Guild Wars 2

Oh man, you’d be really upset with the number of bow types in the first game.

I got a blue one that swivels. I think they all need the swivel.

The reason there are only two tiers of loot, being “common enough you can afford it easily” and “so stupidly uncommon that you’d best just resolve to be surpsied if you get it” has very little to do with drop chances and everything to do with GW2’s global auction house.

In most MMOs, auction houses are limited to much smaller portions of the player base, usually only a single server or a handful of servers. This means that the supply for items is far lower, and thus, the drop rate for valuable items is often somewhat higher.

In GW2, the auction house is not only shared by every single player, but it is the only system by which players can safely trade items. This means that unless something is ridiculously rare, and thus likely outside the drop tables of most players, it’s going to end up on the auction house for not too much gold, as there are myriad restirctions on armor and weapon types, and its far more likely that even if one were to find such rare look, the liklihood that person is using the proper class, weapon, and build for the item is statistically pretty low.

On the one hand, this results in making tradable drops easy. On the other hand it makes selling those drops for large sums of money difficult.

The likely reason other loot systems felt more rewarding was a combination of stats (it doesn’t have to be great if it’s just better than what you already have) and a much smaller economy where supply is much lower than in GW2’s full-region economy.

I don’t think it’s going to fly, specifically because the weapons are tied in to the selection of the elite spec traits for balance reasons, the same reason you can only choose one elite spec (once there’s more than one to choose from)

The design of elite specs was done so that they didn’t have a moving balance target, and every elite spec only had to be balanced to work with the core class, and without having an ever growing selection of skills.

Allowing people to equipe, say, a greatsword on a necro without taking reaper doesn’t seem like a big deal now, but when the second reaper spec is released, then you have to make sure reaper builds are still balanced with the spec 2 weapon, spec 2 is balanced with the reaper weapon, etc.

Then a third elite comes out, now you have to balance all three specs around three weapons, etc. etc.

This became a problem in GW2 because every expansion new skills and classes were released, and the ability to combine them freely eventually made it a nightmare to properly balance everything.

The whole point of elite specs is that they’re easy to balance, and thus easy to design so we can get a lot more of them faster, as well as having spec weapons tied to specific spec trait mechanics if needed. Doing what you suggest basically undoes the whole design of elite specs and creates the same problem GW1 skill balancing had.

“Form” gliders.

Basically, gliders with tonic effects attached, stuff like gliding turns you in to a darkness mote in stead of using your model. Like mist form, or any of the transforms that turn you in to a ball of magic for a skill, only as a glider.

I second guild gliders as well. As a guild upgrade. That we can get by playing the game.

Aviator’s glider: uses the aviator cap and no glider model. Uses the aviator’s cap voice clips (NEEEEOWWWW BRBRBRBRBRRR)

ROFLCOPTER: Looping spin animation. Just rip it out of the various weapon skills.

Mo, Arenanet has a pretty bad track record of supporting new systems long term.

HoT was pretty content light at release based specifically on its heavy implementation of new systems meant to mark an end to ‘iterative development’ and allow the staff to move forward with a clearly expandable structure.

While I applaud the admission that something is wrong internally with staffing for legendaries, legendary journeys were advertised as both a large part of the expansion and the ongoing content focus.

We were told that the future of GW2 was a combination of guild content, legendaries, raids, and living story. We were also told tht living story was decoupled from the previous 2 week cadence to allow for better quality control and extended devlopment to create better and more impactful releases.

HoT was supposed to set a precedent whering Anet broke a persistant pattern of inventing and immediately abandoning systems and content. You told us that’s why it shook out the way it did. You said the HoT systems were the final solution, the fix for arenanet’s pattern of spending lots of R&D time on new systems, only to roll them out with a skeletal amount of content and then discontinue support while you go spent more R&D on new systems.

This move appears to be more of the same. You designed an amazing new set of systems. You released a skeletal amount of content for them. Then you put them on hiatus indefinately. This is exactly the type of thing we were promised HoT and beyond was supposed to put an end to.

What changed? Did HoT not meet projections? Did more staff than you expected vacate their positions after its release?

This move doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence in the promise that we’ll see the kind of support you promised for other content that supposed to be core to GW2 moving forward. You’ve had a brisk rollout on raid wings, but everything else, which was supposed to be tackled by separate teams so that those deadlines don’t conflict hasn’t seen any meaningful additions in two major content patches.

What we have seen is the inclusion of yet another new system, the pvp leagues. Again, another new system, while adding no support of content to the existing, supposedly “core” systems.

