Guild Wars 2

Wouldn’t call it more balanced, can’t play with a dedicated group, and is missing basic things like having allies as dots on your mini map. You get all of the issues with teammates in hotjoins and none of the benefits.

It is more casual friendly. But it ain’t going to stay because snow gotta melt.

Okay, I laughed out loud when at the end of the first fight you said “You don’t even need the shield.”

If Necros don’t have enough damage on Staff or Scepter to get through this either with crit damage (+20% from the Soul Reaping line) or power (Carrion amulet), then I have to agree that this looks like more than a hard counter. I like the guy from the previous page that coined the term “Diamond counter”.

As a proposed nerf, I’d say only block certain conditions. Primarily the damaging ones (burn, poison, bleed, torment, confusion) so that Necros can still use snares and weakness to kite.

This post came up way too late to get snuck in. They might be able to hotfix it in before Christmas, but generally speaking I feel this thread will need to be kept up until at least the next PvP preview (whether balance or blog post).

Malcastus.6240:

Will you be able to craft armors/weapons etc. tomorrow/today after the patch, using your to-be-useless-in-the-future materials?

PvP’s current Mystic Forge crafting won’t be going away for months, just like Glory.

Guys, remember, Glory isn’t just going away some time in the future. It’s getting replaced. There will be a new reward system, which may even have its own currency involved. But they want to make a clean break from Glory. Probably because of some special way the new rewards/currency is earned.

Lordrosicky.5813:

Well at least the water spirit looks bad. I was going to quit this game if the spirit activated on death. But instead only the small 2k aoe heal activated on death and the 4k self heal didnt. Which is important. Rangers also need healing spring. Honestly, I played my ranger for a while and I lost alot because I was running a horrible build. But the options are so bad. No active condition removal at all really does screw the class over completely.

A lot of classes get screwed if they’re forced to trait into not as viable trait lines for condition removal. Those who get most of their condition removal from skills alone, especially healing skills, get off pretty well.

It’s the weekend. The only ones posting probably don’t want to touch the thread until they get into office and can discuss this.

ronpierce.2760:

Proven.2854:

Volrath.1473:

ronpierce.2760:

Hammerguard.9834:

Necro, mesmer, and ranger heals were underwhelming. The rest were okay.

Agreed except if I’m not mistaken, this new heal might actually be pretty OP for PU Mesmers, can’t be 100% certain on that yet though, but it may have promise for them. (Not that PU needed it, but regardless.)

you truly believe that thieves heal was OK?! a poison on a 45 sec CD that requires you to LAND 4 hits in order to get healed?! Not to mention you need to be in Cleric gear and and it is heavily trait dependent?!

Unlike the Necro heal you actually get some health just for using the Thief skill.

Actually, the necro heal does give 4k healing initially, now. It’s just that, you know… 4k healing + a total possible of 1200 more via leeching (which was nerfed), equaling 5.2k heal for a necromancer (highest HP class in the game with warriors), on a 35 second cooldown is absolutely garbage.

Why would anyone take a heal to get 5.2k heal every 35 seconds or regen 300 hp IF hit no more than once a second (where warrior healing signet is 392 every second on the dot). For 800 more damage if the target literally stands still and doesn’t dodge the cast OR any time afterward…?

CC is like 5.2k BASE + rids all conditions AND heals 700 more per condition removed… Oh and it has a 25 second cooldown.

Blood fiend heals (if it hits anyways) 927 health every 3 seconds, so that’s 309 hp/s as long as the Blood fiend keeps up on its target, plus it does about 100 damage a second and has a 20 second cooldown, 16 if traited. Blood fiend is BAD (outshined by healing signet in every way possible except the little added damage) and STILL outshines this signet. o.O

And- just to mention, we didn’t need another support heal. Leeching is supposed to be selfish and tanky not support… We have Well of Blood for one of the better support heals in the game already. >_>: We didn’t need another one. Not to mention wells are meant for supporting, leeching is not. Fix it.

Thank god there’s a base heal.

