Guild Wars 2

azyume.6321:

-snip-
I don’t see other professions pigeonholed into defense like the ele because they have other ways to mitigate incoming damage with blinds, blocks and evasion.

wtf are you talking about? look at the meta builds pre-patch. The forumla is: HoT spec (cause marketing > balance team) + 2 defensive lines. The classes that came out on top were ones that could still put out significant pressure while being heavily, if not entirely, invested in defense. Ele, engie, mesmer all say hi…

JFLaliberte.5749:

When faced against servers with double the WvW players, lower population servers are simply getting farmed for ppt. Considering that each kills give ppt, higher population servers seem to get an unfair advantage. As an example, servers with lower population who barely manage to have 30-40 players to defend their BL get wiped by larger population servers who come in with 80 players in that BL. It simply doesn’t work anymore. Ppt should be given according to player ratio. The more players you have, the less ppt you get. It’s just going to make players transfer to higher pop servers and it’ll be screwed up all over again.

The population issue was identified along time ago, but players transferring so they can have fun in wvw makes Anet money – so no real hurry on working on a fix. In the mean time, here: enjoy some more siege.

This is absolutely baffling on how poor of an idea to even put forward. Sure WvW may be a sup’ed up hot join at its core but kitten its comprised of PvP-centric players.

WvW players have complained about siege and pve in wvw dating all the way back to when ACs could rain death through the floors in smc into lords. You put so much pve elements, made the maps so turtle-up-and-defend biased, that you now have a DBL map that you had to ‘carefully word’ a couple of poles to get it back in play. You guys don’t play wvw. Okay. You don’t consider wvw when it comes to skill balance. Sure. You’ve even had employees log in to troll gvgs. Weird, but okay. But really, wtf is the deal here? Siege is awful to play against, and because you neither play or balance around siege usage (and placement) already the game play is slow as defenders can bunker in incredibly hard with the tools already available.

TLDR:
- Anet has found the most hated and complained about element of wvw and will be introducing it as a ‘beta’

Why do I get the feeling that these things can come in as beta with a majority only vote, but will likely take the 75% majority to remove it again.

Palm Tiger.8275:

Dear Arenanet,

Over the past couple of days, my team (between 3-5 people) is having trouble with spvp queues for Stronghold. We have been experiencing queues differencing between 20 to 45+ minutes. Due to this we mostly had to give up on playing spvp.

We would like to hear how this can be solved.

Hey Palm,

You must be fairly new here, so you may not be aware of Anet’s 80% policy. Anet likes to get things around that 80% functional level only to completely abandon it and start the whole process over again.

In the case of Stronghold, Anet has decided to go the full 100% and give up on it entirely.

gl and have fun queuing as a group into a tiny subset of a tiny population that is pvp. And welcome to GW2.

Terrier.8732:

Love the idea of a log on tactivators.

The question is to what end though. If Anet isn’t going to ban for trolling, and to give them the benefit of the doubt it could be difficult to tell the difference between a new player wanting to pull it to ‘see what this does’ and actual sabotage.

They could be setup up so that someone has to be in the guild who applied the buffs to use them, but then that forces someone to sit in an objective, and from my experience, scouts are often very small guilds or even just individuals – so making it guild bound takes something useful away from those players.

At the end of the day, the issue was and is with the implementation of guild buffs as a whole. There really isn’t a perfect solution and now that players ground their faces along a cheesegrater that is pve and flushed loads and loads and loads of mats to upgrade guild halls to gain an advantage in a pvp gamemode there’s no going back.

Kadin.2356:

At the end of the day, with no changes being made, WvW will devolve into nothing but condi cancer wars.

It already has. Roaming/small-group is tank/condi + healer/support. The condi duration additions to gear for the sake of making condi a thing in PvE and the reduction to the passives to offset it has made things incredibly gross.

For larger group its damage reduction stacking and boon uptime.

Take the venomshare usage from a previous meta. Venomshare was garbage everywhere in the game (pve used power, pvp it was impractical to apply) with the exception of making wvw miserable by applying it to unblockable wells. So rather than shaving vs, Anet buffed it slightly and then annihilated stability as an added bonus.

