Sad to see anet cater to the noobs complaining. The counter to this banner was having a working brain.
Banners are frequently hard to see. With Turtle Banners noobs has nothing to do with it. As for Dragon the darn thing hits like a truck and in the middle of a big fight with graphics overload it can be easy to miss until it drops a nuke on players.
Ranger pets have been one of the weakest class abilities in WvW since release. Most of the time people can just ignore them. As for them screwing up a DH trapper build… fine with me as that build is OP right now.
I suspect people will be yammering on about WvW being dead in this forum next year. People have been saying WvW is dead for years. It certainly is on the decline but it will likely take a very long time to die.
Doing a quick google search we find players complaining about full servers through all last year:
02-2015: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/JQ-Full
03-2015: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Joining-Full-Servers/first#post5079440
4-2015: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/How-to-get-into-a-FULL-server
5-2015: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Server-Full
8-2015: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/servers-full-causing-problem-for-new-players
9-2015: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Full-Servers-is-their-an-end-in-sight
10-2015: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Servers-that-are-full/first
11-2015: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Server-full-Please-why/first#post5740265
I can find more and older ones too. Full servers have been around a LONG time. This is actually the first time I can remember in a very long time that all servers were open.
Players cannot bind Right Click, Scroll Wheel Up or Scroll Wheel Down.
I know this was originally because the menus behave differently than the interactive portion of the game. However since adding Action Camera, the game now knows when it is in a menu and when not. Basically when the Action Camera is active or could be active, these keys should perform their bound function. Inside menus, behave as they always have.
Probably not a bug perse but seemingly an oversight for an action driven MMO.
Even though it’s against the rules, it’s clear they are using macros to issue commands for those not on TS.
It is a gray area. They allow macros to play music. The combat mod macro was good then sort of not. IMO as long as it doesn’t offer a competitive advantage, macros should be fine. Macro’ing text should be allowed simply because most AAA MMOs have this feature built in and it is enhances the game without making it unfair.
Like all things, I am not the arbitrator of cheating in GW2 so any macro program always comes with a use at your own risk.
I am aware of previous tier shifts but today’s WvW is not yesterday’s WvW. We have no idea how strong T1 or T2 is any more. For example, Glicko has stuck TC in T2 with little hope of them ever moving up.
Besides a change like this would only take a couple weeks to find out. If the tiers are properly sorted everything will go back to normal. If they aren’t, the matchups in each tier could improve.
I would like to see the top ranked servers in even matches manually moved up one week and odd top ranked servers the next. Even if it is a one time thing just to see if it shuffles the rankings a bit. Several tiers have become extremely stale and I think it would be a nice change of pace for several tiers.
Best one is keep lord at the fire keep spawn on top of lava, so it dies to lava repeatedly. It’s really amazing bugs like these have not been fixed 3 months into the expansion.
I haven’t seen that one… that is particularly bad.
Since most tiers are lopsided, the WP restriction doesn’t punish servers for not having an equal sized population. It also takes the sting out of off hour capping. Enemy servers can still put an emergency WP into the keep.
we just wiped because, keep was way out on the green side inner and we went from the back, so frustrating. sometimes lord spawn outside after keep is taken and runs even further outside of the keep on the blue keep even if we kitted him back in the keep. this has been going on for months now.
I have seen this bug in towers, keeps and camps but so far it has been generally annoying. Last night it was demoralizing and game breaking to some. With all the new tactivators coming to fruition and pirate ship fighting, this bug can become infuriating and actually cause players to quit WvW even if only temporarily.
BTW, I cannot fault JQ for taking advantage as I am sure any server would.
(edited by Straegen.2938)
Well well well.. Yaks bend couldn’t siege up and were forced to fight open feild? The real problem with this game is that defending an objective is extremely easy with siege, and that people hiding in keeps with arrow carts are not a viable strategy when they don’t have keep:).
In this case, JQ took the keep during off hours, upgraded it then sat on it with the help of BG. As for open field, fighting in a T3 keep controlled by the enemy is the exact opposite of open field.
Not sure how any of this is relevant to this discussion.
The Keep Lord spawning well outside the circle of a keep can make taking a keep nearly impossible when it is heavily defended. YB in T1 found this out last night first hand. The Keep Lord was well away from the circle. At times fully outside the keep. Because of this our Q’d map could not defend both the Keep Lord body and the circle at the same time from JQs Q’d map. If we split our forces, JQ zerged us down. If we unified they would either hold the circle or rez the keep lord.
This issue is compounded now that the tactivators are in full effect. It is hard enough to breach a T3 keep while it is being actively defended by a Q’d zerg but add on the defensive tactivators such as the Dragon Banner and the feat becomes extremely difficult. Even if a server can overcome that, the keep lord being well away from the circle makes it all but impossible.
