Guild Wars 2

it’s true that largely not giving a kitten about comp as long as everyone has damage bleeding from their eyes makes it easier to group up, but i am not sure this is entirely a good thing.

Regardless.

The raids are intentionally built to require careful thought on group composition. It is deliberate, it was always going to be this way, there was always going to be waiting to make a proper group.

Would it really lead to more diversity ?
Once people figure out the optimal* number of players in each role, I doubt you will see much, if any, variation from that. So no increased diversity there.

pretty much by definition it will be increased diversity:

All Damage Builds Team

versus

Mixed Builds Team

available slots for non-zerker build currently: 0 (see also: Charity)
available slots for non-zerker build in future meta: Some!

‘any’ is better than ‘none’ no matter how elitist or restrictive it is

the meta for the raids might end up totally different from the meta for the rest of the game. however, we can be pretty sure that unless anet totally screwed the pooch there’s going to be more in it than damage builds.

zerker meta:
damage builds: ok
not damage builds: not ok

not zerker meta:
damage builds: ok
not damage builds: have a place

the point is that not-damage builds will have a place in the meta. this is an improvement for people who prefer not-damage builds, regardless of how much elitism will be involved in raids.

we’re all aware that the zerker meta was about clearance time, although tbh i think thats way overstated by people. part of the zerker meta for fractals/dungeons is various stacking tricks and places to stand that permit zerker builds to breeze through fights that would otherwise be tougher for them.

– People need to take a defensive stat on their gear.

i dont think this is possible. taking vitality or toughness in place of a damage stat will make you, what, 30% tougher at most? that’s easily within the margin of error for a fight. don’t screw up a dodge and you won’t need vitality. or just don’t get that close.

IMO the real problem is that damage is probably too important. fights where damage is less important would help. i.e. the part in ascalonian catacombs where a bunch of graveling mounds spawn when you’re collecting soul essence. damage makes that a breeze, you splatter all the gravelings/mounds before they can build up #s. That sort of fight should have been more dependent on control and survivability than damage.

one of the few things theyved explicitly shown off with raids is a fight where you’re trapped on a platform with a boss, you have to not die to it while killing a wall keeping you on the platform. healing will always be relevant in that.

apart from that you are pre judging druid pretty hard. remember its not just ‘druid rangers’ but the results that new druid utilities and elites will have on current ranger builds.

for example glyph of empowerment will probably fit into the zerk meta pretty easily as is and would be stackable with frost spirit

glyph of unity gives a ranger some very impressive zerker facetanking ability too and has a lot of synergy with healing (but limited synergy with mitigation)

why do you think a ranger could not be an off-healer?

zealots equipment exist, as does celestial.

staff/bow or staff/sword/x are totally plausible builds

the druid stuff is more than just heals.

for example a tanky melee ranger with the new elite – the one that channels damage you take into all nearby linked enemies – could do potentially ruinous amounts of damage.

the glyph skills have a great deal of utility not necessarily related to healing

you can combine the druid specialization tree into existing builds as well

Celestial sounds much like some hocus pocus healin crystal crap you’d hear about from some new age healers

That’s unsurprising, since Druidic imagery heavily influenced new age stuff.

wherever the meta settles, stricter or not, it’s going to be more in favor of diverse builds than the zerk meta. i mean, that’s the whole point. there’ll be a place for tougher builds, maybe even bunkers.

….exploits are usually the most efficient way to play a game. if they wern’t more efficient, they wouldn’t be exploits… they’d just be bugs.

not that zerker errything is an exploit.

cant the druid just swap to sword or longbow

celestial druid can be a thing like celestial ele is

just because you are druid spec doesnt mean you can’t do damage

it’s true, combo fields are cancerous

i’d like some pets that execute f2 faster than a million years

maybe they should make dodging into walls just not work

a balanced game is objectively good

ideally, people should never feel that one choice is objectively better than others.

nerfs are good for you. embrace the nerf. let the nerf into your heart

you are generalizing the term gear grind too much.

