Guild Wars 2

I spent a little time doing the Balthazar chain in Orr, and the Pact NPCs have way too small an attention span. If it were just players assaulting the temple we could have made it in half the time it took to ferry the NPCs up there, because any time an enemy came within visual range, “SQUIRREL!” and then off they’d go, chasing after it, then killing it, then jogging back, wasting thirty seconds or more of everyone’s time on a fight that didn’t need to happen, by which point another mass spawn of dozens of enemies had hit the core group.

It’s massively annoying when the NPCs effectively have a “time limit” after which they all just give up and go home.

They need to be tightened up, eye on the prize. Their route needs to be more direct (they seem to take the long path up the hill, zig-zagging rather than straight up), and they need to prioritize targets better so that they’re less likely to wander off. If it’s not in the general direction of the temple, they should ignore it completely. If that level of AI is impossible, then they need to either A: have a much slower enemy respawn rate so that they can get away from the enemy spawnpoints before they respawn, or B: remove the “morale” element and have them fight until the players all die. The morale element would be find if the Pact Squads were smarter, but they aren’t, so it doesn’t.

You are compulsive, not the game.

It’s not life-breaking if you miss a daily once in a while. I think. Just go make your dungeon and don’t think about the rest.

I’m aware that it’s a combination of my own personal attitude and the game’s mechanics, I’m just saying that the game’s mechanics function in such a way to encourage that sort of behavior. Game design is all about analyzing human behavior and designing mechanisms that encourage positive behaviors and discourage negative ones. That’s why they designed DEs to only have ways that a player can make it more likely to succeed, and very few ways to make them less likely, so that cooperation is encouraged and trolling is discouraged.

I think that the daily nature of dailies encouraged an unreasonable response, that is, that players are encouraged to play every day, and to prioritize doing the daily objectives, since that personal story or dungeon will be there tomorrow, but if you don’t get today’s daily then you’ll have missed out on those rewards for the day. If you don’t play 1-2 hours each day to collect the daily rewards, then it doesn’t matter if you play twelve hours over the weekend, you’ll be down five mystic coins, five laurels, and five karma jugs on someone that plays each day.

I’m not saying that the player bares no responsibility for how he chooses to interact with the game’s systems, I’m just saying that the system should probably not be encouraging daily participation, there’s too much burn-out factor in that.

On average, there are 30 dailies a month to complete, missing 10 of them doesnt harm you in any way. It is an MMO, expect to spend a little time in it.

If you miss ten dailies then you’ll be ten mystic coins, ten laurels, and ten karma jugs behind where you could be, not to mention ten chances at getting a bonus perk. I’m not suggesting rewarding players for playing less, I’m only suggesting more flexibility in how they play. If it takes around an hour to complete dailies (I’ve done it in less, but often in more depending on how I’m playing), then it would take around 7 hours to complete seven dailies, one each day. I’m not suggesting that a move to weeklies should require any less than 7 hours of participation, equal work, equal skill, equal investment, I’m only suggesting more flexibility, in that a player could invest that time into an hour a day, or into to hours a day for four days, or three hours for two (and a little more), or even an epic seven hour run if they can only spare one day per week.

It would be more respectful of people’s lives outside of the game, while still requiring the same effort/reward ratio.

Ideally perhaps they could retain dailies, but allow them to stack up. Like if you miss the daily for Monday, then on Tuesday you could complete Tuesday’s, and Monday’s too if you took the time to do so. It would only need to stack up for several days, and beyond that they’d be lost, but that level of flexibility would be very nice.

your reward should be playing the game, not getting a cookie at the end of a ‘grind’ for a daily

Maybe so, and if they removed the dailies entirely and distributed those rewards via some other means then so be it, but so long as there remain the daily rewards, the specific time investment it takes to earn them remains a concern.

And replace them with “weeklies.” I like the idea of dailies, to give you something to do and encourage you to play regularly, but I don’t like the gameplay consequences. In practice, dailies make me feel that if I’m pursuing tasks that don’t increment the daily goals (for example story mode missions or dungeons or crafting which doesn’t increment things like events), then I feel like I’m wasting time, so I only do those once my daily has been completed. It also means that when I do want or need to take a couple days off for other activities, I miss out on my daily rewards.

A good MMO should encourage people to play regularly, but not this sort of OCD compulsion.

So my suggestion would be to switch to a weekly goal instead of daily. Make it so that it requires the same total effort, and offers the same total reward (7 of everything), but that you could do over the course of 7 days if you like, or over 3-4 days if you have a busy week, or even over 1-2 days if you can’t play during the week but can play for long hours on weekends.

1) It’s too easy to exploit, since AI creatures aren’t aware enough to a avoid being backed up to a cliff

2) What happens if you knock an enemy into an bad spot and their corpse had an item you need? Or the fall isn’t enough to kill them, but now you can’t reach them, and they can’t reach you, so now you can’t kill them? This would potentially block a story step, or event.

Very good points. It might be cool to acknowledge the trick of knocking enemies off cliffs though by instead awarding bonus damage. Maybe if you would have knocked them over a cliff, they instead get knocked down (for longer if they were already going to be knocked down), and take a large dose of bonus damage.

I also think that if players can’t knock enemies over cliffs then those same protections should be extended to players, and they shouldn’t be able to be knocked/feared over cliffs by enemy actions.

Well if Kaineg is so good, then what are they doing slumming it on Tier 4? I mean, a few weeks ago, we were dominating on T3, and then we seemed to be doing ok on T2, but then suddenly we’re T4 and the scrubs are beating on us.

