Guild Wars 2

After what feels like an absolute age, Arena Net support finally refunded me the Gems used to make the failed purchase so I could re-buy the item.

I’m still pretty annoyed by how long such a simple thing took to sort out, but at least they got around to it eventually.

I have no friggin’ idea how you’d make this game ‘stronger’ without changing fundamental basics which are unrealistic…

It’s a difficult situation. A lot of people pine for the old days of GW1 (myself included) but those days are gone and GW2 does have it’s charms. It’s a really good game for what it’s worth. I guess one of the main things I miss about the ‘old’ game was the need for synergy to achieve kills.

People have argued that this exists on some level already and others have argued that isn’t the case, or that the synergistic play is incredibly shallow. I can see both sides… Sure you can work with someone else to push a kill through, but at the same time this is somewhat diminished when someone can get a kill solo.

This is just one issue granted but in a nutshell: Neither method matters as long as the same thing is achieved.

What I think would be a great start to fixing the issues people have is to give more options for custom arenas. Allow players/owners to do things like reduce/increase damage by certain percentages. Allow them to adjust how many points killing awards their team. Even how many points holding a point gives.

This way players can ‘make’ their own deathmatches (by making capping points matter a lot less than killing players). They can see if reducing overall damage by 50% really forces people to coordinate kills and reap the benefits of more synergistic combat.

Instead of players making posts about what ifs’ and if only’s, they could just grab some like-minded friends and go test those theories to a certain degree and Arena Net could see the results. I think that would be pretty awesome…

I’d rather they focused on making what we have now really good, for everyone. Then start adding more modes of play. I don’t see a point in adding new modes of play when the core pvp game is slightly underwhelming at the moment.

You’ll just have more places to be annoyed in, but ‘still’ be annoyed…

Don’t think the game is too far way from being ‘fun’ at the core tbh. You know, the subtle things that happen in a fight. The thought processes and the visible decisions people make etc. Just a few things pushed here and there to make that stuff more obvious and chess-like, then they can work on solid balance and adding textural quality to PvP.

From GW2 Customer Support:

This message has a replacement item for you (or another character on your account). If the items belong to another character, please log in with that character to accept. Enjoy!

- 1 vial of liquid karma

- 6 drops of liquid karma

Is this a friggin’ joke? Is this how you’ve decided to ‘fix’ the fact that I so painfully obviously bought a second ’Braham’s Heavy Armor Skin’ in your store and received nothing for it? (I’m looking at the purchase history in game myself, right on the first page on the black lion trade broker, and see absolutely nothing for it). A purchase to failed item delivery path that is so easily tracked, that I’ve explained several times already, in several different places, to different people.

What the hell are you people even doing!? It’s been almost 3 weeks! Are you telling me it takes 3 weeks to look at the purchase and usage history of an item that’s account bound and utterly untradeable? 3 weeks?

Yet your support team has failed to even offer up anything more useful than a copy-pasted mail asking for ‘information’. I’ve filled this out. What have you done? Sent me some karma bottles…

Honestly I am utterly disgusted by this behaviour. Your support team is a joke. On what planet do you think this terrible support is even remotely acceptable?

It truly saddens me that the Arena Net support system I used to praise to anyone who would listen, after playing the first game has devolved into this sorry excuse. The apple has literally been ‘booted’ away from the tree so far it’s lineage is completely unrecognisable…

Millions of copies sold to people who don’t want to PvP?

The game was sold on a progressive, next gen PvE experience, not on PvP. So in essence they actually delivered this… Just doesn’t help anyone who wants to PvP. I mean honestly…
What did you expect from a game that has heavy stealth/target breaking on some classes? Stealth has been a cancer to almost all PvP games forever. The fact that the ‘developers of Guild Wars 1’ added it, along with generic critical damage on skills spoke volumes…

True, but that’s like saying…

“If your team plays the perfect game, you all don’t need to heal”.

Also true. Also unrealistic… Especially in an environment with retaliation and AoE on points. Unless fighting off-point is a ’thing ’ now.

Lyssa runes on their own are obviously not as good as Shouts+Soldier Runes with potentially Pure of Voice. The point is that a triple med build with 2 cleanses is still not enough condi cleanse these days. Lyssa runes give up some damage for an extra condi-cleanse and buffs to help you stay in the fight. Of course if you get corrupted… Yeah, but I definitely fair better against spam Necro’s with Lyssa.

Staff is cool for team fights, but on mobile maps, you’re a lot weaker without people next to you. It’s a lot easier to control a staff guardian off a point than if he wielded a hammer…. Still, that’s a bunker perspective.

From a DPS PoV it’s pretty good, although I reckon the scepter/XXX combo is just so good. DPS or Bunker, It’s very hard to give up and you can’t really rely on range weapons to DPS/burst. As to GS, it’s very telegraphed and you can easily kill yourself against retaliate with WW, especially at a mid-fight hitting multiple targets. Pushing far points can also be a pain if you run into a control bunker. Mace/Sword or hammer (sceptre/focus alt) are just better than GS in a fight like that imo.