fractal agony is gear grind, since you need to grind agony resistance to not die to agony in higher tier fractals. in effect, fractals are gear gated by grinding fractals.

introducing new content where glass cannon builds have it tough isn’t forcing grind, it’s just changing the meta. you’ll be fine with exotics if it comes to that.

in any case, you don’t need to alter all your armor to change your build. you can equip 1 or 2 gear pieces with completely defensive stats (like +tough +vitality) to reduce your damage and increase your survivability a little.

or easiest of all just change one of your traits to a defensive one

there are videos of people afk auto attacking bosses like lupicus to death in cleric gear with things like heal signet or signet of restoration. it takes hours. how is that more skillful than learning a boss’ animations to know when to dodge/block? but by all means continue to get bent out of shape because some people are able to play the game better and more efficiently than others.

since speed in clearing content directly increases rewards, balancing dps vs other roles has always been a struggle in MMORPGs.

the struggle in gw2 is that several core mechanics (namely dodging) contribute to make glass cannons way more survivable than in many other games, and a glass cannon who knows the content will be more survivable than a tank build who doesn’t.

there’s also a lot of combat where dps straight up equals survivability, since enemies come at a fixed rate and and killing them asap means they don’t get to do anything. very notable in dungeons.

Moving on to tanks…. No aggro meter in GW2 so lets just stop right there.

the example encounter they talked about in raids is in the trailer.

the raid team needs to break a wall, while also stopping a boss from killing them.

tanky and healy players concentrate on tanking the boss, while dpszerkers concentrate on breaking the wall.

that is how tanky can be rewarded in raids.

druids dont heal people near them, they heal people in their autoattack beam or next to the target their attacking, or in an aoe, or they convert projectiles into heals.

Shen Slayer.3058:

Zalladi.4652:

My concern with the healing though, is how would a Druid get credit for an event/kills/loot if they are solely focused on healing others?

This is especially crucial for WvW fights as an example – those on the Druid would receive significantly less credit for doing more work.

Yep….this is not going to work. Why would anybody want to be a healer when they can’t tag for loot. WTH was Anet smoking when they thought of this.

druid won’t have a lot of problems tagging, except maybe when zerged by enemies. At least a couple of the staff abilities do attacking and healing at the same time, including the autoattack.

don’t you have to have big guilds and parties and such to go from the SOFT map cap to the HARD map cap?

better coordinated servers actually can bring more people to a teq fight…

That does not require individual skill.

jumping waves & sticking with your group while maximizing your damage does require skill. I haven’t been at a Tequatl event where I couldn’t have done better, so clearly skill is involved.

awesome siege @ Stonemist last night. Many players and much siege died on both sides day. Extended battle that wasn’t too locked down with siege but wasn’t just bumrushes either. Final victory only came after SF split up and attacked Kaineng’s side of EB and SM simultaneously. Pretty much everything WvW is about!

PS Kaineng might be winning by a lot but the fights have been awesome so far.

Honestly so much of Kaineng’s score comes from night crew that they are probably missing out on the good fights xD

Mostly, you need to zoom your camera in close to your character. Then you can see the clouds peeking through the lcouds.

Oh come on, thief invisibility is way more fako nonsense than blocking. It’s pointless anyway, it’s an arbitrary RPG simulation. Thief stealth isn’t suppose to represent a cloaking device any more than a blocking Warrior represents just holding your shield up.

So you drop them at your feet – how does a thief simultaneously avoid these AoE’s and get close to you to actually do damage? Oh wait, they don’t – that’s why when a thief stealths around me, I drop AoE at my feet and watch them come out of stealth with less HP then they went in with (and poison, and weakness) .

This counters bad play, not thieves. It doesn’t matter what class they are if they kitten into strong, clearly marked AOEs. No conceivable change to stealth or thieves would affect this.

If you failed to kill a Thief, you failed to win a fight, therefore you don’t deserve a reward.

if the other guy (the thief in this example) reaches the conclusion that he can’t win the fight and runs away, you won the fight. you just don’t get rewards if you don’t kill them.

re: other posters, I agree that warriors are too good at running away too. Most of their mobility skills probably need a Ride-the-Lightning like mechanic where cooldowns are double if they do not hit something.

