Guild Wars 2

Not sure if GW2 itself will be around in 3 years. And unless Anet wakes up to the fact that WvW is dying, WvW definitely won’t be around in 2 years. But judging from past actions, Anet will not do anything.

A lot of people will leave for ESO. Some will be back. In any case, Anet’s doing a pretty good job of killing WvW with lack of attention towards the game mode — ESO isn’t the biggest problem.

Just as a note: one of the recent Living Story updates only lasted two weeks (was it the last one?) .. so sometimes they’re two weeks, sometimes a month. Best to get moving just to be safe.

Infamous Darkness.3284:

I believe that it is Tazza that drops it, but she only has drops if you kill the commander before her.

As far as I know this is not true — there’s been another post about this: people have reported that killing Kaeyi it doesn’t work.

Also, I believe any of the bosses that drop wondrous goods can drop the recipe — it doesn’t have to be the end boss (who in this case no longer drops anything).

People (e.g. TTS) are already creating their own instances via overflow. So why not just make our lives easier and allow us to spawn an instance? That’s all that’s really needed. The apparently dirty word “raid” need never even be mentioned.

spoj.9672:

I assume you arent using DS to dps even though you are running 30/0/10/0/30. If thats the case I would suggest changing to 30/15/0/0/25. This is the superior trait setup for lupi solo on necro when using a power build. Gives good fury uptime and slightly higher base crit chance. Problem is you will still lack crit which is why its so difficult to get a good time with power necro on lupi.

Yep.. just flashing DS except sometimes DS 4, 5 for the locusts.

Thanks to all the tips (warhorn is great in phase 1) I can get deep into phase 2 pretty regularly — and as promised, phase 2’s actually not so bad… I just lose concentration every time at some point.

I’m doing the 30 in soul reaping for the stability — I don’t have energy sigils because buying an exotic weapon set after having gotten ascended makes me sad… stupid, I know — so I use DS to absorb the kicks in phase 1 when I need to save my endurance.

And I’m using 10 in Death for minion recharge reduction — I’m thinking maybe I can sometimes use flesh wurm to escape Lupi’s AOE and save some dodges. Or maybe he’ll even suck the wurms life instead of mine. (No idea if this works.)

If all else fails, I’ll definitely suck it up and do 30/15/0/0/25 with energy sigils — it’s definitely a better build (which Emanuel uses very effectively in the video above). But why use a better build when you can irrationally handicap yourself? I blame Anet’s introduction of Ascended gear

DusK.3849:

several times, they’ve stated that the player base is growing, not shrinking.

Anet’s really good at spin. I wouldn’t be surprised “player base is growing” means the total number of people who’ve ever logged on is growing (in fact, it can’t not be LOL).

Jski.6180:

There also the high amount of pve in ESO rvr the ppl who are “hard core” wvw hate PvE in there wvw a lot so i cant see something like that last for that long.

If you look at the current WvW CDI, it looks like Anet’s moving towards adding more PvE into WvW.

TeamBattleAxe.3901:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Vavume.8065:

Ragnar.4257:

Does this mean that the Ruins and Bloodlust are a waste of real estate? Could they be put to a better use? Or is my experience of it, in EU T2-T4 not reflected in other tiers/regions?

I think is is a waste of space yes, I would even rather see the krait come back than have these ruins. The whole middle section now just feels completely different from the rest of the border in the sense that you almost feel you are in spvp rather than wvw, this creates an immersion break for me, and makes the border feel like its wearing odd socks.

100% this. Unfortunately, this looks like the style of maps we’re going to be getting here on out — EoTM is very similar (except worse, IMO).

Has anyone ever built the siege in there?

Yeah, we sometimes build cats/trebs in Hollow (Briar) and Ascent (Lake). Both spots are decent for small-group sieges against moderately defended towers because there are some good choke points to use if the enemy tries to push back.

Yeah.. there are some good spots for regular siege… but there are cannons or something can can be built, right? Anyone ever use those besides just for lulz?

Levis.6137:

I still have around 500 boosters left and i dont even care, if they get deleted lol.
I rlly dont get why people are crying about this.

So if you don’t care, nobody else should either, right?

Just be happy that the Black Lion Trading Company doesn’t loan money and there aren’t Guild Hall mortgages… we’d probably be seeing foreclosures right now LOL

It was supposed to be merely a stepping stone to help move players from PvE towards sPvP. Turned out, it was much more popular than sPvP due to its open world/play-how-you-want nature. Unfortunately, Anet did not seem to ever recognize or take advantage this.