We’ve still yet to see a single new guild mission, fractal, adventure, elite spec, guild upgrade, or guild hall. In six months since the expansion’s release the only meaningful content additions have been raid wings. Those are great pieces of content, but we were promised that all of these things would coexist meaningfully and get updated regularly because the teams were restructured to allow it to happen.

Nobody is questioning the absence of living world. I think everyone is willing to wait for quality ongoing story content with fun encounters, cool maps, great writing and voice acting, etc.

But the other systems, the ones specifically designed to be easily iterated on and added to, the ones designed around rapid implementation of smaller pieces of content haven’t produced. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have those teams push out mirco content? Like just one new fractal/guild mission per patch? What are those teams working on and why does it take six months?

So, Mo’s contribution after stepping in to Colin’s shoes is, basically, give people what they asked for.

That’s a pretty good start.

The Downed state doesn’t exist for you as much as it exists to turn you in to an interesting mini-objective for the people around you.

While its certainly possible in some scenarios to rally yourself, the bulk of the down state design comes from left 4 dead, and its purpose is similar in function. It’s there so that in a fast paced and hectic combat situation there’s an extended period of time to bring allies back from defeat. Rally is thrown in there because it makes a lot of thematic sense that if you can take down the last bad guy you should be able to get up and continue fighting (wheras in the game that inspired it, there was rarely a “last bad guy” and the entire game was designed around not having players do things alone)

They very much do exist, but just like the Roman fascination with lions, knowledge of them comes from outside sources and historical records from Elona. I’m guessing the Black Lion Trading Company was just a slick marketing move by Gnashblade to make his enterprise more attractive to other races by equating himself with lions, and thus the city of Lion’s Arch

Lion’s Arch was established by Elonians, and for a lot of people the Lion, as it was in Rome, is something of a mythical beast and symbol. They’ve only heard tales and seen artistic representations of it, so it acquires a sort of larger than life reputation.

lorddavito.2395:

/violin
/flute
/drum
/guitar

Please buy our toys from the gem store!

lorddavito.2395:

/zaishen
/guild
/attention
/bowhead
/excited

Coming soon to a gem store near you!

Report anyone that harasses you for harassment.

Just because someone paid 300g for a commander tag it doesn’t mean they’re in any way qualified to command you to do anything. Commander tags are a stupid, broken system in the first place for exactly this reason.

Anyone giving you grief for choosing not to join a squad on a public map is just on a power trip and feels that their 300 gold entitles them to order people around as they please. What that tag actually means is you have the ability to invite people to follow you, and tools to more effectively lead those that choose to do so.

Putting on a commander tag doesn’t make you the boss of anyone. People that choose to join your squad choose to follow your instructions. People that don’t aren’t obligated to do so.

Furthermore, people are not obligated to contribute to the map meta. There are a lot of other things going on on the maps. If there aren’t enough people around targeting the meta, then the meta doesn’t get completed. This doesn’t mean commanding gives you a sovereign right to draft everyone you see in to your command structure.

PvE commanders are, more often than not, completely useless. The meta events are designed in such a way that maps can (and do, regularly) complete metas without any commanders at all. The difference is that in one case someone has elected themselves “boss of the map” and in the other the whole map is organically cooperating as a group of equals through map chat. The maps themselves tell you where to stand, and what to do. Commanders are superfluous.

They’re fine as they are. I’d like to be able to continue to use a title because I like it. Your system would create a situation where I’d be pressured to change my title depending on the content I’m doing, and seek and display titles I might think are dumb.

Titles are cosmetic outward signifiers of achievements. That’s their purpose. The games I’ve played that gave them functional effects made them annoying grinds that people felt compelled to complete for the stat buff rather than a way to show off some cool thing you did.

I don’t like this idea.

Gwen
Rurik
Kilroy Stonekin
Vekk
Livia? (is she even dead)

That’s the point. Gaining masteries is supposed to be a combination of breadth of content and depth. Masteries are the force on the breadth, requiring you to do some specific things. XP is the “depth” that simply requires you to do anything, but a lot of it.

The entire system is designed to ensure that people incapablele to earn enough masterry points are incapable of earning all of the masteries. If the only points left that you can get are related to adventures, and you’re incapable of doing them, it is intended that you are also incapable of earning more mastry points.

They’ve been pretty good lately about loading up the options menu with all sorts of useless check boxes, so I’m certain it’ll be added in the next couple of patches.