But most classes in the game have limited ability to escape, and only the thief can actively pick and choose what they want to fight. As opposed to everyone else, who needs

I understand that people want to change it, but the question I have is – what is the problem? What needs to be balanced?

essentially, in WvW that permastealth equates to infinite ability to choose engagements and/or to disengage

coupled with the wide availability of stealth

a good thief won’t win every fight but they have no reason to ever die (which, for example, deprives other players of the rewards for winning a fight.)

oh that explains that

that is a stupid bug xD

[QUOTE]I wonder if Mr. Carver has EVER used his dev privileges to jump in as HOD world player and face IOJ for a week and seriously thinks that is fun.
[/QUOTE]
maybe if SF and HoD ganged up on IoJ rather than bashing eachothers borderlands we’d be better off. :P

Supposedly, there is a revive hack in a cheat program, but it seems more likely that some Skale got killed by his bouncy daggers outside your immediate view.

Human Male Ranger

My Falconers gloves are clipping rather noticably with my Invaders Rawhide Vest. Or rather, just the left one is. (Weird :o)

The helmet, chest, legs, and shoulders are Exotic Lvl 80 Invaders Rawhide Medium from WvW, obtained with badges and gold. The gloves and boots are transmuted Falconer’s human cultural armor, obtained from the human tier 2 cultural armor merchant in Divinity’s Reach.

Number 12 stands a chance against number 5?

i wish people would stop saying things like this, because that’s not how the matchups work.

it would be 2v9v12 or some such configuration. WvW is 1v1v1 for a reason. theoretically advantages the stronger server achieves should be limited by the weaker servers ganging up on it. For some reason this rarely happens. shrug

Dragonite Ore, Account Bound (Refines into dragonite ingots, Artifice/Huntsman/Weaponsmith 450) – Comes from Temple chests in Orr, Megabosses, and Keeps and Castles in WvW.

Empyreal Fragments, Account Bound (Refines into Empyreal Stars, Artifice/Huntsman/Weaponsmith 450) – Comes from dungeons, mini-dungeons, jumping puzzles and camps/towers in WvW.

I’m worried about this, it implies that these materials are gained by capturing targets in WvW. Does this mean that if I invest 15-20 minutes in an epic tower defence that ultimately fails, like I just did, the attackers will get ascended mats and I won’t? :|

The wording’s unclear, maybe it’s just from any tower/camp/keep/castle related event? Would love clarification.

source – http://dulfy.net/2013/08/30/gw2-account-magic-find-ascended-crafting-and-legendary-weapons-revamp-preview/

fun fight @ Quentin Lake today, repelled 3 rushes, one by the skin of our teeth... finally succumbed after half our siege got trebbed

I loved you, superior ballista *cries*

So the majority, the PVEers suffer continual skill nerfs and fidldling about while you pander to the incesant PVP QQ?

this has been a complaint in every system with pvp/pve equivalent skills. it rarely has grounding in fact, as imbalanced skills are usually flat imbalanced regardless of context

i still remember people complaining in champions online about ‘PVP skill nerfs’ when those same skills were letting people solo dungeons. :P

You can not balance PvE and PvP under the same skills. It will not work. Your team needs to stop thinking “ep1c e-sporrtzzz xD” and start thinking “How can we provide genuine balance between classes and present the transition between game types as best as we can?”
Listen to your players. I do both High-end PvE and I’m a WvW commander, currently building a WvW guild on my server. Sure, I’m not the best, but I understand the implications of your current stance on balance, better than most.

epiiic eeesports when pvp is seperate? sPvP is insulated from PvE/WvW balance.

so how does that make sense?

the only implementation of wvw where 15 could beat 100 on ppt terms is one where the maps narrow to Thermopylae-style passes, even if AOE limits are removed.

even assuming you could consistently beat 100 guys in a fight, they could just send 30-50 guys after you and send the rest to cap

good 15 man Guild Group (and we are good) will lose to a bad 100 man zerg every kitten time. I guarantee it.