Vavume.8065:

Ragnar.4257:

Does this mean that the Ruins and Bloodlust are a waste of real estate? Could they be put to a better use? Or is my experience of it, in EU T2-T4 not reflected in other tiers/regions?

I think is is a waste of space yes, I would even rather see the krait come back than have these ruins. The whole middle section now just feels completely different from the rest of the border in the sense that you almost feel you are in spvp rather than wvw, this creates an immersion break for me, and makes the border feel like its wearing odd socks.

100% this. Unfortunately, this looks like the style of maps we’re going to be getting here on out — EoTM is very similar (except worse, IMO).

Has anyone ever built the siege in there?

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Other than that, there’s no real need for compensation.

If they’re compensating people who bought glory boosters directly with gems, they why not people who bought glory boosters indirectly via BLCs that were bought with gems?

The storytelling is amazingly terrible. It’s as if they’re just going update by update and making it up as they go along.

That’s why they had to blow up Lion’s Arch: the fallback when you can’t right a compelling story is to blow something up. And the worse your story is, the more important what you blow up has to be (hence Lion’s Arch).

Nage.1520:

According to patch notes, glory boosters were removed from black lion chests in the last patch.

I just looked it up… they were removed in the Jan 21 patch. Supposedly. But I got one from a BLC two weeks just over one week ago.

So apparently glory boosters will be removed from the game:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/March-18th-Glory-change-FAQ/first#post3692772

…with no compensation if you did not buy the boosters with gems. The given explanation is that it would be unfair to those who used up their boosters after reading this blog post in December:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/March-18th-Glory-change-FAQ/first#post3692772

Now what if you bought Black Lion Keys with gems and got Glory Boosters in those chests? (They’ve been dropping in Black Lion Chests as recently as a couple of weeks ago.) That’s very close to directly having bought the booster with gems.

(Not sure if this should be in the PvE or PvP forum — do Black Lion Chests even drop in PvP?)

Liewec.2896:

c’mon devs,
come march 18th you’re actually taking a large part of pvp away from us with the removal of glory and the vendors,
and all you’re leaving us with is a vague hint that we “might” enjoy something in the feature build that “might” be released in afew months time…

If the recent removal of fractal ranks for the fractal leaderboard (which never came) is any indication, there isn’t actually going to be anything to replace what was lost.

Leeto.1570:

I cant find any definitions of maintenance patch and feature patch so if you create your own termins then you make the rules what is what.

This. Whatever happens, there’s no real record of them saying anything concrete — very politician-like.

Anet is really good at spin and hype. But there’s a point where if you don’t deliver, people will no longer listen.

Charr walk this way to confuse enemies who are possibly tracking them. Either that or a really embarrassing bug considering how long it’s been in the game.

spoj.9672:

Its rng based. I have about 3-4 locusts spawn at once almost every attempt on my necro. Best way to deal with them is save well of suffering for when you get a group. Rest of the time just maintain locust swarm on warhorn and flash DS for weakening shroud as much as possible. It actually works quite nicely as a semi cleave when there arent too many. You can still fight him on the wall with lots of locusts but it requires a bit more experience with locust walking.

Phase 1 is a real pain on necro. But once you get used to it the other phases are pretty easy in comparison.

Out of curiosity what build are you using?

I’ve been starting with my WvW build and moving points around as I adjust.. right now I’m at 30 0 10 0 30 (almost all zerker — still cavalier trinkets from WvW)

the 10 in Death is almost is probably no good, but I’ve wanted to try using the flesh wurm to exit Lupi’s AOE in phase 3 and that’d require faster minion recharge. Plus, I’m curious whether he’ll use his single target life sucking attack on the wurm (or even other minions?) instead of me. Either way, it might save me some dodges so I can avoid having to get a new weapon set with energy sigils. (The furthest I’ve gotten is toward the end of phase 2 so I have no idea if the minion would work.)

Thanks for the tips!

Emanuel.9781:

You won’t need to move out of melee range, just circle around him. Locusts autoattack also has half a second cast time or so, so they will need to stop for a moment to hit you.
Use Warhorn #5, Focus #4, Death Shroud #5 &#4 and Well of Suffering(the damage/vuln) one to deal with locusts if they’re giving you a hard time. Keep your target always on lupi because by the time you dagger down locusts, he might just spawn some more.

Old melee berserker necro solo vid of mine for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1adt8Bi6Vw

I don’t advise pushing him to the wall in phase 1 unless you can avoid getting eaten up by locusts.

Nice video! Looks like fury is doing you a lot of good. Warhorn as well. And I hadn’t been moving along the wall as much as you.