Doesn’t seem all that difficult to add a “hold jump to glide” toggle.

You’re giving arenanet too much credit.

They didn’t design the cooldown of wells, or anything, around alacrity. That’s why they had to nerf alacrity. They were far too short sighted to recognize how game breaking its effect was in a game where cooldowns are the only resource most classes, including the one that provides it.

It’s pretty much textbook Anet lack of foresight in profession and skill balance.

They’re not going to split certain players off to a different server. They removed the entire concept of servers from PvE because it doesn’t work for their design and population.

Similarly, even a personal debuff “hard mode” doesn’t work for their design. There’s nothing hard about being the only guy in a zerg with an 80% stat debuff or whatever. It would be a completely exploitable difficulty/reward adjustement that would be instantly games by the player base to wring the reward from it for virtually no risk.

The entire concept of new game plus simply doesn’t work in a shared space like an MMO.

Vinceman.4572:

MithranArkanere.8957:

Not if you went grab the singularity while someone else went ahead to the platform. The cinematic may start right after you get teleported.

The question is: Why would you take it? It’s not necessary at all.

Because its there?
Because you’re new to fractals and could use 5 more AR?
Because its a safety net if you screw up and die?

Why would you not take it is a better question. I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it. I see enough people in PUGs go down in that fight that I often wonder why those people aren’t all over that thing in stead of making me stop hitting bosses to rez them, screwing up both of our DPS and making the fight take longer for everyone.

What’s really hilarious, just like the pole exploit, is that it is actively slower to kill mossy when you do it. Mossy’s fight already encourages and rewards stacking, but stacking on the tree means invulnerable wolves which don’t proc various things, and several classes behaving to skip movement based skills in their rotation and do less damage.

Oh, and also, mossy cleaves way more people if he gets in a sweet spot.

In addition the fight isn’t even that hard

Why people are insisting on going out of their way to engage in a stacking trick that often makes the fight both harder to survive and slower to complete blows my mind.

Welcome to fractals!

Keep in mind that the mastry vendor will also sell you a potion that gives you 10 AR. Although the potion doesn’t stack with “real” AR, 10 AR is enough for you to do the mid tier “Pick 3” daily if you stick to the low level fractals, which will give you an additional ring token and chance at a ring each day so you can speed up your ring acquisition if you don’t have them yet. If you’re really lucky you can also do the mid tier numbered daily when it rolls a low level, giving you yet another token/ring roll.

We did this for some new fractal players in the guild and it has usually halved their time to get to a pair of build appropriate attuned rings in which to stick their agony infusions, even if they don’t have any other ascended gear.

Venomshare is a waste of time unless you’re raiding. You’ll be much better off taking trickery for dodge caltrops and lower steal cooldown so that you can take more survival/utility in the open world, fractals, or dungeons.

In the more controlled tank/dps environment of raids where your DPS really matters, and you very rarely have to defend yourself or bring utility other than your venom damage and breakbar shred, swapping out trickery for venomshare is the way to go, but outside of raids you’re going to be a much better help to your party and yourself by taking shadow refuge, bandit’s defense, and whatever third utility you want.

Dahkeus.8243:

Froptimus.6741:

My one big concern was the potential aoe loss of vault/bound/wc. Do you still do okay against big groups with lotus/db?

Yea, lotus/db are also AoE. It has less max targets (3 max, vs 5 on staff Vault) though.

Keep in mind, however, that it hits 3 times, which actually translates to anywhere between 3 and 9 targets hit.

Kraggy.4169:

So if they’re not in the game and it’s mere speculation they will be added at some unknown and entirely theoretical time they should be REMOVED from the achievement!!!

No, they shouldn’t. Just like the way map reveals by piece worked in LS2, those areas are part of the map. They’re simply unreleased parts of the map. This means you can progress the achievement, but can’t complete it until you have access to those areas.

Just because an achievement exists to “explore the whole zone” doesn’t necessarily mean you can get to all of it. I’d rather have the hints and mini-foreshadowing of unreleased map sections than only be able to get credit for ‘exploring the map’ when the last piece is revealed, making me go back and actually explore it all a second time.

It also doesn’t need to be in obsidian sanctum, but its own map. They added the “arena” to obsidian sanctum at the time to curb the dispruptive influence of GvG on the actual WvW gametype, but lets not forget the actual purpose of obsidian sanctum is a pvp jumping puzzle.

