Guild Wars 2

The questions were funny. My favorite one was:
“Could we have a message in the guild chat, when we obtain a legendary?”

It really made wondering, if the concerns voiced on the forums are so disconnected from the normal player. PvE’ers complain about ascended gear and timegated contet everywhere, PvP’ers complain about … I guess we all know that. Nobody asked questions about the fundamental isssues of GW2.

Knote.2904:

LoL is a bad example, summoners rift has WAY more depth than a conquest map 5v5.

Hell you just made their point actually, Dominion IS conquest and dominion was pretty fail for LoL because of how few specific niche champs dominated in it mobility or bunkering.

Why did some champions dominate Dominion? Obviously, not because it is conquest, but because these champions were balanced for Summoners’ Rift. The third gamemode, 3vs.3, had the same broken balance for the same reasons. You cannot balance for more than one gamemode.

@GvG:
If you take all major flaws of GuildWars2’s PvP and created a gamemode out of it, then the result would be GvG. Skill effects cluttering your screen, the poor targeting system and the AoE cap, GvG has it all and brings it to the excess. It’s ironic to see 20vs20 in a game that was clearly not designed for it.

Their argument was stupid, so is the title of the thread. However, there are good arguments why different gamemodes harm the game.

Most importantly, various PvP modes will break the balance. Professions and skills are OP in one gamemode, but absolutely useless in another. In GW2 the 0/30/30/10/0 D/P thief is a prime example: borderline OP in WvW, but useless in sPvP. Riot tried to add another gamemode to League of Legends. Is anyone still playing dominion? Riot has learnt its lesson from Dominion. ANet has learnt its lesson from GW. It’s time to stop the requests for different gamemodes.

You might hate dailies, but they leave at least a bit of freedom to players. Without changing your playstyle you can complete most categories. For example, 50 Kills, 10 successful dodges …

The new ascended weapons force players to craft. For me personally and some others, crafting is the most boring aspect in the game. I simply cannot stand doing it: stand there, press a button, wait 1 minute, press another button.

ANet forgot about my birthday. No gift for me.

Dual.8953:

An ideal meta is when there is no meta. Meta’s exist because certain things are percived as superior to others, in a game without a meta, everyone can play how they want and be considered valid.

Utopia! Every game has an optimal strategy, even chess.

Players want their favorite class to dominate the metagame. By their nature players favor power classes over condition classes. That’s why the majority hates the current meta and advocates power-based one-shot nonsense.

Class forums have the highest concentration of MMO lobbyists. With nerfs on the horizon lobbyists freak out.

It is always funny to read some of the advices, how to handle stullcrack:
- “Skullcrack is short range!”:
A good warrior will shieldbash you first as a preparation for skullcrack.
- “Dodge it! It’s readable!” :
The skullcrack animation looks just like the autoattack animation.
- “Use stunbreaks, learn to play!”
Most stunbreaks have a long cooldown, a longer cooldown than skullcrack.

Warriors need a nerf.

Ironically, on the hand Helseth promotes deathmatch, on the other he complains about skill effects cluttering his screen. How is a teamfight at mid point different from deathmatch? Both is as terrible to watch. At least conquest forces players to spread out over the map, so your screen isn’t cluttered with spirits and skills effects for the entire match.

Teamplay in GuildWars2 is limited to Combo fields and rezzing. In contrast, in the first GuildWars everyone in the team had a specific task. Coordinating a spike required everyone to fulfill his role to make it work: the monk removed blind from the axe warrior, the mesmer shattered boons from the target and the hammer warrior shut down the monk with infusion. In GuildWars2 teammates play next to each other, not with each other. Conquest gives the game at least a bit of depth, because splitting across three points and a second objective requires teams to coordinate.

In conclusion, conquest is bad, but deathmatch is worse.

The matchmaking system should be based on K/D ratio!

I left the stream after 2-0 for AL. What a surprise that SYNC won the best of 5 in the end!

Shockwave.1230:

FirstBlood.7359:

Shockwave.1230:

Lightning Flash deals damage, but I don’t know of anyone who ever used the skill for offense.

Churning Earth > Lightning Flash to your target to avoid it getting dodged.
Earthquake > Lightning Flash to your target to stun it immediatly.

That’s just to name two offensive uses of it. I think it’s still a great skill. It can function as a stunbreaker without being one. Most stuns in the game have only a 3/4 to 1 second duration. Despite being stunned you can still use Lightning Flash to teleport out of danger. It doesn’t break the stun, but who cares with such short durations.