The only option is to drag the keep lord back into the circle which we were slowly doing as the night progressed but eventually players got frustrated and left over the situation.
There was never full servers before HoT either so that is not a measurement.
Prior to HoT all of T1 and part of T2 was locked in the US for a fairly long time. The populations were much higher as well.
HoT drained a lot of players out of WvW and many never returned. Those that did stay seem to be dropping off lately. T1 is now a hodge-podge of guilds I barely recognize. Only JQ seems to have kept a couple larger guilds in tact.
Unfortunately T1 this week is sending a lot of players out of the game. I know at least 5 that have quit this week due to general staleness of WvW. They probably would have played to at least the balance patch but BG/JQ have double teamed YB killing the last of the decent roaming there. I couldn’t get anyone I know to even log on.
(edited by Straegen.2938)
The only way you could receive that much damage from CoR is if you were either running naked, an up-level, or you received the infamous “double hit”. Anet has said that the patch release next week will remove the latter. As for the first two… it’s your choice to play that way.
It can hit that hard. Two of us got hit with 12.5k CoR a couple nights ago from a roamer on an initial hit we didn’t see. Not that we run a lot of toughness but we are at least medium armor. Had that player been buffed and us with some vuln stacks it would have hit a lot harder. He dropped me with a 5k hammer bolt next and my friend a few seconds later. We both checked the logs in disbelief.
If a thief had that ability, all hell would break loose on the forums from jump.
Original DaOC nor any expansion have or require macros (would get you banned) nor did it have 99 keystrokes. No more or less than gw2 today. CU, I’m not sure but would assume it will be similar.
DAoC had two default action bars and players could add more. It also had built in macros (/macro command). Did you play the game? Not using multiple action bars and macros would be a tedious affair in that game especially since it didn’t have something like fast ground targeting.
Yeah our guild is all but dead as I am now the last one playing these days. Now that BG and JQ have teamed up to turn EB into a camp-fest roaming is dead.
The speed T1 went from fun to why bother happened quick.
I would be fine if parties were one color and squads another. Our party doesn’t join squads for this reason.
If they plan on keeping these, it should be extremely obvious when a person is carrying one. Right now they look like a regular banner. If they were say twice as tall, groups could more easily target these players.
For me, I never had a problem beating other Thieves, Warriors, Necros and Revs. The classes that gave me trouble but were manageable were DH, Eles and Scrapper. Classes I could only beat if I was on my A game were Druids and Mesmers.
Any non-elite is beatable generally speaking and none rank higher than moderate given above average skill or less.
Dare Devils, Reapers and Zerkers are generally easy targets. Druid, Herald and Revenants are beatable but dangerous/annoying. Scrappers, Tempests, Chronomancers and Dragon Hunters bring a tank and/or a bazooka to a knife fight.
It is one of the worst matchups for a thief outside of using P/P. Even with pistols the fight is pretty brutal. A summoned pet can actually be quite beneficial here either with thieves guild or something like Ogre runes.
SA with steal on stealth and blinding powder make Staff a very effective weapon set. It does mean dropping the big damage of either the CS or DA trait lines but that knockdown makes landing vault 1 or 2 times a snap. Once BV cuts through blocks I can certainly see a substantial amount of added pain to several builds.
I am a bit surprised that the thief sword auto-attack is getting a buff. It already hits for substantial damage (full chain on a maxed vuln tower lord is north of 20k), applies weakness and cripples.
CnD needs to use less initiative when it misses. That single change effectively brings D/D in line with the more effective weapon sets.
As for D/P being the only viable build that is just flat wrong. The Staff is not only viable but performs well. IMO S/P is actually better than D/P as it has one of the biggest weapon attacks and its auto-attack has far more utility in addition to a condi removing teleport. Once you get past those weapon sets on the thief, everything is is second tier or worse.
We have been doing a pretty good job 2v1 ganking the bunker builds with thieves so now we will just need 1.5v1 to get the job done.
As for Scrappers, that stealth gyro cooldown is HUGE. 20 more seconds without stealth is enough to wreck their kitten s. The 20% hammer recharge also is a nice DPS/mobility decrease.
When they say WvW is a priority I am sure they are referencing current development efforts. I believe them when they say they have been working on a big WvW overhaul.
Their silence on why it didn’t make HoT is telling. It appears to be months away and likely points to the project being more difficult than the initially planned. I also think they believed the HoT “improvements” would satisfy the WvW crowd for a bit and did not anticipate the poor reception.
CoR is broke all to hell. Nobody should be landing long range AoE damage over 12k on a crit add in that it is ridiculously spammable. Even the Hammer Bolt auto-attack can land for 5k on a crit.
Sustain also needs an adjustment. I am looking forward to the first balance patch that will address some of this.
