Guild Wars 2

Over on the http://www.guildwarsinsider.com/ website, some of the top stories are about things like “Reaper’s Rumble,” and “Lunatic Inquisition,” and the “Mad Realm,” from which you can enter one (or both?) of these.

What is all of this stuff? I can’t find anything about any of it anywhere, such as the simple question… what is the Mad Realm, where do you go to get there, etc.

Any help?

I have the same problem and I DO NOT use the mobile authenticator. I have also had all appropriate ports forwarded almost since launch with no problems whatsoever until the recent patch.

Since the patch last night, I have seen many reports of lag in the map chat and have personally been dropped several times. Just now, I was trying to do the Shelter’s Gate event and had the game “lag out” (The entire world and my skills stop functioning apart from my own movement for several seconds) 7 – 10 time over the course of the 5 minute event before it finally just dropped me at the end.

If a class is too strong, it needs to be nerfed. Buffing it along with those nerfs is absurd on the face of it, because it, well, means it wasn’t really nerfed. I don’t understand how people can sincerely call for buffs along with nerfs when the intention of a nerf is to make the class weaker in some regard.

Crossfire was never overpowered. It barely keeps up with other classes’ DPS.

I never really had FOV problems, but I must say it feels like I am now. The FOV definitely feels smaller after the patch.

leprekan.7248:

arcaneclarity.5283:

leprekan.7248:

I have a level 80 ranger … before people wonder, the shortbow NEEDED a nerf.

Probably 90% of ALL bots are RANGERS using SHORTBOW. Why do you think that is? There are literally PACKS of them running in every zone. Why? Because it was TOO GOOD. When it is so good that it becomes the bot standard you had better expect the balance bat to fall your way.

Be honest … DPS wise you could easily get away with a Bear and skill 1 (auto attack) and do nothing else and down almost anything. Oh no we might have to work 2-5 into the rotation now. Anyone crying about a nerf should be forced to play an Ele for a month for perspective.

Because the Ranger is the only profession with a permanent pet and the short bow is the only viable Ranger weapon and it is a ranged weapon. It has absolutely nothing to do with it being overpowered.

I know it isn’t something you want to do but … I did say “be honest”. Gold sellers are in it to make REAL LIFE MONEY. There is a reason they were choosing the ranger. Any class can be used to bot (pet or no pet). The Ranger was just too good to pass up … like it or not. No amount of spin will get you out of that logic trap. Sorry, if that helps any

I’m sorry, but I honestly don’t think I’ve seen a single Ranger bot. That isn’t to say they don’t exist – enough people talk about them that they obviously do – but as for me, of all of the dozens or more bot I’ve seen, the vast, vast, vast majority have been guardians. Why? Maybe survivability, I don’t know. In any case, it’s simply nonsense that Rangers somehow have some kind of monopoly on botting.

Burner.1643:

Thanks for the disabled camera smooth, and the increased distance.
So much better.

Increased distance? I’ve found my FOV has decreased – or at least I think it has. It certainly feels like it has, and its making it very hard to play the game.

I’m not blaming it on DR precisely. Moreso, I’m just noting that after the patch I’m not getting any loot from DEs at all. I’ve done a few of them at this point and I think I may have gotten 4 or 5 drops over all of them.

The patch is supposed to have relaxed the DR on loot and events, but my experience has been something very, very different.

I’m not a farmer. Never have been. I think I farmed once when the TP was briefly down one night (after the DR system was added) to get some mats for crafting level 30 gear. I mainly play for zone completion and really only do events if I happen to run through them. I never ran into DR before, and always got tons of loot from dynamic events, regardless of how many I did in a short time.

After logging into the game after the 10/7 patch, I am getting virtually no loot in DEs, even the first one I did. Anyone else experiencing this kind of thing?

At least, some of them. On occasion, they’ll send along a copper with their email. I have reported the emails and have hit the return to sender button, but I can’t delete the email without taking the copper first – something I don’t want to do.