Everything else is the biggest problem with this signet. When you look at Warrior’s Healing Signet, it had to be markedly better than the other two heal skills to get any use. When you take the Signet of Vampirism, it’s remarkably worse when compared to Necro’s other heals.

It’s the same issue with the rest of the other Vampiric abilities. I can’t help but feel like they’re kept weak because their synergy with Minion Master builds. Maybe if there was a Vampiric trait that gave your conditions to your enemy on a critical hit every 5 seconds…

Just want to say, on average a single PvP match is 7-10 minutes long.

Volrath.1473:

ronpierce.2760:

Hammerguard.9834:

Necro, mesmer, and ranger heals were underwhelming. The rest were okay.

Agreed except if I’m not mistaken, this new heal might actually be pretty OP for PU Mesmers, can’t be 100% certain on that yet though, but it may have promise for them. (Not that PU needed it, but regardless.)

you truly believe that thieves heal was OK?! a poison on a 45 sec CD that requires you to LAND 4 hits in order to get healed?! Not to mention you need to be in Cleric gear and and it is heavily trait dependent?!

Unlike the Necro heal you actually get some health just for using the Thief skill.

It’s probably related to the same issue that’s plagued PvP from launch. For PvP players, transferring from NA to EU or vice versa meant that you would get zero tournament chests until you made as many tournament wins as you had before.

The new system combined with the new vendor gives us both gold and an immediate gold sink. But I suppose nothing in the vendor is really necessary…

You don’t have to stomp the guy. You just have to take him down so his threat level goes down. Then you get ready for the next target while your team stomps. Same for the other classes that have bad times when trying to stomp in the middle of a fight.

For the rest, I realize now that responding to this thread in the first place was a mistake. The Thief has a unique combination of all of these, in addition to its unique playstyle.

I’m not looking for what’s better than every other class. But you are, so I guess I can’t help you.

On my own Thief build I have two hard CC abilities, AoE poison for downed enemies or regen builds, four snares, easy blast finisher, projectile reflection, boon sharing, and boon ripping. I’m happy with it.

Crovax.7854:

Proven.2854:

If you have the shaking trophy tourney win thing over your mini map, you can open those now for the extra glory rewards.

If you have chests (including chests from the shaking trophies you just opened) save them until the patch on Tuesday. At that point, any PvP gear you salvage has a chance to give you luck.

They made that pretty clear. The question was whether to open them now or if there is a chance of them containing valuable materials in addition to their current loottable in the future because i don’t want to open my stack only to see that they contain shards of legends in a month or two.

If you paid enough attention to get that, then you should have also heard them say you might as well open them on Tuesday or keep them forever.

If you have the shaking trophy tourney win thing over your mini map, you can open those now for the extra glory rewards.

If you have chests (including chests from the shaking trophies you just opened) save them until the patch on Tuesday. At that point, any PvP gear you salvage has a chance to give you luck.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

RoRo.8270:

Use them now is what I heard

so we’re not getting any replacement for the pvp glory boosters?

Nope, sadly. So now my characters are going to have constant glory boosters for the next however many months and maybe I can use them up before they’re obsolete. Maybe.

Necro one feels too weak. It will only find use in a full Vampiric build running Cleric gear, and even then I’m not sure if it’s enough to keep it up and running.

If we go down the road of alternate game types, would you stick to tying them to PvE dynamic event types? I mean, instead of deathmatch or capture the flag, having an assault (attack/defense) or escort (reminiscent of Team Fortress 2’s Payload game type that’s essentially a moving control point) would be a good fit for GW2. Just like TF2, GW2 seems balanced primarily around the idea of taking and holding points.

Arkantos.7460:

Proven.2854:

Here’s the post where Jon Peters said they weren’t swapping Trickster into Adept anymore: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Dec-10th-thief-changes/page/6#post3164422

yep, and on the same page, scroll down, Johns answer on my question on trickster:

It will get there, just hang on because we want to get it right so after Dec 10…

touchee

I’m primarily concerned in how long that will take. Gotta work with how the game is right now and near future. But I’ll admit I didn’t read your post fully.

