Guild Wars 2

It’s more obvious on male norn. On my female norn, it just looks like some odd dance from the ’30s.

Hope that dance vendor opens soon. She needs a smoother dance animation.

Having even around 40% is generally enough. There’s no point whatsoever in having it that high, unless you just feel like ruining the rest of your build’s stats, I guess.

Hopefully it’ll return as an elite shout in some form. Personally, I don’t think it should revive people. (Even if Rally didn’t exist.) Maybe instead it grants some natural regen to downed teammates. Not enough to revive them if they aren’t healing on their own, but enough to basically keep them from bleeding out. Also, I think it could stand to be more like its GW1 ancestor, and replace the generic move buff with an IAS, if it’s going to be an elite.

Something like:

“I Will Avenge You!”
Elite Shout. If a teammate is dead or downed, gain Might, Regeneration and Quickness. Nearby downed teammates gain Regeneration.

Might (3 stacks): 10 s
Regeneration: 10s (1300 health)
Quickness: 4s
Duration: 10s

I’m not sure what your health really is when you’re downed, so applying the same amount of healing may be too much or too little. No idea. But you get the idea. As it was, it honestly was just the same thing as Signet of Rage, only weaker.

Really want that tier 3 cultural set. Only two more years to go…

[edit]: Wow, this board’s formatting code is terrible.

Sword+Warhorn. Warhorn in general. Other than GS, that’s about it.

@Baldovin
That passive effect always works but the gain is so incredibly tiny that it doesn’t overcome the natural adrenaline degen you have out of combat. I think it makes you gain something like 1-2% adrenaline every couple of seconds, or similar. (The passive effect is worthless in other words.)

Another one, huh? It’s like if every Thief video was just people spamming Heartseeker. Every Warrior video is generally the same thing.

I imagine if they decide to balance the elites, they’ll probably just make Signet of Rage worse, to ‘encourage’ us to use the others. Not because that’s the correct solution; that’s just how ANet usually solves its problems.

Use Bull’s Rush. This stuns the target. Then use Frenzy and then use Hundred Blades in the same moment.

Then watch as you die. Later you can read about how OP you are on the forums, despite the fact that the people complaining just broke stun and moved out of the way.

I agree, for the most part. I get the impression they were trying to discourage Warriors from doing anything alone, as if they are alone, they cannot get up from the downed state whatsoever unless it is a 1v1 situation, or they can barely manage a rally.

The #1 skill has the highest downed state damage in the game, but that’s it. That’s our defense, for the most part.

#2, as we all know, is next to worthless. Even if it’s a 1v1, it can be blinded away, evaded and so on. Rangers can even just walk up behind their pet, ensuring you can’t use it on them. It’s a worthless skill.

The #3 kills you. That about sums it up. This is assuming it actually becomes available that century, as it has a very long recharge.

The whole downed state seems to revolve around how powerful Vengeance is supposed to be, as you’re the only profession that can go down, then just get right back up. Sounds overpowered until you play a Warrior long enough. It’s not a huge deal in PvE, obviously, but in sPvP, if you go down, you’re probably never getting back up again.

If they add a new elite shout, I’d imagine we’ll see IWAY’s return.

It’s a combination of factors. For one, not every server is highly WvW active. Another, of course, is the 24 hour period didn’t really gather all the data it needed, especially with whole guilds transferring two or three times. Still another is it’s possible the most WvW-obsessed servers are top heavy on the server list, with the rest either being inactive in WvW or very casual. And yet still… during the course of the matches, many began evenly, but as one side pressed more and more, the less committed or coordinated servers eventually started to crumble, resulting in people being less interested in fighting what was obviously a tiring battle.

My main concern is that there are basically four WvW-focused servers, and one will probably end up beating up on the two best-of-the-rest servers that have a lot of participants but just don’t have the coordination that’s necessary, or the Oceanic support. Two weeks may end up being too much. Another concern is that servers may end up fighting the same opponent for years to come. Which may actually be funny, as blood feuds begin to rise.

I discovered I could make a norn woman that looked almost just like a character I include in some of my settings, minus a tail. I run a comic named “Gauged” that she’s a part of. Unfortunately, just “Jael” was taken, so I had to add a second name. I think if I could back and do it again I may have just added a title. Or not. I didn’t get any of the names I wanted, and I was in-game literally the very minute the gates opened. Ho hum.

You don’t. Even if you go after their Lord (assuming they have one), they can just ignore it, take the point loss, and continue sitting on the points indefinitely. They’ll easily make up the points over time. You could do it if you organized a specific kind of team build, but it’s not like you know you’re getting this sort of team as your opponent.

I’m hoping there’s a balance patch down the road that will correct some of these issues with the professions.

