Guild Wars 2

It’s impossible for developers to predict how hundreds of thousands of players will use a system they’ve developed without putting into their hands. I’ve been playing MMOs since they were text based (i.e., before most players on here were even alive) and there are always bugs when a new feature is released since when you have 100k+ people trying to break and exploit the system, someone will find something that was overlooked.

Leagues are definitely ready, they’re just not perfect yet. I look forward to what they will be once all the launch issues are ironed out.

It won’t get fixed on a weekend. Also, there are numerous other bugs, which Anet has said will address in the coming patch (mid-late December).

Thanks, I’ll give this a try!

I’m suddenly missing all of the Hall of Monuments titles. I’ve had them for 3 years and one of the recent patches totally broke something and now they’re gone.

My accounts have been linked fine and I still have all my other unlocked items (skins, pets, hall of monuments teleport stone, etc). Just the titles are suddenly missing. Seriously, WTF? I also got this mail in-game so I know it’s someone failing at their job.

I should have all titles up to and including “Closer to the Stars”

Anyone else experiencing this issue? I’m pretty angry about it.

The system could be a lot better if the MMR —> League relationship was reversed. See here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/PVP-UNPLAYABLE-teeming-with-EXPLOITERS/first#post5825005

I’m really puzzled by the new system. Anet appears to have gotten the MMR to league relationship backward.

MMR should impact the rate at which you can progress through the various leagues:

1) High MMR makes you gain more points faster in the lower leagues —> this would bump all of the actually good teams and players, like Abjured, to the higher leagues so they don’t have to farm noobs all day. It will also allow them to compete against each other rather than having new players afk/ragequit because they got matched in an impossible game.

2) How many points you gain per league depends on your MMR. Low MMR = less league points and you stay in the lower-league bracket until you get good enough to start winning and get your MMR up.

3) To progress through each league, players should require a certain minimum MMR. i.e., if you have super low MMR (i.e., you don’t win consistently against skilled players), you should not be allowed to advance in the mid and high tier leagues. Why? Because you haven’t earned it.

mbhalo.1547:

My question is when we’ll get matchmaking system in the game? Why as a beginner pvp player i get demolished by premade groups of Legendary Champions over and over and over again? This builds frustration and frankly at this point i don’t have any desire to play pvp.

And of course Dragon Hunters are just plainly insane.

It sounds like you haven’t played enough matches for the system to figure out your skill. You need to play quite a few matches before the system figures out your skill level — during this process it will put you against both high and low skilled players and gauge your skill based on wins/losses vs differently skilled opponents.

It’s quite puzzling why this feature is still missing. Even new games that are in beta have it (e.g. Overwatch).

Ranked Arena has a rank requirement for new accounts, so you actually can’t get total noobs in there. Aside from that, the matches consist of 10 players of mixed skill that are randomly assigned to both sides (while trying to balance the average skill on both teams).

Trying to lower your MMR will have a very minor effect, if anything at all, on your overall ability to win matches. There are plenty of good players with low MMR who are on their way up, and you will still be matched up against them since they haven’t found their place at the top yet.

bloodthirsty.5682:

So i recently picked up GW2 again with my friend, and we are very intrested in playing PvP. When we join a game however we get one shot and we cant kill anyone. Outside PvP we are only lvl 15, does this affect our PvP? Our gear we have noticed is alot worse than other peoples and we think this is why we cant win anything, if it is, do we need to level to 80 to finally enjoy PvP or is there a place to get cool and good armor.
Thank You!

If you are playing in structured PvP (through heart of the mists), you become level 80 with standardized gear so you are on equal footing with everyone. You have to click the PvP build button at the top-middle of your screen to fiddle with your sPvP stats. Your gear may look different, but it will have equal stats.

Just to be clear, you can be level 2 and as soon as you go into sPvP, you become as powerful as everyone else. Gear and level have no impact on sPvP.

If you are going into World vs World (the huge maps where you have to run for a long time to get anywhere), you get upleveled to 80, but your gear will be inferior to a true level 80.

Evan: If you think load times are such a huge issue, can you explain to us why we are FORCED to load HotM before resuming an in-progress tPvP match that we were disconnected from?

