Guild Wars 2

Stop playing GW2 for a while. Seriously.

You’re half right. Yes, several of the changes are to make our version more like the Chinese version (or rather, the Chinese version was designed with the changes in the feature patch already in mind).

No, most of them are not to make the game more grindy. Nerfing champ trains (the grindiest loot farm in the game) certainly does not promote grindiness.

On reflection, I don’t unequivocally like this change. Not the champ loot nerf, that part is fine. Rather, the nerf to event rewards. There’s little enough incentive to do most DE’s as it is, so nerfing the reward won’t achieve the stated secondary goal of spreading players out in the open world.

Actually, the only problem I’ve had with the Nageling giant is the weirdly small area it has before it leashes. A few times in the past I’ve soloed it down to 50% or whatever, only to accidentally go out of its area and lose all my hard work. If the leash area were increased to the entirety of Nageling village, there would be no problems with the event. Well, maybe add a reward chest at the end, but otherwise no problems.

Bear in mind that there is nothing else in Nageling village that the giant is stopping you doing. No heart, no other events, no poi, even the waypoint is outside.

Conncept.7638:

Or, and I know I’m really straying in to dangerous territory here, they could just make the event scaling system that hasn’t worked since launch day, actually work.

It’s a Group Event. It has a minimum level of scaling that’s set at more than 1 person.

Warlord.9074:

ANET caved to the bad players that begged them to nerf warriors. Le t me be more specific everything about this patch is about making the game more simplistic and easy for new players, and nerfing warriors.

Yep. Cause the constant, entirely passive, regen signet isn’t for those who like things simplistic and easy…

Fashion Mage.3712:

Completely agree. Who’s bright idea was it to put a selfish trait like that in a supportive line anyway? The only guardians who would want this are damage-centric ones, and why would they ever go near honor?
I’m so jealous at what the elementalists are getting, that totally should’ve been on the Guardian. Heck, I’m even a little jealous at what the rangers are getting.

Not to mention this trait is just boring and unimaginative. I couldn’t come up with a more boring trait if I tried. I doubt ANet will change anything about it despite all the complaints.

The elementalists would be happy to swap with you.

Justin ODell.9517:

As Roy mentioned in another thread, all the current traits will remain unlocked, even for new players. It is only new traits that need to be unlocked, and you will not have to PvE to obtain them.

Then why make a distinction? If PvP can happily go along with players getting 12/13 traits per line, why add an extra layer of frustration and difficulty instead of giving them 13/13 traits per line? It’s obviously nothing to do with easing new players in.

Horizontal progression is a nice concept… but it’s one that I’ve never seen mentioned on the PvP forums, only the PvE ones. If you want to get more players in to PvP, somehow I don’t think keeping back build options is the way to go about it.

Lance Darkrage.1398:

For discussions sake, does anyone have any alternative solutions to acquiring trait points, or would you prefer they simply revert the new leveling system for traits?

Only revert the unlock levels, ie. first trait point would now be at 15, get one each fifth level until 80. Master traits would unlock at lvl 40, grandmaster at lvl 60. Everything else about the new system would remain as they’ve said.

maddoctor.2738:

Olvendred.3027:

Vol.7601:

These changes are great and exactly what people wanted when they asked for horizontal progression.

Levelling is, pretty much by definition, vertical progression.

The changes are about traits though not leveling. And traits are a mix of vertical (on which level they are unlocked) and horizontal (when/how to unlock them)

The OP is talking about levelling. Specifically, at what levels you unlock trait points. Try reading the first post before you jump into a thread.

Vol.7601:

These changes are great and exactly what people wanted when they asked for horizontal progression.

Levelling is, pretty much by definition, vertical progression.

Agree with the OP.

And it’s not just the early levels. At least from level 30-80 you’ve got something rto do each level (assign a trait point) that actually makes it feel like you’ve gained something by levelling. Now, it will be rather more boring.

Scarlet somehow convinced them to work together. She didn’t stand around all day holding a gun to their heads. Why would her death even matter?

Speaking of new players… no traits at all until level 30? Sounds like early levelling just got worse.