Zuggy.4501:

It’s not just to stop botters, but speed farmers in general from flooding the TP with gold and making players who don’t farm still able to use the TP without having to buy gems.

The thing is, if you have the kind of money to actually buy the best stuff in the game (100g+), whether or not you can buy gems is irrelevant.

There should be enough good looking armor sets in the game that how you look is a choice, not a time investment. I think the tier 3 set especially is outlandish. It looks good, so it makes me wonder why the tier 1 and 2 sets generally look terrible most of the time. I guess to encourage people to grind for tier 3?

Really, I imagine the only people to have tier 3 are going to be either people who exploited the TP or scammers. After a year I’m sure many of us will have a set, making the whole argument that the price makes them unique completely irrelevant.

@Ragnar
I actually meant 250. Although, some people DO have 350, I think. I actually have 292 hours on the Warrior and 315 hours total. I’ll edit it to prevent confusion.

I know the 5 skill is a blast finisher, but combos in general are not as useful as we were led to believe. Honestly the benefit of using it vs just getting it out of your hands just isn’t there. Three stacks of might, frost armor, etc. Not really a big benefit. Just a cute trick. I think making it a long range attack that lets you place it at range would be a lot more fun and useful, while retaining the finisher.

I actually know about the active skills (the offhand suggestion, I wasn’t intending to retain the 4 and 5, but to possibly have a new 4 and 5). The damage the primary attack does is actually pretty funny. It usually won’t exceed your ordinary 1 skill chain, but it’s more than what you’d think. It actually does a little more damage to gates, for example, than your normal attacks can do. It’s a little weird. But again, it’s not worth losing your whole skillbar. It’d be nice if the banners gave interesting conditions or effects based on the profession using it, and had their own 1 skill chain. But anyway.

I’ve used nothing but the warhorn, but not because I wanted to. I actually detest it as a weapon. I just use it because Charge is on there. It’s just a getting away from something weapon. Applying weakness is cute but really doesn’t mitigate as much damage as out-DPSing someone will. (They can’t hit you if they’re dead.) The 5 skill is really only useful to help you dodge around a little more, after a quick weapon swap.

The Warhorn doesn’t really have much effectiveness against one or two enemies. It’s more effective in groups, yet in WvW, if you’re close enough for it to affect that many enemies, you’re in way too deep. You could use it in 8v8s, I guess, but… why would you?

Personally, I think in terms of combat performance, it’s the worst weapon the Warrior has. It’s just a weapon that’s doing the job a secondary skill would be doing in GW1. I really hate using it, but it’s the fastest way to get around, and I do a lot of walking.

I have actually wondered this. It may be worth using just for the effect if it made you a giant and gave you that aura constantly. I imagine there’d be problems using it indoors, certainly.

Traits:

Without actively going through every trait in the game, the general problem is that Warrior traits are mostly all +10%, +5%, +12%, and so on. This may be intentional, but it’s BAD intention. I literally cannot begin to go into this, as the problem is so vast I’d be here all day. Almost all Warrior traits are like this, and this is a very big reason for why the profession is often so boring and stuck in a rut when it comes to playstyles. Instead, I’ll nitpick a few traits:

Powerful Banners would be more interesting if instead of applying a flat damage on summon, it did small bits of AoE damage around their location – or even applied single stacks of bleeding or poison every few seconds – allowing them to be used as very minor control abilities. Warriors in general need more abilities like this – things that allow them to be at least a little creative, rather than behaving like drooling idiots just spamming cripples and bleeds 100% of the time. Just because it’s not supposed to be a Thief or Mesmer doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have some depth.

Weakness-based builds are mostly worthless because they rely a lot on constant strikes, which is more of a GW1 style of application, where it’s easy to maintain constant hits. It’s not especially viable in sPvP and is certainly boring in PvE. It’s a sustained damage kind of setup, which is not viable on the Warrior in GW2, because GW2 is not a sustained damage kind of game. It’s a game about suppression, burst and sustained support, not damage. Traits in this sort of line should focus on also granting short bursts of stability either passively or (preferably), based on your actions. Using a burst skill on a weakened enemy granting stability, for example.

Make Empowered work with any passive state, boon or not, including signet passives, but reduce the gain. Warriors don’t have a very wide range of boons to begin with, and Empowered is already outclassed by a large margin by Empower Allies, which does the same thing for you and allies while granting a better resulting buff. You know what would be even better, though? If instead of just raising invisible numbers, the trait actually did something, like dropped little AoE fields that granted Might, whenever you use a Burst skill – anything that actually changes the battlefield around you instead of just crapping numbers.

