Guild Wars 2

Shooopa.5632:

But I’m not even looking for a WvW group, I wanted a general purpose group. And the only two so far I’ve gotten in touch with are located on full servers.

Game design this poor is practically an insult to players.

Any server has decent guilds that can provide you with the general purpose group play you need, zero need for a full server if that’s what you want. And locking full servers is poor game design? Seems rather practical to me. I have no doubts that Anet did their homework on both what kind of population their servers can support as well as what sort of population threshold would negatively impact the gameplay experience for people if it were exceeded.

@OP: That’s some bad luck there, but you were using the server transfer feature for something it’s not really intended for so…

Maybe you’ll get lucky and manage to get back in during off-hours, though with the Halloween even starting soon I highly doubt it.

I’m ok with cosmetic rewards as they are, but they don’t exactly offer much incentive to play. I mean, once my guardian gets his TA set, he’s effectively done with PvE in the game because that’s really the only heavy set I like.

My main is a Mesmer but in sPvP I play Ele and Necro because they are fun for me. Both have a large number of bugs (last time I counted the ones in the Ele bug thread there were 95 listed bugs, which included function, visual, and tooltip bugs of course) but I really enjoy the playstyles of each.
I think you can make any profession work for you, whether it’s in PvE or PvP. Some have it easier than others but not to the point where the convenience outweighs the fun factor.

The timing isn’t screwing anyone, or rather it’s screwing everyone evenly. Since the events will presumably end at the same time, NA players in the western timezones will be screwed out of most of the last day of the event because of working hours. So yeah NA players have a little extra time at the beginning while EU peeps have to sleep, but that time is made up and everything evens out.

I did notice that acolytes tend to aggro from farther away when running around compared to, say, pirates or grubs. I’m glad mesmers have possibly the easiest time running past mobs thanks to invisibility and clones, or I might be frustrated myself.

Glad I don’t like the way any of those armor sets look, or I might be mad too…that’s a rather exhorbitant price for some average-looking armor.

While there is a fair point buried in the OP, the post itself seems designed to start forum drama. I agree that it sucks to have to skip some DEs because they are extremely difficult to solo, and that this scenario becomes a little too common in the higher level zones, especially the zones in Ascalon, which seem a lot less populated than the western zones (probably because they are visually boring and repetitive).

Yikes, I feel bad for tier 2 servers right now, nobody enjoys a one-sided fight. Tiers 1 and 3 are both pretty interesting this week at least!

I don’t think people mainly put points in arcana to reduce the attunement cooldown, it’s mainly because the traits are all great, no matter what attunement you are in or what weapon you are using. That said, if you are chaining damage abilities and then need to go into a specific attunement for a control spell (or anything along those lines), the lower cooldown would be useful. It’s especially helpful if you’re trying to be methodical about skill use and not just using abilities as they come off cooldown.

A few of the default faces do look a little too soft for my taste, but there is plenty of potential for creating something more rugged.

Here’s my guardian, for example:

1v1 is actually the easiest scenario to beat a thief in, if you’re in a group fight a smart thief will wait until you’re occupied with someone else and then jump in, and chances are you don’t have all your cooldowns up and are at less than max health by that point, so unless you’re a bunker, you end up dead. Then again, if you’re a bunker the thief probably wasn’t targeting you in the first place.

So then how would you tell apart friendly and enemy aoe in a large fight? The combo field border?

Judging by the large number of thieves plaguing spvp, rolling a thief is exactly what a lot of people did. I spent half of my last match on my ele running away from two thieves who insisted on chasing me across the entire map.

Here’s an idea, maybe they should make thieves better at other roles so people actually play them in different ways.

Glyph of elemental power is fine as is. With all the attunement switching we have to do, if the condition changed with attunement you might have to sacrifice a useful condition (weakness/chill) for the sake of using an earth/fire cooldown which would suck. Proc rate could be a tad higher.

Eruption is not fine just because you can use instants. Being rooted for that long, especially as d/d, is just asking for pain. That and the cast is so obvious anyone can easily avoid it, essentially wasting it.

