Guild Wars 2

Exciton.8942:

Now I finally realize the wells, in addition to be mostly hard to use, also have laughably long cast time.

Well of recall has 1 sec cast time, really?

Yeah, long cast time, delayed damage on last tick, overall pretty useless (at least for me).

coglin.1867:

Why bother fixing it now? Just make sure it is fixed in the new maps. Fixing it now, when the maps are about to disappear, strikes me as a waste of time.

I’d say fix it in the current map if it feasible in a short timeframe, and make sure that you can’t do that in the new map before releasing it.

Drakkar Lake was exploiting this yesterday as well.

I had one instance where – for some reason – I didn’t get ported back to the original position, but I couldn’t find out what it was… I’ll check if I recorded it, anyone else noticed something like this?

I only tested some builds for WvW raids and one build for WvW roaming and, if anything, I found Chrono quite disappointing.

How I would like Gravity Well:

• First tick on drop, pull in a 450 unit radius and apply cripple, no damage
• Second tick after 2s (increasing the total duration to 4s) pull in a 360 unit radius, no damage
• Third tick at the end (4s after deployment), pull in a 240 radius and apply heavy damage
• Back to 120s cooldown

Plenty of time to react between the pulses, you don’t necessarily need stability to get out (just time your dodge on second pulse and you’ll be out of the area of effect of the third). No hard CC at the end, but some damage.

Something like this I would consider taking over TW…

Power Block if I’m playing with Mantra of Distraction, mental anguish otherwise…

Xyonon.3987:

I like the skill the way it is – pretty amazing imo. Just the phantasm is another stupid bouncer instead of an aoe

I wish it gave AoE alacrity like iDefender does and applied Slow with a single-targeted attack…

I’m pretty sure the strategy here is “we want for you to experience all the game not just WvW!”… so even if you don’t want it, go run fractals!

From a WvW organized group perspective, I’m quite disappointed.

Wells are bad.

• 0.75s cast time (easily interrupted) and damage delayed to the last tick, so it lands 3.75s after I started casting. The cast time should be 0.25s for all wells except maybe the Elite and the Heal.
• I understand ANet designs with tPvP/conquest in mind, hence the “defensive” focus of wells, but there is no cap point in WvW. The enemy will just move out of the red circle. I would really like to be able, by selecting a trait, to give up some of the defensive value and get the bonuses and apply the damage around 1.5s after the well is deployed. There’s still plenty of time to dodge it, but it would be easier to land it on… someone in WvW fights and it wouldn’t force the melee to stand in it for 3 seconds…
• Gravity well has been gutted and rendered completely useless, it needs a rework. I’d rather have the pulls than the float.
• The heal well is like screaming “look I’m gonna be there in 3 seconds! drop your AoE!”. Maybe it’ll work in PvE because the AoE heal is not bad, but I don’t see any reason to pick this over Inspiration + MoR.
• The only good thing I can think for the wells is that most of them are Ethereal fields, so you can have good Chaos Armor uptime.

Continuum split
It’s a shatter and as all shatters suffers in big scale fights because our clones are regularly obliterated by AoE. I was hoping it would allow you to open with some jukes (double portal?!), but with the base duration limited to barely a second, the best you can do is just double timewarp. Meh.

Shield
I’m so disappointed that Echo of Memory is not a proper block for 3 seconds… Instead, we get this gimmicky skill that allows you to block 2 hits at best, summoning a somewhat unimpressive phantasm. Slow and Alacrity are strong, but I’m not a fan of the “bounce projectile” mechanic on phantasm and the attack recharge is way too slow.
And then we have Tides of Time. I was so excited about this skill. Double stun with no target limit! And quickness! In practice, though, it’s very situational. The wall travels slowly, so fleeing enemies can just outrun it and if you want to use it agaist a group you need to be practically in melee range. Also, it’s retaliation will utterly destroy you (I’ve been saying this like forever, retaliation needs fixing).

There is some good stuff (Quickness on shatter, Alacrity, and the movement speed trait are my favourites) and in small scale roaming it did a lot better than in large groups (chronophantasma is very strong in those scenarios), but I was hoping this elite spec would be useful for large group fights…

It was the easiest way to bring our max burst combo (Mirror Blade + Mind Wrack) in line with other high damage skills (for example Backstab).

