This is the reason all mesmers use Staff in PvP. Agaisnt thieves, it’s the only way to not die in 5s and have the time to put the pressure back on him.
It works very well in Solo Q at least (got up to top150 EU with it, I’m quickly losing ranks now that I’m playing D/D ele), because you are a very good close holder (which is pretty crucial in Solo Q as nobody seems to want to take that role), but on top of that you’ve got great support for the team fights. The versatility makes it great in almost all fights and you can always find something useful to do for your team depending on your comp.
In team Q it’s a different story, as the flexibility it provides isn’t that interesting, as specialized builds are often preferred. That said, even there it remains a strong build.
The amount of salt in this thread would not dilute in the Pacific Ocean.
Guys, don’t expect anything more than refinements to the system, making for example the low tier traits more accessible by removing map completion for example on the list of the things used to unlock traits.
The problem at start was the lack of things to do. Conquest got boring after 2 months.
The problem in the last 20 months was that most of the (2?) PvP developers’ time was dedicated to things that ended up useless or unexploited.
- We got a leaderboard that is off-game and hard to check, and has no reward linked to it
- We got a spectator mode that lets you look … hotjoins
- We got two new maps that players do not want to see in competitions, and one that can not be played outside private arenas (Temple is great though, good job on that)
- We got custom arenas that are only used for those quite discrete offline tournaments, duels and funzies
- We got solo queue,
Things have changed with the PvP reward track that for the first time brought something to play for. We’re still missing :
- IG tournaments
- IG promotion of the competition : replays, rewards, leaderboard, announcements …
- IG rewards for this competition : monthly rewards for the leaderboard & tournaments
- Fun PvP game modes
- Many, many convenience functions : pause game (see Starcraft), disconnect protection (see Starcraft), build import/export/save (see GW1), cancel the game if not 5v5 at start, …
The main problem of those matches was that they were all pretty much one-sided, which does not make up for interesting matches. Anet can’t do much to that, but NA & China reaaaaally need to step up their game.
Also : conquest is still boring to watch, most of the interesting plays involved the secondary objectives (lord kill, boss theft, tranq/calm spawn). Which shows how good this game could have been if Anet hadn’t been stuck with Conquest for 2 years.
I take two minutes of my time to sign in and thank you for that post. I saw it on reddit and thought it was awesome, and now I can thank you for it. Great job.
When I heard the unlocks were character bound, I facepalmed.
Did they really forget everything about GW1 ? Or even at the beginning, were “everything will be unlocked in PvP so everybody stays equal” ?
The unlocking per se is OK as it gives some sort of progression in PvP, but unlocking needs to be account-wide in PvP or it simply does not achieve its goal.
Yup, boring match-up. UW is simply not playing, so it’s basically Aurora vs us and we’re massively outnumbered. Result : 555 vs 90 vs 40 on sunday afternoons …
Honestly, FoTM aren’t that bad loot-wise. Some are bad yes (the Colossus fractal especially), but others are long and profitable (dredge) or fairly quick and easy (water and swamp).
I don’t think fractals need to be the most profitable thing in the game to make it enjoyable. It just needs some basic loot and a chance at exclusive loot to be worth it, and offer a challenge to make it interesting.
- The basic loot is there whatever people says. A basic lvl 30 fractal run should give you at least 3-4 cores, 6-7 yellows and sometimes one exotic or two (somthing like one every three run), plus a ton of standard loot in the right fractals. I don’t understand why people skill all the trash in fractals all the time, they have nice loot tables. For example, bats (grawl fractal) and harpies (asura fractal) drop T6 bloods (30s a piece), sons of svanir and wolves after the elemental drop T6 claws/fangs/totems, …
- The exclusive loot is there but I would revamp it : get a rare chance at a token to buy any fractal skin you want. The chance for that token should be kinda low but not too much (1/10, 1/20), and should NOT be tradable.
- For the challenge part, they had it at the beginning. Any kind of content can not retain the same challenge infinitely. Let us wait the addition of the new fractals, and the “official” opening of levels above 48 and we will have it back.
When a person in the time of a week manage to get 5 precursors out of the forge and at that not even using 100 gold to do it, while others use close to 400-500 gold in there and not get anything… there has to be something WRONG with it… at least that is my opinion!
My good sir, that is how randomness works. Some people have luck, others don’t. Some people might never get their precursor even if they try 3000 times, while others will have two in 500 tries.
