Guild Wars 2

Welp, tons of Maguuma folks seem to have retired from WvW this week. We can’t put people in the maps to save our lives… probably it’s holiday event attrition, but it doesn’t seem to be affecting you other folks at all. Symptom of being the ‘fun’ WvW server I guess is that we’re easily distracted by the shiny.

Yes.

Oh great!

Waste all my AoE cooldowns on a .05% chance the Thief is even in the place I put the AoE! Then when they see I’ve wasted my stupid useless crap on nothing they pop back to re-do the massive damage my long-cooldown heal skill sort of healed from the first burst!

Genius! They don’t even play this game, I am convinced.

Well, even increased traffic can’t fix how the events bug out about a third of the time. Tried Balthazar today with guildies and some other folks, wound up with an NPC stuck in place and no way to progress the state of the quest forward.

I’m horrified at the idea that a single instance is now the end-all be-all don’t-bother-doing-anything-else source of the best gear.

What a gorram trainwreck. A dull, repetitive, lazy, trainwreck.

Columba.9730:

The stealth in GW2 is hands down the worst implementation of stealth I’ve ever seen in any game.

QFT.

Short and to the point:

As a fairly new player, I am very dismayed that almost every dungeon path I’ve done so far, has had some seemingly mandatory player glitching or mob or boss skipping that is now the standard way to do them.

This is a combination of the design of the dungeons overall, and the risk/reward involved in getting through one.

Trash mobs are uber tough and hit like trucks, bosses are often snoozefests of repetitive action.

Random drops are generally worse than junk, so there’s no incentive to ‘clear’ anything.

The less you have to do to get to the chests/token rewards, the better, according to the players that have been taking me through them.

No one is in them for the dynamics of group play, or the good boss fights or challenge, or even to pray to the RNG gods for drops.

They’re chores that are apparently best ‘worked around’ and glitched, than done with care or and desire for legitimate completion.

Relentliss.2170:

My big issue with thieves is not their damage so much, its the fact they attack you. You MUST use every available CD to surivive. They then stealth up and rebuild initiative and heal. They come back at you with 85% power while you are reduced to 50% or worse depending on class. Chances are your abilities are now on CD while theirs are near ready to go. Stealth in this case is doubly effective, it gives the thief an offensive weapon and a defensive weapon in one. As such its OP. It needs to be used as one or the other. How about initiative does not regen when stealthed. That way it can be used as an offensive opener, but, if you use it defensively, you can not immediately return and use it offensively again. You would have to use it more tactically, not to constantly drain people of CD’s and make yourself immune to any single target damage.

This. They have their cake and eat it too. They control when the fight starts and ends. They wipe conditions and heal and come back in seconds, to do the same level of damage they always do, while you’re staring at ticking down numbers and auto-attacking. They don’t even have to think about positioning, their skills pop them right on top of their targets. They have a high movement speed seemingly without penalty otherwise.

There seems to be no ‘you have to give this up to have this capability here’ at all with them. Oh well my Thief is well on the way to 80. Can’t be beat, won’t be balanced. Join ’em.

Well. All I know is that this system really penalizes a group of like-level and like-geared players if one of them is ‘dead weight’.

That guy who’s always downed in the 1st 30 seconds of every fight, who never does anything but autoattack, doesn’t know where their own heal skill is located, specs in a way that makes them ineffective or incredibly squishy. At least in a trinity system, those players would completely shut down a groups effectiveness so you could toss them and get a competent replacement. Here, any scrub can coast along through any encounter as long as they don’t mind repair bills and a lot of waypoint running, while just making it harder on the competent folks and dragging out the time it takes to complete stuff.

Couple weeks ago, some idiot was spamming some ‘Ghost’ costume sound effect at the bank in LA, for over four hours.

White Knights all up in this thread and every thread that tries to discuss any possible negative reactions to the game.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Note: ANet has stated they will never explain the system fully to us

This infuriates me.

90% of the PVE content in this game is either an annoying bad joke, a chore, or mindless.

It really need an overhaul.

After playing this game for two months and getting two 80s, I’m coming to the conclusion that most PVE in this game is generally a waste of time.

You feel like all the ‘behind the scenes’ mechanics like DR are working against you.
There’s little reward for it even without DR.
Too many players with no skill and or actually trolling your group with bad behavior.
Every instance/event seems to have a glitch everyone ‘in the know’ exploits.

Content that’s polished.
Content that’s balanced.
Content that has depth and variety.
Content that makes you feel a sense of character progression and increasing power and ability.
Content that rewards you for being knowledgeable and observant.

I used to. I’ve basically fallen in love with, and then out of love with every aspect of the game, as I played.

