Guild Wars 2

Anet semi-recently asked if players were interested in doubling the number of servers so they could mix and match better on population, something they can’t do with 24 servers. It was not well received based on identity issues, though that remains an issue with the current system.

I don’t disagree that also adding it to spvp would be a right thing to do.

I will say a pver in my guild went into wvw recently to get gift of battle and is falling in love with the game mode.

I use magic find, though I will say I managed to spent 5 million karma during wintersday, mostly on materials. Before wintersday I had no way of spending… any of it, now I am actually kinda low.

Guess I’ll have to go roam and take people’s kitten.

X T D.6458:

Sarrs.4831:

I wish the XP enrichment would affect WXP. If it did, I would recommend that.

I recommend Karma for a roaming PPT player, otherwise Magic Find.

A WxP enrichment infusion from the laurel vendor in WvW would be interesting.

I’d totally buy one.

Or a rewards track boost, I’d prefer that.

Amaimon.7823:

Hesacon.8735:

Mordremoth slays Lazarus and frees the sylvari. Mordremoth rules Tyria for a thousand generations and everyone lives happily ever after. Except the humans, charr, norn, and asura, since they’re all dead.

There will still be quaggan.

How is still an option now. Even if the devs get REALLY drumk, mawdrey’s already dead.
And kindly find yourself in the nearest realm of torment before you quaggans into a sofisticated discussion again. I will forever deny they even exist

Mordremoth is really the pale tree and needed people and the other elder dragons to think he is dead. He used his champion Traehearne to assassinate Zhaitan and has another champion, Caithe, guarding Aurene so that he might use that body to restore himself later.

Soon you will all fear the true power of the jungle dragon!

Mordremoth slays Lazarus and frees the sylvari. Mordremoth rules Tyria for a thousand generations and everyone lives happily ever after. Except the humans, charr, norn, and asura, since they’re all dead.

There will still be quaggan.

Your gear is probably fine. I wouldn’t bother with trailblazer’s on armor because the price-to-usefulness isn’t there, unless you get it from spvp.

That said, trailblazer’s trinkets are quite easy to get farming the LW3 maps if you really wanted it. Rabid is nice for the sake of critical hits, though.

A lot of season 1 has been rolled out in the form of fractals, which is a nice compromise.

Jeknar.6184:

Aitadis.8269:

Stop making CD a host server, last merging we didn’t win a single week out of the 9 weeks we were merged, and most those weeks we had a max of 5 first place skirmish victories throughout an entire week. Stop. Everyone left CD when you guys made it a 4server merge and stuck us in t4 for 5/6 weeks with no way to get out until you manually adjusted our glicko.

CD took DH place as host server… Either you die as bad as Darkhaven, or you’ll remain host.

https://leaderboards.guildwars2.com/en/na/wvw

CD would have to drop below 1528 glicko points before next relinking to cease to be a host server.

If the scoring changes to 6/5/4 for each skirmish, it will be impossible to actually lose glicko points. It may not be mathematically possible to drop that low in 2 months at 2/1/1 either.

As someone on SoS, I’m not sure I like that somehow we’ve been in T2 for 2 weeks now. Neither of our links have allowed us to be competitive with JQ.

That said, all 4 maps had a queue for most of the first skirmish post-reset last night. Not sure how I feel about that, I couldn’t switch toons.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that each of the new LW3 map have its own tokens, combined with nearly a dozen different kinds of keys.

Inventory management is a problem in GW2.

Is the loot on these things really worth the grind?

Dire is a fraction of the price. You wouldn’t use either set in pve and there is so much cleanse in wvw that you might as well go dire and do more damage per tick.

Chaba.5410:

XTR.9604:

Chaba.5410:

Please leave in Desert Borderlands so players can continue to produce epic gameplay content such as this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_SsifpEgMg

omg ahahahaha… I watched it on repeat like 50 times. So far best video of 2017 imo.

There’s also the TC mesmer’s POV video available of this event now.

When I go roam there, people seek me out to stop me and back cap objectives behind me as soon as RI is up. Always finding fights.

Sit facing an enemy’s hill on EBG and treb a half dozen people? I can see dumping someone’s keep, there’s glory in that. But discouraging them from even fighting?

Randulf.7614:

ShaelynSnow.2395:

This is aggravating as I just bought a character slot last week and 1 LAST NIGHT!! Just my luck really… Ugh

If you bought one last night, contact support. They are pretty accomodating.

I think I bought a bank tab within the last week. Do they have a limit on how long they can work with people or should I not bother with a ticket?

I guess nightmare only takes 25 minutes total in a decent party, so I stand corrected on that.

