being said … Sword has the whole shadow-step-to-your-target-and-back thing going for it. I’ve had some good WvW fights against even, small groups of opponents (2v2, 3v3) where I enjoyed bouncing in, smacking them around, and dropping back (with the added bonus of cancelling 1 condition) to make Sw/Pi more than just “press PW, press steal, profit”.

I’ll check back in here though, I’m interested in seeing some good gameplay Sw/Pi videos too.

Sometimes I feel that they were going for a more “fencing” or duelist vibe with the animations. I agree it can look odd using a big clunky knight’s longsword. I’ve been keeping an eye out for lighter-looking swords; I’d like to see a good light saber, or rapier. Hell I’d even take a decent scimitar.

You don’t HAVE to use a sword though, as a thief. Many people do not.

They also have many different skins for weapons. I’ve seen some less boring, less “omg English broadsword” looking 1handed swords. Higher level you get, more options you have.

I did decent-to-very-well in PvE through and including at 80.

Sword/Pistol Black Powder spam works well in most every situation while leveling. Dagger/Pistol & Dagger/Dagger have their own benefits & avoidance mechanisms that you can use to stay alive & keep them dead.

That being said, I get wrecked in dungeons unless I run short bow 90% of the time. If I get into melee range I will be downed in 2 hits. 1 more hit kills me. This includes AoEs, some of which are hard to avoid or easy to miss the cues for in a clump of people and/or when the screen is a fireworks display of spell effects.

I put my talent points into DPS. I like by skills/talents so I don’t want to have to dump traits I think are beneficial to pick up some added survivability, so I was hoping to find gear that evened out my defenses. I haven’t, and am currently scrounging to get together a few Valkyrie pieces, or something, to help me survive.

At 80 I can kill singles anywhere easily. Vets I can burn down pretty too.

Zerg events against champs? I tend to stick to short bow again.

All in all though, I have a lot of fun on my thief. I just wish I brought more to the table in dungeons … I feel like a watered down Ranger.

Dwok Immortalus.2763:

All of this said, it’s not DB’s fault. They are acting within game mechanics, and they can’t help that they have a large night time population. I know we are all grumpy because no one likes an unfair matchup, but shouldn’t be jumping down the throats of people with no control over it.

Hi, you must be new around here.

Jackle.4173:

tarnin.1690:

Ill state this again, why is it an issue? Player mentality. Period. If you wake up the next day and everything isnt yours, go get it. All those night guys are now asleep and you are up. Take it back. Don’t look at the score and go “oh screw this” and not queue up.

I have not tried WvWvW yet becuase i have been lvling my character but is there something stopping people from doing this? When you come back to the game and things have been taken why not just take it back. Is that not the point of WvWvW.

You can try to take it back, yes. You can even succeed in doing so. You cannot earn back enough points to be competitive though.

Thing is … Enemy Server X captures the entire map at night. You are now a gigantic number of points behind them when you log in later because they earned points for owning the entire map for 8-10 hours overnight.

Lets say if (big if) you are able to get an awesome group together, and you fight for 12 hours straight. Somehow you take back the map. You win back what you lost and dominate all day.

Now, the entire time you’re fighting … you’re slowly taking objectives from the enemy, and gaining them yourself. They go from getting “all teh points” to (halfway through the day) getting half the points. By the end of the day, you’re getting full points and they are getting none each “tick”.

You log off, exhausted.

Point tally (I’ll simplify the numbers and use 100 for a total map domination): Server X got 450 today (100 in hour 1; 90 in hr 2; 80 in hr 3; 70 in hr 4; 60 in hr 5; 50 in hour 6; and lets just say then 0 the rest of the day because you kicked kitten).

Your server: 750! (0 hour 1; 10 hr 2; 20 hr 3; 30 hr 4; 40 hr 5; 50 hr 6; and 100 × 6 for the other hours you are so super awesome)

Their night crew comes in, captures the whole map in a fraction of the time you fought for today (say 2 hours instead of your 12). Now, for the remaining 10 hours, they are getting full point value and you are getting 0. Their lead is growing massively, and will continue to do so each night.