It gets tougher for every profession to some degree due to the high density of mobs in the Orr zones. Leveling through crafting is the best way to go for 70-80. Pick up a crafting booster at the gem store and go nuts. 70-80 took me about 40 minutes this way. Then buy some exotics with karma/gold and things get considerably less hard after that.

The funniest part of the mesmer downed state is when your own teammates try to heal the clone instead of you (the clone has a white revive mark above his head, while the real mesmer has a blue one, for people who don’t know), and I have to tell them they’re healing the wrong person in chat.

But yeah, for people trying to stomp a mesmer, here’s how the 2 ability works: you teleport in a random direction and summon a clone. The clone will always be the first thing to appear, followed one second later by the real mesmer. The real mesmer also has a large red arrow above his head. The clone and mesmer will also stack confusion on their targets, so go straight for the stomp rather than attacking them.
If you are in the middle of a stomp when the mesmer disappears, do not cancel your stomp as there is a chance that the mesmer didn’t teleport far away enough and your stomp will still hit him.

edit: and yes please buff the elementalist downed state, seriously.

Crunchy Gremlin.5798:

Sorry I guess i meant not a noob to mmo pvp. a noob to this game.
im leaning towards the build that eurosdown points out.

0/0/10/30/30 cantrips.
scepter/focus.
but maybe and certainly later
scepter/dagger.

It’s a pretty great support build and you feel useful for the most part as long as you are in a group. For example, the elemental dodge effect on evasive arcana is a blast finisher, so if you dodge into somebody’s combo field (or one of your own if you run staff) you can pull off some neat aoe effects like a hefty aoe heal. The spec is also great for condition removal if you go with those particular traits in water. It’s a good idea to switch your traits (and even weapons) out once you know what kind of professions/builds you are dealing with in any given match.

I forgot to mention utility slots; I like lightning flash, mist form, and I switch out between armor of earth and glyph of elemental power, armor of earth against heavy cc opponents and glyph of elemental power for the sweet sweet weakness or chill stacking. Chain inflicting weakness on several people at once with staff is a great help to your team, and chill is always great, though you have other options for chilling people so I prefer weakness. (the glyph will allow you to inflict the condition associated with whichever attunement you are in when you activate it, so if you activate it in air and switch to another attunement, you will continue inflicting weakness).

I really dislike scepter though, other profs can lay on condition damage a lot better than eles and I like to run with a soldier’s amulet for the survivability, which leaves no space for condition damage unless you count runes. It’s up to you of course, but I prefer d/d or staff myself.

Don’t play elementalist, it’s honestly a huge waste of time. If you do want to to try though, the 0/0/30/30/10 build as mentioned above works, or you can do a water/arcana build with 10 points in earth for earth’s embrace. Water traits usually revolve around cantrips and in arcana I usually pick evasive arcana and always always always elemental attunement. The third trait depends on what weapon you are using, though for daggers I prefer the vigor on crit trait if I have any precision or final shielding if not.

Just remove the movement component from heartseeker and leave the damage where it is, problem solved. Good thieves will still be good, bad thieves will have to learn to work for their kills and maybe improve in the process.

Bunzy.8674:

Please stay on topic, this isn’t about who has the strongest or weakest. It’s about the whole downed state being a flawed mechanic, you can go on about correct timing to stomp someone and terrain issues but you are clearly missing the point.

I don’t think the downed mechanic is flawed, abilities need to be balanced better and there needs to be a suicide button. Besides, giving all profs just their1 and 4 abilities will favor the profs that have a slowing effect on theirs like thieves and engineers, while everyone else can get stomped in a matter of seconds.

