Guild Wars 2

Hey just wondering what will become of glory boosters?
I’ve got over a stack in my bank. Will these be converted to something else? Or just disappear when glory gets removed?

Jgr.8765:

Hahaha, that one never gets old. Heard that so many times in AB, GW1. Teams which just capped missed all the fun. >_< Oh well, more teams for my team to kill, can’t complain.

It’s AB week btw!

Do people still AB? I might come back just for that xD
Also fighting was integral part to AB. Dead teams cant cap anything

I think most of these are a great step in the right direction. As mentioned above it would be awesome if there were pvp-only skins that could be ported into pve and look awesome!
However I think the removal of rank and the associated rank-finishers should be rethought. This was an aspect of gw1 pvp that showed not only skill but also veteran status. I don’t want my finisher to be tied exclusively to the ladder. It also favors all the sky-hammer farmers who exploited their way to rank 50-60+.

Simplicity.7208:

Once ladders are implemented, ranks will be retired. To honor the effort that players have put into the rank system, existing players will be able to keep all unlocked rank finishers and will earn a special title based on your rank to show that you were there from the start. Variants of existing rank finishers will move to the ladder system and will be used to show your current standings on the ladder from season to season. The original finishers will not be earnable again.

This seems like a reward for those who took the time to do Skyhammer glory farm/abuse. “Congrats on illicitly getting vastly more rank than the regular players. As a reward, have a finisher that’s getting removed before the legitimate players can get it.” What are your thoughts on this?

That’s exactly what I thought too.
I am all in favor of removing glory as a currency and replacing it with actual gold.

However I think they should keep ranks and rank progression for finishers. This was an aspect of gw1 pvp that I loved.

TuBrown.4510:

thanks guys for the advise!

i came up with a build but dunno if i should put it in place: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQJARWlYgqCnFyvDf4ERVh4h9AjZsjXPcYCZIA-jkCBIjAoNQEEQUBAZPCjJQKqVWFRjVZDT9iIq2guIa1SBcxYA-w

its focused on dmg and armor for zerging but no crit chance, is that a bad thing? any thoughts on this? thanks!

I would suggest you switch your rings and pants to knights and you’ll get a lot more precision. You can also take the minor valor trait to convert some toughness to precision. And energy sigils definitely. Also I would suggest either 10 in radiance reduced recharge on signets (your heal) or 5 in precision and 5 in virtues for the extra boons on your F1-3 skills (synergizes well with altruistic healing). Be careful with save yourselves, it can be great to save your team but you can also kill yourself with it lol. You can take sanctuary and put 10 in virtues for recharge and longer sanctuary. Purging flames is also nice.

The “taster” wxp boosters you get for leveling characters from world level 1-5 (and last only 15min) are soulbound. The ones you buy in the gem store (that last an hour) are account bound. Since after wxp becomes account bound, this won’t make a difference, I doubt they will change it.

edit: thanks whiteandmilky

What I like about sky hammer:
1) lots of use of z axis and jumping
2) positioning is very important.

What I don’t like about sky hammer:
1) Cannon does too much damage, on too short a cooldown, and is completely unavoidable.
2) Instant-death from fall.

What could be improved:
1) Make cannon dodgeable/blockable so that it doesn’t completely shutdown a cap point.
2) Reduce the falling distance so that you only die from it if already low on hp. Give a way to get back up. Knocking your opponent off the map should only buy you time, not be an instant win. Especially since some classes have wayyyyyy more access to knockbacks than others.

Overall I like it but with these changes I think it would be a lot more playable.

I don’t care if it’s a time gated thing, or another mining node in the home instance. The fact that such a popular stat combination was only accessible for a week and now costs 100s of gold to craft is insane.
I do agree with your second point though. We should be able to craft ascended sentinel gear (along with other stat combinations like valkyrie and carrion trinkets)

So with the reintroduction of the molten facility, I, and many others, were hoping that azurite orbs would make a return. Azurite orbs are crazy, rediculous expensive right now. Especially since everyone wants them on their tanky/wvw characters. And with the reintroduction of molten facility we CAN mine azurite crystals.
However there is no recipe for upgrade from crystals -> orbs like normal crystals
Therefore exotic sentinel gear will remain crazy crazy expensive.
I’m fine with orbs not being directly available, but pls give a recipe for upgrade.
kthxbye

Madora.9340:

I was lagging harder last night than I was before on HoD’s BL, specifically me against groups of five. Wouldn’t even give me a chance to pop invis and dodge before I was instantly down for no reason at all.

lag is not the same thing as skill lag.

the best suggestion (too lazy to dig up thread) was a 3/6/6/9 setup with 4 leagues. the top 3 servers of silver are much more on par with the bottom 3 servers in gold than they are with any other server in silver. This is a win for everyone.

