Guild Wars 2

It’s pretty bad with a breached wall – but the Mesmer has to get into your keep, to a position to drop the portal than hop over the wall and create the other one. Once the portal is open there’s a time window of 10 -12 seconds (never mind the skill description – it’s plain wrong) in which the portal can be used.

So … let’s break that down a bit …

(1) Once there is a breach – however short it may be – there is a chance that a Mesmer will slip through. Invisibility is short for a Mesmer and once (or if) ANet manages to get rid of the culling problem it will be apparent just HOW short it actually is. So if a breach is imminent pepper the area that will be exposed with arrow carts – even if the Memser uses Blink he’ll be slowed when he moves to his intended position.

(2) If a breach is about to happen have people watch steps and walls for a Mesmer to appear or a portal to appear.. It’s a really nice thing if those watchers had interrupts or high dps to down the Mesmer.

(3) You should also have watchers who watch enemy movement. Because of the narrow time window it’s usual to pre-cluster (usually around the commander) and the Mesmer hops into the balled group. So if your watcher sees the enemies ball up you have warning that a portal attack is planned.

(4) If not all of your Siege engines point towards the door but you have some that cover the walls as well …

Being a Mesmer myself it sometimes amazes me that once I blinked through the AoE I can at times walk up the stairs to my location without ANYONE attacking me …

Fortunately with FotM there’s another source for shards now. ^^

BabelFish.7234:

a limit of 5 people per portal sounds reasonable and those people must be in the Mesmer’s party.

How about limiting 100 blades to maximum of 3 hits on a single target and, oh, limit the summed up damage to, say, 1500?

It would kill any sword playing warrior just as your suggestion will kill the Mesmer for WvW UNLESS you agree to up all weapon damage or shatter damage so that burst will be en par with warriot or thief.

I’d agree to 10 people but requiring them to be in the same party is just saying: Eliminate the Mesmer class from GW2. If they annoy you so much start thinking up efficient counter strategies, please. Can’t beat them – nerf them is a rather pathetic approach to solve the problem.

Kanto.1659:

Which one do you believe? The one who blurted it or the one who came afterward trying to cover up what was said? Does the myriad of bugs and non working traits waiting to be fixed since beta seem the work of two guys, or of a ‘full team’?

Seriously – a team can make MUCH more mistakes than a single person can, even more than you’d get fro straight multiplication of error quote by number of people assigend.

So, actually, if you have an extremely bug ridden game … it just might be the result of a whole team. ^^

Aberrant.6749:

Pay attention, you should be able to see the vast majority of thieves coming and be ready. If you did… then your reaction time was also slow… you should have blinked away or distorted before he got all of that in. When I’m in any PvP my finger is always on one of those two buttons.

That might work well for PvP but in WvW you quite often run long distances through countryside to get to a keep or to a team. It’s usually there that thieves like to hide and then approach you stealthed from behind.

Add the usual lag and culling issues if you’re near a bigger fight and … one moment you are running, the next you are downed – you do not even see the individual attacks coming in – it really is instantly down.

Well … one day I might be able to afford exotic armor and in WvW we’re more support than damage anyway and hopefully with tough + vit on armor and jewels it won’t be instant any more.

The tool is usually called a guild – I agree it would be better if there was (a) a dungeon finder tool and (b) if it worked across servers but as this does not seem to be implemented at all (or in any forseebale future) your best tool is a guild.

We regularily run players through lower levels – since the achievement is soulbound, so to say, there is always a chance to get an alt to a higher level.

If your guild is not doing this for some reason or other it might be time to look for a second one – you do not have to abandon your old guild – you can be in as many as 4 and I believe I already saw a post where a guy formed a fractals guild for exactly that purpose.

Azariah.8420:

This is good. I don’t mind having new gear itself(assuming it doesnt turn into a gear grind), as long as I don’t have to go dungeon for it ugh

Have you actually ever tried Fractals? It’s VERY different from the other dungeons, requiring much more teamplay.

Thrumdi.9216:

Parthis.2091:

Thrumdi.9216:

Parthis.2091:

Like if you have a mindless melee ball getting in the way of healing your ram operators, get them away from the gate. It’s not like they’re doing much there anyway, and they’d make better scouts.