The achievements do require that the event succeeds. Want to get In Tune? Sure, you can stand back and basically do no damage, but you’d better hope that very few others are going for it or else your group will simply fail to beat the Hologram.

Frankly, in any group event, some are going to be contributing more than others. Maybe one knows the fight better. Maybe someone had a long way to run, or wasn’t waiting around all day, and simply did show up late. Should they be penalised? It may be that the fully-geared LB ranger standing at 1500 and auto-attacking contributes more than the low-levelled mesmer trying every trick he knows just to get credit (trust me, I missed my share of world events when levelling my mesmer, cause things died so fast back then). And sure, people leech. But it’s unavoidable that some players are more helpful than others.

manysongsgw.2931:

Any sort of compensation/exchange for boosters hurts those who used them already. Lets assume player A has 250 boosters and player B who saw they were removing glory and used all his boosters ahead of time. Anet announces today they will compensate the removal by exchanging 1 booster for 1 gold. Player A is out 250 gold and B is happy, where +50% more glory for 250 hours is less valuable because glory will no longer have any value (not that it did have much value until recent kodan vendor).

The exchange doesn’t have to be gold, it can be anything (another booster, skins, etc.). Point is that anything is better than +50% glory… since glory won’t have any value

The glory vendors will stick around. Which is why everyone has been suggesting glory be used as compensation for glory boosters. Specifically, a smaller amount of glory than would have been obtained from actually playing PvP with a booster for 1 hour. My suggestion is 100 glory – sufficiently small that no one who used their booster feels gypped, sufficiently large that people who have unused boosters get some value for them.

While I have very little sympathy for anyone too lazy or stubborn to guest to a server that has enough people, I agree that the downscaling is terrible. Especially when they have an exact counter of how many players are capable of damaging each knight at any time – ie. the number of players with each calibration buff.

Yeah. She’s kinda not from Earth.

Not that I would find that combination at all surprising irl.

Perhaps the team that wins gets a bonus WvW rank-up chest. Assuming the player in question actually did at least some minor requirement in terms of actually contributing to that win.

That part makes sense, especially if he is the first and only one of his kind. Perhaps he was the prototype for an entire production line of the things, or even the intended progenitor (less likely, if he is more sylvari than krait). Either way, he wants there to be more like him, but since he’s going to die, he’s actually the last as well as the first. It’s just a matter of emphasis.

Konig, you keep making the assumption that all dragon minions must be the same, when we very definitely know that they’re not. This is especially apparent when you talk about ‘corruption.’ Corruption is what makes Risen, Icebrood and Branded: an existing creature (human, norn, quaggan, gorilla, whatever) is infected by dragon magic and corrupted to become a dragon minion. It’s a clear paradigm that we see throughout the game, so it’s understandable to think it might be universal. Except… we have the destroyers too. While some destroyers do seem to have undergone corruption, a large proportion did not. Instead, they were born from destroyer queens. Destroyers reproduce, which strongly indicates they are an entire race created by Primordus. Unlike the Risen, Icebrood and Branded, they do not require other living beings to maintain a population. Moreover, they are born as dragon minions. No corruption happens, which means that paradigm is not the universal rule for dragon minions.

This may seem an obvious (and minor) point, but it’s important, since many of your arguments against the ‘sylvari were made by Mordremoth’ theory are based on the corruption paradigm. If destroyers are an exception, then sylvari could equally be different. Remember that the elder dragons represent different elements: as different as these elements are from each other, the way the dragons act and the things they create may also by different from each other. That means that Mordremoth’s minions could be an exception to anything or everything we’ve seen from the minions of other dragons. Especially if they happen to be a ‘created’ species rather than a ‘corrupted’ one.

That said, I’m not advancing any positive hypotheses. I agree that the evidence in favour of sylvari as dragon minions (even if freed or whatever in the past) is rather underwhelming and requires considerable conjecture. What I’m saying is that comparisons to the behaviour and attributes of other dragon minions cannot absolutely disprove the theory, especially when some of the ones mentioned (those pertaining to the corruption paradigm) are already not universal to dragon minions.

