Guild Wars 2

Razor.9872:

Sartharina.3542:

Ooh! I like this idea! And we could call it the Berzerker’s Sigil. Then, I can run around with my Berzerker’s Berzerker Torch of the Berzerker on my Berzerker.

That’s so meta

Not as meta as a warrior in down state

Aedelric.1287:

DoctorDing.5890:

Two things:

1. It’s not a democracy. Anet make stuff and we choose to play it or not to play it and that’s how it should be. I don’t want to play a game that is designed by committee.

Committee? Really?

It is called peer review friend and it is a good thing.

Players are NOT the peers of the dev team. A peer review would be if Anet invited some dev’s from another company/game over to get feedback.

Arena Net certainly do not operate as a democracy, but perhaps they should. If they listened more they would weed out a lot of the trash `content´ no one wants. (NPE etc)

Operating a game as a democracy would be a terrible idea. I can tell from your post that you aren’t a working member of society, so consider this: have you ever tried to pick a movie or a place to eat with a group of friends? It takes much longer to make a decision more people involved, and in the end you still don’t make everyone happy.

Your point on the ‘trash content’ is something that I’ve pondered as well. I think that Anet makes content that will resonate with a majority of their player base which seems obvious. So I imagine when they see mouthbreathers doing lap after lap after lap on a shovel train in silver wastes, or k-training in in EotM, or champ training in queensdale or frost gorge sound, or blobbing down queens pavilion or Halloween labyrinth or semi afk’ing auto-attacking world bosses, etc etc – Anet comes to the conclusion that players are doing this or behaving this way because they like it. And I don’t think that their conclusion is wrong. Try to be objective, and from your experience/observations what do you see the majority of players playing in game? If I were in Anet’s shoe’s I’d likely play it safe and make more of what’s popular (hence HoT maps are a reskin of the silver wastes – but with timers added to slow players down on consuming the content). Is it ‘trash content’? Largely yes, but it sells.

Straegen.2938:

As for the fighting thing, YB lacks a large organized guild. It is not fun to continually run pugs into a group like Sekz and get bag farmed. If YB had a large organized guild I am sure the style of fighting would be different but finding 30 man guild groups is pretty rare these days.

If you will cover the transfer costs [DOLO] might entertain trimming their numbers down to 30. Contact Mini Jak (Jak.9247) in game.

I feel like this is going to be an unfortunate situation coming down the pipe. The DBL map was certainly not layout as well from a strategic standpoint as Alpine, but bringing back Alpine alone is no where near enough to bring people back into WvW.

The stability changes mean that groups still won’t be able to push even on an absolutely open and flat field, and a lot of the ‘for the fights’ players have long since moved on or are all to happy to run around in a huge blob in zerk gear (knowing that a melee train will get obliterated trying to push/pressure them). There are flat places to fight in EBG and we still see glass blobs don’t break up to fight; just wall to wall blobs in glass gear (at least in the only two remaining tiers that can queue a map in NA).

Those awesome and protracted fights that were precipitated by having objectives that mattered are likely going to be diminished by the upgrades granted to large guilds that can PVE grind extremely strong buffs. Who is looking forward to fighting inside a fish tank that is the lord room of each of the Alpine keeps with the extremely oppressive guild claiming tactics buffs? The guy posting about the perma paper gate at garrison forgot that we now wvw with Invulnerable fortification buffs, and perma uptime of coordinated shield generators usage, and of course siege disablers (if needed). And the best part is that Anet made scribing so unbelievably expense they can’t possibly remove or over neuter these buffs without hosing over the PVE’ers that farmed these upgrades in the first place.

On the positive side, I’m interested to see how the Alpine map layout is going to interact with some of these oppressive guild upgrades. The DBL is laid out with such a huge advantage to the defenders (before factoring the guild buffs/upgrades) that it promotes a very uninteresting ‘turtle up and siege hump’ type of play. Alpine doesn’t offer so many untouchable defensive siege locations, and the size of the map and increased effectiveness of catas (i.e. hitting multiple walls from one build site) makes havok play more effective.

And finally, the PVE heros were never interested in wvw to begin with. So on top of wvw being neglected for so long, and then further beat down by poor design choices (stability change, massive power creep of guild upgrades, auto upgrades) that the veteran wvw population has been absolutely decimated. In NA where I play, servers in T3 (aside from Maguuma who is actively buying guilds to push for T2) can’t queue a map during NA prime. On top of this, the content drought timed (and its gonna be a drought for another ~6months) in PVE land, perfectly timed with new shinies in the mmo world like The Division or Black Desert AND the poor reward structure for wvw (if you play competitively its a gold sink for food/nutrition, gear, siege) means probably right around zero PVE’ers will head into WvW.

I honestly feel bad for the dev team on this. The change back to the Alpine map (I don’t think Desert should be tossed in a bin, but reworked/massaged) is a step in the right direction and certainly a good show that Anet does still remember that the WvW gamemode exists, but the extensive amount of damage done to the player base that primarily play WvW likely means WvW’s glory days are squarely in the rearview mirror. I’m concerned that the dev’s are gonna grind to get Alpine back in WvW only to have players continue to focus on the other negative elements plaguing WvW and then the dev’s go back to completely ignoring the gamemode again for another year or more.

Mishoo.5918:

Naix.8156:

How many legendary weapons you got now skipper?

10+1 legendary weapons. 13 complete ascended armor sets, 40+ ascended weapons.
A small guild without guild hall to invest in, legendary armor locked behind raids.
Nothing left to do, except to buy buckets.

Good stuff. Credit card? Unemployment levels of free time? Both?

And the second part… ?

Also, just so we are clear, you are cool with the rate of ~1 month+ per legendary and were okay waiting 16 or so months after HoT to get your legendary? But the announcement to postpone rolling out further legendaries is just too much for you?

Mishoo.5918:

Not everyone leaves. I won’t leave the game. I will indefinitely suspend my activity. Economic activity, since I cannot find any use for gold and materials hoarded. I’ll stay around till the end, to kill the lights and collect fanboi tears.

How many legendary weapons you got now skipper?

Also, just so we are clear, you are cool with the rate of ~1 month+ per legendary and were okay waiting 16 or so months after HoT to get your legendary? But the announcement to postpone rolling out further legendaries is just too much for you?