so?

i mean look at the odds. :P

‘things will be the same even though incentives are different’

okay

to my knowledge they have not announced any changes at all to legendaries other than ascended status and stat switching.

there’s no reason to think they are changing

the point of the new system is Ascended crafting. In contrast, Legendaries are all about the mystic forge…

p.s. oh and precursor crafting shrug

With all due respect, Devon, I believe time dilation “can” be made to work with the GW2 combat system – I seriously doubt there’s no server-side time ticks at all (even if it’s just 10ms or 1ms), that’s just not how programming (in a simulation) works. The question is, how small are those ticks, and how would you present the slowdown of time to the client. As well as what happens with the points acquired. … And the points thing is really a big issue, because I can see no way this won’t get abused. :-/

it’s not a question of tech, it’s a question of sense and gameplay

time dilation doesn’t matter much to gameplay in EVE’s 1Hz deterministic system. but in GW2, noone would land any big hits because you would have all the time in the world to dodge.

it would also add a lot of down time and frustration. imagine someone finishing you off at 1/3 speed, it’s like the game itself is teabagging you

Are you joking? 7 vs 9 is normally a slaughter. How can you expect 12 vs 6 not to be?

well there are some incentives working in the league system that wern’t there before

say the #1 and #2 servers are in a league with the #12 server. if #1 goes after #12 to get some PPT, #2 has every incentive to cap #1’s undefended territory and/or screw over #1s assault attempt on #12’s keep. #1 and #2 are much more likely to keep their attention on the threats to their league standing rather than they were before.

it’s probably been discussed and rejected a hundred times but: buff NPCs scaling with population?

hooray xD

would prefer a button but a one time will do

the eternal battlegrounds jumping puzzle is designed for griefing and nonsense, what with the boulder traps, spike traps, vicious monster traps, blind turns, narrow walkways, fire traps, other spike traps, and so on and so forth.

i mean… xD

you’re lucky if its only the ENEMY team trying to kill you

you go over 5 targets in AOEs in PVE quite easily

you arn’t making a protest

you’re throwing a tantrum

there is a difference

dear GvGers

this is why noone likes you

stop it.

Nothing wrong with food in WvW, don’t like diverse builds go SPvP, don’t like +40 duration, run -40 duration.
It’s not hard to use food. I pop food during a fight ALL THE TIME. Press I (default inventory) double click desired foods. Like 1-2 seconds if that.

haha condi food is not diversity its purely wealth and annoyance

+-40 condi duration is better than runesets, its better than traitlines, it’s just nuts

just remove condi food and compensate everyone who has some

the food meta is honestly the worst part, +40 and -40 just from food is awful

i agree that celestial needs compensation or refund on the basis of players having chosen it because it had MF. It’s the right thing to do.

Celestial builds do work btw, it’s just that going FULL celestial generally has problems. All celestial trinkets + focused armor or all celestial armor + focused trinkets gives a little more oomph. Celestial has pretty good +crit damage, mind.

Need options to turn this on/off for masterworks and rares at the least.

[QUOTE]3. Player characters should occupy 3D space, which blocks others
- just like in GW1
- this would allow body blocking
- no possibility to be inside enemy or allied character model[/quote]
Hahaha that would lag so hard.

It is objectively good for skills to be the same in WvW as they are in PVE. The entire idea is that your character is entirely transferable. A good build will do fine in both settings. This makes WvW more accessible to the general populace… and helps keep the PVE and WvW communities together… which is a good thing!

Pretty much the only thing that seems fine in PvE but has trouble in WvW is thief stealth. But w/e.

Honestly offhand I cant think of what a WvW-focused skill would be. Changes to banners so people carried them around as buffbots/leaders? Like if you are carrying a banner, people running toward you have improved move speed. That’s the only thing that comes to mind.

Or perhaps skills that revolve around buffing or controlling guards/mercenaries…. Temporary environmental weapons? I don’t know.

New thief elite, “Scale Walls” ;p