Guild Wars 2

I agree, the Shatterstone buff is ridiculous. Needs a nerfin’.

Nocturnal Lunacy.8563:

… with no indication its coming

Really? No indication other than one of the most telegraphed animations in the entire game, maybe.

…and no way to defend against it…

Suggest setting a keybind for dodge. Heard it’s quite OP.

I’ll just keep it simple by saying actual WvW players are interested in fighting other players/groups without a myriad of gimmicks and nonsense. They want to pick a build, gear and skills for their class, learn how they work most effectively individually and how they synergize with their team, then use these against other people who have done the same. Commanders want to pit their forces, composition and tactics against enemy commanders, with the victory going to the commander and team who can outwit and/or outmaneuver their enemies and perform the best in combat. That is the most ideal scenario for an enjoyable fight, at least, and one people take the most pride in winning.

So where do the gimmick banners fit into that equation? The answer is that they don’t. There’s a reason the use of siege has generally always been frowned upon during open field fighting scenarios, and that’s because people enjoy fights in the manner I have outlined above, without OP gimmick spoiling the enjoyment of the engagement. Banners fit firmly into the “OP gimmicks” category, and I honestly fail to understand why such items were seriously considered for implementation as their use is directly contrary to what most WvW players would consider to be conducive to promoting a fun fights environment.

All it requires is the basic understanding of what many WvW players constitute as a decent, fun fight, which I outlined above, to realize why any fight aiding/manipulating gimmick, both present and future, are probably a bad move for the game mode.

Siege is fine and expected when assaulting/defending a structure, but not in the open field. Similarly, if banners have to exist, their use should be confined, in my opinion, to being used in the defense of the structure in which they’re slotted. They could give a nice advantage to the (probably outnumbered) defending force in a final “last stand” type of deal once the gate/walls have been breached. Allowing large groups to run around with these in the open field is ridiculous, however, and usually results in a a tit-for-tat escalation by the other force who then brings their own banners to the party. The net result is usually an unenjoyable fight for all concerned as the outcome comes down to who can cheese the most players down with their banners before the other. When it degenerates to this level, people then start logging off or doing other things because it’s simply not fun to deal with or participate in, win or lose.

- T1 Commander, Jade Quarry.

Honestly, the shared slots would have been cool to share siege etc. But not at 700 gems per 1 slot.

Siege should be something that goes into the account wallet or something anyway which is globally accessible.

Could have been a very cool upgrade for WvW commanders/players to share siege between all of their characters to avoid having to keep moving them around. Not at 700 gems per 1 slot though, lol. RIP.

Murksler.5261:

It’s nice how most people don’t understand what he’s showing with this video.

This probably depresses me most about this whole thing. =P

Are you using the new 64-bit client? I’ve heard this happen to many people who switched, and seen it myself on occasion.

Join your realm’s Teamspeak server. I honestly cannot emphasize this enough. It should be your #1 priority to download it, find out your server’s TS and hop on when you see someone tagged up. You will learn a huge amount just from following a pin and listening for awhile.

Gotchaz.7865:

I don’t see how bringing the old maps would help. I’m on a T1 server and prior to HoT coming out the BL’s were a ghost town.

We’re on the same server. No they weren’t.

It was an awesome concept. Even just the concept of teams progressing to fight other teams who had also progressed whilst those who lost were kicked back to the lobby and had to begin from the start again was a good one. It created much more fun matches at the end of the scale against good teams due to the lesser teams having been eliminated previously in the tournament. The HoH matches themselves were almost always competitive for that reason, because the teams had proven themselves in order to get there to begin with. It was essentially a self-regulating matchmaking system which, by and large, worked well.

Even Random Arenas worked the same way. If you won with your random team, you would move on to the next match with your same team and the system tried to match you against teams who had a similar level of win streak, often causing fun matches as the best teams stayed together until they lost. I think winning 10 games in a row awarded a point towards a title track or something, if memory serves me correctly.

I think the concept of tournament-style progression would be an interesting idea to explore for a game mode anyway.

You have a 70 person roster and out of 70 people only a maximum of 2 are on the same server? That’s mathematically impossible unless a lot are multi-region also and even then it would be incredibly unlucky for that to be the case, lol.

Anyway, if you’re struggling you could always ask people within WvW on your server itself to join your guild temporarily to help with your guild mission. I’m sure you wouldn’t have any trouble finding someone to help.