The way it is now, the losing server has to go outmanned into a heavily upgraded tower, drop as much siege as possible to take it as quick as possible, and then have a big zerg come steaming in behind them and taking it back easily. The losing team needs to have these keeps towers easily taken. Making things easier to take will allow them to take more than one thing, which will split the enemy force up into smaller, more managable chunks. This will give both sides better, more enjoyable fights.

Anet has done so much great with this game and I am sure they will keep tweaking things, but they need to make it much easier to get these losing servers back into the fight much faster than having to wait until next week when the reset happens.

I think the real trick would be to lower the personal incentives for steamrolling. Make it so that the more of a map that you hold, the less personal XP, loot, and Karma you get from the various events. Make it so that once a team controls 80%+ of a map, then it isn’t really worth their time to stick around, aside from bragging rights and that sort of thing.

What the hell happened to CD? I haven’t been WvWing much these past few weeks, but we’re getting rolled right now. Did everyone take their balls and go home?

I would just like to see the NPC’s with armor, health, and actually have some skills. They are absolutely worthless at best right now.

Sometimes yeah, sometimes not though. Most have really weak attacks, like they can wail on an enemy for five minutes and not get anywhere, but most have relatively decent defense against standard attacks, so they make excellent meat shields if you let them acquire some agro before taking on the fight. If I’m taking on an event with NPCs around, I’d much rather have them alive than dead, especially on my squishier characters. The problem is that with these "one-hit-KO type mobs, they tend to get annihilated way too quickly, while against ordinary mobs you can keep them alive if you can draw agro off of them and/or use area heals.

But yeah I agree with you that NPC towns should typically not fall to the enemy when players aren’t around, but I think they do that on purpose because when players are around most places never fall completely, so times when players are absent are the only times you’d ever get to see the “retake the town” event. Besides, most places are much easier to retake than they are to hold, requiring you to only kill a dozen or so scattered mobs, instead of several waves of a dozen mobs at a time. The only location I’d ever had trouble retaking from the enemy is the Zinti temple area in Sparkfly, which requires that you take over about a half-dozen different locations in the town, dozens upon dozens of mobs in total, taking a decent sized group about ten to fifteen minutes minimum, and yet the reward is no more than any of the standard events in the area. Totally not worth it on a personal level (but of course having the area open makes it much more useful to the players).

I was doing some events in Sparkfly Fen, and I realized a problem that a lot of events can have. Some enemies require intelligence and NPCs are stupid.

Specifically, I was defending Hylek villages from Risen, and they were sending in Plague Carriers. Plague Carriers are good enemies to fight humans, because if they hit you, they’ll flatten you, but if you’re paying attention, you can avoid them completely. They are terrible enemies to send against NPC assistants though, since NPCs never bother to escape their blast radius. What ends up happening is that even if you’re doing well, the NPCs tend to get flattened on a fairly consistent basis, because they just can’t take he kamikaze burst effect (this same problem occurs with Range pets and Necro minions, btw).

Assuming it would be too difficult to program NPC assistants to dodgeroll when targeted with an AoE, my recommendation is that you could give massive damage “run away or this will kill you” type attacks a unique tag, a “run away” tag in the properties of the move. This tag would be meaningless and invisible to human players, but what it would mean is that NPC characters, AI controlled help, would be mostly immune to these types of attacks, dealing only standard attack damage, rather than the 50%+ damage that they normally deal.

This way, if a Carrier runs up to you and a pack of Hylek, and starts his suicide timer, the human player would have to avoid it or take a ton of damage, like normal, but the NPC support characters would only take a reasonable amount of damage, consistent with other attacks being thrown around.

I think a raid UI could easily work without having to create any new design. Simply force raids to use the “Simple Party UI” and you could easily fit 20 people on the left hand side then

Maybe, but that’s still a lot of data to be juggling, a ton of moving boon/condition icons, health bars, etc. I think there’s some value in highlighting your core party members, 4 other people to whom you’d have some personal responsibility, but then giving you “bullet point” details on how the rest of the raid party is doing. Maybe it could be an optional thing though, choose which one works best for you. A back line commander might find the expanded view more useful, while a front line fighter would just want the general overview.

Midnight Ice looks great, although you need to pair it with other teal shades because it tends to clash. I also use Midnight Rust on my necro, it works well with reds and browns. Midnight Fuscia is a good purple, but a bit reddish so it’s also tricky to match with other colors.

Aren’t all the Sylvari British? I really don’t have a problem with the humans having American accents. Kryta is a country, Krytans have American accents, just like Americans have American accents. It would actually be a bit unusual if they did have a wide variety of accents, given that they have only one major metropolitan area and a few scattered farms. I don’t know what went on in GW1, but I could see them having it so that explicitly Ascalonian descended settlements would have a slightly different accent than Krytans, but there’s no reason for human accents to be all over the place.

In a recent interview, there was talk about having larger groups in the game, for large scale content. I like the idea of this. I have a suggestion for a useful UI for this that would not overly clutter the screen. The idea would be that you would need to know the full details on your primary group, but less so for the outer fringes of the raid UI.

The way I would see it, you would have the standard four face icons for your own party, just as there is now. Then, below those in the UI, you would have a series of small rosettes, five small icons in a pentagon formation that is, together, roughly the size of a current face icon, or perhaps slightly larger. These could be class icons, perhaps, or even just circles if necessary. Each would of course represent one character in that sub-group of five. The way it would represent these characters is that the icon would be green when they are at full health, yellow when they are below 50%, red when they are downed, and gray when they are defeated (optionally, “blue” could represent 100% health/out of combat to give some distinction from “fighting but fine”).

This allows you to get a strategic sense of the battlefield at a glance, without overloading you with conditions, or exact health bars, or anything like that. If you see a lot of green dots, then you’re doing fine. If a lot of those dots are yellow, then things aren’t great. If a bunch of them are going red/gray then it’s something of a rout, get moving.