This is by far the worst design I have seen and absolutely cripples a team if a member gets disconnected in the match. It adds a ton of loading time for no reason, especially since HotM is full of people idling which makes the load times even longer. It’s not like the player can choose not to join the match upon relogging, it just goes from loading HotM to loading the PvP map. This process is slow even on a modern computer.

You should be skipping the HotM and going straight to the PvP map when rejoining an in-progress match!

The trick to stomping revs is to make sure you clear slow before you start the stomp. It works the same way as quickness in that if it’s not on you the entire stomp, the stomp will take the normal time even if the animation is desynced.

Anet really needs to fix the animation for quickness/slow stomps since they’re super broken.

Signet necro is still popular because it’s one of the few vanilla builds that’s still viable and is still the only real counter to boom spammers. Running into a Rev/Tempest/Scrapper who has 25 stacks of might is suicide in most cases, so boon stripping is really important.

Don’t forget that defiant stance has a cast time and can’t be used while stunned/cc’d unlike the Rev skill which is simply superior in every way.

claytonmorby.3751:

Hm I agree it would be nice, but I don’t think you can compare proofs to tomes. I think tomes were given so anet could encourage pvp players to venture out into pve after the initial starter zones had cleared out after the first couple of years.

Edit: Actually I take it back, I do NOT want it. That would mean pve players coming in just to farm them and not actually play.

A player that chooses to grind out PvP matches rather than do PvE is a true PvP player at heart. I believe you’re wrong about PvE players coming to PvP just to farm when unlocking the elites is much quicker in PvE. They already have access to the WvW process and that hasn’t broken WvW.

Cat Has Ducks.1982:

Jaxom.7310:

Kharr.5746:

It doesn’t take long to get the dragon finisher anymore. You can do it in 1-2 weeks of playing, if not less. It is not an indication of skill. Most of the skilled players don’t even use it because of this (they prefer to troll with Llama, Cow, Bunny, etc).

thats a serious 1-2 weeks of playing

That’s a full time job of playing right there. Prolly take a little over a thousand games right?

It currently does, but it also depends on when the rank was achieved. Over the years, Glory Rank has seen several changes. At one point, it was possible to farm it in hotjoin farm maps by stacking boosters within a very short time before Anet nerfed that method. Many people who had never PvP’d before used this method to get the dragon finisher because it used to have prestige associated with it.

It doesn’t take long to get the dragon finisher anymore. You can do it in 1-2 weeks of playing, if not less. It is not an indication of skill. Most of the skilled players don’t even use it because of this (they prefer to troll with Llama, Cow, Bunny, etc).

Core specs are the new anti-meta! You can play them to troll people and /laugh if you manage to win.

It looks like we will have a rolling meta until the new optimum sets in. I wouldn’t say conditions ever left — it’s just that people wanted to try non-condi builds for a bit.

Condi builds are a counter to physical damage builds due to their high toughness, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we see the old condi meta revived. The aoe condi application still surpasses aoe condi removal, so it’s possible that we’ll settle on a condi meta until the next balance update.

Play the new pre-HoT maps like Silverwastes and see if you like what’s there. If you don’t like that kind of gameplay, then don’t spend money on HoT.

Traps are not visible, since that’s the entire point of traps. Ranger and Thief traps are also not visible and both professions have a knockdown trap as well.

DH traps being instant cast, unlike every other trap in the game, is a whole different story.

Acid Bomb also has no red ring.

Gear matters in WvW, which is also PvP. If you want to show your prowess using your fancy gear, just go into WvW.

Slow breaks other skills, including stomping, which is arguably super important in PvP. It was obviously not tested very well before it went live. There have been numerous posts on the forums about the issues and no replies, so I’m not surprised you didn’t hear back either. Maybe in in the year 2025 we’ll at least be able to stomp when slowed.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Sunshine.5014:

So, in the best condition, it deals 20k, and in normal condition it deals 15k. It’s fine, class like Thief can endure the one shot.

More like 8-10k on a legit zerkerberker roaming DPS build

Here’s me from the other day

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8EO59KThFQ

Note: I have hit a glass thief for 15k once in pvp. His fault really :p

And here I thought I was the only one trolling people with a full signet build (which I play for giggles pretty often). I love that you instantly die to a single Unrelenting Assault at 3:20 then proceed to call him a 2 spammer.