Avoid traits that increase recharges. All this does is cause you to balance the skills so that you HAVE to bring the traits to normalize them, which means if you don’t have the traits, you won’t be using the skills. This is a no-no. I will spray you with a Windex bottle full of water if you do this again. Traits like Physical Training should not exist. They do more to hurt normal use of the skills than to benefit you for bringing it, because I know good and well you are increasing their native recharges because the trait exists at all. Traits like Physical Training should do something like increase the knockback of all physical skills, or apply a short immobilize after their use, or cause cripple for a second or two. Lots of choices that don’t involve punishing people trying to use the skills normally on other trait lines.

In general, Warriors are very melee focused in a metagame that is VERY control-heavy, meaning certain skills are simply not viable over others. I cannot stress the importance of changing your traits to reflect this. Certain trait lines should include the means to grant yourself passive stability upon triggering actions in combat that should normally be quite rare. This can be burst skills, combo effects or simply things like “grant 3 seconds of stability at the end of a dodge roll.” (Warriors don’t get to roll too often anyway.) You get the idea.

Innnnn conclusion, Warriors are dominated by certain skills mainly because of how bad their traits are in a metagame that does not like them. This is why Warriors in sPvP are generally considered jokes if they aren’t running very specific kinds of builds, which are usually novelties that rely on awkward chains. The traits are simple-minded and have extreme tunnel vision with no utility involved in acquiring them. This is bad. Very bad. It’s not a feature of the profession; it’s a crutch. In addition, its weapons have their own problems, many of which are tied to how traits do NOT change how you play. If you change your traits to do something other than just pile invisible damage buffs, you will see the gates of how Warriors can use their weapons and secondary skills open up immensely.

I look forward to your disagreements and nitpicking.

Secondary Skills:

Healing skills are generally fine. They’re just heal skills, after all. Healing Signet is pretty ineffective in sPvP, though, because you don’t generally have the native resistance you will in PvE. It should probably heal for more, actively, if you’re loaded down with CCs, which are way, way, way more common in sPvP.

The “three slot” secondaries are primarily trivialized in sPvP because of the dire need for closers and stability in a very CC-heavy environment with no native reductions. Proposed changes to traits should alleviate some problems. However:

Signets all have direct competing skills that do the same thing but with much lower recharges. (Dolyak/Balanced Stance; Stamina/Shake it Off; Fury/Berserker’s; Might/FGJ) This was obviously intentional, but I feel like it was already a mistake. It waters down an already small array of choices. Due to active use playing a prominent role in sPvP, signets are often fairly worthless; their passive effects do not accommodate the loss of an active state, and as such you are encouraged to never use the signets or to simply bring the competing skill. In PvE, they may see use, but again, simply due to the fact that their passives are passively working, and you never have any need to use the active abilities. This discourages their use and as such, discourages actively playing the game. This is wrong. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but mine is the only correct one. (Kisses.)

My opinion on the signets is that their active states should be distinguishable from the “real” skills they are modeled after, and their effects should move away from simply being boons or buffs. Their passives could even be the actual boons. Might, for example, may actively cause your next attack to also have knockback (bow AoE hilarity ensues) while its passive state simply gives you a single stack of Might (would have to check the math on this). Fury could actively grant ranged attacks piercing and melee attacks life steal, or similar. Stamina is in a good place but could function to actively remove a condition a second for five seconds (right now its intended function is rarely needed, and when needed, is usually in a situation in which you’re going to die anyway). Dolyak’s, you could make actively consume control effects for health, rather than simply granting Stability.

I think the physical skills are fine, but would see more use with improved traits that focus more on stability and less on just adding up damage values. More to come on that. Stomp could use an improvement on recharge, as right now it has a high recharge rate just because Physical Training exists. More on THAT later, too.

Shouts are fine, as is, and are one of the few viable kinds of builds for Warriors at the moment. I’d like to see a better selection of them, however. In addition, it would be nice if their mechanics were more interesting than just granting boons or a condition (excluding Fear Me, which actively DOES something), but… I’ll settle.

Banners are kind of a big problem child, as they rely a lot on large groups of people to be effective, and the traits dominate their use. If you aren’t running traits FOR banners, you’re usually wasting a slot by bringing them. For one, I think they should always do a little bit of damage when you summon them. Just nowhere near the amount you currently trait them for. Secondly, I’d like to see them be able to behave as an offhand rather than overwriting your whole skillbar. Not too important, but it’d encourage some people to actually use them, as right now, as with all skills in the game that overwrite your actual skills, they just destroy your build synergy. The #5 skill also needs to go, as dropping the banner (no animation) has the same effect. It does act as a combo finisher, although this does no damage and only grants a short, worthless boon. The #5 skill should instead be a reticule throw ability that can strike enemies, and loses the weapon. It would be nice if the passive effects of the banner improved if the number of people it affects is reduced.