Point total for the night:
Them: 1,000 (0; 0; 100 × 10)
You: 200 (100; 100; 0 × 10)

People get upset by this, because it creates a situation you cannot crawl out of. The most you can do is earn a few hundred to a few thousand points toward their large (and growing each night) lead.

They pull ahead 800 points each night in the example above, and you eek back 300 more than them during the day. They’re pulling ahead 500 points each 24 hour period. Your only hope to catch them is a massive power outage covering a huge swatch of the planet or a kittenload of your server forgoing sleep and “alarm clocking” every night this week.

It is obvious the encounter isn’t finished. No mobs spawn, the AoEs he throws don’t hit you if you stand in certain spots, there is zero music playing.

It is funny though, just previously to this encounter one of my group mates had remarked “we’d never be able to do any of this if we couldn’t death-zerg it” because of the instant, everything-covering AoEs blasting us that you couldn’t really avoid and you got a milisecond of time between the giant red circle and the damage hitting.

Then, this seemingly placeholder’ish final fight comes up and we’re not sure if we should laugh or cry

Oh god, and the loot? Broken.

It is an odd situation right now.

If you want to craft as a way to make your own gear each tier, as you level, you:

- Often gain character levels faster than you can collect the mats and advance your crafting level.

- Often find drops that are on par with, or better than the items you can craft.

Now, if you are short some mats and decide to farm for them you will gain further XP and outlevel your crafting ability even more.

If you think “I’ll buy mats from the TP to supplement what I’m short on” you’ll quickly find that the mats are often more expensive than the cost of the good they produce (which too is often also for sale on the TP). Compounding this, if you happened to not get lucky and stumble upon loot drops that are better than the items you’re trying to craft, well hey, those are for sale on the TP at ridiculously low prices as well.

I gave up crafting below 150 leatherworking. I realized I never had enough materials to get to the next tier gear, and saw that even if I could mystically conjure up those materials to make up the gap, I already had drops better than what I could make.

Then, I realized that I could purchase an entirely new set of gear from the TP, every couple levels, for vendor price+1cp. That meant that if I sold ALL my gear to a vendor the next time I felt like upgrading, I effectively rented it for a handful of pennies.

The cruddy thing is, it is still true at 80. I can purchase a lot of what I want for cheaper than the cost to buy the individual mats … if you factor in the cost to get my skill up to 400 so I can make those items? Geez.

1 – Ringmaster fight in human city. Necromancer. Way too many mobs with way too many HP, all aggro at once. Friendly NPCs didn’t scratch them and died way too fast.

I basically died over and over, trying to take 1 NPC with me each time. I found no way to split them up either, so I can take on one at a time.

2 – The later quest where you have to save NPCs from undead in the swamp near/in the Sylvari area. It is a post “choose-your-faction” mission. I was playing a Sw/Pi black powder thief.

WAY too many undead spawn and rush you. Again, the NPCs do little damage and get ripped to shreds. I won by running around kiting with my shortbow for a good 10 minutes with a giant mob chasing me down. I died a few times … usually because more mobs spawned and rushed from a different direction, or I bumped into terrain (argh, tree roots & rocks!) and my 2 or 3 step lead fell apart.

Now, good balance: Very early human commoner story quest where you go to the Inn in town and bandits show. There are a few of them, but the friendly NPCs hold their own enough to kill their target, or at least keep it busy enough til you can help.

You can engage the unfriendlies in manageable numbers.

… frankly, WAY too many story mode quests turn into “ZOMG kite kite kite!!!” situations. Friendly NPCs drop dead, and you cannot take the time to revive them. I do not feel heroic running through every story map with a slew of mobs chasing me, trying to get them stuck on terrain or abuse pathing (almost feels like I’m forced to semi-exploit) to squeeze off a couple AoEs.

I found most of these encounters felt not too “difficult” but too “imbalanced”. I never felt like I lost because I screwed up, or chose bad tactics, or got distracted and wasn’t paying attention… I always felt like I lost because the game was throwing an unwinnable situation at me unless I resorted to cheese tactics. I couldn’t “play smart to win” or “utilize my class’ strengths”, it was backpeddle & kite or quit in frustration.