Druss.6917:

Stinson.5972:

Yeah, if I were anet I’d be trumpeting this to the heavens. The zerg-crippling lag is just… gone.

Not true. Last night everytime we came against Fort Aspenblob our skills would lock up. It only got worse as the night went on. The problem was gone for a little while, I will agree there, but not entirely.

What map were you on? I was on both EB BL during the big zerg fights and EBG during the big battle in smc and never got any skill lag.

Whatever they have done, the skill lag is much much better now. Almost unnoticeable. We can actually have 3-way fights for smc and use our skills!!!

Nice try for SMC last night CD. If I hadn’t gotten a last minute scout, you would have capped it for sure! Very nice move taking advantage of our assault on red keep
Cheers
Mouse
EB Commander

4 would make more sense. Since 4 people would take down the 4 stacks, and the 5th could actually interrupt the skill.
O no wait, that would take too much skill. Sorry gw2 must bee noob friendlee
bad idea

Do not do this please
Myself, and plenty others, have worked so hard to get fractals 30+, 40+, and even 70+, on multiple characters because THIS WAS THE ONLY CHALLENGE IN PVE. And we did this for almost NO REWARDS, only the satisfaction of completing it. Reverting all of that progress to level 30 is the biggest slap in the face to the dungeon community you could possibly give, in addition to having ZERO updates to dungeons since you announced that dungeons were getting a revamp almost year ago. Srsly. Number 1 method to completely drive off the only remaining dungeon commuity you have. I completely gave up on pve for this exact reason. Don’t make it worse. Don’t do this.
Try to a least, keep personal reward levels the same, but make everyone start back at level 30, so that everyone who grinded and grinded and grinded to get level 80 get the rewards that are deserved.
Compare fractals 78 to cof p1. It’s not even kittening close.

I would love to see the ranger guards around keep get the “sic em” skill. Put an end to those annoying thieves who do nothing but tag keep gates 24/7 :/

Crazy fight in SMC tonight guys. Porting up to the third floor was a good idea, too bad it didn’t work out. Great fights tho!

This build used to be much more effective because of signet of restoration and especially before the cantrip nerfs. Right now it’s questionably effective in spvp. It’s better in wvw where the bould doesn’t suffer as much from the pvp-specific nerfs.
Basically the build is effective because of lots of little heals, good mobility and high boon uptime. Also because it is considered “melee” it does have some nice damage coefficient on a lot of skills, but also has 600 range on others making it between melee and ranged.

No problem. Dead commanders can’t command, so must people run really tanky builds as commanders
As far as zerg fights go, there are several threads outlining effective strategies in zerg fights. If you’re wiping them and not taking much damage (usually happens when they don’t see you coming), you don’t need to peel off. However if you are taking heavy damage you’ll want to peel off, drop water fields and your feet and call for regroup and blast finishers.
You will basically be part of the frontline, which means pushing into the weakest part of the enemy zerg – the tail, mostly composed of squishy targets. You want to direct your melee where to land stuns and ranged where to drop aoes, but you also need to keep your melee away from their aoes and protect your squishies. It’s a complicated endeavour, but one that becomes easier with practice
Cheers and happy hunting

Completely disagree with what Neko said. I play my staff ele when I command and I love it. Because I’m in front of the zerg I can place static fields to maximum effect. I get fire fields exactly when I want them, and I can drop and call water fields exactly when they go down.
However as mentioned above you do want to be very tanky as a commander since you will be the first person to run into battle. I suggest either 0/10/0/30/30 or 0/0/10/30/30 with full soldier’s gear. Nice thing about 0/10/0/30/30 is you dont need to change your traits when you switch tag on/off, just your gear.

