Guild Wars 2

Pvp has great rewards, and most of all, rewards that matter. Transmutation charges to look smart. Tomes of knowledge for those of us who don’t like the leveling (I have 6 chars lvl 80, only my main I leveled without it, and it was I did it in WvW). Dungeon armors and weapons easier to obtain than in PvE. Even gold-wise, if you want to make more in PvE, you have to do boring stuff like champ trains or silver wastes or endlessly speed run the same dungeons. In pvp you can make decent gold without grinding.

I don’t even talk about Wintersday, when Pvp was more rewarding than any other area in the game. And if you worry about ascended, I only loot mines in reward tracks: I just reached rank 80 and had 6-7 trinkets and rings, 3 weapons (berserker, rabid and carrion) and 2 armor pieces. And I’m not sure crafting qualifies as PvE.

However, I would want to see more Pvp exclusive rewards (I don’t really like the glorious armor, even if I like the idea). But the PvE crowd doesn’t want us to have nice things, even though we can’t get their cool carapace skins in Pvp and you don’t see us complaining.

Mouseheart.8672:

And certainly, seeing a flamethrower engi in PvP is a very rare thing. Also, to bring bomb kit (or FT for that matter), you’d have to throw out your only stunbreak, which is ridiculous, grenade kit, which is rather unlikely unless you REALLY like CC more than anything else, or toolkit, which is the greatest thing ever. So. yeah, most engis simply don’t do it because outside of stomping someone, the other skills are more usefull.

Do you play engi? Yes, bomb kit engineer is viable (it was even listed under “meta builds” a month ago or so"), if you take it instead of grenades and trait for it, and play condi. On this same build, pistol #3 is also a blind. Flamethrower is arguably rather bad, but I’ve seen Backpack use it when he queues solo. And if you really want to play the meta engi build, you have a blind on your grenade kit #3.

If skill matters to you, I’d say that berserker mesmer is a bit less forgiving than ranger. Both are good choices and fun professions imo. By the way, you should consider changing your keybinds if you can’t use your F1-4. I play on a laptop as well, and have moved all my skills closer to my movement keys (ESDF). Sizer, one of the best thief in pvp, once said that playing on a laptop was better because the keys were closer and more reactive, so congrats! You’re esport already^^.

You should try AC story. Did it in semi-exotic gear with a non 80 with a flamethrower engineer, and I rarely do PvE stuff (I always get a friend to help me do Living Story stuff), so you won’t have to much trouble finishing it, while it still is challenging enough.

Any idea on how to change it on Mac? I’d prefer to have a dedicated folder somewhere else than my Desktop.

I really, really hope that the collection items will involve a fair mix of PvP, WvW and PvE, but I doubt it. But it’s the only way for the weapon to be truly legendary, imo.

I’m already throwing money at my screen, but sadly nothing is happening.

Sube Dai.8496:

Lol hambow in courtyard?

Some people obviously can’t adapt to the death match game mode.

Personally I love it.

You can play hambow. You just have to play shouts instead of stances, like you would in WvW. An alternative is to play hammer and sword/warhorn.

Aomine.5012:

I’m gonna repeat myself until Anet finally sees it.

Make a “Newbie Arena Que” for anyone who just entered PVP.
You have to complete 100 games in “Newbie Arena Que” before you can participate in any Unranked or Ranked Arena. (To avoid leeching, additional requirement is that you need to win at least 25 games among those 100 games.)
To protect the Newbie Arena’s safety, after you fulfill all the requirements (100 games, 25 wins), you cannot Que up in Newbie Arena again.

Also, to avoid shortage of people, the game will be automatically started with any number of players currently in Ques(1v1, 2v2, etc) after 5 minutes of Que time.
With this, newbies can play around with each other, not being slaughtered by pros, and not being a liability to a normal team. They can learn the concept of maps, movement, classes, combat in this Arena with all the other newbies.

Point of Newbie Arena Que is to let “real” newcomers grasp the flow of PVP, and not fighting in the horribly unbalanced 5 v 4 spectator/auto-balance hot-join, yet not being brutally beaten by the more experienced players in real arena.
And this feature is an account bound thing, so no, you don’t have to go through this process every time you create a new character.

If you already play PVP for quite awhile, please don’t respond on the behalf of newbies, since you’re not newbie anymore. This feature is created exactly for newcomers of PVP, so veterans have no place to protest for the system.

I like this idea! Allow me to brainstorm on your original proposition.

I fear that your Newbie arena would split the player base even more. In fact, I think to have unranked and ranked is still dividing too much. Old soloq was less rewarding, so less people were playing it that the new unranked queue.

