Guild Wars 2

I’m not sure what there intentions are — it’s true that there needs to be some changes to promote build diversity in PVE, but this is more so a symptom of poor dungeon/encounter design.

Condi roaming has been the way to go for some months now, I was honestly anticipating a nerf — I’m shocked.

Totally anecdotal, but I was dueling a guardian for about five minutes with neither of gaining much ground (I’m a warrior). Suddenly, he drops from 80% to downed in a split second — no other players, no environmental damage. It was really quite odd; I do run reflection on shield, so it could have been that? No clue, spooky weird.

I was under the impression that the active getting buffed wasn’t guaranteed.

Also, it just seems to me that the devs have little understanding of the meta-state of pvp/wvw/pve.

It’s situational; it’ll probably perform well in a zerg, and become progressively worse the less people you’re fighting, becoming almost useless in a duel.

I’m still using it, it remains to be seen how much worse it is. Like I said, you can cancel the animation now and not waste your adrenaline — I don’t think it makes up for the instant cast, but it’s something.

Yeah, I’m disappointed too. The upside is you can cancel your mace animation now because it takes so long to cast.

I’m skeptical, the only thing to come out of the patch is the quickness at 50%, and potential for rifle builds. Although, I suppose the mace stun animation increasing means I can actually cancel it now…

Zen.4678:

To be honest, the good warriors I know really think they were buffed this patch. So much for warrior nerf.

They lied to you.

It’s true, I’ll be experimenting a lot. The only real “game changer” for warrior is rifle being moved to adept tier — that may or may not open rifle/greatsword as a meta build, though I don’t feel comfortable playing in such a constrained play style.

He was probably running healing signet and had toughness gear. Ele’s are my easiest fight 1 v 1, but pose a serious issue when paired with other enemies (i.e. I get snared and they can almost one shot me, though these are zerker D/D).

I had played a mace+shield/GS prior to the patch; I didn’t realize how much losing unsuspecting foe would hurt! My dps is too inconsistent now to rely on the mace stun.

This means that I’ll likely drop burst mastery and either pick up furious or unsuspecting foe. I’ll give it a shot for a few days, but I think this build has run its course.

The new heal seems useless for roaming.

I’d like to see a pull skill similar to the scorpion wire.

Donut.6914:

Rewards always being bad doesn’t justify this reward being bad. That’s something that ANet should actively be working to fix, and this was a great chance for them to do that, which is why many expected something of value.

I don’t disagree with you, literally the only game I can think of with a worse system of loot/drops is Diablo 3. People love getting awesome drops, and I don’t think I’ve gotten more than one since launch. I’d be happy if they started making account-bound skins drop commonly similar to Guild Wars 1.

Nuzt.7894:

I’ve said it before, Anet is notorious for terrible rewards in WvW, how many towers, keeps, camps, castles have we all taken and constantly received green or blue items ? If your lucky once a week you might get a yellow and an exo maybe once a month, and yet people are shocked that the rewards sucked ?

Its mind boggling thb, you want rewards ? Go run fractals and dungeons 24/7 because your not going to get them in WvW.

Arenanet is notorious for terrible rewards in all aspects of the game, hence the joke “two blues and a green.”

azizul.8469:

is the WvW season 1 rewards worth the cost of transfer ?

I don’t understand this attitude, you’re essentially giving ArenaNet a free pass on lazy content/rewards. Why wouldn’t you want better rewards??? The more popular WvW becomes the more likely they are to develop content for it — if everyone had your attitude WvW would die out fairly quickly (see: Warhammer)

Asami.3572:

So… basically I’m noticing the casual WvWers and the PvE achieve grinders are the ones complaining about the lackluster rewards. While the hard core WvWers are sitting there saying “Eh, we knew it was gonna be s**ty rewards. WvWers never get anything worthwhile.”