Lol burnfall…just lol.
D/D ele has been nerfed into the ground to the point it’s barely playable in spvp.
Those bursts are extremely easy to avoid and he does the exact same combo every single time. Half of them were probably against uplevels. If you get caught in an extremely obvious to dodge, highly telegraphed burst like that you deserve to die.
He is full zerker glass cannon and probably insta-dies if anyone with even moderate damage so much as looks at him. There’s your balance. Now go away.

The rewards for defending come from the loot bags you get when wiping the zerg at your tower door, who are so tunnel visioned pvd’ing they dont even see you coming xD
God I love that moment of smashing into 30-40 people who dont even see you coming lol.

sephiroth.4217:

Argh curse you FA, so many small group fights happening for hours on EB BL and then you wreck the fun with a karma train

Choo CHOOOOOOOO!

Great fights in EBG last night [DIE]! That was really fun
Sorry I had to pull off…I felt to much like we were spawn camping you guys, which I don’t approve of. I was happy when you guys came all the way up to red keep to fight us again
I was really proud of my militia. They stood strong and stayed on tag (though we did outnumber you).
Hope to see you again tonight!
P.S. You guys are really hard to kill Like, really hard :O
P.P.S. Let me know if you guys are okay fighting outside your spawn like that. I would have stayed longer.

You guys complain about FA coverage and there is no denying that FA has much better coverage. But that doesn’t explain why we’re running 400+ ppt during prime time and EB and IoJ a reduced to bunkering their garris lol.
Good fights though DIE when I saw you in EB yesterday. Too bad we only had PvE militia noobs on the map at the time, it would have been much more interesting fights. You’re the only people who actually fight and play well instead of insta-melting.

Nothing you guys have changed in the balance preview will change this.
Trying to remove dependence on arcana while keeping the “golden” ele traits at 20 and 30 arcana is going to do nothing for build variety.

Hi Jon
I hope you are still reading this thread. The problem with ele right now is they have to make up for their low hp and low armor. They must increase their EHP through the use of several healing skills as well as protection and regeneration uptime.
While I respect that you are trying to remove the dependence on speccing heavily into arcane because of the class mechanics, moving elemental attunement to master tier in arcana has the complete opposite effect. Eles need these boons to survive.
While I also agree that elemental attunement is a very powerful trait, it is also class defining. Being able to share boons with allies is what makes an ele an ele.
So is 15 points in water for heal on attunement (and ideally cleansing as the adept trait as a bare minimum investment into water tree). And to a lesser degree evasive arcana.
All of these are very powerful traits but are also class and build defining. An ele needs these things to be comparable in terms of EHP to other classes. Most eles dont want to play cheesy glass cannon fresh air burst-then-die builds. This was the old warrior bulls rush hundred blades cheese and I’m sure you remember how popular they were in spvp.
Probably the best suggestion I have heard is to make the boons on attunement the 5 point minor traits. Eg. gain 5 seconds of protection when attuning to earth. This will do several things:
-It removes the dependence on arcana to get the boons we so desperately need.
-It also forces tough choices. You want to play a 0/10/30/30 d/d build, but without 5 in earth you wont have the protection uptime. You also wont get might on attunement either.
Lingering elements:
This is now a trait. The functionality has been changed along with the 5 point minor traits of all attunements. The functionality would provide additional access to the boons provided by the 5 point minor traits. Eg. % chance to gain protection for x seconds when struck while attuned to earth.
Renewing stamina:
This is now the 15 point minor trait in arcana.
Diamond skin:
While I do agree that a trait like this could open up more possibilities for ele for speccing outside of water, I think in it’s current form it would either be completely useless or completely over-powered.
The best idea I’ve heard so far is that below x% hp incoming conditions have a y% chance to be converted into boons (something like below 33% and a 50% chance). This to me would be much more worth investing 30 points into earth rather than the current form. Eles will lose 10% of their health easily in just one autoattack, and you immediately lose the whole reason you specced 30 points into earth. On the flipside, lowering this threshhold too much would make this completely broken overpowered if you can stack enough regen/healing. I think you would back yourself into a balancing nightmare with this one in its current state.
Anyway hope you enjoyed the read and I would love to hear more about what you have to say.
As someone who has over 2000 hours on ele (not including beta), rank 30+ in spvp, rank 300+ in wvw, dungeon master and lvl 40+ fractals, I have played ele everywhere in gw2 and then some. I would be more than happy to take the time to talk to you in-game

This would be really nice and much needed imo. If I knew it would take 5min for queue to pop or an hour I could decide to wait 5min or maybe do a quick dungeon run instead of sitting around LA/mists for queue pop. Even just an estimated queue time could be great.

