Guild Wars 2

I’d like to thank the devs for doing this, especially for outlining the philosophy behind the changes, and comment on some of the proposed Thief changes.

Quick Recovery
I approve of the change to the generic initiative rate and think it is a good change that will make thieves much less dependent on traits to generate initiative. However, I think that changing Quick Recovery in the proposed way will only serve to make it a very underused trait. With the proposed change Quick Recovery gives the same initiative as Infiltrator’s Signet, only without any of the other benefits, like the stun breaker, shadowstep, etc. To compensate for the decreased initiative regeneration, I think it would be best to add a secondary effect to the trait, though I’m not certain what effect.

Assassin’s Reward
I approve the idea of making this trait more effective, however increasing the scaling with Healing alone won’t accomplish much on it’s own since many thieves do not spec into Healing. I propose splitting the scaling by increasing the scaling with initiative of the skills used and Healing instead of just Healing. A 10/25% split or similar would be better received given the increased initiative regen.

Hard to Catch
I like that this trait is becoming more available, but having a movement skill you cannot fully control can be disastrous with the game’s heavy emphasis on positioning. I think if there was a better way for the thief to control the effects of the trait it would help people adopt the trait.

One way to do this would be to change the trait to make Steal a stun breaker. Even fully traited into steal that would mean a stun breaker every 21 seconds, which isn’t far from the 24 second strun breaker you can get with Signet Use. This would give the player complete control of when the escape occurs and make the trait much more reliable. If combined with the idea from earlier to make Steal shadowstep you forward even without a target it would live up to the trait’s name.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

These consumeables do NOT need to go. They need a universal 30-60 second cooldown.

Is one gear going to save someone from dying in a 1v5 scenario? Not likely. Someone would have a stunbreak or when the stun wears off, the five kill the one anyway. Can it buy that one person some time? Yes. Is this gamebreaking at all? No.

Are 50 gears going to save someone from dying in a 1v5? You had better believe it! Is this gamebreaking at all? Oh yeah.

See, the problem isn’t with the item, the problem is with the frequency of use. Throwing a long global cooldown on these bundle consumeables would fix the problems without having to remove them. Since it would be global, they couldn’t chain together multiple consumeables to get the same basic effect.

Spy kits need to stay removed, though, due to allowing memsers to stay hidden for unreasonable amounts of time even with fantastic sweeping by their opponents.

Completely agree. I don’t mind if someone uses one or two of these in a fight, but the fact that they can entirely replace the usage of your regular skills because they lack a cooldown is ridiculous. Add a global cooldown to all consumables when one is used in combat and that instantly fixes the majority of these “broken” items.

I don’t think they should outright remove the consumables, rather they need to add an actual cooldown to consumables while in combat. I don’t care if someone tosses a Gear/Spikeroot fruit at me to stun me for a few seconds. The Golem in a Box is also fine. What is not fine is that they can throw one every second 250 times in a row. Add a 20 second global cooldown for all consumables while in combat and suddenly the items that were considered OP become bits of extra flavor.

Check your combat log to see what is causing the stun. It may be someone is throwing cogs at you. Cogs are a consumable item that can be spammed to permastun a group of people at range so that might be the cause.

Let’s also talk about throwing cogs. 2 seconds AoE stun, almost no cooldown. I’d be ok with items like this in WvW if they couldn’t be popped every second forever. They seriously need to a cooldown on consumable item use while in combat. That means they can keep them for variety’s sake with not making them be completely ridiculous.

Ragnar.4257:

Enenion.8127:

I’d rather see an overhaul of the upgrade system. WvW is a team game right? So why is upgrading structures all done by one person? Upgrading structures should be a team effort. I think that all players should be able to donate money (with a minimum depending on what you’re upgrading) to the upgrade npc and then be placed on a pool of people who get to vote on an upgrade. Then, when someone talks to the npc and starts a construction all people who put in money get to vote on the upgrades that are available at the time (depending on the objective’s supply and the gold in the pool). This would be similar to the voting system for choosing explorable paths in dungeons. The votes of members of the guild that own the tower, camp or keep would count twice.