Anet doesn’t care. They really don’t, so its either take it or leave it when it comes to wvw and ‘balance’.

This is a pretty slippery slope to be suggesting. As it stands Anet makes money from stale matches and server stacking by players paying to transfer.

Maybe you could also suggest you solution in the general discussion as well for the PvE community. Something along the lines of: remove mega servers, and pay to transfer for PvE as well. Your server to dead to do a world boss? Or push a map meta? No problem just by gems and transfer to another server that can!

Just consider that when you are making suggestions to throw money at Anet by asking for a solution they can sell in the gemstore you are only encouraging them to create additional problems to sell solutions to.

It was really fun to finally be part of the k-train while being paired with Mag. The PPT and blobbing effort you guys put out was really impressive to many on DR, as we really don’t have the population to support that kind of PPT-tier pushup play.

I’ve also never seen so many players willing to dedicate themselves to manning siege at all time in an upgraded SMC. It was over two weeks into our pairing before I was even able to get a turn on one of the SMC canons!

Xbon.9086:

youtube videos != popularity, there’s plenty of people, maps are still full, world boss maps are still as lively as ever…

All situations where the population is masked by megaservers, but tell us more plz.

Dragonfeu.4356:

How’s WvW? Is it basically the same old Alpine Borderlands or did they change stuff up ( merge the desert borderlands mechanics or something )

There have been some positive changes made to wvw, but its come too little and much too late unfortunately.

The Alpine maps have gotten the DBL update (nodes, tactivators, vendors, etc), but the ecological balance that made wvw what it was has been mostly destroyed. Blobbing in more common place than it ever has been and the partial stab revision (a positive change imo) combined copious amounts of resistance (Anet once again showing it either doesnt understand scaling or just doesnt care about wvw, take your pick) has created a perma-push type game play. So it’s pretty much numbers = win again. Most guild groups that were into gvg, openfield, or zergbusting are now either blobbing hard or have moved on from the game. The changes brought in with HoT has many of those that cared about ppt either now k-training or have moved on.

All in all there have been several positive changes recently but just too much damage has already been done. The other notable point is the dev’s now poling the wvw population before doing anthing may be well intentioned, but its also very alarming. Players aren’t dev’s and don’t have all the info or behavior metrics or understand dev time required, etc available and yet are being poled on decisions that largely require that info.

echo.2053:

They aren’t linking servers or considering to merge the bottom half of of na servers because of excess number of players.

You need to go back and re-read the dev’s post on this topic. You are incorrect.

Vayne.8563:

People taking a break till new content comes out is not dying. You’ll see more videos when the new raid wing hits, for example, which should be very soon. WvW is busier than it was six months ago. PvP is relatively busy for the season.

If it were a subscription game, I’d be more inclined to agree that active population cycles doesn’t necessarily mean dying. In a F2P model that is here to milk cash from the gem store, players that aren’t online aren’t there to buy the 2345871 new glider skin. I suspect that in a F2P w/ microtransations model an inactive player base has a much larger impact to cashflow.

It’s also strange that you site raids as a success when it specifically only appeals and is accessible to a small portion of the veteran population. And bonus white knighting points, for choosing to compare the once again dwindling population of wvw (T3 only gets a slight queue on a single map on the most busy night) to when wvw was completely dead.

Vayne.8563:

Also for a lot of stuff, videos really don’t tell the whole story.

They certainly don’t tell the full story, but are more along the lines of ‘one more piece of antecodotal evidence’. If you watch their streams they are all mostly bored/sick of gw2 and looking for ways to keep their viewers/followers. Several of them may have a histrionic disorder, but they are still people and like many others they mirror the general feeling of either ‘bored’ or ‘nothing to do’ in GW2.

The damage done by HoT to the population has been pretty amazing, and the aftermath that has been dev’s working on undoing HoT work combined with what’s looking to be another year long content drought is really attritioning out even, as you put it the ‘hardcore players’.

