Guild Wars 2

My advice for a new player.
Choose thief. One of the two skill balance developers mains thief and it’s been top dog for five years and never gets nerfed. It’s amazing now and in the expansion (according to leaks) gets 1-shot kills while being invisible and maximum range. FACT.

Don’t touch necromancer. It’s garbage, can’t do anything and has infinite cooldowns on everything and no movement abilities. ALSO A FACT.

Please realise these are slight exaggerations but they are also… pretty much true.

LordEnki.9283:

Svarty.8019:

SubHonour Guard.6498:

Pre-hot it was much easier for a larger force to get into keeps but the defenders also had more options for defending against a force that was inside the lords room. Bannering the lord and using the keep waypoint between events were ways to prolong lord room fights. Prolonging lord room fights allow a smaller force to potentially cut off reinforcements and whittle away at the larger force.
[..]
In short I believe that keep fights are important for keeping a 70/30 fight win rate between uneven groups, which is important for the longevity of the game. For this to happen I believe that keeps need to be redesigned to prolong the fights in keeps, not the fights to get into the keeps. Examples of this can be seen in pre-hot gameplay that has now been removed.

Many of these points have been identified many times over many many posts on this forum. But they remain as valid as ever because;
. A R E N A N E T . N E V E R . D O E S . A N Y T H I N G . A B O U T . T H E M .

This is the biggest problem. No amount of begging, pleading, yelling, arguing, and no matter how well spoken gets anything done it seems. They’ve created the most bitter game mode possible and don’t understand why.

I wouldn’t say bitter, per se. It would be a whole other post. Anyway, I’d say Arenanet don’t WANT to know why the playerbase is divided. They want to address WvW as though it is the same as all the other content in the game. I suspect this is a philosophy disseminated by the head honcho himself.
i.e. Forget what exists and make a new system. That’s how development goes with Guild Wars 2, if you hadn’t noticed.

They don’t like to modify existing content because it’s difficult (expensive in terms of man-hours) because they have to have new programmers understand the old code (written by people who moved on – Hello Amazon Games), which takes up valuable programming time. They want the new programmers to spend all their time programming, not reading and pondering.

So it is logical that Arenanet doesn’t WANT to understand why the players are unsatisfied with the gamemode. I know we’re all disappointed in the company because of this. I thought that my opinion of NCSoft was brought to a low when they canned City of Heroes, but Guild Wars 2 has really put a downer on things. Such amazing potential… I know, I know, we’ve all said this much before. I’ll stop now before I cry.

Expansion cancelled™ Rofl.

Great to see this thread dumped in a subforum that nobody at Arenanet will read.

“But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

DirtyDan.4759:

I would be happy if the LFG tool wouldn’t start with an open tab that instantly closes when clicked on the LFG tab (you know what I mean?)

No, I don’t use it. There is no need for the LFG tool in WvW. Sorry.

Forget all that rubbish. Just press ‘B’ select … eh… Select Eternal Battlegrounds for now.
Watch you’re backside and follow your friends. Good luck out there.

Some good work here. It’s sad that nobody will read it unless it’s on Reddit, though.

Also, I’d like to see the particular player’s WvW world name on the Hero panel SOMEWHERE and the WvW ladder shown somewhere in-game, too, since it’s so important.

I’m in the same boat as the OP and can confirm there are tonnes of thieves in WvW at the moment making life miserable for soloers with their PvP builds.

Please could Arenanet force Karl McLain to nerf them? He’s been making life worse for everybody else for 5 years.

I thought this thread was made in jest, but I realise now that it’s dead on serious.

Funny how lots of staff got snaffled by Amazon but some are left behind.

Ben K.6238:

It may have made the customization more difficult, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d have designed the races differently in hindsight. But there’s a couple counterpoints to that.

• GW2 is the only major game that I can think of that’s actually done heavily customizable player races that aren’t just reskinned humans. It’s an example to the rest of the industry in that sense, and if I ever have to move on from GW2 I’m going to miss that badly.

I believe we’d see far more content if all races were reskinned humans.