Got my $60 worth, any way. I still love the people I WvW with all the time and the genuine challenge and group effort and coordination required there; that’s pretty much the only reason I log in and the only reason I want to get any characters to 80. I’ve even gotten past the profession imbalances and sometimes jerky behavior/glitching that can go on in there.

But I’m really really trying to just enjoy the PVE world today, get some levels for some alts, and make some cash while discovering new places and content … but the giant bugs and imbalances and glitches in the general 50-60 and up level content is literally destroying any possible immersion and crushing my morale.

I could post these ALL DAY long.

Latest discovery of crap PVE – Veteran Flame Legion Effigy. ‘Clear the pass’ event.

I tried fighting it six or seven times and gave up the eight time it reset it’s health completely, seemingly because I dodged it’s aoe. Not glitching, I’m playing a Warrior and STANDING RIGHT ON TOP OF THE MOB in melee, and it’s constantly resetting it’s HP to full.

GG ANet!

I completely agree with the OP on this. Instances are disappointing, very disappointing.

You mean the East Keep treb position that can easily nuke Southeast Tower?

I’ve always felt like it is asymmetrically balanced: East Keep can always easily nuke SE Tower with an easy to defend treb – while an easily defended treb in the easily captured SW Tower can always easily nuke West Keep.

I agree with the OP.

Orr is horrible. Orr is a chore. Games are not supposed to be horrible chores.

… but should be labled as group events. I keep running into these. World events that aren’t labeled as ‘group’ that are completely impossible to do alone.

Latest is Dewclaw Village.

I’m level 73, and exploring, getting waypoints and trying to find my way to a 70-80 zone. I run my way to Iron Marches, on the way to a higher level zone. I port in, find an event… okay cool I’ll do this for some XP… roll into the village… zerged by upwards of 6 or 8 enemies at a time. I can handle this for about a minute, kill many, but the respawn… the respawn wears you down, eats your cooldowns, cuts off your escape when you’re getting to dangerous levels of low health… eventually I have to run off or be killed. Cannot come close to completing it. Cannot revive any NPCs as before I’m done, new enemies pop into being right on top of every one.

This is not the first time I’ve run into this kind of ‘death by poor design’. It’s starting to get old and is really turning me off the game. I hate leaving something undone, I hate passing over content because it’s badly designed.

Oh you say, get some people to help? The zone’s empty, on a Sunday afternoon. Everyones in the Arch, LFG.

All I know is I finally got an 80 and started doing harder instances and boy do I not like them.

They’re not ‘harder’ in any way other than things are instantly lethal and ridiculously durable.

They’re just more annoying, and just cost money to complete, as people don’t think or talk or strategize, it’s just charge in then die-waypoint-fight-die-waypoint-fight-die-waypoint-fight-die-waypoint-fight-die, etc etc etc. until you’ve chipped down whatever you’re trying to kill.

Really disappointed.

This is not a polished game. It’s got so much crap wrong with it it’s outrageous. I don’t know why there’s not a major patch weekly, at least.

Bargain-basement development of PVE especially. It’s a rare hour I don’t run into a massive glitch or bug with an event or NPC.

CC effect notices in the Combat log.

Add it. ASAP. That is all.

At best PVE is ‘uneven’ in this game. It’s fun, then terrible, then fun, then terrible.

Usually it’s spread out, but Orr is a lot of terrible in one place.

Nickczh.6341:

PolarApe.9351:

So my Necro is almost 80…… I hit level 79 in WvW this morning … and I hate it more than ever.

Blah blah blah..

If you’re “running from veterans”, missing your marks, having a generally bad experience in PvE, then I really have to say you’re one bad Necro. It would help if you would share your build.
<bunch of other good and reasonable advice was here>

.

I get it, I have to play it a certain way to be effective. Been talking to people in game and getting more info and advice. Got some great builds people have linked me, etc etc.

Problem is, looking at the builds/options… I hate playing the character that way. I like the way I’ve learned to play it – which was effective up until the 40s-50s. There’s the problem maybe – Necros are inflexible. So I still think I’m abandoning the Necro ship. Maybe not because it’s sinking, but definitely because I think it’s a not the ship I want.

If I get another profession to 80 and it’s also another case of ‘you can only pick one or two builds and all the other stuff is junk’ I’m probably done with GW2.

Zyphent.2967:

A pain trying to find a Fractals group you say?
Try finding an Arah group, or CM, or any old dungeon. Even with that handy little website, its pretty much impossible.

This.

I just got to the near-80 and 80 content.

It’s really really terrible. It’s obvious they spent all their time polishing the introductory and early level content because that’s what hooks the new players, and what most players will all see.

It’s a shame when you go from fun and interesting and challenging to annoying, boring, and delete-your-character levels of frustrating.

1. Damage output is low
2. Damage output is low
3. Damage output is low

So my Necro is almost 80…… I hit level 79 in WvW this morning … and I hate it more than ever.