Some of the visual noise reduction didn’t make much sense imo. I’d love to see this get another pass with some more consideration given to the strength/dmg of the skill.

Some notable skills that are poorly represented graphically:
- Shocking Aura — nearly invisible
- Dragon’s Maw — no area of effect indicator, ward ring nearly invisible. The 15’ tall snapping dragon animation untouched…
- Acid Bomb – no area of effect indicator, only aftercast of acid gurgling at the final pulse renders
- Hunter’s Ward – no area of effect indicator, chains often culled out leaving invisible wards

A spammable auto attack like ele fireball was a good candidate for a trim on the animation, where as invisble wards that are 4 or 6s in duration probably not the best choice to make invisible.

The issue seems to be that absolute bads can farm their way into ruby by grinding which leaves the ‘skill’ level in ruby incredibly skewed. The later in the season we go, the worse it gets, and its at Hot Join level garbage in there.

Played a few this evening and decided to call it a night the second time I was teamed up with someone running a turret engie build.

This match making is an absolute train wreck. Seed the divisions based on mmr, and let it be about the PvP – ya know, players having closer matches with others at their skill level. Match making by division would work if:
1) More players were in the player pool to spreadout in the divisions. GW2 pvp population doesn’t really fully spread out due to short season length and most importantly the total pvp population is incredibly small.
2) The first 3 divisions didn’t just act as a conveyor belt dumping garbage in to ruby.

DeeSystm.1256:

I must be the only one who thinks various servers/tiers/guilds stacking for ppt or fights just builds another layer of wvw.

Honestly if I had it my way server transfers would be insanely cheap to encourage people to move around and fight various servers and types of play, but that would be exploited probably.

Believe or not what you described was a thing back before seasons. This lead to server stacking of epic proportions. Also, Anet realized that the best way to monetize WvW players is have them pay to move servers so it’s unlikely to see them give this cash stream up.

garland.5193:

Curious what kind of comps ppl are running for 15 mans. I’m T2 if it matters.

Thx

15 mans are long gone everywhere except for Mag where they are the preferred group size for ‘solo roaming’.

ToraSempai.8946:

Is there a way that we can actually demote/expel the leader so we can keep going with the guild without having to wait for the unknown thingy to appear?

Your best option is to talk to him/her about it and see what’s going on. With guild upgrades being absolutely ridiculously priced, I’d at least talk/msg him to find out what’s going before ‘just starting a new guild’ as others have suggested. If things don’t work out, I suggest joining another established and active guild (probably a large one at that, as that is what Anet wants based on cost of guild upgrades).

On the flipside though, if you started a new guild would you like to have a feature where a couple of officers could kick you as guild leader? It’s a awkward situation you’re in sure, but it goes both ways.

That happens a fair amout in pvp so you’ll need to get used to it. Anet gives zero kittens about this type of behavior. Many have asked for additional report categories for a very long time and exactly zero have been added other than what you’ve got to choose from now. On the bright side though it could be worse. Players are free siege grief or take golems and walk them off cliffs to destroy them in WvW which another player paid with no report option or action taken.

Raven.1524:

I kinda noticed that despite the complains or what not about the game or the expansion, the population is quite ok on GW2.
Which I find it interesting since we all knew of the old fights on the internet where people said that games like Wildstar, Black Desert, etc. would make the population decline a lot in guild wars.

A really neat feature that was implemented a long time ago to hide population was megaservers. Because you are playing in instances everywhere from the pvp lobby to pve maps, you can’t get a sense of the population. Now if you check out wvw on the other hand, or are a long time player and trend from how fewer and fewer guildies login to GW you’d be inclined to come to a different conclusion regarding the health of the population.

Raven.1524:

…lot of people regretting buying Black Desert because of the low population and other issues.

Most of the BDO complaints stem from the fact that you paid money to work a make-believe job online. The grind is the game in BDO.

Raven.1524:

I’m quite glad to notice that despite the anger on some posts on the forum, there are still many players on the game and specially with all the F2P change of the core game, I didn’t see any bots spamming any RMT sites on LA nor any other map.

F2P has been interesting in GW2. On one hand, yes it got more people to come check out the game. The trade off is that F2P’ers have to be segregated from ANY expansion stuff. So where the philosophy pre-F2P and HoT was login and play any content (aside from wvw) and make progress, now it’s get in those silverwaste 2.0 expansion maps only to make progress. Not only did HoT go extremely light on content, the fact that you can only progress on anything HoT related by playing the expansion maps makes the game feel even smaller. On top of that the treatment of the old content (i.e. absolutely ensuring the most profitable content to play or farm is in the expansion) has core content under populated. Dungeons is the most prominent example of this business choice.

What makes mmo’s fun and stretches the replay-ability so far is doing stuff with your friends online. But even that has its limits, and for the reasons mentioned above HoT has players bored and leaving. If you are still having fun, then what I or other ‘angry posters’ as you refer to them have to say is irrelevant. However, don’t kid yourself that its all happy times with GW2 – many veteran players (in the guilds I am in at least) are all moving on or login in less and less.

But don’t worry though, it’s only another few months until LS3 gets underway…

The match making in this game is incredible in how bad it is. But to be fair, the population playing could fit in an average mall elevator and the match making system doesn’t take into account the ‘human factor’ i.e. players in for a daily and out, players rocking sweet sweet builds like turret engie, your classic ‘afk guarding home node’ garbage, etc etc. They all get matched up and get to ruin at least 4 others game as well.

Anet has created an interesting situation with pvp: step one bait pve’ers back into pvp (again) and then road block them in ruby where the loss tiers safeguard goes away. And voila! you get unbelievible hot join level garbage players stuck and made they can’t progress further to get that digital carrot on a stick backpack, and the fact they are garbo and their are loads and loads of them in ruby makes it a rough road for players actually there for the pvp to get through.

Gratz Anet everyone is mad at the situation. You win. gg.

Also ZERO content outside of grind and nothing on the horizon for months is also helping the mood in game btw. Bonus dev trolling!

Daddicus.6128:

Naix.8156:

That’s how balance business works. Straight up power creep is better for sales.

Actually, with this game it’s the opposite. Since they’re not getting paid for making people pay, power creep works against them: it provides a disincentive to new players.