Here’s a practical example. Say 4 players want to upgrade a tower they just captured. Players 1 and 2 donate 2 silver, Player 3 donates 5 and Player 4 donates 1 silver. Player 4 is a spy so he wants to use the money on buying merchants, so he initiates the vote for what to build. Player 3 is a member of the guild that now owns the tower and he wants to reinforce walls so he votes for that. Player 1 doesn’t vote and Player 2 votes to reinforce the walls. The walls are then upgraded thanks to the collective work from all people involved (even the spy, who helped pay for the upgrade). Had there been a tie between two upgrades there would be a runoff vote eliminating the lesser voted options (except for the option to not build anything yet, which would always be there).

What if the spy is the first person to donate, and immediately initiates the vote?

Just like the voting system for choosing exp dungeon paths, there is some time for a vote to occur. While that timer is counting down anyone else can donate money to get a vote in the decision. Players near the tower would also get a notification that an upgrade is being built so they can donate and vote if they want to.

I’d rather see an overhaul of the upgrade system. WvW is a team game right? So why is upgrading structures all done by one person? Upgrading structures should be a team effort. I think that all players should be able to donate money (with a minimum depending on what you’re upgrading) to the upgrade npc and then be placed on a pool of people who get to vote on an upgrade. Then, when someone talks to the npc and starts a construction all people who put in money get to vote on the upgrades that are available at the time (depending on the objective’s supply and the gold in the pool). This would be similar to the voting system for choosing explorable paths in dungeons. The votes of members of the guild that own the tower, camp or keep would count twice.

Here’s a practical example. Say 4 players want to upgrade a tower they just captured. Players 1 and 2 donate 2 silver, Player 3 donates 5 and Player 4 donates 1 silver. Player 4 is a spy so he wants to use the money on buying merchants, so he initiates the vote for what to build. Player 3 is a member of the guild that now owns the tower and he wants to reinforce walls so he votes for that. Player 1 doesn’t vote and Player 2 votes to reinforce the walls. The walls are then upgraded thanks to the collective work from all people involved (even the spy, who helped pay for the upgrade). Had there been a tie between two upgrades there would be a runoff vote eliminating the lesser voted options (except for the option to not build anything yet, which would always be there).

Cactus.2710:

It would also cause LOTS of friction between players on the same team if the point system discouraged players from joining groups. You’d have small groups of elite players roaming around doing their best to exclude lesser geared or lesser leveled players entirely. You’d have small groups competing with each other for taking camps and arguments over who actually took it. I don’t see any of that as being positive for the game at all.

That was kind of the point of my 3rd paragraph. They are not going to add a system that splits rewards between players because that makes you unhappy to have more players. It creates a very antisocial playerbase that needs to compete with itself as well as enemies and you can tell they care about this issue by how the rest of the game is designed. This applies to both the system I was talking about and the system for splitting rewards based on damage as was being discussed above.

Given that the entire game is based around facilitating large numbers of players working together, the new reward system is not going to try to discourage players from playing together. It’s just not going to happen. And that means that the best way of earning the new rank is going to be by playing with large groups of players, aka zerging. The new rewards are not going to change this.

Look, clearly the best reward system to break up zergs is to assign a pool of rank points to each objective and split them up based on the number of people who participated in taking the objective. Here’s a practical example. If killing an enemy player is worth 10 point and taking a supply camp is worth 100 points, if 10 people take a supply camp each person gets 10 points (the same as a solo kill). Then if 20 people zerg the supply camp half of them get no reward at all. That would certainly break up zergs since having an overly large amount of players take an objective would hurt your increase in rank.

Of course the system can’t be as easy as “a supply camp is worth 100 points”. For instance, the number of points given needs to scale with the level of upgrades on the objective and the amount of enemy siege inside it. Taking a fully upgraded tower is a lot harder than taking a brand new tower obviously so you’d need more people for that. Still, the principle of splitting the rewards based on the number of people participating is surely the fastest way to discourage zerging through rewards and is also part of the “reward people by damage done” suggestion above.