I always figured Thief group utility came from mixing damage with control. They can blind, boon rip, boon share, assassinate, cripple/immobilize, and/or stun depending on weapon set and traits. When a thief is in your party you use call target to tell him or her who you want to take out of the fight ASAP.

This is from a more sPvP perspective, but if you’re with a Thief outside of a zerg setting I don’t see how it’s much different.

Adian.8756:

As I mentioned in the CDI thread, this change is beyond stupid.
To the people who think “Well, it’s not that bad”, consider this:

1. If you can unlock all the skills really quickly, then what’s the change for? It has no impact on the game (except a principle one), and thus, there’s no reason to add it to the game and spend resources on it.
2. If it’s difficult to unlock the skills, then new players, or alts, will be at a distinctive disadvantage from the get-go. It removes the even playing field that sPvP was advertised to have, and as such, it should not be added.

I see absolutely no benefit in adding this to the game. ‘The number of skills are intimidating for new players’? You kidding me? Exactly how many new players do we see in sPvP, that have never set foot in PvE first? Zero. Exactly zero. And if someone actually does, he’s not some PvE scrub who can’t read skill descriptions.

I’m pretty sure it’s in there for the principle; both for the progression crowd, and as precedent in the future when they add however many new skills. I’m fine with this because it isn’t as bad as Ascended.

Here’s the post where Jon Peters said they weren’t swapping Trickster into Adept anymore: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Dec-10th-thief-changes/page/6#post3164422

I believe on the Thief forums they said they were going to revert that change, but I can’t find the post at the moment. Was decided a couple weeks back.

doomfodder.2906:

Michael.7382:

This!!!
Rank should be a signal of skill and prestige.
Spvp should be a place where people go to compete each other and prove to be the best and rank system must rappresent that.

My take on this sentiment is akin to what I’ve read in this and other threads: “Players need skill-based rewards, not farm-based ones.” So my question is still… What’s wrong with both?

Currently rank finishers/emotes are basically achieved via grind where grind duration CAN BE reduced by individual skill (or farming/cheating). IMO, current rank reward feels like the best long term goal for casual PvP’er, you put your time in & eventually get your shiney that can be displayed in other venues of the game (ignoring the ability to display one of many titles that almost nobody reads). If PvP community doesn’t like the word “RANK” assosicated with grind based reward, call it something else (like “PvP grind based reward title finisher”)

THE REAL QUESTIONS ARE
1) what criteria is used to measure “skill”?
2) How to prevent/police abuse of these “skill” measurements"?
Again, IMO PvP Skill based “recognition” can only really be assessed via tournaments/seasons/ladders (but even these CAN BE manipulatd).

Off topic suggestion: skill based rewards might be “gold” ghost finishers instead of the current “silver” ghost finishers which are awarded by the current rank system.

The post you’re quoting is forgetting that we are getting a ladder system with an additional reward and finisher system that’s tied to your skill.

I agree with you Jeydra, and currently I just start queueing for solo queue at the same time. The more people that just solo queue to try and avoid imbalanced hotjoin teams, the less waiting time on queues. Otherwise, you might as well switch to a build that can excel in imbalanced situations.

stof.9341:

Incurafy.6329:

Withdraw on a 12 second cd? Yes please!

Who would takes Trickster instead of Bountiful Theft or the other Master Trickery traits anyway?

This is my problem. Thrill of the Crime + Bountiful Theft + Super Steal are way too good a combination.

Thedenofsin.7340:

DiD GW2 release in Asia? I haven’t been able to find info on a release.

That’s off topic, but no, it hasn’t. China release has been delayed to some unknown time in 2014.

Incurafy.6329:

Wolf.5816:

No one has seen the heal values or Cooldown times. No one has used them, how about we just take a few deep breaths for the next 6 days and relax. If it doesn’t work it will be changed.

Yes they have, it’s called datamining.

