Guild Wars 2

How would you “fix” that?

Dusty Moon.4382:

FogLeg.9354:

Thats the thread about legendary WEAPONS, there is a small chance they will still create new legendary armors or backpacks. Small chance. Very small…

If they aren’t going to make Legendary Weapons, why would they put any effort into something they haven’t even done before?

For fun?

Thats the thread about legendary WEAPONS, there is a small chance they will still create new legendary armors or backpacks. Small chance. Very small…

gennyt.3428:

FogLeg.9354:

People who like current BL maps are playing the game, not whining in the forum about it. Removing them will upset lots of players who actually like them, and possible make them quit. People who demand old BL maps do not even play the game anymore, and they will not return once there are old maps again.

Sure, sure continue the clear and rapid downward spiral by catering to the people who like empty maps. Recipe for success right there.

Can you explain how old maps will generate more WvW players? So many players waited for HoT to solve actual WvW problems (server population, nightcapping, skill balance etc) and people were just sticking around to see if these will be adressed. Nothing was done about these so people left the game, making the maps emptier then ever and creating an illusion that new maps were to blame for everything.

The issue with reverting back to old maps is that it takes a lot of work and wastes even more time that should be spent fixing real WvW problems. The BL maps were empty before the HoT and will be even more emptier once the old maps are returning because there just is not enough WvW players anymore to cover 4 maps, at least below tier 1. So, things get changed, work is being done, time is wasted, and result is exactly same as before, if not even worse.

WvW could be great even on completely flat green square if the basic problems are first taken care of. And it will still suck and continue to lose players no matter which map is used if nothing is done about the basics.

FoW is not a lot larger… Anyway, if there is going to be any mergers, EU servers could be easily reduced to half and there would still be no queues. I mean last 12 servers together, from 16-27, and you would still barely end up with 1 server about same size as servers in top tier.

The problem with any merger is that half the players left in those empty servers would leave the game at once, effectively reducing WvW population even further.

I have said it before that number of servers should be dynamic, based on number of WvW players. It should be adjusted either every week, or every 2 weeks or once per month. The current static number is just plain bad, long ago when WvW was new there was too many players and they had to wait in queues, so Anet gave us EotM which was again really bad for WvW gamemode. Now when so many players have left, half the servers are empty, and they should remove number of servers and shut down EotM too but they can’t. Or don’t want to. Or something. Anyway, as far the latest replies from Anet went, they plan to work on BL maps for next 3 years and do nothing about poppulation balance.

People who like current BL maps are playing the game, not whining in the forum about it. Removing them will upset lots of players who actually like them, and possible make them quit. People who demand old BL maps do not even play the game anymore, and they will not return once there are old maps again.

I have been running GW2 for 1,5 years on Gigabyte GeForce GTX 750 Ti, full name – Windforce 2X 2GB GDDR5 OC (GV-N75TOC-2GI) and link to the product page:

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4948

You should be easily pick one for about 125 EUR even without extra sales (these do not cost 400!). Also GTX 750 Ti uses so little power (around 60 W max) that it does not even require extra power connector.

GW2 is not very demanding game and the GPU has never had any problems to run it, but I do have some graphics settings 1 step below max (reflexions, character model limit). Its probably more important to have good CPU for GW2, i5 should be good enough.

sparc.3649:

FogLeg.9354:

sparc.3649:

I was actually disappointed to see it removed; it was a sure-fire way to get everyone to have to at least “stop in” WvW. Perfect time to “hook line and sinker”!

Yes but until WvW map completion was in the game whole forum was filled with PvE players complaining about it. And if Anet is to listen complains in the forum (reset time, BL maps), they can not possibly put it back.

I am not denying I got into WvW because of map completion. I had no interest and no knowledge about WvW and was just trying to get my 100% map. I was hooked. But I still think forcing PvE players into WvW is bad idea, same way like forcing WvW guilds grind guild upgrades in HoT maps is terible idea.

