Guild Wars 2

The more QQ there is about her on the boards the more I like her.

It seems ANet has inadvertently created an amazing meta-villain. Scarlet is a more effective villain outside the game than she is within it.

Part 2 – Horizontal progression – Cosmetic

In my experience, cosmetic horizontal progression is in a similar place as the ascended gear. There have been lots of great skins introduced in the game, but I’ve barely been able to bring myself to use any of them because I would only want to use then on best-in-slot gear, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to craft best in slot gear for the above stated reasons).

Again skin lockers like those that have been suggested elsewhere resolve this issue for me. There could be a moderate cost associated with producing a new duplicate skin if it is judged necessary to tax the players who want use the skins multiple times, but it should be affordable to even casual players. Skins are a great draw to almost all players but players shouldn’t feel punished if their one single use skin was used on a piece of gear that was obsoleted by a patch, or other change.

In my personal experience, the current state of legendries and legendary crafting is fine. Legendary armor, Dyes, Back pieces etc… are all items that could (should?) be pursued and could be very interesting. I strongly feel that the stat-changing ability of current legendries should be transposed to ascended weapons and armor. The only “core” aspect of legendary gear should be the unique look.

Horizontal progression – Weapon skills

Other kinds of horizontal progression should cover skills and skills and utilities acquisition.

When I first heard of the skill system for GW2 (as an avid GW1 player) I never imagined that it would be so static. For instance, I fully expected that although swords would come with 3 skills, that there would be more than 3 “sword” skills with multiple types of swords with different skill combos to be found. I expected some swords would be more offensive and others more defensive.

For example:

• Bonetti’s rapier: (1) Auto attack, (2) Riposte, (3) Bonetti’s defence.
• Gladius: (1) Auto attack, (2) Gash, (3) Hamstring.

Introducing skill variety within weapons could be a great way to introduce build diversity. This seems very long term.

Horizontal Progression – Elite Skills

I also feel that a good avenue for horizontal progression would be to have a long and hard look at Elite skills in GW2.

There is a pretty big difference in philosophy regarding the role of elite skills in GW1 and GW2: GW1 elite skills were build defining and the majority of GW2 elites are not.

GW2 elite skills have such high cooldowns that they are often an afterthought (with some exceptions like war banner in a banner build on warrirors). In general, GW2 elites are in an odd place, they have low uptime, high cooldown, and their impact is debatable across different play types (PvE, PvP, WvW).

It would be nice to see some progression related to class skills and class elites in the following forms:
Class-related personal story elements
Class-related crafting

This would lead to unlocks of new and reworked elites (think necro guild, warrior guild, etc.).

I really would like to see “build-around-me” elites that really help define a build. These elites could have a lower immediate battlefield impact than something like the Guardian tomes, but a more sustained and reliable impact on gameplay.

For example (forgive me if my examples aren’t the best but you’ll get my point):

• A skill like GW1’s broadhead arrow (i.e., a low cooldown source of daze) could open up more controlling builds for rangers.
• Warriors could have elite battle stances that either increase adrenaline gain or reduce the cooldown on certain types of skills.
• Necromancers could have an elite effect similar to aura of the lich (on a signet with with a drawback maybe?) that could really support minion master builds.

I think that there is a lot of potential to be found in elite skills, and in as much as it doesn’t strictly involve a level/stat/gear upgrade I think it’s something that should seriously be considered as a key aspect of horizontal progression.

I’m probably forgetting a few things but I’ll probably end this post here.

Thanks for reading.

Part 1 – Some thoughts on vertical progression

I’ve been giving a lot of thought about vertical and horizontal progression in the hopes of contributing to this thread. A lot of my thinking has been tied to weapon skins and to ascended weapons to you’ll forgive me, I hope, if some or all of this has been covered before.

At the most basic level, vertical progression in GW2 is fairly limited. We have leveling and acquiring the higher gear tiers. This is the kind of progression that you have for increasing the raw numbers on your character’s stats. In as much as the last leg of vertical progression as the game currently stands is the acquisition of ascended gear for your character(s), there is a big issue where the design goals of the game are directly at odds with encouraging players to progress vertically.