One way to make outfits or suits work would be to have invisible or none-existent head pieces.

marelooke.9708:

Svarty.8019:

If you want lore, play Guild Wars 1.

GW2 lore is sparse and weak and refers to GW1 all the time, so players who didn’t play the first game don’t engage with what lore there is in the second game.

Lore wise, here is my opinion on the backgrounds (which is basically all Guild Wars 1 story, I think):
The story about humans being pushed back into one city is good.
The story about the sylvari treemother and the tablet guy is good.
The story about asura being forced to the surface world is good.
The story about charrs is forgetable. What was that about? They are disgraced because they are the race that prevents us having cool-looking equipment and clothes.

And the Norn weren’t even worth mentioning ;-)

Who?

If you want lore, play Guild Wars 1.

GW2 lore is sparse and weak and refers to GW1 all the time, so players who didn’t play the first game don’t engage with what lore there is in the second game.

Lore wise, here is my opinion on the backgrounds (which is basically all Guild Wars 1 story, I think):
The story about humans being pushed back into one city is good.
The story about the sylvari treemother and the tablet guy is good.
The story about asura being forced to the surface world is good.
The story about charrs is forgetable. What was that about? They are disgraced because they are the race that prevents us having cool-looking equipment and clothes.

Has anybody got a video of vanilla Necro beating Thief now that they get reveal on Shroud #5?

Turk.5460:

Svarty.8019:

theodor.3480:

Dodge, cc, fear them or make them waste that precious ini that is in limited number so that he can aa only.
But thieves have so much dodge, why can’t i hit? Condi is your friend here… Thieves melt with condi, with 13k hp in glass gear they will melt.

So at the end of the rant i want to ask you why so salty against thief when there are many counters? This is coming from a thief, and I love the class over any others.

I’ll bite.

Thief has so many dodges, and target-clearing that I can’t hit it with the counters you list.

No wonder you love the class over any others.

https://tinyurl.com/mzfcg75

I suppose, from that response, that you have nothing rational to back up your opinion.

Chinchilla.1785:

My issue is that people want to outright delete said tactics instead of adding opportunities to “outplay” those that employ the above. Because it’s easy to nerf, I guess? Adding stuff means it comes down to map design, and balance. Something that I hardly trust a divided community to agree on the details.

Do you have any ideas for outplaying a stacked up blob with a few people?

I’ve already commended the idea of a powerful Lord who can even up a fight (like we have at Air and Fire keeps atm). Perhaps a shorter tether so the room can be bombed more effectively, too.

If we’re judging whether anything will change … well, I guess it’s easier to do nothing – and that is exactly what everybody has come to expect.

Rapier.3675:

Server identity was lost long time ago with introducing mega server.

I agree with this to some degree.

Just think … Where in the game is your server name shown?
Why would any PvE player even think about joining WvW if they don’t even see their World name shown anywhere?

theodor.3480:

Dodge, cc, fear them or make them waste that precious ini that is in limited number so that he can aa only.
But thieves have so much dodge, why can’t i hit? Condi is your friend here… Thieves melt with condi, with 13k hp in glass gear they will melt.

So at the end of the rant i want to ask you why so salty against thief when there are many counters? This is coming from a thief, and I love the class over any others.

I’ll bite.

Thief has so many dodges, and target-clearing that I can’t hit it with the counters you list.

No wonder you love the class over any others.

TheDarkSoul.1938:

Do I want it to be some cheesy one-shot “sniper” build? Nope, I think that’d be boring as kitten and I wouldn’t touch it with a stick.

… because a cheesy one-shot melee build is so much more interesting.

jk .. I know it takes two-shots to kill people.

Bigpapasmurf.5623:

The same red circle that your marks can almost completely cover? Must be rough.

Necros use staves in PvP? Lawl!

Holland.9351:

Things you would like to see

Thief nerfed.

It feels like all of Arenanet’s passion goes into this content only.

CrimeMaker.8612:

requires arena net to put in time and effort which is not gonna happen.

^^ this. Nobody has faith in the brand anymore.