If you want your character to be more powerful, or in the case of PvP be remotely competitive at all, you need to by the expansion. GW2 has done a lot of thing right, but the pay to win of the expansion wasn’t one of them.

Aidan Savage.2078:

Honestly, I’d get it. The quicker you can manage to get through the story of HoT, the more ready you’ll be when LS3 is released.

In what way would OP be more ready? The ‘story’ to date in GW2 is delivered in a very thin vignette sort of fashion that’s more driven by creating space for xbox achievements style gameplay over lore.

Most MMOs struggle with being able to deliver good story and GW2 is no different. It’s not for lack of trying, but that their primary goal is making a persistent game; a game that above all else exists to keep you logging on. Even if the game could deliver something on par or better than your favorite story in any medium, thats not enough to keep you logging in to play it over and over for months while you wait for the next chapter/installment. A story that is so thin it could be scripted on a napkin, roadblocked by grind and offers xbox achievements on the other hand will keep you coming back for weeks.

That’s just narrative design business in the world of MMOs.

Sansorin Winterwind.5891:

So ppl only play the specialized classes in pvp now?

Pretty much yes, everyone. Anet made sure that the specialization version of each class is strictly better than the base version.

That’s how balance business works. Straight up power creep is better for sales.

maddoctor.2738:

I’m not saying only raids specifically can have good mechanics and encounters. They could even make open world maps with more interesting mechanics and mobs but then see what happened with HoT. There are players who find HoT mobs challenging and hard… Can’t even kill a Mordrem Sniper or a Smokescale and ask for nerfs.

I disagree with some of this. Sure Anet could go and give the existing content additional passes and polish, but its unlikely not because encounters become to hard, but that it’s not going to bring in more revenue. The core game is pretty good as is, and further polish is largely only going to benefit F2P players. For example if Anet made your favourite dungeon path mobs more challenging, with better AI or even new attacks/mechanics you are still going to skip all the mandatory encounters and stack+dps to melt the bosses in seconds.

The second and more general design criteria is that the expac content has to be strictly superior to the core because F2P (and existing by to play players) need to be herded towards purchasing the expansion. So the core will largely sty as is in terms of polish and fixes and nerfed rewards because it is a safer business route than gambling entirely on that players will upgrade because the new expansion is fun.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Raids currently employ 6 of the 300 devs at Anet, or 2% of their work force. They are one of the best investments in the game right now. If you want to talk about waste and bad for the game look at esports or WvW, which consume huge amounts of resources and generate almost nothing in return but wastes of money.

The core team that works on raids is 5-6 people, with support as required. Think about all the components in the raid: art, sound, story/lore, animation, encounter design, reward system, programming, testing, etc etc. I know you are just one of many who are currenly and will likely continue to misquote the reddit ama, but its far from 6 people = raid. There most certainly was numerous hours of input from various extended team members to create the raid.

IMO raids wings are some pretty polished content, and a sign that Anet is learning from what worked and what didn’t in past content. My issue with raids, primarily stems from the fact is that its raids or nothing and it has been for months. The feeling of nothing to do has been cranked to 11 for a lot of veteran players as we all waited for nearly one year with zero content to get to HoT release only to find that is was very light on content.

From a sustainable and persistent game perspective I don’t think raids are the way to go. Out of the box they are gonna be polarizing as they are challenging content, but its more to it than just that. They are going to be inaccessible to a good portion of players because they need to get a ‘good and dedicated group’ to be able to do them. For example in one of my guilds there isn’t enough dedicated players to quite make two 10 man raid groups, so what happens is and has happened is a pretty consistent set of 10 players do the raid and then the other 6-7 are stuck trying to get some of the 10-group to re-run it to fill the slots OR trying to join or pickup pugs. So to me raid wings containing story related to the next LS season, and being the path to acquire legendary armor doesn’t sit well. Raid specific skins, and titles? That’s fine IMO. Blocking players from BiS gear and story content (as sparse as it is), not fine. That said Anet has to keep those filth F2P players segregated until they pay-up, which only leaves game space to deliver the ‘new’ stuff in a couple of new silverwaste maps and a raid wing – so I guess this isn’t something that’ll change anytime soon

@Swagger and Tspatula, you guys must not be familar with Maguuma and CCCP in particular. CCCP plays wvw for the sole purpose of hardcore ppt’ing; particularly flipping empty structures and the new BL has the market cornered on empty in general. These guys go through stacks of guild catas in a matchup.

I’ve little hope for WvW personally. So little attention for so long by the dev’s has really done loads of damage. What made wvw so great, imo, was that it was a delicate balance of BL moms/dads, blobbers, zergbusters, havok and roamers. The lack of skill split with PVE/PVP has mostly turned the fights into glass v glass plick/CC spam and hence the fights groups have mostly moved on. The auto upgrade and on the new BL’s poor strategic layout made it so the moms/dads weren’t needed and validated by doing upgrades so no need for them to stay. And with the new upgrade buffs, and again the poor layout of the new BLs, defending has become extremely extremely easy so you either havok something that is empty or you don’t take anything at all. The thick and diverse population is what made wvw fun. What’s here now is garbage, and unfortunately the harder and harder Anet chases new players and PVE’ers to come check wvw out the more quickly the WvW veteran population bleeds out and often swallowed up in the MMO churn of leaving the game entirely.

In all seriousness if you were in Anet’s shoes who would you pick to beta test a wvw map or major changes?
Roamers and fights guilds can do their thing in essentially any open area. A bunch of fights guilds scrimming each other for a weekend on the new map might be fun, but offers next to zero useful feedback on the map design and mechanics itself. The maps need to be strategically tested for assaulting and defending objectives first and foremost. On the old BLs when we wanted to get a fight going we would go and hit NW or NE tower and use the enemy BL moms/dads to call in their map blob to defend their precious bay. We’d get the fight we wanted and they’d enjoy defending their digital sandcastle from being kicked over. It was an evening of fun for all involved. But this all hinged on first and foremost someone caring about upgrading and defending something.

Buran.3796:

Aezyr.5304:

Because you don’t have 10 necros dropping wells on those that got caged into your LB #5? There are “little” differences between pvp and wvw….