What needs to be done is simply larger arenas. Arenas were purpose built for exactly these kinds of emergent player created gametypes. The problem is that I think most of the GvG community sees the arenas as too small for proper use in their larger matchups. Fix the arenas, leave OS alone. OS as a GvG arena was a temporary fix that was never intended to be permanent.

Arenanet wants the tradepost (and its associated fees) to be the default option for all trades because the entire design of GW2 is extremely generous with faucets (personal resource nodes, personal loot drops) and extremely light on sinks (Waypointing, salvaging, and a small number of vendor items)

The economy is designed around the assumption that virtually all player to player trading is done through the TP, and thus taxed.

There’s a reason map chat in main cities isn’t filled with trade shouts, and that is because Anet opted to do away with peer to peer direct trading. In the instance you want to give items away or trade with trusted individuals, they made usre it was easy to do so via mail that you can collect anywhere.

They also made sure it was easy to sell from anywhere so you didn’t end up in a tough situation where you needed to offload stuff for bag space, but couldn’t due to lack of direct trades.

The result is a less spammy and scammy game with less inflation. Sure its weird, but it met their design goals, and after a while you don’t even miss it.

Can’t really agree with thief. Sure the auto is good, but using any of the good autos generally puts you at close range where you’re going to have to go dodge and stuff. My current favorite “playing with one hand tied behond my back” build is minion necromancer.

Just hit 12345, f1(rebound to Q), 12345 and let your minions worry about tagging. You can mostly just stand in one place and be lazy while still being not completely useless to your party. Its extremely rare I have to dodge an AoE or anything.

Not exactl optimal, but for being lazy? It’s great.

Gnashblade uses it to pay all those black lion agents, maintain black lion facilities, and keeps the rest to fund his next election campaign obviously.

Also keep in mind that here are some materials now that can only be acquired by salvaging ascended gear, creating further uses/sinks for these materials. Especially if those materials start to see use outside of certain legendary collections.

I’ll bite on these question s, as none of them are difficult to answer.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

• ANet wants a guild’s reputation to proceed it — this gives people an incentive to ensure that their guild has a good reputation and does not get spoiled by a bad apple or two.

I don’t think Anet particularly cares, given their offering of character makeover and rename kits. I think it has a lot more to do with how the database entires for guilds are set up, or more accurately, how they were set up when guilds had “chapters” on different servers.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

• ANet wants to avoid getting involved in intra-guild politics and there’s nothing more political than deciding on the name of a guild except who leads it. Who decides on whether to change? Who chooses the name? Who pays for it?

The current owner of the guild (the one in the leader rank) obviously. Changing a guild’s name is obviously a permission that only the player with the highest permission rank. It is the guild’s responsibility, not Arenanet’s to conduct fair democracy/accounting for how well that decision reflects the desire of the guild as a whole. That’s guild politics. It’s the same logic that governs how all guild permissions/ranks are assigned, as well as how guilds are named in the first place.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

• How does ANet deal with the inevitable support issues?

The same way they deal with any other support issue. I don’t understand this question.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

• Regardless of the feasibility or viability of potential solutions to above, changing the status quo costs ANet time and resources. What other features should we be prepared to give up on to enable this one?

We shouldn’t. What we should expect is that the same engineers responsible for database-centric items like name changes are capable of designing an item that can change the string that controls a guild’s name, and that arenanet can see the value in giving us the option to do so for 800 or so gems as a convenience fee. It is not difficult to query and alter entries in a database, and especially now that guilds have been given a partial rework and are universal rather than server sharded on their server clusters I’m guessing that guild name is one string, and guild tag is another. This is exactly the kind of stuff the guild team was created to work on. Guild content and guild QOL. If we have to lose anything it may be a small delay on a crafting recipie, a delay likely smaller than the amount of time taken to make and QoL its art. if they have to borrow engineers from elsewhere in the company, I’m sure they can fit it in after the rollout of whatever this super-secret WvW revamp is during LS releases that are far more asset than engineering centric releases.

They went out of their way to create an maintain awhat is now a fairly robust end user API. This is actually a lot simpler in most cases where I’ve worked with similar database structures.

sirrealist.1360:

Why do you need a LFG to collect hero points? It’s not like any of them can’t be soloed. Unless you’re talking just to have a group to run around with, or RP?

Open world LFG is commonly used to find organized maps for various zone metas or harder world bosses because arenanet’s instancing system is awful and tends to underload maps designed to require cap or near-cap player populations to complete.