Kungsmurfen.2861:

I put a portal under a wall and after the enemy capped I could portal myself inside the wall. Maybe not the most useful thng but still ^ ^

you can already do that… not very useful

ASP.8093:

For me, the main difference with the new guards seemed to be to discourage solo/duo break-ins into keeps. I really didn’t feel confident killing them all, half-building a ram, and then running for more supplies. That may change as I get used to the guard mechanics, though.

I completely agree. And it’s good, because losing a keep to two people is really silly…

Exciton.8942:

Why do you have to see all the elite specs to have assessment?

because I think that to even start to speculate on what the meta could be after HoT we need a full picture of what the classes and elite specs will bring to the fights…

even after this beta weekend we’ll be able to say that “on paper” some skills seem to work or not, but it’s hard to tell if the whole meta will shift in that direction, because simply we miss more than half of it…

right now I think the only wells that makes sense are well of precognition and of action, because the bonus on pulse is actually good, but for the damage and CC you need to wait 3 seconds and that’s an eternity during a WvW fight

Curunen.8729:

Well that sucks.That well sucks.

fixed it for ya

I’m really disappointed with this nerf. On paper, I don’t see any reason to run GW over TW or MI. We’ll see in game…

Rampage.7145:

NOBODY likes this new map make a freaking public pol and see it by yourselfl, if you feel like you really need to add this garbage to the game just make it optional like EoTM. Do not force WvW players to play on this map since we all dislike it please.

I liked the map. And no, I’m not an arrowcart lover. Actually if they removed arrowcarts this map would be even better: you could have decent fights inside the towers/keeps without arrowcarts showering on everything.

I’m gonna record WvW fights if we get a decent matchup.

I’d say… until we see all the elite specs there’s not much sense in speculation. Some of the wells are nice and interesting, but our utility slots are already in high demand…

So much stuff to test, not enough time…!

Not sure if this one had been reported, I found out I actually had footage of it, exploit to get inside Air keep from the Air shrine on top-south: https://youtu.be/a9R4QiGoRLg

apharma.3741:

Anyone had any thoughts on utilities that could do with a buff?

I’d personally like Phantasmal defender and disenchanter to be looked at again. Those guys die far too easily.

Also mantras need to be a bit less clunky to use. Perhaps not go back to recharging in the background (while it was marvellous it felt a bit too good) but I also don’t want increased charge time, almost 3s is long enough.

I agree with both: utility phantasms should be tougher than the DPS counterparts and mantras need a solution to their many problems and general clumsyness. I understand that the “recharge in background” change created some incredibly strong synergies (for example MoR), but it was also a lot easier to play with mantras then…

/fix forum bug
/15chars

Seems like we have at least an official acknowledgement of many of the issues reported earlier in a video from John Corpening (he starts talking at 0:48)

Another thing I noticed is that it seems that due to the keeps being so huge, there’s no “cata spot” where you can hit both outer and inner with the same siege (but I didn’t test specifically for this, maybe there is some?)

bad troll is bad 0/5
/thread

Shrines
They might seem like a “minor” objective, but they are not. And I’m really glad of this. I hated every single second I was under fire of the turrets in Fire and Air keeps (Earth turrets seemed less annoying by comparison) and that means that shrine buffs are working. I would say that flipping Shrines felt mandatory to flip a defended keep and that means that you need to split your group if you want to succeed. Good job!

Guards and Lords
Guards hit like trucks and merrily spam CC on your head. I’d say the “basic” gate pack felt as annoying as the upgraded packs of the current borderlands. They are a bit too much on the strong side, if you are in a small group they definitely represent a challenge by themselves, so they will be important if a same-sized group will try to defend.
The lords actually feel more “alive”: not only a custom skin, but custom attacks and strategies for each one of them. As someone mentioned, they can actually make the difference in a even-number fight for defense.