Maybe is more because stability was destroyed in June. With the old system this wouldn’t be a problem. So ArenaNet created the problem, and isn’t a trouble linked to this specific class, but due the rampant umbalance between the amount of cc that exist in the game compared to the small acces to stability -and how easilly gets wiped-.

WvW will always suffer from scaling issues. There was a balance stuck, for better or worse, when stab stacked in duration that countered CC spam. Groups had to organize to manage and maximize the uptime on their stability. What we have now is that blobs spam CC, same as always, but now its extremely effective as the stacks are stripped away. What we all need to accept here is that: Anet balances on PvP nearly exclusively, and that WvW (at least how we used to know it for the couple of years until the stab patch) is not something Anet is interested in supporting. In PvP, going to a stacks system for stab arguably made room for boon duration as a stat. In PvE the change made little no difference. In WvW it was single handedly the most detrimental change Anet ever made.

I think its likely too late now, but I really believe that even with layer after layer of OP garbage adders only accessible to large PvE guilds (dragon banners, airstrikes, etc etc), and even with pay-to-win power creep on Rev’s spamming 10k+ Coalescence of Ruin every 2s the players would have stuck it out (longer at least) if stability hadn’t got gutted.

Extreme.8350:

Guardian has always been the most op broken class in wvw thats why you see zergs where 6/10 players is guardian

It has nothing to do with broken, and has everything to do with Guardians being the only source of mobile group stab in the game. Since the stab changed to stacks, you’re getting a glimpse of what wvw would look like without stab: no one can push in melee due to CC spam, and without melee to pressure casters the casters are free to zerk up without fear. The end result is two groups look at each other pew pewing from max range.

WvW has come to the end of its life, but it would never have been able to have the life that it did without the existence of Stand Your Ground.

Transferring at this point for anyone doesn’t make much sense. Actually, looking back its tough not feel slighted when Anet freely monetized WvW by milking cash from players transferring upwards to chase that ever shrinking WvW action.

It’s absolutely amazing that a big part of whether or not a player got to really experience WvW complete with epic fights, rivalries, camaraderie and those omgwtfbbq moments was all decided in a few seconds after a new player finishes that GW2 install and reaches the World Selection prompt…

Randulf.7614:

Azure Prower.8701:

Randulf.7614:

The misc weapons are worth mentioning because some of them are sublime
-snip-

Some of those listed are super rare drops that you basically have to pay hundreds of gold on the TP to obtain.

That’s a separate issue though. They are obtainable without gold and without use of the gemstore, which is the topic of discussion here. I don’t disagree that they are perhaps too rare, but the point stands they exist in game through content.

It’s not entirely a separate issue. Super rare drops are not something that can be worked towards. Those luxury items/skins likely present a tasty piece of whale bait, and Anet isn’t going to complain if a whale or two wants to go $$ to gems to gold to purchase them. The OP was referring to a system of how armor was delivered previously in the game: dungeon armor, wvw armor, skins from story achieves, etc. These in game means of obtaining skins once existed side-by-side with gemstore skins. As the game has matured, in the gemstore route has been far more favoured over in-game means.

caveman.5840:

because this is anet listening to the wvw community

You’ve missed that fact that the dev’s have been very biased to the T1 servers (since pre mega servers even).

There is a very sad reality is that when you purchase GW2 you are prompted to select a home world server and essentially roll the dice on how enjoyable your WvW experience will be. If were fortunate to pick a server with an active WvW community (I’m referring mostly to earlier in the game when people were still actually in WvW) then you would you have a chance to experience those intense, epic and awesome moments that only large scale wvw has to offer.

IMO, the real issue with Anet abandoning WvW and now has it in a state that is so awful its uncertain if they will be able to breath any new life into the game mode (not just bring back vet player; any players would do at this point) has to do with money. It’s a longer story, but as a player with alts and who has transferred multiple times the server population was exaggeratedly high (every server in the game was either high, very high or full) and seemed to have a pretty wonky script/alorithm to determine populations at all. It’s hard not to think Anet was being pretty slimy here as the only thing that was monitized in WvW was players paying to transfer servers. It’s quite likely that the highest wvw revenue was made during seasons as players paid to stack servers and then again as players repeatedly transferred to higher tiers during the last year+ in search of tiers with active wvw populations.

Hands down there is no component of the game that the dev’s are further out of touch with their player base than in WvW.

Let’s take a quick look at the Anet track record:
- Pay for the game, find out what wvw is, then pay again to transfer to a server where you can play the wvw gamemode in a game you already purchased
- EotM addressed certain aspects players at the time were asking for, but has been left untouched/unpolished and operates almost entirely on large scale map collusion for players to k-train and level alts.
-Changes to stability, zero attention given extremely unfun mechanics/skills (venomshare+wells) and since HoT rev hammer spam – even though in almost all accounts the culprit mechanics were used neither in pvp or pve
- The first of what was supposed to be several ‘tests’ and fun events in WvW – the golem rush. The event was bugged giving players massive damage buffs out of golems – it wasn’t acknowledged, wasn’t fixed and left as-is for the duration, and no ‘fun test events’ have been run since
- The new border land maps without a doubt put a massive effort into the art and aesthetic but completely overlooked the strategic elements (some egs: you can’t capture and then threaten another objective, savagely biased map design and mechanics for defense (tower turtling and siege humping), almost completely removed the supply attrition element of counter play, etc etc etc)
- New wvw buffs are only available to large guilds that do a lot of NOT wvw play and can afford to craft incredibly strong buffs in wvw.

Anyway, for those that missed it Anet did an adopt a dev thing back in the fall of 2014. Here’s the video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Bd0UWUr6l0 as an after the fact sort of hype video.

Some bonus trivia from a longtime player:
You’ll see Hugh Norfolk in the video there and he did run with [Cern] and streamed some of his play. Any guesses on what he ran for organized guild fighting?

Cynz.9437:

Really, if you gonna nerf class (thief) to oblivion or/and buff everything else to the point where thief is a joke in comparison…snip

Warrior class says hi.

Cynz.9437:

YOU (Anet) ruined the class, YOU suppose to make sure that players at least don’t get harassed in game WHICH you are NOT doing. Instead all i see is more nerfs (since HoT) and people that harassed me are still playing. Instead of wasting time on forums, banning people for harmless posts or spamming reddit about muffins why don’t you actually do some job ban people for verbal abuse. Thanks.