Is the game dead? No. Are many players questioning why they even logged in or just finding other games/things to do instead? Absolutely.

Xenesis.6389:

You can corrupt boons all you want, but then they can put the boons back up just as fast, not the fat stack they had to start with, but nevertheless it isn’t that hard to restack boons.

There should be a hard duration limit to boons, but it’s not needed in spvp hence why nothing like that is enforced in balancing other than “25 stacks”.

I really hate how much this game has made combat revolve much more around boons and conditions since release.

It’s been working towards a spam more game for some time. Which is strange in regard to Anet’s focus on the PvP scene.

It’s always going to be some sort of mess in WvW as it inherits both the gear max/min ability of PvE and adds a heavy helping of scalability issues (what works in small scale of PvP doesn’t account for 20+ organized players running something, etc).

X T D.6458:

Xenesis.6389:

Post it in the spvp forums, that’s where the balance for the game comes from, not from the pve side which wvw falls under.

There should be a general balance forum I think, or something similar.

Why create another forum that Anet doesn’t/won’t read?

Don’t get me wrong, it’s been nice to see some dev interaction since the Colin departure, but really its coming as too little to late. Content drought for over a year + stab nerf patch + poorly received expac (extremely content light, power creep, grindfest) + followed by what’s looking to be another ~1yr content drought has certainly taken its toll on the population.

Let’s just try to enjoy the all the reversions that’ve been put in that we paid for back in Oct.

Chaba.5410:

Reverence.6915:

It would mean you wouldn’t be able to throw siege while in a golem, but that rarely happens anyway.

It happens a lot more often than you think. I remember T8.

Hey Chaba, your family misses you. And FWI posting and refreshing spamming here and on gw2www.net doesn’t count as taking a break to spend time with your family.

TallBarr.2184:

Supernatural Dawn.3194:

gennyt.3428:

Supernatural Dawn.3194:

I think it is odd that people look for fights in WvW and those who don’t are told to go to sPvP or PVE. I’m interested in capturing objectives. If I can split my guild and hit two objectives and come out with one then that is a success. I think conquering the map is much more satisfying than some lagfest war. You prepare for war but with good tactics, should come the win.

I liked DBL the forts were tough to crack but the map was huge so feinting attacks was more effective in confusing the enemy.

You could have saved yourself the effort and just said that you like to PvD.

Not at all. I love a good fight if it last more than a few minutes. That usually doesn’t happen in blobs and DBL encourages splits and better fights in my opinion.

I agree, alpine is nothing but open field, nothign inetretsing whatsoever

Looks like EotM entertains you though and its remained untouched. Maybe make a few more laps there, ya?

TallBarr.2184:

Swamurabi.7890:

I never saw a three way fight in the open in DBL. I saw a couple in the keeps. Most of the rest of the time it was small scale fights or roaming.

After the switch to ABL, got in a three way fight by SWC. It lasted for half the raid. That one fight was more exciting then all the months in DBL.

DBL towers are useless, but the worst tower in WvW goes to SET in alpine.

Threeway fights, you mean those where none can use skills right? yeah so interetsing, much skill, wow

Your sig suggests you’re a EotM hero which makes your comment here pretty hilarious.

keenedge.9675:

I’m kinda sad that no one bothered to learn or run the Desert maps. True it was harder to find the opposition, but it also required deeper strategy. Going back to the Alpine maps seems like a jump back into easy mode for the borderlands. Frankly, it’s a bit boring now. No hunting or planning . . . just Zerg vs Zerg.
- sigh -

The Desert maps had less strategy because objectives were extremely defensible by map layout alone (before the rest of the guild buffs) and could not be threatened from minor objectives. This made towers completely useless from the get go. Second, on release, some extremely poor design choices to increase siege cost ontop of objectives laid out that could not have catas hit outer and inner walls and tada the dev’s had created that ultra turtle-up map. Also bonus: the insane lag from a lame PvE event in the middle made the map near unplayable until the event was resolved.