If I were to play a human Durman Priory character, would the Priory stuff be the same as, say, a Norn Priory character? Or, would the Priory specific material be different just as the first 30 levels or so worth of racial stuff is different?

It seems that the minor sigil of luck is not working as of the recent patch. It is supposed to give +.2% magic find per kill, up to 25 stacks, ending on down. Previously, an icon displayed showing how many stacks of this boon were present on the character. As of today, there is not one regardless of how many kills I achieve.

A second sigil from my water weapon, giving +5 condition damage per kill, seems to be working.

Update: I had a hunch, so I allowed a mob to down me to clear the condition damage boon from some previous water combat, and upon getting up and killing the mob, I can now stack the luck.

Therefore, it seems that one of two things are happening. Either

A) Only one boon icon is being displayed, but both sigils are applying their benefits.

or

B) Only one such sigil can apply its effect at any time, and the first to apply gets it until it is cleared.

Devildoc.6721:

Blacklight.2871:

I don’t find the stories all that bad. I’m OK with the presentation, dialogue and voice acting for the most part. However, I don’t find them all that engaging. I never really feel invested in them and always play through them as kind of a detached observer. This is because the stories seem to be written in a very PG manner, which is not something that is generally going to command my attention. They don’t grab me by the throat and drag me into them, which would be my preference.

For instance, my favorite story from Guild Wars was about Lady Althea, primarily what happened after the Searing. And it’s not because I enjoyed but because it kicked me in the gut and made me angry. I still hold a weird grudge against the charr because of it, but that’s because the story bit deep. I don’t find the ones in GW2 are capable of evoking the same level of emotion, so are far more forgettable. Years and years later, I still remember Lady Althea.

Somethng I mentioned back in Beta was that characters in Tyria don’t swear, and that always strikes me as odd when we’re talking about any kind of fiction. You show me an entire town where not one person ever swears in it.

It simply does not exist.

They might not swear using the words WE recognize as swearing, but in every language, every culture, there are “curse words” devised for the same purposes (expressing pain or anger/frustration/stress) that have the same taboo in their culture as any word replaced by “kitten” on these forums.

It seems… very unrealistic and unimmersive for Tyrians not to have such words or expressions.

The closest I’ve heard was “By Ogden’s Hammer! What savings!”

I’m fairly certain I’ve heard “kitten#8221; a few times.

My feedback:

Overall, I just found much of the personal story to be lacking in seriousness or cheesy. That isn’t to say all of it is. The Norn I’m doing with the Durmand Priory is actually engaging me and I think its overall decent enough.

The human I did with the Order of Whispers, on the other hand, is just bad at times. Here you have this ancient, secretive order who is in the shadows influencing kings and many of your interactions with other order members play out a lot more like Inspector Gadget than James Bond.

The human character creation choice is another example. My biggest regret is that I never found my parents.. ok, ok… or that I never found my sister’s body… cool cool… or that I never joined the circus. Wait, seriously? The circus? See the problem here? (As an aside, its also very anticlimactic how soon in the story and relatively easily these personal decision items are resolved).

I also tend to find a lot of the dialogue in the personal story to be fairly trite or cheesy or… maybe a good way to describe it would be to say it reminds me of a kids cartoon. I agree with the fellow who said the NPC ambient dialogue generally sounds more mature. Keep in mind, I’m not saying don’t have fun with it. You can have fun with it while still avoiding this problem. Just earlier I was listening to the Norn woman bemoan her potential mate hanging out with his Son of Svanir friends. It had that nice sense of humor, but it sounded like the kind of sentences real people would actually use.

Honestly, a lot of folks have complained about the voice acting. I think its fine. I think the problem is far, far more the lines these people were given to read. I hate to speak negatively of what I’m sure folks put a lot of work into, but you asked for feedback so here it is – and like I said, I do think a lot of the ambient dialogue is far better.

