Guild Wars 2

Rising Dusk.2408:

What I’d prefer is that Slick Shoes can only knock down a single target once per cast, never more. Everything else about the skill in its current incarnation is fine, although I also think a cast time sort of like Caltrops wouldn’t be unwarranted.

That’s not an entirely bad idea. I could see an ICD per character work, the same way that shocking aura works. It would need a slightly reduced CD though.

Balsa.3951:

I feel anet take money for things they gave for free before, so many ppl scream take my money do a xpac.

so anet not stupid stop releasing new content for 9 Months then give us all we would have got in this 9 months step by step for free in one swipe and take money.

after that they going back to there old concept.

everybody happy

That’s simply not true. The patch on Tuesday had some major features in it, completely changing the stability system and adding the new camera. They worked on the LB system for pvp and start testing it today (I hope it’s good this time). And that was only this week. People like you have taken for granted that a game financed exclusively through a gem store and some episodic boxes sell would just be able to give out the same amount of content a subscription based MMO does. Furthermore, after the expansion was announced, a lot of new players came into the game, so for this reason alone the expansion strategy is working.

Coldtart.4785:

It’s a bad thing that both melee and ranged builds are viable?

No. And it will still be the case. The new meta melee builds have not been found yet, that’s all.

It’s a bad thing that a chokepoint doesn’t just hand a free win to the defenders?

Well, yes, at least in the extreme situation we had before the patch. Defending in a chokepoint, while it is supposed to give a tactical advantage, had zero impact on the fight, since just on SYG on ONE guardian per party was enough to get you through most of the CC. Add the AoE cap while running into the chokepoint, and gg.

Two problems with Slick Shoes:

1) Super Speed works while carrying the orb in Spirit Watch. Annoying if you like this map
2) It sometimes seems to affect not moving target, and that should be fixed

Now, you have to realize that engineer’s utilities are designed to be among the best in the game. Tool Kit for example is a combination of 5 great utility skills. It’s how the profession works. Now, engineer has to play a stun breaker, which excludes every triple kit build without EG. Before the Slick Shoes buff, engineers ran only two possible, viable stun-breakers: Elixir S and EG. Slick Shoes was buffed to their level and that’s good. I personally prefer EG, but I won’t have build diversity injured because some players need to l2p.

Hint: Yes it’s insta cast, yes it’s unblockable, but it’s melee range, so just watch the animation.

Yeah, PPT players have a hard time because other players have an influence on the match-up, while not wanting to help. If it’s of any consolation, when we fight, the enemies we fight can’t cap stuff! Sure, if one server happens to only play PPT…gg. Wait till the next WvW season, when everyone including roamers care for PPT.

Mesmer of just three patient guys hidden in the tower for four minutes.

Johje Holan.4607:

Disable hard CC in WvW. Disable Stability in WvW. Problem solved.

Yeah, and then complain that the stability change was made for casuals… Frankly the serious casualness is expecting to not care about an entire aspect of the game (cc), having it negated by just one boon application, in order to dumb down the gameplay. I’m glad this was fixed.

@coglin: could you please post your engineer build, or is it a secret (mp me wink wink)? I use my engineer mainly for roaming, but I would be interested in a zerg build.

Orochimaru.4730:

What map rotation?!

When the new map was announced they did say it would be added to a rotation.

But now they claim the new map is a replacement for the old map. So WvW finally gets a new map but we’ll still only have one.
They say they may bring the alpine map back in the future, but in WvW the future is up to 3 years!

I really do hope the devs have been working on more than one new map and hopefully they will release a second new map a few months after HOT is released.

I think they still like the idea of a rotation (the alpine maps are too much like EB imo, but I like them and so do a lot of people), but they are keeping only the new BL when HoT comes out because an immense majority of players will want to play there, drew by the appeal of novelty. But when everything settles down, I believe we’ll see the alpine BL again. It’s not like Raid on the Capricorn which a lot of pvp players hated.

The reason why they are being quiet about when the old BL will comeback is most likely because they have no idea yet about how the rotation will work. Feel free to post suggestions.

I don’t know really. The Gates Assassin, the pvp forum specialist, is commenting on every major thread trying to clarify the debate. I wish we would have something similar on this forum.

Well, it depends on what you call easy.

Easy mechanically and to be useful to your team: warrior, guardian, ranger

(Relatively) easy mechanically but harder to be useful as a beginner: necromancer, thief

(Relatively) difficult to play mechanically but easy to be useful to your team: elementalist, engineer (kits, not turrets)

Hard to play, hard to not be eaten alive, but super fun: shatter mesmer

Don’t try shatter mesmer right away, don’t try engineer because unlike elementalist there is no rotation, so you’ll get overwhelmed by the number of skills you have. Every other profession is a good choice, keeping in mind what’s written above. About the difficulty, I meant for a beginner: of course thief is mechanically harder to play at higher level than elementalist.