Equilibriator.8741:

Olvendred.3027:

Equilibriator.8741:

They should just take the item that requires you to complete the game in pve and make it an optional item towards the legendary. Then make it so you can either complete all the pve content, get to a certain massive level in WvW, or get to massive lvl in PvP(or something balanced like that compared to completing all pve content). The item you get for completing either of those 3 being interchangeable in the recipe. That way whatever you do specifically in the game can benefit you for your legendary without forcing you to do a huge portion of the game you shouldn’t have to (depending on your preference).

(I realise there’s still a lot of pve content either way but lets be fair, your not gonna be able to find enough stuff in wvw or pvp to make this balanced. Pretty much anything you do in pvp or wvw is everything you can do, you don’t have enough variety to keep it balanced)

And while they’re at it, make the Gift of Fortune optional too. And the precursor! Cause those are just SO much effort, man. It’s almost like they don’t want everyone to have a full collection of legendaries. Which is extremely repressive of my gaming experience.

Why the sarcasm? Slightly over the top don’t you think. Im talking about taking the biggest pve element and replacing it with either wvw or pvp to satisfy people that do those things specifically.

you sir, are a kitten

mhmm.

You’re talking about taking two requirements and replacing them with one.

Equilibriator.8741:

They should just take the item that requires you to complete the game in pve and make it an optional item towards the legendary. Then make it so you can either complete all the pve content, get to a certain massive level in WvW, or get to massive lvl in PvP(or something balanced like that compared to completing all pve content). The item you get for completing either of those 3 being interchangeable in the recipe. That way whatever you do specifically in the game can benefit you for your legendary without forcing you to do a huge portion of the game you shouldn’t have to (depending on your preference).

(I realise there’s still a lot of pve content either way but lets be fair, your not gonna be able to find enough stuff in wvw or pvp to make this balanced. Pretty much anything you do in pvp or wvw is everything you can do, you don’t have enough variety to keep it balanced)

And while they’re at it, make the Gift of Fortune optional too. And the precursor! Cause those are just SO much effort, man. It’s almost like they don’t want everyone to have a full collection of legendaries. Which is extremely repressive of my gaming experience.

It’s simple. The Gift of Battle always required 500 BoH. Before they brought out achievement awards, you had to go into WvW and kill enough players (shock horror!) to buy it. Essentially, playing WvW has been an important element of making a legendary since the beginning.

The only problem was when the achievement awards started giving everyone hundred of BoH. It has now been remedied to something like the original vision. And as has been said, there are workarounds to this requirement that there weren’t for the original one.

Alcyone.8695:

In this thread, WvW players beg for a PvE-related thing.

Not sure you understand what PvE means. A cosmetic change to WvW-exclusive items (siege) =/= PvE content.

Regina Buenaobra.6193:

Amar.1547:

I can see why they wont let you join mayem with a group, easy to dominate and becomes to competitive. But the bell one would be cool, same with the puzzle, set up a group race thing!

Correct. Specifically for Snowball Mayhem (a PvP activity), allowing group join would allow pre-made parties to face-off against random match-ups, which would result in very lopsided matches. While a matchmaking system for Snowball Mayhem would be nice, it was outside the scope for this release.

I think this misses the point. People don’t want to join as groups so much as they want to play with their friends. By ‘with their friends’ I mean in the same instance as their friends, but not necessarily on the same team. I still don’t see why a version of the sPvP browser hasn’t been adapted for all the minigames and activities (both the permanent ones and the seasonal ones).

On eles:

Massively nerfing 2 trait lines and then buffing 2 others does not encourage build diversity. If you want get more diversity, leave Water and Arcane alone, and add the buffs to Earth and Fire. This would actually give us the option to choose between different builds, rather than having to abandon all existing builds in favour of new ones. A few months after the patch, there’ll be the same lack of diversity, just with a different build.

applecup.3047:

the best resurrecting anim i’ve come across is when culling has kicked in and it looks like people are mining the corpse.

Exactly.

Culling kicks in a lot of the time for a lot of players. If you want a ressing animation for yourself, that doesn’t matter. If you want it to show it off, then you may run in to difficulties.