GW2 by design encourages people to have many characters (easy leveling curve, multiple races, multiple stories, skill scrolls, tomes of knowledge, items that skip you through to level 20, shared bank and crafting mats, etc.). Also GW2 devs, by design, continue to work on increasing build diversity (more or less successfully). The outcome of this is that a good chunk of your active player base likely has multiple characters at level 80, each of which can (and probably should) be played differently in PvE, Dungeons, WvW, Fractals etc.

Personally, for most of my characters I have 2-4 full sets of exotic armor that I swap in and out of for different builds and different content. The cost and availability of exotic armor allows me to “cope” woyj buffs and nerfs to classes and resulting changes in the meta.

Not so with ascended gear. There are 17 stat combos for ascended gear, and for most players to maintain the same basic functionality as with exotic weapons and armor at this point the cost is incredibly prohibitive. For one character I would eventually want at least to be able to shift between 3-4 stat combos which means if I wanted to properly gear out a single character in ascended gear it would take me upwards of 3-5 months for the time gates alone and/or cost thousands of gold. Repeat for X characters.

We are always one patch away from “feeling” like a build/stat combo isn’t viable anymore. ANet has repeatedly demonstrated that it isn’t shy about making changes that drastically changes the functionality of certain weapons/utilities, usually changes that are perceived as nerfs.

There is a pretty strong contradiction between the design philosophy encouraging you to have many alts and many play styles, and this element of vertical progression (ascended gear) which explicitly punishes players for doing so.

The result of this situation is that even though I have the resources to craft ascended weapons, I don’t. With the systems that are in place, and the accumulated history of the game thus far, It is impossible for me to make a decision about which character to craft ascended gear for, which stats to pick, which build I should essentially lock myself into. So I just don’t engage.

I feel that the current state of vertical progression has me halted one step below the top because making that last step is associated with so much uncertainty and so much potential time/resources wasted that I simply can’t go there.

It seems like this is a major issue. You probably want all of your player base working toward vertical progression goals, to be encouraged and enthused about pursuing them. But the way ascended gear is setup, it is unavoidable that some or most individuals who have crafted it will be punished by future game changes.

So far just about the only solutions that I’ve come across that would alleviate that are the ascended gear stat-changing ability. This would also help to step in the direction where build templates are a real and viable thing. If this were a solution I would have no hesitation going head long into crafting ascended gear. Systems whereby gear stats are crafted once and then unlocked could also be interesting (several of them have been described).

Other solutions such as increasing drops or alternate routes of availability are only palliative if in the end I will still feel like I need to craft 2-4 full sets of gear for each character (for the characters I currently play that’s at least 24 sets of gear).

Your first mistake was bringing a bear to WvW.

Sanduskel.1850:

life isn’t fair. is it fair that I was born this way?

That’s the kind of logical equivocation I would expect from an angsty 14 year old.

The long and short of this argument is that the outcomes for most of the leagues was already known well before the end.

Servers at the bottom of their tiers, especially silver league, were doomed to 7 weeks of getting steamrolled by everyone above them (bottom of bronze have essentially no WvW anyway, and bottom of gold can at least muster up decent populations).

So yes… roughly 1/3 of the servers was awarded 7 weeks of horrible unwinnable WvW matchups. Everyone knew this would happen, locking them in for the worst rewards is just the worst.

ANet should apologize for locking those servers into 7 weeks of suck.

I dont even mind Scarlet but that was definitely facepalm worthy.

urdriel.8496:

PD: now Fractals of the Mists are account bound .

It only took them 13 months to figure that one out too!

Oh you Evon voters are so silly.

You should be on your hands and knees thanking us that the story team worked on the Thaumanova fractal first. With the current sad state of the work going on with story and lore at the moment it is almost assuredly guaranteed that the Abbadon fractal would have disappointed everyone.

Now when they do work on it, the Abbadon fractal has every chance of succeeding.

You’re welcome.