The rest of the skills are fine, and are considered the core skills to begin with, and are generally why I’m writing this to begin with. The only one I can really ridicule is Berserker’s, because it’s marginally eclipsed by the other three, just because the other three are often so much more useful, as they actively change how you play. Berserker’s simply increases adrenaline gain. If its adrenaline gain was reduced some, but you gained a second of quickness for each level of adrenaline you do NOT have at the moment (3, 2, 1), I think it’d be a better skill while achieving the same thing.

(cont)

Many Warrior players, myself included, having about 250 hours or more under our belt, feel that while the Warrior is in a good place for several kinds of builds, but in other areas it is either lacking, or more importantly, is simply very dull. By the way, this is for the purposes of discussion. If all you have to add is that no one should suggest anything and just accept the existing state of the game and leave it up to ANet, just… don’t post. The forums exist for a reason. (Come on, guys.)

I thought I’d list a few ways you can potentially change up the class with minor alterations to make it more interesting. Most of these involve altering traits or secondary skills to make them more active. Much of the Warrior’s problem isn’t numbers (which it has a lot of), it’s the fact that it compensates for the lack of proper utility and interesting gameplay by just slapping more and more numbers on top of one another. So…

Core problems:

Stability, utility, “number” traits. Utility should exist either through active effects in traits or more importantly, secondary skills. For the purposes of this example I’ll treat stability as something that should be handled primarily by trait use, not secondary skills, as those should be unique to one another. More on that later.

(cont)

I wouldn’t expect any major changes. ANet stated they were “happy” with the Warrior. Ultimately, whether or not the players feel it needs more diversity and/or more interesting skills, it’s ANet who cares about ANet’s opinion.

The trait Last Stand doesn’t seem to work. I know it has an internal cooldown and also seems to freak out if you recently used Balanced Stance, but during testing with NPCs, I could never get it to actually trigger. I thought it may only turn on but not affect existing affects, but this also proved untrue.

The problem with any of the existing races is they all look more or less the same. It took ANet quite a few years to flesh out the Charr, and they’re still the least played race, because if it’s not human looking, people generally save it for last. I imagine Tengu is the next, although I imagine it won’t be too popular in comparison to the other races.

I just stay away from the TP. I know it’s the best way to make money, but I really don’t want to work at an office. I guess I’ll stick to doing Dynamic Events for one silver each at level 80, like a chump. If the rewards in this game weren’t so insultingly bad, you wouldn’t have such a big problem with gold scammers, farmers, sellers, etc as you do now.

Signet of Rage is, to be practical, the only true elite.

You’re dropping the Warbanner mainly as a resurrection ability. Its actual active state is next to worthless because of the small range and the naturally mediocre stat buffs banners always give. Stability? Good, but increase the range. Other classes can AoE stability too. Fury? Next to worthless – this is just an extra boon thrown in to try to make up for how crummy the elite is without overpowering it. Might? Wait, just ONE stack? Are you serious? So Battle Standard is basically just a small AoE of Stability. Pretty pathetic. I don’t see it changing any time soon, though. The funny thing is, a mesmer can AoE rez too – with a lower recharge to boot. It’s a joke. That’s kind of the lesson of Battle Standard – it’s a grab bag of almost entirely junk that ANet hopes together will be an elite. (Hint: it isn’t.) Warbanner = Black Lion Chest of elites.

Rampage isn’t even worth mentioning. ANet for some reason decided they loved transformation skills in GW2 as elites. Unfortunately, when you transform, you lose all your skills, and hence, your build synergy. In addition, if you gain any health at all, it’s wasted in the actual transformation. To boot, the transformations are usually weak, ineffective and easy to avoid. Sucks for my Norn Warrior, since I have the most elites in the game, yet all of them but Battle Standard and Signet of Rage are transformations.

I think they really dropped the ball on elites, in general. They were touted as game changers that in their tests people were afraid to use because the matches were always so even that the other team could counter them and then use their own. I really call total BS on that, now that we’re the ones playing the game. Not because of the elites, but because combat doesn’t even flow that way. Elites are an afterthought, for the most part. You rarely see them used not because they’re valuable, but because they’re usually very weak, and in some cases will actually get you killed. With some obvious exceptions. Rampage is a poster boy for this problem. It doesn’t really do anything other than make you a big, lumbering, neutered target.

ANet, reevaluate all thesekittentransformations. And stop adding them into the game. Transforming should be incredibly cool and terrifying to your enemies. It isn’t. It’s quite the opposite – it’s a sign you don’t know what you’re doing and that you’re now a free kill.

It’s very class dependent, too. Some professions can win a 3v1 or more with the right tricks. Others will probably just evaporate in anything but an even fight.

Not much. Good for mobility, closing distance and keeping targets close. It’s also supposed to be the condition weapon for Warriors, but it’s not very effective, especially compared to other professions’ options.