Getting a mushed sample does count. It’s essentially ‘Daily Gatherer’, but only for Toxic Seedlings. Whatever you get per gather, it increases by one each time. If you manage to gather a single node twice, the count goes up twice.

I know where there are a ton of Toxic Seedlings in Sparkfly on BG, but you’ll have to look around on your own world. Or just do 20 offshoot events.

The OP has an important point, but the solution suggested is perhaps not ideal. The issue is that lots of players, myself included, suffer from extremely long loading screens sometimes. Whether this is due to bad internet connection, slow PC, server lag, or a combination of the above. For me, the worst thing (that continues to happen) is that I get completely timed out of activities before my loading screen has even finished. This issue is more or less unique to Lunatic Inquisition (since in Crab Toss, for instance, dying doesn’t really matter): that he gets killed before the loading screen in finished.

A preferable suggestion would be that the client send some sort of message to the server when the loading screen ends. Prior to that, players should be invulnerable and the inactivity timer should not start.

Trebs are going to disappear. But the 5 ballistas some troll built on top of the supply depot are going to stay all week. And they’re going to count towards the siege cap, so you can’t build as much useful siege. That’s what Jayne is talking about.

A modest increase to, say, 90 mins, would probably be ok. It’d basically allow you to refresh every hour, rather than every 30-50 mins.

I’d definitely prefer FIFO, with the single exception that if you get DC’ed from a map, and immediately log back in and queue for the same map again, you jump to the top of the queue.

I’m not on TC, so I’m happy to be corrected, but I doubt they have particularly long queues in Oceanic time. Certainly not for normal WvW (once League is over).

Bones.5762:

god can’t believe this thread is still going.

Just let me get this out, it is IMPOSSIBLE for JQ to win league IF the 2x that BGvSORvJQ matchup happens and the other 2 servers force JQ into last place. Assumming that JQ beats the other server without the other 3rd super server.

JQ would get score a 1+5+5+5+5+5+1=27

For arguments sake, lets say SOR is going to win all the matchups without jq against bg. and in the second matchup with BGvSORvJQ same outcomes with jq last, bg first, sor 2nd.

SoR scores 3+5+5+5+5+3+3= 29
BG scores 5+3+3+3+3+5+5= 27
JQ scores 1+5+5+5+5+5+1=27

Now for the reverse situation of where bg beats SoR all of the time. I’m still holding JQ’s wins constants, assuming they beat all servers 1v1 not ganged up on by the 3rd super server.

bg scores 5+5+5+5+3+5+5=33
sor scores 3+3+3+3+5+3+3=23
JQ scores 1+5+5+5+5+5+1=27

OP was about easy weeks, and yes, they will have more GUARANTEED WINS but their outcomes is solely decided by the 2x you guys meet. if you make sure they get last place the next time the BGvSORvJQ matchup happens, itll come down to sor or bg.

I’ll remind you that JQ coming third in week 1 would have considerably less likely if this draw had not existed in the first place. Further, immediate action to change the draw would have forestalled that.

Second, everyone seems to be assuming the exact same result will happen in Week 7. This is anything but assured. All three T1 servers will adjust their strategies depending on the results of weeks 1-6; and, indeed, dynamically on the hour-by-hour standings in week 7 itself. If week 7 comes down to SoR vs BG, and whichever side gets higher wins, each of them will be going after the other, not JQ.

Third, your hypotheticals each assume consistent results between BG and SoR throughout the season. If BG and SoR split wins between them, JQ would need only to come 2nd in week 7 to win (assuming my maths works out).

None of which matters. This thread isn’t about who is going to win Gold League, nor is it about defending the current draw on the basis of the final outcome. The OP was asking for a draw which is independently defensible as being equal between the T1 servers. The current draw is not, and I see no reason why BG, SoR or JQ should be happy with it.

With a more equal schedule:
- BG and SoR have equal footing towards winning the league
- BG and SoR have more opportunities to take a break during the league.
- JQ gets fewer boring matches, as many JQ have complained about
- JQ doesn’t get focused as much when it’s BG-SoR-JQ.
- The winner of the league means something.