The most common use of open world LFG is to go to an instace for the silverwastes boss, or the various world bosses when they are about to spawn so you know you’re entering a map instance with enough players to successfully complete the event.

So I have a few thoughts on the issue.

Pigments
At a basic level, pigments are a nice idea. They give a sink to the dye market, they give more universally desired/valuable drops from harvesting plant nodes, and they’re a great trade commodity as they have a niche, but desirable use so that those that don’t need them feel compelled to sell rather than hoard while those that need them can’t reliably opbtain as many as they’d like so they’re incentivized to buy.

The problem with pigments is the rarity isn’t consistant with their use. A start would be removing the upgrade schema from the ink sets. This would lower the value of lower tier pigments and raise the value of higher tier pigments so that they’d eventually table out in value. Once you don’t need brown for every single item, then ever smaller amounts of the other colors the current supply/demand of the market may find that the current 10 pigments per color per set are at a good price point for buyrs, crafters, and sellers.

Resonating Shards
These are a fantastic design from an acquisition standpoint. They give value to guild missions and ensure that a resource used solely for the benefit of guild is acquired by running guild content. I believe the culprit here isn’t the supply, but the demand. most recipies simply require too many shards. If we cut the upgrade requirements from 3 per upgrade to 2, and remove the frankly ridiculous 20 shard requirements from the “guild” set of decorations they’d be far more reasonable.

Coarse Sand
Sand is one of the two the biggest problems with scribing. It can only be obtained in a very small area of the world, can not be obtained reliably, and is needed in obscene quantities per recipie. It is my belief that the top end of the price point of scribing should rest in the resonating shards, as an easily earnable but somewhat time gated material. Coarse sand needs its scribing requirements cut by 90%, just slash a zero off of all the sandpaper recipies. Additionally, its demand necessitates other means of acquisition. Sure, leave silverwastes as the most direct and reliable means of acquiring it, but how about adding packs of 10-20 to the commendation trader’s crafting materials page, as one of the random rolls on the Ley Essence converter purchase tables, and as a purchase from the pact Supply mastery’s vendors.

This would allow people to reliably acquire sand without forcing them to farm silverwastes over and over and over.

Linseed Oil
This is a major cost barrier not only for scribing but guild halls in general. The steep cost of 20 seeds per oil is, quite frankly, absurd considering the number linseed oil one must make for the various hall upgrades and nearly every single scribing recipie

Drop the flax needed per oil to 5 and it’s still a valuable commodity that rewards dedicated gathering, but doesn’t create such an uncomfortable choice between putting off decorations or hall upgrades for potentially weeks in order to afford the other. I should have to weigh my priorities and make decisions about where to apply my resources, but the demand versus supply of flax seeds creates such a high price point that they don’t feel like compelling choices, but annoying ones.

Dropped/unique scribing materials
These are the best parts of the system. I love that to make an ascalonian lamp you need a special piece that only drops in ascalon. I love that making god statues requires items from their respective temples. These create fun collection opportunities and interesting loot for unguilded people and non-scribes.

Banners
Simply put, when you can obtain both commendations and shards from a guild mission, and get upwards of 15 objectively superior banners from the commendation vendor, there’s no reason to spend hours waiting or multiple crafting steps to scribe an objectively less functional version. Scribed banners should have the same use restrictions and inventory ones, including being usable in instances, and should be functionally superior to justify not only their cost, but also their crafting time. Guild members using a scribed banner should recieve its benefits for a much longer period, say 2 hours, which encourages supporting the creation of these items and encourages guild members and leaders to treat them as guild buffs first, and public buffs second.

Finding a heroic banner dropped by another guild shouldn’t be as good as using a banner with my own guild’s name on it. Banners are a great way to help those around you, but they’re also a good recruiting tool. Ensuring that guild members recieve superior duration benefits from their own banners encourages obtaining more banners in stead of relying on the kindness of strangers while leaving the current philanthropic use of them unchanged.

Trophies should be trophies
Having a trophy for boss kills shouldn’t require a high level scribe, guild upgrades, or sacrificng a goat to rngesus. They should be fun markers of things you’ve killed that you can place in the hall and go “yeah, we have so many of this boss kill”

Trophies like the new boss ones are effectively guild acievement, and the hall is effectively the guild’s achievement panel. They should be treated as such, guaranteed drops from their respective content, and essentially cost free to combine in to higher tier versions. They don’t conflict with “real” decorations, and they would serve a much more compelling purpose if they simply had a few more upgrade levels (larger trophies after gold) and were free to upgrade. As they are they’re a curiosity, but have little weight as actual trophies due to the incoherant RNG design that makestheir acquisition representitive of luck rather than marking content completion numbers.