I completely forgot about mixing it with Churning Earth. People have been getting good at timing thier dodges, so mixing in Lightning Flash has been irrelevant in my experience.

I like the idea of mixing it with earthquake though

Most people simply walk out of Churning Earth instead of trying to dodge it. That’s a smart thing to do. However, feeling so safe they get easily hit by Lightning Flash + Churning Earth. By my observation 97% – even good players – get caught by it, because it’s difficult to avoid if you don’t anticipate it.

@The Necro from Bullfighters:
Very well played, not much I can do as an ele against a necro. No idea how to beat you in a 1v1 either (except for rerolling) and that does not happen very often in WvW.

What happened to the Cleaning Staff? Are you on vacation? I miss you.

Shockwave.1230:

Lightning Flash deals damage, but I don’t know of anyone who ever used the skill for offense.

Churning Earth > Lightning Flash to your target to avoid it getting dodged.
Earthquake > Lightning Flash to your target to stun it immediatly.

That’s just to name two offensive uses of it. I think it’s still a great skill. It can function as a stunbreaker without being one. Most stuns in the game have only a 3/4 to 1 second duration. Despite being stunned you can still use Lightning Flash to teleport out of danger. It doesn’t break the stun, but who cares with such short durations.

Mana management forces you to play your UI instead of the game. It’s another layer that makes your game more complex, but not better.

CobaltSixty.1542:

The manifesto is the Word of God for some people.

God can change his mid, Anet can not.

I have always felt that the peons in Lions Arch envy me for my legendaries. This thread confirms the feeling.

Capturing a tower with two groups? Capturing a tower with 50 players? The same reward. Killing one player in 1 vs.1 ? Killing one player with your 14 friends? The same reward.

The WvW reward system, WXP and bags, is poorly designed. It encourages players to move in one mass instead of spreading out over the map. The concentration of players in one place overwhelms the game engine. The result: Low FPS and skill lag that ruin the WvW experience.

The worst crime, however, is that the reward system does not feel rewarding. In other games the positive experience of winning against all odds or slaying an experienced opponent was reinforced by additional rewards. In GuildWars2 slaughtering that L27 guy, that tries to get to the Vista, is as rewarding as fighting against the Diamond Legend. Good performance is not rewarded, while running around in a herd is. The mindless leveling destroys any feeling of accomplishment.

How to solve it? Set up a pool of WXP and loot for objectives and playerkills. In case of success the rewards will be divided by the number of players. This will be an incentive for players to spread out as the rewards dimish with their numbers. The rewards for kills should scale with the experience, the WvW rank of your opponent. This makes fighting experienced WvW groups more attractive.

New WvW Masteries every patch don’t help improving a system that is built on the wrong incentives.

Moa’ed and then killed by a dozen of zerglings. That’s the true spirit of WvW.

We clearly need a central planner ( John Smith! ) to set “fair community prices”.

The countries with equally distributed wealth tend to be the poorest. In other words, everyone is equally poor.

Arbitrage (Let’s use the correct word!) is good for the economy. It makes the market efficient and brings it into the equilibrium. In GuildWars2 it has even more positive effects – some of them have already been mentioned – such as taking currency out of the system.
The profit potential on the Trading Post is limited. First of all, there are time constraints. Observing the market, storing items and placing orders consumes time. Learning how to flip the market is a time investment. Second, there are many other arbitrageurs with the same goal. Their pursue for profit dimishes your own profit. Third and most importantly, wealth doesn’t equal utility. Spending all your leisure on the Trading Post won’t make most players happy. The more money you have, the lower the incentive to make more.

The large numbers of players using the Trading Post makes it an efficient market. Most complaints are motivated by envy.

The GuildWars2 communist party [KP].

Zerg is the only [way].

Better match-up than last week, against Vizu and Baruch. Roaming has been as much fun as running against a wall.

Let him play, then at least he doesn’t open his mouth. That one time as shoutcaster with Grouch …

Let’s not forget that Necros have the highest base HP in the game.

Most comments in this thread demonstrate how little some players know about sPvP. Complaints about stealth? Terrible class balance? Limited attributes compared to PvE?
Limited attributes are a good thing. In WvW it’s possible to reach extreme levels on some attributes such as 120% +crit damage. In PvP the maximum + crit damage is capped around 60%. The limitation reduces the role of luck and takes insane burst out of the game. Another problem is the dominance of bufffood: +40% condition duration makes a world of a difference. The additional attributes and bufffood ruin the balance in WvW. The limited attributes make sPvP the best balanced mode of the game.