This is the problem: People using aoes effectively against single targets when they have the OPTION of single target attacks. (staff ele does not qualify, staff necro does not qualify, thief shortbow qualifies)

I’m sorry, what single target does Thief SB have? We have the auto-attack, which is a chaining AoE, and even so does almost no damage. We have the retreat attack which causes you to go flying (whcih isn’t always a good idea) and does almost no damage. Then we have the Shadowstep, which literally does zero damage. If we aren’t using AoE, we aren’t doing anything at all.

So Terra, do you think clusterbombs usefulness compared to other shortbow abilities should be addressed? Right now its more efficient for the thief to clusterbomb a downed enemy than it is to attempt a finish as a shortbow thief, while doing large amounts of damage to anyone attempting a res.

As well it should be. Finishing moves are stupid show-off stuff and should be avoided at all cost, no matter what you’re playing. You should always be damaging downed layers, rather than grandstanding over them.

Finally, if the problem were with Cluster Bomb, the solution should be to fix Cluster Bomb. Nothing the devs have said indicates that they believe this is specific to Cluster Bomb, and everything they have said points toward AoE in general.

I can’t imagine Cluster Bomb being the problem. It is literally the ONLY move Thieves have that can target people on walls or from walls down to a target, if they nerfed it then Thieves would be pretty useless in siege warfare.

Where did the devs specifically say they would nerf an aoe weapon that only does aoe?

They said they were “nerfing AoE.” We have to assume that they mean ALL AoE until they come back with more specific concerns.

Cluster bomb does a very high amount of damage, its an offender. For shortbow thieves skills 2-4 hardly get used.

Clusterbomb IS skill 2. Do you even know what those other abilities are? They are mostly highly situational and a SB Thief should NOT be using them very often. They are are using them then they are wasting everyone’s time, like activating a heal when you have full health and there’s no perk for using it, or activating a stun-breaker when you aren’t stunned. I run D/D and SB, and when using my bow, I tend to drop poison fields first (but only because I’m specced to make poison damage particularly good, many thief builds would gain almost no benefit from using this one), and then it’s almost entirely Cluster Bomb until I run out of ini. I use 3 if I need to escape a bad situation, 5 if I’m trying to travel asap or if I need to avoid trouble, and 1 if absolutely necessary, but 2 really is the bread and butter. If they were to nerf it, they would need to completely overhaul what the other attacks do, because nerfing clusterbomb alone would destroy the SB as a functional weapon.

Note that I say this as someone with a Thief main, but with alts of every other class, so I’m well aware of what they each can and cannot do.

In all fairness to meteor… the damage is unreliable. Who you hit and when you hit with it is completely random, and considering that, the damage is rather underwhelming.

Yes, I don’t think it’s overpowered, but it is overly annoying to be on the wrong end of, since it’s so scary.

No-one complains about aoe on the forums…here…The abundance of AOE based abilities (whether pbaoe, gtaoe, conical aoe, or bouncing aoe), and the relative strength of those abilities in regards to its damage capability and utility effectiveness against 1 enemy in comparison to other single target abilities is one of the major reasons why this game is coming up short as a skill based esport machine.

Who cares? I have zero interest in this MMO becoming an esport machine. I want it to be a fun game.

I’ve seen two beserker elementists completely dominate walls with meteor shower hitting for 5k a pop. They are easy to kill but it was bay keep inner and even if you did kill them they’d use their run while dead ability into the water and heal back to life there. The stone ability I am refering to is the same one when gargoyles fly upwards. Don’t know what it’s called but I’ve seen half my hp dissapear because of it. I’ve seen most my hp disappear to the theifs spinning dagger attack. I run a balanced build so 5k a hit on meteor shower seems like a lot for something that covers such a large area. Those are the only 3 aoes I find overpowered. Most other aoes can probably be countered with retaliation. You know every guardian is going to spam “Stand Your Ground”.

I do have to say, I am not a fan of Meteor Shower. Not “AoE,” just that one ability, Meteor Shower. It may or may not be overpowered, but the duration and random damage ticks of it do bother me when I’m caught in one. Not a fun time.

Now, if their comments had been “we’re looking at Meteor Shower, [ability X], and [ability Y], and maybe a couple others for minor tweaking,” then I’d have been fine with them poking around a bit and seeing what might work, but when they say “we’re nerfing AoEs,” and about half the abilities in the game are AoE in some fashion, including every ability in some weapon sets, then I have trust issues with that sort of sweeping statement.

When I saw this topic I assumed that it was people yelling obscenities in Morse code.

Matt Witter.6982:

There are a few different knobs we can turn in regards to AoE some of the bigger ones being:
Radius of the AoE
Frequency of the AoE Damage
Damage of the AoE
Max Targets of the AoE

Currently, some players causing the AoE are able to do more damage to one person while also controlling a portion of the field, compared to a player with single target damage.
In our balance discussions we always look at what these changes could do to PvE as well as PvP. Any changes we make will undergo a lot of testing, both internal and by our trusted alpha team. It is important to understand that we are not doing a blanket nerf to all AE’s or a dramatic adjustment of the damage AoE’s can do. There may be some cases where players can build for AoE damage, but are just not viable or other cases where AoE is clearly the dominate way to build, and as such the other builds get left on the side lines. Its these classes/builds that we are concerned about.

I know that when you say this, you mean it to be true, but I hope that you can understand that from our perspective, we have little reason to trust in the testing team to only turn out well balanced changes to the game. Too often overthe past few months, “overpowered” options been nerfed, leaving a barren wasteland in their place, breaking that build entirely, in some cases the entire class, without any positive changes to make up for the loss.