Also, it looks like he never used the bubble of death on you in phase 3 — as I understand it you have to stay stationary? Was using DS #2 a big factor in this when you moved back into melee from his AOE?

Terravos.4059:

ESO has something similar to Combo Fields, they’re called synergies…

Players can activate area’s basically do things.

You still got to be careful about clumping up though, can very easily be wiped by AOE.

That’s cool — stacking being a double edged sword makes gameplay more interesting.

Lupi’s locust attack in phase 1: anyone know what determines how many locusts spawn?

I’ve seen 0-2 locusts spawn when solo, but is there a way to “convince” him to spawn at most 1?

I’m trying to solo Lupi on a power necro — I can get through phase 1 but I’m having to occasionally pull out into range to deal with the accumulating locusts .. it’s really ugly and time consuming — anyone got advice on how to speed this up? Or is the answer more DPS?

Wethospu.6437:

Rebalancing instabilities should definitely help with the issue. If they are tracking which instability completion they should be able to tweak them relatively easily.

But problem with lethal combinations would still remain. Some instabilities are quite ok on some maps but get on rampage on other maps. I can’t see anyone regularly doing these levels.

IMO they should do away with set-in-stone instabilities and replace them with the gambit system a la the Queen’s gauntlet. Let the party decide which gambits they want and how many they want.

With just 5 gambits and the choice to take any number of them, you get 32 ways to play one map. It’s an easy way to refresh old content. I can already see the PR hype Anet can use for this: “… and introducing 434 new ways to fractal!!”

Population problems are making WvW very close to being beyond repair. From the looks of the CDI topic, it doesn’t seem like Anet is even aware of this.

This is not directly about fractals, but very closely related as it concerns the LFG tool:

• Proposal Overview Disable the merge party button in the LFG tool.
• Proposal Goals Stop the griefing of LFGs (using this button on an LFG destroys that party’s progress). People are afraid of creating LFGs because of this issue.
• Proposal Functionality Disable the button so that it does nothing.
• Associated Risks None.

Perhaps instance owners should have sole kicking power. It’s not an ideal, but possibly better than what we have now. Of course, the UI should make it clear exactly who is the instance owner.

As for the merge party button — it boggles my mind that Anet hasn’t disabled it. A one minute solution for a very major problem.

MrsKryten.5104:

Lord Kuru.3685:

MrsKryten.5104:

to make the two areas equal?

It’s pretty clear at this point they don’t want to do this. And you can bet the next such pass will have even more features.

It isn’t so clear to me at this point what Anet’s intentions are. They added the skill trainer to the Royal Terrace after the Captain’s Airship came out which suggests that they are attempting some parity. But then they left out the activity NPC. Is it because they haven’t had time to work one in yet to the Royal Terrace, or do they not plan on adding it at all? It’s difficult to say until someone from Anet addresses this.

Haven’t had time to work one in? It should take no more than 2 minutes to put a guy in there.

In the end, ESO won’t really matter because Anet is already doing a great job of killing WvW all by itself anyway.

Menzies The Heretic.3415:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Knackers.8562:

No jumping puzzles, the new way of upgrading maybe, gets people working on their own instead of following a blob. NPCs that scale, i relize Eotm have powerful npcs, npcs in wvw should scale to that lvl or even more. Say someones running a 80 man blob, while youre outnumbered in a map of 15, why not make an NPC as strong as SMs buffed lord with 10x the hp =o. Npcs that actually can help ALOT instead of getting steamrolled the moment a zerg decides to tickle it.

Awful idea. The last thing WvW needs is more NPCs and more powerful NPCs. We’re here to fight other people not PvE.

Band-aid solutions of buffing NPCs when your outnumbered do nothing but make WvW into PvE, except with far lower rewards. Who wants to play that?

Anet really needs to address the population issues that causes outmanned buffs.

He said “scaling NPC’s” which means they are equally hard to kill by one person or 100 persons. Which in my optics promotes more good than bad.

By the way you didn’t contribute to a solution yet.

Simply stating that anet needs to populate wvw maps isn’t nearly a solution to the problem without stating how they should do that…

Still a terrible idea. We’re not here to PvE. And here’s my contribution: Don’t waste dev time doing band-aid fixes (of which EoTM is one) when it is better spent fixing the root issue.

In EoTM, losing doesn’t matter. So if you’re starting to do badly, you just quit and get into another EoTM map. Repeat until you’re in one favorable to your color.

I think a lot of people do this because a large percentage of EoTM are PvEers just wanting to get their dailies quickly. They re-roll EoTM until they find a zerg on their side that can steamroll everything.

They’ve already shown us previews of patch notes months ahead. They ended up not listening to the criticism anyway.