Huh? I saw the list on reddit. I don’t see any numbers.

Another thing to add to the rumored heals possibly or possibly not being the ones that make it to live, in the Edge of the Mists test currently a few NPCs have the Warrior stance heal. Whether this means Warrior will get an altered one or if it was scrapped completely and given to NPCs instead, who knows?

We don’t even know if the rumored heals are real, or if they were once real and got altered, or if they have no basis in reality.

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046:

Thats the thing, you can’t press any skills because your stuck in the laying flat animation.
happened to me a few times..

That sounds like a bug. Normally when you get knocked around you’re given the regular amount of cooldown to all your skills from the CC, and then are able to do something (and will magically right yourself back up as you cast it).

Qaelyn.7612:

As a newb, this thread would be more useful if someone explained what the issue/change is about.

For a while now, they changed it so that personal score doesn’t increase glory gained from a match. You need to have more than zero score to get glory, but then you get a set amount no matter if you win or lose unless you do some specific things… and even then those things only get you a pittance of extra glory.

Considering Engineers are already ahead of the pack, I don’t quite see how these are bad ideas.

The only exception comes from cooldown reduction traits. Something will have to give, and it may end up being that in cases where the trait is too easy to get, the cooldown for the healing skill without the trait will have to be increased. Best example for this would be turning Ether Feast into a Manipulation.

cymerdown.4103:

I’m alright with it, so long as you can get these unlocks by doing only PvP, and that they aren’t insanely hard to get that way. If we’re talking several weeks of play just to get a single skill unlock on one character, then that’s way too much.

If I had to guess, the new skills will follow current skill point trends and cost 3-6 skill points. For anyone with a level 2 character in PvE, it’d be trivially easy to quickly get those points from level ups, buy that one skill, and then have it in PvP on patch day.

And then there are all of the tomes already dropped from achievement point chests and other sources, and the “level to 20 or gain 20 skill points” scrolls given out around the one year anniversary. If you have any of these, you’re already golden.

Dahkeus.8243:

Proven.2854:

Venoms would be fine if they just lowered their cooldowns (except for the elite) and then made it so that you could only have one venom at a time. Using a new venom would then replace any older venom on your weapon.

Even that wouldn’t really work well because filling up your utilities with venoms means that you sacrifice:
– Stun breaker
– Condi removal
– Gap closer
– Shadow’s Refuge

If venoms could at least get a stun breaker and a condi removal, they might be able to competed with other options. It looks like this new heal will provide neither.

I’m not asking for you to be able to fill up your entire bar, although it’d be trivially easy to make up some magic venom that was a stunbreaker or able to transfer conditions on hit. A lot of utilities are more interesting when you can only afford to have two of them on your bar, and being able to shift one to your healing skill would be great.

I’m asking for venoms to not be just some kind of weak burst mechanic that’s hampered by the existence of Main Hand Pistol’s Sneak Attack.

kirito.4138:

Can we buy hats yet? I just want hats like TF2

After we get push type control point maps (which I’d personally love).

Let’s see how it is currently
If you afk in a match: match ends faster. If a match ends faster, both sides get less glory. For example, a 5 minute match currently gets you about half the glory of a regular 7-9 minute match.
If you afk from the beginning of a match: you get no points. If you finish a match with zero points you get zero glory.

Let’s imagine the future
If you afk a match and cause it to end quickly, you get reduced gold.
If you try to get a few points before afking, they can increase the amount of points needed or change the requirements needed to count for participation.

Let’s imagine the other argument
If you get zero gold, or extremely reduced rewards for losing in anything outside of team queue, you may avoid afk players. But you’ll probably get a lot more people leaving losing games. More 4v5s or worse for solo queue (which may then lower match times, which will then hurt the winners as well). More people switching to spectator or leaving games in hotjoin more often as well, making that less fun to play too. Team Queue might be the only place that gets something out of this.

Honestly? I think it’s fine. GW1 was similar in keeping the difference between players relatively low in PvP, and they still had people buying skills.