I can understand your post, but, they don’t have to “stay” in WvW; just “come check it out”

Maybe they could lighten it up a little bit and just make it EB (since BL’s, even the old ones, could be too daunting for a new player, even more so when you consider each server is supposed to own their own BL – so just make it so that they do have to go to the BL, like N camp POI only).

If at the end you don’t like it, they don’t have to stay

It was not really very well thought through as it required team colors to change each week so you get at least chance to gather up map points from the keep your server owns in EB. There are matches where nothing changes for literally months, and that means you could be waiting for 3 months just to get that green keep poi in EB.

Camps are fine, you can even solo those, or at least get the pois without big zerg. But the keeps, the vistas in those… Adding these back will be making many players really upset. I am not sure if WvW really needs bunch of upset people who really dont want to even be there.

The cost/time of upgrades and rewards for capturing objectives should depend on how much you already control.

Lets say you control 1 keep and you start to build waypoint. It will cost 1g and will take 1 hour. Now suppose you control 6 keeps (in any of the maps), building new waypoint will cost 30g and will take 30 hours. Same with all the upgrades for camps, towers, keeps. Dominating server should find it increasingly more difficult to control most of the objectives. In perfect scenario all 3 servers will finish with score very close to each other, instead of half the points like we commonly have now.

Same way rewards depend on how much objectives you control. You capture your first keep, you get x amount of gold and chests and xp. However, if you already control 10 keeps, you get very little rewards. It would be perfectly fine to remove all rewards once your server has already taken 50% of all objectives.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Fairly often I see it posted that we didn’t make any changes to WvW or the Desert Borderlands map as a result of our Desert Borderlands stress tests. While it’s totally true that we didn’t attempt to completely overhaul the entire map a month or two before the Expansion shipped (as that was definitely out of scope), we made more than a few changes and bug fixes as a result of the playtesting and feedback from those pre-HoT beta events.

That is quite an impressive list, even when we remove stuff that is basically bugfixes.

I am not denying minor things were changed between beta and release, specially when developers start to list everything they had to rework. But I think where things went wrong was that players sort of expected much more changes after they got first test plays on new maps and with new WvW mechanics.

As you say, things were pretty much finished and large scale rework out of question as it had to ship at certain date. Yet, as far I can remember general understanding among players was that beta was only first draft and actual release version was months away and stuff could change A LOT. As it turned out, even with this list of changes (and some made after release), the whole BL maps are still pretty much same as they were presented in first beta.

The very first thing everyone disliked, and still mention about BL maps, is that they are too big and too confusing to travel around. Its all very simple and clear from players side – just remove some rock from here and push this creature there and carve little path from point A to point B, can’t take possible more then 30 minutes. From developers side “fixing” these things probably means many months, if not even years, of work for large group of developers, artists, coders and game designers.

Maybe if you could run beta test earlier, when the stuff is not actually 99% finished, there would be more time to change direction before product has to ship. Or if the players mostly dislike the new stuff, abandon it at early stage.

sparc.3649:

I was actually disappointed to see it removed; it was a sure-fire way to get everyone to have to at least “stop in” WvW. Perfect time to “hook line and sinker”!

Yes but until WvW map completion was in the game whole forum was filled with PvE players complaining about it. And if Anet is to listen complains in the forum (reset time, BL maps), they can not possibly put it back.

I am not denying I got into WvW because of map completion. I had no interest and no knowledge about WvW and was just trying to get my 100% map. I was hooked. But I still think forcing PvE players into WvW is bad idea, same way like forcing WvW guilds grind guild upgrades in HoT maps is terible idea.

I don’t personally like the current condi system much. There is, for example too many condis that are all basically same thing and could be reduced to half to make things easier to follow. Also half the condi fall into category of “this can be ignored” so again, those could be easily removed to reduce the litter. Next there is question of DoT condis being actually instant damage bombs since they have too short times. And last, too many skills got extra condis to apply auto with damage, really bad idea, specially when condi removal is still rare.

TorquedSoul.8097:

If Anet were to remove the incentive to capture objectives, there would be less conflict. While the current PPT system may need to be adjusted, ditching all capture related points is foolish.