All of these poor features came standard out of the box, before anyone mentioned how it was a hard map ‘to get around’.

I’m really hoping they invite PvE and PvP streamers as priority again so they can really get some meaningful feedback on a game mode none of these players play and some outright despise.

Don’t worry guys. The next xpac will have the power creep solution to shield gens. Just have that $50USD + ready to go!

Anet: selling balance solutions since October 2015.

sephiroth.4217:

Works fine for me and my zerker warrior. (played premade teams too)

Dem bolas…

#JustHavingFunBeingCarried

Tuthan.3250:

Hello,

This has happened not one or two time, but many time now. I queued up as solo player, but for some reason the matchmaking put me up against full team players with communication. It’s unfair, and I think anet should look into it. Thanks!

Anet doesn’t care. It’s been this way since they delete the separate SoloQ matchmaking.

Once you play a bit more you’re going to realize that even the most amazing match making algorithm in the universe can’t create good matchups when working with a population that would comfortably fit in a shoe box.

It’s incredible how awful the matchmaking is in this game. I saw a keyboard-turner in sapphire which means that he/she was probably seeded there from last season. Makes me think seeding the divisions based on last season and not MMR probably wasnt a good idea.

Real talk here though – the last expac and the savage content drought both before and following it’s release have done irreparable damage to the population.

At this point we can be certain of a few things for the next expac:
- power creep injection at the level of pay to win
- grind and roadblocking the ‘fun stuff’ slows down player consumption and hides the lack of content (i.e. lack of ‘fun stuff’)
– story is hard/expensive and typically single pass content; expect nothing and you might not be disappointed in this department
- the ‘every day of march’ sales were a success, so wait for ‘every 12hrs of December’ sales

The other factor that ANet can’t control is that now there are other game options out or coming out. MMO players are fickle at best, and there’s certainly no point playing a game that you don’t feel like you are having fun in.

Also, does anyone else feel like they’ve got Stockholm Syndrome? It’s amazing how excited players are to have the expac content they paid for reverted back to find fun in the game again. ggwp Anet.

penelopehannibal.8947:

misterman.1530:

Actually, “people who preorder are not competent consumers” is, unfortunately, an economic reality.

I’m afraid it’s not.

People will buy what they want to buy. There’s nothing incompetent about purchasing stuff. Someone buying something and it doesn’t quite work out to what they wanted isn’t something exclusive to pre-orders.

I can buy an O’Chicken Burger from a new restaurant called O’Donnel’s for instance. If it ends up not being what I expected, that’s not my fault as a consumer. It’s not me who was incompetent for purchasing something that looked like it would appeal to me.

It’s not buying the burger that makes you an incompetent consumer. Its the part where you pay for that burger, in full, a year or more in advance. The part where you rationalize how this type of consumer behavior is logical is the real icing on the cake here though.

Carry on though; Anet needs people like you.

There’s two layers of cd:
º Evasive Poweder Keg has a 10s cd
º Thermobaric Detonation also has a 10s cd

Anari.2137:

Like i said 100 times,
If the Class Balance team knew what they were doing that patch would of been a lot larger then it was.

I think the team has an idea of what their doing, but their pushing pvp in a certain direction and on top of that theirs the pvp/wvw/pve link to content with.

Rev is fairly ridiculous in both pvp and wvw, but if the dev’s so much as shave a point off of precision strikes dmg you’ve got pve mouth breathers lined up and going ape that the class is now trash can tier for raiding. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not happy with the direction the pvp balance has gone, especially since HoT dropped, but the dev’s are pretty much in an impossible situation.

I’m concerned about what the next expansion will bring. It’s very likely, almost a given, that the next specializations are going to be even more powerful than what we got with HoT. Just like HoT >> core stuff, Expac2.0 >> HoT to make sure players spend those bucks to keep up. It’s disappointing but then again that business and marketing for ya I suppose.

StickerHappy.8052:

Mesmer already got nerfed, then it’s still not enough!? lol. Forum people are always pathetic.