Well, it is extremely unlikely that such a system will ever be implemented in GW2. Even a cursory examination of GW2’s mechanics reveals that GW2 is designed to allow large numbers of players to play together with little to no downsides. Take for instance the fact that everyone gets full exp and their own loot roll from defeating mobs. Or the fact that events scale so that more players will yield more loot. Or even that the gathering nodes are not shared between players. Well, having a system where the rewards are limited by the number of player present flies in the face of all of that. Going back to that previous example, if I’m about to get 10 points for killing an enemy player and an ally joins in I only get 5. That’s not going to make me very happy to see that player is it? Well, the same applies to a system where I need to share my rewards based on damage done as is being discussed above. As long as the rewards I’m getting for whatever I’m doing are less than what I’d get if I had the same thing with less people it directly contradicts the design of GW2.

tldr: if you’re looking for the new reward system to discourage zerging, don’t get your hopes up. At it’s core GW2’s design enables large groups of players to play together with little to no downside and it is extremely unlikely that this new reward system will directly contradict that.

I am so disappointed by this I am cancelling my subscription.

But seriously, I’d rather have the patch be mostly bug free and working well when it comes out than getting a buggy patch right now. With that said, WvW is getting a little stale after so long so I may take a break until the update actually hits.

By the way, in the next patch can you introduce an item to stack stacks of consumables? My various stacks of badges is crowding my bank and I would love a way to convert one stack of Badges of Honor into one Large Badge of Honor and the other way around. That way I could keep all stacks of my badges in one slot instead of having to spread them out into 8.

A couple of things. First your math is incorrect because it doesn’t factor in leap years, and there would be at least one in a six year period.

Second, the solution is not to make the titles take less time to achieve, but rather to add intermediate ranks of the titles. It doesn’t matter that the Ultimate Interceptor title will take 1,000,000 yaks to kill when you can be a Novice Interceptor (1000 yaks killed), an Apprentice Interceptor (5000 yaks killed), a Master Interceptor (20000 yaks killed), etc. Take for instance the Rank title in GW1. It has a cap that no player has ever reached since the start of the game, but no one complained about that because you could show people you were rank 6, or 9, or even 13. They need to rework the WvW titles so that there are more intermediate titles in between because that way even if no one ever achieves the Ultimate titles people are still happy showing off the intermediate ones.

The Power of the Mists buff is now always on. It used to appear in the boons section but after the UI update you can now see it’s effect by mousing over the fort icon in the top left corner of the UI.

I don’t think the categories are very good. The new system for me is both better and worse because enemies will appear faster but it’s become harder to see allies. Personally, I like that better so I marked better but the categories aren’t as well defined as they could be.

Why is it gold instead of Badges of honor? Because ANet designed the Commander tag to be used in both WvW and PvE (for helping with the larger event chains). That alone means that the currency required for it needs to be shared in both WvW and PvE. In other words, it can’t be anything you can only acquire by playing WvW. Like Badges of Honor. It doesn’t matter that PvE is so easy a commander is neither needed nor wanted, as long as the title is shared between PvE and WvW the currency to acquire it must also be shared.

Why does it cost 100 gold? Because they don’t want everyone and their mother to be a commander. So they make the price high, but make it so the currency is shared so many people can “elect” a commander by giving them currency. In other words, it can’t be any currency that you can’t trade with other players like Karma or Badges of Honor.

So what types of currency is there that exists in both WvW and PvE and can be shared? The answers are Gold and Influence. And since you can trade Gold for Influence making it cost Influence just adds another unneeded step to the process. Gold then is the only currency that makes sense, given the design of the object. In addition, Badges of Honor are the worst form of currency for it since it fails both design criteria.