I’m a hardcore WvWer and the achievement chest was terrible. The historical lack of rewards in WvW is also terrible. It’s possible to enjoy WvW and simultaneously want to be rewarded for it; defending ArenaNet’s stingy rewards is hurting the game in the long run — it doesn’t make you a cool dude to claim you’re indifferent.

So I found that one of my posts comparing the drops in this system to Diablo 3 was deleted and I suspect a number of other people’s posts were deleted as well.

The rewards in this game are terrible, and frankly it’s disrespectful toward the player base. I play WvW for the sake of WvW, but that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t like to be occasionally rewarded for it.

I was inclined to make a gemstore purchase to support the game, but this WvW reward chest is just another reminder of how hard you try to push people to purchase gems for cosmetics.

250 uses is less than a week of stomping. Huh?

This game has worse rewards than Diablo 3, and that’s saying something.

I play WvW for its own merits, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to be rewarded accordingly. If you think ~1.5G and a limited use skin is an appropriate reward for forty hours of playtime… well, that’s like your opinion, man.

I’ve completed the story, and immediately after had it show up in a 2X fractal rotation — it was a disaster.

Despite having played the level twice, I had almost no idea what was happening. I think the map very poorly communicates both the story and the steps you need to take to finish it. In neither instance of doing the fractal did we have to do anything with the cooling rods, but the dormitory glitched and we couldn’t advance further in the fractal. We managed to use warrior banners/mesmer portal to make it to the end of the fire room, and that advanced the game — why did that happen?

The whole thing seems like it wasn’t tested very well. It’s very easy once you know what you’re doing, but that doesn’t excuse it for being terribly designed.

This is a hard question, do you mean WvW? SPvP? Are you assuming players are of novice, intermediate, or expert skill level?

At the expert level, I generally think warriors (excluding Hambow, which I can’t speak to) come up short versus most other classes. At the novice and intermediate level, we tend to stomp everyone outside of mesmers.

During scheduled dueling within WvW, I’ve found my hardest fights are against mesmers and engineers, and occasionally against certain necros and thieves. Without food/melandru, expert necros tend to beat warriors — though if the warrior is using it, the warrior will generally win.

The people calling for the warrior to be nerfed are generally novice – intermediate players, and warriors absolutely have an advantage at that skill level. Warriors have a lot in common with fighting game characters that excel at mashing buttons (you’ll dominate your terrible friends, but get your butt handed to you by someone good).

Autumn Frazee.3158:

Yes, the ‘Tower Hybrid Slayer’ and the ‘Tower Hybrid Master’ achievements are for repeat runs of ‘The Nightmare Incarnate’ instance.

Fair enough, but that’s not reflected in the description of the achievement.

My real question is why is ArenaNet enacting so many changes at the same time? Wouldn’t it be better to make small, incremental changes than to play whack-a-mole balancing? Additionally, shouldn’t there be a test realm where we can see the repercussions of these potential changes?

Unfortunately for warriors, we’re a class that’s very effective against terrible players and not terribly effective against good ones. The changes to hammer (though I admit some were needed) and the telegraph being added to mace are just reinforcing this.

Kilandros.2098:

Fiorrello.8126:

threads like this make me wish i had a downvote button. so no one else needs to be subjected to this brand of stupidity.

Let me guess, you charged into this thread with an unnatural vigor to also protest that Warrior is in need of a buff?

PRO TIP: Warrior is objectively the strongest class in the game. If you couldn’t figure out that a thread calling for further improvement was done sarcastically, then the joke is (literally) on you.

You’re pretty far off the mark. Warriors are the strongest “easy” class to play, meaning almost anyone can pick up a warrior and do well. Unfortunately, they also have a much lower skill cap, meaning they’re not nearly as good as some other classes played at the meta level. This leads to not much being done to help us at the meta level, because crappy players whine on the forums about how hard it is to carry a stun break.

I play a mesmer and a warrior in WvW, and I’m disappointed to hear about these changes.

Warriors are in a rough spot as they’re very easy to play and do reasonably well, but simultaneously suffer a low skill cap (that is to say that in the hands of an expert, we aren’t as powerful as some other classes).