The sPvP community is not visible. There’s no skill lag and no blob. Around 50.000 players on EU, probably the same number on NA, so 100.000 in total played at least 10+ tournament matches since the implementation of leaderboards. Would you call that unpopular?

Loadingscreen to Eternal Battlegrounds: I’m looking forward to the Cleaning Staff zerg welcoming me at our spawn.

flyingfox.6150:

How so FirstBlood, if every class has the option to play melee why not Elementalist? I play D/D with Fresh Air and Stone Splinters in WvW, works fine for me.

Having the option to do something doesn’t make it a smart choice. Don’t get me wrong, the melee ele is viable in PvP, but Stone Splinters and Fresh Air are just terrible traits for a D/D ele.

It’s always pointless to discuss a build without mentioning its use. The performance of a build depends on depends heavily on its surroundings. A build might be weak in sPvP with the current dominance of Necros, but strong in a PvE enviroment where conditions seldom matter.

The new Stone Splinters trait is barely worth it, at least in WvW or sPvP. You have to sacrifice too much to get the +10% damage. Earth provides little synergy in general.

KarlaGrey.5903:

If you think GW2 wouldve sold as many copies as it did without riding on the glory of GW1 pvp, you couldn’t be more wrong.

Glory isn’t the right word, nostalgia fits better.

How many years did it to take implement the reconnect feature, so matches don’t get lost to a single dc? How long had the implementation of automated tournament been delayed? How did it take to fix the dominance of the [rawr] build?

GuildWars2 is far from perfect, but so was GuildWars.

LordByron.8369:

should we discuss again why PvP is different from WWW?
A bunker in WWW unless has a role in a zerg is a waste of www space.

Are you talking about the 3 seconds of skill lag, most players just using autoattack, constant complaints about blobs, gear differences and in general uneven numbers? WvW isn’t a fair or competitive playground, therefore it’s a terrible place to compare the strength of different professions.
The 0/20/0/20/30 meta ele is the opposite of a bunker. It’s a roamer with strong burst and excellent pressure on downed players. The healing of Cleansing wave isn’t nerfed by 50% in WvW and the mobs on WvW maps allow you to shorten the RTL relieably, thereby making the ele more mobile. There’s no reason why the S/D ele with a build that excels in small scale sPvP combat should be worse off in WvW. It’s better. Your comment illustrates very well how little how you seem to know about the gamemechanics in general.

In respect of PvE: Healing Ripple, Cleansing Wave, Cleansing Wave from Evasive Arcana and Water Trident heal in total for about 10k, even if you are not specialized on healing power. Most skills are on a short, 10 seconds, cooldown. No further explanation needed.
The lines between support and damage are blurred. Does a warrior with banners not support his group? Does a thief with weakness from poison fields, shadow refuge and smoke screen not support his party? The strict distinction between those roles is left over from players that are still stuck in their old trinity mindset. Damage and support is not mutually exclusive.

AoE damage is largely irrelevant for dungeons. Trashmobs are easily avoided or, in the case of fractals, barely exist (except for the dredge fractal) in the first place. Phoenix, Churning Earth, Dragons Tooth – some of the most powerful AE spells out there – are more than enough.

There are many reasons why you want to fight the shaman in ranged combat, especially in a pug. The distance allows you to avoid the flame arrow just by movement, because it’s a projectile. If you’re in melee and it hits someone, then it would be mandatory to spread out. Not to mention, if he targets someone with his flamestorm AE.

The scepter got buffed with last patch and the 0/20/0/20/30 build is better than ever before. You can dodge hundred blades, easily mitigate backstab damage, but avoiding the lightning strike arcane burst combo is almost impossible, because all the skills are instant. The elementalist has the highest relieable burst in the game at the moment.
What about WvW? Some of the recent bunker nerfs such as the healing reduction of Cleansing Wave are restricted to sPvP, thereby leaving the strong sustain of the profession in WvW unchanged.
CoF shouldn’t be used to measure the usefulness of a class, because it’s a fast, dull and easy dungeon. Let’s have a look at the opposite: vulcanic fractal level 48. A scepter/focus ele brings a strong anti-projectile spell, group healing, condition removal and high ranged damage to the party. For fractals I would choose an elementalist over a warrior any day.
If some of the excentric posters (Why does ANet hate our profession?) spent as much time in the game as they do on the ele subforums, then their problems would fix themselves. The top sPvP teams have at least one elementalist on their team, sometimes even two. Think about it!