Unranked conquest requires rank 10. Unranked Stronkhold has no requirement. It seems Anet want new players’ first PvP experience to be in Stronkhold, for whatever reason.

The guardian’s roots lie within the monk and paragon classes in GW1, which were heavily support-focused. It’s ashame that, at present, rangers can fulfill this role more effectively and playing a bunker/support guard is barely viable since the removal of the minstrel’s amulet as it is difficult to deal with the power creep since HoT with such a low base HP pool.

I’m a fan of the new look, personally.

Having separate functions for skills in PvE and PvP in GW1 was an absolute mess and undoubtedly a development nightmare, not to mention highly confusing at times. I have no doubt they’ll be wanting to avoid repeating the same mistake in GW2 having seen how it turned out in the original so they won’t go down that route.

It’s amusing. The other month people were up in arms because Mike O’Brien insinuated that very few people played the WvW game mode exclusively. Now when you ask where all the WvW players are, you’ll be told “they’re in PvE.” Guess he was right afterall.

With the addition of the Minstrel’s amulet, I found bunker guardians to be in a good place as the extra vitality felt necessary for them to deal with the power creep. I was pleased to see an “old school” spec still being kept relevant and assumed that’s one of the reasons they added the Minstrel’s ammy to begin with.

With that amulet removed, this is unfortunately no longer the case. I concede the amulet was OP when used by rangers, but the classic bunker guard still felt balanced. I have not tried to play bunker guard w/ the cleric’s amulet in this meta, but Firebird’s assessment of its non-viability seems accurate with all the extra damage/on-point cleave.

I’d really like the balance situation of the bunker guardian to be looked at in coming balance patches, specifically their 13k HP pool w/ the cleric’s option.

I jump like crazy before matches. I just realized how terrible I must be. FeelsBadMan

In PvP, the warhorn is very underwhelming when compared with the focus for tempest. The focus offers better defensive options (earth 4 condi clear, earth 5 invulnerability) as well as projectile destruction (air 4) and an aura (fire 5) to synergize with aura-related boon application.

It is very hard to look beyond D/F right now for PvP for the best synergistic set which offers good, and much needed, defensive options.

You don’t need to claim the camp for your guild to get credit for it for the guild mission. You just have to capture it with at least 3 guildies, I believe, and ensure your hold it for 10 minutes so it gets its first tier of upgrade.

You have just discovered one of the multitude of reasons why most PvPers, I’d guess, have auto-targeting off.

I agree with the L2Mow consensus.

Was really disappointed this didn’t make it over from GW1, although it came later in that game also. Hope to see it in GW2 soon, for sure. There’s literally no reason not to implement this.

GW1 spectator mode was fantastic and allowed you to watch and re-watch games from different perspectives every time at any point you wished. You could watch GvG tournament games on demand, etc. It was really neat and allowed newer players a good reference to help them to learn how to play their classes/builds.

I was disappointed there isn’t something as comprehensive in GW2. GW1’s spectator mode was way ahead of its time.

P/P thieves are only good for catching you off-guard at the start. Then when everyone realizes you’re playing P/P, you’ll spend the rest of the game in downstate. At least, this is how it should work.

P/P damage was buffed recently, but they weren’t really unused due to their lack of damage before. They weren’t particularly viable due to their lack of survivability and the fact that most other classes/specs brought more to the table, which hasn’t really changed. You’ll see them for a little whilst people are still trying out the buffs, but not much beyond.

Roid.6832:

DresdenAllblack.1249:

How about you stay where you are and make your own server stronger?

Not possible. I’m in SOR it is a ghost town…

Can confirm there’s nothing ever happening on SoR. WvW and GvG scene completely ded. Best transfer to the blob tier, boiz.

#SoRRevival2k15

Synosius.9876:

Dont come to sor, theres only freaks and weirdos here…

Can confirm.

It has nothing to do whatsoever with the drivers. It is the “Render Sampling” setting being reset to “Native” (even if it still shows “Subsample”) in the graphics settings. It needs to be fixed.

Many people have multiple characters each with pre-set builds or whatever to make it easier for swapping. PvE level really has no bearing on someone’s PvP knowledge, and I’d assume any low level players are just veteran PvPers swapping out or trying new stuff.

To be honest, I’ve never seen anyone being flamed for having a low PvE level. I can only assume those doing so are in really low MMR brackets.

Saw a character named “Peace Love and Moa”. Was pretty awesome.