With the current schedule:
- ???

Seriously, if anyone has actual arguments in favour of the current schedule, I’d love to hear them.

It’s more about having at least some choice and variety in how to do each particular daily. This is the only one that offers none of either. Many can be obtained in the course of pretty much any type of PvE gameplay (Kills, Kill Variety, Champ Kills, Vet Kills, Ambient Kills, Aquatic Kills, Events, Group Events, Event Mentor, [Regional] Kills/Vet Kills/Events, Dodger, Condition Applier, Condition Remover, Gatherer, Recycler, Reviver, Skill Interruptor, Leveler, Skill Points). Sure, you may have to go a bit out of your way to do them, but you can progress towards them in any PvE map, while doing whatever you want.

Some others require a higher degree of specificity, like Dungeon or Story Dungeon completer. But these still give you plenty of choice: you can pick any of dozens of explorable dungeon paths. Much the same applies for Puzzle Jumper. Even the ridiculously token ones like Karma Spender or Laurel Merchant give you the choice of which of the merchants you visit, or what you spend the karma on. It’s a token choice, granted, but those are token dailies.

Now, admittedly, Daily Activity doesn’t give you any choice in what activity is available that day. (Though it might if, as currently, the LS event provides activities – eg. Lunatic Inquisition). But it cycles through every day, so there’s always some variety. And each activity is fairly different in gameplay from all the others.

The ‘be at Tequatl’ daily gives no choice. To get it, you have to go to Tequatl. It offers no variety – the Tequatl fight is the Tequatl fight. The equivalent for Dungeons would be a “Daily Arah Path 4”. Sure, you don’t have to get it, and I don’t, but that’s no excuse for putting up substandard dailies without any of the choice or variety that all of the others offer.

webtoehobbit.4201:

Twilight Assault was a particularly terrible Living World as it’s time gated achievements relied ONLY on dailies….

I’m not sure what you’re talking about. You could get the Twilight Assault meta achievement in a single run-through of the new dungeon path, without doing any dailies at all.

If anything, Twilight Assault was exactly what you’re asking for. Plenty of achievements to get the meta by doing the dungeon path; but if you found it too hard, it was possible to get by doing dailies.

1. Balance: both between servers and between classes.
2. Commander functionality.
3. Better alt-friendliness.
4. Incentives for scouting and defending
5. Getting rid of lag, so large-scale fights are even more fun

StriderShinryu.6923:

MastaNeenja.1537:

If I don’t see it happen in the game, it didn’t happen.

This, in multiple ways. For those who do visit the forums, there’s a definite disconnect in having to go online outside of the game for lore content. For those who don’t visit the forums or site, the lore content truly may as well not exist at all.

But that’s the thing. A rather large proportion of those who don’t bother to read the stories (conveniently linked in the news feed when you log in) already… will definitely not go to the trouble of reading a lengthy story in-game. Especially on an substandard interface for conveying large chunks of text, compared to an internet browser.

They’ve said they’re working on a better vehicle for conveying the Living Story. But I really, really hope it’s considerably better than just the short stories in a library book. It needs to be something that can easily and succinctly convey lore to players who are only casually interested in lore; probably more so than to give lots of detail to those who are very much into lore. Hopefully, of course, they figure out some way to do both.

angelpaladin.7921:

I am going to keep this short and sweet. The Halloween living story was something I was seriously looking forward to. I heard all the awesome events and achievements that happened last year. Then there where the awesome skins they added that you could obtain.

This year’s event was extremely short and unsatisfying. There are barely any achievements for the event its self. Where is a pumpkin carving achievement or a achievement for the mini game?

For the most part, they’ve removed the old ‘carve 200 pumpkins over the space of the entire event’ style achievements, in favour of ‘carve 5 pumpkins but within the space of today! dailies’. Essentially, you get more choice in what you want to do, and most of them are presented in smaller, easily doable achievements, rather than massive monolithic grindiness. A lot of people last year wanted to carve all their pumpkins in a couple of days… and then complained about how boring it was. I feel the current system is considerably better for play style… admittedly at the expense of making each achievement individually more memorable. Also, I guess, it’s problematic if you can’t do dailies very often (thought the meta only really requires 6 dailies, of which there are 2 per day. So 3 days worth).

