Guild Wars 2

Vandereign.7648:

I don’t know why people are complaining so much, there has to be a few extremely ultra ultra exclusively rare items in the game, I mean c’mon not everyone can have everything. That would be pretty boring if you ask me. It’s not like every item is like this besides legendaries.

The main reason for an ultra exclusive skin to exist is to show off, but in this case, what exactly would the wielder be showing off?
Being extremely lucky at a lottery?
Having played the TP and/or farmed gold like a boss? Isn’t already that what most expensive skins, including legendaries, show off?

You can lock an account-bound skin behind a quite weird achievement like, I don’t know, defeating Liadri throwing 8 orbs at her with at least 3 gambits active, making it quite exclusive and prestigious.
The current Chaos of Lyssa recipe obtaining methods pretty much prevent a lot of people that might find it cool from getting it without granting the wielders anything to really feel proud about and worth to show off.

Dosvidaniya.3260:

Vargamonth.2047:

draxynnic.3719:

The problem is that apparently, in the Pavilion once the group is larger than a certain size, the bosses durability scales up substantially faster than the expected damage output of a single additional player.

As I said before, I could be wrong, but this is probably a myth.
I’ve seen huge blobs defeating a boss on gold reward time right after activation, which shouldn’t happen if the events oversclaed that much.

…

It’s not a myth.

Yes, you can see a blob beat a boss within the gold timer. A good small group can kill most of the bosses in 2 minutes. You can still take 3 times as long and make the gold timer.

Here’s the reason it isn’t a myth; boss leveling. As the number of players increase past certain thresholds, the level of the boss increases as well. This means an increase in glancing hits. If a player comes and causes a 2% decrease in damage to everyone while scaling the boss, there is no way they’ll make it up.

Boom-boom makes this really obvious. If you see that turret hit level 84, you know it’s going to take forever. By then, the boss has scaled up enough to reduce everyone’s damage by 6% in addition to the normal scaling. That hurts. It’s not a myth. The scaling is such that an additional player can hurt more than help.

You might be right about the level. We can’t know if the regular scaling already takes it into account though.

About a good party being able to take a boss in less than 2 minutes, while true, you can’t expect the giant zerg to be using the same specs that party would use.
A zerg-like 5 man party would be something like a berserker DPS spec, a support/healer Guardian/Ele, a condi user (it could work on a single group, but the zerg will waste almost all of them), a PVT WvW build and an upscaled character. That won’t defeat a boss in less than 2 minutes; it might be faster than the whole zerg, but not by a huge margin.

draxynnic.3719:

The problem is that apparently, in the Pavilion once the group is larger than a certain size, the bosses durability scales up substantially faster than the expected damage output of a single additional player.

As I said before, I could be wrong, but this is probably a myth.
I’ve seen huge blobs defeating a boss on gold reward time right after activation, which shouldn’t happen if the events oversclaed that much.

There’s probably, however, a quite negative psychological effect related to a zerg where, even if a perfectly linear scaling requires the same average damage output per character for any amount of people, a player can easily feel less relevant for success and undeperform (playing safe just spamming ranged autoattacks, laying on the floor fully dead, …).

draxynnic.3719:

The problem is that in this case, it seems to be punishing the players simply by having a larger volume of participants rather than using the wrong tactics.

From the assault knight events, it seems that the cap on players in an open world instance is around 150. From what people have said earlier in this thread, it seems that the optimal number of players per boss is around 15. But if you have a full district, then the district can split up pretty close to perfectly and still have 20-30 players on each boss. As a result, a district of 90 players – which would hit the sweet spot of each boss – is actually at an advantage compared to a full district unless nearly half of the players in the full district just sit out. That’s a problem.