As soon as I read this line, I realized the author of this article probably doesn’t really understand the game mode or the actual challenges facing it:

I would personally consider two of the biggest problems facing World versus World to be the existing map size and “zerging”.

Just a hype article sponsored by ANet without any actual meaningful insight or substance, which can only be provided by actual WvW players. A cute advertisement for non-GW2/WvW players, but irrelevant drivel to everyone else.

You are on SoR, right? Those have been there since Sunday.

Wow. Just wow. I have no words.

LOL. I was there for the slaughtering. I joined ya in your parade but my guildies are beasts, I tell you. Beasts.

tbh, necros are right up there with warriors in terms of the best class to command with if you know how to theorycraft a good build and you know how to play. Very few do, so stick to the generally meta/cookie cutter guardian which is fine, but there are better options available to the top commanders if they can work them out and have mastered their usage.

Not overly keen on another “season” either, although the fights would probably be better with everyone try-harding. Having said that, all the PvEers would be queuing the maps to get the stupid meta achievements done which ANet will probably return to S2 levels of annoyingness after everyone complained about S3’s being “too easy.” QQ.

The problem you are describing isn’t exclusive to gold league, even if it is most prevalent there. Far from it, actually. Even the higher end of the silver league vs. the lower end wouldn’t result in balanced matchups. The same is true for bronze too with servers like GoM who are ridiculously stacked in comparison with lower bronze servers.

The fact is, the whole “tournament” and “league” concept is broken from top to bottom and needs to be reevaluated. The server populations themselves are broken, for a start. The full status of servers should only be determined by participation in WvW since servers now are irrelevant from a PvE perspective and it should be cheaper to move to servers which are least populated. New players should also be educated on what relevance server choice has to them and perhaps be encouraged/incentivized to pick certain servers depending on population which dynamically changes.

There seems to be serious misconceptions about T1 and “push weeks.” As someone else said, if a T1 server is deemed to be having a “push week” it just means they’re basically pulling overtime and trying to maximize PPT basically like they would during a season match. That doesn’t mean they’ll automatically win the match or there is an acceptance that they will win that week. The opposite is often true, actually. If it is obvious one of the servers are pushing harder than usual, this can cause 1 or both of the other servers to start pushing too in order to prevent a server from winning on their “push week”, thus often creating some epic fights and fun for all concerned. In fact I think one of the points from that stupid meeting someone referenced was to try and co-ordinate the so-called “push weeks” so everyone’s “pushing” at the same time meaning a greater level of competition, although that often happens organically anyway rather than through some agreement.

T1 is effectively locked and will basically remain locked because none of the T2 servers have the coverage or the will to compete with T1 servers. The established T1 servers have become stacked by people looking for around-the-clock large group play and will remain so unless something drastic happens.

FA had a small window to push for T1 when TC was getting focused, but only their SEA really did so. Even if FA rolled a T1 matchup, they wouldn’t be able to compete with T1 servers on coverage alone. There wouldn’t need to be a coordinated 2v1, they would get completely obliterated and k-trained naturally when they simply didn’t have any groups on to defend. T1 servers have groups operating 24/7, for most part, which is not the case for T2 servers and below usually. FA’s brief opportunity to come up has long since passed anyway and their main SEA guild is bored with PvDooring in a timezone they vastly outnumber the other 2 servers and is seeking to transfer to T1. The rest of FA didn’t really have the will or ambition to come to T1 so that will lead to guilds on the server who did want that to transfer off. FA will become less stacked in the process which will probably be a good thing for the T2 scene.

shaman.1938:

I wanted to try gearing up my ele with celestial gear (as per some people saying it is the best option) but my gawd..

Those people are wrong. Celestial gear in PvE or WvW is far from the best option for an elementalist. I do not recommend using it.

The celestial amulet works in sPvP because you cannot mix and min/max your individual armor pieces there, therefore you can take advantage of the stat spread whilst complimenting your damage via might stacking as d/d. Everywhere else, you have the option to focus on stat thresholds of your core stats and build an armor suit around those from more specific pieces.

This min/maxing is only really worth it in WvW, tbh. Feel free to check out the link in my signature, specifically the armor area, for WvW armor ele setups. For PvE you can just run full zerk (or mix in a few soldiers/zerk+valkyrie accessories if you need to tank up), which is also more than viable in WvW if your positioning is good.