Most of the time fights like this end up with the OP dead, their guild marked for retribution and guilds on their own server abandoning them when they need help.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with interrupting a duel in WvW but be prepared to live with consequences. I also wouldn’t whine about being called a loser on public forums especially when some guilds will actively spawn camp you for doing that.
Venom Share makes most thieves individually less effective while adding a group buff that is almost solely reliant on running with a bunch of condi builds. So if roaming, it sucks. In large fights, it mostly sucks. In skirmish it sucks unless a team is built around it.
They effectively killed stability a few months back. Most players now completely opt out of stability for stun breaker skills.
Confusion sucked at release. They buffed the hell out of it until it was ridiculously OP. Then they nerfed it hard so it was mostly used as a cover condition. Then came the rise of the ridiculous OP PU build and that kittened almost everyone that wasn’t a mesmer off. After they nerfed the PU build “for the good of the game” they added passive damage to confusion.
So confusion’s base damage is better than at release and it now has passive as well as active damage. IMO working as intended since getting several stacks of confusion is still enough to kill a player that isn’t aware and remains relatively easy to apply thanks to perplexity.
it still has issues with the lack of boon stripping skills. Unless we get more boon stripping skills and stab gets more priority in getting stripped, the unstoppable heavy frontline meta will be there. That was the reason ppl were shifting to immobilize skills (gs warr, hammer guard) rather than sticking to hammer train. CC was kinda irrelevant with the past stab system
The meta has changed. The backline AoE DPS is much higher now, far more effective builds with both short and long range damage and sustain is 4x better than it was. A hammer train with the old style stability cannot dominate backliners like it used to.
At the very least I would suggest reverting it for a couple weeks and see the effect. If nothing else we get a change of pace and a new discussion topic.
I could give two craps if someone exits the game rather than get stomped so long as the winner is rewarded. What I dislike is there is a way for enemies to exit and deny players a bag and a kill. They need to make it so that the Exit WvW button doesn’t work while in combat.
CU is very old school MMO. I am sure that is great for some old school MMO players but it is a hard adjustment after the semi-action oriented nature of GW2. I don’t think I can go back to that style of play where I have to master 99 different keystrokes and macro the hell out of everything.
Crowfall looks interesting. Course ESO did as well. One can only hope they pull this one off.
Albion… uhhh… an Ultima Online in a sandbox mode running on a bunch of platforms. Almost every part of that sentence reads like a failure.
Alpine is much better than Deserted in terms of WvW. Not that Alpine is a particularly great map but it is miles better than what we have now.
I have been critical of ANet and WvW for a couple years now but the new content in other areas does not mean they are sacrificing WvW time tables. Development isn’t a single group of people marching to a single destination. It is various teams working on various aspects of the product at once. Shatterer being overhauled may not have anything to do with the delays in the WvW design.
Pure speculation from a developer with 25+ years in the business, the WvW design and development is taking WAY longer than they originally planned and is likely in development hell right now.
As for throwing more devs on a project. That generally doesn’t work because when new devs come onto a team they actually slow development down for a while as it takes time to learn the systems and training to get them productive.
Move to YB or one of the other T1 servers. We don’t have tags all the time but they are very common. We generally don’t have Qs and certainly not long ones. Lots of activity in T1 right now and great for roamers. Course there are plenty of gank squads running and lots of experienced players but IMO that adds to the fun.
The concept that stability needed to be fixed in WvW was wrong. For a time hammer trains were OP but Necros eventually became part of the larger meta to counter them. Given the new HoT changes to the meta, it is difficult to see exactly how the old stability would be OP. Reverting would certainly make for better fights IMO.
It is less than we hoped, more than we expected and aside from an unknown stealth change has no downsides. Solid B effort by ANet IMO.
Still going to have contend with ridonculously tough Tempests. Chrono teams won’t have ridiculous amounts of sustain and DPS. Scrappers are going to at least have a bigger window to kill them.
Unless stability gets a rework warriors will continue to suffer. They didn’t fix the Ranger briar pet so that thing will continue to stack a massive amount of bleeds/DPS. DH really didn’t get nerfed at all. The trap change is nice but they will still be melee killers. Revs CoR may still be a beast depending on how that “double hit” effected its damage.
Necro… seems to be sitting in a decent spot so not much here aside from the CB mechanic changes.
I think the big damage from CoR was that double hit. It will still hit pretty hard but hopefully the 10k plus hits will be gone. Course last night I got hit with a 12.5k CoR and a 5k Hammer Bolt. I have a full zerk thief and don’t see numbers like that on my auto-attacks much less ones from relatively long range.
We are down to a handful of players and only a few of us bought HoT when it came out. Sadly the 3-4 remaining are here because there really isn’t anything better on the market currently.