OriOri.8724:

Astralporing.1957:

Andovar Edoras.2143:

I recall anet already mentioning that theyre gonna do something about the mystic coins. They’ve acknowledged the issue.

Quite the opposite. They said they won’t be interfering with market prices until the situation settles down on its own.
The only exception to that, so far, is that they mentioned they will do something about AB multiloot. Which doesn’t introduce any MCs into the market.

INB4 Anet says

“Guys! We fixed ABML and MC at the same time. We doubled the amount of great and grand chests in each map, and added 1 guaranteed MC to each great and grand chest! Now ABML is balanced with the rest of the game in terms of reward / time invested.”

But seriously I really am curious to see what their solution to ABML will be, and I hope it gets implemented soon, just so we can go ahead and get all of that QQing that will happen out of the way already.

Removing the guaranteed rare from the chest would put a quick end to it. Even if it dropped to a 25% chance most people would stop since it would be competitive with other HoT maps, silverwastes, and LW3 maps.

I actually am rather amused when someone does that to me. It’s like they’re ashamed of a base necro using an axe dropping them.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Jahroots.6791:

Hesacon.8735:

I was doing daily T4 fractals for 2-3 months and I kept getting streaks where my loot for the day would be 7 gold and a couple fractal potions. I have since stopped because the length of time to complete many fractals doesn’t make it a good investment in time.

If I see molten boss, volcanic, snowblind, or aquatic ruins I’ll do it, but then ones like cliffside, mai trin, and nightmare are such a time investment I can’t be bothered.

Yeah, definitely agree. The loot was quite good before the changes, when a lot of this community considered them to be ‘faceroll’ content. Now that many T4 fractals basically require twice the effort and/or time, the rewards hardly seem worthwhile.

It’s especially discouraging when your daily chest gives you a single ectoplasm or single stack potion. Increased challenge should always be followed by a proportional reward buff.

The rewards for T4 are much better than for T3. But they still are RNG-based: on any given day, the T1 reward might be better, but in the long run, T4 is much more rewarding, i.e. increased challenge is indeed followed by a proportional reward buff.

And sure, revamped fractals are more difficult, but that’s completely in line with T4 fractals being among the most difficult PvE content in the game. T1 fractals remain easier for those who want faceroll. (Even T2 and most T3 are easy enough still.)

Sure the rewards can be good for T4 fractals, but the issue is that they didn’t scale with the effort required to finish them. It’s exceedingly frustrating to open the 12 chests from the dailies and get an ecto and ascended salvage kit for what is usually an hour or two.

Figure swamp’s time to complete went up 5 or 10 times going from one of the shortest to one of the longest fractals. Don’t get me wrong, the mechanics are neat, but compared to the original swamp or most other fractals it feels like a poor use of time.

Nightmare Fractal, while including a lot of cool mechanics, takes a long time to actually finish. In most pug groups it’s a good hour.

Mai Trin, before it was backed off on, had a timed mote to complete just the final boss in 25 minutes not counting the first champion. I always skipped this one before for that reason.

All fractals give more or less the same loot from the final chest or daily chests regardless of how long it took to finish, and making old fractals longer and adding new fractals that are also long and take up a space in the rotation change the time vs. reward equation.

I was doing daily T4 fractals for 2-3 months and I kept getting streaks where my loot for the day would be 7 gold and a couple fractal potions. I have since stopped because the length of time to complete many fractals doesn’t make it a good investment in time.

If I see molten boss, volcanic, snowblind, or aquatic ruins I’ll do it, but then ones like cliffside, mai trin, and nightmare are such a time investment I can’t be bothered.

I’d like to say it’s working, but when you bounce between bronze/silver you end up on a lot of teams where the other 4 players don’t understand what “home” is and eat a 20 rating loss every other match.

Amaimon.7823:

Ls3 is like ls2, individual chapters that are purchased, or rewarded/gifted to active players. Unlock is permanent. Unlike ls1, future LS’s wont disapear

It’s different in that you don’t have to buy LW2 to play dry top or silverwastes.

The only game mode I have found greatsword useful in is dungeons with the stacking mechanic and elite mobs you can gravedigger spam. Using it in wvw, spvp, fractals (except for static fights like old tom), open world, or raids is an exercise in frustration.

Ryze.2891:

I had my up and downs when i got placed in gold league, thought i could never get higher. I changed my attitude and it worked much better. Now i am in platium league from gold division 1. I solo’ed all the way

9/10 of those matches are total blowouts. Were they closer than the final score would seem to indicate?