There’s also the kindof… “rushed” nature to some of the character development, and some development which just flat out doesn’t make sense. So, I help defend the garrison from centaurs and all of a sudden Logan Thackery and I are Bff and he’s asking me to do a whole bunch of important missions? It feels more rushed than the opening sequence of the Lost in Space movie. Or, the Hero of Shaemore who fought off the centaur hordes and did a series of other great acts is called with great urgency because… someone’s kid got lost? Really? It’s just completely contrived and not in the least believable.

I guess I could say, go ahead and watch through videos of the TOR personal story quests or whatnot. I know its the cliche thing to say or to point to, but they did a really good job and if you’d like to get a sense of what a lot of folks would be happier with, that’s a good example. For a good look at the balance in seriousness and humor, I’d say take a look at the Imperial Agent story. It certainly gets fairly dark in the later portions, but the start has a lot of a kind of classic “secret agenty” humor… hitting on women, doing somewhat unbelievable missions, etc., but while keeping it all believable.

The best way to describe it is to say that playing that story, I’m immersed and taking it in as though I was standing there, but in the stories I’ve done in this game so far I’m too often losing my suspension of disbelief as a particular line of dialogue stands out as silly.

One final note, and I hate to say it because its partly a matter of style or aesthetic choice, but the “two characters standing in front of a backdrop,” in my opinion, just exacerbates a lot of these problems. When I’m already having a hard time buying into something and I see two people who are supposed to be exchanging packages or arguing or sneaking around somewhere just standing there with blank stares, it only makes it worse. Again, check out the cutscenes in TOR. Even mediocre dialogue is saved in some of those because you see the characters actually doing what their dialogue suggests they are.

Idk. I can understand it on the one hand, but on the other hand I’ve seen an MMO go through multiple server problems, items going missing, etc. etc. and never once did anyone actually lose anything, so I have to ask why ANet can’t reach the same track record. I wasn’t even affected by this issue, but to me its really the one kind of thing thing that MMO companies absolutely cannot allow to happen.

I know other games have experienced this before, but I also know some have altogether avoided it so… I don’t know.

Gilandred.9870:

tolunart.2095:

I accept it, life is full of disappointments. As such things go, this is so minor as to be almost unnoticable.

And I don’t like football, so what happens during the Superbowl is irrelevant.

Life is full of people who choose to live with disappointment. Others, like me, prefer to take an active approach in making things better. Also, analogies are a time-honored tradition in forum posting, lol.

It’s also a terrible idea for customers to accept mediocrity from those they patronize, especially when its been demonstrated that their errors can be avoided – and especially when the errors are of such a immense variety.

Honestly, losing character progress/items/etc. is probably the one thing in an MMO that should never, ever, ever happen. Other bugs and problems are to be expected, but this kind of stuff is in a way sacrosanct.

These things don’t happen. I hate to be so negative, but I’ve never had this happen in an MMO before. Even when items simply disappeared, servers stopped working, or anything else, the items were always there when things got sorted out. That this could happen (and I doubt I was affected so it’s not even personal) is just not good.

If it’s helpful information, I was playing an Engineer, not a thief.

I consider this a bug, but after spending time on these forums I notice a lot of posts pertaining to personal story bugs getting attention in this subforum and so I’ll put it here for now.

The Norn story quest The Stone Sheath is buggy as heck. You have to obtain an item underwater, which acts like an environmental weapon that you pick up (a rock, a keg, etc.) and replaces your weapon skills. You then need to take it outside of the water to a drop off point. However, anytime you leave the water you lose the weapon altogether when your terrestrial weapon skills pop back up.

The only way to successfully complete it seems to be to very carefully inch forward towards land while underwater and manually drop the weapon at a point where you can get out of the water and pick it up again. It took me several tries because I was concerned I would go too far and lose it for the 4th time.

Then after successfully getting it out, the NPC doesn’t seem to recognize you’re at the correct location. I ran around the drop off location for some time before the NPC finally registered that I had reached the correct spot and allowed me to continue.

I did try to report this via the in-game bug feature, but there is no Sub-Area which remotely fits the type of bug it is so I wasn’t sure how to even do that.

Someone should take a look at the code or something, because I am waiting until the flags do die down as explained in the game and in this topic and then getting blown off.