Jorjeis.2169:

Keiel.7489:

Your statement is based on your assumption that a smaller force is always more tactical and/or strategical than a larger force. Which is not true if your smaller force constantly gets -steamrolled-. When both sides have equally good players, the only ting left to define the fight is numbers, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that, the option to move away to a better position or attack a different objective is always there if you believe your small force is in cappable of taking on the larger force.

This many times over

Agreed.

There seems to be pretty rampant disdain for “zerging” and although some of that io justified, as others have mentioned, zerging is a legitimate tactic.

People seem to automatically assume that the people ion the zerging group are talentless hacks only smart enough to mash their face on the 111111 key. Some of them probably are, oithers might be skilled players looking for a break, or just looking to push their side’s PPT up. As a smaller force you are not entitled to do well against a zerg, and the average skill of the players in the zerg is probably much closer to yours than you’d like to admit.

Additionally, zerging “properly” requires some skill and some discipline. Better servers have better zergs and better commanders that know how when to stack, when/how to push/pull back, that dont chase after stragglers, and that have players that know when to break off and re-supply.

That’s a big part of our problem here on NSP, the population density of the servers we usually face (out of season) is low enough that roaming here is great (usually), we do not know how to zerg. Many of our players and map chat are disdainful of following a commander. If you’re in a close battle against us (probably only prime time) all you need to do to break our zergs is send a few scouts to distract us… every straggled will pull 4-6 players out of the zerg, before long the commander will reach their objective with only 7-8 people with them.

TooBz.3065:

Buffy.9246:

Why does nsp always hit bp? Never seen them hit cd much.

There is a long standing tradition that 3rd place hits second place. If BP gets head in points NSP will start attacking CD. I have no idea why this is, but it seems to happen in every match up, no matter how close.

LOL… if BP thinks NSP is a factor in this matchup they’re in trouble. NSP is just looking for spots/fights where fun can be had.

bloodletting wolf.2837:

I used to get discouraged with the blow out matches but then I decided to change my strategy when it happened. There is more than one way out of your spawn if you are getting spawn camped. If you have a small group 2-5 with some mobility you can avoid those blobs and kill yaks, sentries, guards, flip camps and knock on doors to get the blobs attention. Will you die – sure but if you are out manned you don’t have to worry about armor repairs and there is no consequence to dying other than your pride. If you do these things you are a pain to your enemy and that gives me satisfaction. I don’t care about the rewards or the ppt any more since I started playing this way.

You are ,making the best out of a bad situation on NSP, anyone who still WvWs on NSP has to. But don’t kid yourself, this season 1 is a debacle.

For season 1 NSP has been awarded 7-weeks of horribly lopsided unwinable matches. For our trouble we are locked in for the worst or second worst possible rewards. And as extra icing on that, our most frequent enemies will all have fancy new finishers from the top of bronze league.

I know this is somewhat of an overreaction, but ANet should be compensating the NSP WvW community and whoever else was in a similar situation for our participation in their botched and failed experiment. Instead they are rewarding our most frequent enemies (who allegedly tanked their scores to ensure they would be in Bronze).

I don’t envy ANet’s position in this situation, if they give out bad rewards there will be crying and gnashing of teeth from the top tier servers. If they give out good rewards, everyone else will angry. If they give out the same rewards to everyone then what was the point?

The saddest part of all this was that any consultation would have revealed immediately how bad an idea this would have been.

JonPeters.5630:

As I stated, this change is a lot about low hanging fruit. The problem with ranger is things that are good we don’t want to overpower and the things that are not as good are difficult to change.

This, I think, more than anything else is a huge part of the problem.

You have had 1.5 years and more to pick at these low hanging fruit. You can keep doing that if you like be that will be pretty much like rearranging deck chairs on the titanic. The issues with this class more than any other class wont be fixed without some major work on all of pets, trait lines, and weapon skills.

A fairly large number of rangers have known this and asked for this for a very long time. I’m fairly certain other developers and yourself have been aware of it too. The tweaks are nice but in the end will always fall short and this is why whenever we have some nice ranger changes the prevalent attitude on the forums is “yes, but…”

On a side note I find that the repeated shortbow nerfs utterly inexplicable. The most recent range change was especially baffling. I understand some people think that flavourwise the SB shouldn’t fire as far as the long bow, but how much sense does it make for rangers to throw axes as far as they can shoot a bow?