So, the net result is consistent healing where it’s needed (siege operators) and a considerably smaller chance of being rushed.

“Other protection skills are now also limited to 5 men.”

Yes… indeed. I mean this in the nicest possible way; there isn’t another button to press, players need to get out of this mentality. Adjust your strategies, as ultimately, these changes were made as a result of the strategy you’re clinging to (i.e. spam healing a stack of players without thought).

Nope, it’s nothing to do with spam healing.

It’s just trying to heal the guy standing right next to me.

A game is broken if you can’t heal the guy standing right beside you.

Broken?

No. Targeted healing would break this game in lots of subtle, odd ways.

Did you even consider any of the reasons why this change was made, and what you could change to counter it?

You’re not a healer. You’re a support class that can spike out emergency healing if needed, but you’re going to have to work for it. Again the point remains; if you want to heal the ram guys, get your mindless door beaters away from them and heal the ram guys. Co-ordiante better. That’s the difference between a zerg and a great team.

But this is ludicrous.

To heal one specific person, you have to ask everyone else to move away from that person so they can be isolated. Only then can you reliably heal that one person.

Do you have any idea how dumb that is? That a game would make you do that is a sign it’s broken.

Targeted heal is not the best solution, but it’s definitely better than something that dumb.

There’s marks to be set, wells to be placed, healing springs to be placed … Almost every class has AoE heals. And in a smart team you have two or three rams at the doors + 1 or 2 supporters. If you cannot coordinate that simple strategy via chat if need be and get a ranger or a guardian or an elementalist to place heals and the rest of extras to clear the path … seriously … your TEAM deserves to lose. Never forget – WvW ultimately is a team against team competition – and if you have one smart person who knows what should b done and the rest of the team clueless and unwilling to co-operate …

Ralathar.7236:

Yes you can sweep but it’s toxic gameplay forcing 20 people to spend 5 minutes sweeping a keep only to still possibly miss a mesmer thanks to the amount of hiding places and stealth. Heck most people don’t even run a thief with said mesmer to help them stay stealthed for 20+ seconds if needed.

Oh so 1 person found the mesmer in hills keep? don’t worry they are near a cliff and will almost certainly simply throw that person off the cliff and hide again nearby. It’s not balanced and it’s not fun gameplay when used on keeps.

It’s a perfectly balanced and strategic addition to the game when not being used to bypass keep walls.

If it was for me captured keeps would not be insta-repaired on capture but would retain the damage taken during siege so that a team that captured a keep COULD not rush to the next but would have to spend time getting mats into the keep, repair the walls and doors etc.

This “toxic play” is actually what I think things SHOULD be – the rushing from keep to keep is toxic in my opinion.

Same.4687:

For the poster above me (HtFde) do you have any proof to these accusations of hacks?
If you spec right you can easily be in and out of stealth every 3s for 4s WHILE damaging your opponent. If you only do CnD you can be in stealth for 4s everytime stealth runs out (depending on how well you time your next CnD this could be every 0,1-1s). If you run D/P you can be perma stealth by using #5 followed by #2.
Last option is limited because if you are near a player while using either #5 or #2 you will hit that person because of targetting and get the 3s debuff.

I followed the Dude I suspected of foul play and saw him micro teleporting when he thought noone was watching – I reported him.

Unfortunately that was the only one close enough to tag to be able to report him but the micro teleport is a dead giveaway especially if they have 10% health at teleport 1 and 100% like 5 seconds later without the bar filling up gradually but the bar jumps to 100% immediately.

Hobocop.1508:

There’s a lot of other things to do besides shoot at siege equipment from a distance during that fractal…like controlling the fairly significant number of mobs running around and helping to keep people topped off through incidental arrow cart damage.

Afterwards, you know to throw on a weapon with more range when you start that particular fractal. I ran into the same situation on my Warrior since I typically run with two melee sets, but I never felt like I was doing nothing or was being useless because of it.

Nods – actually when we decided to go for the campion at the gate (after we fought mobs for a bit and eliminated the ground based siege weapons) we were surprised that a lot of green allies had reduced said champion to about 33% of his health.