If you don’t like it the first thing you need to do is convince ANet to split the Commander title into separate PvE and WvW versions. That or convince ANet they need an entirely new form of currency to determine who gets to be a commander.

The new system is better for me and I haven’t run into a situation where I’ve been killed by an invisible mass of enemies yet, which was happening to me with the old system. I did have trouble seeing allies when we were organizing a golem rush though, but overall it’s an improvement for me.

I like the downed state and think it adds an interesting layer to the combat. The only thing I would change is remove the ability to res defeated players. I think being able to pick up defeated players anywhere in the field makes battles much less interesting because there is no concept of loss of players. Sure, a small team can attack a zerg and maybe defeat 5, but that doesn’t matter because they are back on their feet seconds after the fight is over. It also trivializes the downed state itself, because even if you fail to rally and die your mates can just pick you up again and continue like nothing happened. Removing the ability to pick up defeated players would make it even more important to save them in the downed state and make the downed state a much more interesting combat element.

To counter taking away the ability of players to res their allies from the defeated state, I would res all allies in the vicinity when a Victory occurs. Upon capturing a castle, keep or tower, that objective would project a healing effect called Victory that would resurrect all nearby allied players. This effect would only last a few seconds at best and then disappear completely afterwards. This could also be used to rally defeated defenders after a successful defense of an objective, but right now there isn’t really a good way to tell when an objective has been successfully defended (the defend timer doesn’t do a good enough job).

For me, it’s working a lot better for spotting enemies but I have some trouble spotting allies. Still, this is a good start at fixing the culling issue.

85% to 90% reduced treb range? You do realize that would give trebs a range of 1000-1500 right? As in, about the same distance an engineer can toss a grenade? Who needs a siege engine, just grab a boulder and start tossing.

An argument can be made for some reduction in treb range but 85-90% is ridiculous.

The concept is cool, but it opens up griefing opportunities. 4 catapults beating on a wall? Build your own wooden one in front of them to block projectiles. Since they are your allies they wouldn’t be able to hurt the wall either.

You mean to say that having transfers be free and unlimited for so long enabled large numbers of people to transfer to low-tier servers and completely break the ranking system? Who knew!

Paid transfers star next week. It’s a bit pointless to say they should swap back to 24 hour matches now.

Making the commander icon cost gold makes perfect sense when you consider ANet’s motivations. First, they want the commander icon to be used in PvE as well as WvW (Not Just for WvW section). That naturally eliminates any WvW specific currency, like Badges of Honor or WvW achievements. Second, they want it to have a high cost so that there are few commanders but they want to mitigate that by making the currency for it shared. If the currency is shared people can pool some together to “elect” a commander, which is exactly what currently happens with big guilds. This also eliminates Karma or any Soul/Account Bound currency since they cannot be shared.

So what currencies exist in both WvW and PvE that can be shared between many players? The answers are Gold and Influence. And since you can trade gold for Influence, they may as well skip the middle man and have it cost Gold.

If you don’t like this or want it to change, the first thing you should be asking for is a split between WvW and PvE commanders.

Well, if you can find a way up there you can do whatever you want. Keep in mind though all the legendary guards will one shot you and all players and NPCS are invincible, so there’s not really much you can do. There was a video of someone getting in there to shoot fireworks for a bit so there is that.

Stiv.1820:

I like it the way it is as well there is just one change I would like. Swap the effects around so the 1st hit rips a boon and the 2nd hit is unblockable. Currently the unblockable aspect of it kind of sucks.

The first hit it unblockable to be able to remove boons through Aegis. Honestly, I prefer it that way since there are better ways of doing damage.

I like Thief Venoms but find them uninteresting to use as skills. This is because they spend a long time on your bar doing nothing. Out of combat the venom does nothing for you since there is little point using it when you don’t have a target to hit and even weapon skills you use for movement (I’m looking at you Infiltrator’s Arrow) will use up stacks of it. In combat you get to use the skill for a couple of seconds at best and then the skill is put on recharge for a large part of the fight.