Wemil.7052:

thanks for today bagzzz:)

lots of bagzzzzz:)

tomorrow is golem rush festival so expect a lot golems in our zergs:)

and yes I will go rampage over who ever slacked in eb when I was afk eating:)
lost upgraded sm:) -.- sad-.- cant trust sfr very bad ppls:) thiefs you now:)

I wish I could express my fuzzy feelings over lootbags in such an eloquent way.

This thread demonstrates very well how little the typical wvw’er knows about PvP and game mechanics in general.

Skyhammer has to stay. It’s fun and most importantly it’s fun to watch as a spectator. To me seeing people fall to death is much more entertaining than players spamming hundreds of skilleffects on a node. Success is so close to failure by breaking through the glass, I like it.
A competitive game doesn’t have to be excessively complex and demanding, it has to be entertaining.

Is it so difficult to see why having stunbreak on all cantrips was wrong? Today’s Lightning Flash is absolutely fine.

The fighting spirit of Riveside will be broken within 3 days.

majos.8503:

FirstBlood.7359:

The thread is obviously so clean, because it’s a match-up of three national servers. With the language barrier whiners and forum heros are a rare species.

Maybe it’s because people understand the tier diference and know that Baruch have more people on more hours and is stupid to argue about it…

Numbers? Coverage? Score? I don’t complain about that, I complain about their playstyle. A guild with more than two groups camping our spawn on EB every day after midnight is absolutely annoying if you want to roam. Hunting down scattered players with their numbers is as challenging as raiding empty keeps and fighting doors.

I’ve seen nothing more of them but camping players near their spawn and hunting down randoms that they can outnumber at least 10:1. With that said: Joke funny and they’re terrible players.

The thread is obviously so clean, because it’s a match-up of three national servers. With the language barrier whiners and forum heros are a rare species.

BaruchBay is full of zerg trash. Every time you log in later during the night, there are one or two groups of the spanish Cleaning Staff camping near our keep. It’s obvious that they thought that their guild name is funny, but not in the way they intended. While it’s true that the cleaning staff cleans up the dirt (your WvW opponents HAHA!), they are also the low-skilled type of people. The pay or in our case the amount of wxp or bags is terribly low. The activity isn’t the most the challenging, not to say outright boring, and so most people tend to look down on them. See, my dear friends from the spanish Cleaning Staff, you have more similarties than you first thought.

The only honorable guy that I met was the frenchie thief from Above Average, who really was above average and a though opponent. I’m looking forward to friday, because the match-up can’t get worse. One week with terrible skilllag during primetime and swarms of low-skilled zerglings during the night is one week too much.

Jaytee.9513:

Lol, staff elementalist beating thief 1v1. What game are you playing?

It’s called GuildWars 2. Some classes in this game such as the elementalist have access to many area of effect spells that can be casted without targeting an individual opponent. Not to mention their ability to make themselves invulnerable for a short time, break out of stuns easily, heavily reduce incoming damage for a short amount of time and control their opponents movement by stuns and snares.
The PvP in GuildWars2 is not rocketscience. Is it really so difficult to see why the staff ele is a good choice against a Thief? Just to remind you: Thief is a class that relies heavily on burst and avoiding damage by movement and stealth. Maybe you can figure it out on your own.

Sid.4609:

Yeah, pls tell us more about your superiority over others and natural selection. With your attitude you would get a top notch position back in Germany of 1933.

Oh, we’re on page 2 and it’s already time for Godwin’s Law. There’s surely a helpful wikipedia article on natural selection.
After reading it you may ask yourself: Can virtual characters die out? No, but the players behind them can quit the game. Look at all those threads about thieves that are full of frustrated bad players threatening to leave PvP. Now you might understand the funny metaphor for rogues as means of natural selection.

Roamer.2075:

Thx for the lootbags.

I’ve never understood the absurd obsession of WvW’ers with their lootbags:

“Look at all these lootbags after successfully defending SM against 5 seconds of skill lag and hords of WvW zombies! " (insert screenshot here as seen hundred times on the forums)

or in our case:

“I ran from this scary elementalist until I had enough of my friends around me. With full zerg support and all cooldowns we finally managed to take him down. Thanks for the lootbag!”