Fighting stun warriors was always a matter of “learn to play”. It’s unfortunate that warriors are essentially a hard counter to terrible players.

Pretty sure this is people using the exploit for point zerging.

Alternatively it’s people using one of the many available teleport hacks (wasn’t this supposed to be fixed ages ago?)

How is this up for debate?

Different cosmetic rewards (e.g. a colored finisher) for server rank, and fixed rewards for completing the meta. Possibly throw in some temporary rewards for your server rank as well.

Anything else will lead to even more imbalance than we have now, as people will surely flock to the winning server.

If you’re bragging about your server/ belittling other servers, I suggest you take a hard look at your life and reevaluate your priorities.

It’s clear that leagues are imbalanced for a number of reasons and no amount of self-admiration is going to change that.

@DreamOfACure:

That answered my question, it struck me as strange that ANet’s never run a fair A/B test for RNG within GuildWars, but if they’re sitting on the data from previous games, welp, that answers it. I still believe RNG diminishes consumer goodwill and in the long run hurts profits; however, this really only holds true for North American/ European players, which I’ve heard rumor to the effect don’t make up the bulk of the player base.

Markadis.9012:

You think ANet would have changed the game plan by now if it wasn’t a working business model?

My question is essentially where are they getting the data from, because there hasn’t been a valid comparison within Guild Wars 2 yet

Electro.4173:

Super Adventure Box didn’t use RNG for its skins. I still consider that particular event the absolute best one for rewards in all of GW2.

True, but they also didn’t make SAB skins directly available over the gem store. I suppose my original point (or question) is that ANet has never directly A/B tested RNG vs. straight gem store purchases (aside from the Christmas skins, which weren’t a fair data point).

@SpyderArachnid.5619:

I suppose I was just wrong about how long it would take to burn through that consumer good will. Every patch I half-expect to see non-rng items on the gem store, every patch I’m mistaken.

DarcShriek.5829:

They’ve always used RNG. All MMO’s use RNG.

I meant more so do they have any substantive data that RNG earns more money than just listing the item at a fixed price?

At first glance RNG seems like a clever pricing tool to capture willingness-to-pay across the board, but I (incorrectly) assumed that decreasing consumer goodwill would negatively impact that over time.

This isn’t a troll question, I’m legitimately curious where they’re pulling their data from. To the best of my knowledge, Anet has no data to test the effectiveness of RNG vs. listing (without RNG) on the gemstore. I recall the Christmas skins and the Rox/Brahm skins were available without RNG, but these are generally unpopular skins, and I do not believe provide a valid comparison to the other BLC RNG items (e.g. Fused).

Do you think this policy is the result of testing on other games, like Aion? Not having played those I couldn’t say.

Edit: I posted this in “Blood and Madness” as it pertains to the new BLC items.

This is one of the first times I’ve seriously had to seriously reconsider the amount of time Guildwars merits playing.

Because it costs them less time/money to make.

Talic.9608:

Ewon are you bothered that we didn’t fill Ferguson’s Crossing’s entire server with Blackgate? That’s definitely not the intention we have. We are partially filling a low-pop server so they can get their people in, learn the strats, and get a kill without needing to suffered guesting overflows. Besides if you have been in TS all day you would have heard a group of Blackgate people saying Anvil rock was the next server to guest.

Bullkitten. You’re preening, that’s it.

As someone from Blackgate, this doesn’t reflect well on Blackgate.

My home server is Blackgate, and I was disconnected halfway through the Tequatl fight where we beat him; unfortunately, that meant I’d have to wait in a queue and wouldn’t get any loot or the achievement.

Normally I’d shrug that off as a “kitten out of luck” moment and try again later, but I’ve spent the better part of a day trying to get back into the blackgate main server and and I still haven’t made it out of the queue. I imagine there are hundreds or thousands of players who call blackgate home that are in a similar situation.