P.S. Oh and i dare mods to bann me for this thread, this would mean they support player harassment.

Or you could take the training wheels off that soldiers ami and play something a bit more meta, ya?

Lauren Kamieniecki.6245:

Azaruil.3406:

Are the devs aware of the ranger longbow range bug? Range is supposed to be 1500 and that is what the line underneath your skills will show, but longbow shots will hit their targets beyond that point. Looks like 1800 when I tested it with guildies in spvp.

This bug has been around for a while too, figured it would get fixed but it hasn’t been yet. Possibly a bug from when base range was 1200 and the trait added 300. Wouldn’t be surprised if the added 300 range was somehow accidentally left hidden with the grandmaster longbow trait.

Almost all ranged skills have an overage, this is because projectiles like arrows and bullets don’t just “stop”.

I recall a dev stream from a longtime ago that mentioned that the overage was +15% range on skills above what they are listed at. If I recall, the purpose was to help these skills land on moving targets near the max range as listed.

Stand The Wall.6987:

I think the lower the total pool of available players, the less effective the glicko system is.

The low population is a big one for sure, but GW2’s pvp matchmaking also gets beat up by factors like:
- requiring a ‘functional team comp’ to be competitive
- no one person can carry, but one much weaker or bad player can completely ruin the match
- at low level play matchmaking likely over estimates the value of comms and at mid to high level play it grossly underestimates the advantage players in comms over those that aren’t
- the system can’t determine other build related factors

A larger player population will certainly help, and if they’d get away from letting premades stomp out soloq’ers it’d go a long way to help things, but matchmaking is always going to be pretty shaky due to the nature of the game.

Evan Lesh.3295:

As for what changes would most improve leagues, you’ll have to wait for more info on that.

I hope that you and your team are able to workout the kinks. In the past, not just in pvp but in all parts of the game, Anet’s had this tendency to take a chance and push something new or bold and then not really followup to polish or workout kinks. The reason I say this is, that despite all of the rage fueled feedback on the leagues, its not the concept but rather some issues with the implementation of the pvp leagues and it’d be unfortunate if you weren’t to iterate another season or two until things clicked. Granted there are other items outside the realm of the league sysetm and matchmaking that are having a negative impact as well and hopefully a compromise can be reached to address at least some of these issues (some egs: pay-to-win level power creep in elite vs core specs, pvp/pve skill coupling which now has to interact with tighter tuned content in raids, soloq vs teamq, etc). This season felt more like a beta than a finished product and that’s not inherently a bad thing; instead whether its a bad thing or not will ultimately be determined by the follow-up and polishing (or lack of) in the upcoming season(s).

imo, the fundamental component that leagues got right was implementing a way to communicate player progression without going against the Anet’s philosophy of refusing to show player MMR. Players have complained about the grind of the progression system, but I think if we look at the broader picture that grind coupled with the progression meter (i.e. pips) and a bit of a reward (back skin, new stuff to craft) all combined to get new players (or vet players new to pvp) into pvp and stick long enough to perhaps become regulars in this content. More players in the pvp pool that will naturally distribute along the skill spectrum can only help make your job of match making easier and my time as a player more enjoyable with more frequently landing in those close matches. It’s a win-win, and the right direction to steer the design toward.

TLDR: the concept of leagues is solid; implementation needs polish; please don’t neglect/abandon/discard this system.

vana.5467:

Skill updates are quite literally the only thing that keeps an MMO interesting in the long run.

I disagree. Imo its the mmo portion – that fact you are playing with friends – that keeps you playing long past the point of actually enjoying the game itself. Additionally, thousands of hours of time, and varying amounts of money sunk into your account create a sense of value that is hard to abandon and walk away from.

vana.5467:

I can’t even describe how unfathomably stupid I find their decision to do balance passes so infrequently.
Monthly should be the minimum time frame. Ideally, we’d get a small patch every 2 weeks.

Would you feel the same if you had spent hours grind the same content over and over and over to optimize your build for pve raiding, or wvw and the devs were changing/tweaking every two weeks on you?

The topic of splitting pve/wvw from pvp is a touchy one. As a pvp’er and long time player I’d like to see it happen, but I can see it being a barrier to entry into pvp for new players (you enter gw2 mmo land in pve first, and find your way to pvp later). There are/were some skills that work differently between pvp and pve/wvw but the devs do not communicate these discrepancies to players. Remember the wiki is not maintained by devs. Here’s an example of a split skill: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Tactical_Strike

It’s a separate discussion, but i think that the modes could reasonably be split by creating a second set of accurate and clear tool tips for skills and traits for pve and pvp. Currently, your stats/gear are overridden when you go into pvp and above is an example of a split skill already, so it seems that there is a known and working solution already that could be expanded. PvP skills would be based on the PVE versions (so they don’t work wildly different from pve and pvp gamemodes) with the pvp version tuned appropriately (loads of dials to be adjusted here: base damage, condi stacks, effect durations, number of targets, and possibly even cooldown adjustments).

Father Busho.2796:

Naix.8156:

@Vieux P and Azukas

You realize that Blade and Soul, like Wild Star and Guild Wars, is an NCSoft product, right?

For some time now, GW2 is no longer a NCSoft product. Anet got kitten loads of money from HoT so they could afford the split.
The current state of balance is one of the first things that is 100% on Anet only.

I guess someone should let NCSoft know then, as it seems their homepage must be out of date then…
http://us.ncsoft.com/en/

Other options would be to check out the links at the bottom of my post where NCSoft is reporting on GW2 (among their other games) to investors. Or just even hit up the interwebs and take a quick check on who pulled and owns the trademark to HoT: http://imgur.com/a/ASYs61

@Vieux P and Azukas

You realize that Blade and Soul, like Wild Star and Guild Wars, is an NCSoft product, right? You show that bad NCSoft by walking away from the money you sunk into Guild Wars and start sinking money into Blade and Soul’s cashshop. That’ll teach ’em real good.

Anet answers to NCSoft and NCSoft has shareholders to satisfy, and the F2P + microtransaction model has management and investors absolutely salavating at how much money can be made. GW2, in the past, had done a really good job imo when it came to selling electronic barbie/ken dress-up items in the gem store and avoiding any pay-to-win type items. That’s not to say the gemstore wasn’t or isn’t entirely free of sleazy cash solutions to in-game problems that they created. For example, how many people do you know that have bought alt character slots or accounts on top of additional bags and bank tabs to handle all the mats in this game?