Mes is sitting high on that god tier throne at the moment. It’s incredibly easy to play and gross to play against; its not good for the game.

IMO the pvp scene is continuing to dwindle (then again this is an mmo, so not a real surprise I suppose) as its not about landing skillshots or having good reads (even at ESL level play), its become finding that class+build combo that can’t be outplayed. It makes pvp not as interesting as it could be to play, and incredibly dull to watch. ESL is skewed a bit in just how bad of an issue a couple of classes are as they don’t allow class stacking any more, otherwise it’d likely be 3 prof teams again.

Mes, Rev for sure and likely ele need a few more rubs down the cheese grader to shave them back closer to the rest of the field.

Phineas Poe.3018:

I find it incredibly easy to 1v1 most professions and really only struggle against revenants and condi mesmers, which is to be expected. I think engineers will probably shift to team fighting this season anyway, letting mes take sides on start.

What’s your measuring stick here? Hot join play? Vs the near random matchups in unranked right now? Curious, what other 1v1 matchups are you going to find yourself in in even midlevel matchmaking matches?

Phineas Poe.3018:

In team fights the sustain is just absolutely bananas. Paired with a druid or ele you can 2vX a point for quite a long time.

So your definition of ‘sustain is absolutely bananas’ is that you can be carried in a teamfight by a support class. Even within your ‘someone can carry me in a teamfight’ logic, wouldn’t you agree that it would be better choice to pair either of those support options with a rev or necro.

Naix.8156:

The issue with the engie ‘balanace’ changes are that nothing was given in exchange for the amount of survival gutted out of the class. It’s put engie in a pretty tough spot right now.

Super speed still ticks for 380 a second with baseline healing power. It wasn’t gutted anywhere near as much as people make it out to be. You just can’t run Marauder and expect to facetank in 1v2 situations anymore.[/quote]

Engie survival was absolutely gutted across the board. I don’t follow how 380 per tick healing when you have super speed is somehow amazing. What’s the uptime on super speed in an avg match again?

Engie survival to damage ratio was slightly too good. The reason was the engie ran all defensive trait lines and paired it with a glassy amulet. Instead of shave anet tweaked nearly every survival tool down – hence engie is in a weak position for competitive pvp.

Eastcorn.5901:

A mobile shredder gyro would be really awesome…it could work like a faster Whirling Axes.

So long as the Gyro can actually keep up with a swift’d engineer.

Engineer got short end of the stick with the expansion getting gyros. Exactly zero players wanted more AI summons in the game as most of the prior existing ones didnt or dont work very well.

There is so much other parts of the engie that need fixed or reworked before gyros are a priority. Engie has heeps of garbage traits and skills that need love.

Seems like solid choices for unranked puglet play.

This balance (seems like the wrong word for what we got really…) patch has rev, mesmer, and ele still up at god tier+ status. Competitive teams (that make the meta that everyone emulates) are going to need to decide if engie brings enough to the table to even get a slot on a competitive team. I’ll be surprised if we see many, if any at all, in the upcoming proleague.

The issue with the engie ‘balanace’ changes are that nothing was given in exchange for the amount of survival gutted out of the class. It’s put engie in a pretty tough spot right now.

Also, if anet wants to delete stealth gryo, just delete it already and stop teasing with nerf after nerf after nerf instead.

What Gaile is saying here Dusk is: Thanks for coming forward that you are selling GW2 stuff, it makes it much easier than searching for these types of copyright infringements. The take down notice is in the mail.

… I really think this is a large part of why HoT feels so small; players have been stuck in SilverWastes 2.0for months.

AndyJo.8794:

Literally no point on this post made sense… silverwasting wouldn’t help you get anything discussed in this thread.

Do raids now, or wait for LS3 and get them how you got pink Sinisters gear[/quote]

The was that because Anet has to cordon off the new paid content from those who didn’t pay for it, limits HoTs play style and how players can make in game progress, including the acquisition of new statsets and gear. In the core game it could be in a collection spreadout over content, craftable, purchase off the TP, etc etc. But with anything it has to be acquirable by a means only available to those that bought the expac. So everything in HoT has to be: account bound, and purchased with map currency. Which is similar (but much more extreme) to the impementation of the silverwastes (accountbound items, even food, purchase with geodes).