Have you ever wondered how people could win at Euro Millions when you have 1 chance out of 116 million to win, something that will probably never happen to you ? Yet hundreds have done it already.
With all this drama it is fair to say that there is an urgent need for official GvG support. Because the permanent drama it causes on all levels is quickly becoming painful. That said, GvG sounds like a real opportunity for the game and I can see why people would enjoy such a game type. That said, WvW is NOT intended to be played that way and those GvG matches DO INTERFERE with it, it’s blatantly obvious.
P.S. : I haven’t even seen a single GvG match, I’m not interested in its current form at all. I also am not a dedicated WvW player, I’m just tired of this.
There are so many false truths in this thread that it can not be seriously taken as “interesting feedback”. My personal top 4 :
The winner !
The only “national” servers you have are French, Spanish and German, because of legal issues.
Close second !
It’s just that most of the EU population is german
English the most spoken language in the EU
4/ In the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary and Denmark, German is the most important second language. In Belgium it’s the most important second language after French.
Those threads can only exist on english-speaking forums, where english natives expect the world to use their language exclusively. Guess what : no.
The Tequatl fight clearly suffers from infrastructure problems. The fight itself is great and all, but it’s a nightmare for people to participate in due to the overflow/guesting problems.
When I hear the stories of most people that beat him, it’s always something like “I guested to Blackgate and waited for 4 hours to have a place on the main server”.
I really want to beat Tequatl, but not at this price. I think this is not Anet’s intention either, so I’ll just wait hoping for improvements on this regard.
Since i have my rings and backpack i barely visited Fractals, there is just no reason.
The only thing that made me run Fractals are the weapon skins but RNG is not really incentive.
This I can’t understand. Every single RPG has RNG-based rewards in dungeons since Dungeons and Dragons. It can not be the problem.
People here probably have incredibly sad lives to keep playing a game that only gives them “oh no!” moments for one year. Or worse, to keep posting on its forum when they don’t play it anymore.
@OP : Beating SAB W2Z2 (took me 2 hours, pre-nerf, solo, no guide).
It is pretty obvious that underwater is not a priority atm (good sign of it : we’re stuck with a non-max green breather since launch, even though exotic breathers exist in PvP). Since Karka and Fractals (who were obviously in dev before launch), I can’t think of a single update that did anything underwater.
I think that while I appreciate going underwater as it is an interesting feature, many people like me have the feeling that it is completely separated from the rest of the game. If I take my Mesmer for example : I use a berserker/fantasm build with appropriate runes and sigils, but underwater this does not work very well, so my character sux. Do I want to change my build because of this ? Certainly not. And I can’t use my legendary underwater …
I think the devs realized that underwater needs more than just a skill balance to be fully enjoyable and as it’s not a priority, they maybe leave it for a future major release.
The Scarlet events are fun. But they still suffer from one design flaw that plagues the game since day 1 : the event rewards are crap compared to mobs loot. So players prefer to farm the mobs that spawn (especially the champions in this case) instead of actually completint the event.
If they could just remove all aetherblades/molten events as soon as their morale bar are depleted, it would already help a lot.
I cursed you, Josh, many many times yesterday. I lost 55 lives in W2Z2 (solo) and got so close to the end before I ran out of continue coins. Then I remembered when I received my NES 20 years ago with TMNT as my only game, that I beat some months later after months of practice … and I was only 9.
This remembered me that I’m getting old and pathetic, but more importantly lazy. It was a shock to me how video games lost that “gamer vs developer” aspect.
I will now proceed to crush your little piece of art with a renewed sense of perseverance and courage.
“Here’s what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game. Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games — we leave the grind to other MMOs.”
Ascended items do not require a thousand hours each. Other players can easily acquire it.
Invalid quote, though I see the point. It is indeed a stretch from the original statements, but the overall philosophy is respected.
You do not require ascended items to enjoy the entire game.
It does not require an insane amount of time to get them (not even one hundred hours btw)
It does not make you super powerful.
Supported. Time gating is only okay when you can plan the required action to happen even if you are not online, or if you get the result while doing other things (like daily achievements). Having to log in to do something as trivial as “transmute my daily quartz” just enhances that awkward I-log-in-to-do-boring-things feeling, which naturally leads to “the game is boring”.