Are many people saying to get rid of capture points? As far I followed recent threads there has been proposals to remove passive tick, not entire “capture and hold objectives” system.

There is basically 2 ways to think about WvW, and many players follow stricktly one or other:

1 – go to WvW to find enemy players and fight them.
2 – go to WvW to increase points for your server and win the match

I wont be adding EotM karma trains as those are not really about WvW and should never be considered same gamemode.

Now for players who just go to WvW for large scale fights objectives hold no real value. Something flipped means there are enemies around it so you should go there and fight them. You could replace all objectives with enemy markers on the map and they would still find it interesting and fun.

However if you play for the points, then capturing and holding objectives IS the WvW. Much time and effort is spent to avoid fighting enemy, using wp to hop into other corner of map or change maps when enemy gets near. Wisely taking our undefended objectives and using off-hour capture teams allow less populated servers to win matches.

I am not sure if even Anet knows which type they want WvW to be. Or where the WvW should be heading, and therefor which changes should be implemented.

The reset time change will make my data useless (plus looks like API is still bugged) in the context of comparing week vs week action.

Last beta before HoT was open and everyone was able to join it. I did. All my guild did. There was a lot of feedback posted about the new maps, new mechanics and in general. Then the HoT was released and I went to WvW and it was EXACTLY same. Not a single thing was changed or fixed. So… yea. Pretty pointless.

Orpheal.8263:

So all American Servers mixed up evenly among 3 Factions and all European Servers mixed up evenly among 3 Factions. This and only this change will solve also at the same time the Nightcapping Problems especially for European Servers where you have servers with many different time zones, what is a problem that you Americans DON’T HAVE, because you live all in the same time zone on the same continent.
Correct me if I’m not right with this :P
…

The Factions system already exist and its called EotM. Whats the point having double of same thing? You are basically saying to scrap WvW and everyone join EotM instead.

Any server merge will mean a lot of players left in lower tier WvW servers will most likely quit the game as the "pointless Server Pride” is pretty much only thing they have left. I mean anyone who just plays for rewards or something similar has already left the lower tier servers long ago.

Have you ever even looked at EU server list? Ever noticed how its dominated by national servers? You go into german server and tell them they are now merged with French, seriously, I dare you. The international servers generally do worse just because their population cares much less about the server.

Osu.6307:

So basically what you are saying is something, anything must be done to rebalance wvw populations. I’m fairly certain the big wvw revamp in the works will include either removing low pop servers or a switch to a faction system.

And I am fairly certain Anet said in Reddit AMA they gave up on big WvW revamp already because it is too much work.

Arcan Soulstorm.4356:

I’ve posted my stats over at r/gw2wvw (https://en.reddit.com/r/Gw2WvW/comments/4b41v6/euna_kill_stats_133193/)

The gist: Around 580k kills (without the time between EU reset and NA reset). Based on the 710k kills in February this would be “just” 20% less kills. Similar decrease for the borders.

Thanks a lot!

Your data looks very interesting. Is it gathered automatically?

Just asking because the WvWIntel kills/deaths had nasty habbit of getting screwed up for unknown reason to me. I mean after some update MU kills were 100-200-300 and next update jumped to 5000-6000-7000 so I had to refresh it sometimes for an hour to get data that looks it could be correct, and still did not manage for some week to get all of those properly. Last week it did not happen anymore, not sure if the API has been improved/fixed or I was just lucky.

Please keep posting the updates weekly, longer we can gather some data more chance the bugs will not affect end results and it can be compared better.

Megaservers make practically impossible to get any real player count. We only have WvW stats and those have been dropping like crazy.

No. It would require rewriting game engine and most of the content so the cost would be practically same as developing entirely new game.

Xenesis.6389:

P.S I hope no one is under the delusion that bringing back the old bl is going to bring people back in droves, some may return, but there are many other problems that drove a good number of them away, guildhalls, tactivators, banners, pirate ship, condi meta, forced to pve, etc.