The mesmer’s downed abilities are no better at delaying a stomp than, say, a guardian against people that know what they are doing (read: anyone in tpvp). Most people by now have learned to target the real mesmer (the one with a big arrow above his head), so their 2 ability ends up buying no more than a couple of seconds, same as the guardian’s knockback.
Also, sometimes their teleport has a chance to fail utterly and teleports them 2 feet away when the terrain is uneven or if they are close to a wall/barrier, in which case they still get hit by the original stomp if one was being performed at the time of their teleport. OR if they happen to teleport in the direction of the person stomping them, they end up on the other side of the person but are still considered within the range of the stomp and the stomp once again hits them.
I won’t even go into bad teammates trying to heal the clone and not the real mesmer, but that’s really only a problem with people in pugs who don’t know what they are doing.
The thief’s downed state is better than even the mesmer’s in that they can interrupt two stomps (one with the teleport and one with stealth), but once again it’s fairly predictable.

I will say that the thief/guardian/mesmer downed states are better than other professions because their 2 abilities cancel the stomps of multiple opponents. Anyone else is kittened if more than one person tries to stomp them and nobody is there to back them up with cc.

Ranger and elementalist downed states need buffs, I think everyone can agree on that.

The patch really didn’t do anything to alter the phantasm playstyle in pve or pvp imo, unless we’re talking about long fights against dungeon bosses in which case yes, the added cooldown time will start to add up, assuming your phantasms die off on a regular basis (which they usually do).
Killing regular mobs in pve usually revolves around rapidly pulling out two phantasms through weapon swapping and then finishing the mob off with other attacks, and that hasn’t changed at all.
Same goes for pvp, where 2 phantasms and a clone are way more practical than 3 phantasms because of the large number of clone generating abilities we use, some of which will destroy a phantasm if you have 3 up.

DonRobeez.3560:

I disagree on this, people focus too much on a 1v1 basis while this game’s main focus is 5v5. Keeping an enemy in a downed state can also be used beneficial, you can delay him from respawning to give your team an advantage on the field.

That’s exactly a part of the problem with the downed state, you can keep someone in it almost indefinitely, depending on their profession of course. It was not designed for that purpose, it’s an exploit of the mechanic.

Warriors are only a threat if you’re occupied with another opponent imo. If they catch you with a bull rush while your pants…err…cooldowns are down, the fight gets ugly quick. Thieves though…I hate thieves.

There really is no point to spvp or tpvp except some random fun every once in a while. I feel like WvW, for all its flaws, is a much more rewarding pvp experience in this game.

@Bakbakaa: Engineers don’t have quickness? They actually do, it’s called Elixir U.

OT: I do think quickness is a bit ridiculous, even if it has counters (killing a ranger with reflection if just priceless). 40-50% extra speed would still be a sizable amount, 100% is just unfair to the professions that don’t have it.

I’ve only ever gotten 4 slivers from salvaging stuff, and 2 of those were actually from the same item, so they seem pretty rare.

I find the elementalist playstyle to be fun and frustrating at the same time (in spvp, haven’t done much pve on mine yet). It’s quite fun to be able to give swiftness or protection to your entire group on a short cooldown, or to lay down some nice combo fields and aoe in the middle of a fight, and yes they are pretty good at running away just like those poor druids in vanilla WoW. When it comes to damage builds however, I feel like Elementalists have to give up way too much survivability compared to other classes without being able to come even close to the burst that a thief or mesmer can put out (granted mesmers have been surprisingly easy to deal with in a staff build for me, probably because their illusions can’t really stand up to all the aoe). I feel like traits need to be looked at too, because it’s very difficult to make full use of many of them due to having to switch attunements so often.

heartseeker > any kind of slow, I absolutely hate dagger thieves

alanis.6094:

Eurosdown.6072:

Just a note: iBerserker is not bugged. There is not a single phantasm that requires line of sight to be cast. The difference between Berserker (and disenchanter and warden too btw) is that they spawn on the target rather than next to the player. This can easily be tested in the Mists. Berserker does require line of sight to execute his whirl attack of course, just like any other phantasm attack.

iBerserker will execute his whirl attack without line of sight.

No, he will run after the target if he doesn’t have line of sight to it. However, he will always have line of sight to his target when you cast him, because of his spawn behavior. The mesmer’s line of sight and the berserker’s line of sight are two different things.

Just a note: iBerserker is not bugged. There is not a single phantasm that requires line of sight to be cast. The difference between Berserker (and disenchanter and warden too btw) is that they spawn on the target rather than next to the player. This can easily be tested in the Mists. Berserker does require line of sight to execute his whirl attack of course, just like any other phantasm attack.