Several other games we have been playing for years tends to bring us back when new content arrives. Unfortunately several of my crew simply say they are “done” with GW2. I think the boring PvE and relatively stale WvW finally ran them off.
Pretty much the only thing that change fps in zerg warfare is character model limit.
I get visual feedback faster with everything turned down even if my FPS is above 30 during large fights.
Like the OP I have an overclocked i7 with a beefy NVidia graphics card. I have a 3D Mark FireStrike score around 18k and the machine has 32GB RAM. It isn’t the hardware. Dropping the graphics to the minimum seems to save a few milliseconds on player response time. It could be perception but our entire guild has noticed the issue on each of our machines so some performance issue seems to be present in the higher graphic render settings. Oddly this is the only game I have this issue. Everything else for the most part can be played in Ultra settings without an issue including other MMOs.
Like many I have thousands of hours playing the thief pre-HoT. I loved D/D, P/P and S/P the best at various stages. I thought D/P while efficient was cheap as hell for the longest time. The Dare Devil variant now has a variety of non-stealth options available to them. Once upon a time Shadow Arts was near mandatory but now with the high evasion and speed up times stealth is very optional.
That said, I think the Dare Devil line is basically Acrobatics on steroids. I love the line and find the melee thief more fun to play. It has a ton of mobility, solid DPS traits and perma-speed or big bonuses to damage/condi.
I am not sure I will ever fully forgive ANet for killing off P/P when they nuked Ricochet since that was the funnest build I have played but my Staff Dare Devil is pretty close. I think Dare Devil actually made S/P more powerful. Had the other classes not gotten absurd sustain with medium to high AoE at the same time, the thief would be sitting in a decent place.
GW2 is mostly CPU bound and even then performs poorly in large fights. I have a similar rig to yours and I run with everything turned down except a handful of settings. Player model limit is setup to high, Particles are turned down for sure and normalize enemy players is turned on. I believe everything else is set to its lowest.
Almost every other game I can run on “Ultra” but GW2 becomes too clunky when the graphics are turned up in all three of my rigs and all of my friends as well.
Guardians are always welcome in zergs. Not so good for roaming or skirmish though as they have virtually no escape.
Necros are very strong in zergs right now. Also not good in roaming or skirmish as they also lack escape.
Mesmers are the king poop of roaming and skirmish and probably the strongest non-Elite in the game in this role. They also have great utility in zergs with portals, time warp, stealth, etc. A lot of players don’t like their play style though.
Engineers suck. Seriously they suck at just about everything. Scrappers are currently awesome but that requires the expansion.
Thieves… don’t bother unless you have wicked fast reflexes, are willing to run away from a lot of fights and have virtually no use in large scale fighting.
Warriors… they are in a bad spot right now. Avoid.
The Elementalist is probably the most versatile class but has a high difficulty curve in roaming and skirmish. In zergs and large group play the Staff ele has great DPS, great group healing and decent escape. In small fight settings, the Celementalist (D/D with Celestial gear) is still strong. Not as strong as some of the Elites but still strong.
Rangers… ughhh… they are below average IMO. They don’t have much to offer in large scale fights. They aren’t great at roaming since they are easy kills up close. They are pretty decent at skirmish if they are in the right group. They are a pain in the kitten with the Druid elite from the expansion but otherwise I would avoid.
The easy answer to the Alt-F4 issue is to run AutoHotKey and remap Alt-F4 to F4 in the GW2 window. I do this with the Right Click on my mouse as I use it for dodge and GW2 doesn’t allow that configuration (or at least didn’t).
Not his builds but pretty close and the ones we run:
S/P
Staff
Yeah but still everyone would use d/p or staff + sb. And some overall thief improvement is required because they fell behind since expac. They shouldn’t be favored in most 1v1’s ofc just like last meta before the expac, but at least they weren’t worthless.
S/P is very powerful right now. Staff and D/P are also in good spots. S/D could use some serious love. D/D needs an adjustment to the risk/reward. Shortbow is OK but they should bring back the spammable Cluster Bomb as that skill is now mostly useless.
Instead of ricochet they should just add a pierce effect IMO, I’ve never liked RNG immobs.
P/P was the thieves only reliable AoE spammable attack when Ricochet was in the mix. It was one of the few hard counters to clone spam Mesmers and allowed a thief to apply group pressure in skirmish which now only the staff can do. If it had a mobility component or they brought back AoE on it, it would be worthy once again. Pierce alone won’t restore the weaponset to its former fun play style.
My suggestions…
Skills:
Trait wise:
Gear:
I will be happy if they put a nerf on the bunker/AoE builds that are dominating right now. They can put a cherry on top by putting Ricochet back in the mix and make CnD misses not cost full initiative.
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