Thats what I have been posting about… And it really looks like for many players old maps are miracle solution to every problem WvW has.

What Anet has already said is that bringing back old maps or fixing desert maps require both A LOT of work. That means if their whole WvW team works on these maps nothing else will be fixed for months. And that for me sounds really stupid and pointless.

I do believe we already in situation where there just is not enough players to support both EotM and normal WvW. One of those has to go. And since I never cared about EotM myself, I would prefer it to be removed. Only other option is to keep the EotM and remove all other WvW.

DPS is not everything. Your most valuable group members could be purely support/boons/heal/CC types.

X T D.6458:

Do you still not understand, we don’t hate that there is a new map, we hate that the dbl is a BAD MAP. Of course after 3 years people are going to want something new, and some changes. Of course things were stale in wvw with the same match ups, lack of tournaments and any meaningful updates. If the Dbl was a good map that catered to peoples playstyles, there would be no issue, and people would not be leaving the game or avoiding that map like the plague.

The old Alpine maps were also bad maps, just we did not have anything to compare them against.

I personally do not know anyone who quit WvW because of the new maps, instead I know a lot of people who did quit WvW for various other reasons like guilds getting robbed from their upgrades and forced into endless PvE hell to get those back. Or horrible class/skill balance. Or non-existing rewards in WvW, again forcing everyone into horrible HoT PvE maps.

The problem of population balance between servers, problems with stupid scoring that rewards non-fighting servers, these existed long before HoT and new maps. And none of these has been solved. New maps were just last piece among all these things are, were and will be wrong with WvW, a lot of people were just waiting out the HoT for months hoping something would get fixed. But nothing was fixed. So they left.

It is irrelevant if you or me or someone else likes the map design. Maps are not main reason nobody wants to play WvW anymore. And so, demanding to restore old maps is also waste of time and money and will gain nothing to bring players back to WvW since they never left because of the maps.

A lot of basics for WvW has to be changed. Scoring. Population. Skills. Etc etc. It does not matter what kind of maps are used, if there is no players they all remain empty. And there wont be any players without fixing real problems.

Cool, I sort of expect some of my data to be incorrect. More data from different people allows better accuracy.

So, a month (or to be exact, 5 weeks) later.

I took the data about kills every friday about same time (I am sure there are few obvious mistakes and bugged numbers managed to creep in somewhere but it wont change big picture). It doesnt looks very good for WvW. Lets see number of total kills in EU and US:

EU: 57k – 50k – 37k – 26k – 27k
US: 45k – 38k – 38k – 20k – 21k

Its pretty much 50% of the kills now compared to the kills 5 weeks ago.

Not all servers are of course same. Biggest droppers

EU:
Fort Ranik – 75%
Riverside – 73%
Elona Reach – 73%

US (sorry, the data for last 2 tiers in US is really buggy):
Sea of Sorrows – 81%
Crystal Desert – 80%
Borlis Pass – 80%
Fort Aspenwood – 79%

Now the servers that have managed to gain kills during these 5 weeks. Joking! No server has done that. So, smallest droppers:

EU:
Arborstone – 2% (fairly sure FR server in same tier merged with them)
Gunnars Hold – 20%
Dzagonur – 22%

US:
Tarnished Coast – 23%
Dragonbrand – 26%
Yak’s Bend – 32%

Interestingly, when I started recording the data I expected much more changes depending on which matchup servers are assigned to. It happens a lot in EU that first 15 servers change places around. My logic was that if there are 2 servers with strong will to fight, they will both generate a lot of kills and if server is matched against 2 nightcappers there wont be much action. But I was wrong, servers with high kill count will have high kills in every match and servers with mostly nightcrew doing PPT will continue to do it no matter who they fighting.

Other thing I kind of expected was more players transfering from last tiers to high tier servers. This does not happen as far I can tell. A lot of players just have quit WvW, not transfered around. Tier 1 servers are losing a lot of players too so even when some transfer up from last tiers it does not compensate for players leaving the game.