It’s more of a GW1 style weapon and a relic of the Warrior’s very early design direction. For how GW2’s gameplay ended up, the movement control it’s supposed to perform doesn’t work especially well. It can be annoying, though. I use it for mobility at times in sPvP, and all the time in PvE just for its leap ability (and getting places developers never expected). My favorite thing to do against players is, during all the rolling and dodging, immobilizing them with my burst skill for a rather long duration. It makes it quite easy for teammates to spike them. Sometimes I can get several of them stuck in my F1. All the better. I used it as a secondary long enough to unlock the skills, then never bothered again.

Agreed all the norn elites are terrible. Snow Leopard is the only source of stealth, even if it’s next to worthless. It’s mainly something I use to impress new players in low level zones for a quick laugh. All the forms are basically worthless, other than one or two odd situations, or as a means of escaping a swarm of npcs ever so often.

Norn technically have the most racials; it’s a shame they’re all the same thing – terrible.

I play a Norn female. The tier 1 and tier 2 armors are ridiculous looking. The tier 1 especially is a big joke. It makes you look like a drunk, or a hobo. Tier 2 is mainly just oversized in all the wrong places. I’m sure it looks okay on a male, but on a female it’s terrible. The tier 3 helmet is ridiculous looking. Oddly, on a male it seems kind of okay. For me, I’d rather wear the Vigil helm on the tier 3 armor (which would be perfect looking if not for the fact I chose Order of Whispers before I knew about it, so now I’d have to delete my character to get it), or the Orrian helm. The tier 1 helmet makes me laugh out loud whenever I see it. It’s so laughably oversized and chunky. I honestly think they intentionally made the other two worse looking than they had to, in order to make tier 3 the only option.

Ragnar Dragonfyre.1806:

Funny how I see so many Warrior’s complaining we’re not flashy, boring and have no options… yet, I so rarely see any Warrior’s taking advantage of all our options. It’s not the class’ fault if you choose to use a build entirely consisting of passives.

Early on in my Warrior career, I had some second thoughts, but then I played with more weapon combo’s and practiced more with my Banner and there’s always something for me to be doing.

I rarely see other Warrior’s using their Banner’s actively in PvP (or at all). Keeping everyone buffed, picking them up when the cooldown is done, rebuffing… using the 5 skill for Blast Finisher’s on fields, etc. Picking up your Banner throughout an engagement is VERY important. For me, the Banner is the most important aspect of the class and I find it highly enjoyable. There is a tactical aspect to using and choosing which Banner to use in various scenarios.

As far as I’m concerned, Warrior’s are one of, if not the most mobile class in the game. There’s never a situation where I don’t reach the fight first, unless I choose not to. I can almost permanently keep Fury, Might and Swiftness up on me and my party which has turned many a fight from a stalemate into a steamroll.

If you think the class is boring, then try a different weapon combination. Every single time I needed to upgrade weapons I tried a new weapon set. I tried them all until I settled on Axe/Mace and Longbow. Try a different utility build. Don’t think Warrior’s are flashy? You realize Warriors’ CAN self combo right? There are more options than you think, you just need to get out of the limited mindset that other MMO’s have burdened you with.

If all else fails, roll a different class. Play games to have fun, if you’re not having fun either play another game, or change how you play the game. There’s nothing wrong with that.

You don’t see people using them because they aren’t effective. Getting +90 condition damage is cute but it’s not actively doing anything. It’d be different if enemies took damage per second near banners, or they repulsed enemies, or similar. That’s the Warrior’s problem – their skills are all just generic number buffs that don’t do anything other than add a few numbers to an invisible stat.

Note that the skills people DO use – balanced stance, endure pain, bull’s charge, actually do something. More importantly, they do something that’s necessary for a class that focuses heavily on melee yet has no utility in its primary weapon skills. That’s why no one uses lesser known Warrior secondaries. Those other skills are junk in 80% of situations, whereas the others actually work when YOU want them to.

Flashheart.8749:

I play golf twice a week, have done for years, usually the same course to. Can you believe I actually PAY money for it ? as in, do something and not come out of it with any physical reward whatsoever ?

I also run Guild Wars dungeons with the same friends, we have a laugh and try not to die too much.

I must be insane obviously.

How cute. Now imagine you pay that upfront fee, and once you’re on the course, you have to play the first five holes for a full year before you’ve gained enough club points to gain access to the next five. The final two are “prestige holes” and will require you to play hole 3 at least five hundred times to gain enough tokens to unlock it.

I do agree, now that people are finally getting out of fan boy mode and just jumping on anyone with the slightest of concerns, and people are hitting level 80 and setting their sights on new goals, the grind is becoming apparent.

Income is fine for just day to day getting around money, and even for buying your first set of exotic, but if you want certain things in the game, the grind does become nightmarish. The price of many things needs to be lowered. If the concern is that everyone will then have them, isn’t the point supposed to be aesthetics? If all your armor/weapons look terrible except one, then improve your art. Add more aesthetic options.