I think Venoms would be much more interesting if they acted like Guardian Virtues or Signets. While the venom is active on your bar you gain stacks of the venom up to a cap depending on the venom. Each attack skill would then use up one stack of each Venom you have. Then activating the venom gives you the maximum number of stacks but means you no longer get passive stacks of the Venom.

Here is a practical example with Devourer Venom. Say Devourer Venom gives one stack of itself every 20 seconds up to a cap of 2 stacks. The player is then given the choice of letting the skill proc every 20 seconds or using up the skill to get 2 stacks instantly but then not getting any stacks for 60 seconds (recharge time increased a bit to compensate for new functionality). These numbers are purely hypothetical and the timer per stack doesn’t have to be the same, each venom should have it’s own timer depending on the strength of the venom (so Basilisk Venom could gain one stack once every 40 seconds). I think this choice would make Venom skills much more interesting than they are now.

This would require some reworking of certain traits to work with the new system. For instance Residual Venom could increase the maximum cap on stacks of Venoms by 1 and Venomous Strength would have to be nerfed to 1 stack of might per application to prevent incredibly might stacking from triggering all Venom skills simultaneously. Quick Venoms could either decrease the recharge of the actual skill or the interval between stacks.

I’d love to hear more information about the planned AoE nerf. Are you guys planning to lower overall AoE damage but raise the number of possible targets to compensate? How will you handle classes whose majority of skills are AoE? Any information on this issue would be really helpful.

If they do nerf the damage of each AoE tick they need to increase either the duration or the number of targets affected to compensate. AoE should not be more effective at doing damage to a single target than a single target ability, it’s purpose should be to deter larger groups. Ultimately it depends on how they handle this, but it’s pretty clear a a simple damage nerf to all AoE skills won’t cut it.

Daecollo.9578:

StugLyfe.2134:

Henrik.7560:

Thieves shouldn’t be able to move 50% faster in stealth as well as damage doesn’t break stealth, that just gives them a chance to run away miles down the road if things go bad for them.
They can’t have 50% speed in stealth combined with stealth that can’t be broken.

Don’t forget also yhat they loose conditions when entering stealth too.

Speed is capped at 33%, the 50% speed does not make a difference.

Thieves can run far, but they must burn and save there utility slots and initiative for such.

Speed is capped at 33% out of combat. In combat the +50% move speed allows you to move faster than with swiftness. Try in out in game if you don’t believe me.

Predator.7321:

Enenion.8127:

If they do decide to make waypoints contestable 100% of the time I’d hope they add a new way to make them useful to compensate. What about allowing people to res at a contested waypoint at the cost of the keep’s supply (2-5 per person)? Or being able to make the waypoint uncontested for the next defense event for a larger amount of supply (100-200)? This would give defenders an advantage as long as the keep still had supplies and not make waypoints useless, even if they can be contested most of the time.

That would make griefers very veryhappy it would be worst than orb flyhacking

Griefers can already use up a keep’s supply by building useless siege weapons, which they can get for free from jumping puzzles. But I agree that there should be countermeasures put in place to stop giefers from emptying the supply this way. If waypointing to a contested keep costs supply then there needs to be a maximum number of times you can waypoint to it in a certain amount of time. If removing the contested status of a waypoint costs supply it needs to only be allowed every other defense event or only be doable by a member of the guild who owns the keep.

If they do decide to make waypoints contestable 100% of the time I’d hope they add a new way to make them useful to compensate. What about allowing people to res at a contested waypoint at the cost of the keep’s supply (2-5 per person)? Or being able to make the waypoint uncontested for the next defense event for a larger amount of supply (100-200)? This would give defenders an advantage as long as the keep still had supplies and not make waypoints useless, even if they can be contested most of the time.

After a capture there is a little delay for when certain guilds are allowed to cap an objective. The delay is done on purpose so that the guild that contributed to the assault the most is given a little time to be the first to claim it. After a certain amount of time without being claimed anyone is allowed to capture the point.