Knackers.8562:

No jumping puzzles, the new way of upgrading maybe, gets people working on their own instead of following a blob. NPCs that scale, i relize Eotm have powerful npcs, npcs in wvw should scale to that lvl or even more. Say someones running a 80 man blob, while youre outnumbered in a map of 15, why not make an NPC as strong as SMs buffed lord with 10x the hp =o. Npcs that actually can help ALOT instead of getting steamrolled the moment a zerg decides to tickle it.

Awful idea. The last thing WvW needs is more NPCs and more powerful NPCs. We’re here to fight other people not PvE.

Band-aid solutions of buffing NPCs when your outnumbered do nothing but make WvW into PvE, except with far lower rewards. Who wants to play that?

Anet really needs to address the population issues that causes outmanned buffs.

Distaste.4801:

Lord Kuru.3685:

The $15 monthly for ESO means devs are constantly under pressure to provide/enhance content and bug fixes.

Not really true. Company based content development can NEVER keep up with customer consumption, people get bored and leave. That $15 that promised new content becomes a weight on the quitting side of the subscription scale. Once people leave it’s a game of balancing profit, new content, and not pushing your current player base towards quitting. That means no huge changes outside the current scope of play. Even if the big changes would make the awesome for those who quit you now have the $15 hurdle once again keeping people from playing it because who wants to spend $15 just to see if the game is now better?

Subscriptions are the exact opposite of what you believe they are. They don’t pressure devs into making big changes to keep the game fresh, they pressure the devs into stagnating the game so they don’t lose their customer base, because once lost it’s hard to get them back due to the subscription fee.

Don’t get me wrong, I certainly think ArenaNet is developing this game at an absolutely glacial pace, even going backwards on several fronts. However subscriptions are not a beacon of hope, they are merely a flame meant to lure people into a monetary trap.

The way I see it, everyone paying $15 a month makes the game more “democratic.” If you’re, say, primarily a WvW player, or dungeon/fractal runner, would you pay $15 a month for the dilapidated, stale, bug-ridden, hack-ridden, griefer-ridden versions that Anet provides? No way. For $15 a month, you better give me something or I quit. For $15 a month, the company has to at least provide basic maintenance for each major aspect of the game.

However, with the gemstore as primary source of income, Anet just needs to focus on the whales and what they want (apparently, LS zergers). Everyone else only need to be satisfied at a bare minimum level — just enough that the whales will have some play companions. And bare minimum is exactly what many aspects of the game are getting under Anet’s model.

Pip.2094:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Anet has shown zero interest in this issue so:

1. Don’t fractal in a pug that has two members from the same guild.
2. If you must violate 1, always be the first person to enter the instance.
3. If you must violate 1 and 2, write down the account names of everyone in your party. When you get kicked by them, don’t party with them again.

How can you even know the two people are from the same guild until you enter the dungeon? It happens like once each 100 that the other people are in your same server…one should leave asap I guess…which will be like a “kick in the face” for people who are just aiming to fill a team, maybe two friends who have no bad intention (Like it happens with me and my friend)
I find such situation sickening though. Never happened to me, rare or not, it sucks. I find it shameful how the best thing one can do is “Always start the dungeon yourself”…hope at some point every person in game will claim to start instance and no team will even possibly fill again, we’ll just see like 30000000 1-person-teams “Lvl xx/Px already inside”. Maybe then something will actually be done.

Enter the party, and if you see two people from the same guild, leave.

Yes, most of the time nothing bad will happen if you stay. But getting kicked at the last boss is so terrible an experience that it’s best not to take the risk in the first place.

Of course this is a terrible solution. But it’s the only solution available. Anet won’t do anything about it. And their in-game mods/devs/GMs/whatever are more interested in banning people for being AFK in Lions Arch.

PariahX.6970:

styx.7294:

Should we care about Edge of the Mists?

apparently we should because ANET is considering ways to make WvW more like EotM which for the most part I think would be a huge a mistake.

Indeed. Look at the things brought up by the dev for the CDI:

• more verticality — though it’s well known Skyhammer is absolutely hated as a PvP map.
• more NPCs — though forum post after forum post rage against the yellow rally bait NPCs and the LS NPCs.

It just shows how out of touch the devs are.

Vavume.8065:

I think part of the issue is the way in the way the teams are put together, when you start a match and are outnumbered a lot of people just quit, and it never really gets any better on that overflow, one color will just dominate.
They need to remove the current system and just add people to each color keeping each side with the same numbers, as they do in spvp hotjoin. If the teams are balanced for amounts of players less people will quit and EOTM will be more enjoyable.