I’m running it on a high end system, for what that’s worth, as I’ve seen some discussion of this.

For anyone else having this problem, exiting the game fully and reloading it fixed the problem.

Although the trading post is reported via the forum banner and twitter to be back up after the extended maintenance, anytime I try to use it I simply get a black “Error: Invalid Authorization” message.

Jamais vu.5284:

If they put a soft cap on how much money you can accrue with over and over grinding events and dungeons, and you recognize that point, I think maybe it’s time to get the memo that they don’t want you grinding as badly, at least not if you’re purely doing it for profit, and not the inherent fun.
Yes, cosmetic dungeon gear takes buckets of time, but this is intended to be spread over several weeks and months done at a moderate pace.

Well this is the OPs point, really. What exactly do they want people to do?

Rizzy.8293:

Um… we call it vitality
If you want HP and defence try going for Carrion gear.

And stack your traits on vitality and toughness lines.

Carrion gear is the glass cannonist of glass cannony gear. No toughness at all.

snadge.2483:

Elysian Rose.5283:

Draknar.8604:

I started to hate the gameplay, but wanted the rewards.

So basically, you couldn’t be bothered actually spending the time to get the gear, or to enhance your skills/strategies so that you could get the gear more quickly, and so you gave up.

Poignant, really, and it’s what so many of us have been arguing here. This game is for casuals who can’t be bothered, and would rather just buy the stuff with gems.

Your post is almost too good to be true.

I think you have it wrong, this game is designed around PvP from the ground up, the PvE is not really why most of us play it but it is there to give you a general idea of how to play your character in end game, which is WvWvW and tPvP.

It is the same as Eve Online, why would you play Eve for the PvE, it is horrible, the end game is in 0.0 space fighting for resources and control which makes the PvP unmatched in any game.

WoW PvP on the other hand is tacked onto a PvE game and so reflects the type of game it is, a time sink of grinding based on a subscription business model, to keep you paying the monthly subscription you have to grind mindlessly to actually get gear that is competitive.

Personally I know which type of game I prefer.

Before you ask, yes I have played WoW, started about 7 months ago and realised how expensive it is to play a game that has the most laughable PvP in the history of gaming, it is a shame really as WoW PvP could be brilliant but to do that would really break Blizzards business model.

The thing is, I don’t find the PvP in this game to be, well, good right now, for a variety of reasons. The biggest are probably that with all the pets running around its more of a chaotic PvE than an organized PvP, that the capture system currently encourages zerging, that the burst damage/CC is out of control, and that it is pretty far from balanced at this point (though that will hopefully improve over time). I previously played SWtOR, which a lot of people complained had horrible PvP fro imbalance and too much CC, but I think its worlds better than what we have right now.

This is pretty disappointing, given that I bought this game exclusively for the PvP.

If I had to guess, I’d say it’s probably related to some kind of exploit they’re trying to curb – which I can appreciate but would much rather have the TP up. Even if it took a brief server shutdown at some point (how other games have tended to manage large exploits) it would likely be better than this, as much as that doesn’t necessarily make a whole lot of sense.

I hope they realize – heck, I can’t imagine they don’t – how important it is to have the TP up. It’s such an incredibly central part of a game like this that the amount of time its been down during these first few launch weeks is a tremendous black eye on the game and can actually drive some players off. Hopefully they can take care of it soon…

I’ll add a quote of myself from another post to throw in my 2 cents. Keep in mind I do enjoy the game, but find this (and a few other things) very disappointing and quite a hindrance to really getting the most out of it:

On the second point about skills being boring, I have to kind of agree. Like I said, I enjoy the game and the combat, but there’s still a certain element of combat in the game being not much more than circle strafing and letting the game autoattack for you. It’s more true for some professions than others. This is very noticeable as I play with my various alts… some of them, like the thief, I can only play for an hour or two before I feel somewhat bored. However, once I do feel bored with it I am able to have fun logging into a second character and play with it for a bit – especially my engineer, which has one of the more complex skillsets.