The problem isn’t that the achievements take too long to get, since they are designed to last for the entire lifetime of the game. The problem is that they need to add more intermediate tiers so people have something to work towards in the short term. It’s like the Rank title track in GW1. No one felt bad that it went up to Rank 13, which took a ton of time to get, because you could show off the titles leading up to that. They need to add more easily achievable smaller goals along the way.

As an example, the Yakslapper track is ridiculous not because it requires one million yaks for the final achievement, but because it doesn’t offer any reward for killing 100, 1000, or even 10000 yaks along the way. Instead of only getting the Ultimate title they need more titles working up to the huge one that will take years to get.

Crystal Desert is currently green.

Doing the jumping puzzles on a regular basis nets you so much siege that you shouldn’t have to buy any unless you need one specific piece. You can get 8 pieces a day from the puzzles, and more can be dropped by guard NPCs. Run them with a full party and you get 40 pieces, more than enough to take down or heavily guard any objective. They don’t even take that much time either, the borderlands ones can be done in less than 3 minutes and the one in EB in less than 10. Spend half an hour stocking up on siege each day and you’ll never have to use money on siege again.

I’ve gotten about 2.25k badges in total but after buying some armor and the gift I have 1.3k just sitting around in the bank. Hopefully the February update will give me something to spend them on.

As a little aside, that icon was used in the original Guild Wars to represent a skill only a monster could use .

Here is an official statement from ANet on the matter from their reddit AMA awhile back. I was looking for the post they made on the official forum stating they were not considering putting names in WvW but I couldn’t find it, so here you go:

“There’s been a lot of discussion about seeing enemy names in WvW. While I certainly understand the reasoning behind the request to see enemy names, we are fairly firm about not showing names of the opposing teams. I think of it this way, in a war people dont introduce themselves before trying to kill each other. When you are fighting in the mists for your world, you are in the middle of a giant war against two opposing forces who want nothing more than to take everything you own and kill you as many times as they possibly can. That guy who just shot you is not Bob the Engineer, he’s the enemy.
Not showing enemy names in WvW also helps players that are less pvp-oriented feel less threatened about venturing into the battle because seeing enemies as anonymous ‘invaders’ creates a sense that opponents won’t be able to recognize them and pick on them because of their lack of skill in a fight, so they in turn feel more embolded to go out and fight in the first place. Not showing names also makes it so people can feel as if they can ‘hide’ in a fight if need be, but still be around to help out. That’s a pretty critical part of making WvW feel more inviting for people that would normally never think about playing PvP in any other game.
We’ve heard “I usually dont PvP, but I love WvW” again and again from people in our beta, so even though showing names might make for a more competitive pvp environment, we’d much rather create a game that is more welcoming for people that don’t normally play the more hardcore PvP games. If you want to see enemy names and get to know the community of people you are fighting against, competitive PvP is the place to get that sort of thing in Guild Wars 2. WvW is the place where you fight with your friends and show your might against a faceless never-ending horde of enemies. It’s not about taking names, it’s about taking back that tower and claiming it for your guild so it can wave your flag right in the enemies face!"

I can confirm that out of combat the trait moves you no faster than with swiftness. There is a hard cap on movement speed which is given by swiftness out of combat. Anything above that is brought in line with that maximum. This means that out of combat you will not notice a difference between swiftness or running with stealth.

In combat your base running speed is lower so the trait allows you to reach higher speeds without hitting the cap. In combat you can see a clear difference between swiftness and running in stealth with this trait.

Additionally, the bonuses are not additive or multiplicative, only the highest bonus applies. That means if you use both SoS and the +50% move speed in stealth, while you are in stealth you will only get the +50% movement speed since it is the highest buff available to you. They won’t add to give you a +75% or anything like that. The same applies with swiftness and SoS, if you have swiftness on it overrides SoS’s passive move speed instead of adding to it.