I’ve used pumpkins as an example, but this applies to everything. There’s been a daily for the clocktower, one for the Lunatic Inquisition, etc.

Golgathoth.3967:

I think the only skin I got was that gourd looking one, which I destroyed. No one wants that thing.

Grinning gourd rifle? I use it on my engi

gwfanboy.2496:

You do realize that necros and eles can rez and eles can rez with a range of 1200, right? The problem isn’t the warrior banner..the problem is rezzing an npc. This should not happen via skills.

Yes… but it doesn’t target. So if there’s another dead NPC, or a downed player, within 1200 range of the ele and closer to them than than the lord is, the glyph will res them. Warbanner resses 5, so there’s not much chance it will miss the lord.

I agree with the rest of your point: res skills are only balanced when they work only on downed state for players. Because downed state is weak, the player can be killed in it, and the downed penalty applies (ie. if you go down multiple times in a short period of time, eventually, you have less downed health each time). None of that applies for NPCs.

Kuzletti.9175:

This is exactly what’s on my mind. Before playing GW2, I thought this Living World thing would add lasting content to the game, would change stuff, but all it does is add temporary (and usually farmable) content that rewards you with some vanity items and then vanishes. I stopped doing those LS things when Teq came out (a single boss fight is just poor, imo), and now we have Twilight Assault, which is just an addition to Twilight Arbor.

I’m very disappointed. :/

umm, right… you want “lasting content”, but the two Living Story patches you most hate are ‘the one that added a permanent change to a world boss fight’ and ‘the one that added a permanent new dungeon path.’ These are quite specifically not temporary, and the skins and vanity items associated with them are also permanent drops.

A backpiece or weapon skin is one skin. Armour needs to be done differently for, at minimum, each race and gender: that’s 10 skins. That’s for each piece of armour, so 60 for a full set. Multiply that by 3 if the armour is going to be different for each class of armour (heavy, medium, light).

Armour also needs to be able to be dyed, which weapons and backpieces don’t.

mexay.3902:

A few simple bosses:

Perma-retaliation boss

Exists. Last boss in HotW P1, or that golem in CoE. Sure, you’re able to kill their totems to remove the buffs, but they respawn pretty quick, so close enough.

Damage and condition immunity boss. Can only be damaged via CC-ing into certain spots. Has no kite ability and will walk away from all these places. Immune to fear.

Seems unlikely to happen. While all classes have access to CC, not all have access to CC that is good at moving mobs into specific places.

30-second timer boss. Boss resets HP every 30 seconds. 600k health pool (20k dps for a party is actually pretty easy to achieve, by the way)

Close enough to Dwayna in Arah P4.

The exception to the AoEs rule, but still interesting:
Endurance boss. Endure a boss for a whole 2 minutes. He’s immune to damage. Does large scale AoEs, single target DPS, conditions and CC. Decent length/sized telegraphs. Gives a use for non-DPS spec gear. At least 1 party member must survive. Additional 50% endurance regen. Stacks with other buffs. Achievement for all party members to survive. Personal achievement for not going down.

The ‘avoid all the cannon shots’ phase on the last boss in Aetherblade Retreat was a lesser version of this. People hated it.

Reflection/Block Boss:
Boss will only take damage from reflects and melee range blocks. Each reflect/melee range block does 5% damage. Single target projectiles. Deals 10k damage. 3k dps per second 200 range AoE ring. Must be within ring for block to take effect.

Again, considerably more favourable to some classes than others. Necros would be entirely useless. Unless there’s some sort of boss-specific way to get a reflect, in which case, it exists with the final boss in Arah P1.

Ranged only boss:
Boss has a 600 range AoE ring. Stepping inside the ring results in a 3k DPS effect. Lasts 3 seconds on application. Boss has mid-high HP pool. Conditions do double damage.