I think a lot of the changes for this class, including the changes proposed for this patch, testify to a real lack of vision and direction for the ranger. It would be helpful if you were to restate what your vision for the class is (i.e., those lovely paragraphs that tell players what they can expect from a class when we create a new character) and refocus your balancing efforts to make sure this is true for the ranger.

I appreciate that you feel mainland sword leads to unique and high level play as it is, this is true. However, I am not convinced that this is still good for the game. MH sword for the ranger is the only weapon where a new player needs to go change settings in order not to fall to their death and/or leap into a new pack of enemies while on low health. Overall I think that speaks to an error in design.

It’s also the only weapon that keeps you from dodging in its auto attack chain. There are ways to get around that but those are kuldges to get around an issue with the attack chain to allow you to use an extremely important functionality in combat, the dodge.

Sorry about the ramble.

The low hanging furit approach is what you’ve been doing for 1.5 years and for this class, this will not work. Please please please stop doing that, roll up your selves and and get to work on the core issues.

JonPeters.5630:

Main-hand sword

…snip….

In other words: “It’s not broken, it’s advanced”

I respectfully disagree.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Sepreh.5924:

Hey Jon, just wanted to echo everyone who has already said thank you for the preview and for explaining the reasoning behind some of the changes. Is much appreciated by many of us and a great step towards collaboration

No prob, that’s why we wrote those out for you guys.

We’ll try to do more of that going forward!

Seriously out of all the posts in this thread, this is the one you respond to?

bloodletting wolf.2837:

That’s because all of the pve achievement hunters allowed Sm to get flipped and sabotaged defense on purpose.

Yes, because flipping SM is of no benefit at all to the true WvW players.

I wasnt around when it happened because I play later than easy coast prime time, but I believe we managed to take SM from SBI a couple times early in this week’s match.

Been encountering quite a few EB who just AltF4 or use that other transfer window glitch to WP away or DC when a noob like me is about to stomp them. Do that to someone else please… I could use the WXP.

Riava.7985:

To the guild of BAEST (funny spelling so I apologize)… You are the guild we hate to love and love to hate. I can’t tell you how many times, I’ve been run over… and over and over by you all but seriously…. I do enjoy watching you guys run forms and stack and just to see a group listen! It’s been enjoyable watching (from a tower)!!!

They seem to enjoy trolling towers, hiding in the Lord area as a tight stack, letting 10-15 ppl groups break in and stomping them, then picking off the endless stream of stragglers that come in after because they saw swords on the lord room from the map. I have a morbid fascination for seeing our NSP folk come in in small bunches, trying to guess when they’ll figure it out.

Good times. Rough week for everyone, you have to find the ways to make your fun.

Looking at the map a bout 20 mins ago and seeing only one camp in all the BLs as the only thing that wasnt green was a little terrifying.

That EB human thief with the dreamer, I like that build he/she is using. So many boon and evades. Fought to a stalemate a couple times yesterday morning on my ranger but my other alts just get stomped.

THE Dentist.5960:

Tyops.5894:

Glaeser.8015:

Tyops.5894:

Ugh… I dont think the people on NSP realise yet how bad for us it was to beat IoJ, if this means we’re not in Bronze next season.

Quit whining.

Not whining, just an observation. 14 weeks of unwinnable matchups wont be good for our fragile WvW community if that’s what happens. The 7 weeks we have line up now could be interesting if it hardens our core and then we get to dominate in bronze a little.

Fragile server? Seriously?!?! We have one of the most, if not the most, stable server in WvW. We haven’t seen any mass exodus of guilds like other servers have and we haven’t seen a heavy influx of new guilds either. The people who are on the server now are the ones that want to be and want to make the best of it. We may not when the ppt battle but we win plenty of fights. The community here is what makes it a great server and now, thankfully, most of the complainers have left. Beside how much fun is it when you pvD and rotfl stomp people with lower pops. We did that to get into Silver and there is no way it would be fun or good for us to be the FA or SBI of Bronze league. Just my opinion….