I’d venture a guess that of all the fights that happen in wvw, less than 0.1% of them are underwater. I’d love a ZvZ fight underwater, but everyone rushes to the shore

I’d rather development resources (which are finite) be implemented on other things. Unless the plan is to make water combat more prominent in-game.

It’ll be the case where the bubbles/steve story arch is released in novel form between GW2 and GW3 as a cop out for spending development time on it.

They said it… somewhere. I think the patch notes.

MMR is fine, but placement matches are too important and matchmaking needs tweeking. 14 of my last 15 matches have been blowouts one way or the other. I won one 500-17 last night and lost one 500-150 the night before.

Skill can only get so far in a match that is a train wreck.

The spvp season ends February 6th, I’d expect it won’t be until then that a new episode behinds, else they conflict attention between two big areas they are promoting.

sophiewhite.3149:

you guys need to realize this is how you grow a healthy pvp population. all games do it. you get pve and wvw players to go to pvp most leave when they get their shiny but some stay the ones that stay grow the population.

Mostly this. People have long lamented spvp as a “dying mode” and now anet has made an effort to get people interested in it. There are pve players who are in it for the gear and will leave, but some will find they enjoy it and stick around.

There are also a lot of wvw players (like myself) who are mostly in it for the gear. I’d like to continue after since it gives me a different skill set to bring back to wvw with me, but 9 of my last 10 games have ended with a >150 point difference in winner and loser, which isn’t fun either way.

On second thought I went 6-6 tonight and of the last 10 games all but one have been a total blowout one way or another.

I don’t know if last night’s even matches were a fluke or the perpetual blowouts are a feature of spvp, but at this rate I might just get the ascended armor currencies and stop. It’s not fun to win or lose by a comical margin.

Orangensaft.7139:

I think they should keep ~50 Ascended Shards of Glory for each repeated completion of the last chest

That is not too much but still gives a little bit of progress to ascended gear for players who REALLY play pvp

I think this is fair.

The bloodstone fen and ember bay reward tracks replaced tomes with siege boxes.

9 of those are blowouts, the 10th is on the edge.

Finished nearly three dozen spvp matches thusfar, thought I would add to the loud yelling with some measured thoughts.

The Good:

• The queue system has been fixed and is fantastic. No longer do I have to give up in emerald because I can’t be bothered to wait 10+ minutes for a match
• The rewards building regardless of winning or losing is an excellent way to keep players (well, me anyway) interested
• Fewer blowout matches, although anything is fewer than last season’s “all of them”

The Bad:

• Placement matches are weighed far too heavily, I went 3-7 in the first 10 matches because I was testing out new builds trying to get one I liked after abandoning spvp due to queues and other issues. I started with a rating around 900. I have won 8 or my last 10 and got it up to 1000. People on my friends/guilds list (see attached) have similar or lower win/loss rates but 500 more rating.
• Blowout matches are still fairly common, probably related to people being placed into the wrong MMR by placement matches and being matched accordingly
• 60 days of league games to the The Ascension

The Ugly:

• Class balance is still more or less in the toilet

I did the challenge motes by:

• Waiting until each one was a daily (otherwise you won’t find people running them)
• Asking nicely if we can compete each challenge
• If that failed on the ones that required a challenge mote, I started the fractal, activated it solo, then put it up on LFG as a daily X run

Think it took me 3 tries to do solid ocean. The snowblind one is surprisingly difficult.

I experienced a bunch of teams that liked to, well, not work as teams during my placement games and ended up with a low MMR as a result.

The loot is greatly improved, as is the queue. I would say some class balance issues aside, the way placement works is the only real problem with this season.

So this season corrected my single biggest issue with the league system, the queues. They are now at most 2 minutes and can be done on any map (vs. 10 minutes only in heart of the mists), so I can finally be bothered to do these achievements towards the legendary backpack.

But it looks like I need 60 total days to actually get it! There aren’t that many days in the league, am I out of luck?

It’s simple:

• Trahearne is a champion of Mordremoth
• The Pale Tree is really Mordremoth and Mordremoth needed to go underground so he needed to “kill” himself
• The Pale Tree taught Trahearne a ritual needed to slay Zhaitan
• Mordremoth assassinated Zhaitan
• Caithe, another one of Mordremoth’s champions is suspiciously close to Aurene
• With Mordremoth’s “absence,” Primordus and Jormag are going to kick each other’s kitten
• With 3 elder dragons out of the way, Mordremoth will assume Aurene’s body
• Mordremoth will destroy the world

Fear the power of the jungle dragon!

The Sylvari will be free!

Hail Mordremoth!

Scarlet was right!