The more recent trend with Guild Wars has been to continually test the boundaries of sleazy and pay-to-win with players. For those that have been around since launch I encourage you to consider the history of Anet’s behaviors that remind us (or for some, not) that ‘fun’ is too risky to base cashflows on, and that behaviour conditioning and customer manipulation are more reliable (and ultimately better performing) business models.

Some micro-sleaze highlights:
– The infamous Watchwork Mining Pick. Gemstore only item to gain access to sprockets from past LS content.
- The trading post make-over including a gem/gold converter with preset conversion volumes
- The concept of purchasing boosters have always preyed upon new players that do not understand how worthless these items are.
- Combining RNG with gemstore transactions —> promotional dyes, blacklion keys
- Resale of free content in the LS seasons
- Larger and larger and larger volumes of mats required for higher level crafting and collections applies pressure to purchase ‘solutions’ only available in the gemstore —> bag expanders, additional character slots for mules, addition bank tabs, additional multiple storage expanders, and salvage tools. Even further pressure added here with the trend of bags within bags with in bags full of mostly trash. More pressure added with collection items that are unclear on whether its required to keep or sell leads to hoarding which requires more bag space. New tokens/currencies x4 maps intentionally do not go into the wallet and need to be carried with you to use (eg. machetes, crowbars, etc).
- Large quantities of grind injected, ‘hardcore’ content that puts pressure on ascended gear, loads of gold and mat destruction/sinks added, and gold sources nerfed steers players to ‘pay to short-cut’ by purchasing gems. If you hadn’t noticed the gemstore got a new add in the banner reminding you to use that gem to gold converter.

There are certainly serveral more examples, and I’m finding the most recent mini situation interesting: purchase a mini in the gemstore and get access to small collection/quest to obtain a glider skin. Anet just dipping a toe in the water and gauging player’s reaction to purchase of content in the gemstore and let’s see how far this gets pushed in the future… Keep working on that whale hunt collection Anet.

Anyway, even with all of that ‘marketing pressure’ continuing to bleed through the game, until HoT came along PvP remained largely untouched and hadn’t been poisoned with pay-to-win. With HoT, every single elite spec was objectively superior to the core or vanilla option. But that’s not necessarily enough pressure to secure xpac sales. The influx of players into PvP ensures that core only users would be pitted head-to-head at a disadvantage to HoT players. Upset? Feel frustrated you are at a disadvantage? No problem, for a quick $50 US you can level the playing field and keep up with the power creep. To me this is the most disappointing element of the xpac and perhaps the most telling of future direction GW2 is heading.

Here’s a video presentation from Steve Fowler and Grouch discussing the business side and ‘road forward’ for PvP in GW2. There isn’t any pay-to-win plan discussed in the video or anything like that. Instead I encourage you to watch and consider some of the goals and philosophies presented to essentially to keep you playing longer and that ‘minutes equals dollars’ and compare that to the general design goals and implementation of HoT as a whole.

This isn’t a bash Anet or quit the game thread, instead I encourage players to ask ‘why’ they are doing what they are doing or ask what the dev(s) intended for certain game systems. For example there is another thread going asking for automated home instance harvesting (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Home-instance-hired-labour) because this isn’t a fun experience and a player is questioning the behaviour the game is steering him/her towards. Think about it though: you’ve either pounded out a bunch of meta achievements from LS, or purchased nodes/perks for your home instance only to give you chores to do daily. None of this is at all fun an instead is a gold/time sink at best and a behavior conditioning trap at worst (just gotta do my daily, and my crafting, and harvest, and and… ).

Anyway, this I’m out of my BEvERages and this got too long. Good luck to you sir with Blade and Soul, but do a bit of homework and follow the money (it leads back to NCSoft with both GW and B&S).

PS

Not much specifically about GW here, but if you are wondering about direction of the game in broad terms check out NCSoft’s investor information.

Here’s the transcript for Q3 2015: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/edited-transcript-036570-ks-earnings-050738384.html

And here’s the historic ones directly from NCSoft: http://global.ncsoft.com/global/ir/quarterly.aspx

Q4 2015 will be available early February to check out to see both how HoT faired interms of its release and hints/milestones for 2016.

Dream Shake.8741:

A smart team would know not to defend with 5 people at lord unless it’s at the end of the game.

With an organized group once you are on lord it is the end of the game. The defending team is forced to commit a lot of players to the defense of the lord. Hence, if you get on inner with an organized push of 4 or 5 players the defending team is forced to react and match numbers.

Dream Shake.8741:

If the attacking team wipes, this can completely turn a match as now the defending team can summon tons of breakers with the supply from kills and get ready for hero channels. Channeling heroes can be a comeback mechanic as getting both would give lots of points.

Its unlikely at even moderate level play to pull a quick five player wipe on the pushing team at lord. For discussion’s sake, let’s say that quick 5 wipe does occur. The pushing team’s response is to respawn, group-up and immediately push lord again. In approximately kitten a 5 man push with full all their cds up are on your lord again. Meanwhile the defending team needs to collect supply (either for lord room or mid point channel) then run back to summon breakers for counter push, then commit player(s) to guard breakers and clear any guards at each gate.

Often the defensive team can’t spare the players to head out to channel the heroes either and its instead the pushing team that picks up the hero channel(s) – if even necessary at all. This is why SH isn’t as fun as it could be because the game is often over minutes before win is awarded. This is anticlimactic as players are forced to play out the inevitable.

At high level organized play, or in a world where Anet matches organized teams versus organized teams, different strategies would likely emerge. But for the current state of match making and the SH gamemode, just get a team q together and farm pips with the zerg rush strat.

Dream Shake.8741:

Naix, this is only true when it’s an organized versus newbs. I got farmed a few times as solo queuer vs premade but unorganized vs unorganized it’s pretty balanced.

Naix.8156:

someone.7485:

It is far too easy to lose 2 pips in stronghold compared to conquest. Until this is remedied stronghold should be avoided in pvp.