As a Mesmer I entered with scepter/pistol and sword/focus which is less than optimal for getting the oil. I had little problem retreating to the spawning point and change weapons after dealing with the odd enemy that decided to follow me.

Fletch.4603:

joebane.5872:

Gaming companies think that we still want to play against the computer. There’s several hundred thousand of us who keep game hopping hoping for the next good place to get large scale PVP. So far this is ok to good, but it could be a lot better with some focus by Anet.

Agreed

Unless there are hard numbers I’d be careful with throwing around your figures. GW 1 was about 80% PvE and the PvP guys STILL claimed that GW 1 is all about PvP. PvP players have a strange, rather self centered opinion at times …

It would surprise me, actually, if GW 2 had less than twice the amount of PvE players than PvP players.

I don’t agree – you might be surprised the 1st time enter the zone but the number of zones is limited and you CAN change weapons in the spawn point. As soon as you notice that you’ve grown some extra hair (unless you and your party are Charr to begin with) you should now know what awaits you and prepare properly.

Apart from that – I DO play all classes (but for engineer and necro which I have not yet managed to connect with properly) and I usually do NOT go D/D on my elementalist into terra incognita but prefer a ranged weapon until I know that melee will work.

LordByron.8369:

Lets say i m using a DD elementalist?
annot change weapon and i cannot get near walls due to heavy aoe fire….
If you have instead rangers it becomes easy as hell

Same for battles on pseudo jumping puzzles….half of my skills require mobility .-.

Again dungeon designed with few classes in mind…..

Coughs … if you run around with only daggers in your inventory and have not noticed that you can switch weapons and skills when out of combat …

As a Mesmer I CONSTANTLY switch my skills and weapons to accomodate the obstacles thrown in our path. Portals when jumping puzzles occur, Moa Bird when facing non champion bosses who are tough an where it helps, time warp when against bigger groups or champions, etc.

So, seriously, if you say I am a D/D elementalist and I absolutely refuse to carry a different weapon in my inventory then the problem is less ANet’s design but your attitude.

Shadowlancer.7102:

… Half the people that join, lie about having full exotic gear, don’t follow orders …

I guess I spot the source of the problem here ^^

Being ordered around by an elitist snob isn’t fun and possibly some acted dumb to spite you ^^

We did this with sub 80ies so no exotics at all … gear does NOT matter (at least not with the lower levels). Teamwork does.

When coordinating raids in WvW or getting people to “follow orders” it matters greatly how one “orders” the others around. It’s fun running with some people and I absolutely refuse to run with certain commanders and rather switch to a different map. It’s all about how you address those you expect to follow your lead …

diablodropout.8670:

the statue one is somewhat annoying but doable as long as you have a few good jumpers. admittedly I am not one of them.

That’s why we usually pack a Mesmer (me) – the new cooldown hurts but you can help your team greatly with portals and I can jump like a frog ^^

That fight is actually rather easy – it does not help, of course, if sole team communication is done via chat – verbal communication via TS or similar is a big help.

Do NOT use melee weapons – it makes dodging so much more difficult and if you spent too much tiem rezzing people the fight drags on.

Have Mesmers shatter their illusions when they have done their damage – avoid the scepter.

Rangers keep their pets on a leash.

A good team usually manages to find out who has aggro from the boss. The whole team should move clock- or counterclockwise from lava drop poin to drop point. Should the boss start to heal you should interrupt him – Mesmer GS #5 and whatever the other classes have.

Mesmers (possibly Guardians as well, didn’t test this yet, though) can make use of the reflective shield ^^ Preferably when he’s about to launch his bombs – count in your head to get a feeling for the interval.

If you have a Mesmer or a Thief on top of the ramp they can stealth to lose aggro + the Thief can shortbow #5 to hop to the next platform.

Northlander.4619:

Also kudos to whoever created Fractals. I haven’t been through all of them yet but so far they are tons of more fun than regular dungeons (except the swamp but that’s just me).

Not just you I think – the swamp map is a nightmare. But it’s another case where a mesmer portal can be ever so helpful ^^

Dware.4259:

They feel they are forced into grinding out fract over and over and over and over so they can get their shinies to comepete in WvW.