Killance.4158:

For the expac…

It just feels… bleh.

The story does what it set out to do: confront and takedown Mordremoth. It’s that the plot has a few weak spots; unfortunately the weakest plot point is just before you the climax which really deflates any tension. The roadblocking with the mastery system and a deadend detour stop at one of the location really hurts the pacing. If you’ve already got the necessary masteries unlocked, it’s worth a single playthrough.

Video games have it tough when trying to spin a story in an interesting and entertaining manner. This isn’t a story driven game either – it’s a persistent game first and foremost. In an MMO, this one included, so often the mechanics and scope (there are a lot of other stuff that needs created and story can’t be front and center all the time) don’t quite mesh with the story deliver. The plot is at its strongest right out of the gate, but by time your heading into map 2 and definitely by map 3 things are feeling like sections were rushed or omitted entirely. Canach is the highlight of the story as he’s the only character that has an arc. The complete lack of denouement or epilogue just leaves the player with that ‘well that’s over I guess’ feeling and it probably would have felt better to get some closure and dialogue with the other characters in the cast (voice over not needed even). A complete of significant events occurred and it was a missed opportunity to use those to further expose of develop characters – but the ending, storywise especially, just felt incredibly rushed.

The writing staff certainly has talent but I suspect that the narrative get short end of the stick fairly often leaving the plot feeling like its being made-up on the fly quite often. HoT, more than most other areas of the game, makes use of the world (the maps, the npcs, the mini stories and types of event chains, the sound design, music score) to support the plot. It really does feel like a world at war, especially in verdant brink. By time we’ve reached dragon stand though once again the material is starting to run out of jam and this is likely why dragon stand has so little ‘stuff’ on the map at all and was instead implemented as a instance that closes (nothing populated on the map to explore so don’t let players see how empty the map is; make it a rush for a few minutes after the map meta is completed to artificially make it seem exciting and a rush to find stuff due to the time limit).

Anyway, its worth playing through once. The plot is serviceable, and if nothing else you’ve paid at least $50 US for it.

Oxidia.8103:

my motivation was doing it 5 times because you get ley armor piece.

Chase that digital carrot on a stick – stay thirsty my friend.

You realize that Anet wouldn’t make garbage like having to play the story over and over and over and over and over to get an armor set if players wouldn’t do it.

Thank you for participating in Dr. Skinner’s behavior experiment sir.

It’s how the paywall fence works with HoT. On one hand it keeps those filthy F2P and core-only players out cause they didn’t pay. On the other hand its a fence that keeps you trapped inside if you want to make progress or get anything new. I really think this is a large part of why HoT feels so small; players have been stuck in SilverWastes 2.0 for months.

Linken.6345:

Beast Sos.1457:

MP and HP are not content though. They are gates.

Nope they are horizontal levels dont make you stronger but make you able to do dif things to progress on the maps

Don’t make you stronger, but prevent you from doing different things to progress on the map? So you’re saying a gate then.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Beast Sos.1457:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Beast Sos.1457:

Take out the mastery system and HP, you got yourself 15 hours of content..MAX.

Take out everything and you’ll have no hours of content.

Silly analogies are silly.

Yes, removing core parts of an expansion decreases the playable time of that expansion. That doesn’t mean that the expansion was only half of an expansion.

They said when they sold it to us that it was content light because they spent most of their work developing new systems. If you didn’t like that part and the pricing of it you shouldn’t have bought it.

Edit: this did not need its own thread. There a perfectly good thread on the same idea in the first page of this sub forum. It could have been posted as a rebuttal to the other thread.

MP and HP are not content though. They are gates.

So is leveling.

The mastery system is an alternate form of leveling. Your post is like saying that removing all leveling in an expansion decreases the playable content, which it does because getting to new levels are a big part of most MMO’s expansions.