If you are queuing as a group Stronghold is an absolute farm-fest:

My suggestion to OP is to consider team queuing (also combine it with other matchmaking manipulations available to him/her such as grabbing a smurf to queue with) and using SH to farm for pips off instead of soloq’ing into that gamemode.

Trigr.6481:

It’s not really the fact that metabattle is making the meta worse. However its existence pretty much means that balance is so slow that popular builds are able to sit on that website for 6+ months at a time at the minimum. A stagnant game has never really led to anything good.

Trigr.6481:

However [its] existence pretty much means that balance is so slow …

Trigr.6481:

…metabattle’s existence pretty much means that balance is slow…

Logic seems solid to me. Let’s get rid of metabattle so we can get faster balance patches.

Countless you are my hero

someone.7485:

It is far too easy to lose 2 pips in stronghold compared to conquest. Until this is remedied stronghold should be avoided in pvp.

If you are queuing as a group Stronghold is an absolute farm-fest:

1) ‘competitive’ players don’t like it and aren’t playing this gamemode
2) the map mechanics are very poorly implemented so as soon as one team is on lord defense they lose. This is primarily due to factors that create ‘slippery slope’ and the map lacks comeback mechanics:
- they can’t spare players to run supply, run back and spawn creeps, then escort or push to remove any remaining guards ahead of the breakers
- the pushing team has players free or running back on respawn to grab heros to push harder

Basically, this gamemode is, imo, Anet’s worst implementation of a pvp map thus far. It could be salvaged potentially, but the fact that very very little was adjusted based on player feedback from the betas makes me think this map will probably end up the same fate as SkyHammer and just straight up be avoided. But in the current sate of the game, where matchmaking manipulation more important than actual PvP’ing you can and should take advantage to farm those pips while you can. Anet will also be excited to see players playing this map and falsely assume that people are playing it because it provides a fun pvp experience.

With and organized team, just 4-push with all door breakers at start and one player goes on defense. 4-push group will need one or two support to heal/support the doorbreakers. Defender player can either gank the doorbreakers while the enemey players rush way ahead to kill guards, or aoe/cleave doorbreakers through the gate, or go in and out of the portal to chip them down etc. All the defender player needs to accomplish is to stall the enemy team until your 4 push breaks the inner gate. At that point your team wins, its just a matter of time (for the reasons listed above).

A coordinated team can typically win in around 3-4 minutes over a team of solos and/or duo queuers.

Zodian.6597:

Yeah.. lots of people crowded around bank and TP vendors, or running to LA portal.. They made it an appealing place for the PvE crowd, the actual number of people queueing sPvP is abysmal.

It’s a win-win for really. Players access tp and bank without wp costs or losing your location on a PVE map and for Anet’s end the players gathered around the bank/tp works brilliantly to mask the tiny PvP population.

Supreme.3164:

You can’t have build weaknesses when some professions enjoy innate better sustain than other, by innate sustain I mean before any trait or gear get applied.

Having access to strong defensive mechanics like : stealth, higher HP, blocks and clones before even traiting….makes the game unfair to start with

Your idea of build weaknesses would work if all professions would start from 0 something which will never happen, some start ( before any trait or gear get used)at 0 like ele…others start at 5-6 like stealth/block/higher HP classes

At 0 means that before traiting an ele would lose 100% against anybody who starts on other professions before traiting

-Before anything the base sustain of all professions should be reviewed…some enjoy too much of a base sustain, some others must rely entirely on traits/gear to survive

What I was referring to was that no profession should be able to create a build that is good at everything or effective in any situation, and unfortunately this is where we are at right now with pvp. I’m fine with the asymmetric game design concept (every class has access to unique skills, abilities and different base stats), but I want there to be counterplay, both pregame and emergent, to keep the gameplay fun and interesting.

Don’t worry fella, Anet isn’t looking at the forums for meaningful feedback anyway. Its much more likely that they are tracking behavior(s) or other metrics in game to steer their decisions. When there is a mess going on with gameplay (players gaming the matchmaking system rather than playing pvp), or dirty pulls implemented to sell gems (original gold to gem converter, sprocket pick axe, etc), etc etc Anet does not check here but instead, like most people, heads over to reddit to gauge the rage.

In all honesty, there is just too much dribble here for them to sift through whether it be constructive criticism or not. The fact that these forums are now moderated by ‘forum specialists’ and CDI data collection initiatives haven’t been a thing for almost 2 years should give you an idea of just how little stock anet puts in the content on these forums. You are better off to post your feedback on reddit where you are able to be candid with your feedback, both good or bad, and not worry about your post being censored, deleted or swept under the rug and merged with other ‘similar’ posts to go unread.

I’d like to see some return to builds making trade-offs. I think a classic trade-off is survivability versus damage potential and I’d like to see this concept make a return. I really miss the design philosophy of ‘holes in roles’ in that by design no one class and build could be strong at everything. Every build would need kitten or a weakness that allows for pregame metaplay of making teams that cover each others weaknesses and also emergent play of the strategy (primarily rotations) to try and get the matchups you want and avoid those that you don’t.

On a more negative note, I feel that even with the best intentions by the devs the Hot specializations are going to continue to be more powerful than the base choices. I want to give the devs the benefit of the doubt here that they are out to create a competitive gamemode on a level playing field but the marketing pressure with the game now being f2p is going to trump a level playing field in the name of securing sales.

Ross if you’d play something besides that p/p venom share feeder build you wouldn’t rage quit and have ruined Talzed’s game. Least you could do Ross is send him a pip; it is xmas after all.

Zargoon.9835:

Hey Justin,

I actually have a lot of experience with this issue, and I have some thoughts on fixing it.
….

Intuitively, I think it does make sense to increase the volatility for a team queue roster (2 to 5 man premades) as you’re suggesting, but I’m not sure that it’ll address the issue all that well. For example, if I queue with two other players and let’s assume this 3-made is all similar individual MMR, low volatility on their individual rating, we’re on a functional team comp and builds, etc. Now consider how many matches we’ll queue as this exact 3-man roster versus the number of matches it will take for our volatility to settle (i.e. our 3-man rating to become accurate and for us to be matched accordingly). It’s likely that we’ll have lopsided matches (wins and losses) as our new 3-made rating is being established, which is contributes to the issue of ‘bad match ups’ and it’s unlikely that we’d even stay team queuing with the 3-made for enough matches to get an accurate team MMR and have a chance at getting those ‘good matches’.