I honestly wonder how someone who doesn’t have a lot of MMO experience (or gaming experience in general) could handle some of the more imbalanced-feeling encounters. I’ve seen a few solid rants in guild chat about story mission difficulty and these are MMO/gaming veterans quite often.

More people reaching the level to be able to gather them = more supply. More supply w/ static demand = prices fall?

.. or maybe evil waves of teleporting hackers driving down prices?

.. just some people kitten’ing with the market on purpose?

… and I’ll add: having an issue where if I buy several of 1 item from the TP, and put in the quantity I want to purchase (say, 9 leather), I’ve had instances this week where the transaction looks to go through, it takes ALL the money for the quantity I ordered, but only delivers ONE of the item to be picked up.

Result: Paid for 9, got 1.

I believe the Dragonbrand night-capping is due to guilds from Asia (a few obviously from Taiwan) and not the Kiwis or Aussies, but I could be wrong.

Either way, it just shows how weirdly lop-sided WvW is, and how it rewards points evenly, but that distribution seems to reward certain groups more than others.

FWIW, TC & Meg seem to join forces and push DB back pretty solidly during prime time. Watching TC & Meg players literally both siege the same DB keep within viewing distance of each other without fighting between them is kinda’ creepy though.

Seeing 150 Meguuma players in a clump together with variants of ‘Goon Squad’ guild tags (‘Goon Squad’, ‘G00n Squad’, Goonie Squad, Goon Squid, Goon Squad Too, etc … just makes the whole server seem one one massive zerg. lol)

Oh, and DB is that low down the list because it gets destroyed by any server with serious organization, and/or their own significant night-capping populous.

Lastly, I might as well mimic other posters in this section of the forum … if winning is so important to you, then free-server-transfer to a server than wins like so many others are doing. It seems the in thing to do.

In this thread (like many of the others) we see this:

Person 1 – “We planned to dominate 24/7 WvW & you didn’t. Do all the outside-the-game leg-work we did and be competitive or enjoy losing, <expletive>.”

Person 2 – “I bought this game randomly/because my friends did/whatever and the advertisement said there was fun, competitive world PvP that you could just hop into if you’re more of a ‘casual player’. I’m not finding it fun or competitive, my team cannot win.”

Person 3 – “I’m a troll and can represent either side of the argument just to be a kitten.” Lets ignore person 3 (or try to).

So, person 1’s alliance crushes WvW. Person 2 hates constant death & repair costs, or never being able to make up the point differences in WvW so is demoralized.

Person 2 then either quits, jumps servers to be on the winning side w/ Person 1, or comes to the forum all “uhm, I can’t have fun doing this but I should be able to, what gives?”

What Person 2 will not do is alarm clock. They won’t spend all kinds of out-of-game time forging some globe spanning alliance. They want to log in and have fun playing the game they paid to do so, not have what they’d perceive as a 2nd job just to enjoy their limited leisure time. The system, to them, just seems stacked against them though.

So, how do you balance WvW for both types of player? How can you suggest WvW can be fun for casual players if so much non-casual work is required just to be on even ground?

Ok, this is where someone screams “matchmaking”.

Basically, we have a server pool of different players.
We’ve got ‘World Competitive’ teams who trained and planned for 24/7 warfare.
We’ve got ‘National League’ skilled teams that might be good and competitive when they’re around, but didn’t plan to be (or want to be) 24/7 global alliances.
Then, we’ve got good old fashioned ‘After-Work-Teams’ (you know, like your job’s weekend softball team).

There is nothing wrong with any of these groups, and each bought the game and deserves to play WvW equally, and generally want to be pitted against their own tier of players.

No one joins an after-work football(soccer) team expecting to be pitted against a world champ, professional New Zealand team. Nor did those Kiwis figure they’ll be crushing the crap out of ’Teddy’s Automotive’ on Saturday afternoons.

I just hope these groups are divisible by 3. Then, each gets a good, fair, competitive match-up each week.

Thing is .. if you factor in more variables, there are even more varieties of servers out there. Suddenly, the odds of there being multiples of 3 (so things are even, fair & fun for all) become even more difficult. … and even if there are numerically these magic 3-groups of competitive servers, what if you’re in a bracket with only 2 other competitive servers? What fun is playing against the same 2 servers each week?