Trading
Schematics should be tradable. All of them. This lessens the apprehension of heavily investing in to a scribe that may potentially leave the game due to real life issues, allows scribes to recoup their investments, allows even small guilds with infrequesnt upgrades to acquire cool decorations, and may even allow some guilds to subsidize their hall upgrades via scribing!

Keep the implementation of the decorations being bound to the guild once created, but the blueprint should really be physical and tradable items.

DGraves.3720:

PopeUrban.2578:

I like the functionality of the fall traits, but i think in stead of “when you take fall damage” they could update those effects to “when you fall x distance”

Stay with me here.

The reasoning for the change would be to reduce the amount of time you need to fall to trigger the effect, making the traits more useful as positional/tactical effects in more places, allowing you to trigger the effect in a lot more situations.

I like the idea of these traits, but the rather extreme distance oyou need to fall to get the effect makes them useless in a lot of theplaced I’d expect to use them to “get the jump” on enemies.

“When you take fall damage” and “You need to fall X distance” are equivalent since the damage you take is based on the distance you fall. You just want a shorter fall distance. But how small can it really be? You can’t just fall off the tiniest ledges and commit oblivion on the world below…

Honestly? the current fall distance to get damage is what, about 1200 units right? The problem is that very little of the world is designed in a manner that allows for this.

The traits as traits are fine, but their problem is that, compared to other options, they’re not often useful buld choices because the world is largely designed around non-jumpable drops of around 800 units.

Basically, I’d like to see the traits adjusted so they fit the world and are more useful options in a general sense in stead of the extremely niche sense they are now. I can find plenty of places to jump down at enemies and can’t get back up/am stuck in the fight, but very few in which I jump down at enemies, take enough fall damage to trigger a fall trait, and little enough to not completely screw myself over with fall damage.

When its an option compared with tow other selections that makes it far less valuable. I like it being a build choice. I just feel like it should be a more useful build choice that allows people to play the terrain more at the expense of other options.

Honestly, I like the current numbers.

It means that camps matter a lot more, and are things people want to defend and attack for reasons other than a supply dump. Those “paper objectives” are paper because people are still attempting to play an all-assault meta in stead of a strategic meta.

By spreading the upgrades out this way, it creates an imperative for defense, but not the boring kind of defense where you twiddle your thumbs behind a wall for an hour. In stead, you have to defend your assets to get the upgrades by patrolling the whole area of your objective and its feeder camps, which pulls you in to the field to fight enemies trying to disrupt your supply in the field. Overall it results in more fights, in more places, and ensures that more fights actually matter than the ones directl on top of an objective.

Even sentries become a lot more important in this system as having that intelligence on enemy movements can be crucial to protecting those supply lines, and telling you where you need to defend.

It gives real tactical utility and meaning to yak patrol as well, as having someone running yak guard duty and swifting them significantly speeds up upgrades, and upgrading the camps themselves for more yaks or slotted yak upgrades does as well.

This serves to seriously break up zergs, as even a small havok group can completely shut out a tower or keep upgrade without too much trouble just by back capping camps.

People hate this because they’re used to a WvW in which strategy simply wasn’t a thing, and decisions revolved around flipping camps in stead of holding them, because the yaks were secondary, and easily outdone in a few minutes by a large group of players running supply.

Literally all of WvW boiled down to “which objective do we send the zerg to to flip the fastest?”

If you’re still playing that game, you’re getting paper objectives taken from you and doing nothing but playing catch up by retaking what you’re losing over and over. If your enemy is doing the same then it’s the same boring endless flipping of objectives that people hated before. Of course it isn’t fun. You’re missing the entire point of the changes and complaining about the result of your own poor tactical decisions.

But, overall, this set of changes got rid of “auto defense” and “auto upgrades” without turning the whole thing in to ‘camp an objective’ in stead making the system more about “patrol this map quadrant”

My only real qualm is the laser even in the new BLs, which runs directly counter to this “strategy and defense actually matters” rework by letting people completely ignore your preparatings as long as they have a bigger zerg at the laser

That event is cool, but its reward is ridiculous, and undermines everything Anet is trying to accomplish by making WvW more tactically sound and interesting. it needs to be changed to a less potent effect.

Q: What’s up with the Karka?