Venoms would be fine if they just lowered their cooldowns (except for the elite) and then made it so that you could only have one venom at a time. Using a new venom would then replace any older venom on your weapon.

Paying to 80 feels like a way to skip PvE and focus on PvP and WvW. And there’s the crafting discipline method, which got ruined by ascended equipment.

But in no way do I see getting to 80 as “winning” the game.

I saw this on stream live. It was funny, although I think it’s a bug from the way you got off the treb while holding down the turn button.

As others have said, I’d love it if you kept Ranks. Having both the ladder for skill invested and ranks for time invested would be great, and having two sets of finishers instead of modified versions of the old ones would be more enticing.

The only other thing I’d like is if rank up requirements were shortened. Like the ranks in WvW, having upper levels of rewards that require years of hardcore play, and several times more of casual play, sucks. I don’t mind each tier taking longer to get through than the previous tier though. Like with the restructure of achievements, having more regular updates on your progress is great. As it is, once you get into the 20s you start forgetting about rank ups ever happening except once in a blue moon if you’re a casual player. Then again, the restructured achievement paths might alleviate the fact that ranking up is the primary visual progress of your time investment.

There is an issue with this discussion though. You guys have a plan in place to replace rank/glory with something in addition to the ladder system that will also reward time invested to some unknown degree. But because we don’t know what that system is, we can’t honestly say if we’d prefer it more to glory/rank.

Since we can’t be sure of what we’re getting, we’d prefer to keep the thing that we know instead of possibly being disappointed with the thing we don’t. Plus, the best choice from our perspective would be to have both.

I thought the whole reason this thread existed was because of burst specs. Sustain and Condi specs don’t have as much of an issue with the dodges as they usually carry enough CC or enough consistent pressure.

And don’t you get the same risk/reward with weapon swapping in the current system of the endurance bar being hidden information? You wouldn’t even know about the energy sigil in the new system until partway through the fight either.

garethh.3518:

Chaith.8256:

The problem with this is the fact that Energy Sigils exist, endurance levels are very transient and no, it’s not reliable information to count dodges or see the endurance bar atm until that’s changed.

With shown endurance bars, you can know.
You can see the energy sigil pop on weapon swap and know to watch out for it from that guy on that weapon swap.
It’s part of learning your enemy.

Without actually seeing the endurance bar (especially on a class like the ranger where they have a constant half-vigor) you can’t be sure, you have to be counting dodges perfectly and taking into acount vigor/exc. to a T… without that you can never really be sure if it was the bonus endurance regens or the actual bump from an item.

It was already explained that this wouldn’t help much. Someone is low on endurance, you push for the kill, they just weapon swap and immediately dodge. What were you going to do then? How different is that from what we have now?

If it’s only natural regen, it’s easy to just assume 8 seconds regen if it’s a Ranger unless they’re running a build you know doesn’t use the trait. If a class has access to vigor and is using it then you should just assume 5 seconds.

Since I was prompted in another thread, I’ll add something else.

The issues with PvP and PvE skins are largely because of two reasons. The first is the fact that if glory is removed, gold will be what buys high end pvp skins. For that reason I posted earlier in the thread that glory should be kept as a limiter.

The second issue is the skin debate. Especially with cultural and dungeon skins. This wouldn’t be a problem if these skins were just never put into PvP in the first place. PvE should have exclusive high end skins tied to dungeons and a few other pieces of content. WvW should have high end skins tied to Badges of Honor, instead of just the Invaders set. And PvP should have a number of exclusive skins as well instead of just renaming existing skins all the time.

It’s similar to the recent uproar over the Flamekissed gem armor. The only way to fully avoid it is to keep creating brand new armor skins, despite the extra work that it involves (and you guys already run with some painful schedules at times).

Right now things are still somewhat okay because there’s a lockout with tournament tokens and higher end animal tokens being needed. There’s also the fact that all the chests are a level of RNG. But still. Adding in these sets to PvP and the basic crafted sets in WvW always felt like it should have been a stopgap measure, but it’s now instead more of the status quo.