CutePicsHunter.7430:

Sorel.4870:

BlackTruth.6813:

Aylpse.6280:

The game is more balanced then you think, Celestial was too weak before, now its too strong. And its the one big kitten stain (hehehe that censorship works well with this sentience.) the game has.

The issue isn’t truly balance, but the players. Someone will always find something OP. Once cele is nerfed, something new will take its place. (However please kill off OP Cele Anet)

Players? Explain how you make “triple physical utilities” on Warrior work then.

It’s not the players enforcing the meta, it is MOSTLY ANET.

Try a condi interrupt warrior with perplexity runes in WvW. It works.

Perplexity runes? In PvP? Try again. And yes, this is pvp subforum, not wvw, where you can accumulate tons of stats and some balance breaking runes. At least in spvp it is not that bad.

Well, he asked for triple physical utilities, which is a bit restrictive. Maybe with only two I could do better. I gave a WvW suggestion because I think that’s where this kind of build would work at best. You want me to try again and I gladly will. I don’t have time to try any build till this week-end, but I’ll mess around and post something here if you are still interested.

If you want a little spoiler, I will probably try a mace-sword/bow build with three physical utilities and the confusion on interrupt trait.

Well, it’s difficult to comment on your post Supreme because it mixes different elements.

First of all, yes, a buff to useless mesmer and necro traits is a good idea, but it should be done for every profession. Anet seems to focus on balancing around the meta (which a lot of people seem happy about btw, always complaining that the meta is stale and needs adjustements), but we don’t see build diversity balance changes that often. Guardian, engineer and ranger have received some pretty nice build diversity buffs recently, and everyone seems to like them, so imo that should be the way balance is done. It’s fun, and it’s safe (never saw anyone complain about the engi’s shield buff or the ranger war horn or torch buff).

By the way, shatter mesmer can’t burst at 1200 range. It brings a rather low sustain damage for a zerker at this range. GS2 burst and sword burst (for those who play sword), as well as IP shatters, are melee bursts.

I totally agree. I won’t be playing in the closed beta, but I really hope that among those who do there will be a good amount of WvW players, to detect problems early. Then of course open beta will give a better idea of what works and what doesn’t, but it will already be too late to change some stuff if needed. Finally, I hope we don’t face a similar problem we had with EotM, where the beta-testers were WvW players and had fun on the map, then we ourselves liked the map for two weeks before it was invaded by the PvE players. Since the map will be in regular WvW rotation, fingers crossed!

Baldrick.8967:

I really wish they would develop these things using real wvw players to test at an early stage (and not just fanboys)

You’re right in what you’re trying to say, but I had a good laugh reading this sentence. Opposing real WvW players to fans is basically saying that if you REALLY like WvW, then you don’t like the game and take no pleasure playing it. It’s a kitten CHORE!

Yes! Please! I hope Belinda’s great sword will be available in the gemstore again comes the expansion as well. Every body will be wearing one, but for once I don’t care.

Warpinator.9860:

Who should I fear ? I got no idea.

Engineers. And decent meditation guardians (fortunately they are rare).

ll Wrath ll.5961:

If you want to play where you don’t want to rely on stealth…..choosing thief doesn’t make much sense. There is the S/D build which is an evasive boon stripping build, but that’s it. Personally, I wouldn’t want to pick a class if I could only limit it to one meta build.

If you go by that logic, the only professions you could choose from are thief and ranger, since they are the only professions to have two different builds played in the WTS.

S/P accrobatics or panic strike doesn’t rely on stealth and is viable everywhere except ESL tournaments. Give it a try.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Cronicle.5691:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Tengu.5267:

you can with shortbow #3 as well.

And S/D #3

And S/P #3

And PB&J

And Spear #2 and 5

d/d is a weaker weapon set than d/p in most aspects, mainly because the skills 3 and 4 are at best situational, while d/p skills 3 and 4 are extremely useful. It’s however really fun to play, and you won’t have any problem roaming in WvW with it. Everything works there.

Advent.6193:

Thief’s got a similar problem as Mesmer, when it comes to getting really rude with Celestial. Namely, that mightstacking is what makes Celementalist/Celegineer as hardcore as they are. Thief can stack might a bit, but not nearly in their league.