Right, I understand basic MMO design, but that goal, with the bosses anyway, is already met by the personal loot. As far as i can tell the upgradable trophies seem to be designed as kill counters, just like the achievements that track kills, or the achievements that track wins, or towers defended, etc.

As a guild trophy system it’s a great design… expect for the part where its an RNG drop and thus not a reliable kill counter.

I like that they’re adding champions.

I just really like stronghold in general.

I’d like more maps, say a map with no trebs and a longer/more out of the way supply cache, a map where you have to “jungle” for supply by killing mobs, etc.

The current map is cool, but its way too easy to rush and tends to result in really short matches which don’t involve much fighting. Most competitive games boil down to who rushed doorbreakers fastest and wiped opposing defense one time.

I’d also like to see more more GW1 big timers as heroes.

Rurik, Togo, Mhenlo, GWEN, Koss.

Actually if I had to pick one… just Koss.

babazhook.6805:

That Adventuer rune is appealing but I am sort of hooked on SOM in a d/d build so rarely activate a heal.

^

Though I’ve found that withdraw tends to give me better mileage if I’m doing back capping/solo stuff. These days I run SoM in stronghold and Withdraw in conquest.

SoM is super legit in PvE though. I almost never swap out unless I’m doing dredge fractal or the SW maze. Withdraw in dredge fractal just because I run buckets and thus am not hitting anything, and HiS in the SW maz for more stealth stacking to emergency escape glowy death dogs.

If you don’t have any way at all to remove immobilize in less than 24 hours, there is a fundamental problem with your build. This may be a bug, but the fact you had to relog indicates you have absolutely zero condition cleansing in your build, even some long cooldown ability or trait.

You may want to rethink that.

Here’s a handy list of stuff that removes conditions:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Condition

Angelica Dream.7103:

Mission Slot PVE: How hard are these? We only have 3 players in the guild. Can we do these?

War Room Missions:
Again with only 3 (maybe 4 players) which are the best to do for a small group?

PVP Slot:
Who do you play? Inter- Guild? If not can we pick a particular guild to battle?

What good is becoming a scribe? I see that it is crafting, but why would I want to buy that?

thanks

PvE missions:
Generally you’ll want 6 people for puzzles due to switch and lever mechanics (though you can do proxemics lab with 3) and challenges (though you can do skritt and shatter crystals with 3)

You can easily pull off easy/med treks with 3

You can easily pull off any race with 3 (though you’ll have to get good at it for the harder time limits, or try and pile on with another guild doing it at the same time.

You can probably do single target bounties with 3, and 3 target bounties if you sacrifice a goat to rngesus to find them quickly and roll bounties you’re good at killing fast.

PvP:
You can pretty easily do all of those with 3, although some will take multiple tries due to que times or bad matchmaking with your random teammates

WvW:
You can do these with 3 as you just have to have the mission started and 3 people present. You can be with the zerg to do them, or if you’re particularly enterprising focs less populated maps (I like the wvw missions because of how they keep maps a bit more populated this way)

Also, you’ll find yourself capped on favor pretty fast, and from there you might want to actually intentionally fail treks and races, only doing them for the personal credit after one run/click point, and saving the favor credit for later in the week after you do an upgrade to dump favor.

I liked the dungeon master’s guide in EOTN, and thought it was a great mechanic. It made me run around and do a bunch of things and had a way of reducing that grind feeling by being a big list of different stuff.

I support this idea.

In fact, we need a handbook like this for each tier of fractals (basically, make the “do all scales” achievement a repeatable collection) and heck, while we’re at it how about one for world bosses, hero challanges, and other stuff?

How about a collection that collects all of the above for something super spiffy?

The only place you can run back from a waypoint after dying is in the open world, where nothing is challenging enough to care in the first place. if someone wants to invest entirely too much silver and time in waypoints because they’re horrible at the game, let them.

It doesn’t work where there’s an implied risk/reward for killing the boss “properly” in places like dungeons, fractals, or raids, where the idea is that individual skill is important. it’s only a thing that happens in the open world, where the game is more about group organization and individual skill isn’t supposed to be as important as getting enough people on each mechanic.

I like the functionality of the fall traits, but i think in stead of “when you take fall damage” they could update those effects to “when you fall x distance”

Stay with me here.

The reasoning for the change would be to reduce the amount of time you need to fall to trigger the effect, making the traits more useful as positional/tactical effects in more places, allowing you to trigger the effect in a lot more situations.

I like the idea of these traits, but the rather extreme distance oyou need to fall to get the effect makes them useless in a lot of theplaced I’d expect to use them to “get the jump” on enemies.