Following your idea, we could make unranked accessible only to people either new to the game or new to their profession. For example, you could not play in unranked if you reach 30 victories on the profession you’re playing, unless someone in your party has under 30 victories in theirs. You’d need 30 victories to enter ranked arena. That way, unranked arena would have a slightly less effective matchmaking, but ranked arena would have a better one.

zone.1073:

If anything, courtyard is a truer test of pvp skills than all of the other maps. While the conquest maps offer a lot of strategy through node and objective control, success on courtyard relies heavily on pure pvp tactics and knowledge. It’s a full-on phalanx vs phalanx, where the most competent PvPers win – not the best back-cappers, split-pushers, PvE mob farmers.

That’s an opinion. Some would argue that back-capping and proper rotations qualify as pvp skill, as it takes a tremendous amount of experience to do properly, while grabbing a hambow or a shoutbow warrior to carry your team in Courtyard is achievable even by the newest player. That would also be a valid opinion. I never understood why pvp couldn’t be a tiny tiny bit intellectual according to some.

But yeah, play ranked if you don’t want Courtyard. Chances are your matchmaking will be better as well.

Also, Cloak and dagger deal 50% more damage in PvE, and the revealed debuff lasts one second more in pvp (though oddly, not in WvW).

style.6173:

Wow. just wow. You think that a thief can carry a game. Usually the thief is the liability of the team. Give me a strong engi any day.

I think you believe that because in medium-MMR regions you see a lot of bad thieves and, well, ok turret engineers. Turret engineers can carry relatively new players because it’s a very easy build: just sit on far node and do your things. The thief’s role is complex, not only mechanically, but also rotationally (if I may use this word): when to decap far, when to leave a fight, which fight do I join, can I win this duel fast enough, etc.

Not assuming that you have an average MMR, but you know how the matchmaking can be at times.

Xac probably rages at matchmaking and then complains about new players! Sure they are new now, but give them time, and they’ll become our challenging foes of tomorrow! I hope you kept your thoughts to yourself: we want them to stay around. Play ranked till their MMR lowers enough.

Morwath.9817:

Buran.3796:

snip

I Ranked there is only one goal: Win at any cost.

Some say that a lazy, low-MMR engi had that thought one day, and he invented the turreter build…

First of all, guild groups are not necessarily good. I’ve been playing in a full guild group since before I became a deer.

Second of all, did you consider that maybe he should practice a bit before jumping into the arena? 4 levels in PvE to get used to the UI and his key binds, and then hotjoin for a while? Unranked is for new players, sure, but it’s there to learn rotations and team work. You’re expected to learn about your skills a little beforehand, and he very well may have been the worst player in the entire queue.

As always, Vee Wee, a very reasonable and impartial opinion. Of course, a lot of people like playing conquest (25.000 in EU only, quite good for a casual MMO), and the most watched export games at the moment are some sort of stronghold games, but you don’t like it so obviously no one else do, right?

Frankly, I’ve got nothing against 2v2 and 3v3, but don’t come and tell us it’s esport. There’s no strategy, no team work, only gross mechanical skill. Maybe I should write to the FIFA and tell them “hey, your game is so complicated, it’s never gonna be a sport, just do penalties, nobody cares about defense and all this stuff”.

OP, I don’t know how good you are, and how good your team mates were, so there’s no way of telling if it’s your fault. If you want to play solo on a mesmer, and don’t want to change your build too much, I would advise you do the following:

1) Replace your portal with a condi cleanse. Portal provides great mobility, but in soloq no one is gonna take care of your conditions for you, so it’s not worth it.

2) Never expect your team to win a balanced team fight you’re not a part of. Never.

3) Encourage your team before the game, and discuss some sort of strat. People tend to rage quit less if their team mates are friendly.

4) Never rage. Your team mates are bad, but it’s the fault of the match making, not theirs.

Now, it’s true that mesmer can’t really carry a team. If you want to perform better and be less of a liability, team up with a thief you like to play with, so that he can keep an eye on the enemy thief, and use your portal to bring your burst power where it’s needed. Good luck!

Osu.6307:

Coldtart.4785:

Making defending involve fighting players instead of sitting around waiting to fight with siege against siege would be a more rewarding defence experience.

This is absolutely right. Siege wars are simply boring. Who enjoys one guy firing a treb while everyone else stands around? I would definitely support changes that include a lower cap on the number of siege engines built per objective.

I was hoping for something that would reward open field fights, not sitting on objectives all day. I live for large fights. Rewarding tactics that encourage sitting on objectives is a step in the wrong direction, imo. I guess we will just have to see what the details of the changes are.

Well, again, the WvW community is so diverse that not everyone will be pleased. Open field battles are a numbers game: the more players you have, the more likely you are to win. WvW was intended to be a siege game, and yes, siege take time, and a small army can in theory keep a fort against an enormous zerg for a long time. You can’t cry all day about population imbalance and at the same time ask for a gameplay that favors zeroing.