Sirendor.1394:

Player pool
Instead of making who you can play with server-bound like it is now, and which makes no sense at all in the light of megaservers, allow any guild from ANY SERVER who can get 5-10 people together to join up.

The idea sounds ok to me but the numbers may need to be raised. 5 people is probably too low and they should perhaps join PvP instead. Lots of guilds can easily bring 20+ players to the raids.

TheGrimm.5624:

WvW was already losing people because it was stale. Scraping the DBL and putting back in the ABL would just re-introduce something people were already tired of…

Exactly.

I guess not many people have been hanging in the forum long enough but before the HoT one of the most complained theme in WvW forum was how bad Alpine maps are, how we absolutely need new maps to bring more players into WvW.

psizone.8437:

joneirikb.7506:

Partial.

I would love to see Desert BL made into Desert BG. But I don’t want to get even more maps active than we already got. Who are going to fill them ?

Remove EoTM. Seriously, there are more people that play on that map than there are active on some servers.

One of the reasons for EoTM was to give people a place to play when waiting for queues to pop, now it’s a huge karmatrain for anyone that rolls green that week.

People that want to continue to play WvW will slide back into the normal maps, populations will grow a bit, added onto whatever Anet is planning for their population balance fix (my money is on merging some servers) and we might have a chance of getting enough players per server to play on all 5 maps.

I agree. EotM is now part of the problem we losing real WvW players. Because it rewards people for being lazy and stupid. It would be best to remove it completely.

Scoring

It all boils down to problem with scoring. Trying to fix WvW without proper changes to score calculations is like picking a proper lipstick color for dead horse. It can make it prettier but its still dead horse.

The passive tick has been really bad idea from the beginning. It will work if your game can assure there are lots of players in WvW around 24 hours for each server. Which is not the case. Most servers atm have enough players for 4-6 hours. The scoring has to reflect this.

Current scoring system rewards actively avoiding any contact with enemy players. It is better to change map then fight an enemy. It is better to play when no enemy is online. These have to be changed.

Population balance

This is closely related to the scoring problem. Players flock into bigger servers because more players will win against less players. They will continue to do so unless scoring will be changed to reward less populated servers and punish running around in zerg taking empty objectives without never fighting enemy players.

The WvW was losing players even before HoT because matches were won or lost based on the number of players. There is number of ways population can be spread evenly but this needs to be done or there wont be any WvW to fix.

Skill balance

There is a lot of threads about stability and most of them are wrong. Nothing wrong about current stability itself.

Of course there is a lot wrong with current skill balance. HoT added too many too strong skills. Too many skills now have extra CC or apply conditions. Its currently a big mess and some builds remain way too strong.

I understand how complicated the problem of skill balance is and will be in the future whenever more elites or new classes are added. I also understand most classes are designed for PvE (either solo or small group fights) and so large group fights in WvW can easily break anything that works fine elsewhere.

I would be fine if WvW would only allow few pieces of PvP gear or only small selection of PvE skills or no conditions at all. Clearly it is impossible task to consider how every possible item and skill combination available in PvE will work in large scale WvW combat. Then don’t do that, pick just selection of stuff that works for WvW and disable the rest.

Fix or revert DBL

Such a waste of time and energy. First fix the scoring. And population. And skills. Then, after these changes look at the maps and consider what to do with them.

People whining about desert maps and demanding old maps back are really just saying they want more players to WvW. They remember days when WvW had more action and just because it happened to be on old maps they assume changing maps back will magically fill WvW with players again.

Most of them will shut up when they have enemy to fight. Does not matter which map it is.

Yes, all these stations are single use. Which explains why nobody uses them.

There is a lot of people who do not understand much about map design and just keep posting about bringing old Alpine maps back because they remember times when there was more players in WvW.

New maps or old maps, they both pointless when there is no players to fight. And the reason players left WvW is not because of new maps (or it contributed very little). WvW was already fairly dead before HoT and none of the actual changes needed to save it were implemented with HoT.

Yes, they have to fix the scoring first or there wont be any point fighting over any objectives no matter which map you in.