From my point of view that is a serious misconception. I have played WvW with many alts who are below level 80. Some of my level 80s aren’t fully equipped in exotic gear …

If WvW was about 1:1 fights, yes, gear would matter. But in WvW you’re one team against the other and that’s where coordination, tactics and strategy come into play. Better gear will help but unless we’re talking +100 strength +100 precision, etc. it will not have the huge impact many people claim it will have.

At the moment I am getting 15 crystals for 3 runs in about 1 – 1 1/2 hours (we’re still getting most of the guild through level 1) and the only item I’ve seen so far for sale is a backpack at 3500 gems … ouchies.

If I look at the recipies for the forge I see that it will take a LONG time to acquire even one recipe.

So people who will first have this new equipment are PvE grinders and I doubt that their new equipment is helping them against a well coordinated and PvP hardened enemy.

teg.1340:

The main problem with thieves is they can use stealth not only to open the fight but at the same time to end the fight.

Low on health? Poof, Im stealthed. Poof, Im teleported. Poof, Im gone.

Way to much escape abilities imo.

Stealth opener? OK. Massive damage? OK. Massive escape abilities? NO. Not all with the same build!

Careful here … I’ve run into quite a few thieves in WvW recently who use hacking tools. I guess it is because everyone believes thieves to be (1) able to perma stealth and (2) to get out of combat and heal so that they can get away with it.

Stealth lasts for 4 seconds if skilled right and if you used a cripple/snare/slow skill on the thief he cannot get very far in those 4 seconds. In the worst case he stealthed via stealing then used blinding powder and then his heal – if he didn’t attack in between that’s all he can do – 3x 4 seconds of invisibility – now he either has to build his “house” shadow refuge which is a giveaway or attack to regain stealth.

As a thief myself – it’s not very easy to escape if you’re slowed ^^

But those micro teleport, invisibility on demand and full heal on demand hackers can bypass this. If you see a Necro pulling off such a number you’re sure to report him – if you see a thief ddoing it you just believe it is normal – that’s why so many exploiters feel save with the thief class in WvW.

Polaritie.4851:

Basically this. Sitting on the camp with 10 people, one thief blocks the capture for twenty minutes. We killed a number of Dolyaks, the group that came to try and push us off (twice), but we couldn’t get the capture bar past 1/5 because a single thief was able to permastealth and line of sight around buildings until the group finally gave up. It’s beyond stupid. The capture circle is large enough that you can’t smoke the thief out with AoEs, and any group of enough size to not get pushed off easy has so many targets for Cloak and Dagger that the thief doesn’t get caught. Even landing stuns isn’t enough.

Then why do you make it so easy for the thief? Have all but one or two move OUT of the circle and keep 2 in the circle – a good combo would be Necro + Guardian or Ele + Guardian. Lay AoE around them (or pack a Ranger in as well and trap) the rest of the group moves out of the circle and spreads a bit.

(1) With you not being all clustered so tightly the culling issues will be against the thief so you have a chance of seeing him whenever he comes out of stealth

(2) If the thief goes for the middle target he’ll be damaged – if Necro marks or traps are used people will see them go off and can AoE the spot

(3) If thief goes for someone outside of the circle he will have to leave it and thus capping proceeds

Unless you’re up against a cheater (I see many thieves in WvW use hacking tools – it’s probably because anyone accepts that they can perma stealth which they can’t) you’ll get him and/or your capping point.

Dhar.6392:

Make it party members only. Tie the ability to those in your immediate group and no others. Problem mitigated.

Nods – because being able to teleport 5 players would render the whole skill useless and since the recent nerf to the Berserker (instead of fixing the door camera bug) that would render the Memser completely and utterly useless in WvW. Speed buffs can come from a Gardian or Warrior just as well – only time warp would remain a viable option but that only makes sense if the group is more or less stationary like Golems bashing down a gate. Since your proposed change would make teleport of Golems even more difficult the matter of time warp won’t even matter much …

The fun part is (pathetic would be better) that all the whining comes from people who just see their side and are completely ignorant of how things work and too lazy or … to work out a counter strategy.