Nice vid. I get what you mean about DPS guards’. Ever since the condi meta I just had more trouble than I wanted running a bunker in spite of how important the role is, so I switched to running Silven’s Mace medi spike. 3k auto hits on light armour and AoE fire proc’s are just delicious!

Really like the idea of running high virtues for the Resolve buff and condi cleanse with a hybrid DPS build.

@ Silv:

If you’re having some trouble against really heavy condi-spam, you can make another armour set with Lyssa runes. At match start, you can switch sets if you’re sure the other side is going to be heavy condi spam. It’s pretty strong against them.

The damage loss isn’t really that big a deal going from Scholars/Ogre since damage stat variance isn’t as extreme in Tpvp. I personally prefer Ogre these days though. Too much attrition damage normally drops you off the benefit of rune 6, and I just prefer base damage increases over crit damage in general.

I think there’s some misconception here…

It’s not that players as a whole don’t want to try different things here and there to cope with the trash builds, it’s just that because balance is so out of it, it becomes a disconcerted effort.

Why make such Herculean effort in an undernourished environment when the developers can simply course-correct the direction they pushed towards in the first place? Top players have already proved they can beat teams that employ these unsavoury elements, but a lot of them have also remarked at how distasteful the experience is, which is the point.

Understand, not a lot is needed to make things more enjoyable. These trash builds don’t even need to die in my opinion. They just need to be weakened enough to bring them in line with others.

Judging by Mr. Sharp’s post, they unequivocally ‘get’ that we need more options and viability (not just pre-game choices, but also mid-game for that matter). At the same when trying to get things ‘right’, iteration is king…

By all means make bold changes and try cool new things, keep the meta shifting. The key is that it needs to remain in flux, even if it’s incredibly subtle. Leaving things stagnant for Pax may not have been the best decision. Especially when the current environment is so potentially damaging to the game.

Ryan.9387:

The highest dps class is axe axe warrior. Thieves are second but due to their incapability to stack might and vulnerability warriors win the dps fight.

Quoted for emphasis. All this talk of 100 blades? Lol…

The thing is… Before they can truly fix anything, Arena Net needs to decide once and for all what GW2 PvP ‘is’…

Is it a free for all, solo commando type PvP game (old school FPS for example) or is it a ‘team’ game, where you balance collective weaknesses… Okay that probably sounds weird “Of course it’s a team game” right? Well that’s the thing, I don’t think it’s so simple.

Example, Rock Paper Scissors (RPS) is a very good system for what it does. It offers balance by way of “the enemy of my enemy is my b****”. Starcraft, Total War etc…

It’s easy to apply RPS to GW2 if you do so by way of build vs build as that’s the level where it works, but as soon as you throw people together and look at possible team synergies, of varying sizes to make it worse, it starts to break down.

What can a Stun lock War + an SD thief do? How about a Stun Lock War with a bunker Guard? Necro? How do you even begin to quantify data like that? Do you even try it with RPS? Do you even bother at all in the first place?

I don’t know how best to look at the situation on a core level but simplification may be where it’s at. For example simply balancing around what/how many options a team has at any given moment to help them win a fight, might indeed work.

Or it could be something else. Like Aza’s breakdown is a good example of a simplification that functions at a higher level. A pillar of balance centred around core combat themes.

Either way, that primary question needs to be answered first. What is your balance target?

GW1 conditions were balanced most of the time simply because to get anything truly oppressive out of them, almost the entire team needed to be built around the concept. You needed to coordinate to get those condi’s to stick (divert the Draw/Foul Feast, D Shot the LoD keeping everyone up etc.). Especially since Energy as a resource meant that if you just spammed away, you’d eventually run out of juice and lose. Another layer finesse.

When people pulled off those delta force coordination condi’ builds, they worked incredibly well (crip slash War condi meta was really strong). However most of the time, it could ‘still’ be beaten by a solid balanced build, as most maps allowed you to simply split on them (reducing the team condi synergy) and kill their lord, winning the match.

This is kinda’ what GW2 lacks and why GW1 PvP was so good… Most of the time when some FoTM, bs gimmick build was flying around, unless it was insanely broken, a well played balanced team still had strong options to beat it. They just needed to work out ‘how’. Since the damage wasn’t ridiculous and the pace was chess-like considerate, the best teams could even suss a build-counter, same game.

If we can get to a place where there are always viable counters for a ‘typical balanced team’ to use, the game will be in a very good place.

Well I hope now that it has somewhat of a spot-light on it, we’ll get some fixes soon. I’ve been wanting to apply the armour skin to my celestial set for about a week already!

Frantically updating support ticket…

Adding reference number: 130808-000067

How sad do you have to be to continually insult another person for not being amazing at a second language? At what point do you become utterly despicable trash? Discuss!

Edit, on topic:

The funniest thing is, Anet is only letting these builds persist because of a desire to retain consistency throughout a tournament. To feed some desire to be an e-sport.