The psuedo code is on the wiki: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Matchmaking_Algorithm

The match making tries to account for the premades and that’s better than nothing, but in a lot of instances it really isn’t that much better than nothing.

IMO, a better approach would be for Anet to look at what and how they are communicating match ups to a player. As it stands right now, the only info I get as a player from a match is knowing that I won or lost. A better approach might be having match up odds displayed at the beginning of the match to help manage expectations. If I have a 35% chance to win in a given match up and I lose by 75 or 100 points, even though I lost I can recognize that our team performed fairly well (given the match up). The ‘tech’ as Anet likes to call it, is already there as this is essentially what was done during the last pvp league/season where you gained or lost points based on how well your team was predicted to perform.

Another option would be to display you individual MMR to help players not only see their progression, but also to help understand how wins and loses are affecting their MMR. You just sat in a overly long queue only to blow out or be blown out? It may not be that big of a deal (an unfortunate waste of time, yes). As noted above you may have been very likely to win or lose and if you performed as predicted no new information was gained from the contest and hence your MMR should remain unchanged.

TLDR:
- Match making ‘feels’ awful a lot of the time and that would likely be better addressed by displaying/communicating win odds going into a match and invidual MMR outside of matches versus trying to ‘fix’ the match making algorithm.
- The game needs to better communicate to players that they are out trying to exceed the predicted outcome of a contest which isn’t always a discrete win/loss result.

Dang, that 6 man team of 4x Reaper and 2x Herald does sound really strong!

Look, warrior isn’t in a good spot or even remotely close to a good spot right now and that’s really due to the dev’s giving into players cry for moar moar!

Instead of the old holes in roles philosophy from the Chaplan days current meta builds no longer really have built in weakness or as much trade offs in the builds. If you look at pre-specialization gw2 and post, you’ll notice the the weakness or kitten in the armor your pre HoT competitive pvp build had has been mitigated or comepletely removed.

For warriors, its not that warrior is bad, its instead that the HoT warrior doesn’t address or remove nearly any of the weakness of the pre HoT warrior. Hence, we have warrior left in the dust behind the other professions.

I’m not against the goal that they made in trying to make condi warrior more of a thing (i.e. you need to have burn application to do a condi build, so they added more burns to warrior), but it would seem that all of the dev’s weren’t on the same page with the goals for their respective profession changes.

Anyway, to wrap it up, my advice to you is not to make more and more posts asking for stronger and stronger skills/traits but instead either:
- play another profession that is already broken (what it takes to be considered for a meta build)
- avoid pvp, or take a break from the game

Crysis, here’s a good dps warrior build you should try

http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Dragonhunter_-_Meditrapper

Experience ruined by buggy content

I got to enjoy either the floor not loading in and hence being unable to reach the rift to channel and progress the fight: http://i.imgur.com/RFdGhAK.jpg

Second bug was the allied shield bubble wouldn’t work to launch my character to let me glide over the floor aoe attack.

Bugs just alternated. Couldn’t complete the instance and had to give up.

On an unrelated note: want to report though that the gem store is working splendidly.

Silverkey.2078:

Chronomancer is much weaker in the new meta than mesmer was in the previous one.

Yes, chrono is an upgrade from mesmer. But a mild one compare to the other elite specs. You gain a large block/invuln uptime (shield, well of precog) , but if you take it, you cannot take torch and decoy, so no stealth. Result: Helseth and Frostball moved back to torch/decoy. Yes you gain a very strong damage and CC skill with gravity well. Result: Helseth and Frostball used the good old Moa.

Moa + focus fire is very good for bunker breaking in the current state of the game. Moa is good, but its much more difficult to setup the coordinated burst in soloq when all you can do is call target.

Shield block isn’t as strong against skilled players that have unblockable skills available. Shield is probably the better choice for most soloq though.

glaphen.5230:

Ross Biddle.2367:

“Chronomancer is good” ~ Spoken by non-Mes/Chrono players.

Chronomancer is good at what, exactly?

OP, if you want a decent discussion on Mes, go to the Mes forum. Or stay in the PvP forum and get every pro warrior/thiefs opinion -_-u

At winning team fights. Or is 11 seconds of quickness and pulsing slow to anyone inside the 50% bigger than a point bubble twice per 180 seconds balanced to you. Maybe the 6 seconds of AoE CC that removes 6 stacks of stability plus 2-4 seconds of shield fits your taste more. How about 12 seconds of invulnerability, and 120 endurance to your allies every 90 seconds. Don’t forget to lower these cooldowns by Alacrity.

Mesmer has some really good tools it brings, but mesmer’s performance depends on team coordination more than other classes so it’s really not the best choice to soloq on.

General advice for soloq, is to play a class and build that is self sufficient.

I agree it’d be nice to earn some sort of mastery progress via PvP. For example WvW has a token system. I’m quite surprised that the game shipped without a means to progress your masteries in PvP as one of Anets goals is to get players playing a wider variety of content (it makes players stay longer and hence more likely to be monetized).

The CoF farm was either an oversight or underestimated as grind that the mastery system injected into the game serves to delay gratification, which also keeps players playing longer (if not done properly, can often keep players playing much longer than is actually fun/enjoyable).

The general match making pseudo code is on the wiki:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Matchmaking_Algorithm

It’s not for lack of trying, in the coding component at least, that makes for poor matchups in pvp. There are some complexities that no algorithm will be able to handle with a reasonable queue time; especially with a small pvp player population. For example, you could have equally skilled players on both sides and get a random comp that makes the match difficult if not impossible to win.

Really, the last low hanging fruit that is left to go after, and I really hope that Anet does, is to separate soloq from teamed up players. An algorithm can’t do a decent job of accounting for the coordination benefit of having players, even a couple, in comms. Once you get past even mid level play, what’ll often happen is the soloq team will lose a team fight and then won’t be able to recover or regroup and push back into the map. Instead, especially with baddies, as soon as they respawn they either run back into an outnumbered meat grinder at that teamfight they died at or run off to take another point and end up in being picked up and forced into a bad 1v1. Due to the nature of conquest matches they often end up snowballing from this scenario.