So, what’s the deal with the lootbags? Your opponent doesn’t lose anything if you loot his dead corpse. From a financial prespective you gain nothing, because in the same time you would have made much more cash in mindlessly grinding CoF. So what about fun? Unless you consider moving and autoattacking like a bot as fun, both situations described above are a waste of time. So, Roamer (sweet irony!), we can conclude that statements such as yours are rather amusing.

LordEnki.9283:

The only character I’ve leveled to 80 is an ele. I’ve played him since opening week and have never felt powerful in this game. Anytime I every got close to feeling powerful a mesmer, guardian, warrior, necro, ranger, engineer, and/or certainly a thief cut that short for me in a hurry. Finally gave up on my favorite class and rolled a guardian just to get two shotted by the 50 million thieves in WvW. Still better than the one shot for my poor ele. Guess I’ll just have to shelve him and hope that some day he is more viable.

Given your grim experience with class balance, have you ever considered that you’re the problem? After feeling inferior to every class out there, then rerolling and still crying like a wimp, maybe it’s you. Have you ever considered that?
In MMOs rogues are like a mechanism of natural selection. Players with the reflexes of a dairy cow and clicking all skills are easy prey, but no thief can touch a good player under fair circumstances. Mistform, protection, knockdowns, stun and chill aura – what else do you need? It’s almost impossible for a properly built S/D, D/D or even staff ele to lose against a thief.

I’ve been playing my ele since Beta and we all have to admit that the ele has been at the top of the food chain for many months. The steady nerfs for the D/D ele brought him back into line. Today the elementalist isn’t top tier anymore, but still viable in all aspects of the game.

The population density in WvW is higher than in a slum of Mumbai. Once you’ve finally found few players in one spot, the hive mind calls additional players to help. After a short time you have groups of zerglings swarming around you and furiously chasing you all over the map.

This applies especially to the Baruchos. During my expedition through the exotic Borderlands I discovered some impressive specimen from a local tribe. They call themselves “Redencion”. Their characteristics such as having on average more than 4 signets under their name (just to name one) further support my theory that individual playerskill decreases with time spent in WvW.

To be frank, the match-up is dissappointing for players that want to roam and enjoy small skirmishes. Let’s hope it’s just the weekend and the overpopulation situation improves throughout the week. Looking at the labor market statistics I’m pessimistic, but as we all know hope dies last.

“So Lifelike.”

There’s no meaningful content in the latest updates. I’ve always interpreted Anet’s vision as an MMO in which players are driven by intrinsic motivation instead of chasing a carrot on stick. Sadly, every new update is about doing the same pointless tasks (press F!) over and over again. The only motivation for most players to go through this grind is a shiny new back item. GuildWars2 didn’t stay true to its ideals and is now just another dreary MMO out there.

My setup:
3 Warriors in full zerker gear
1 Mesmer with timewarp
1 guardian with wall of reflection

Riverside is just outmanned on the english forums.

Players are too focused on simply winning their match-up in WvW. Their most fun comes somehow from looking at the scoreboard. My server had easy matches in the last weeks and that made the people euphoric about their great performance. At this point they didn’t notice that the lower quality of our opponents rather than improving our tactics had helped us win.

Now our server that is always around rank 10 got matched against the server on rank 2. At least during the weekend the power balance was actually quite even. Instead of appreciating the new challange, most people complained about getting killed more often than usual. The moral dropped, because the players had been too used to their easy victories.

In my opinion the new server matchmaking system is so much better. I prefere the new variety and challenge over the same old opponents every day, even if this means facing a server that is so much stronger than ours.

League of Legends doesn’t have much diversity either. For every position and hero there are only one or two optimal builds with minor deviations for different situations. Nobody plays Dominion and the only competitive gamemode has always been Summoner’s Rift. That said, a game can be successful without much diversity of playstyles and gamemodes.

The problem with GuildWars2’s sPvP from an esport perspective is, that the matches are not fun to watch.

1.) Too many combat effects: Even with few players fighting on a node, it’s impossible for a spectator to spot the smart and decisive actions. It’s exactly the opposite of “this well-placed Amumu ult just won the teamfight”.

2.) Linear score accumulation: Just recall all the desperate tries of the shoutcasters in the Tournament yesterday to keep the match interesting, even though it has already been over. After few minutes you can declare a winner, if the score difference is high enough. Comebacks are impossible.