Thing is, any potential new ‘competitive’ player (attracted by the tournament spectacle) that sees the game in it’s current kitten -poor rng, AOE Spam, AI dominated state, won’t even think about touching it in the first place. Irony much?

Still not a response so far. It’s quite disappointing to be honest. I assumed it wouldn’t take this long as all the information is there to see, even at a glance.

These items (armour skins) can not be traded, so they can only be used or destroyed. You’d think someone would have responded to that by now right? Yeah…

My theory is that Anet are working on a game-wide fix and would rather do that than fix the issues individually. Even if that’s the case, it’s pretty sad that they haven’t responded, their support used to be so good in the original game…

I’ll give it another day and I’ll try and contact them again.

Regards,

A Jaded, trust maligned, utterly disappointed gamer.

Lordrosicky.5813:

The only thing keeping that burst in check is necros and s/d thief. You remove that and I dread to think about another 7 months of a mesmer/ele/guardian meta.

The thing is people EXPECT to be dominant on their mesmer and ele because they always have been dominant and overpowered. Now necro is viable people cry about it. I dont think it is because necro is OP. I think it is just better than it was. You can still kill a necro easily.

Alot of the known players became known because they played mesmer and ele. As they were the best classes for a long long time. So there is a bias from the known players towards expecting these classes to be dominant. Whilst nobody with legitamacy speaks up for necro or other “newer” classes.

Why do you think people want it removed? I don’t think that’s what people are saying. It’s more it needs to be toned down. Leaving the build as oppressive as it is isn’t really a problem in my opinion. I just think it kills too quickly, making it comparable to DPS/ non-extreme burst builds.

Keep all the skills as they are but reduce the condition damage amulets by about 10-20%, limit Mark and Well stacking by some arbitrary value and I think it would be fine.

I saw someone mention something like force everyone in TPvP to use only celestial amulets to reduce the crazy extremes of some builds. As crazy as it sounds, that might actually work.

I don’t think Necro is too bad, but it needs some subtle changes to make it a bit harder to play. It just feels like you don’t have to work very hard to get a lot out of it, which is just wrong. I feel it’s more conditions in general than actually the necros themselves. Since they’re just the best at it.

Seems my own issues has been escalated. Hopefully they’ll look at my gem purchase history and figure our that my purchased armour set vanished into thin air…

Same here. I lost one of the new sets of armour skins that I paid good money for because of this. I mean I like Anet a lot and spend more than my average share on gems to support them, but to lose ‘real’ money because of this and not have them even say anything really makes we not want to bother any more…

I just really hope my ticket gets replied to…

I guess this will encourage teams to run a more balanced team-build for all rotation maps, rather than building around the map itself.

Doesn’t seem so bad tbh. Guess we’ll see…

Oh well. Sucks to be a working EU player that’s for sure…

I quite like Prot Strike the way it is now. It hits really hard at the moment, while also blocking an attack. If you could just release the AOE damage whenever you want it would probably come with a damage nerf.

Sure it can be countered by the enemy not doing any attacks, but then… They’re not doing any attacks, which is good either way. Besides with all the passive AOE damage and AI damage going on these days, I’ve never seen this ‘not’ go off in the heat of combat.

If Glacial Heart proc’ed on all weapon crits, it would be kinda amazing. Imagine Smite landing most of it’s damage, with the chill covered by the eventual burning…

Sword is as much a defensive weapon as it is offensive. I think taking off the short CD, AoE, teleport blind would be a very bad idea for the weapon…

Conditions are just annoying anyway. Why would you even want more when we already have the strongest condition in game? It’s just Guild Wars 1 Hexes/conditions all over again. They’re either too good or terrible and thus classes based around them get hammered by Anet’s inability to balance them…

Yeah, need to be careful what you wish for…

It’s a real shame things came to this. Both teams played well. It also seems both sides have a decent case for dispute…

On one side tournament rules should simply NEVER be changed mid-way. It’s pretty disgusting that this happened in the first placed, irrespective of whether or not the teams were told prior to the match. Rules are in place to prevent situations like this… Just makes the whole thing incredibly questionable.

On the flip-side though, one team straight up won the fight. That on it’s own is incredibly compelling. They straight-up won. Sure, tactically the maps aren’t balanced and as luck would have it, map-favor might have gone this way and that, one team being fatigued by hours of play while the other was fresh etc., but there’s still no disputing the simple fact that one team did in fact ‘win’.

So here you we are at the end of all this with bitterness and lots of “…but if this was like that, XY would have happened differently…”

So what I don’t understand is why the TO doesn’t just say. “Okay, guys. Want to settle this? How about a decisive rematch?” One with the correct rules (whatever those end up being), and one with both teams fresh, and map choices known well ahead of time, and no deviations in team build.

Can’t say anyone could really dispute the out-come of that fight, it would solve all this madness, and would probably be the most watched match of the entire tournament…

That’s how I’d settle this. Play again and prove beyond doubt your team is the winner. While probably also being the most anticipated match in the history of the game….