The overall income rate in GW2 is insulting, though. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game less satisfying in terms of rewards. I’d like to play “just for fun,” but the ever-present and looming shadow of my wallet is constantly distracting. I imagine it’s all designed to encourage you to buy gems IRL, but this has only made the Chinese botters worse. (Way to let your store ruin the entire game, ANet.)

Reward us appropriately. In GW1 I had five armor each sets across all of my characters. I loved them all, and they were all 15k sets or better. In GW2, getting just one you like can be a nightmare. When everything at the endgame costs almost 100 gold, when you get through with a 15 minute dynamic event and see your 1 silver, 55 copper reward and realize you only got about five drops, totaling about 2 silver, it really just makes you feel like you’re wasting your time.

I’m still not sure what the “exploits” were. In my runs we did everything legitimately; we just did it as quickly as possible.

As far as I can tell they just lowered the rewards because they got tired of people getting money faster than they wanted them to, which is a major problem in GW2. When pretty things cost 100 gold and when you get to 80, it’s the only thing left to do other than revisiting locations for no real reason, it results in irritated players and a lot of grinding.

I really just wish they would resolve some of this by making it possible to stack currencies to make up for deficiencies in one or the other. Like if I want cultural armor, it’d cost about 110 gold – months of casual play, and even weeks of hardcore dungeon speed runs. If they just made it so that you could also spend karma on them, gather tokens of some kind for them, and even perform a quest chain for some of them… it wouldn’t be such a big problem. As it is, things like this just end up being goals that you won’t achieve for months. The game shouldn’t have things like that. There should be enough content that you can achieve goals in a few days, then move on to a new one.

Not that I remember. The population dwindled over time, as all game populations do. There were a couple of major patches that did a lot of unnecessary meddling and made a lot of things unviable, but that’s all I can think of.

ANet has very “safe” design practices. They tend to try to make numbers tiny – insignificant really, and make it next to impossible to make a build work without intense min-maxing. Take a look at the GW2 economy (worthless, tiny rewards) or its sPvP (lots of min-maxing to get a small, barely visible payoff) or even its itty bitty handful of skills compared to GW1 (“Traits will change skills in a way that makes GW2 have even more skills than GW1 did!” LOLOLOLOLOL No.).

GW1 kind of turned into that over time. It started balanced, then got REALLY balanced, then became a gleaming plank of wood, then became a two dimensional line in space. To me, primarily a PvP player in GW1, this made it a lot less fun. Not because they removed exploits, or something, but because running one build ended up feeling too similar to running another one, because they marginalized everything in the game and killed off a lot of builds by making them “balanced” to the point that even min-maxing them and running them with perfect team coordination, they were still barely effective. It was very tiring and boring.

It is very grindy if you make a decision for yourself that you want something specific. ANet is really trying to force people to “play casually,” but when you have an objective on your mind, the only thing you’re going to be thinking about as you wander around Orr or return to Queensdale to help someone (and make just barely enough money to cover the waypoint cost), is your own goal.

You can’t introduce an armor set and weapons, for example, that require hundreds if not thousands of tokens that you get a maximum of 20-30 of from a very specific location. You’re telling the player they need to grind that location dozens upon dozens of times. Even with three paths, that is still a mountain of grinding. There is nothing casual about that. Actively trying to discourage people from doing dungeon runs while tying a reward to them that is exclusive to that content is a little offensive. You can’t tell players they can do whatever they want, then punish them for doing what they want. I’m not saying there’s a better system, just that it’s very foolish to assume you’re doing players a favor by whipping them when they try to grind for something that they want when you’re the one that made it difficult to get. You can’t encourage people to have fun in an approved manner. It just makes everything else unfun.

The only example I have for myself is cultural armor, which I want three pieces of. The prices are obscene. Playing “casually,” it would take me literally months to get it, because it’s so outrageously expensive. Unfortunately, when I play, all I can think about it is how awful my character looks, because I’m not allowed to get the look I want without months of grinding. It’s depressing.

If your answer to that is “no one is forcing you to do that,” that sums up GW2’s endgame in a nutshell, I think. It’s like being a kid to a parent with a play schedule you don’t want to follow. They have a strict list of fun activities planned for you with definite start and end times. If you don’t enjoy that, well, it’s your fault for wanting things and having personal tastes and desires. And you should be punished for it.

People were complaining in a thread yesterday about how because of how terrible rewards are throughout GW2, it necessitates doing dungeon runs over and over again, which is not very fun.

I believe I said in that thread, and I know I told someone IRL, “I bet you anything ANet’s solution to this won’t be to improve the terrible rewards you get everywhere else. They’ll just make dungeons unprofitable.”