Not really true. Most celestial engineers stack less might than SD berserker thieves. The build is just good because a lot of the engineer’s abilities happen to be a mix of power and condi damage (grenades, pry bar, condi bomb, pistol #2).

P/d dagger celestial thief can be viable, and is one hella strong dueling spec! The only problem being that your best ability will be your stealth pistol#1 skill, which will make it impossible for you to keep a point neutral. So I would suggest you use it in solo WvW roaming mainly.
I don’t like the build you linked though. Playing leeching venom with one lame venom is a bad choice. I would either go for a SA Panic strike build, or for a SA Trickery build. SA is cancer, you’ll say? Maybe so, but Shadow Rejuvenation + celestial healing power = OP.

edit: I you somehow find a way to spend 4 points in accro, you can take pain response and might on dodge. With the might on stealth, you got yourself a pretty nice might-stacking cele thief.

Ok I Did It.2854:

Balance WvW your joking right, the change to stab was done across the board lets look at it,

PvE change, a boss/enemy may to a CC skill once every 5-10 seconds the stab change is more like for the new HoT update coming at a later date,

Does anyone on this forum play more than one game mode? Even without playing PvE regularly, I’m sure you would see why your argument to claim that the patch was PvE balance is fallacious.

One cc skill every 5-10s = no change in the gameplay whatsoever after patch

I’ve already shown how pvp wasn’t affected. So the change was MEANT to affect MAINLY WvW. The devs STATED this was a WvW change. You might not like the changes but they are not some random collateral damage from a balance change somewhere else in the game. They are a design choice, which a lot of people who were bored with the cheesiness of the current zerg meta are happy about. You happen to not be one of them. Anet made a choice, one you dislike. Deal with it.

funassistant.6589:

Obviously Colin is a necromancer main that never gets stab.

“If I don’t get it, nobody can.” Kinda thing.

Man you really gotta stop with that “everyone only plays one profession and want it to be god mode”. Nobody wants his profession to be OP. I myself play six of the eight professions (surprisingly enough, I don’t play guardian nor necromancer, so I STILL don’t fit in organized zerg meta), and it’s really silly to think that developers would like to favor a profession.

On the contrary: GWEN meta only included four professions. For many players, that was a problem worth crying on the forums twice a week. Now the meta has a chance to change, and the crying continues. There is really no way to content the WvW crowd.

tom.7468:

Guess what meta havent changed at all i still see 60% of zerg is guardians 20% is warriors telling others to reroll because their class sucks.

The patch is two day old… A lot of these same guardians and warriors (I play warrior as well in WvW, but I’m not afraid of change like they are) are now complaining on the forums that their good old metabattle build doesn’t work anymore. They will need to adapt. Not necessarily change profession, but change their build. Give it time.

Kasteros.9847:

Engineer? ENGINEER? AHAHAHAHAH get into meele man with standard worker warrior – hammer / sword+wh, and FGJ, SIO, BS and banner. Go ahead and we will see if u can survive LOL Also stand against at last 60 man blob with ur group It is easy to play paper now lol, the point is about heavy meele, since they need to hold enemy group. The only way now is to play pirate ship meta and all go range weapons Like we did yesterday, fight for 40 mins but we won afetr this and lost almost everything at eb due to blbo of otehr server U adjusted to same thing u did before patch – going around and bomb, or pick up all survi skills and spam 1 lol

Engineer is better in melee range, not that I would expect you to know that since you seem to only play guardian. He was smart about the patch and adapted his build and strat. You expected to still be carried by the build you picked on metabattle and would like us to acknowledge you “skill” on top of that. That’s not even a l2p issue at this point: that’s a natural selection issue.

Trevor Boyer.6524:

The frequency of 4v5s has gone up for a couple reasons. Firstly, I’m hearing people complain about lag so I’m sure there are DCs going on. Secondly, the MMR matching has been terrible lately and a lot of people are just leaving games when they see their team of combat healers being murdered by a bunch of legendary champions.

Your diagnosis is incorrect. The increased number of 4v5 is most likely due to the bug that makes a queue pops in the middle of a match, and people who accept are taken out.

Furthermore, you shouldn’t take titles so seriously. Some players just take the one that fits their play style (guild warrior, combat healer for a shoutbow). Legendary Champion is too often use by players insecure about their personal skill. “The blazing light” for example is an amazing title, I don’t care about it being pve.

MightyMicah.7451:

The funny part is that if we had played despite the 4v5, we might have caught up and won when the opposing team’s player left. lol

Morale of the story: don’t be a bad sport.

Kasteros.9847:

But some ppl like Sorel claim that this update isn’t made to make Revenant totally op and force us to buy expansion

I do hope I’m right. The revenant certainly looks OP, but we don’t have enough elements to decide of that yet.