Great job taking t3 SMC last night guys. The simultaneous pressure on our keep and smc was intense and something we wish we saw more on FA. Honestly I wish BP and NSP intentionally double team us so that the fights would be more entertaining for us.

Cheers

Mouse
EB commander

Vigor is one of the most powerful boons in the game, on par with protection and stability. Being able to have permanent vigor on any character is a very powerful ability and should require significant investment. However here are a couple concerns I have about nerfing vigor on elementalists and engineers:
1) mesmers and guardians get permanent vigor for 5 points!!!! 5 points!!!! You can’t not touch these while making eles and engis invest 20 points for the same effect (and engis won’t even get perma vigor).
2) PvE. I know this is the wrong subforum to discuss pve problems. However since anet doesn’t balance around pve and never ever read the dungeon subforum, Jon needs to read this: Permanent vigor is necessary for survival, especially in high level fractals where a single autoattack from a mob can one-shot eles. Literally. 15k damage on an autoattack.

My suggestion:
-Make them minor master traits (15 points) for all classes. Or even minor grandmaster (25 points).
-In pvp make them last say 2 seconds on a 5 second icd or 5 seconds on a 10 second icd. In pve they should be 5sec on 5sec icd.

elemental attunement -> master
renewing stamina -> master
cleansing wave -> master
aquamancer’s alacrity -> master

how is this supposed to help build diversity?

here are (imo) the two biggest things that limit build diversity:

15 in water for heal on attunement. Without cleansing wave or aquamancer in adept all the adept traits are useless, meaning i will now have to invest 20 to 30 points in water to make this traitline useful.
10 in arcana for elemental attunement. 30 in arcana for evasive arcana (NOT for the attunement cooldown) is so strong regardless of the build you are running I doubt many eles run without. I have made many a build with only 10 in arcana for elemental attunement for the synergy with 30 in water and the boons and I never ever noticed that my attunement cooldowns were a couple seconds longer, only the lack of evasive. Moving elemental attunement to master tier is only going to further reduce build diversity.

Conclusions:
The projected patch notes are only going to further limit build diversity for eles and do nothing to improve their viability and will in fact have the opposite effect. Unless diamond skin goes in as projected, which I seriously doubt it will because it would be too completely broken OP.

@Jon
Please see cmc’s analysis of the ele changes in this vod (discussion starts at ~16minutes)
http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2pvptv/b/475861123

Cheers
A sad ele since beta

I just don’t even know where to begin with what you are doing and have done to eles. Clearly no one at anet plays this class. Please hire someone else to come up with balancing ideas for eles.

The upcoming patch preview shows this pretty clearly. Would anet pls hire someone like cmc or bitcloud to explain to them what an ele is and how to play it, because they seriously don’t understand what an ele needs to have to be viable and what traits are limiting build variety.

I don’t even know where to start…

Positioning and high ground are very important. Always take the high ground, even if it’s only a small height advantage. Draw them into a choke point or smash them against a gate. Fight near seige if possible. Always avoid the frontline and flank the backline. Keep a tight stack on the commander to reduce aoe damage.
The element of surprise plays a huge role. Surprise them by stacking around a corner or jumping down on them. Mesmer veil skill is great for getting a positional advantage while keeping your movements hidden. Chain one after the other to close a large distance while keeping the whole zerg invisible.
Class compositions and skill usage play a big part. Call for static fields/hammer stuns to cc the enemy. Call for stability to counter their cc. Call for necro well of corruption and mesmer null field to remove stability boons so you can land your cc. Restack and call for water fields/blast finishers to heal the zerg if you’re taking damage. Necro plague form and ele tornado give lots of aoe stuns and blinds. Call for them on your second pass after the warriors have blown all their ccs on the first pass.

Check out some redguard videos on youtube (warning commander yells a lot )

I was wondering what you guys think of awarding wxp for ordering upgrades?
The numbers awarded can be balanced but here are my suggestions:
ordering a t1 upgrade: 50wxp camps/towers, 100 for keeps
ordering a t2 upgrade: 250wxp camps/towers, 500 for keeps
ordering a t3 upgrade: 1000wxp camps/towers, 2500 for keeps
Especially for keeps ordering t3 is quite expensive compared to the average income in wvw.