We currently have 21 servers in NA & 27 in Europe, AFAIK. I feel that ANet wasn’t thinking there would be such disparity between server point-numbers, so the matches would be more competitive. I feel they wanted the system to “even out”. Hell they’re even practically BEGGING people to leave over-pop servers to bolster WvW numbers on lower servers.

They built a game mode in a game that is supposed to cater to all different play styles, but the mode highly rewards the ‘hardcore’ over others. Suggestions I’ve seen are “L2P noob”, “maybe WvW isn’t for _ people” and “lets change the system to make it more fair to non-hardcore players” which inherently removes the rewards that those more hardcore players receive, so they are against it.

So now we just .. well .. wait? Hope the matchmaking system turns out to work awesomely (just like the Trading Post! .. ok, sorry, had to take that shot .. it was just too easy)?

.. or you could recognize that the downed person is a thief, and wait a couple seconds for them to use their 1 useful downed ability (the short-range targeted shadowstep) and THEN throw your ‘R’ at them.

As the player behind the engineer (or a necromancer with their ability) YOU actually know you are there and control when you throw your R.

As a thief, I do not have a constant rolling roster of every member of the PvE zerg nearby when I get downed. I have zero knowledge, usually, if there is an engineer nearby (unless I’m surrounded by turrets), and I have even less the ability to know if a nearby engineer has thrown R loaded, and off cooldown.

Though, I would suggest to others that play a thief, during PvE events if you end up downed, when you use your shadowstep (if you have time to look around and plot where to use it, which you often will not because of constant AoE damage and how quickly health ticks down) … try to ’step close to other downed people – it DOES make reviving easier even by the traditional method.

Happens pretty much 100% of the time when I’ve WvW’d lately. Actually, I’ve seen people just run up to doors solo, drop an AoE to rouse defenders, then seemingly get killed on purpose, just to “test to defenses”. This isn’t too bad a tactic honestly. BUT …

Then they lie there dead for quite a while (several minutes), reporting on the number and classes of defenders, what siege or upgrades are built, if the defenders left, etc. Its basically unlimited nearly-free (costs them repair costs) unstoppable intelligence gathering in real-time.

Actual militaries spend insane amounts of money to get satellites, aircraft, and unmanned drones to do the same thing.

One issue with siege weapon friendly fire is server-jumpers (or just alts) getting into enemy (friendly to them) fortifications and blasting down their own doors while their friends sit waiting …. oh, and griefers/trolls doing it just for the lulz.

You have no way to stop someone on your own server from building siege and using it for whatever stupid reason they want.

I’ve found quite a few people making siege equipment in rather safe, friendly, no-need-to-be-defended areas to farm PvE mobs with the system we currently have. Adding the ability for MORE people to misuse siege (and in a much more damaging way than just wasting a WvWvW slot & supply) would be bad.

There were some good parts and some parts where, in my opinion, the writing/story fell flat.

I’ll mimic comments I’ve read here already, but …
Good Stuff:
- ‘flavor’ chat between NPCs is often comical, or at least interesting. Those kids playing Divinity’s Edge were really good. I never played the first GW, so no idea who any of these people were (if they played a part there) and those kids actually summed it up nicely for me.
- Everyone’s favorite Charr w/ a fruit fetish was a good character and voiced well.
- Early personal story stuff feels decent, at least from the Norn, Charr & Asuran stuff I’ve played some of. Human I don’t enjoy much, it feels kinda’ “blah”.

The Bad:
- Characters feel ‘flat’; little to no growth; many seem 1 trick-ponies or 1-track-minds.
- Very little emotion expressed in much of the voice acting & dialogue.
- Big chunks (for me at least, probably 1/4th) the spoken dialogue being bugged and not working in the cutscenes.
- Disjointed story at times; I’ve read that buggy bits along the way are giving people bits of reference in further cutscenes of stuff they didn’t choose (never went after artifact QRS, or met XYZ character, but NPCs act like that is what the player chose).