It’s unlikely the overflow will ever become organized enough to down tequatl, so what are displaced Blackgate players to do (or any other server, for that matter?) Is it “working as intended” that players can squat indefinitely in the map? I’m legitimately curious.

He hasn’t spawned on BG yet either.

The toad weapons look awesome, but the pistol clips pretty badly

(Sylvari female wearing Svanir leggings.)

Nettle.9025:

A guide isn’t going to let you sail through this mode. When you get further in there are some very difficult jumps and maneuvers you have to pull off.

As it should be. What SHOULDN’T be, is that the infinite coin is the only way to play the game as it’s intended to be played (alternatively, farm baubles all day).

I probably should have followed development of tribulation mode more closely, as I’m very disappointed.

The Halloween JP and to some extent, Liandri, reward high levels of skill/ technical ability (though, they each admittedly have their problems.) Invisible floors and untelegraphed KOs don’t reward skill, and in a few days everyone will be able to follow a guide to complete tribulation mode.

At this point, my troubles don’t even seem to be skill based, but rather trial and error. Not even sure how to escape the starting area — I assumed you had to launch yourself with the boulder, but I can’t seem to get that to work. How did you make it through?

Stanky.7134:

LOL

Warrior has shouts heal trait, constant regen with adrenaline, MINOR trait. Regen from banner. I’m sure there’s others.

You obviously don’t know warrior.

plus endure pain AND defy pain on 60 sec CD. Omg win all over the place. You can’t sustain on warrior, you’re bad.

So what do you attribute the lack of warriors in meta-TPVP to? None of the top ranking teams run warriors, but you seem to believe they’re borderline OP — can you clarify?

You people can stick your heads in the sand and pretend warriors are great, but the fact is far better players than you are actively showing that they’re not.

I’m feeling skeptical about today’s patch, but I’m ultimately reserving judgement once I get to play test more. All of these changes beg the question: what exactly are we meant to do?

Additionally, what criteria are ArenaNet using to determine which skills get balanced? Is the benchmark PvE, WVW or SPVP? Do we have any idea how they’re bench marking our skills or their visions for where they want us to be?

This isn’t a QQ, but rather a request for someone to shed some light on today’s patch and where the class is going — as far as I can tell, it seems muddled.

Thanks.

darkace.8925:

Twilight was and always will be a vanity thing. You didn’t get it because it made you better, you got it to show it off. The fact that the greatsword build just got nerfed does not prevent you from showing off your vanity item.

Isn’t that EXACTLY what it does? I’m not saying this is the case, but if he wants to remain (semi) competitive he might wind up having to shelve his greatsword. We’ll see how these updates shake out, but I’m skeptical.

Maximillian Greil.1965:

right cause ya know… there aren’t people out there addicted to games or anything. Oh man! bars target people who are addicted to booze, we should totally outlaw alcohol. Gotta close all those casinos too! People can get addicted to caffeine, better go picket starbucks.

Honestly, I have no complaints about the skin. I’ve been farming karkas for EVER trying to get one, and I’ll keep farming till I get it. I have noooo problem with that. I understand the company has to make money to stay afloat, and as long as there’s no “pay to win” I’m totally fine with it.

That’s a faulty comparison, but in many instances there are laws in place to protect those kinds of individuals (whether or not this is enforced is another story). The gaming industry (as far as I know and might be totally off) has escaped scrutiny and haven’t had any gambling regulations placed against them; however, continued use of predatory RNG may lead to exactly that, e.g. see: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1dkkj6/ama_i_spent_over_6000_usd_on_gems_since_start/

ArenaNet is a business and I expect them to maximize profit; however, I believe that excessive RNG is going to leave their player base jaded and alienate both existing and new players. Ultimately this is bad for both us and them.

Scumbag Mawile.6384:

Jett.1239:

With a drop rate like that you have to wonder what the point of creating a dozen or so new skins was — the only thing most players are going to wind up with is buyers remorse.

They’re still buyers; they spent money, which tells Anet that RNG is still successful and should be repeated for more profit.

But for how long?