If there was a better track record of making nerfs only once the counterbalancing buff was ready to maintain the class’s effectiveness then we, as players, would have more reason to have faith that these AoE changes would be for the best. Given the current situation, however, you guys seem to be taking aim at something that we do not view to be a problem, and which numerous classes and builds depend upon, which gives us perfectly solid justification to fear that you would be perfectly willing to decimate certain classes in the game of “game balance,” rather than waiting until a truly balanced solution could be found, and then it could be months before positive changes go in to clean up the devastation left in the wake.

I would recommend involving the players in the decision process here. Suggest the nerfs you’re intending to make well before patching them into the live game, take in feedback, and be prepared to go back to the drawing board if the players do not agree with your proposals. Don’t just spring them on the players and force us to live with the changes until the next major patch, whether they destroy our characters or not.

If they want to stop skipping, there’s a fairly easy way to do it that most games already do. Require you to kill things. Make it like an event. If there are ten trash mobs between boss A and boss B, then throw an indestructible door in front of boss B and add an event so that you have to “kill ten trash mobs” before that door will open. Or maybe like 8, just to reduce the chance that a bug would make opening the door impossible.

If they really wanted to minimize the chances of an error breaking the event, they could put a back-up timer in it, like say ten minutes. That way, if you wanted to avoid the mobs entirely (or more importantly if they break somehow so that you can’t kill the required amount), then you can just chill out at the door for ten minutes, but if your goal is to make the best use of your time, then killing the mobs would be the fastest way in.

you mean like dodge, or aegis, or running, or walking?

Sure, but if they don’t believe those are enough, then more could be helpful, like more abilities that have Reflect (and making sure all Reflect abilities work on ground target AoEs).

Issue with buffing damage in anything but PvE, you make classes with less survivablity less plausible.

Then also buff survivability. Having played a number of the lighter classes out there, I can definitely agree that there’s a lot of room to temper the glass cannons a bit.

If they’re going to be tampering with player attack damage then the goal shouldn’t be to balance it against player HP, it should be to balance it against mob HP. If that then makes it unbalanced against player HP then you tweak player HP.

If they are primarily worried about WvW balance then their changes should have nothing to do with PvP, and should be involved in giving players more defensive tools to counter AoEs.

Imagine thieves and warriors doing more damage than they do now. Buffing is not always the option.

Neither is nerfing though, because most AoE abilities, and the builds that rely on them, rely on what damage they have, and would not be viable with noticeably less damage.

Why shouldn’t it be like this though? that’s what I don’t understand. What better way to break up a mass zerg than a few eles throwing down mass aoes?

True. One thing that I DO think would benefit the game with AoEs is better feedback about them. To a player being attacked, you mostly just see a big red ring. Now, is that a red ring that will damage me the second I enter it, or one that won’t damage me for five seconds? Is it a ring that will kill me the instant it goes off, or one that will tick me for negligible damage as long as I’m in it? A red ring is a red ring, unless you have the luxury of paying close attention to a lot fo subtle effects and know all the various moves.

It would be helpful if they had bigger clues, like maybe a second ring within the ring that starts at the edge and moves to the center as an attack approaches, like as a treb shot gets closer the inner ring collapses, so you know to roll right as it reaches the center. If the inner ring is pulsing then you know it’s a steady pulse of damage. Alternately it could color shift, like it starts out yellow, for neutral, and then shifts through orange to red as the effect approaches, only being fully red when it’s capable of dealing damage.

Maybe make the size of the border ring indicate damage potential, if it’s a broad outline, like several times the default width, then it would be an insta-gibb type attack, run like hell. If it’s just the normal little ring then it’s chip damage, avoid it if you can but don’t let it mess with you if you have business inside.

They could do a lot to make AoE’s more user friendly.

you basically got 5 skills, if 1 is basic decent damage, 2 is aoe decent damage 3 is defensive 4 is condition stacks and 5 is damage/movement, you basically simplified DD to only use 1, only use 2 if there is 4 mobs.

Or take, as an example, Ele DD Fire, that’s 1 Cone AoE, 2 cone AoE, 3 line AoE, 4 field AoE, 5 cone AoE, which move are they meant to be using?

Buff single target.

I get the problem being described, that in many cases it’s better to deal damage to a lot of enemies than to deal damage to one, but nerfing AoE damage is the worst way of dealing with that.

The fact remains that when faced with several opponents, taking each out one at a time means you’ll usually be dead before the second one drops. And when hitting single enemies, if AoEs deal less damage than they do now then it means that in many cases half or more of your available abilities will become practically worthless, greatly reducing current single target DPS.

So if you feel there is a disparity between AoE and single target attacks, fix it, but don’t fix it by hurting AoE moves. Take the AoE moves as the intended level, AoE moves are working right, and then raise single target damage to be better than they are. If you absolutely positively must nerf AoE in some way, don’t do it in a way that would make AoE attacks deal less damage to a single target.

That is a good patch for a player to employ until there is a real fix, but you guys should offer a better solution. If the goal of the trait is to grant Stealth when people Steal, then it should cut off Auto Attack when it goes into effect. Players should not have to disable a very useful UI function just to make the trait not fail.

There is a relatively fast cycle of two missions (one right after the other, then the first one starts again in about ten minutes), based on the southern edge of Bloodtide Coast that has level 54 mobs. It’s doable below that if you can stay alive and offers decent rewards.

Also in the high 50s to low 60s there are a lot of events in the middle of Sparkfly Fen. I’m not sure what the cycle rate is but they seem to be going on a lot of the time. By the mid-60s the area near where Tequatl spawns has several common events.