We hear tall stories of Mesmers being able to bypass keep defenses – the truth is, that the portal must be placed inside, the Mesmer must therefore (a) be in the keep to begin with, (b) place a portal inside, © hop over the wall to his friends and (d) make it to where they are standing.

This can only happen, however, if noone searches the keep for Mesmers and if noone watches enemy movements and keeps an eye on the battlements. As a Mesmer myself (among other chars) you do not really undestand, I think, how difficult it is to achieve a to d. So if a Mesmer pulls this off YOU have been lazy. Period.

Why do you want to punish others for your team’s deficiencies?

Next thing that people are whining about is portal bombing. Again … it takes a good and well coordinated team to enter a portal en masse and to appear at a strategically good location – including the Mesmer’s problems of getting there.

What happens when those people come out of that portal?

Yes – they suffer the same rendering problem YOUR side does with the people coming through the portal. The sole difference is that those who whine usually neglected to place scouts and thus the portal’ed team can (I have experienced this multiple times) stand in their portal for 3-5 seconds and NOT be attacked because the enemy is utterly fixated on their targets.

Again – failure by YOUR side. Place scouts and if you place siege enginges do it like you would do in real life – place some covering your flanks and rear as well. Then have the scouts shout when they see a portal ring and you’ll be surprised – because you CAN rain AoE on a portal spot even if you do not see the enemies inside.

I’d suggest everyone who thinks Mesmers are so overpowered should play one and try to pull off the tricks they complain about … and see how hard this can be.

Since most Mesmers do little to no damage in WvW (almost no bags) – take away the portals, take away time warp (seen that mentioned somewhere too) and you can just delete the class for being useless.

Do WE complain that a warrior can more or less insta-kill us with his sword or greatsword attacks?

It’s about time we file a complaint with ANet against repeated name calling.

Since you believe in a micro teleport free multiboxing bot (a thing even a 5 man bot cannot achieve without getting out of sync) that spans multiple classes (something else no bot has yet achieved) which also happens to fire the skills needed to keep a turtle alive at the right times (and not all at once, mind, but sequentially when the first stack is on cooldown) —- well, I guess you still believe in the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, hm?

Ivonbeton.6814:

The price and any drop of a precursor is unfair to everyone except to those who have found one. So no wonder you aren’t complaining. You think it’s a good motivation for anyone that most items are at most worth a few gold but precursors are worth between 50 and 200g?

Well – I did not get any precursors (but acceptable loot – especially a +10% to all stats rune in an armor piece) but I still think it is ok. Many people from my guild got much worse than I did – and of the 60 or so people who participated in “my” event maybe 2 or 3 got a precursor – after a 3h long battle.

You can get one by just shooting a few arrows at Jormag’s Claw which takes you like 5 minutes or by dropping 4 yellows into the mystic forge and be lucky which takes less than a minute.

So you could not participate – well – the Claw runs every 3 hours or so and the mystic forge is always open …

In another post I made a sugfgestion that, alas, didn’t even receive a single comment. I wanted caravan escorting to be (a) capped like Zaishen battles in GW1 (to stop people powerfarming) and (b) to be a bit situation dependent – like a caravan to a keep with 0 supplies gives max experience/karma/gold and one to an almost full keep only a fraction.

I posted it before in a separate thread that unfortunately went almost unnoticed but since it has been brought up here: Just do inbuild low polygon models for the enemies which are rendered whenever someone is in view but the information to render is not yet fully on the client (armor model, colour, etc.) or when the client is a low power machine that cannot handle that many high detail models.

Have the client dynamically adjust which model it uses and even low spec gear people should be able to play wvw in a 60 vs 60 fight with decent fps. I think what is actually stopping ANet from implementing such a mechanism ist the fear of low detail screenshots giving the game a bad name … but – from a player’s point of view – I could live easily with 30 ugly models on screen – much better than with 30 invisible ones that clobber the hell out of me.