It’s not even about the balance really, but the basic purpose of a trophy like these.

Their sole purpose is “killed a boss, got a piece of boss”

It simply doesn’t make sense that they’re not guaranteed drops when it appears from every other part of their design they are meant to track how much your guild is killing said boss, rather than how lucky your guild is.

Boss chests guarantee a few rares, which are economically valuable items which can be salvaged, equipped or sold, as well as some random drops and unique skins which, given the way gear works in general, make sense as random drops.

These trophies have the same basic function as the new shatterer achievements, only in a guild-wide rather than a person manner. Trophies are, basically, guild achievements.

Having these items, which have no intrinsic economic value and in fact only serve to remove valuable scribing materials from the economy to upgrade them to the higher tier versions is like make the “imp slayer” achievement only randomly give credit when you kill an imp, rather than update for every imp killed.

These items only exist to track how many of your guild members are participating in boss kills. They have no other purpose. They can’t be used to replace other items. they don’t make other items less desirable. They’re “Guild Achievements” handled in what would be the most sensible manner to implement such an idea.

Only they’re RNG drops, which completely undermine the only functional reason they can conceivably exist in the first place.

Having a gold trophy should equate to “our guild members, collectively, have racked up 1000 kils” not “our guild members killed the boss who knows how many times and some of them got lucky.”

It’s not about how many are required, but rather that making them RNG makes their use as “kill tracker achievements” completely pointless.

Your glider is opening because you are holding the jump button.

You do not jump higher by holding the jump button. Just tap it.

Title.

Considering it’s 10 to get a bronze statue, 10 bronzes to make a silver, etc. you’re looking at 1000 of these drops in total for the final gold statue for these world bosses.

Combine that with the fact that they’re on a lengthy timer, and that crafting thr trophies from the drops requires master+ scribing kits and it just seems like these should be guaranteed drops.

Isn’t the point of trophies just visual evidence of a boss kill? What’s the point in making people repeat the fight more than 1000 player kills worth just to get a gold trophy?

Isn’t a boss trophy that effectively tracks kill participation through multiple upgrade levels effectively pointless when it’s not an accurate representation of participation?

Haven’t had a chance to do the raid bosses to check, but are the raid boss trophy bits also RNG?

If a thief autoattacks you to death, even after this patch, you may want to review your life and/or build choices.

Thieves didn’t ask for auto damage, and TBH it was a silly buff. It accounts for more damage, but in pvp terms it isn’t reliable damage. Very little would change were they to remove it right now and leave all the other balance changes intact.

It isn’t that thief is suddenly OP. It’s that bunkers that can ignore quality thieves don’t exist any more.

Agemnon.4608:

Ohoni.6057:

Feline Grace: This trait’s vigor duration has been increased from 4 seconds to 5 seconds.

OMGOMGOMG! They totally fixed it! 4 seconds of whothekittencares Vigor to a whole FIVE seconds of whothekittencares Vigor! This is totally just as good as it was before they completely destroyed it now! Viva Acro!

I know right? Especially given how you’d normally refresh it anyway within that time but is more likely a fix for PvE.

My gripe with acro at the moment is how many traits overlap with daredevil making some of them redundant. The 50% movement speed in stealth was better off in acro because reveal provides too strong of counterplay to justify taking shadow arts. The grandmaster traits in acro especially needing a good look but they removed the best trait in acro and replaced it with a passive that has a cooldown.

Keep in mind that acro is base and daredevil is an elite spec. Daredevil is, essentially, improved acro, and thus can synergize with acro.

This seems like an academic distinction now, but after a few more elite specs are out, acro will be your only option for endurance related stuff should you decide to play another elite spec.

Which, in turn, indicates to me that acro still needs more love. Feline grace should at least also grant swiftness or a flat 25% move speed increase for starters.

Sagat.3285:

Still nothing about CiS and SRej in the same tier, d/p needed improvement why not buff that?

Because D/P isn’t the build that actually needs improvement, and never has been. The nerfs to the other classes were really the only buffs D/P needed. This dagger auto damage is just icing.

This just in: Mobility reliant class has a mobility advantage trait at the cost of damage and utility.

PvP is now broken.

Please report to your assigned shelters.

The front line!

“Hard” is a relative term. In this case it’s relative to the general difficulty level of GW2.

That they don’t fit your personal definition of “hard” is subjective based upon your skill level. However, in relation to an objective standard (the game they’re in) they’re “hard”