The two places where message suppression has effected me the most:
1) Sending food to party members in dungeons.
2) Being a commander in wvw, I frequently get message suppression for spamming things like Supply up, rally up, stack up.

Cool thanks for the reply. Your english is very good

I’m probably asking too much out of my gear but I don’t like running around in wvw without at least 2500 armor. Being a necro of course I want decent vitality too.

When I was leveling I was using a mix of knights and carrion, which gave me decent toughness vitality precision power and condi damage.

What do you guys think about swapping out some carrion for celestial gear to get my crit damage higher?

I was wondering if anyone has a good hybrid spec for necro for wvw.
I usually run wells with staff and scepter/dagger so I want to have good power and condi as well, but I also want to have a good amount of tankiness.
I was thinking something along the lines of mixtures of knights and carrion or knights and celestial.
Also is 30 in blood magic worth it at level 80 for the wells siphon health?
What do you think about the following build:
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/necromancer/?5.0|6.5h.h1j.0.0.0|b.5h.h1n.8.5h.h1j.0.0.0|1h.9b.1h.9b.1n.9b.1h.9b.1n.9b.1h.9b|21j.0.21j.0.31j.0.211.0.311.0.2s.0|0.k69.0.u58c.k29|0.0|3r.4a.4d.44.0|e

Also would runes of the traveler be worth it to drop the signet of locusts for another well?

Thanks in advance for your help

Today we had TWO “daily mist camp capturers” achievements under the daily achievements. If you finish your daily camp capturer and try to open your achievements panel your game will FREEZE. So don’t open your achievement panel if you wvw!

The basic build setup is this:
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-k;7U0;9;9;0T;36A;9-5o0;9;0m-knF6;55VAWFXKYO3V_-o-G-2i;9;9;9;9;3kkkkkkW
The missing stuff is up to personal preference. If you want to mix in more defense or go pure glass is your choice

We have a guy on our server who is in the 900s. Not sure who is the highest. Would be cool if they added this to the leaderboards (hint hint )

With the recent changes to the borderlands that make it impossible to treb Bay from Garrison, do you think they should do they same with Red Keep in EB?
This is the only place in EB that can directly and safely treb Stone Mist outer wall. This gives Red an unfair advantage in pressuring stone mist and makes it difficult for Blue or Green to hold SMC. Blue and Green have to build trebs in the nearby towers, where they can be easily countered by trebs on SMC floor 3 or by taking the tower.
Is this working as intended?

1) REWARDS This is so important and should be the focus of the pvp team. A great example is the fact that only rewards are skins, and to get those most of the time pvpers have to go to pve.
2) Tournaments and matchmaking. Can we expect to see ATs and MATs like in gw1? Improvements to solo queue match making (such as not letting 5v4 games start).
3) Game modes. What game modes are currently being tested? A ptr for these before they get implemented.

For myself these would be:

1) Dungeons – specifically fractals. Why is there still a hard cap? Class balance: guardians, mesmers and warriors are far more useful than other classes (with a couple exceptions). Progress on dungeon and boss mechanic revamps and new fractal design/rebalancing.

2) Guilds. Guild halls, guild alliances like in gw1, added functionality.

3) Living story and permanent content. Where is it all headed? How much developer time is being spent on adding new permanent content?

Necros and staff eles are both extremely useful in large zergs. Mesmers are also useful although most organized groups only run a couple of them. For havoc squads, I would say necros are less useful than eles (running dagger/dagger or scepter/dagger) or mesmers.

I think it’s a good thing. If they were too kitten looking then everyone would look like clones like they did in gw1 with the obsidian armor.

Each individual damage tick will take into account any buffs at the moment of inflicting damage, not when the skill was cast.

Why are there no in-game announcements? I just got screwed out of thousands of wxp because I haven’t been to the wvw subforums in the past week. Updates like this should be accessible from the long-in screen.
Not only for updates, but other things like pvp tournies and developer live-streams. I’m sure these would get much higher viewership if everyone in the game was aware of their existence, not just the small portion of people actively browsing every subforum or following on facebook and twitter.

ProVeN.8423:

They did, well… at least if you’re reading these forums accurately.

There is a sticky up here.

So people who don’t visit the forums or don’t visit the wvw subforum on a regular basis are out of the loop? How is that fair?