The comparison could be interesting, but the first post is just too dumb to start any meaningful disscusion. On one hand he cites every single feature, on the other he cites the name of the updates. GW1 list would then look like :
- Sorrow’s Furnace
- Factions
I appreciate the critique, but try to maintain a form of credibility. To say you’ve never seen a LS event change the world permanently does not help you in that.
I think the invasions are what the Karka attack ought to be in November. It is actually fantastic AND do indeed give a sense of a massive battle with the removal of the culling the system. Timed invasions with support of the overflow systems are actually working well.
And the loot, my god. My inventory get full twice per invasion.
Same here. Used two of them and aside from falling on my kitten it did nothing at all. I thought this was intended (after all, they are malfunctioning right ?), but apparently not ?
Warrior stuns are on much shorter CDs than mesmer stun breaks and everyone that plays mesmer knows trying to use swap as a stun break is insanely difficult
Please try it first.
We use a phantasms Mesmer as a hard counter to the dreaded MSh/GS contest warrior build. It’s simply impossible to lose.
if u are a warrior, sty stunlock. mesmers have barely any stunbreaker
kitten ? Most stunbreaks of the game, and on nice skills. Any Sword mesmer with blink and decoy (two very useful utilities) has 3 stunbreakers, 2 invulnerabilities, 1 daze, 1 cripple, vigor on crits … http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stun_breaker
Phase 1 : Use focus and Feedback alternatively to reflect projectiles. Use #2 in case of emergency
Phase 2 : Switch to GS, run in circle, use #1 and #4 for damage, #2 to create a clone to divert liandri, #5 to control her. To get rid of conditions : mantra, healing skill (traited), or shatter one clone (traited). Use blink in emergency.
Went pretty smooth after I switched to that build, but failed a lot with Sw/P before.
@Ashanor : Go say that to Plastic Fantastic and to Bruho’s Warrior who solo’ed all Nonstop Nonsense holders in the last match of ESL. Warrior is very strong at the moment against the spam of condi builds with low evades and stunbreaks.
They also don’t build anything around him, Bruho just contests the far point solo during the entire game.
I’ll bump this. This is getting out of control. Yesterday in Team Arenas, 6 or 7 games (I don’t remember exactly), all on temple. I like the map but jeez, how are we supposed to train for the ESL
EDIT : Oops, missed the second reply from Allie, sry :P
I don’t agree, Conquest isn’t a “bad” game mode for GW2. It promotes a wide variety of builds (bunkers, holders, roamers, support) and forces people to split on different points instead of zerging. It allows you to see 1v1, 1vx and group fights.
GW2’s PvP with more than 6 people involved is just awful to play and watch due to the spam of particles, pets/minions and passive traits involved. For these reasons I just don’t think this game is fit for any kind of 5v5+ mode, would it be deathmatch, king of the hill or others.
It does not mean I don’t want to play other types of PvP, but I think many suggestions just won’t work very well at the moment.
While I like GW2’s pvp overall, I agree this post puts the light on one of the worst part of it : passive traits and AI spam.
Passive traits are hard to follow. Why was GW1 easy to follow ? Classes had 8 skills, one weapon, no passive traits. Everything that was happening could be seen clearly. Who the heck is able to understand the importance of a sudden proc of protection and regen due to a passive trait or rune/sigil proc ? No one. It’s a complete mess of effects happening all at the same time.
And then AI spam. GW1 made one thing right : the available AIs (minions/pets) were sub-par. Even a 8v8 was watchable because it was only 16 players against each other. GW2 just has too much AI in PvP : Mesmer’s illusions, Necro’s minions and Ranger’s pets and spirits are the worst offenders, but you can also add the occasional thieve’s guild, elem’s elementals, guardian’s summons and even invocation that come from runes ! To me that is just WAY to much pets.
The worst case is probably a spirit ranger against a minion necro. That’s a 1v1 that is in fact a 6v8 AI war where both players are counting on AI and passives to bring the other down. It’s a nightmare to fight and watch.
^
Not to be mean, but that’s almost the single update of the year, 7 years after release. Probably an update on which they worked for months and that completely changed the class. With all that, sure, they had the time to take 5 days writing a huge blog post and get the translations before releasing it.
Sorry mate, GW2 updates goes at a MUCH faster pace. There’s just no time for this. And there has not been such a drastic change to any class like that. Really irrelevant.
Yeah, they should really participate actively in community-driven initiatives you know, like discussing during podcasts with top players/shoutcasters.
…
Wait a minute ?