@OP. If you try to fight a ranger as a cele/rabid engi… u gon die m8! Welcome to the wonderful world of the engineer, where you roflstomp half the builds, and get rekt by the other half!

edit: I meant real ranger. Not that power kitten.

Amstel Steel.2058:

Except soloq wasn’t removed because it wasn’t needed it was removed because queue times for team arena were too long because there are no ladders. Furthermore soloq does not need leaderboards it needs an in game tournament system that was like gw1 RA were after so many wins it dumps you in TA.

Is this NA specific? In EU, soloq queue times were insane, because most skilled solo players played in ranked, to avoid the lame rotations and bad matchmaking you had in soloq. I had 10min+ queues in soloq, and insta pops in teamq. And I didn’t even mention the 4v5 one match out of three. The choice was easy.

Wilco.1458:

As much as ANet is putting money into tournaments and stuff, all of their game changes seem to have no intention of forming a competitive community. Besides the obvious “they haven’t put in a balance patch in a year”, it seems they want to close the gap between experienced and new players. Skill differentiation is necessary for competitive development, we must trust our new players to learn the tricks of the trade.

Well, Anet did nerf some really braindead meta builds like spirit rangers and Hambow warrior. Celestial builds are still easier to play than some others, but they are nowhere as stupid as old meta builds sometimes were. In addition, having characters with so many different mechanics necessarily leads to some professions being a lot easier. It’s a MMO after all.

brannigan.9831:

Fix what’s wrong as soon as possible that should always be the thought process.

Agreed, but it’s hard to have an agreement on “what’s wrong”. Think about Supreme who still thinks thieves are the most OP profession in the game because of stealth, or Lordrosicky who only ever played necro and have no idea on how other professions work. Some players will always want the game to be balanced around their own preferences and aspirations (some prefer one-shot fights, some prefer longer skirmishes, some like insta-cast skills, some others prefer long cast, big numbers skills), and your overall reasonable argument doesn’t work in practice: every balance change you see an equal amount of QQ and screams of joy.

BlackTruth.6813:

Aylpse.6280:

The game is more balanced then you think, Celestial was too weak before, now its too strong. And its the one big kitten stain (hehehe that censorship works well with this sentience.) the game has.

The issue isn’t truly balance, but the players. Someone will always find something OP. Once cele is nerfed, something new will take its place. (However please kill off OP Cele Anet)

Players? Explain how you make “triple physical utilities” on Warrior work then.

It’s not the players enforcing the meta, it is MOSTLY ANET.

Try a condi interrupt warrior with perplexity runes in WvW. It works.

Yes yes yes! Plus I really would like to change my mastery points again. WvW tournaments are fun for roaming, and the extra competitiveness in zerg plays is interesting as well. Silver League talking here.

Celestial engineer is pretty easy to kill if you don’t make mistakes. Open with a good burst, or with diversion if you play Halting Strikes. You won’t be able to interrupt his heal, but you can mess up his timing with a well-timed Diversion. Don’t underestimate your F2: even with berserker amulet, you have 6 points in Illusions to boost your condi damage and confusion really ruins engineers. If they carelessly block with gear shield, make them eat a whole unblockable melee GS2, see if they like that. Keep them at range in-between your melee bursts. Keep Blink for Slick Shoes: your CD is lower. Keep Decoy and Distortion in case you were to eat an OS (dodge Magnet Pull, it’s not that hard). Use Mantra of Resolve if you’re in soloq: Portal is not worth it. Try to keep it for the rifle immob and the Pry Bar confusion stack.

denis.9487:

I suppose we should thank anet. By fixing blink maybe fury or some other adept will be more appealing in wvw. Thanks for promoting build diversity.

Blink is still very good. Better still for some uses. I’m pleased not to end up facing a wall with Blink on full CD when I failed to correctly target the edge of the hill I wanted to port to.

[quote=4893358;Nike.2631:]

hedix.1986:

pepper.6179:

i believe the stab changes were for pvp. Why not make the stab changes exclusively for pvp?

WvW reeeeeally needs to be separate from PvE and PvP!

Except you are both wrong. The change was meant to affect WvW in priority. Apart form elites, there were absolutely no gameplay change whatsoever in pvp. Colin even stated somewhere that the idea behind this change was to nerf stability abuse in WvW. It’s working as intended, whether you like it or not.

The Killstreak booster is a must. It’s also really really fun to try to maintain your stacks at any cost to kill everything in sight.

Yamsandjams.3267:

Another flaw in the personal story design, you can do everything yourself but then need a party of players to do the very last part.