However, there are some achievements which are infinitely repeatable currently. It is highly likely so this new system isn’t broken we’ll need to cap those and people who have made insane progress down one of those lines will lose some of their progress to get back to the cap. I wouldn’t recommend anyone go bonkers trying to progress an infinitely repeatable achievement category in anticipation of the release of this system, as you will likely lose some points/progress if you take it to an extreme number.

Lol, entropy for Agent of Entropy.

Yeah, I’m an altaholic, and I didn’t fall in love with my Ele until the mid 30s. The base version is just too squishy, the human skill takes a while to build up, it’s definitely the hardest class in the game to fully grasp, but once it all clicks, it can be a whole lot of fun to play with.

I definitely would not suggest this as a starter class though, Warrior would probably be best for that, or perhaps Guardian.

For example, when your inventory fills up items you receive go into inventory overflow and your character becomes encumbered. That makes you move really slowly and that didn’t seem like a nice thing to do to people in the middle of a fight.

Yeah, why is this? There’s no particularly good reason for the “encumbered” thing. I mean, it happens only very rarely in actual practice, basically when you break down or open a bag in most cases, which is something most people aren’t doing on the move anyway. Why not just remove the movement penalty from being encumbered completely? You still have the restriction that you only have that one floating “overflow” space, that’s the real penalty here, the movement thing just seemed redundant, and removing it would make it easier to have “drop into inventory” WvW loot, which is something that needs to happen.

Can I have all 40 of my characters visible at once?

No, Mr. Roboto.

But when you think about it, I don’t think they actually expected anybody to be a ranger. So there’s your 7

Lol.

It’s set that way on purpose. To entice people to buy gems. Just like EVERYTHING else in this game

Lol, poor reader comprehension.

I’ve got an idea and I’ll probably be flamed by thief-main players for this one….but how about this to control spam:

Play TOR (I haven’t since playing this game). It uses the same mechanic on their thieves and it’s boring as kitten. There is also a mechanic where players can choose toboost their damage based on having high Ini, I’ve never found that worth it and maybe they should buff that to make it more enticing, but I definitely disapprove of turning Ini into TOR “Energy.”

So we’re assuming that you don’t play intelligently, yes you’d get destroyed. Like any other class.

Setting fun aside for a moment and just considering pure balance, this really doesn’t work well. Thieves are designed to burst out. What balance they have is based on the idea that they flip out and burn all their ini as fast as they can, and then dodge around a bit as it recovers. Thieves are not designed to be played by making a single attack and then pulling back a bit and repeating at intervals. If you’d like to test your theory, you can do so in game right now, just take a reasonably high level Thief, or take a new one into SPVP if you don’t have one yet, and then just moderate yourself, fighting in such a way that you do a three count in your head after each attack to simulate the need to ration ini. I doubt you’d do very well.

The problem is, the thief is the only class you really don’t have to play intelligently right now and still have a good chance of winning. Even if you don’t win, you have the best chance to escape alive in the game. If you’re a very skilled player, you just never die as a thief…you never have to.

That’s not true at all. Any class can be spammed reasonably well. My current Guardian rotation is actually a lot of fun. I have a GS/Scepter-Focus build, and almost every fight is the same, 4352~25431111~repeat. Give or take. There are more buttons involved, but the rotation is no more mentally intensive than a Thief’s, a bot could do it and while he might not be quite as savvy as me, it wouldn’t make a huge difference in most fights. With a Thief, you usually don’t have to worry too much about which button you’re hitting or managing cooldowns, that skill is not terribly important to a Thief player, but positioning can be vital. The skill in playing a Thief is in active avoidance and movement.

Now, I will say that of all the classes I’ve played, my Thief is probably the least likely to die in a dangerous situation. This is true. It has absolutely nothing to do with initiative though, it has to do with utilities and Traits. Thieves tend to have a lot more “escape” buttons than other classes, emergency resets that allow them to get away from sticky situations. They need these because when things go wrong for a Thief they go wrong hard and fast, but they do mean that a well played Thief can escape situations that would doom many other classes (my Guardian, for example, is invincible. . . until he’s not and then he dies very painfully and unavoidably). There are other classes that can be good at escaping too though, Mesmers, D/D Eles, Necros, basically the squishier a class is, the more escape options they tend to get.

This isn’t some kitten gripe about how we only start with five. That’s not the issue. I already bought three more slots for a total of eight. You’re welcome.

My problem is that the loading screen only has room for 7 slots to be displayed at once. This means that one of my characters always gets bumped off the screen and I have to scroll over to reach her. That’s silly. I can get why you wouldn’t have room for infinite slots, and 9+ would be pushing things, but in a game with 8 classes, you can safely assume that a large number of players would make one of each, so having 8 slots on the main screen instead of 7 would just make common sense.

The biggest issue with initiative is that it forces you to spam. As a thief, what incentive is there to use any skill other than heartseaker on dagger? I don’t even know what the other skills on my bar do. There is no trade-off involved in choosing which skill to use. When I play other professions, I’m forced to use different skills due to cooldowns and therefore I’m forced to manage which skills I use and when.

I almost never use Heartseeker on my DD/SB Thief, it’s a complete waste. I almost exclusively use Death Blossom, then Auto when it’s down, Dancing Dagger on packs or distant enemies. I don’t use C&D, but it’s essential to stealth Thieves. It’s all about how you spec. With other classes, it’s all about the rotation, cycling through all (or most) of the abilities on your bar in the optimal order. With Thieves it’s about having a toolkit and only having to use one or two of the tools. Each of the tools has a very good function, if you’re designed to use it, but if you’re designed to use a specific tool then the other ones aren’t nearly as useful.

people saying HS isnt spammable must be blind. pick a thief and spam 4 HS without any delay beteween them, if you say have delay you are LYING.

Who’s saying HS isn’t spammable? It only costs 3 ini so you can launch it 5 times in a row. Sometimes 6.