Now contrast this to TOR, a game where I leveled 6 characters to max level, 6 more halfway or further, and on several of them I “grinded” out basically max level PvP gear (though I had too much fun doing so to call it grinding IMO). Even after doing the same quests 53 million times, I never got so bored with it I had to put it down except on my Vanguard – a class with a combat mechanic literally consisting of 2 buttons 90% of the time. I’m not sure, but I think my similar experience with this class and most of the GW2 ones is related to the fact that most of the GW2 classes involve only a few skills that you actually use most of the time with the rest being used here and there.

I enjoy the game quite a bit, but I also don’t think its perfect and the items in the original post are some of them.I’ve only really played TOR at any length in terms of MMOs, so let me make some comparisons on his first two points.

On questing and the reasoning behind it, I find that GW2 quests are typically more fun than in TOR. They’re not always, and some of the TOR quests are just really fun compared to the GW2 ones, but that makes perfect sense as nothing is going to hit a home run every single time. The thing is, the quests in TOR always made perfect sense, had a background/story to them that I found interesting and made me feel like there was a point to doing it, and so on.

In Guild Wars 2, the vast majority of the time I’m just doing stuff without any reason for it. This is because, in the first place, you typically come across the quest activities before you find the heart NPC to explain things to you and so you do at least a big chunk of each one without having any idea what you’re doing or why – ditto for DEs, and in the second place, there just isn’t a whole lot of motivation to read the heart NPCs unless you’re really a lore hound. Now its true – for those who want to know what’s going on, the lore is there to read. The thing is, there are a many people who aren’t that kind of person – I’m not for instance – but TOR still found a way to get me the information in an interesting way and made me care about the reasoning behind the quests. GW2 feels almost like a light version of WoW in this category – a game I’ve only played for a few hours in my entire life – in that the only real lore behind most things is in a bunch of text that you have to be interested enough to read in the first place.

On the second point about skills being boring, I have to kind of agree. Like I said, I enjoy the game and the combat, but there’s still a certain element of combat in the game being not much more than circle strafing and letting the game autoattack for you. It’s more true for some professions than others. This is very noticeable as I play with my various alts… some of them, like the thief, I can only play for an hour or two before I feel somewhat bored. However, once I do feel bored with it I am able to have fun logging into a second character and play with it for a bit – especially my engineer, which has one of the more complex skillsets.

Now contrast this to TOR, a game where I leveled 6 characters to max level, 6 more halfway op further, and on several of them I “grinded” out basically max level PvP gear (though I had too much fun doing so to call it grinding IMO). Even after doing the same quests 53 million times, I never got so bored with it I had to put it down except on my Vanguard – a class with a combat mechanic literally consisting of 2 buttons 90% of the time. I’m not sure, but I think my similar experience with this class and most of the GW2 ones is related to the fact that most of the GW2 classes involve only a few skills that you actually use most of the time with the rest being used here and there.

Once again, I really am having fun with this game, so I don’t want to be brushed off as a hater or whatever else it is a lot of folks are being called about the game these days, but I also think the OP has some valid points which at the very least contribute to the game not being all it could be.

I look at it as the opposite. I certainly don’t think it should be possible to win 1 v 2s regularly, but I find its essentially impossible in this game unless you’re one of a select few professions. In previous games, I could at least survive in 1v2s versus equally geared opponents long enough to make some difference in the game, and I could occasionally win one. I think that’s pretty reasonable, and makes for a more interesting game.

Avatar.1923:

Birdy.4816:

Moonthrower.1406:

You blew through 300 hours of content in 3 weeks? And you paid how much for it?

its not 300 hours though, its more like 100 doing it effeciently.

and to the previous poster…. that list is rubbish.

i am doing things “properly” and after 40h i am level 30, with 10% map completion.
and that is without any pvp.

the only way to get to 80 that fast is if you teleport everywhere, skip text, no social, no enjoyement of the world and arts.
but at that point.. youre a d3 player

Nonsense. Everything in this game gives you XP. After 40 or 50 hours I was level 80 without even trying.