I get a couple (maybe 2-3) a week (as broken spoons) playing between 20 minutes and 2 hours a night.

I’ll have enough clovers for ad infinitum this week, but I’d prefer The Ascension. How is the achievement grind?

Evan Lesh.3295:

I don’t mean to pick on you specifically as the “dreaded 50% matchmaking” conspiracy has a lot of the community in its grips. Ratings obviously can’t be known unless matches are played to generate data. Do you want to play random matches and have a chaotic experience with an inaccurate rating? Or have balanced, competitive matches with an accurate rating?

Sure, we could have zero matchmaking, but two things will happen: First, your teammates will have random ratings and your opponents will have random ratings. Did you lose because you are less skilled than your opponents, or because your teammates are less skilled than your opponents? There is no easy way to tell without a lot of complicated math. “Make a system to figure it out, then!” you say. Well, Glicko does this for us already. Matchmaking assumes its data is correct by pairing opponents that appear to be evenly matched, then Glicko does its job to adjust ratings in case the outcome wasn’t what was expected. Second, random matches make your rating update verrry slowly. Every match won against a much less skilled opponent won’t make you go up because of course you were suppose to beat them, your rating must already be accurate. Every match lost against much higher rated opponents won’t make you go down because of course you were suppose to lose, your rating must already be accurate.

I honestly do not know why people think 50/50 matchmaking is a bad thing. My best guess is that people just want want something to blame when they lose.

My experience last season was about a 50/50 win/loss rate. What made me stop playing last season was:

• I could not progress unless I grinded and got lucky with win streaks. This is being addressed.
• Almost every game ended as a blow out with one team winning by 200-300 points. This happened regardless of whether or not I was on the winning or losing side.

So how is this blow out mechanic being addressed? It sucks the fun out of the game entirely. They’re totally not balanced or competitive,and it’s my experience that nearly every match is this way. We’re not talking the occasional blowout that will happen, it felt like it was designed to be that way.

Having never played LW1, a bunch of characters magically appear between the personal story and LW2 and the Pact Commander recognizes them all. I think they’re all just a figment of the imagination and thus “unkillable” in the traditional sense.

Really the only solution to kill the characters is to put the Pact Commander on the appropriate medication.

As if necro wasn’t already unplayable in the current meta.

Muchacho.2390:

Unholy sanctuary has the same numbers as regeneration and given our average shroud uptime, the numbers are not good enough for a GM trait. The base healing should be higher imo (around 200 i think is a good number).

Yeah the passive shroud activation is situationally useful but for someone who knows to use shroud properly it isnt really needed.

In the end US is like most other deathmagic traits medicore at best. Only shrouded removel is good but it isnt good enough to carry the line.

I wouldn’t be upset if they buffed it. The last couple of balance patches anet has a history of buffing the underloved things I run anyway like Life Blast (removed range-based damage), axe (seriously buffed #2 and #3) and focus (faster casts and lower cooldowns), so who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky.

It’s an underwhelming line to be sure, but if we’re wishful thinking about improving trait lines then blood magic and curses are equally underwhelming.

Lily.1935:

Hesacon.8735:

Lahmia.2193:

Lily.1935:

Hesacon.8735:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Hesacon.8735:

I rather like how death magic works and your suggestions make the trait line useless to me.

So, what gets cut, exactly? Only change that could possibly make it “useless” is the removal of Reaper’s Protection (since the only other removed item is just stats).

The rest is either preserved or improved upon with better synergy.

He suggests removing deadly strength, which is very painful for my power wvw build since it adds 100 power outside of shroud and 200 within it. We’re talking a 5-10% loss in DPS/spike damage. There isn’t a way to make up that damage with other trait lines.

It’s a very big nerf.

If that trait is the only reason you’re taking death magic I’d suggest dropping death magic for something more useful. Blood, or spite, or even Soul reaping. The power you get from it pales in comparison to the life stealing damage or the might stacks you’d gain from Spite.

This is exactly what I did with my WvW build. I run a soul reaping/blood magic/reaper staff wells build. The overall damage/sustain from blood far outweighs anything death magic offers, as well as quicker cd on wells for spiking and a helpful extra heal/res assist in the form of Ritual of Life.

I use death magic because I don’t run reaper because I don’t find reaper to be very… good, even before all the nerfs it got. I use it as much for unholy sanctuary as I do deadly magic, but at the end of the day it’s a nice mix of survivability and DPS improvement.

I don’t find blood magic to be at all useful because for blood magic’s damage to mean anything you have to be constantly applying damage. The sheer amount of dodges, invulnerabilities, and blocks in the game make this difficult, so I personally opt for spike damage making every hit count. As such, blood magic is too slow.