Rata Sum has the best bank in the game, since it has easy access to the TP as well.

I love my Asura. I have eight characters, three of them are Asura (the others being two humans and then one of each).

I love the humor in their personalities and stories, I love the sci-fi bent to them in a fantasy world, I love their awesome and unique animations, and I love how much faster they seem (which is an illusion since every race has the same speed, but this means that the shorter their legs, the more strides per second, so they feel about ten times as fast as a Charr even moving at the same speed).

Really there’s no good reason not to play as an Asura as often as possible, I only have non-Asura characters to get access to the other storylines.

Definitely Batanga. . . and not just because she’s the blonde twin of my own Asura.

Why do you see fit for one profession to have a spammable gap closer, homes right to target, conditions, combo finishers, and huge damage to boot. Why? All in one SPAMMABLE move.

Which profession are you talking about? I play a thief and I wish we had a spammable gap closer, especially one that did condition damage. We have Infiltrator’s Arrow, which can blind, but deals no damage and you can’t use it more than a couple times in a row. It’s also not a finisher.

in that case you could ask the top x pvp teams to do an exclusive vote
so that they can compare it with the general public.( get out those false negatives)

Why would PvP players matter? for one thing, they’d be no less biased than the general population. For another, it would dismiss more than 80% of the game’s content, and the vast majority of the players.

But they need to find a way to get a better understanding of what the community really wants to see changed in pvp . ( vote is 1 kind of solution)

What players want to see isn’t particularly relevant when it comes to balance. What players need is. If a given element is leading to genuine imbalance, they should fix it. If not, then they shouldn’t, no mater how many people complain. They have metrics to determine if a given class tends to outperform others, or if certain move/trait set-ups tend to get overused, those provide far more useful data than player anecdotes.

Coud i make a suggestion of considering putting a vote system on the forum that lets the community vote if something needs a change ?

A voting system wouldn’t provide very useful data. For example, if only 1/8th of players play any given class, then wouldn’t a call to nerf just about any trait of another class that people tended to fin annoying result in more than 50% of the people saying “sure?”

But autoattack chain have GCD.

Auto attacks don’t have GCD, they just have animations they need to get through to move to the next attack, as all moves do (aside from a very few “non-animation” moves in the game that can be done in the middle of other moves).

Why dont you give Thieves .25 GCD like mesmer?

As mentioned in the Mesmer threads, the GCD on Shatters is not an intended design decision, it’s a patch for an exploit. Basically, they don’t want Mesmers to have a GCD, but there was some exploit people were doing in which they were apparently getting multiple shatter effects off the same group of illusions, and they can’t figure out exactly what’s allowing that, so their two solutions were to A: allow the exploit to continue, or B: make a change that fixes the exploit (which also stopping some behavior they have no issue with), until they can figure out a more precise solution.

So, long story short, don’t take out your frustrations on other classes, this would be a completely different issue.

Does it only work with utility skills? Because i cant cast heal and ride the lightning for example, while rtl is instant cast. Same with updraft and other instant cast skills. Maybe this only applies to casting skills that pins you in place?

Instant-cast are their own thing, different from “moves that go off instantly.” Instant casts have no animation of their own, they just happen. For example, on the Guardian Shouts can be cast during other moves, while dropping shields cannot. I can’t think of any weapon skills that are instant-cast, even if they activate immediately.

People are already concerned about dying, and your logic is insensitive to the fact the game is designed to kill people OFTEN, especially since it’s partly catered to casual gamers who die very often.

Higher repair fees makes a large group of players suffer for a minor comfort.
Notably: The entire WvW playerbase would suffer if your idea was implemented. People die there (not downed, die) on a minute-by-minute basis.

As I said, I understand that some activities cause more almost-inevitable death than others, but that’s easily solved by causing them to give higher cash rewards than they currently do. If they can expect WvW players to die, say, five times as often as PvE players, and they double the repair costs paid each time, then they could just raise the amount of cash each WvW player earns over time so that it balances out that they are paying very little more, or about the same. Basically an active WvWer would spend maybe 10s more per hour, but he’d also be making around 10s more per hour, so it works out. Same with fractals.

That is a non-existent issue. Your statement is empty-fluff.

All players use way-points and Higher level players earn more then enough coin to pay for fees.

All players use Waypoints to some extent, but you cannot argue that they get used as often as they would be if they were free. I often jump through a lot of hoops to avoid WP fees, using the mists to get to LA, using LA gates to reach other cities, using the Divinity gate to reach Ebonhawke, etc. It’s hassle that I could avoid if wayoints were relatively free. Yes, you make more money at higher levels than at lower, but the cost increase for WPs is higher than that, it costs about two greens or three blues at level 80 to WP from one side of the world to the other, and costs around one green to just cross the map you’re on.

Way-Point usage is not gated by fees. It’s gated by appeal of content.
Warping there is just as expensive to travel to Cursed Shore, but people still use them. Why? Because the reward is more appealing. It has nothing to do with fees.

People warp to Cursed Shore because the only other way to reach it is a very long run (as detailed above), while the awards are the highest available. Therefore, it is one of the few zones in which the WP costs are “worth it,” and you can offset them in a couple of minutes of play there. On the other hand, traveling from LA to Brisban Wildlands or Mount Maelstrom costs about as much, and yet is less rewarding, which is a discouraging element to players. I’m not arguing that reduced WP costs would automatically flood every zone with high level players, but people would feel much more free to travel around where their whims take them, instead of sticking only to those areas that are “worth the trip.”