Kinda but not really in the case of HoT because you can only ‘level’ on the HoT map itself – and without those ‘levels’ you are not only roadblocked in the story but also in exploring the map itself.

Yes, masteries are similar to leveling, but let’s not kid ourselves they primarily exist to roadblock and slow down the player in progressing through actual content such as the story, map exploration (needed for opening your elite spec).

DOWNYAGO.4896:

I’d like it to be a simple option added to our dye window. I don’t want it to be restricted to the Hair Stylist or Total Makeover Kits. If I own the dyes on my account, I want to be able to use and change them all the time with now fee.

Now put your business hat on and ask how to monetize what you as a player are asking. Self-styled hair kits are just over $3 each, and Total-Makeover Kits are about $4.50 each.

I’m not arguing whether the current pricing structure is good, bad, fair or otherwise. I’m simply pointing out that you are asking for more for free, and that’s a tough sell to a game supported by its cash shop.

WAR.8465:

You are butchering your own game with this. The map is empty and its so frustrating to solo anything , i didn’t buy this game to get a headche . i mean its doable its just frustrating. so if anyone gan reply to me ‘’ L2P NUB !! ’’ well i know how to kittening play its just i dont want to spam refresh party search waiting for the meta to happen so i can get rewards easy like everyone is doing , i wanna play the game and enjoy the game not die every second because the map is empty because nobody want to do it because its hard.

please nerf kthnxbai

I’d argue that it has very little to do players feeling that the game was hard that has more and more gamers getting their gaming fix elsewhere. In my opinion, its that the expansion was very small content-wise, introduced a level of grind well above the norm for the game, and forces players into HoT to make any progress. The result is that a fairly content light expansion feels even smaller and grindier.

There really was several strange direction decisions made with regards to the expansion that has myself and likely many others wondering what happened here. To be reasonable, there is only so much game that can be created and polished in a year and a half or so, and I really believe that GW2 is going to struggle with many of the same issues that hurt HoT.

Anyway, the game is not dead but its absolutely bleeding, more likely hemorrhaging, active players and has been since shortly after xmas. To make matters worse, the cycle time is quite long until players will see the fruits of whatever the devs are working on currently. So if you are, like so many others already, logging on and immediately quickly asking yourself why you’ve logged in; take a break, or play something else. You can always comeback to GW2 if and when something new gets released. No sense dragging your face down a cheese grater for months on end in the meantime. Remember games are ment to be fun, and persistent games by design want you keep playing well past the point of having fun.

winterlove.6834:

title says it all

You’re missing the truly amazing part of forum posting though. If and when you have an account issue that blocks/bans/suspends your account it makes it so you are unable to post on the forums as well. You want to follow up on why its been a week and no one has looked at your service ticket on why you can’t log in? Better have a friend or a second account handy so you can post in Anet’s stale tickets thread.

Ashen.2907:

Naix.8156:

its never worth it to invest in toughness; or any of the defensive stats for that matter.

Never say never.

There are situations where defensive stats can be worth the investment.

Yup. Here’s how that looks if you had cheery picked at least a whole sentence from my post instead of what you did

Naix.8156:

So outside of corner cases such as raids (which are brand new) and wvw skill groups (which are now playing either BDO or The Division) its never worth it to invest in toughness; or any of the defensive stats for that matter.

Reading is hard, but stick with it. You got this.

reapex.8546:

Yes, toughness is useful.

For managing aggro in a raid, yes. Anywhere else in PvE land: no, it is not useful unfortunately.

Rezzet.3614:

it seems armor is tied with vitality , for example i tried rabid gear and my damage taken dropped by around 12% but then i tried soldiers i believe it was and the damage dropped by 50% ish

This isn’t true or how defensive stats work in this game.

Let’s say you got hit by a direct damage attack (i.e. not condi tick). If you were all rabid or all soldiers gear you would have the same amount of toughness and its toughness that reduces incoming damage. So the hit would do the exact same damage to you in either set.