Misc

• The console in Earth keep that controls the configuration of the rock walls behind the gate is pure genius. You can split an attacking force literally by pressing a button. Amazing!
• I could hit most cannons as a mesmer \o/
• Weirdly, some cannons (I think I noticed it in South West tower) cannot hit their own gate, rendering them useless for defending against rams or alpha golems.
• The range for the buff on the dolyak felt a bit too short, if I’m fighting off an attacker I might want to be able to move around a bit
• Exploits. There’s already a few known for each keep. I really hope the map will be thoroughly tested for this and everything will be fixed before release!
• Test Timing: it was really bad for EU… The tournament went on during the (late) night and the prime time the next day was weekly reset, so people went to “real” WvW and the test borderlands were empty
• Oasis event: I think it was broken on the map I was on, didn’t get to test it
• I got stuck many times climbing or descending stairs, especially in Fire keep (the staircase with the lava cascade in the middle)

Here we go with the wall of text \o/

Map
The map is beautiful. Breath-taking in some places. Every tower and keep has it’s own identity and I really love that.
There’s more than one path from one point to any other. That means that scouting will be extremely important (and we don’t have a proper interface for that yet: map chat is not enough!!). As a side effect, I believe towers and keeps will be the real focus point where most of the battles will happen because it will be hard for groups to actually find each other. It makes sense since ANet said they wanted to focus more on defense.
The walls cutting off the shortest path are a brilliant idea and work really well in making life harder for who’s not holding the nearby objective, but they also represent an important “blind” choke: perfect for ambushing your enemy!

Scale
Although the map is not bigger than the Alpine borderlands, it feels a lot bigger. Keeps and towers are huge: that is good thing because you can have meaningful fights inside (if you don’t get slaughtered by ACs and shield generators), but it could represent a problem for underpopulated servers: I doubt a single player can scout an entire keep in a timely manner, let alone defend the shrines.

Splitting the zerg
It felt to me that the removal of waypoints in East and West keeps and the design of the map will make defending or even attacking with one single blob a lot less effective. Moving from one side of the map to the other takes a long travel time and if the enemy is organized enough to have the Earth keep contested, moving from spawn to defend Air and Fire keeps will take ages. You can’t just WP and run to defend everything. Good job!

Siege wars
The keeps and towers really felt like you could actually defend them, but between the already rampant use of superior arrowcarts, the introduction of the shield generator and automatic upgrades, I feel we risk ending up in endless “siege wars” where the ultimate weapon will be either the Omega golem or the Trebuchet to attack from afar. That could be fun for someone, but most WvW guilds would like to have a proper fight instead of sitting around trebs, waiting for them to clear out the siege and tear down the walls… All keeps have tons of space to place arrowcarts and that scares me.

Auto upgrades
From one point of view, as a member of a “combat oriented” WvW guild, I love auto upgrades. We never cared about upgrades and now they’ll mostly take care of themselves automatically. The flip side of the coin is that if you don’t apply constant pressure to the enemy, in no time you’ll be facing fully upgraded keeps that takes ages to cap. And from what I’ve seen, defending a fully upgraded keep is so easy that most of the time the attackers won’t even be able to get inside and have a fight with the defenders, it’ll only be arrowcarts and shield generators raining down on you: boooriiiing.
Flipping upgraded keeps will really be a problem on underpopulated servers. Three of us tried flipping an upgraded Air keep with 3/3 shrines and even reaching the outer gate was incredibly hard: guards stunning/taunting, pushing us back, immobilizing us in AoE and the “turrets” launching us in the water, life feels easy for defenders!

I got another one on Fire Keep: https://youtu.be/MH4QSBMbIpc

Also, there’s one on Air Keep where the shrine on top is, but I didn’t get footage for it

Continuum split, wells, Tides of Time, Alacrity… I’m really looking forward to it. I think it will make Mesmers even more valuable in group fights…

my download is capped a 4kb/s … I doubt I can download 25G in time for tomorrow if it doesn’t speed up a bit

AlphatheWhite.9351:

Menaka.5092:

• Maim the Disillusioned, bring it back to 2 stacks, reduce the duration to 3 seconds

It’s 6 seconds now, right? So 2 stacks at 3s is roughly equivalent to 1 stack at 6s?
I’d say 3s is too short, then. Make it 5s, and you’ll have still cut down MtD’s potential, without chopping it off at the knees like they did before.