Please don’t remove this. I love my many salty fans. <3

Stephen ClarkeWillson.1802:

The “rubber band” variety like you report means the client and server are not communicating and if it gets bad enough you get disconnected. This is the problem I’m working on understanding.

In the short run, just in case you are getting traffic shaping from your ISP, try, as an experiment, using “/clientport 443” on your command line. This moves you away from our standard port 6112 which some ISPs associate (incorrectly) with torrents. What happens with port 6112 is your traffic will be fine until you hit a zerg, then your internet traffic takes a big jump, and then (in some cases – not necessarily what is happening to you) your ISP or another one along the line will drop a lot of your traffic and/or disconnect you because they think you are serving torrents.

I tried the -clientport setting, as I mentioned earlier, and this didn’t resolve the problem. My ping was still spiking to over 2,000 and when I tried to ping the server’s IP I was receiving at least 20% packet loss at the network level, unrelated to the game itself.

Interestingly, I set up a secure shell tunnel to a server elsewhere and ran my GW2 traffic through it for awhile tonight. My lag issues went away and my ping was fine. 0% packet loss from the server I routed through.

This may well be an issue with certain ISPs or routes taken at particular times. Later on in the evening I went back to my home connection and it was back down to 0% packet loss. I’m a UK player playing on NA servers and many of those who have been experiencing these type of issues have been in Europe. The server I routed through is in Chicago. It only seems to be ANet’s servers I experience this type of packet loss to. My connection to everywhere else seems fine during these times, hence why the tunneling was effective in resolving the problem. I shouldn’t have to go to these lengths just to play the game, however. This type of work-around is beyond most players.

After a relatively lag-free weekend, game has been unplayable all day for me from UK. Ping spikes to 4,000+. Tried cycling my connection and using -clientport switch to no avail. QQ. Seems to be packet loss related:

Ping statistics for 64.25.38.168:
Packets: Sent = 82, Received = 68, Lost = 14 (17% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 210ms, Maximum = 213ms, Average = 211ms
————————————————————————————

I do not have packet loss to anything else other than ANet servers.

Join the Jade Quarry hordes in our noble and benevolent crusade to eradicate the TC vermin from T1 in time for HoT, lest they wreck us all with 50 open-field shield generators guarding their ACs and ballistae.

Truly, we are doing the work of the six gods who shall guide us to glory and bags.

Congratulations. You’ve just figured out why no decent player would use A and D to turn their characters and why no decent player would click their skills, all at once.

Merchant Of Shadows.1526:

Tiffany.8576:

Merchant Of Shadows.1526:

Waiting for new content is very hard for me as I want everything RIGHT NOW.

Most people get over that phase when they’re above 10 years old or so.

I appreciate your insulting me when I offer up my current opinion on the state of the game. I’m sure you’ll go far in life.

You’ve not really offered up any opinion. All you’ve posted is the rather childish cry of “I want, I want, I want and I can’t wait!” and “The game is stale for me.” Who cares? Go play something else if you feel you’re done with the game until the expansion or whatever. No-one’s forcing you to keep logging in. At the end of the day, it’s a game. If you’ve got nearly 3 years of enjoyment out of it up to this point for your original investment in the box price, I’d say you’ve had a pretty good deal compared with most other games out there.

We all know there’s an expansion coming out. That will solve the “staleness” factor in the interim, although pretty much all MMOs/games in general suffer with players consuming content way faster than developers can produce more of it. That’s just the nature of the beast. With MMOs, the community usually sustains people’s interests in the long term when the content does get rather stale until the next batch is released. People just have to be patient in between those periods and either find something they can still enjoy to do in the game with friends, or find something else to do entirely in another game or whatever.

Merchant Of Shadows.1526:

Waiting for new content is very hard for me as I want everything RIGHT NOW.

Most people get over that phase when they’re above 10 years old or so.

I wish it was just a 1 hour debuff or something which fell off after the time expired. Having this effect on for the entire day blows. It gets old fast, particularly in PvP environments like WvW. It’s not enabled in sPvP arenas and it shoulda been disabled in WvW too. It was pretty distracting whilst I was trying to command earlier.

I think most “April fools” jokes are stupid. Unsurprisingly, that also means I find this one in-game stupid and annoying too. Definitely not worth getting mad and spending time writing paragraphs of rage on a forum about, though.

gr8 b8 m8

A+

Lag is ridiculous today from EU. Constant DCs and lag, where everyone keeps moving for 5 seconds then warps back to their original position. Meh.