Djinn.9245:

Mishoo.5918:

Greyraven.4258:

…
No one seems to want to have fun anymore…. .

Not really true. Some save the fun for the end.
He who laughs last, laughs best.

Save fun for the end of what?

I, for one, am looking forward to a celebration of what the game could have been when the final server shuts down.

I guess it’s way too late to think of these ideas in relation to this particular game – and that’s a sad thing.

Cynz.9437:

Does thief have invuls, huge HP sponge, high access to blocks and multiple heals, stab? No. All they have is [the ability to be invulnerable three times on tiny cooldown] [total invisibility]

When I change it to what it means it suddenly doesn’t seem so weak, does it?

You also missed out the ability to be half way across the map in the blink of an eye and massive burst with no cooldowns.

Not OP at all… #BlameMcLain

Holosmith smells of Mesmer to me.

In my experience, none of the classes are fun. It’s just a case of finding something you can tolerate.

All the skills and abilities in GW2 are weird and none of the combat makes any sense.

The only redeeming feature is dodge.

Having said that. Guardian is a mediocre choice. It’s not one of the Pianist classes (i.e. button mashers: engi, mesmer, elementalist, thief), so if you are good at remembering button combinations or have macro hardware (but not software), you might want to use one of those as they are far more powerful than the non-Pianist classes.

Aury.1367:

Look at WvW: Thief got ALL the boosts, but the nerfs were PvP only. Its even worse here. Thanks for screwing up again.

Karl McLain strikes again! Muahahaha!

Sly.9518:

Svarty.8019:

I believe that Stealth is a huge issue for video games. It causes more aggravation, frustration and disappointment than any other power – in ALL games, and understandably so.

It is very rare to find a thief so skilled as to shun Stealth entirely. I have heard tell of such amazing players, but that when they were threatened by a large group of players, they resorted to Stealth to escape. Which illustrates how ridiculously powerful Stealth is.

Counterplay is vital to making games fun. Stealth takes away counterplay, therefore Stealth is the opposite of fun.

Budding games developers take note.

Yet all but 4 classes has counterplay to Stealth, funny how that works

Even funnier how it doesn’t.

Kerivek.5740:

My issue with scepter/torch in PvP is the terrible projectiles. Scepter isn’t so bad anymore but the accuracy issues with Torch 4 frustrate me to no end.

That’s because it’s really a melee attack. If you’re trying to use that at range, well, you’ve seen the results and come to your own (correct) conclusion.

I’ll still use bow. I never saw True Shot as a decent skill in the first place, it’s never been the, “powerful attack”, it claims to be on it’s tooltip. In fact, autoattack seems better than True Shot.

I believe that Stealth is a huge issue for video games. It causes more aggravation, frustration and disappointment than any other power – in ALL games, and understandably so.

It is very rare to find a thief so skilled as to shun Stealth entirely. I have heard tell of such amazing players, but that when they were threatened by a large group of players, they resorted to Stealth to escape. Which illustrates how ridiculously powerful Stealth is.

Counterplay is vital to making games fun. Stealth takes away counterplay, therefore Stealth is the opposite of fun.

Budding games developers take note.

Most of the informed opinions here seem to concur (to varying degrees) that using weapon skills to take down doors is unsatisfying for all involved participants and viewed as somewhat cheap and borderline exploiting.

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

Sviel.7493:

So many people missing the point here~

The problem isn’t that the gate eventually falls, but that there’s no player interaction in it falling. All defense is just stalling—that is enshrined in the mechanic of supply. A well-played defense will always lose when it doesn’t have the supply to keep going. It can lose even faster if the offense manages to break something open before the defense can adequately respond. In the case of 5v40, the strength of the offense is such that they will very likely break something before the defense runs out of supply. Unless they’re dumb.

That’s all fine.

The problem is when the defense is present, aware of the attack and unable to do anything meaningful about it. By meaningful, I mean there should be some avenue, provided they have enough time, to repel the assault. That doesn’t mean that they need to succeed at repelling every assault—that would be ludicrous and boring. It just means that for every offensive assault, there must be a defensive action which can theoretically repel that assault.