Roughly equivalent in theory, more burst and less chance to cleanse it, since shatter is intended to be our burst, not our sustained damage…

Nicknobreak.7543:

All I want is to burst people down to 50% HP in two seconds flat as soon as I pop out of stealth.

Sure you don’t want a thief?

Nicknobreak.7543:

K thanks for the advice guy with 5 mesmers. You have been a big help.

You are welcome!

fishball.7204:

There aren’t even enough OCX players in tier 1 to form queues on ONE map on all 3 T1 servers in NA let alone spread out to 6 or more servers. This change really does nothing to balance out anything, they should have looked at timezone server status rather than across the board because having 100 people during SEA is different to having 100 people in NA prime.

Yeah, as I pointed out since 2012, if you want coverage to matter, you need the tools (in game and outside) to handle that. GW2 doesn’t have any, and the algorithm they devised doesn’t seem to keep track of that – on the contrary, they said it smooths out “rapidly changing” population artefacts, including the daily variance.

A few ideas tweaking only PPT:

Double point towers/Triple point camps: during the week, towers/camps give double/triple the points than normal. Switch the focus around! Could help spreading out the zergs a bit.

High effort, high reward!: T2 towers and keeps give double the points, T3 towers and keeps give triple the points. But killing a dolyak en route gives X points (10? 25? 50?), flipping a camp grants a one time bonus (20? 50? 100?) and flipping upgraded objectives grants a one-time bonus (200 for T2, 500 for T3?). Numbers require tweaking.

How to read ANet server ranking (from an EU perspective):

• Full: queues all the time
• Very high: queues at reset and maybe short queues during the week. The best night capping team wins the match.
• High: Aurora Glade.
• Medium: you will have some nice fights. Once per month. Hope you enjoy solo roaming.

With that build you can possibly kill people that are so stupid to sit there and wait for you to wear them down with conditions. If they are smarter than a rock they’ll probably just avoid the fight and leave you behind since you have no swiftness, no immobilizes or stuns, no cripple and only random access to chill to slow them down on a huge CD.

And I have bad news for you, the power burst build has been nerfed as well!

You might be forced to learn to play. A shame, really.

I don’t understand this thread.

The nerf to Mirror Blade was possibly the easiest way to bring our burst in line with similar classes (thieves).

PU is useless in PvP and they balance around PvP.
Nothing to see there.

The only change that really stings is the one to Mantra recharges, because they go back to being very clumsy.

All the rest were bugfixes.

MailMail.6534:

Confounding Suggestions: Fixed a bug that caused this trait to function improperly with some runes and sigils.
? idk what the issue is here, but I haven’t been using this trait often enough to notice. Probably fair.

It was bugged with runes of the mesmer and sigil of paralyzation. If you were running those, you would lose the Stun part of the trait and the total duration of the daze would be a whopping .2 seconds
I’m gonna test again in the next few days.

MailMail.6534:

I need to see what they did to the others, but overall, I’m not too bothered by these changes. Nothing too drastic really unless you count the Mantra recharge change. Still waiting for pDuelist to be fixed…

Eles got the ICD on Fresh air removed. GG

Fay.2357:

Daniel Handler.4816:

We also have an entire spec coming that is essentially devoted to PvE. I think they saw lowering the damage from mantras as a temporary issue.

Uh.