Edit: I watched the rest of that video and you’re dead or downed almost the entire game. May want to put on Endure Pain instead of Berserker Stance. You can use Healing Signet to negate condi damage if you get nuked with condis.

25 stacks of vulnerability, 25 stacks of might, scholar runes with 100% hp, all the damage traits makes gunflame only hit for 17k vs a naked target in sPvP.

Were you even in sPvP? In WvW I’ve seen much bigger damage due to food and ascended gear vs upleveled newbies. This really looks like it’s not from sPvP. It’s not difficult to get 20k+ fire grabs, back stabs, etc in WvW when you have ascended gear + food against upleveled players.

I can help solve your disco floor problem right now. Turn post processing off and turn shaders to low in the graphics options. This game is one of those cases where turning graphics to high/ultra will actually make you blind from all the sparkles on the battlefield.

This happens to me on a daily basis since HoT launched. Eventually, you just give up and learn to play the buggy game.

I’m pretty sure it has to do with terrain changes and mobility skills. I get it quite often after using Ride the Lightning on elementalist and Savage Leap on warrior to enter combat. I sometimes get it on revenant as well when using Malyx skills. My character just sits there and no skills work. Not even stun breaks or instant skills (which work even when cc’d).

My hypothesis is that it could also have to do with skill queuing. Dodging or emoting fixes it, but those two things tend to interrupt skills and flush the skill queue. Perhaps when a skill can’t execute, it clogs up the skill queue and prevents all other actions and movements, except for those that override skills, such as dodging. I wouldn’t be surprised if Anet broke something again since the skill queue was broken and then fixed during beta HoT.

The game is not balanced around 1v1. All this would do is bring more QQs. Custom duel servers already have plenty of banned amulets and builds.

I’m pretty sure this is talking about the build I use and yes it’s broken. Also, every profession currently has a build like this that’s supremely OP relative to 90% of the other builds available for the profession. Anet needs to squash the OP builds so we can have proper build variety.

For those saying “bring condi cleanse” — the reality is that even if you have 3+ condi cleanses, all you’ll do is prolong the fight. I can easily take out 2 people, sometimes 3. It has to do with Anet allowing the DD dodge to behave like a whirl finisher if you take Lotus Training. Anet — if you want to fix this build, change Lotus Training to not be a whirl finisher.

The build has 3 basic steps:
1) Put down a field, I personally prefer poison from SB4 since it is spammable. If there is a fire field nearby, even better. Potent Poison trait works very well with this build (33% more damage and duration)

2) Endlessly spam whirl finishers (Lotus dodge + death blossom). You are unkillable since both are evades. You can do this in the middle of a group fight and not die.

3) Every dodge and death blossom will apply 3x whatever the field is, be it poison, burning, chaos ON TOP of the normal bleeding + torment + poison from the attacks.

The build pairs super well with caltrops (obviously) and caltrops on dodge (obviously) and remove conditon on evade (obviously). So, basically, you’re immune to direct damage from dodges and you remove condis on you every time you evade (i.e., death blossom and dodge both remove condis), so you’re super tanky.

I personally like to add an extra cover condition for the full “condi overload” so I use sigils of ice or frailty + energy for the extra dodging. Ice makes is so people can’t run, while frailty gives you a flat % increase to damage while covering your harder hitting condis.

Utility traits that pair well include Impairing Daggers to immob + slow (no running away), Basilisk Venom (keep them from running). Going for Panic Strike also helps if they manage to cleanse the cripple/chill/immob that you keep on them. There really is no escape from all the snares/immob/stun/chil/teleports. Bountiful theft is great for the extra vigor (more dodging!) and boon steal.

And yes, it can kill reaper (lulz) because reaper can’t keep chill on you or hit you with any big attacks due to the evades. Also, with all the dodging/evades, the odds of someone transferring condis back to you is very very slim.

There are other viable variations of the general build that use Pulmonary Impact + Pressuring Strike paired with interrupts from steal, Basilisk Venom and Distracting Daggers. These destroy anyone without continuous access to stability but lose out on a lot of damage if they have it up.

Any projectile hugely benefits from it. With the normal camera, projectiles (like arrows, bullets, etc) without a target go directly into the ground, making it impossible to DPS a stealthed player. With the action camera, you can aim where your projectiles go, so you can dps downed bodies that are stealthed, or stealthed players.