Yes, they have to fix population unbalance or the matches will remain boring zergfest and winning remains pointless.

Once these major things have been settled you can start to argue about what sort of map design is best. Both scoring and population changes will be very-very painful and lots of people will hate every change Anet will propose. But these have to be done first.

Instead of picking pointless and irrelevant stuff from forum or reddit and waste time and effort on these changes to map rotation, we need Anet to grow a pair of balls and step up with clear vision about WvW as gamemode. All I see is Anet trying to please most vocal complainers without any word about the actual future of WvW.

PPK gives about 5% of points in highest tier and less then 1% on lower tiers.

Serious.7083:

PPK/GvG people don’t want to defend locations like keeps and towers, they just want to generally ‘have good fights’ and preferably beat the enemy into the ground. Often you will find guild groups just running around ignoring any call to defend or help capture anything. Most have no real interest in points or scoring or WvW in it’s present form.

That is because for a very long time now “points” and “winning” have become useless in WvW. There is no real award for winning the match and if your server manages to move up to next tier it will probably get ran over by enemy 3 times the size.

Because servers have hugely different populations there is only very few servers that actually can fight each other. So there is reason to win and guilds are about having “fun fights”.

Dusty Moon.4382:

FogLeg.9354:

Pugs run fine without TS. Guilds run with TS.

LOL – that is why PUIG’s are ‘meat shields’ to most guild groups.

Yes but it is not a problem that needs to be solved with separate servers for voice-enabled players and non-voice players. Everyone was pug at some early point in WvW and ran around mindlessly, then some players formed guilds and joined TS and beat the crap out of pugs. Thats normal.

My point was – some players are fine as pug. They do not need voice commanding. They just having fun and if guild group kills them, its fine too.

Pugs run fine without TS. Guilds run with TS.

Aeowia.7214:

What’s most sad in that data: all that is just capturing objectives, and as we all know well, that MOSTLY means capturing empty objectives.
And that’s called “activity”… can be something more sad than that?

I agree, capture data is fairly similar to the current scores. Servers with higher score in their current MU have captured more objects too. It also means servers with strong off-hour populations are high up.

I still consider number of kills per server more accurate description of how much “action” is going on.

I built new PC about 6 months ago using i5-6400 and GTX 750 Ti. Running GW2 fullscreen at 1920×1080 with some graphics options just below max settings (reflections, character model limit, shadows). It works really well and I had no lags even in large WvW battles. I very much doubt you see any improvements by using i5-6500 or even i7 and honestly think r9 380 is overkill too for GW2.

18 skins per race. You can use single char to buy for example light armor sets of tier 1, tier 2 and tier 3. Which costs more gold. Or you can use 3 different chars of same race to buy light set, medium set and heavy set of tier 1. Cheaper but you need to manage alts.

The Emperor’s New Wardrobe achievement and mastery point are unlocked once you have unlocked 18 skins in every race, 90 in total.

Once you got 18 unlocked, you can still buy 36 more skins for that race but those will not contribute toward any achievements. Its just for the skins.

Every piece you buy will be unlocked in inventory but it is still locked to only that race. So if you buy Norn armors, your Asura alts will not be able to wear them. So these skins are double-locked, you have to be able to wear that same type of armor (light, medium or heavy) and be same race too. For example you have Ascended Light chest piece and your Asura character wears it and now you apply Savant Coat skin on that armor, if you now change to your Norn character with Light armor, you can not wear that ascended armor piece because it is bound to Asura race only.

If you think your actions about server transfer will affect Anet to make improvements faster, you are wrong. This has already happened in EU where whole (nearly) population of server left and they now have 5 people logging into WvW every day.

Ruins of Surmia died in the middle of January. Its been 2 months now, and no, Anet has not jumped in to save WvW because of that. You think IoJ is so special that Anet will drop everything they working on to save your server?