I stuck it out because I thought things would get better, and there were occasional plateaus of slight effectiveness, but I am still here frustrated with almost everything about the profession.

By far, PVE is the worst. By myself it takes four or five times as long for me to kill anything than it does on any of my other professions. My life is fighting respawns right after I just gone done burning all my cooldowns to kill the original mobs. Unless I spend 3/4 of my time in DeathShroud spamming 1 I usually get the crappy credit on world events/bosses. Forget 98% of my possible skills, just hope you can keep up with the actually effective professions and get enough damage in before the targets burst down. All that work for a silver medal, thanks. Drop a mark or well and your target just walks or is shoved out of it before it’s even done casting. Why bother? The number of times I’ve wasted cooldowns on targets that aren’t even there anymore is huge. I’m not even interested in 90% of the world events I come across anymore, because I know I won’t be able to complete them. Maybe this is exacerbated by the fact that the world outside Lions Arch is completely empty. I got to the 70-75 and 75-80 zones last night, been in them about six hours total now, and still haven’t seen another player. I actually backtracked from the 75-80 zone because it was just too stupidly lethal; even at 79, a 76 mob can kick my kitten just because I can’t get enough damage done to the thing before it wears out all my options. I see a Veteran or tougher and I just run.

The one thing it sort of shines at, is average quality group player vs player support.
I can put out very low to average aoe/group damage to set up the professions that actually can do decent damage to get kills(that I usually don’t even get credit for), I put out average to below average group heals on a long cooldown. I can once in a very great while (due to huge cooldowns) put out average direct damage. I am usually the guy rezzing people because I’m still up because of the large HP pool. I can annoy people behind doors. I can annoy people on walls. I can run through uncoordinated groups and live because of the health pool, sometimes. I can go Plague and blind and cripple a small group of players for a short time until I’m CC’d/locked down easily by most other classes. The best thing I can do is drop Well of Corruption and hope somebody is stupid enough to stand in it. Which doesn’t happen often. Marks are pretty much useless except versus the most gormless derping near-afk player. Still wondering why their location is drawn for the enemy player, at all. Thieves get magicial invisibility that doesn’t break on damage or even show damage numbers, but I get big neon sign-like traps that scream ‘evade now’ or ‘walk calmly around this and kill that idiot necro’…

Go ahead and say learn to play, whatever. There’s just nothing fun about endless running and dodging and chipping away at an enemies health in tiny increments with easily dodged or mitigated skills.

You could scale all of the damage output of every skill of this profession by 25% and that would just be a start. Some skills need double the damage output to not be a waste of a slot. DeathShroud is a joke, I can empty an entire lifeforce bar into a same level enemy and still have to spend another half a minute chipping away at the last half of the enemies health with every other skill I have.

I’m getting a couple classes to 80 and then I’m done. No interest in any sort of grind-ish endgame.

Nurse.1085:

I understand that there are probably separate teams that work on various different things in GW2. The problem is, it was said that there are only 2 people working on all of the classes. TWO!

The content designers can keep making content, but please hire more people to be completely dedicated to bug fixes / class fixes. Two is not enough.

I am stunned there aren’t dedicated developers for every profession.

That’s… that’s just… dumb.

Professions are the core of the game, they have to have a dedicated focus or you’re going to be doing nothing but two people putting out fires here and there and breaking everything when trying to fix one thing. There’s no cohesiveness, no actual ‘design’ possible in that situation.

Arcades Saboth.5139:

Nice work Nemesis, though may I suggest to write your tutorial somewhere?
I prefer read carefully instead of watching a long time usually.

Yes please! Video tutorials aren’t the best tutorials. You need to be able to read and re-read for understanding, and to refer quickly to specific bits of information as you work with the tutorial. With a video, doing that kind of thing is really annoying.

You get loot bags/badges in WvW? I never do. I leveled from 65 to level 70 in the borderlands this morning, over four or five hours, have 9 badges to show for it. What the dingdong heck is that about?

I did so much damage to so many players over and over, battle after battle, resulting in many many kills. But all for the purpose of apparently ‘setting up’ dozens and dozens of kills for burst classes that do get badges. I broke zergs with kamikaze Plague to DS runs at many groups… look at the half-dozen dead players, hey I did more than half their total health damage to all these people, but no bags anywhere for me.

In contrast, my warrior is 60 and walks away from battles like this mornings with 30-40 or more badges, easily. I have a 30 double dagger Ele, I got 20-30 badges for them yesterday in WvW. All you got to do is watch for any player with low-ish health, get in there and faceroll at them – ta-da, here’s your reward. Not on this character, not at all.

This is one of the most effective large group pvp professions going, and I love that, but there are virtually no rewards for it. Why?