Azaziel.3608:

The ragequit might be bad or unfair for the winner but it’s worse for the quitter, they lose their place in queue and they appear dead in their own world, meaning they must pay to get to a waypoint.
Just saying…

(a) A number of servers have no queues for WvW … (come to Dzagonur ^^)
(b) If you’ve entered WvW from one of the capitals there is no TP fee

And usually – unless you decided to join WvW from the wilderness – you’ll appear dead in an outpost and find someone to rez you. At least it usually works for me after a disconnect – I’m not using the quit feature.

Rhyis.7058:

You lost out on 2 mins of wvw. Get over it.

You’re not fully aware of the consequences, I gather …

(a) Usually after those resets you’ll find a lot of placed siege weapons gone … how would you like it to have 2 – 5 gold removed from your account after an update?

(b) All keep defense is gone and (hopefully) a few siege engines still live. So if the battle was for the two towers east and west of the ruins (in borderlands) the attacking force can be MUCH faster at the gates than the defenders – allowing the attackers to use what siege engines remained to bash in the doors and to slaughter the incoming defenders when they try to get back into their keeps.

Only two minutes you say …

Unfortunately – and this applies especially to sub level 80 players who need the experience – many important tasks in WvW are being neglected. Since the bad habit of taking your materials from towers no matter how often you ask in chat to NOT do this persists, I’m quite used to go to a tower/keep with 0 ressources in it.

If you ask people to defend the camps and escort the Dolyaks noone usually wants to do this because it gives 0 experience, karma and gold.

I can understand that this is an easily abused thing and I guess that is why you disabled the rewards for caravan duty but disabling != fixing a problem. Disabling some mechanism is usually an interim option until you have found a fix.

How about borrowing a bit from GW 1 Zaishen trapping …

(a) Getting EXP, etc. depending on materials MISSING in the structure (so with 0 mats in a keep you get more XP than if the keep has 490/500)

(b) Giving the EXP from (a) only for players who stayed close to the Dolyak for the entire time and give proportional rewards to those who left earlier or joined later

© Cap the maximum of EXP one can gain from caravan duty (like with Zaishen Trapping) but this amount should be about 1h worth of caravan duty.

Since this is a tedious task people who have reached their daily cap limit should then be rotated out for other players with the former Dolyak guardians joining the regular forces.

Zilm.8459:

If a group of people have to do what you have suggested to counter one playable class, you don’t see this as a problem?

Really?

This is WvW not me against the world. When you encounter a turtle you have to adjust your tactics, when you’re being portal bombed you have to adjust your tactics. When you have a recap team you have to adjust your tactics to be able to deal with the thieves you encounter.

If you keep re-claiming your depots with an 8 man team that knows what to do … how much fun will the thief get from his playstyle? WvW has a strong psychological side to it too.

You might argue that, yes, one class should not be able to block a capping and I agree if you agree, this from my Ranger, that no class should be able to deal as much damage as a guardian or warrior does … where do we end?

Generic 1 profession game with zero options and 1 skill – totally fair and balanced.

Once the culling problem is no longer you’ll see that stealthed thieves are actually rather pathetic (unless, alas, I see them more and more these days, they use hacks with micro teleports and additional stealth + full heal).

Apart from the fact that I think capping should work (once the important NPC is down) so that the team with more players inside the circle should cap it (as it works in GW 1) you’re not really trying an efficient counter.

The thief CANNOT remain invisible endlessly without Cloak and Dagger (D/D, P/D) or the #5 #2 with D/P. Even if skilled so that stealing makes him invisible and given the chance he finds something while stealing to grant him another stealth for free … stealing, etc. has cooldown so that sooner or later the thief MUST attack to regain stealth.

If you have 20+ people you’re helping him if you clump together in the middle. Everyone with a low power computer will have culling issues and thus will prolong the stealth artificially.

Have everyone but 2 people move out of the circle. Those two (Elementalist work well) will stand together and spam blindness, cripple, bleed if they can and lay AoE on themselves.

The thief now has two options when he has to attack. He can go for the targets in the circle and risk being hit by the AoE or (worse) blinded and have his attack miss or he can attack one of the targets outside of the circle.

When he opts for the 2nd plan he will leave the circle and your capping will progress a bit before the thief returns. Eventually you will cap (hopefully before the NPCs respawn).