The issue with PvD is that the only defensive action is attempting to repair the gate. Even that fails when the attacks coming through it are too much to get close. Thus, there’s nothing for the defense to even attempt to do. They’re helpless to watch as they lose the keep.

If the enemies had thrown down 8 rams and 3 shield generators, the gate would still have fallen and much quicker…but the defender’s objective would then be to destroy the siege. It would be very difficult, but it gives them something to work towards.

I literally said a lot of what you said in the first part of your comment.

I wouldn’t be against the idea of gates not taking damage from players but that is the only defensive buff I would be in support of. If you prepare properly, PvD isn’t an issue. I’ve been a part of a lot of keep assaults and 9 times out of 10, it requires at least 3 or 4 attempts before getting through inner even when it’s only half a dozen people defending. If the enemy is determined, they’ll get through eventually no matter what. People need to let go of the idea that they should be able to hold objectives from forces triple their size. It sucks to be in that situation and I’ve been there many times myself, but if nobody can win, everyone loses.

Sviel is 100% correct.

I disagree with you, Spell, when you say,

• “they’ll get through eventually no matter what”, and,
• “People need to let go of the idea that they should be able to hold objectives from forces triple their size”

Bringing us back on topic, these situations are perfectly defensible if there is no skill-damage on gate.

It simply comes down to a supply mitigation game. Remember the tower in question was tier 3. This means that the defenders should be able to build (as well as the pre-prepared siege already built and refreshed) more siege than the attackers can.

My point is that the game in this instance isn’t 60vs20. It’s 1 piece of siege vs 1 piece of siege. It’s the siege and countersiege game. That’s what’s evening this situation up. That’s why it should be theoretically feasible for these defenders to be able to counter this particular outnumbering force.

And that HOPE is what gives defenders motivation to persist. If you take away that hope, as you propose, you take away defenders, pride, rewards and fun – and without those, you have no game.

No.

I’ve been condi bombing siege since tuesday with this. It does a lot of damage but enemy CC means a lot of the time the necro is unable to cast it before being overwhelmed by zerg.

Coordinating lots of necros to do it would be another thing. Someone wants to deprive the zerg of their damage dealers?

Speaking of zerg, I notice that this ability is very situational;

• My main gripe is that it’s utter garbage against enemy thieves
• Enemy zergs don’t walk through it
• If I put my toon in harm’s way to drop it, either I get CC’d in such a way that I can’t cast it or the enemy commander runs his zerg through me

Conclusion: Plaguelands is a neat idea on paper, but it’s too impractical. Having said this, the rest of the options are extremely crap underwhelming, too, so I guess I’ll leave it there until I decide that I want my shout back.

Plaguelands is total garbage.

I can’t get a thief to stand on it, let alone get him to stand on it for 10 seconds.

I want an explanation as to why this is deemed a useful skill. Oh, the impact on competitive play wasn’t taken into account? Hands up if you’re surprised. Nobody? Bueller?

zealex.9410:

I wonder how big of market crash would sigil swapping introduce and how bigger than the foob buff crash would be. Really makes me Thonk.

I suspect there aren’t enough raiders for this to make any impact.

SubHonour Guard.6498:

Pre-hot it was much easier for a larger force to get into keeps but the defenders also had more options for defending against a force that was inside the lords room. Bannering the lord and using the keep waypoint between events were ways to prolong lord room fights. Prolonging lord room fights allow a smaller force to potentially cut off reinforcements and whittle away at the larger force.
[..]
In short I believe that keep fights are important for keeping a 70/30 fight win rate between uneven groups, which is important for the longevity of the game. For this to happen I believe that keeps need to be redesigned to prolong the fights in keeps, not the fights to get into the keeps. Examples of this can be seen in pre-hot gameplay that has now been removed.

Many of these points have been identified many times over many many posts on this forum. But they remain as valid as ever because;
. A R E N A N E T . N E V E R . D O E S . A N Y T H I N G . A B O U T . T H E M .