Titan Alliance? Team Legacy? Ring any bells? We were the first server that I know of in the game to suffer from a mass exodus of guilds.

We had queues last week for EB, this week we’ve been lucky if we’re not outnumbered. I call that fragile.

Johje Holan.4607:

Ebay and NSP you all are the lucky ones this match. I’ve logged on for about 45 min total. Can’t motivate myself to go in when we have 400+ PPT.

Anet took way too long to even acknowledge that WvW population disparity was a problem. I don’t have any hope they’re going to fix it any time soon.

Dont think anyone is lucky in this match, just a flaw in the “league” idea. I’m happy they tried something new for WvW but this was quite foreseeable.

geist.3980:

Tyops.5894:

Glaeser.8015:

Tyops.5894:

Ugh… I dont think the people on NSP realise yet how bad for us it was to beat IoJ, if this means we’re not in Bronze next season.

Quit whining.

Not whining, just an observation. 14 weeks of unwinnable matchups wont be good for our fragile WvW community if that’s what happens. The 7 weeks we have line up now could be interesting if it hardens our core and then we get to dominate in bronze a little.

our dedicated wvw players are the extreme opposite of fragile, even our casual wvw players are quite dedicated, its the half dozen folks that break under pressure and unfortunately have access to forums that are the problem. deep breath Tyops, its gonna be ok. just follow teamspeak commands and pick up all the bags after we run over the invaders.

Heh… How do you explain this afternoon having at most 20-30 people in EB? That’s more than a few people checking out of wvw compareed to our usual pop.

I’ll be fine, but rough times ahead. :-)

Odd… why call it S1 then? I guess I should have been paying more attention to that.

Glaeser.8015:

Tyops.5894:

Ugh… I dont think the people on NSP realise yet how bad for us it was to beat IoJ, if this means we’re not in Bronze next season.

Quit whining.

Not whining, just an observation. 14 weeks of unwinnable matchups wont be good for our fragile WvW community if that’s what happens. The 7 weeks we have line up now could be interesting if it hardens our core and then we get to dominate in bronze a little.

Ugh… I dont think the people on NSP realise yet how bad for us it was to beat IoJ, if this means we’re not in Bronze next season.

We had queues over an hour on NSP for EB last week. gasp

Banzie.5248:

Tyops.5894:

Giving credit to all the CD people I’ve passed by in the JPs who werent being jerks.

IoJ on the hand are just shameful.

Sorry im not sorry you got killed in a pvp map.

A little defensive are we? Apology accepted.

I’ve no issues getting killed on a PvP map, just commenting on the attitude and general skill level of people who seem to enjoy ambushing people 4v1 all day long (and how many i’ve seen from IoJ compared to CD… but that’s just my experience).

Giving credit to all the CD people I’ve passed by in the JPs who werent being jerks.

IoJ on the hand are just shameful.

Odd.. I thought this had actually been fixed but never announced. Will have to test again.

The NSP WvW community is/was pretty fragile to begin with, I dont think 7 weeks of getting hopelessly destroyed will be good for its health.

Geez what an exercise in futility for NSP.

NSP is about the same.

Join the rest of us in a game of guesting overflow roulette… who will be the lucky ones who get in… who will be the lucky ones who land in the right overflow.

zomg it’s so exciting.

milton.1796:

WVW players know what to do on this boss its the pve players who don’t know what to do.

People who only do WvW know what RED CIRCLES mean but pvers just seem to stand in it and then sit there until they die and then beg for ressurections whilst wvw players run back to the boss.

WvW players also know the dodge ability as well I never see pvers using it.

I think you’re missing the point.

Well it seems my server has entirely given up on this even, we are getting fewer and fewer people and we are doing less and less well.

My only hope is to guest to a server, all the “good” servers have full zones and the overflow keeps bouncing me around between overflows. So… this is a great design for the fight (I actually like it) but a pretty poor implementation.

We need to talk to devs about WvW/PvE as well, please ask them if we can arrange that (you know… majority of player base)

JJBigs.8456:

Wait…Rangers consistently claimed how great they were before this patch, how much “damage” they did, how great pets were, the list goes on, how tanky they could be etc…

Yeah….. no, just no.