Morwath.9817:

Ofc I don’t remember name of each character of each player in TCG, because such things aren’t worth memorizing.

I do, and I envy you. It’s amazing the amount of useless trivia the human mind can store.

Tao.5096:

scerevisiae.1972:

When you can post vids of your spirit weap guardian, trap thief, glyph ele, siphon necro, glamour mesmer team owning it up in high-level PVP, i’ll agree with you.

At the end of the day it’s been >2 years and there’s still tons of traits and skills that are universally recognised as kitten. Anet has 300 employees, it’s not like they’re short of resources to tweak these skills/traits, they just don’t give a kitten.

Well, I know some skills aren’t viable(Death Blossom) and some are even broken (scorpion’s wire).

But even if you’ll pick up the rest of the builds and remake them, still gives you a good amount of builds.
It looks like every class has a full set of skills that aren’t working properly or are not viable.
Like you’ve mentioned, Mesmer glamour skills, Thief’s Traps etc.

I’m not going to defend Anet, since I know that despite having such team, and given multiple reports over such trivial things as Scorpion’s wire etc, they haven’t fixed it.

but it’s not like you also have 2 or 3 max strict solid builds or it’s a no go.

Some of these broken skills do get fixed after a looooooong wait: Illusionary Leap, Slick Shoes, and tomorrow warrior’s GS #5. So maybe there’s hope for scorpion wire, but I doubt it. Well, we had a good time with it on the old Skyhammer, I guess.

Oh my… You just won the daily biggest forum-carebear award. And there are dozens of thick-headed WvW players requesting 15v15 DM. Good job.

A good side effect would be that the current LB, which are awful for solo players at the moment, would be ok for a guild LB: it would reward activity and prevent guilds from only queuing with their 5 (or 8 ) top players, and actually show the skill within the guild.

GG uberkingkong. That’s a very legit technique: if you see someone raging in the other team, focus him until he rage quits. I got 70% win in soloq in the test season using this method.

Colin mentionned changing the way WvW worked. I think they are conscious of a lot of issues WvW have (I mean, people come to the forums to complain, but the WvW sub forum looks like a long suicide note), and I wouldn’t be surprised if the PPT system changed completely, for better or worse.

Also, be careful when you mention “hacks”. In game, I’ve seen a player say “this thief ported away and then back to me to finish the stomp, what a hacker”, even though the thief has at least two ways to do it. Try to play a thief, come back and tell us it’s OP. PU mesmer is way stronger at the moment, but still not OP. Sure, people are annoyed because they can leave and reset the fight, but so can warriors and bomb engineers, and you don’t see anyone complaining about them.

Victory.2879:

As a mes you really shouldn’t have that many problems 1v1 against a thief, I’d suggest you play with your build a bit. OFC if you are upscaled then forget it, they will just eat you until you hit 80.

Only in the WvW subforum can you hear such things^^. To elaborate a little if you play PU mesmer or maim mesmer, you’ll have no problems with thieves. If you like playing power shatter mesmer or even interrupt mesmer, you’ll have to largely outplay the thief in order to win.

Jokes aside, I really think that GW2 should favor guilds that play different types of content. So I would like to have the guild hall obtainable by completing PvE guild events in the jungle, by claiming objectives in WvW (or maybe just by paying a lot of badges of honor) and by winning matches in GvG Stronghold (or conquest, I’d really like to have the GvG system in conquest too).

Wow. The WvW community is simply impossible to please! A lot of people have asked for defense to be more rewarding! Wait till we now more to complain.

If I were you, I would begin to stack these Tomes of Knowledge! If the dervish is a new specialization, and it rocks, well good! Just create a new character.

This is a hundred percent true. I hope the results the got from the test season help them improve the LB, because a lot of players like the no-grind philosophy in GW2 pvp, and the current LB are against this philosophy.
I also hope next season gives more rewards, starting from 70% all the way to the top players! This way, you’d always be motivated to bring your A game to reach the next level of rewards.

Bartek.3568:

@Justin ODell If you want you can check my today’s Games, i mean, what classes was on enemy team and my team, how many times i face a premades. I think i will get a rest of Ranked games for now + ppl who stay at spawn when match is 250:100, i think is a time to find some tpvp team

These guys are the worst, especially in the case you could get 400 points and not lose points on the LB. But some players are sore losers, I guess.

Also, a 70% win/loss ratio is quite good if you’re not in a team, so you’d need less matches to reach a good ranking. Congrats!

The Maguuma jungle has three vertical layers: canopy, ground and roots

Colin Johansson gives a summary of what’s happening.