So it’ll be just like sPvP Skyhammer on roids.

In any case, EoTM is just a place for PvE players to get their WvW dailies easily and without pressure.

NargofWoV.4267:

Are they actually going to give a decent reward for season 2 ?

For participating, maybe. For winning, unlikely — winning is directly correlated to coverage and so giving good rewards would really anger servers with less coverage.

In any case, now that it’s fixed, I find it a bit boring in that each level of potion is strictly better than the previous making it a no-brainer which to use. It was more interesting when you had to “get better,” or weigh the consequences in order to use the higher level potions.

(Of course, having the description and the effect be different is unacceptable.)

Junkpile.7439:

Well system is kind of weird. I can’t figure out why it can’t just fill one overflow full and then start to send players next overflow. It’s kind of hilarious join three times map where we have outnumbered and fourth time i get map where all objectives are still white after 40 min.

I’m guessing there is a population threshold for which a new map is spawned — perhaps a whole bunch of people joined more or less simultaneously, and then all left.

For example, I’ll bet a lot of PvE players enter just to get their dailies (it’s easier in EoTM since no one cares and it’s just a karma train) around primetime causing lots of maps to spawn — and then leave immediately afterwords resulting in empty maps.

The $15 monthly for ESO means devs are constantly under pressure to provide/enhance content and bug fixes.

kito.1827:

im expecting some massive pvp-content.

beside the maps there was no content update since release (patching the game to almost fit the releasepromises is no content update at all – so leaderboard, custom arenas, solo/teamQ updates dont count) so im really expecting a tremendous change here.

but tbh i won’t be surprised if not.

pls devs ;( <3

If there’s been no content update since release (there was skyhammer though, LOL), why would you expect something massive now? Shouldn’t that be evidence that this will be more of the same?

maxinion.8396:

Aha, here we are:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Slaying-Potions-the-double-edged-sword/page/6#post3671010

In particular,

All of the potions were fixed with the update on Tuesday, but the release note got missed. It was while I was confirming that the fix went out that I spotted the issue with the Scarlet’s Armies potion, so that got fixed in the later update.

Thanks for looking it up…

Unfortunately, this was posted after the second patch went live when it was too late to check. Is there any evidence from between the two patches?

MastaNeenja.1537:

Yes it needs a rebranding. I think Maximum DPS might be good for replacing zerks. Stacking could referred refereed to as Combine and Cleave?

Party needed, Evading Mobs, Max DPS, be ready to Combine and Cleave.

Rebranding is a great idea. Might I suggest “Tactical Evasion” for skipping and “Close Quarters Cleave (CQC)” for stacking.

robertul.3679:

Posted lfg about buying arah story. Got merged twice. Posted lfg saying “stop joining me randomly!” and stuff like that. Got merged a couple more times.
Here’s a helpful guide to gain some insight into the mind of these people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSEw9CrSc-U

Not surprising. One can only hope that the next Living Story will have a dungeon and that these griefers will merge-grief that dungeon — because that’s the only way I see Anet ever doing anything about this.

Perhaps someone can bring this up in the CDI thread (in a nice way without getting infracted)?

btw, gambits were really a good idea:

• easy to implement (compared to creating new content),
• players choose their difficulty level,
• gives more longevity to content that would otherwise become stale.

It’s too bad it’s been almost a year since their introduction yet Anet has never bothered implement them for fractals/dungeons.

maxinion.8396:

Apparently, they fixed the bug in the Tuesday patch, but not for the Living Story potions. That alone required another hotfix on Wednesday.

There’s no evidence for this that I’m aware of. If they had put it in the update notes on Tuesday’s patch, then I’d maybe believe it, but they didn’t.

In fact, I seem to recall a post saying they weren’t fixed (search doesn’t work).

In any case, I’m a bit surprised each individual potion (dredge, inquest, etc.) holds its own stats instead of “powerful potion” of XXX always automatically means +10% outgoing damage and -10% incoming damage.

Should AR be removed from the game, to be replaced with well-designed mistlock instabilities?

AR is a gear-check mechanic — especially so for unavoidable AR. It’s just bad/lazy game design. Plus, it’s original intended purpose as a way to introduce a new, higher tier of gear has been served. Mistlock instabilities/gambits should be what makes higher level fractals more difficult/interesting.

The negative is that there will no longer be a grind for AR — and everyone wants/needs grind, right?

King Amadaeus.8619:

-ANET had to make this map and roll it out before season 2 due to queue problems during leagues

There’s a dev quote that says (or very strongly implies) EoTM was created so that terrible queues will be less of a problem for the China launch.