Just to give an idea, I have 271 hours played over a level 80, a level 27, a 16, and a 2, including a lot of time in sPvP.

Unfortunately the entire game seems to be about zerg more than anything else, whether that’s PvE, PvP, or WvW

Many of them do use the same skills as players

Zen.1740

Well at least that’s 2x more than was in SW:TOR’s zones when people were asking for server merges. I remember seeing a screenshot showing 4 people on the entire planet, lol.

Is there a way to check a zone’s population in this game?

I’m experiencing the same thing on Maguuma. Even though the game lists the population as high, I’m seeing pretty low population in most of the zones I’ve been in lately, and it honestly makes the game far, far less fun. I’d transfer, but my friends insisted on this server for guild reasons and I doubt they’d be at all interested in moving.

Does anyone know whether or not the server population is calculated based on active users, or accounts registered to that server?

Wolfe.3097:

faileon.4381:

http://img641.imageshack.us/img641/8765/37252285.jpg

I’m not shouting or crying OP and nerf (maybe just a little), I’m asking for explanation. I’ve got very little knowledge of mesmer, I dodged out of some of his Quickness combo at beginning, then some more and then he landed this. Huh? No glass cannon build – engi (1.7k toughness / 18k health)

uhm…1.7k toughness and 18k hp is indeed glass cannon. thats really low toughness, and the hp aint stellar

You must be confusing armor with toughness. Armor can get to 3k or so, but 1.7k is closer to the toughness cap than not. The base is 916, builds which invest a LOT into it have 2k toughness, and the cap is 2300 if you invest only into toughness Average builds run with around 1500, glass cannon builds with between 916 – 1300.

Now, there is another side to this which is that unless you’re going very tanky and getting around 2k toughness or so, just about any build kind of is a glass cannon due to the burst damage/CC chaining in the game, but that’s a larger issue.

ontages.6542:

I agree. Color coded boons and conditions would be much easier to recognize. That being said the boon/condition system in this game is a huge step forward from having to memorize over 100 different buff and debuffs icons like in wow.

Hmmm, never played WoW, but I played TOR and I never had a problem knowing all of the buffs/debuffs. As I understand it WoW had more.

milo.6942:

On that note: why the kitten are retaliation and fury so similar. wtf.

This is certainly the most egregious.

He made an illusion and it attacked you. The thing about Mesmers is that, if they are running a build with illusions, those illusions do a TON of damage. On top of this, they’re covering the map since there are several of them and so its more difficult to be out of range of at least one of them. While you are trying to attack any one of them, the other illusion and the Mesmer himself are still attacking you and doing at times nearly as much damage as any one player of another class can do. It can be at times almost as if you’re facing a constant 3 v 1.

This is one of the reasons many people say the class is overpowered.

Wolfe.3097:

Skolops.2604:

Shukran.4851:

when i write i assume players are skilled enought to face their opponents; writing that mesmer guardian and thief are only op makes me feel sad.

noone wants to learn to play this game anymore? just yell at op classes is enough for you?
ok

People are getting to the point where they do know the game and understand it well enough to declare that these classes are definitively a bit too strong. I am not so sold on the thief being all that overpowered, but the mesmer certainly is.

You also need to pay attention to the logic of your thinking… if it were about learning the game, then thieves and mesmers should also need to learn it and have problems with different things. They really don’t, at least not by the complaints we read.