It also makes it easier to stay on target as melee. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but it is worth spending time getting used to it.

Crinn.7864:

Kharr.5746:

It’s impossible to balance customized stat distributions. The limited stats available in sPvP exist to promote healthy and skillful game play. E.g., Dire Stats allow for super tankiness with very high condition damage. These don’t belong in competitive play since they have no weakness.

Seriously? Guild Wars 2 is the only MMO I’ve ever played that doesn’t allow some level of stat customization.

I understand the concerns with total freedom of stats. But the amulet system is simply punishing. There numberous builds that are prevented from being viable simply because there isn’t a amulet with the correct stats for that build.

The many runes and sigils allow for plenty of customization regarding stats. You can make pretty much anything work if you spend the time looking through them.

It’s impossible to balance customized stat distributions. The limited stats available in sPvP exist to promote healthy and skillful game play. E.g., Dire Stats allow for super tankiness with very high condition damage. These don’t belong in competitive play since they have no weakness. Anyone who’s even remotely decent at PvP will find a way to make the many runes, sigils, and stat distributions on amulets work very well.

Every old meta build is still very strong and potentially better than some of the new elites.

Burn Guards still melt people at an OP rate but since there are fewer of them around, less people are QQing.

Got a source for this supposed “requirement?” Many of us have yet to experience more than 1-2 losses in a row.

Yeah, this is weird, I just tried it and chill is doing around 600 damage in full condi gear.. with might and vulnerability you can get it up to 1k, but at that point burning/poison/bleeding are doing way more so it’s the least of your problems.

Warrior just possibly got over-buffed. The damage I’m doing now is just silly. Anet was like, hey, Berserker needs more dps.. lets give +17% damage from traits, that out to be fine.

Is it DH that’s too strong, or the combination of instant cast traps with stealth + super speed from trapper runes? Without the stealth spam from trapper runes, DH is an easy target. However, DH is unkillable while in stealth + has the superspeed to get out of AOEs while stealthed. Trapper runes need to go. They allow trap spam with zero risk.

There would be a lot less DH tears if Trapper Runes were not in sPvP. Invisible super speed dazing instant killing action just by facerolling trap skills.

I would go as far as saying that DH is probably balanced without trapper runes.

Having a stagnant meta full of faceroll builds for months is both boring and not fun. I’m sure some people want to keep their “I-WIN” buttons, but actual good players will always find a way to perform well, regardless of how often skills are being changed. Other games have a balance patch every 1-2 weeks, and they do just fine with developing a meta.

I think there’s some confusion about the new elite specs. Some of them are simply very strong right now, which is why Berserker seems like it may be underperforming.

One other problem is that Berserker requires you to get a little creative with your build and skills since you have to give up one of the main PvP lines (Strength, Discipline, or Defense) in order to use it. Berserker doesn’t offer much in the way of defense, so dropping Defense is not an option if you want to fight on point. It also doesn’t offer any real utility, so dropping Discipline isn’t a very good option which leaves Strength, which is flat out better for physical damage.

That being said, I’ve still been able to come up with a couple of very powerful builds (one power and one condi) that are more powerful than pre-HoT warrior builds. I’m still experimenting with different amulets/sigils/runes/traits but I’ve gotten quite a few whispers from people being like “omg, I want to know your build” since they’ve been blown away by a Berserker actually destroying their team.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Berserker is definitely one of the weakest elites if you just put random points into it and don’t build around its weaknesses. But, if you think about it a bit and fill in the gaps for defense, condi cleanses, damage, etc it can be much better than pre-HoT warrior. I experimented with many builds and had very little success with most of them — which is quite a difference from Reaper/Scrapper where I literally put points into random things without reading the tooltips and still performed very well.

I’m sure that once the new “good” builds for Berserker get out on metabattle, everyone will start to think that it’s a good elite since they have 1-2 competitive builds. I’d personally like to see the core Berserker skills get tweaked- torch cast times are way too long for a melee weapon. The “Rage” skills are also all very clunky and clumsy. Every single one of them is outmatched by the other warrior skills in terms of damage, utility and defense. The animations are too long as are the cast times. Melee skills with long cast times simply don’t work in PvP — especially if they’re so weak. It’s a miracle if you actually hit with any of them. You end up losing DPS if you use them too, since you can get 1-2 real attacks off during that time that do way more damage.