… and then frankly, chunks of the later story feel rushed to me. I know little about the GW world (again – never played the first one) but it just feels like “and suddenly, zombies!” happens. Like there was a writers meeting and someone said “oh crap, we’re 1/2way through this game and we need a big bad” … and some dude looked up from his burrito and was like “zombies” and everyone shouted “brilliant!”

I felt like there was no build-up to the big bad. Just .. BLAM .. suddenly I’m kittens deep in this war I didn’t know was going on at all.

Maybe it is my fault for doing a few solid evenings of WvWvW (and getting like 30 levels doing it). Maybe because I returned to the story quest and did a bunch of it back-to-back? I dunno’, it just feels chucked together. My Norn spends what feels like forever completing the first part of her story quest, then I go from me wondering what is up with centaurs being so kitten’ish and everywhere, to BLAM zombies are the biggest threat to the world, and “hey lets build a fort” to “fully functional fort is awesome” in a heartbeat.

Along those lines, the game is just throwing story characters at me, and honestly I couldn’t care about any of them.

Generic-Fighter-Archtype-with-Officer-Title #15 just got sacrificed for some reason or another? Why should I care, I never saw the person before 10 minutes ago. If I had seen them before, they were completely forgettable and that is an even worse sin.

Oh … while we’re on the “lets get sad because XYZ sacrificed themselves” trope: if the player is in scene with 50 generic people “Soldier 1-20” & “Thief-Agent 1-15” etc … and EVERYONE DIES, why aren’t we upset about that? Why is Lt. Whats-her-face more important than the other 49 people that just died? Maybe that is just more of the emotionless voice acting thing getting to me; there is little to no reaction anyway. “Oh noes, like everyone died and stuff” about sums up the emotion felt in some scenes.

Trahearne, being a huge part of the story it seems, was the worst with this. I’ve said “I’ll have a medium root beer with my combo meal” with more feeling than he has delivered a “oh noes, kittenloads of people just got slaughtered and its my fault” style lines.

Obviously the game was written/designed to appeal to the broadest audience possible, and especially a younger one, it feels like, but it could have been come across better.

Cliche characters can be done in ways that are still interesting. At times, this happens (Char & Asura characters often), yet other times falls apart.

Think of some of the better known & considered ‘epic’ stories we’ve had in our lifetimes. The early Star Wars films? Very cliche main characters, stolen from previous classical works even, but we love many of them. They were fleshed out.

Someone else mentioned LotR. It is the basis for many of the common cliche fantasy characters, and yet many love the stories and movies. Why? It was done well. You felt for the characters.

In GW2 I didn’t even really like my main character, let along 9/10s the NPCs I met.

Pretty sure it is there to discourage trading camps back and forth rapidly for karma/cash/etc.

Thing is, big enough zerg of players can just burn the person down before the buff wears off anyway.

Creslin.1758:

I really think that adding extra WvW maps on a case-by-case basis per matchup is a good solution. These maps would persist until the end of the match, and be just as persistent as any other map…they would NOT be an overflow map shared between multiple servers…they would be just another map to fight for in the particular match-up.

After all, you already know which servers have long queue times and would be able to keep an “Eternal Battlegrounds 2” well populated. If the match up is with very heavily populated servers, then give them another map. If it is with servers that rarely have all zones full, then don’t give them another map.

To add to this …

What about having the number of maps scale starting from just ONE (eternal) map? Reduce the number of available maps during slower WvWvW times. Save the whole “who owns what” (so don’t reset it to empty and destroy all the hard work put in) but basically just “gray out” the option to log in there, and funnel everyone down into however many maps are left running.

This fixes the “so many people want to WvWvW but we’re locked out, gimme’ more maps!” situation, as well as funnels off-peak players into a more competitive situation.

Currently, there are too many people wanting to play for 12 hours a day to accommodate on 4 maps, and for 12 hours a day so few players spread across 4 maps that servers with higher “off peak” populations can run rampant and capture everything while the other team cannot field the players to defend.

… if geography and ping times weren’t an issue I’d suggest just making it 2v2v2 .. and having each NA server married to a Euro server with opposing population peak times, so there were more maps available and a more even server population.