Add to this that the uplevel system allows all of these players who face a Mesmer or whatever on their class of choice to go ahead, roll a Mesmer and try it out. When people have, they’ve found it substantially easier.

dude, they think they know the game, some of there accusations may be right, but to think that they actually know the game is a falsehood. you really are bad at the concept of keeping balance.

you want to know my problems as a thief? i have trouble with conditions, my only ways to remove burning/poison/bleed is on my 30 second heal or a passive that has a 45 second CD and activates when my hp hits 75%.

my only way to remove cripple/weakness is on a DIFFERENT heal, or a 1 min cd dodge that also returns ini, or traiting so when we dodge it removes them (few thieves take this skill atm). only way to remove chill affects are that heal and 1min cd, obviously we cant have this all, and the best we can get leaves us with a sustain build, not a damage build (not enough points left)

we have another way to remove condition, but it removes 1 random condition every 3 seconds while in stealth (even when stealth specced it lasts 4 seconds, so you get one random condition removed)

i have other weaknesses/issues, certain classes and specs also give me a hard time. but why explain it all, you want wows pendulum design of “balance” and its obvious

First of all, I never played WoW. Second, I have never been one to cry about balance in MMOs but have typically been of the opinion that the games are balanced and people need to learn to play. In this game, it seems so obvious to me that I simply can’t have a different opinion other than that its unbalanced.

More to the point: what exactly do you define as “WoW’s pendulum design of balance?” I honestly have no idea what you’re trying to say.

Shukran.4851:

when i write i assume players are skilled enought to face their opponents; writing that mesmer guardian and thief are only op makes me feel sad.

noone wants to learn to play this game anymore? just yell at op classes is enough for you?
ok

People are getting to the point where they do know the game and understand it well enough to declare that these classes are definitively a bit too strong. I am not so sold on the thief being all that overpowered, but the mesmer certainly is.

You also need to pay attention to the logic of your thinking… if it were about learning the game, then thieves and mesmers should also need to learn it and have problems with different things. They really don’t, at least not by the complaints we read.

Add to this that the uplevel system allows all of these players who face a Mesmer or whatever on their class of choice to go ahead, roll a Mesmer and try it out. When people have, they’ve found it substantially easier.

Shukran.4851:

what about condition removal and condition removal comboes?
what about play your own build and put some condition removal on your character instead of copy streams, builds on forums?

I’ll quote my post (from only 2 posts up):

Just like when fighting any condition build, you only have so many – and for some classes, very few indeed – options to remove conditions and so the opponent can just replace what you cleanse fairly easily. The difference is that at least when you’re being bled or burned, you can fight back, whereas against some of the Confusion Mesmer builds that are out there, you take just as much damage as the bleeding/burning if you don’t fight back, and absurdly moreso if you do try to fight back.

I think the boon/condition display system is in need of an overhaul. The idea that all of the icons are similar fits a certain aesthetic style and looks nice to a a degree, but its not a good gameplay interface.

Other games use a variety of icons with different images and sometimes shape, but most importantly colors. The way human brains recognize color is just much faster and takes less attention than the way we differentiate similar images. With these various icons, its easy to recognize a bunch of buffs and debuffs while maintaining focus on the rest of the interface/battlefield. With the current system of uniformly shaped/colored boons/conditions, it’s much more difficult than it needs to be to take note of these various statuses while maintaining attention where it’s needed elsewhere.

I agree. Honestly, I think the boon/condition display system is in need of an overhaul. The idea that all of the icons are similar fits a certain aesthetic style and looks nice to a a degree, but its not a good gameplay interface.

Other games use a variety of icons with different images and sometimes shape, but most importantly colors. The way human brains recognize color is just much faster and takes less attention than the way we differentiate similar images. With these various icons, its easy to recognize a bunch of buffs and debuffs while maintaining focus on the rest of the interface/battlefield. With the current system of uniformly shaped/colored boons/conditions, it’s much more difficult than it needs to be to take note of these various statuses while maintaining attention where it’s needed elsewhere.

Boomx.7138:

Carlin.1059:

Make 5on5 hot join a thing.
Make arena with rating (Where you can buy gear for RATING).
Remove the whole tournament system, as it kitten sucks.
Never ever again make a water map (not until you fix your underwater combat).
If you want the sPvP to be conquest, then give an incentive to play conquest (Pulsating +10 pts for standing on a point should be the first thing to be added to sPvP next patch.)
You get out of combat after 6 seconds, no matter if the target is still alive, or you have a pet on yourkitten

That’s basically it. Everything else is fine.