Now let’s say you got hit by a condi (say 1 tick of 1 stack of burning). Toughness does not reduce condition damage so the burn tick would do the same damage in either set of armour. Sure with soldiers you have a larger health pool, but the condi is still ticking for the same damage regardless of rabids or soldiers stats (or any stat set for that matter).

Necrotic.7820:

Toughness is what mitigates the hits in the first place.

Dodge roll? Blocks? Blinds(for trash mobs)? These are tools that mitigate the hits in the first place.

Toughness reduces the value of incoming hit, sure. But because their isnt a holy trinity and PvP and PvE share stats/skills damage has to outpace defensives for conquest to work (see last bunker meta), so toughness is, by design, a diminishing returns investment. i.e every additional point of armour gives less and less damage reduction. So outside of corner cases such as raids (which are brand new) and wvw skill groups (which are now playing either BDO or The Division) its never worth it to invest in toughness; or any of the defensive stats for that matter.

Kyzonu.7504:

i mainly play open world content and mid-tier fractals (21-50), i’m currently using rabid gear on my berserker, but every build guide i’ve seen uses viper or sinister.
should i switch my stats to one of those, or is toughness useful?

In all PVE content (raids being the exception) its not worth it to use any defensive stats (toughness, vitality, or healing power). The reason goes back to the original design philosophy of Guild Wars 2 going away from the holy trinity (tank, healer, dps) in an mmo. In order to make this work every class had to have access to tools to both mitigate damage (every gets dodges. depending on class —> blocks, blinds, invuln, etc) as well heal themselves. You’re better off to use those defensive tools and player skill (learn the encounter, watch for attack animations and dodge) than tank any hits.

The second reason defensive stats aren’t worth it is because the original ‘hard content’ (i.e. dungeons and fractals) was based on a design philosophy of massive bags of hp monsters able able to one shot players. The best strategy in this situation is to maximize dps output on all players and end the encounter as fast as possible. The less damage output your group has the longer the encounter lasts and the more swings the big bad gets to take at you. And because bosses hit so hard that you can’t tank a hit anyway you actually hurt your team by trying to play GW2 in as a support or tank type role.

Players very quickly learned the above two items and the game immediately was distilled down into one build/playstyle for all PVE content: do more damage. aka the berserker meta. As the dev’s pushed and prodded to make condi dmg a thing you now have builds use viper or sinister stats – but are still based on the ‘dps or gtfo’ that is hardbaked into the game’s design since launch.

Siege isn’t really a currency.

And most importantly the more pressure the dev’s can put on your bag slots in general can only help their gem store sales, so not much incentive to clean up the current wallet as a priority. For $5 US each for a bag slot expansion players can solve this issue with their wallets kek

STIHL.2489:

There is a bit of discussion about EotM not being “real”

…..

I think that really is where the division is between the two.

Just wanted to put that out.

EotM was created based on a lot of player feedback about issues with WvW (stuff for smaller groups to do, more penalty for deaths so fewer waypoints, scaling of bosses, more interesting terrain, instanced based to avoid being stuck in queues, shorter match lengths to reduce the impact of timezone coverage and night capping, etc etc).

What your post has missed is that Anet has left EotM to be the equivalent of the Queensdale Champ train: new players come into ‘WvW’ to level their tunes in EotM and are met with k-trains avoiding each other to trade caps, and quite often outright collusion/match fixing. Much as it was a problem with the Queensdale garbage – this is your new player’s introduction to the content. EotM is as much real WvW as PVP servers the advertise win trading for dailies is ‘real PvP’.

Mortem.5170:

How can we report players suspected of hacks in WvW?
Is there a normal procedure to deal with this situation?

You can try to report for botting, but the report system seems to be automated so unless loads of people report in a small timeframe or you manage to have your post get attention on the official forums (i.e. reddit) nothing will happen to the offenders.

gr8 b8 m8. would read again.

CrashTestAuto.9108:

I really, really can’t understand why it isn’t permanent.

Keep in mind the only reason SAB is even back at all is to be a bandaid on the gaping wound that is the complete lack of content coming out right now.