There are many flaws indeed, but that’s one of the few good points in their design. It’s a MMO, you’re supposed to play with people.

To find players, try to find some time to do this on a week-end evening if you can. If not, ask some guild mates. My guild gladly accepted to help me with it, although they all had completed that story mode at least once.

It maybe is a bug, since it wasn’t announced, so wait for a while.

If it was a change however, I would be very happy. When advertising for GW2, Anet was proud to say that their downscaling system allowed the content of non-80 zones to be still interesting at lvl 80. And while I still like the dialogs, scenery and funny heart quests while exploring, the combat really feels silly. Where’s the fun in finishing a mob before the end of my Pistol Whip in every zone until lvl 40? I hope they leave it that way.

While I do like mix and match armor, you have to admit that outfits are very popular now. And for understandable reasons: wearing a different armor type, and overall not spending any transmutation charge. I mostly play pvp so I have a ton of those but for those who don’t, outfits are a cheap alternative.

Teon.5168:

Yup. These changes will kill the game by the end of the week. I expect GW2 to close down by the end of the month.

RIP in peace Guild Wars 2 (2012-2015).

Laraley.7695:

Dude, I have so many necros/rangers going full ham into my reflect, I wouldn’t be even surprised if the necro was that blind.

Power necro and power ranger are two builds that seem to attract bad players, just like dagger thief or hammer warrior used to be. I think that’s one of the main reason their downstate are so good: they are expected to use it a lot.

T raw.4658:

We can talk all day about power necros and the injustice you have received, but you shouldn’t be losing to thieves 1v1 on a necro in PvP.

On SD necro is one of the easiest match-up for a thief. That or every necro I run into is terrible. Anyway, there’s no reason of caring about 1v1 in a 5v5 game mode.

Rome.7124:

+1000

And as mesmer, thief already had it way too good (power block doesn’t work on them, stupid Anet), so any nerfs to thief just brings a smile to my face.

This change is good overall, but your logic baffles me. I mean, thieves are not OP, they are just crazily good against mesmers (just like necro>engineer), so I would prefer that nerfs go in that direction instead. Especially because I play both professions.

Sincerly, I much prefer my Blink to fail at times without consequences rather than having it go on full CD and porting me 2m further facing a wall instead of my retreat spot. Better yet, when you’re stunned and you fail your Blink, it triggers anyway. Great for reflex Blinks.

Mrbig.8019:

The game feels utterly random, professions building as tanky as possible and blasting their own fields multiple times to go up to 25 might stacks and other crap.

Also you’re a bit late to complain about that. Baddies these days complain about celestial engineer. I suggest you jump on that train before it leaves.

Mrbig.8019:

nerf celestial, nerf proc/swap sigils, nerf instant CRAP so this game can be balanced as it was at the beginning.

Ok dude, enjoy your Quickness HB warriors, your Quickness 22222222 thieves, your SB thieves doing more damage at range than most classes in melee, all that good stuff. I will stuck with my ok 2015 balance, thank you very much.

X T D.6458:

How exactly is this a balance change? Do you understand what balance is? There was no balance whatsoever done, stability was nerfed outright, durations and cooldowns were not changed to compensate. CC skills/traits and cripples, immobilizes, chills were not changed either. And what do you mean nothing else changed in PvP? All the skills/traits that were nerfed were affected across gamemodes, including pvp not just the elites.

Balance in the context of a pvp game just means adjusting the utility an element of gameplay provides (here a boon). That’s what was just done, so it’s a balance change. Whether you like it or not doesn’t really affect the definition of the term.

When I say pvp wasn’t affected, I don’t mean the changes weren’t applied there. They were, but besides from elites, they had no impact on the gameplay so far. I’ve not seen a single thief spamming #4 on pistol ten times to get rid of a 6s stability, that would be ridiculous. In pvp, boon stripping is still a better choice against stability in every case (with the noticeable exception of the Foot In The Grave trait, which I hope they will buff soon). The number of stacks given is too big to be removed in pvp: it’s meant to affect WvW without affecting pvp. We can discuss (and boy, we did) whether the change was a good idea or not, but you have to acknowledge that Anet was smart in the way they made it affect only WvW despite it being applied through all game modes.

Lordrosicky.5813:

I agree with PHD. Changing ports would be good. i am sick of mesmers and thief porting around like OP idiots whilst I am stuck in the middle of the point getting ranged down.

Thief, mesmer and shout bow are OP… Man, I think you really need to play something else than necromancer to gain some perspective.

If I only ever played my engineer, I would think thieves are under-powered and necros are OP…