Yay, pvp nerfs kittening mesmer pve damage even more, AND they increase the cooldown on chaos storm, one of their few aoes/good utility skills. If they’re going to be increasing phantasm cooldowns, can’t they at least make them last through more than 2 hits in a dungeon?
Good thing I’m leveling a guardian I guess.

Fay.2735:

Eurosdown.6072:

I’ve never had any problems with that path. The knights can be solo pulled and the oakhearts are kitable, the group just has to stay mobile while wailing on the tree.

@Fay: you can do most explorable dungeons/routes with a pug, so don’t spew that nonsense. As long as people know what they are doing, it’s not that hard.

I did not say that PuG’s can’t do it, I said that they aren’t meant for PuG’s and aren’t designed with PuG’s in mind. Next time please read what I say before claiming it to be nonsense. It’s no secret that explorables were made for organised, well coordinated teams and not PuGs.

Yet people continue to be surprised that they struggle with the content in PuGs, Sure it’s possible to be done with PuGs but there is a high probability you end up with unskilled players, bad teamwork or being kicked at the end of the dungeon before rewards etc.

So the content isn’t meant for pugs but most pugs (except the ones without a single person that knows what to do) can easily clear most explorable modes? Makes perfect sense.

You don’t need skill or teamwork to get through most dungeons, you just need to know what the mobs or bosses do. The topic in this thread is a perfect example. Are the knights hard if you don’t know what to do? Yes. Are the knights hard if the group has even a single person that knows to pull them individually? No.

I don’t think the problem is the lack of the trinity, I think dungeon balance is just hugely out of whack because of the ability to run back from waypoints and the downed state.

Right now, encounters and trash have to be designed around the idea that once someone reaches zero health, they aren’t necessarily dead, and have multiple options for getting back into the fight, so they have to make unforgiving mechanics to compensate, or else nobody would ever die.

If death was final (as in, once your health drops you are dead and cannot run back from a waypoint until the encounter resets) they could properly balance encounter mechanics/damage to whatever difficulty level they deem fit for a group with finite health pools.

For example: a group of 5 characters with health pools of 18k on average engages a boss, and they can not recover from being killed until the encounter ends. The encounter designers have relatively solid numbers to work with and a simple goal: to have the boss do more than 18k + X amount of damage, where X is the amount of health gained through healing over the course of the fight.
So if the party is not playing well, the damage done to them will kill them easily. If they are playing at an average level (maybe a 50-75% success rate on dodges), the amount of damage done to them will be very close to what they are capable of dealing with through pure healing, to the point where about half the party will die while the remainder might live long enough to take down the boss, so they have some room for error but not a whole lot. And if they play exceptionally well (know the boss’s abilities, have close to a 100% dodge rate, and use teamwork for mechanics that may require it), they should take relatively little damage and can burn down the boss more easily.

Obviously that’s just a generic example, but I think it gets the point across in terms of the design hurdles the downed state and mid-fight waypoint rezzing put into play for the PvE design team.

I’ve never had any problems with that path. The knights can be solo pulled and the oakhearts are kitable, the group just has to stay mobile while wailing on the tree.

@Fay: you can do most explorable dungeons/routes with a pug, so don’t spew that nonsense. As long as people know what they are doing, it’s not that hard.

Whether they want tPvP to become an e-sport is irrelevant. They will shift their efforts in balance and content development based on what their players do, and if you think the people that play tPvP are a majority, you’re only fooling yourself. Competitive pvp is a niche activity, no matter how much of a big deal they try to make out of it. Anet is better off expanding on their PvE content and WvW if they want to keep people interested in the game.

More on topic: yes mesmers have a harder time tagging things in Orr DEs and it sucks, but I think the solution is as simple as making the trash mob health scale up with the number of players a bit so that they don’t die so easily. If they stay alive for even 5 seconds, mesmers and other classes who have a harder time with tagging will be able to do so and get the loot they need.