Ovalkvadratcylinder.9365:

Svarty.8019:

WvW is having issues with the damage creep.

Even tier3 doors and walls can’t prevent a determined group from standing in a safe-spot and using weapon skills to destroy a door.

This is a problem because THERE IS NO COUNTERPLAY.

…

Yeah there is… determined group to defend a tower is the counter to a determined group who wanna cap it

I guess my original post was really just a vent about the persistent WvW problem of uneven sides, where a small (otherwise they wouldn’t bother being inside the objective) group of defenders has to try to beat away a larger group.

In this scenario, I think there should at the very least be a way to repair the door without being killed by the massive amount of weapon skills striking through it.

I’m looking forward to minor/major rune eaters.

WvW is having issues with the damage creep.

Even tier3 doors and walls can’t prevent a determined group from standing in a safe-spot and using weapon skills to destroy a door.

This is a problem because THERE IS NO COUNTERPLAY.

There are many ways this issue can be solved. One solution might be to redesign every objective so that it is much easier to hit people using siege without the siege being killed by Meteor Shower.

The solution I propose is to have only siege damage the doors and walls. This way we can play the siege/countersiege game instead of having to endure balling up target-cap exploits.

Rauderi.8706:

The solution is not for me “to make it fun”. That is not my job. ANet devs get paid to make WvW fun.

… and yet you advocate Arenanet changing the game to favour you.

Rauderi.8706:

I suppose the point is, why should PvE players attend a game mode that, quite frankly, even WvW players seem to constantly loathe?

I am one of those people who seems to constantly loathe WvW, but I don’t constantly loathe it. I am frustrated that the gamemode I love isn’t as good as it could and should be. I and my fellow WvW players vent that frustration regularly. It’s the passion we have for the gamemode that keeps us complaining. Why else would we stick around?

That’s why I find it mindboggling that people want to completely circumvent the best gamemode.

They wouldn’t add it to anything on thief. That precious godmode no-cooldown bs is … special.

Bandrell.4357:

Please Arenanet, consider putting the Gift of Battle elsewhere. [..] At this point I am no longer enjoying my time playing, specifically because WvW is not fun.

As an almost exclusive WvW player, I find it ironic and disgusting that PvE players want to avoid WvW. As if it wasn’t bad enough that WvW players have to do loads of PvE to get Legendary weapons, we also now have no access to the new Legendary Armour.

I’m disgusted that you want to shove our gamemode off the table entirely.

The solution to the problem you have is to make WvW fun, not to move the Gift of Battle elsewhere.

“Be the change you want to see”

Rayya.2591:

by constant transfering i /we support a-net with gems, considering i /we make 200 players transfer every 2 months.
In return we would like a-net to check the tiers constantly, and to adjust matchups for maximum activity

Don’t you get it yet? After years and years of transferring 200 people every 2 months Arenanet have done nothing to adjust matchups especially for you. The system evidently needs more than 2 months to form fair games and you moving constantly means it never happens.

Aeolus.3615:

People should get their WvW rank reseted each time they would transfer over
And there should be only a 2 -3 times server swap in a year.

I support and endorse this idea.

VaaCrow.3076:

stop letting gunnars hold carry you and do some of the work required to get you up to position 1.

Please understand that the new system is designed around “good matches”. The ladder system is more or less out of the window. By rights it should be impossible for any linkee server to move into the top half of what remains of the ladder.

K THEN.5162:

Alt f4 seems to do the trick for me

I’m not ashamed to say I do this regularly.
It’s Arenanet’s fault for putting such awful classes in their game.

I don’t mean this is a nasty way, but Rayya, you and all your server-hopping pals are the reason WvW never gets balanced.

Anet have stated before that the system takes time to work. When people transfer servers en masse you mess up the algorithm. It’s Anet’s fault really, they shouldn’t allow transfers at any time, there should be specific time windows to do transferring.

Three years late

I recommend sentient anomoly and star of gratitude.
You could make Dragonite Ingots and Empyreal Stars, but Arenanet are doing the usual “ignore existing content, just make new systems all the time” thing with those.