I’d actually prefer if they split the skill into two parts of a chain skill. The first part would feature the dagger hit, boon removal and the evade, while the second part would be the damaging sword attack. This would give players more control over the skill in general instead of locking players in an animation that may cause the second attack to miss. It gives players the option of positioning themselves for the second hit no matter where the pathing for the evade takes them. I’d also split the initiative cost to a 3-1 split between the first and second skills respectively to encourage the possibility of using only the first part of the chain to strip boons repeatedly, but that’s just me.

You cannot give classes the ability to remove stealth from a thief because thives get special skills while stealthed. Saying any class should be able to get a thief out of stealth by hitting them is akin to saying that warrior adrenaline skills should go on a 3 second cooldown whenever they are hit. You cannot give other classes ways to specifically deny thieves from using their abilities without introducing the same thing for other classes as well. I wouldn’t mind a skill that prevents elementalists from swapping attunement if they’re in 1000 range of me, but that’s just not going to happen.

Likewise, you cannot have an increase in the revealed debuff without severely nerfing some of the builds that rely on those stealth skills, like the pistol condition thief that relies on using the ability to stack bleeds. A change like this would severely limit thief build diversity and push people more towards stealth abilities they need to use fewer times (read backstab) and severely weaken thief PvE capabilities.

I’m not saying that stealth is perfect as is, far from it in fact, but these two changes are both unfair towards the thief class and are not helping the discussion. What needs to happen is that first, culling needs to be fixed so that thieves reappear exactly when their attacks hit, not 0.5 to 1 second later. After that, classes need a better way of knowing if they hit a stealthed thief. The best way to do this would be to show damage numbers from direct damage attacks that hit a stealthed thief. This reinforces the idea that invisible does not mean invulnerable and gives people an indication when they actually hit a thief that is stealthed. There are already ways of telling if you’re hitting a stealthed thief, they just tend to be convoluted like looking to see when a chain skill swaps to the next skill, so there is very little reason to not simplify this down to just showing direct damage.

Notice that this change would not have any adverse effects for the thief in build diversity or PvE, as mobs don’t care for damage numbers. This change affects only stealth’s use against other players and makes it more fun for players to fight against stealthed people as they at least get satisfaction of seeing damage if their hits connect.

I don’t think there should be any way of knocking a thief out of stealth simply because that doesn’t allow them to use their stealth skills. It would put the ability to use some of their skills in the hands of other professions and no other profession has that restriction. No elementalist can be stopped from using their water attunement skills if you hit them enough or stack enough conditions on them. Hitting a mesmer doesn’t stop them from using skills that summon clones. So why should a thief not be able to use his stealth skills just because you hit him a few times?

With that said, I feel there should be a way to more efficiently track a stealthed thief. I think a big reason that a lot of players don’t even try to attack a stealthed thief is because even if they hit the thief they get no feedback that their attack was successful. In this game damage is a reward for performing an action correctly, but even if a player hits a stealthed thief he or she is shown no reward because no damage displays. For this reason, I feel that direct damage done to a stealthed thief should still show damage numbers and that conditions on a stealthed thief should show damage every 2 seconds with the first tick being at the start of the stealth.

Now this change would not make stealth useless. The lack of target created by the stealth still saves the thief from any skills that require a target (like ballista skills in WvW). Furthermore, any skills that are likely to hit a stealthed thief are AoE skills which means that even if an enemy player manages to hit a stealthed thief they wouldn’t know the thief’s exact location and only have a hint of where to place their next shot. As far as conditions go, I specified they should show damage every 2 seconds because if they ticked constantly a simple bleed would result in complete tracking of the thief’s position, which negates one of the advantages of stealth completely. Since most thief stealth options last 3 seconds, 4 if traited, a condition would show damage when a thief is either halfway through his stealth or has one second left in the stealth giving the attacker at least a clue what the thief is doing in stealth.