My group got up to him in the dungeon, had a couple wipes because none of us had done him before (but we figured out the grubs were giving the buff to him so for our level of experience I thought we were doing well) then someone has to go, and when we finally find a replacement, both he and the person who went outside to find someone were both put into another instance, and we had to call the run.

I think the dungeon is doable with enough patience but way too long. I like the way the Arah sets look but they are just not worth the pain.

The real mesmer is the one that, like… casts spells and moves around and stuff. Clones do nothing but autoattack until they die or are shattered. They will never ever strafe or backpedal or dodge (they will only move forward to close distance if you go out of range) so if you see someone do any of those, they are the real mesmer.

I’ve seen plenty of organization from JQ and I’ve seen plenty of idiotic mindless zerging as well. Example: early monday, the JQ people in Eternal Battlegrounds spent the better half of the morning zerging down the 15-20 or so CD people trying to hold one tower and supply camp with around 3 times their number while DB took their third of the map in a little over 40 minutes with virtually no opposition.

TheRamosOnline.2670:

I personally have no issues with Mesmers right now, and I’m an engineer.
A stupid Mesmer moves around and is easily distinguishable from his clones, while a stationary Mesmer is open to my AoEs.
Although stationary Mesmers are harder to beat, given an even playing field I can normally still beat them.
Grenade Kit and Flamethrower Kit work like a charm here.

Yeah grenade engis are crazy strong against Mesmers of pretty much any spec because of their crazy aoe and their high damage in general. Shortbow thieves are also good, for similar reasons. Only way I’ve found to take them down regularly is a confusion build and even that is iffy without reliable shatters.

I’m being camped at the spawn this very moment and let me tell you it is so much fun playing against a group that has ten times our numbers and a row of ballistae aimed at us! They even have people guarding the sides so we can’t sneak out and take supply camps.

One match I had today, an elementalist was absolutely dominating the 2 of us that actually bothered with temple, it was almost embarassing. I really need to figure out their underwater combat moves, because I know almost nothing about them except that whirlpool beats the kitten out of me.

There’s a small element of randomness to the forge, sometimes you’ll get stuff that you don’t expect.

I can’t wait until they nerf Moa and every Mesmer switches to Time Warp. Then the real crying will begin.

I can’t really speak about thieves since I have not pvpd on mine extensively, but the key to beating a mesmer is understanding his abilities and being able to discern him from his clones. When I started pvp as an Engineer (my first profession), Mesmers were my worst nightmare because I just didn’t know what the hell was going on with them. I decided to practice as a mesmer for a few matches, as well as to read up on their traits and popular builds (GS or staff condition builds spring to mind). As a result, I feel like I can out-play most Mesmers fairly easily now, especially those that rely on Moa (time warp is admittedly a kitten and a half, but then again the cooldown is even longer than Moa’s).

edit: all that said, I think Eles, Necros, and even Engis need some love when it comes to PvP. Rather than nerf the strong professions, I think it’s a wiser move to buff the weaker ones to be on par with them.

Step 1: switch to another build, condition for example… minion-oriented builds tend to do poorly in sPvP in my experience, because they tend to run around all over the place and get themselves killed by aoe

Step 2: watch for the Moa cast and dodge it

Step 3: if step 2 fails and you get Moa-d, run away, use line of sight, and dodge. You may not be able to damage the Mesmer, but it’s quite easy to make him unable to damage you as well

Seeing how server transfers are free, I could see some people attempting to exploit the market in various ways if it wasn’t global. I don’t see it causing anything but inconvenience for the vast majority of players.

The only problem I have with downed state is rallying, and some classes being able to dish out way more damage and avoid getting hit while downed than others.

All of the pvp necks have at least some degree of toughness and vitality, with the Berserker’s being sort of an outlier because of how little vit it has. Runes are different of course, but I’d say you choose those as much for the effects as the stats they give you.

And the difference between suvivability versus glass cannon gear in this game is far far smaller than the pve/pvp gear gap in WoW imo.

I’m getting the same error, 42:0:9001:3928, when trying to log in. Second time now since the maintenance.