And as others have noted, it may be a good idea to shift the way costs are calculated. The current method is that there is a base cost to use any waypoint, and that cost rises as you level. It’s practically zero at level 1, and it’s something like a silver and a half at level 80. Then there’s an added cost for distance traveled from your current location. Maybe change that method, so that the level-based cost would be almost nothing, but that travel to and from higher level zones have an exponential price increase, such that travel to and from Cursed shore might be around as much as it currently is, travel to Strait of Devastation or Frostgorge Sound might cost slightly less than it currently does, Dredgehaunt Cliffs or Fireheart Rise would be significantly cheaper to reach, and any zone below level 40 would be almost negligible to travel to or within.

The point isn’t whether reduced WP costs would encourage travel, it’s whether discouraging travel is a worthwhile goal of the game’s mechanics.

If people don’t “like” the responsibilities that comes with the title, they should’ve spent 100 Gold elsewhere. Far too many people already buy it because they have more Gold than brains as it is.

If they absolutely have to, even Commanders should be willing to do those tasks, and many are, but it’s really a waste of their abilities and they shouldn’t have to do them. Most of the smaller tasks only need a couple people on them, while a Commander tends to be rallying a dozen or more where he goes, that’s why I think this middle ground is a good idea, a visible “leader,” but a leader designed to only suck up 1-2 other players who happen to be around, rather than attracting a whole swarm from across the map.

But also strip the commander tag from everyone who bought the book.

Then make the Commander tag a reward that can be given or taken away. Based or performance in WvW.

Lol, totally separate issue for a separate thread, but I wouldn’t strictly be opposed to it.

I had a bit of a brainstorm about Commanders and C&C, which was to let commanders temporarily promote other players to a sub-commander role tasked with specific goals. I detailed it here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/New-Commander-ability-Promote-Lieutenant/first#post1140183

You can’t. Need you to target them when visible
A lot of people will target you as you run in or get pulled to the edge and then you will get ctrl-t so that the entire group can target you.
Some pulls like tc of the Mesmer don’t require line of sight.

Fair enough, then how do you shake that? Getting whipped around when you can’t even see your enemy is not fun.

In a WvW thread, people were talking about how Commanders don’t tend to like doing “menial” tasks like repair work, dolyak herding, general defense, etc., but that these tasks need doing, and having a Commander taking the lead can really get people in line with those tasks. I had a brainstorm. Give Commanders the ability to “promote” X number of players to “Lieutenant” status.

The easiest way I can think to apply the buff would be a simple / command or something a Commander could access by right-clicking their portrait. It would be a buff that would last for at least fifteen minutes, maybe permanently until they leave the zone or the Commander removes it.

It wouldn’t make the target stronger, it would just put a unique icon over their head (like a little green chevron or something), and on the map, and ideally the Commander could add an “order” to their map location, so you’d see their icon on the map and it would say “guarding caravan,” or “building defenses” or something along those lines.

I think this could be very useful for WvW, since right now there is no chain of command, there is just “those 2-3 guys who are apparently in charge,” and then “everyone else.” The commanders should be leading the overall tactical defense, ideally they should be able to leave the smaller stuff to other people, but this “LT icon” would allow some other players to take charge over those smaller tasks, and have some small amount of authority to convince other players to join them.

I like that you suggest an alternative. Too bad increasing the repair costs after people have gotten used to them would have its own consequences.

Namely, players would start freaking out about dying in game because repairing gear bears a much higher fee, making the elitist popular that much more annoying.

I think the game would be better if people were more careful about dying than if people worried more about fast travel. It would take some balancing, they might have to nudge up the cash rewards for things like WvW or some dungeons so that people wouldn’t feel to bad about dying so much in them (places with traditionally free waypointing), but in the long run it would be a better solution, at least.

People have a point though, Waypoints do a rather bad job of acting as a gold sink, because all it does is encourage many players to not use them at all when they can help it. It’s a bit like that old argument that you shouldn’t overly tax cigarettes because then people will just stop smoking and you wouldn’t be making that tax money. Of course, it’s in the public interest to have people not smoke, the question is, is it in the public’s interest to have people not waypointing?

Hey, here’s a question, how do you target players that are up on a wall and out of sight from the ground? I ask this because I was up on the wall of Greenbriar once, using an arrow cart in a way where I know that neither of us was visible from the ground, and yet I was getting Scorpion Wired right off the wall, or Dragon Toothed, or Entangled constantly. Whenever I try to fire upwards from the ground at enemies that are not visible, I just get “obstructed,” or can’t target them at all.

Are you kidding? If waypoints were free, you’d never see anyone anywhere except where they planned to be. With waypoints costing something, people sometimes choose to make the run instead of teleporting.

This is maybe true, to some extent, but even when waypoints are essentially free (like at very low levels) I still tend to jog places, just because you tend to stumble over events and resources along the way.

I think at bare minimum every map in the game should have at least one, perhaps even two or three “super-waypoints” that are free to travel to and from. I mean, the minimum “free” route to Arah, for example, involves running from LA to Bloodtide, then through the Whisper base to the Pact HQ, then through three full zones of Orr. Otherwise you have to spend several silver to make the trip, which in this case is well worth it, but still galling.

Your definition of wealth please, how much gold do you have? I’m sitting on top of 20g right now after dropping 65g for cosmetic purposes, as a fresh 80 this week and I will tell you- I don’t want to drop 5 silver on travelling across the map.

You’re doing great. I’ve had an 80 for months now, and a bunch of alts, and I’ve only got around 50-55g between them, having only acquired a max of around 75g total if you count what I’ve spent on stuff. There is a wide gulf between players who just play the game and those who TP-farm, or dungeon farm, or Event farm.

Actually they used to give you event rewards for getting dolyaks through but the early bots would just walk with the yak to automatically get the rewards (and they didn’t have any reaction for if the yak got attacked.) Then people found out they could just idle over the gate.