With most of the team out of the circle range (anyone not able to provide AoE should not be even near it) culling issues will be significantly better and the thief will render pretty quickly once his stealth time is over.

This from a thief who had this tactic used against him ^^

The Mesmer portal does not work as the skill discription says it does. The portals are bi-directional and there is no dedicated entry and exit portal.

So if a Mesmer hides in a keep after capure he can place a portal inside the keep then hop over the walls place the other portal and people can enter the keep via these portals without bothering to tear down the gate or the walls.

Since both portals must be placed within 60 seconds and only remain active for about 12 seconds and have a max distance of 4000 – 5000 there’s two things to watch out once you capture a keep or once one of your walls has been briefly breached:

(a) Scan the keep for hiding Mesmers
(b) As soon as you see a group of enemies clump together in portal range for no apparent reason it’s probably the rally point for a Mesmer portal.

During fights (keeps or in the open) you should also always have a few observers at your flanks and rear to watch for the pinkish circles that are the dead giveaways of Mesmer portals.

Main problem is that the portals do things that are contrary to the skill description (at least in the German version). If the portals were working as the skill description is then the mesmer would (a) build uni-directional portals and (b) he’s be placing the entry portal first then the exit portal.

The skill does, however, not work this way but the Mesmer creates bi-directional portals. If they’d change the skill the way the discription is then you’d still be able to portal bomb but you could no longer get people inside structures by placing your first portal within the walls.

About the only way that rangers can do damage that is really felt in WvW with their AoE is when you have like 6 of them and all coordinated via TS so that you can keep the rain up constantly … they’ve taken the survivabilit of the ranger away (compared to GW 1) and they have taken the spike damage away … I have a level 80 ranger but I see how MUCH easier this game is with my thief, guardian and mesmer – the only one who has an even tougher time is … guess … the ele.

Fast respawn rates are actually ok but there should be a patch … enemies you killed should become green for YOU on respawn and only after a timer period should turn hostile again. This would keep the area interesting for players entering the area but it would allow you to retreat safely (and it would hurt “on spot camping botters”).

coughs – being on JQ you’re on the #3 server for WvW … small wonder you’re not meeting many people running around in the starter areas. How about switching to a server lower in the WvW ranking list as that chances that more people there do PvE is much higher?

Nods, I upgraded some stuff yesterday so it does work but I too stumbled for a while. You actually have to drag and drop your equipped stuff to your inventory as well, then use the HoM item (or transmutation stone – it seems to appliy to both now) and drag both items from inventory to the transmutation window. It should work fine if you do it this way.

I heard the same stuff about GW 1 and it still has an active community. Some people are stuck with the “I want to be bigger and stronger and I wanna single-hit my enemies because I grind all day to get the super gear” idea. GW 1 was not for you, GW 2 is not for you. That these people would leave was never a question in my opinion.

What will remain is the amount of people that do find a purpose in the way GW 2 works – with additional content and some of the more annoying bugs ironed out this number will still be significant, I believe although I expect that we’ll see server merges in the near future becaue of decreased overall population.

It is tied to the number of points to reset, yes and I, as level 80, pay around 4 silver

“6. I like this idea, or at least a way of making it more convenient/cheaper than having to buy a 3g skill book everytime I wanted to re-roll my playstyle.”

You are aware that you can get your points reset with the 2nd conversation option and that’ll be around 4 silver …?!?!

Ponders – this would be an advantage over those people who load the full models quicker because you cannot see so easily what class a WvW opponent is. Given the standard “purge the area of mesmers” order once a keep is taken this would be unfair if you’d colour code them …

I’d say just render something simple that is inbuilt in the game and does not have to be downloaded and that is shown as long as the full model has not been downloaded.

This might also be a way for people with less powerful computers to enjoy WvW with an acceptable frame-rate if only as many players would be fully rendered as the computer can handle (preferrably with a distance filter) and everything that would overload the computer would be reduced to a low cost render model. Not as beautiful but better than trying to do WvW with 4fps, I think …

That’s because a mixup of terms If you have a fixed focus in order to get a broader view you have to move the camera backward – this is, however, a bad idea because there are already anough issues with the cam bumping into objects

The other way to get a better FoV is to use a different focus – lke you do with a zoom lens on a camera. The camera does not move but you go from wide angle to zoom view.