I would probably end up taking curses over blood magic if I couldn’t use death magic, just for the condi transfer.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRUQNAndWjc0Oaqst2WTbsRSb4v93OqFK5QM2BMdMmjqFmABwMA-TlDFQBsb/hGcEAAwJQgAPAg0ojQJK5yjmgkoMQAHiAsoEUhKFajWA3pBRfq/QIgybBA-w

Your build looks…. Interesting. Although I’d still drop Death for blood if you refuse to use reaper. The life stealing and well reduction is pretty solid. Not only that, with that particular build I’d criticize the use of Unholy sanctuary. That trait is more for people who are not used to how death shroud works. But overall, I’m just not sure what your build is trying to do. Are you in a zerg? Roaming? It seems fairly janky if you ask me and most of the trait choices I’m questioning.

I don’t have much experience in WvW so maybe you could explain it better.

Unholy sanctuary is as much about the healing as anything in the marathon fights. Often you will get dumped out of shroud and having a cushion lets you get to your heal. “Targeting the necro” is a meme over on the spvp board, so having the auto activate of shroud is nice to have for when you get carpet bombed.

It’s set up to move between a zerg and roaming without taking the time to change builds. If something needs to be attacked (a camp, tapping a keep) that would be a poor use of zerg resources it’s nice to be able to do that and link back up with the zerg after.

I’ve played around swapping each of the three lines for reaper and blood magic and I just feel like it’s giving up too much to use either.

I guess it’s more aiming at something akin to “90% optimal for everything,” which gives up something. If I wanted to just roam I could go thief or mesmer and if I wanted to just zerg I’d play guardian or ranger (and let people roll their eyes).

Lahmia.2193:

The lack of soul marks hurts my brain.

I understand why people use it, but I don’t need the life force (axe and focus generate enough). The unblockable is nice, but a 7 second shroud cooldown and mobility increase are more likely to keep me alive.

Lahmia.2193:

Lily.1935:

Hesacon.8735:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Hesacon.8735:

I rather like how death magic works and your suggestions make the trait line useless to me.

So, what gets cut, exactly? Only change that could possibly make it “useless” is the removal of Reaper’s Protection (since the only other removed item is just stats).

The rest is either preserved or improved upon with better synergy.

He suggests removing deadly strength, which is very painful for my power wvw build since it adds 100 power outside of shroud and 200 within it. We’re talking a 5-10% loss in DPS/spike damage. There isn’t a way to make up that damage with other trait lines.

It’s a very big nerf.

If that trait is the only reason you’re taking death magic I’d suggest dropping death magic for something more useful. Blood, or spite, or even Soul reaping. The power you get from it pales in comparison to the life stealing damage or the might stacks you’d gain from Spite.

This is exactly what I did with my WvW build. I run a soul reaping/blood magic/reaper staff wells build. The overall damage/sustain from blood far outweighs anything death magic offers, as well as quicker cd on wells for spiking and a helpful extra heal/res assist in the form of Ritual of Life.

I use death magic because I don’t run reaper because I don’t find reaper to be very… good, even before all the nerfs it got. I use it as much for unholy sanctuary as I do deadly magic, but at the end of the day it’s a nice mix of survivability and DPS improvement.

I don’t find blood magic to be at all useful because for blood magic’s damage to mean anything you have to be constantly applying damage. The sheer amount of dodges, invulnerabilities, and blocks in the game make this difficult, so I personally opt for spike damage making every hit count. As such, blood magic is too slow.

I would probably end up taking curses over blood magic if I couldn’t use death magic, just for the condi transfer.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRUQNAndWjc0Oaqst2WTbsRSb4v93OqFK5QM2BMdMmjqFmABwMA-TlDFQBsb/hGcEAAwJQgAPAg0ojQJK5yjmgkoMQAHiAsoEUhKFajWA3pBRfq/QIgybBA-w

If any part of it is a step back it’s the length of time it requires to complete it.

Offair.2563:

ArchonWing.9480:

We have leather synthesizers.

^this.

Been added a couple of patches ago.

A truly fantastic add as well.

It’s not fast, but churning out ascended crafting materials like dragonite ore requires level 450 and will get you to 475.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dragonite_Ingot

Wait until before wvw reset and use the critical crafting guild bonus for the best results. At 475 you have to craft exotics, so discover things like marauder’s which you can use on some toon some time to finish off 500.

Behellagh.1468:

They are looking seriously into it.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/What-s-Missing-from-Material-Storage/6377056

They are seriously looking into it, but added more clutter like berries anyway.