On another note, I’d really love it if there was a straight forward recipe for you to convert one piece of an armor set into another of the same set. It’s annoying to open tourney or rank chests and get duplicates, leaving you with the feeling of “so close…”, but this request isn’t that big of a deal.

Honestly, this wouldn’t even be a problem if we had skins a bunch more skins that were exclusive to each PvP and PvE. Instead of having two paths to the same thing and people grinding their way through the path of least resistance, you’d instead have people using their special armor or weapon as a trophy for conquering a certain objective in a certain mode. Same issue with WvW and the fact that it needs something exclusive to it other than the Invader set.

The recent issue with the Flamekissed gem armor comes to mind.

Is that really needed? The hard part is the queue time, but everyone knows that a match can take 15 minutes max because of the timer. If you get to a point where while queuing you may need to go, you leave queue.

LoreChief.8391:

JonPeters.5630:

The reason we went with heal skills first is that we actually believe this is the highest impact area for build diversity.

1) it is a small pool to begin with so adding to it increases choice by a large %
2) it sees a lot of use
3) it heals you which is pretty important

As time goes on we will also introduce traits, utilities, elites, and potentially other stuff.

Jon

I think that this is incredibly subjective. Take warriors utilities for example;

• Banners = Passives you cast on the ground
• Shouts = Passives you cast
• Signets = Passives
• Physical = Only actual interesting skill type

Utilities should be prioritized first since they are the skills that players actually notice and make their builds around. Nobody makes builds around healing skills, except maybe Healway guardians. I’m not saying new healing skills aren’t needed or anything, but a lot of professions suffer from stagnant utilities, which doesn’t help when you play one of the pitifully weapon-less classes like Thief.

Though, I’m slightly dejected to be honest. I’ve been playing since BWE2, and I never played GW1. With all the talk about how often new skills were added to GW1, I was expecting our professions to have been much more developed by this point. It’s been over a year, and all we have to show for it is a single blanket-healing skill. New healing? Okay, ultimately its a good thing. But compared to what I’ve heard, and what I’m seeing now; I’m worried that you guys aren’t as creative as I’d been led to believe…

Uh… Shouts give an instant effect when you push the button, like leap skills and dodges. How is that a passive effect?

Signets are both passive and active type skills. Even on the Warrior alone, you have an elite signet that you use almost entirely for its active.

I think you should keep glory. Much like you have Karma in PvE and Badges of Honor in WvW, I think PvP will continue to need a secondary currency. Otherwise you might as well remove Badges of Honor from WvW and replace everything with Gold and maybe Karma rewards.

I think rank should be kept too… if only because the only way to deal with the issue opened up from the Skyhammer farmers without banning would be to give the rest of the PvP population time to catch up. Since there’s no ETA on these changes, a person can easily assume sooner rather than later and give up on raising their rank. It’ll leave a sour taste in a lot of people’s mouths. But the more time given for the regular guys to catch up, the better they’ll cope. With that, an infinite amount of time would be preferable.

I’m also assuming that you get much more gold for winning solo and team queue matches than you do for hotjoin, so I’ll leave that alone.

infantrydiv.1620:

Actually, I think most of the community would rather see you buff the numerous worthless utilities many classes have, rather than adding new ones and upsetting an already imbalanced game further.

Well, they’ve already been doing that. Remember Berserker’s Stance? It’s slow going, and they’ve found the time to also add in new skills.

Cat Has Ducks.1982:

Since people seem to be complaining about not knowing when the enemy will dodge. Doesn’t that mean we should see all their cooldowns too, because you never know when they will do a quick weapon swap dodge. That will be the samething as not knowing the enemies stamina.

This might actually make you miss more burst skills, since we can now lure you into a burst, then switch weapons and dodge. You guys need to be careful what you ask for. I am personally fine without seeing stamina.

For the new page, I feel like I should repeat it: The problem is more the energy sigils than anything else.