And that’s the feature I guess people want implemented – not a physical movement of the camera but a zoom function like on a camera – i.e. by changing focal length or whatever that is in English.

Many games/simulations cope with a massive flood of “items to display” situation in a way that they do not wait for all models to be fully loaded, textured, etc. before they display them – a thing, I believe, you do in WvW and why there are so many people invisible if they come from a long distance.

Instead those programs make use of generic skeletons/icons to display when an item should be rendered but the information is yet incomplete (mesh not yet loaded, textures not loaded, etc.).

If you could change rendering in WvW this way people would at least be SEEING the people that are killing them instead of the current situation where you get hit and hit (often a lot of AoE animation takes place all around you, even) and die and after you’re dead all of a sudden a crowd of 30 or more people appears all around you.

By forcing the game to render a red ball primitive with a name + guild above it when an enemy SHOULD be displayed you’d have something less pretty but it would be FAIR and would make WvW worth playing again because atm it is not really any fun because of that bug.

One suggestion would be to try WvW but try it seriously. I’m not a PvP guy myself but WvW is different enough from regular PvP so that I actually enjoy it (much like JQ, FA and AB in GW 1)

Thieves can serve in a multitude of roles in WvW but to actually enjoy WvW you need (a) a more or less active server and (b) work with a group that knows what to do.

(a) might be trial and error but for (b) there are many guilds that take WvW very seriously and who have open TS3 servers for guests as well.

I find myself drawn more and more to WvW … it can be big fun if you’re outnumbered 3:1 on the world but still manage to hold your keeps by being smart and doing a lot of guerilla footwork.

I absolutely disagree with the idea of raids – why? Simply because they are boring as hell – your gind for .. what … tokens to get a rare skin? … and once you have it … it’s boring again, duh.

So raids are a bore and only appeal to those people who like to run predictable encounters with a chance of a rare item reward. The only way to keep that interesting is to feed new items into the loop – something that WoW does.

GW is built around a different principle so that loop will not work in GW at all and – truth be told – GW has many players who do NOT hold with WoW idea of the grind loop and the community – as shown here in a number of posts – will not embrace the idea of raids as a whole.

You have – for endgame reasons – WvW which is a highly dynamic environment. If yours is static then change server to a more active world. But I know that dynamic things go againt the nature of power grinders because they like things to be predictable …

What is lacking is a PvE version of WvW – a topic that has been raised now in a few posts. The idea of players uniting against an invading horde of monsters who attack on a grand scale and what might lead to sieges and whatnot with 100 or more players involved does sound SO much more attractive to me than boring raid grindmills.

Well —- it took ANet like 5 years or so until they finally realized that they had angered so many PvE players with their 100% PvP related changes that they finally did something that had been requested by the community for ages: Split PvP and PvE skills.

Did they learn? Aparently not so because GW 2 comes again with … combined skills, sigh.

So they will, as they did with GW 1, have a look at PvP and patch whatever needs patching there and wonder at the same time if the PvE community starts howling. Hopefully, though, it will NOT take them 5 years again to realize that PvP and PvE are two entirely different modes to play the game and that what is great for one mode does not necessarily has to be good for the other.

And the downed teleport skill is next to useless unless you happen to be on a flat piece of ground. Try to teleport if you’re in between rocks … the time it takes to even get a valid target usually equals the time you need to die … playing an Asuran thief … might be other races have the camera at a more decent angle but with the Asura I try to NOT get downed because downed usually means dead.

As long as the centaurs still head the anti-quadruped-diffamation league we will not see mounts in Guild Wars – and it is good so.

And that is why GW 2 should have learned from GW 1 and SPLIT PvP and PvE skills. They nerfed so many skills in GW 1 because they were overused in PvP that they sent a great many PvE builds down the drain. And it took them YEARS to figure out that there is a difference between 4 vs 4 or 25 vs 8 as happens in many high level areas in PvE.

But for the rare materials – you HAVE to be in the 70-80 zone to get the one or two trees and the one node oricalcium that exist in these areas … or Orr if you want a slightly better yield of highest level mats.