I have shivers everytime I see Courtyard… But I like this system: each map as a probability of occurrence exactly proportional to how much the players love it. We’re part of the majority here, but this systems preserves the interests of the minority that likes odd maps, and Anet did a great job with this system as it is.

GW2 becomes subscription-based!

You can always add the people you want to mail to to your friends, and in the friends menu you’ll have the option to send a mail to the account directly.

That would be awesome. However, the blog post mentions that it’s a time to level-up a new character, so I don’t think so. They’re making an offer to have new players joining the game (the game in 75% off), and that’s what the XP bonus is for.

Lol noob.

Thief: The Paris Swing Box, Parov Stelar (Thanks Sizer!)
Mesmer: Shatter Me, Lindsey Stirling

TheFamster.7806:

So after losing about 10~12th matches in row, here I am facing another great matchmaking comp. I really don’t know what to expect other than going cleric thief=win for all! Sorry guys on my team but you know, matchmaking

First of all, sorry for your losing streak. If you don’t know it yet, you can now switch professions in the beginning of the game. It’s not ideal, but if you really want to win, it’s best. I’d also suggest you play ranked: less new players, less daily professions, more fun. I play unranked because I don’t mind losing, but if you do ranked is the way to go for experienced players.

Secondly, can you record a match playing clerical thief? I’ve always wanted to play clerical with the heal venom and full venom share traits! I’m sure it’s the next meta. I’d probably do it with my team though^^…

Emapudapus.1307:

Previous matchmaking was muuuuch muuuch better than this. Only thing it lacked was population, so either you got long queue or against lower ranked ppl. The thing we got now is just poop. Leaderboards were also nice, except few games->top lb or huge fluctuations. SInce that patch, pvp is joke.

What? If you think you’re farmed by premades now, just think about what it was like duo queuing or trio queuing in the old system, that was strictly MMR-based. I often played with 4 IRL friends on skype, and since we reached dolyak we were winning against dragon-ranked players, losing every 1v1 and every balanced team-fights, but out-rotating them. These guys were raging sooooo much I wonder why they don’t seem to remember this MAJOR flaw of the old system. But I presume you’re one of these soloq heroes who lose for all sorts of reasons besides their own lack of personal skill. Again, why do solo players think they are so special? People who play with 1 or 2 friends want to enjoy pvp too.

Cynz.9437:

Side note: pugs on EU play like pugs on NA from 1 year ago… idk why pugs are so behind in meta, top players are really good though. Wouldn’t say that NA or EU is better though, i think both regions have their share of bad and good players.

My european pride was hurt by this comment and I wanted to reply something mean, then I logged in and saw my scepter ele, my rabid engineer, my sword/torch mesmer and my spirit ranger, and I cried a little…

It’s hilarious in Foefire when you play a condi-based build and take hours to destroy the door. Only happened to me in hotjoin though, and only when the match had already started.

Solstice.1097:

i recall games where high MMR = longer queue always – sometimes 20, 30, 40 minutes or more depending how high your MMR is.

and in those games, being in queue for that long was a sort of bragging rights.

Gosh, if something like that happened in GW2, I’d be glad to be a noob!

u got rekt

What do you want us to tell you? That scepter eles are OP? That air and fire sigils are OP? Yes, the last is probably true, but have you tried playing a berserker spec recently? I play a SD thief, which is considered one of the best zerker build there is, and there is almost no 1v1 I can take because my opponents can’t be bursted down quickly, even with fire and air sigils. If ferocity was a better stat, these sigils would not be needed, but as it is, you kind of need it. Especially if you play ele: the damage output of the fresh air build is ridiculously low if you consider what you have to sacrifice for it.

yes

The biggest problem is that GW2 pvp is incredibly difficult to understand, and there’s no definite important moments. When you watch a football match, you take a sip of beer when the ball is in the middle of the field, and then get very excited when it gets close to the cages. In MOBAS, there is these weird PvE phases where basically nothing happens.

In GW2, the game is won using complex rotations, and fights are always happening on 2 or 3 points, making it impossible to follow the entire action. Plus, every class has mechanics that are so specific that you just can’t understand what’s happening unless you already play pvp as a decent level. GW2 is esport, but if LoL is football, GW2 is cricket.

I was in Lion’s Arch the other day, after Wintersday, and they added a dialog between Ho-Ho Tron and the workers (or about Ho-Ho Tron, I don’t remember). It means they didn’t completely forget about it. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it rebuilt in the first episode of season 3 (or in HoT, whatever that is). Kessex Hills are full of muddy peasants: why should mighty heroes like ourselves care about their fate?

I think most threads about a possible new race at this point are just speculations and hopes, not requests.