Maybe since they’re getting better at weeding out bots they could reintroduce this. And if it only gave out event credit at the end, maybe it would be better to have it slowly drip out reward along the way, like how in an early Norn Renown Heart you follow some wolves around, and get a tick towards heart completion every few seconds that you stay within about 20ft of them. Make it so that there are dozens of invisible “waypoints” along the route, and each time you move from one to the next with a Yak next to you, you get a small dollop of Karma/XP/whatever.

They don’t all have to be “Events,” but there should be some drip of reward for your efforts. I just ran back two Dolyaks to SMC an hour or so ago, and it was super boring, even though we were chain-Swifting it. I like to chip in where I can, but I can’t say I was having any fun, or feeling that I was getting anything personal out of it.

I hate the dues on Waypoints at any level above around 30 or so. It makes me not want to use them. I like free Waypoints. I would be willing to pay elsewhere, like higher equipment repair costs, if Waypoints were free (or much cheaper, like they are below 30).

Well, not exactly. They don’t need to be presents, they certainly shouldn’t be filled with toys, but I like the mechanic. I like seeing the little mint swirls on my map, running to them, opening them up, grabbing loot, and running. Or maybe fighting the mobs if they are Skritt or toy soldiers. But mostly running. Anyways, it’s fun. It gives me something to run towards on the map, since you can see them from much further away than most Dynamic events. I like them. They should stay.

Have them do something else, a different type of prize, a different type of mob encounter, etc., but do something permanent with all those spawn points you’ve situated throughout the game world.

r repairs. I have seen TC and IOJ do this immediately after fending off attacks, and their walls and doors quickly repaired to 100%. If you politely ask ‘can someone repair the walls?’, no one will respond. Neither will anyone stay to repair when they know you are off capping profitable structures.

Maybe they need to provide better rewards for certain behaviors. Like if you get X karma for capturing a tower, then maybe you get some smaller amount of karma for repairing a wall, or building a siege piece. Someone mentioned scouting above, and I enjoy scouting, I’m well specced for it, but there’s absolutely no personal reward for scouting, you don’t get capture credit, or defense credit, you don’t get an event towards the daily goals, or anything. It’d be interesting if there were like a mini-event you could activate and then the goal would be to run to within a certain distance of maybe five enemy controlled towers/keeps, at which point you would get an event completion with the standard rewards (maybe you could only get this once or twice an hour though, to prevent farming). If you’re going to ask random, casual players to do a task, you need to give them a better reason than “for the good of his server full of random strangers who you don’t know or much care about.”

2. Commanders can lead the zerg to supply, and bring it back for repairs. I have seen TC and IOJ do this immediately after fending off attacks, and their walls and doors quickly repaired to 100%. If you politely ask ‘can someone repair the walls?’, no one will respond. Neither will anyone stay to repair when they know you are off capping profitable structures.

I saw a Commander do this once on CD, after taking a keep, but the problem was we got back and we didn’t have anything to spend it on. I’d burned all my siege before that, everything was in good repair, and nobody had dropped any siege to build up.

I really wish it were possible to dump handheld supplies into the structure’s reserves, rather than only being able to take from them or wait for Dolyaks to arrive. If a zerg could run out and each grab 10 supply and come back, that’d be 100-200 supply right away. I wouldn’t mind if they even increased upgrade prices or something if they offered that sort of flexibility.

Also, 10 supply into repairing a wall is really weak stuff. It seems like you’re trying to bucket brigade a flood away, there just doesn’t seem to be any noticeable impact, and then you have to run a couple minutes round trip to get 10 more. It would be better if you could more reliably regain supply for wall repairs, again, if one group could constantly make supply runs and refill the base coffers, while another group just banged away at the walls and only had to run as far as the keep’s depot (without feeling that they were depleting a very precious supply), that would be much more flexible.

Maybe they should even separate into two different supplies, one for offensive structures that everyone carts around for taking opposing structures or building defensive weapons, and one for masonry, the latter being easier to get ahold of and therefore easier to spend.

IOJ also knows how to counter those tactics – they garrison their possessions with multiple players/siege and react quickly with their main zerg to any reported attack. It’s very effective and very simple, and FA/CD just don’t do it enough.

We tend to have people at each location, we just don’t have enough people in total to effectively man every location AND bring a significant zerg to bear at all hours. I’m pretty sure that when they attacked Hillside we had almost every player in the zone there, but they still tore through the gates within a minute. Maybe one thing that would help if if they applied the Dynamic Event model to WvW, such that if one team has less players in total than another on the map, then defensive NPCs automatically become stronger and more numerous. The balance point would be not to make them overpowering, but to make it so that, say, a 50 vs. 25 players mismatch would end up being more equivalent to a 50 vs. 45 player match.

There are a lot of limitations to this. How many people would willingly switch BLs just to help you build siege? Golems are not cheap either.

If cost is a factor then that’s just buy-to-win. You can’t claim that cost is a balancing factor for golems because then you would be saying that golems are inherently unbalanced.

Also consider that IoJ was the worst server in tier 2, so be happy your in tier 3 where atleast its A close matchup :P

Lol, again, it’s not the sour grapes factor at play here, even if we were the ones benefiting from that tactic or whatever I wouldn’t think it’s a good idea from a design perspective (but I’d take the control points, regardless).

I just don’t think it’s the healthiest way for the game to operate. I think that it should take a minimum of several hours to completely sweep a map, even if you are the awesomest players and your opponents are scrubs. There need to be some unavoidable time sinks along the way. They should make long-game siege attempts more successful, and short-game siege attempts less viable. It should be more true siege warfare, rather than turn-and-burn, where you can really put down roots and not be terribly worried that an opposing team can just sweep in and completely nullify any efforts you put in. .