Allmywat.jpg

We have another spec coming together with Chronomancer? ;D

• Illusion of Vulnerability, make it Master minor and buff to 12 stacks of vuln on interrupt.
• Rending Shatter, make it Adept minor and buff to 2 stacks per clone (this would leave a Major Adept slot open for a shatter-related trait since we already cover Lockdown and Phantasms in the other two Adept Majors)
• Desperate Decoy, always disliked it. It’s so easy to waste it with an ill-timed damage and end up with Revealed.
• Mistrust, buff to at least 4 stacks.
• Descent into Madness, who cares about fall damage, really? Change the condition on which the creation of Chaos Storm triggers. Create a Chaos Storm when you are damaged more than 20% of your HP in a single strike. Or on block. Something useful.
• Mirror of Anguish, make the cooldown per-target. Or scrap che cooldown at all and make it a 25% or 33% chance on every incoming CC.
• Chaotic Dampening, buff to at least 3%, possibly 4%.
• Chaotic Persistence, should really be at least 4%. 5% would be even nicer.
• Restorative Illusions, make the condition removal AoE with a small ICD (5s)
• Healing Prism, make it a small percentage (5-10%) of how much the mesmer healed himself. No ICD.
• Illusionary Inspiration, I understand that idea is that you are casting the Signet just after summoning the phantasm, but in game feels horribly clunky. Any way to solve this?
• Persistence of Memory, I didn’t do the math here, but I feel like 2s is a bit on the weak side compared to Compounding Power.
• The Pledge, I really dislike this and the kind of playstyle it forces you to use. What if the trait reduced the cooldown every time you or your phantasms inflicted burning with a torch skill? Hitting 5 targets with the come back from The Prestige would already be better than the old flat 20% cooldown, and the phantasm could possibly contribute more. And it wouldn’t be “sit in stealth more so you can sit in stealth more”.
• Maim the Disillusioned, bring it back to 2 stacks, reduce the duration to 3 seconds.
• Phantasmal Haste, phantasms attack more often and have quickness. This would make it interesting in pvp too (would possibly be counter-productive in PvE for reflects, tho?).
• Shattered Strength, clones grant one stack, phantasms grant 2 stacks

I was expecting the nerf to Mirror Blade, it was the easiest way to bring our burst in line with Thieves.

I am really disappointed with the change to mantras. It felt like a huge QoL improvement more than anything else, although I can see that it was way too strong on Mantra of Restoration and in some cases on Mantra of Distraction (killed so many of those FotM mesmers while they were recharging the mantra in fight).

There was a reason if pretty much nobody went for mantras before the 23/6 patch and pretty much everybody went for mantras after 23/6 and before today. ANet should have worked a bit harder to find a middle ground. Mantras are back to being overly clumsy, on long cooldowns and with long cast time and a huge tell that exposes you to interrupts.

I totally don’t understand the nerf to Harmonious Mantras.

They are still “watching”, I guess… :\

I’d say around 4k to 5k hours spread on my mesmers. Still learning something every day, especially when I notice all my gameplay errors in my recordings.

To clarify one point: confusion only ticks the “high damage” tick when you use one skill, not every time your skill hits (that’s how retaliation works).

Glitching as intended

Forcing people to do anything in a videogame sounds like a recipe for disaster.

I can see only three options:

1. if the group you are playing with is decently skilled, you can probably find some build and class setup that will work for you (even if it’s not “optimal”) to play together as a group
2. or… you manage to convince them that running the meta builds/classes is better
3. or… you find another group willing to try either option 1 or 2

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/World-Population-Changes-Are-Coming/

a good start

I think the price levels will still be too high to entice the “poor” WvW population, but this is a good start

Rin.1046:

Menaka.5092:

Yes, this is something I noticed. The event would have been more balanced if some sort of hard counter (not requiring upgrades like cannons) would have been implemented.

I saw a smart outnumbered group take out a much larger group of golems the other day by using siege disablers. The allied golems could rip into the enemy golems and all they could do was run away.

There is counter play to this, but most people just run around thinking they are invincible sat inside their golem.

As with anything new, at first it seems a mess, but once people start to understand what is possible, tactics will be formed.

yeah I used disablers as well, but they only last about 20 seconds on golems, and if they spread out it’s hard to disable all of them… I was thinking more about something like a mine field that could only damage golems

Inkie Pinkie.9458:

With the golem week, there was no antidote to the golem rush. I would have liked to see a trap that created an empty hole that a golem fell into and crashed to zero. It would allow the towers to build up a defensive perimeter and kill off a number of the golems and give a fairer fight.

Inkie

Yes, this is something I noticed. The event would have been more balanced if some sort of hard counter (not requiring upgrades like cannons) would have been implemented.