Necro/Reaper MM build is very forgiving and your minions will continue to fight while you’re dealing with lag. Check out the old build on metabattle and adjust as necessary. You can also do celestial condi bomb engi/scrapper.

Basically, you want to go for a tanky condi build with either a lot of area damage or some kind of AI support if you have high latency. There’s a good chance you won’t be dodging eviscerates with 190ms ping, so you have to be built around face tanking high damage skills. Conditions and AI keep doing damage once you land them so you don’t have to stay on target.

Do this: Equip a full set of traps on ranger or guardian. Put on Trapper Runes. Chain trap for non-stop stealth and insta-kills. You can win 1vs2 and sometimes 1vs3.

You get super speed so there’s no escape. They can’t see you or your traps. They can’t see you coming and can’t see you going. They don’t know where you put the traps. Since guardian also has instant traps, you can use a trap anytime you get ambushed/when you’re stomping for stealth.

It’s by far the most hilarious and unbalanced thing I’ve tried so far. It’s actually hard to die since you’re always in stealth and the traps do all the damage while you hide.

Zatoichi.1049:

with the way things are going, elites are so strong they offer an advantage over traditional builds, in amny cases. makes it unfair and unbalanced to those who want to compete but cant afford the expansion.

The new content just launched. It is being played in the wild for the first time. There’s no way it could be balanced. You’re jumping to conclusions when in reality, every MMO that launches new professions/skills has poor balance around the launch. There’s simply no evidence that the elites will continue to offer any advantage when balanced in the upcoming days/weeks.

Agreed. All of the new content is basically still “beta.” It will take quite a few balance patches to tune things. I have yet to see an MMO that launches a new profession that’s perfectly balanced.

Nothing is balanced right now. UA is actually pretty low on the “game breaking skills” list. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s too powerful, but it won’t kill you anywhere as quickly as some other things going on right now.

Anet needs to do a balance update at least once a week until we get things normalized.

I would go as far as saying that standard models should be on every game mode.

Without standard models, it’s much harder to learn to read animations and the players that need the most help (i.e., those that are new to PvP) simply get “outmatched” because someone purposefully made the smallest asura possible and gets lost in turrets/minions/pets or gets obstructed by all the glowing explosions on the battle field.

It’s actually impossible to see a lot of asuran animations since they’re regularly obscured by things like minoins/turrets/pets/explosions.

Not long ago, these forums were full of rage as totally new players were joining unranked games and ruining them for everyone. These new players did not know the objective of the match, nor did they know how to dodge attacks properly, nor did they know how to use the map objectives (e.g. treb, lord, etc).

Getting to rank 10 takes minimal effort at best. You can even farm it super quick by going to the rank farming custom arenas.

Since this is a question of “PVE players coming in to PVP for guild missions” you can think about it like this: You need to level up to do PVE guild missions, and you also need to have the map explored in the area that the mission takes place and have a nearby waypoint unlocked. If you don’t have any of those, you can’t do the PVE guild mission. Some guild missions require level 80 in PVE, so I honestly can’t see why you would complain about having to earn a paltry 10 levels in PvP. PvP guilds can’t just go and jump into doing PVE guild missions — they need to go unlock the waypoints, explore the map, and level up. You need to learn the game mode before participating.

Ithilwen.1529:

I read that channel skills like Rapid Fire will be re-targetable. Does this also mean that they will no longer seek through invisibility and other evades?

I too would love the response to this as it would affect almost every profession that has a multi-hit skill (necro mh axe and dagger, engi pistol, thief pistol, warrior rifle, ranger long bow, guardian sword, mesmer GS, elementalist scepter <lightning + earth attunements>)

Solid Gold.9310:

Jasper Defthand.3018:

I only plan to use this function if it will work with my microsoft xbox 360 controller. Can someone from anet confirm if there will be compatibility? Seems kinda pointless to implement this feature if not.

As above.

It will work with a controller, even if GW2 doesn’t get “official” support (I’m sure we can all see this coming + a console port, like ESO and FF14). There are several pieces of software, like Xpadder, that let you bind keyboard buttons to a controller. I’ve used it with GW2 and tons of my other games. Works perfectly.