Plenty of bosses have, at least temporary, effects that make it impossible to melee them.

Crazylegsmurphy.6430:

See. Now we are getting down to it. You came to the conclusion that because I’m doing something, I must therefore enjoy it.

The fact is that I don’t really like the AP system. It outs too much focus on rewards then it does fun. The reason I “want” to get AP is because that is currently how the game is designed.

I “want” gold/gear/laurels and so in order to do that, I must play the game as ANet has designed it. For example, I don’t like doing dailies because I find them to be a waste of time, yet I want laurels.

So, ANet sees me log in, complete dailies and decides I must enjoy it.

The problem with this, is that ingame rewards only have any significance in-game. There is no conceivable reason for you to want in game rewards unless you have an underlying desire to play the game. If you don’t want to play the game, then in-game rewards are worthless, therefore you will not grind to get them.

You do not enjoy crab toss. You do not enjoy living story. Ok, cool. There are parts of GW2 content you don’t enjoy. But you do them a lot. Why? Because your underlying desire to play the game, wherever it is founded, is overriding the dislike you have of those particular aspects that give you your rewards.

Many players simply do not play content they don’t like. You, apparently, are unable to stop yourself from doing so. The fact that you are still playing every day to do things which you don’t find fun is… up to you, I guess.

Anet will, no doubt, draw their own conclusions.

Meh. Nice “league” – the same 5 servers we’re always against. I thought that pretty much the only justification for the league in the first place was to promote variety of match-ups (cause it sure as hell was never about balanced matches…).

Or is ‘league’ just meant to be a shiny name?

King Amadaeus.8619:

And I will say again:

It is utter BS that if 7 people attack me I can only hit 5 of them at a time, whilst all 7 of them can all hit me at once….

While I completely understand that the AoE cap “is needed so your servers don’t implode”, there is also no question that it gives a noticeable advantage beyond that of just having more people.

What I am saying is: If I can only hit 5 people at once, why in the world can more than 5 (five) hit me at once?

Easy answer: you can hit all 7 of them at once. What you can’t do, is hit all 7 of them with one skill. Drop 2 AoE skills, and you’re fine.

Actually, not even that. If your AoE skill pulses (or otherwise hits multiple times, like Meteor Storm), you can hit all seven with 1 skill – you just can’t hit all 7 with 1 pulse.

I don’t have the greatest internet or PC, so I suffer from quite long loadings screens. This generally isn’t a problem… except when I’ve been trying to enter Southsun Survival today, and have gotten DC’ed for inactivity, before I even get out of the loading screen.

Guard Leech and Applied Fortitude aren’t particularly well balanced, but they’re considerably less destructive than Bloodlust will be. They take a lot of Wxp to get (per character), meaning that only a certain portion of players on each server have them, rather than every player on every map. They’re removed on death, rather than by another server going through a lengthy capture process. And they can be on any player: no matter how populous or successful your server is, no matter how many team mates you or your enemies have online at a given time. They don’t automatically contribute to snowballing.

Sigil stacks are just broken. There is no reason for them to exist if the weapon is not equipped. Despite this, all the things I said above apply, which they don’t to bloodlust.

Ascended gear is BiS. Whether or not you agree with the grind to get it, WvW is and has always been a PvP mode using PvE gear. You want BiS, you gotta get BiS. Again, same as above; doesn’t directly contribute to snowballing.

Finally, there are massive arguments against the Bloodlust stat buff that have nothing to do with GvG. It is arguably worse for ‘standard WvW’ than it is for GvG.

DevonCarver.5370:

The stat boost, while controversial, is there to give the buff meaning in the context of the general WvW battle. Providing boosts like %WXP, etc. don’t have impact in fights against other sides, they are just a nice bonus for you. The stat boost and the points for finishing players mean that not only do you want to have the buff, but you don’t want your opponents to have it.

At least make it only apply to the map you’re on, so that you have some chance of controlling whether the buff is applied to your or another server, not your (quite possibly non-existent) team mates on the other borderlands.

A +50 buff to all stats is worth fighting for, but it’s maybe possible to overcome. A +150 buff isn’t.