Sure enough…

I never use the transformations, myself. They mostly just all have one cute trick you can use as an escape switch or for some very specific situation. They’re mostly worthless for general combat, compared to your normal build + SoR or even WB. I guess that’s the intention, but it leaves them feeling very underwhelming.

It’d be nice if the transformations gave you a new health bar independent of your old one, all had stability and simply put you back to your old form (with old health prior to the transformation) once exhausting their timer or health. Sound powerful? Well, they should be. They’re elites, not “cute trick buttons.”

Honestly I’m disappointed with Norn elites. The other races get some diversity, whereas all of ours are the same thing, with a couple of small variations. Again, I’m not saying they’re useless, just that they’re underwhelming and that Norns could at least have a couple elite options that aren’t turning into a fairly worthless animal form.

Sounds like he was using a very glassy cannon build. Kill Shot is actually a joke compared to Rapid Fire, which even if you dodge one of, will still apply most of its (often superior) damage. KS’s only advantage is its range. It’s also incredibly easy to see from any distance. If he’s kneeling, dodge. It’s basically only good as a surprise move. As others have said, Kill Shot doesn’t do much damage otherwise, normally. Honestly I rarely see it go over 5-6k, which yes, is just fine on a profession that aside from damage can’t do a single thing to you; Warriors are not known for having clever tricks up their sleeves. And since the Rifle is single-target and otherwise has no utility (knockback, a cripple), I rarely bother using it, especially in WvW. It’s a ganker’s tool.

Now, keep in mind, I know you aren’t a Warrior player, but this is ALL Warriors do. Complaining about a Warrior dealing damage to you is like complaining that a Mesmer can make clones. Of course he’s going to do more damage to you than you can do to him – he can’t do anything else to you. It’s all he can do. He is otherwise completely worthless. He’s not going to become invisible, make a copy of himself, turn into vapor, throw up an impassable wall or anything else. He just swings big chunks of metal around and hopes he can overpower you with a couple of cripples and a Bull’s Charge.

Now, let’s consider your situation:

• You fought a Warrior 1v1
• You were alone in WvW
• He was alone in WvW
• He had an obvious glass cannon build designed only to gank people
• He could kill some random wildlife in the small window Vengeance allows (they don’t exactly explode when you look at them), meaning he was VERY glassy
• You apparently managed to down him anyway, despite his getting the opening crit shot – very glassy AND a bad player
• He was traited to rally on Vengeance, which normally using = death for the Warrior = he knew he’d probably die (again, he’s a ganker who is otherwise worthless to everyone)
• You actually gave him the time to USE Vengeance, knowing he’s a glass cannon, with his only defense being the second worst #2 downed skill in the game – his only weapon against you IS Throw Rock – the highest damage downed state skill in the game (and single-target)

It sounds to me like you were a pub doing what you should never do in WvW – go anywhere alone. And it also sounds like you encountered an idiot who had only one goal – gank solo pubs. Furthermore, it also sounds like he was a poor player, to get in a high crit opening hit but still die. In addition to that, it sounds like you spent too much time freaking out in the process. Also, in WvW, level disparity and equipment ALSO come into the equation. Were you level 80? Was he? Did you have exotics? Did he? Etc. Again, you’re complaining about a Warrior’s only options in combat. “His Throw Rock is so powerful.” Of course it is. His #2 skill is a single-target projectile that can be evaded, blinded, blocked, stability’ed away, etc. His #3 skill, which he should normally NEVER get to use, kills him unless he burns points for the trait to prevent it AND manages to use it AND manages to kill something. And you’re complaining that his rock does too much damage? “He hits so hard.” Of course he does. Again, this is all Warriors are good for. Even their DPS is eclipsed by other classes. They’re all about single-hit burst damage. It is all, they, do. Imagine a Warrior that can’t do any damage to you. How threatening is he to you? Because normally, when I see a Warrior, I think, “Free meal.” I can do all sorts of crazy tricks, and they can’t. They can only try to burst damage me, and that’s usually very easy to mitigate or avoid.

The lesson here is, the Warrior designed to do nothing BUT this was still terrible (and Warriors are indeed usually terrible), and you shouldn’t be wandering around alone in WvW. Remember, kids: if you see a Warrior, he’s DPS and will die very quickly after using his one good move. If he’s not DPS, and he’s alone (not supporting others), he’s probably a moron. Also, WvW is all about the buddy system.

Get eight hours of milk and don’t do school.

Golems are basically flame rams that you can move after you use them. Don’t get too infatuated with the silly looking things. They aren’t Robocop.

What actually is the story behind that image is ET beats the crap out of SoS, which has been cheating with flight hacks for the past half week. After it becomes apparent that even if ET handed over all territories to SoS and stopped playing for the rest of the week, SoS could never win, Ruin’s leader heads over to SoS’s server to take a picture of the golem group from SoS’s perspective. SoS then uses this one screenshot to invent a convoluted explanation for their own terrible performance.