In short, there shouldn’t be a way to knock a thief out of stealth because that prevents them from using some of their skills. However, there should be better ways of tracking stealthed enemies. Showing direct damage done to a stealthed enemy and showing damage from conditions every 2 seconds accomplishes this while also not rendering stealth useless. It also emphasizes that stealthed thieves are not invulnerable, and rewards players who are able to deal damage to stealthed thieves while making the second aspect of thief defense, mobility, more valuable.

Svarty.8019:

Enenion.8127:

I love the idea and how it works but I think the NPC commander is a little too powerful right now, making defense against a breakout too difficult. The attackers should have an advantage during a breakout but I don’t think it should be quite as severe.

I disagree. I think the breakout is about magically giving the attacker a foothold, so the process itself doesn’t matter and seems to be intended to be uninterruptable.

If it’s intended to be uninterruptible it’s not working correctly as there have been breakout events that fail. In the battle between FA, TC, and CD for example we had a breakout event fail when a huge TC group came and annihilated everything. Besides, it would be boring if the defenders had absolutely no chance of stopping the breakout.

I love the idea and how it works but I think the NPC commander is a little too powerful right now, making defense against a breakout too difficult. The attackers should have an advantage during a breakout but I don’t think it should be quite as severe.

draxynnic.3719:

Luvpie.8350:

Either way. PvE got more interesting this way too

That’s something that concerns me, actually – I’ve been hit with a spate of ‘getting disconnected from the servers’ lately, and they’re annoying enough without the prospect of coming back to be faced with a waypoint fee and damaged armour. If they can find a way to distinguish a player-initiated disconnect from a genuine one, I’d be all for it, but without that this could catch a lot of innocent people if it’s implemented in non-PvP parts of the game.

Not to worry, the new system is only for disconnecting in WvW. PvE and even sPvP matches will not be affected in any way. This was confirmed by Habib on the first page.

I don’t really care either way, but even if finishing were to count as an attack the stealth would be removed after the attack hit. Stealth is never removed when an attack is started, only when an attack hits. Removing stealth when a stomp starts makes absolutely no sense.

I don’t mind the matchup as it’s been consistently a pretty even fight. But if you really want the match to change, you should focus on attacking Yaks. According to the millenium system the matchup might change if Yaks loses by a wider margin and Crystal Desert wins their bracket by a sizable margin as well. If that were to happen, Crystal Desert would move up and replace Yaks as the T3 server. This is the way the matchups can change the fastest as Yaks is closer in total rank to Crystal Desert than Tarnished Coast is to Isle of Janthir. Assuming TC wins again and IoJ loses again they will likely swap the week after this current week.

Tldr: if you want the match to change by next week, focus on making Yaks lose badly. The week after next week it’s likely that TC will move up as long as everything stays roughly the same.

Score update. FA just passed Yaks and is now in second place. Still one to two hours left in the match, but it looks like FA is widening the gap.

Can we get another score update? I’m from FA and I hope we can pull our stuff together to push for second place before the match resets later today.

Yes.

I would love a better LFG tool. At the very least, it would have to be a server-wide version of what we currently have with notes to specify what you are looking for.

However, I would not like an automated tool. I still think that talking to and manually inviting the other team members is a must.

I really like the downed state, but think they need to change the ability to revive defeated people. I think they should either make the resurrection process longer with more people or make players unable to do that in combat (this would mean damage would interrupt a player that is resurrecting someone because it would put them in combat). That would put more emphasis on players that are downed as defeating someone would essentially remove them from the current fight.

NullMad.4370:

Actually Splitrr you can’t get exotic weapons that ares Power/Toughness/Vitality with badges or karma. You can only get them in dungeons or for gold. Why they didn’t make token set for every stat combination is a little beyond me. I think they consider wvwvw a chunk of pve and so they think pure wvwvwers don’t exist.

You can find some Exotics that give P/V/T for Karma in Orr. After the Altar of Dwayna is claimed you can get a set of P/V/T medium armor boots for karma (Source: I wear them). Then of course the actual Invader set can be gotten by collecting badges and turning them in for an entire P/V/T set, but the badge collection process is slower than running the dungeon.