Feida.2163:

The LB buff is amazing and the shout changes to. For the first time ever I hit a 8k crit with rapid fire thanks to the LB changes and BM builds did that to with pets. So really buff or nerf I count this update as a win for rangers.

I dont think you understand how rapid fire works, that number is cumulative for the entire volley of shots. I havent looked at the numbers post patch, but pre-patch using rapid fire was actually a drop in DPS compared to just auto attacking with #1, it probably still is.

Ranger SB was never “too good” as a weapon if you look at other classes. It was “too good” for a long time among ranger weapons, but ANet chose to nerf it repeatedly (presumably to bring it in line with other ranger weapons). At this point I dont think there is any reason to use SB over Axe + Any other offhand.

Evidently rangers are raging too much, a lot of yesterday’s threads have been locked or moved to the trash.

Not entirely sure how we’re supposed to get the devs’ attention any other way but if they havent been paying attention for 8 months I suppose nothing will change now either.

I suppose I have 6 other characters that didnt get nerfed to play, but somehow I still hope for the ranger.

Except that 1v1 is the exception case for GW2.

havoc.6814:

Sarrs.4831:

I’d probably say Warriors got the biggest boosts overall. Cleansing Ire with Burst Mastery seems like it’d be insanely nasty. Don’t know who’s on top of the pile, now, though.

Lol? Cleansing Ire is worthless. Since it removes conditions on adrenaline usage, it gets prevented by the very conditions it is supposed to remove. Try landing that Eviscerate when you are blinded, crippled, or chilled.

At least it’s not an outright nerf

Yes…. (it should have been optional)

Less than the amount of time between when they said the fireworks would start and when they did start for most people.

Aquaman II… just as bad as the first one.

Oh.. and they buffed fixed warrior banners some more. Happy day for rangers everywhere.

irishhaf.1692:

shrugs Gom is becoming DH 2.0 so say good by to solo roamers..

Wow and now NSP is working with GOM or it certainly looks that way… way to ruin whats been a fun fight guys.

What you see as NSP working with GoM is likely just GoM deciding we’re not worth the effort, or just deciding to wipe us second.

Creepy Silent.9801:

Sororita.3465:

sigh where are the solo roamers at…need people to get better against…i find none at all. Dont want any thieves either, what a broken class >.> made a lvl 2 and downed tons of 80s with it.

I find most thieves to be an easy fight as a warrior. Only the really good ones make the fight fun. If you are looking to get better, show up to Thursdays fight clubs and practice there.

Solo and/or small team roamers dont engage because of GoM’s relative numbers (at least in my case). Relatively even small fights are usually spoiled by them thieves who just pop out and ruin a good bit of fun.

As far as I can see, there is no way to get the ascended apothecary stats from the Sclerite back piece on to the Fervid Censer and keep both skins.

Seems like a shame because afaik the tentacle back piece is the only way to get ascended apothecary stats on a back piece.

Am I missing something? Is there a way to get ascended apothecary stats on to the Fervid Censer without destroying the Sclerite skin?

Testing testing testing….. I hear it does good things in the software business.

To be fair, no one got fixes this patch.

Remember, as per their SotG, last patch was their final patch of their first balance patch. Don’t expect anything new and/or significant for a while.

It’s an important visual cue for PvP, WvW. It probably needs to stay.

Here’s the added insult.

Each ranger pet remembers where it was charmed, they each have an entry for that. For some reason that is more important than the pet’s name.

When fractals first came out my guild ran it several times levels 1-5 with groups that had 2-3 players < level 60. It takes a bit longer but it’s doable. That being said this is something you really want to only do with a guild group.

When running this with strangers you have to be mindful that your willfully joining the group with a suboptimal configuration and they have no indication of your play skill. Doing it with your underdeveloped character will at the outset take more time for everyone involved.

Most fractals groups until r20 (that I have experienced) are pretty flexible about builds and I’be never had to gear check. But underlevelled characters might seem unreasonable (even if you are scaled up) given how easy it is to level to 80, and now inefficient the fractals are for levelling.