Logan strikes me as being a simpleton and one of ‘those’ guys who will literally stab you in the back if it means getting laid with his love-of-the-week, even if he’s known you for years. I may think differently of him if he and the queen had a real relationship at the time, but it was obvious he was just being manipulated. Honestly, it always seemed to me he was the wrong one, with no real debate to the contrary.

The only thing I really agree about is the lack of a real backstory to the DEs. The story in general in GW2 seems to have taken a big back seat to hack n slash. It seems now to just be a static setting, rather than a narrative.

That, and too many DEs late game stopped being interesting. Whereas before you could complete them in many ways, now every one of them is “kill X Risen.” It gets extremely tiring, and I was always astonished when I found one that actually didn’t involve killing multiple enemies that all had over 100,000 health each.

I don’t have a problem with it in PvE, other than you can exclusively be ranged but you can’t exclusively be melee.

In sPvP though, because such a huge portion of conditions seem designed to stop melee, this does incredibly narrow the amount of viable builds melee users can run. Freeze, immobilize, cripple, stun, daze, fear, launching, knockdowns, etc all null melee damage. They do complicate ranged damage, but they don’t mitigate or otherwise deny it completely. If you plan on running melee, prepare to be looking at the one or two skills that can give you stability, ALL the time. Want to bring that banner? Not viable! Want to use these physical control moves? Sorry, you’re loaded up with stability and distance closing moves you NEED because of the absolute tidal wave of control conditions in the game. Not bringing these counters to counters is tantamount to throwing away any chance you had at winning with some professions. Guardians can mitigate these every other second, thieves can just vanish or close distance with a lot of moves, mesmers can… well, you get the idea. It’s a big problem with Warriors, though, since they don’t innately do anything as a counter. Most effective Warrior builds look almost the same and do the same thing, with small variations. But that’s been my experience.

Again, in PvE, it’s not a huge problem, aside from one or two enemies you simply cannot get near because they ooze DPS around them and/or have constant annoying knockbacks.

FootDive.3451:

Considering you eventually unite all 3 orders together against Zhaitan, its not exactly a stretch that you’d be able to acquire armour sets from each respective order. It avoids the hassle regarding no forewarning about the availability of the armour sets from the get go and gives players more content for that matter. Plus its a payback for the atrocity that is.. Trahearne.

Honestly, that’s my opinion. It should be something you can do at the very end of the game. Maybe even get a little subpath option for it. Maybe not to join the order, but to at least get the armor, which should not have any impact on your faction decision to begin with.

Knote.2904:

I’m saying, when you’re first choosing your order in the story, the npc’s don’t go “Hey each order has their own armor skin locked to that order just a heads up”.

I know. I said that… If there’s no way for you to head down an optional story path at level 80 to join those Orders or get armor access to them, they should at least warn you as you make the choice that they’ll refuse to equip you later, and show you the armor vendors beforehand.

I’m the Commander of the entire Pact force, and they won’t even give me a hat.

Knote.2904:

I don’t recall anywhere where it told you Order’s have different locked armor skins.

The only “big choice” with Orders is story afaik.

Each has an armor vendor that will refuse to speak to you if you are not part of their faction.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Order_of_Whispers_armor
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Vigil_armor
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Durmand_Priory_armor

I suggest if you aren’t to this choice yet, look through these to see what components you may want, because you won’t get a second chance at it, and they don’t tell you about it. I also think it’s disappointing you may want to make the choice based on playing a role, yet have to go with another option just because of a NPC vendor.

Also, I’m talking about PvE gear. The PvP gear looks the same but obviously won’t be usable in PvE.

I’m fine with the choices I made. I just didn’t know there’d be an armor vendor for each one. Which no one ever told me about, NPC or otherwise. I shouldn’t be punished for that. The alternative is “well, delete your character and lose everything so you can get this helmet.” Those of you moaning about being responsible for knowing this beforehand aren’t thinking about how you would know it. The wiki? An external source? It wasn’t even ON the wiki at the time. Thankfully I’m sure ANet is more considerate than some of the poisonous fans on these forums.

…or purchase the armor of other factions from other players, or something.

When I made the decision to join the Order of Whispers a few days after launch I didn’t even know there were armor sets locked to each faction. I found the PvP locker (just recently found out you could preview anything from it), and noticed a helmet from one of the factions that looks perfect on my warrior. However, I chose another faction, so I can’t possibly access it.

So please, ANet, let me switch orders, replay my story from a set point, purchase that armor from other players or any other solution that will allow me to get the look that I want. I made the decision from a roleplaying point of view, not knowing it would later impact me at level 80. Seems rather harsh.