Honestly, I’m usually taking a break from the social part of the game(WvW/instances), when I am out in the world… and I’m admittedly halfheartedly ‘roleplaying’ in this roleplaying game, somewhat

And you know, I’m paying attention to all the stuff the devs put in, not just maximizing my XP intake, which sounds like a kitten way to play the game. Grouping up with some unknown (and usually playing like they have ADHD) person who wants to plow through content doesn’t sound fun.

And I’m sorry if I don’t always want to group with people named ‘Who Wants Some Wang’ or ‘Snausages’ or even worse usually.

Not that I noticed, but about the time you posted, all the siege in a Keep we were defending in WvW disappeared at once.

Doggie.3184:

A lot of peepz. Servers are breaking.

Yeah and it’s weird as this isn’t even close to a busy time of day for most NA servers. Usually server stress would be the cause of a bug like this, but I don’t think that could be possible now.

NA, I can log in after a few tries, but every other zone change or attempt to enter an instance logs me out and I can’t log back in until restarting the client.

Shabby shabby, argh.

Champs drop nothing or junk. Not even a Masterwork quality item since the patch. I get better loot off random humanoids than any Champion I’ve downed.

Now, Champs that have a chest as a reward, that seems to be better ratio – in those cases I’ve gotten Masterwork items, but not anything worth selling or using.

Now, name change ASAP please.

You never realize how kitten your name is, until your hear it said with confusion, endless times on voicechat.

This is a simple question and there must be an answer, ANet if you would kindly just throw us a number? Purty pleez?

Thou shalt refresh siege despawn timers* whilst passing through or by your owned keeps and other objectives.

• just quickly ‘use’ the item to re-start the 30 minute countdown to when they are automatically destroyed

I started playing mid-October, and so far the discouraging things are:

Profession balance issues, horrid WvW server match-ups, no one runs low level dungeons, not even 80 with any characters yet and already disenchanted with what to do after reaching 80 (I did the gear grind for six years of WoW already I’ll just go back to that if that’s all there is here), player base seems to be shrinking…

Glad to see I’m not the only one who thinks that ‘inconvenience’ is not a valid reason for a game mechanic.

Loot bags, get rid of them. Or please give us the dingdang answer on how long they last.

That’s basically the question. How long do WvW kill Loot Bags remain in the world to be looted?

Searched the forum and didn’t find any answer or even the question asked, which I thought odd.

I’m really curious because it seems inconsistent – last night I was killed outside our East keep, Loot Bag on the ground – ran all the way back from Garrison and it was still there. No idea how long that took but it seemed forever.

This morning, I was manning an Arrow Cart during an East keep siege. During the fight I had six or seven Loot Bags around me, but had no opportunity to get off the cart and loot them for only a few minutes (three or four). When I finally did, all had despawned but one. That is some lame stuff there.

So what’s the timer value? Anyone?

As a new to GW2 player I can’t believe that the game shipped with this. I am astonished that it existed in GW1 and people just lived with it for years.

It’s a complete and utter non-starter, a must-fix bug that somehow they’ve spun into an engine feature.

Everything about combat relies on awareness. I’d rather have awareness and information than ‘ooh, pretty’ visuals.

Bring on the stick men. Standardize all models/gear/weapons in WvW for profession/race combinations. I’d still play, probably even more than now.

All these limitations on AoE effects in general, feel like shortcuts and band-aids for other issues.

I don’t know why people who play this game feel they need to have things go so firmly ‘their way’ and do not want to adapt to the game mechanics. “Having 5 guys who can wipe 20 on a spike” is not in itself a problem. Whiny players who don’t want to have to have situational awareness and somehow want PVP to be a series of balanced 1v1s and want to ignore group dynamics no matter how many players are on the battlefield, is.

Today I learned you can put Karma-purchased items in the Mystic Forge.

So much for the dozens and dozens I destroyed because they were unsellable, soulbound, useless and taking up space.

I am getting more badges more often on a level 20 Ranger, than I have ever gotten on my now level 62 Necro. Necro total is around 96, my Ranger already has 30-some. At the same level my Necro had about 6.

There has to be some behind the scenes issue with how much and what types of damage credit you with kills, and from my anecdotal experience, it screws Condition damage professions over in a big way.

If it weren’t for siege engine kills, my Necro probably would have even less.

Niim.9260:

2) downed bar balance, major review required, with a focus on defense, not offense. Your downed, ie out of the fight. When my guildy asks us to not revive him cause he is doing insane damage, there is a problem.

THIS.

Tired of rolling up on a downed player just to be downed by the player I just downed.
No reason for this level of offensive ability in the downed state.

In general, that’s another thing that makes it completely horrible in player vs player – the different professions have different downed skills, which are nowhere near balanced.