As much as I hate everything you said in this thread, you being a WoW Fanboi and trying relive the glory days, the above quoted statement is the most intelligent arrangement of words you’ve made.

They do need some work in the game, but to say it’s dying kittenpeople it’s DYING not DIEING, l2spell) less than a month after release is ridiculous without any factual evidence to back your claims. Name one game that has not had problems after release.

I think ANet has done an amazing job addressing problems, and actually following through to their word.

I think the evidence that a lot of people are seeing is that they’ve all been involved with different games in the past which either quickly or slowly died off and they’re seeing similar warning signs that heralded the declines in those games.

If you’ve played 3 or 4 MMOs where you saw X, Y, and Z negative indications and then the game took a serious downturn within a few months after, and then you’re playing another MMO where you see X, Y, and Z negative indications, you’re going to be pretty concerned about its future.

Shukran.4851:

maybe different server has different number of players

They absolutely do, and that’s fine. The concern is that even if its only a few servers which are all of a sudden suffering from lower numbers, this is the same way that the general decline in other games began.

Mayama.1854

What about… a condition removing skill. The thing you use to fight ANY condition using build.

Just like when fighting any condition build, you only have so many – and for some classes, very few indeed – options to remove conditions and so the opponent can just replace what you cleanse fairly easily. The difference is that at least when you’re being bled or burned, you can fight back, whereas against some of the Confusion Mesmer builds that are out there, you take just as much damage as the bleeding/burning if you don’t fight back, and absurdly moreso if you do try to fight back.

Lewk.8359:

Hmm, sheathe weapon, good idea.

And yes, confusion kills me VERY quickly if i attack through it, so that is not an option…

I suppose i will just have to chalk it up to : You can’t beat a well played mesmer?

As far as I’ve ever heard, the best option is to use high damage per attack abilities while eschewing less efficient ones. The problem is that many classes simply don’t have any big nukes.

Hyde.6189:

Only if you can only view your own totals, otherwise it becomes like Rift where everyone was just trying to get the big numbers on the scoreboard.

And what’s wrong with that? It’s fun!

Now mind you, I can see two problems with this.

One is that people could start berating folks on their team for failing to contribute enough. This was a notorious problem in WoW raids. However, I don’t think its a problem here because the PvP isn’t even server specific, so you hardly ever see the same people again. Furthermore, whatever folks want to do this kind of thing already seem to do it based on the scores we’re currently provided with.

The other is that some people might start playing for the high score instead of playing for the objectives, but once again, folks already do this about as badly as they could ever be expected to, so there’s nothing to lose.

In TOR, I was one of the best gunslingers on my server and it was always fun to find myself in a warzone with another really good gunslinger and try to get the top DPS. I’m a highly objective oriented player, so I never sacrificed playing the map correctly to aim for the DPS, which made it all the more fun to get the high score (which I did most of the time )

It also made those matches more bearable where you wound up on an awful team or were getting stomped, since even though as one person there wasn’t a whole lot I could do to change the outcome of an 8v8 alone, I could still aim for the top score between the two teams.

I’d love to be able to have these same kinds of experiences in this game.

Yes this has seemed to be functioning erroneously for some time.

Strongfort.2451

Mesmer is my most hated class to PvP against due to Confusion.
If I don’t notice I have a few stacks I kill myself very quickly, which is infuriating. Playing a ranger, my build doesn’t have much room for condition removals (and I hate our heal that has it due to me needing to move around so much)
It’s gotten to where I double guess my self so much that I spend half the match staring at my condition area waiting to see it, and wind up getting killed by direct damage instead.
Retaliation and Confusion are the single most frustrating thing in PvP for me. A skill where you can beat your opponent without doing anything? Crazy.
Lately I’ve resorted to a stupid (but effective) tank-style build which I can toe-to-toe with Mesmers, but I dislike using it as it’s not my personal playstyle.

Interesting. So far the only tanky Ranger builds I’ve found didn’t have nearly enough damage output to go toe-to-toe with anyone. The survivability is higher so you last longer, but they just longer still because of my lower DPS.