I have been in low tiers of EU long enough so I have seen servers die off before. About year ago Blacktide was killed by 2 hackers (and Anet refusal to ban them so it continued for 3 months). With the hackers most players left the BT too and it dropped down to the bottom over several months. But it was not as bad back then, since before HoT even low population servers had players, not many but they were not empty. Now low population servers are completely empty. Also BT was unofficial Polish server and is still carried by the several Polish guilds, having national server even when its not officially supported by game is really big deal in EU.

I honestly believe WvW has broken down too far so even transfering whole servers, combining, merging etc has no real effect anymore. Even the tier 1 servers are getting empty.

Within last month I recorded number of kills per server on Friday same time and it has gone down by 50% already for both EU and NA servers. Thats just last 4 weeks.

There are few exceptions. In EU 24 servers are losing kills, mostly around 50%, yet 3 servers are doing same amount of kills as month ago (Seafarer’s Rest, Arborstone, Blacktide).

But this is WvW. If you got nobody to fight against, you wont be logging in anymore. And then your enemy has nobody to fight so they stop playing. And it just keeps falling apart. I think correct time to merge servers was 6 months ago, before HoT was released. But now… its not going to help.

For WvW buying HoT gives you access to 1 new class (Revenant) and all the elite specs. Lots of new equipment and Guild Hall upgrades also require grinding in HoT maps.

Nothing can save underwater combat since you can not dodge there.

Players do not care much who wins the match. Most of the server score is gathered from nightcapping so why would server with strong off-hour present be rewarded for that?

If you do plan to invest heavily into WvW, your server is meaningless. All servers play together in PvE. If you think some PvE maps are empty, it is because there are just fewer players left in those maps even when combining ALL EU servers.

You can pick 2 different Stances into combat (out of total 5). While in the combat you can swap between those 2 stances (swap has 10 second cooldown).

Unlike every other class, Revenant can not hand-pick utility/heal/elite skills. Once you choose your Stance, all your heal/utility/elite skills are automatically filled based on current stance. When you swap Stance, all your heal/utility/elite skills are swapped too.

Now the Energy. Again, unlike every other class revenant is blessed with double-gated skills. Think of it as Mana pool. Other classes have cooldowns on the skills. Revenant has cooldowns AND energy cost on most skills (not all). While out of combat your energy pool is set to 50%, while in the combat it will slowly fill up until it reaches 100%.

Rev has 2 type of skills:
1 – skills that have set energy cost. For example Sword 5 skill Grasping Shadow has 15 second cooldown and 15 energy cost. If your current energy level is below 15, you can not cast it, even if it’s out of cooldown.

2 – skills that you turn ON and while they are active, they constantly use energy. For example Vengeful Hammers skill from Legendary Dwarf Stance uses 7 energy per second while it is active. You can turn it off again to save energy or once you run out of energy, it will turn off automatically.

um, what? I understand you disagree, and strongly, but with what? The original suggestion that everyone who bought GW2 core game years ago should now get free access to Tyria Mastery Points? Or are you arguing that Guild Buffs should be accessible for players without HoT? Something else in my previous reply is completely false?

BoneHead.1064:

I know they need money to inprove the game but in this way a lot of people will leave the game because they feel forced to buy HoT or played a nerfed game , i dont think this is a good strategy for the game .

How to explain it… See, when you payed for GW2, long ago, there was no HoT. You payed for the access to the game. And you only had to pay once and could play it for many years.

Now once HoT was released and base game went free, you can still play the same game you once payed for. Nothing you payed for has been removed from the game. You even have more benefits compared to free players (more character slots, chat options etc).

Now game has new extra stuff that you can buy (HoT content). This did not exist when you bought it so you are not getting access to it. You do not have to buy it, but of course it is designed so it is worth the money for many players.

Think about the gem store. Once you bought the game, there is still extra stuff you can buy. You don’t have to, you can still play the game without gemstore items but they can be useful. HoT is just like big pile of gemstore items tied together.

Think how much more money they can make by selling all the mentor apples of different colors.

Gold Sellers are rare to me. Perhaps 1 per month and even then it takes 5 seconds to report it.