Even if there are several benefits for smaller groups (condition cap, better combo management and less clutter), 5-10 more players at each boss won’t make a big difference as long as there aren’t several condi specs involved (which should be avoided for this kind of content anyways).

draxynnic.3719:

Additionally, while it’s great to encourage players to split up in the initial phase, the current design punishes players who happen to finish their boss early if they go and help with another boss. Instead, they’re encouraged to sit on their thumbs and wait for the event to complete.

Actually, groups shouldn’t finsih their boss early since that would buff the reamining ones. They should hold it at low health until a low HP call is made for every boss.

Apart from that, I strongly beleive that the “helping other groups mid fight is bad” idea is completely flawed.
If you move to a different boss it will scale up, yes, but there will also be an additional player to take it down. As long as your damage output is quite above average, the reinforcement is probably possitive.
People are just afraid of a giant zerg forming out of nowhere.

Manasa Devi.7958:

Who’s saying that events that mean “stop zerging” is bad design?

People are just saying that this particular event is bad design. And it is.

If you can play it for hours and never find out that you need to “stop zerging” unless you accidentally end up in a small group, because there is no guidance or even a clue that these bosses ‘overscale’ into the realm of the absurd, instead of just scaling like every boss we’ve ever seen since launch, something is simply wrong with the design. No two ways about it.

No one complained about the anti-zerg design of the marionette. That encounter had an intuitive flow to it, that the Boss Blitz is sorely missing.

I’ve to disagree.
The right strategy for Boss Blitz might be obscure the first time you step into the Pavillion, specially if you had played the original Queen Jubilee, but it becomes pretty clear after playing it just once.

The first bossfight should be enough to realize that there’s scaling involved.
I could be wrong, but I don’t really think there’s an “overscaling” issue. In fact, I would say that Boss Blitz bosses are the best scaling ones in the whole GW2 history.
I’ve seen huge blobs zerging a single boss right after activation and downing it on Gold Reward time. I’ve also done many bosses myself with both small (5-10) and quite large (20+) groups without noticing huge time diffrences.
The scaling feels really linear (as it should be) and that means that 6 smaller groups, each one fighting a different boss, should finish the event 6 times faster than a single giant zerg, which seems completely desirable just by looking at the timed reward categories.

On top of this, individual bosses don’t reward loot at all, so zerging them one by one and taking part on every boss kill doesn’t provide any meaningful additional reward.
This should remain the origial Watchwork Knights, which used to grant 6 champ boxes each and were killed sequentially for everyone to get 18 boxes. Since it wasn’t the intended strategy, individual rewards were nerfed and moved to event completion.
If the whole reward is obtained from an event completion chest and it depends on how fast you finish the event, the convenience of splitting becomes obvious.

Finally, every defeated boss pass one ability to the remaining ones, making them harder to beat, which makes pretty clear that they should be defeated as close to each other as possible.

There are so many clues pointing to a zerg split that gets really hard to figure how any veteran player (the scaling mechanic could be unfamiliar to new players) could miss it.

Sartharina.3542:

Vargamonth.2047:

IMHO, the only missing thing is every boss HP bar being monitored under the Boss-Blitz event timer.
This should be enough indicative of which boss needs reinforcements and allow a proper split on an unorganized megaserver.

More important than Boss HP would be “Number of non-defeated Players on each boss” – especially because some bosses have high HP remaining (Boom Boom, I’m looking at you) because there are TOO MANY people on that boss.

The biggest problem with the event is that it’s nearly impossible to self-coordinate even for players willing to try to do so – it’s impossible to tell how many people are on each boss, it’s impossible to tell how other bosses are faring, and it’s impossible to fix a scaling mistake caused by people piling onto one boss (Either by overreacting to a call for reinforcements – You need 3-5 more people for a boss, and get 20, etc, or people just coming by to see what the state of the boss is) – once you’re in the fight, that boss is scaled up for good.

The amount of people on each boss doesn’t provide meaningful information and can be missleading.

The goal is not about having an even amount of people on each boss.
Believe it or not, the scaling is fairly linear and, while a 5 man group can take down a boss before the gold reward timer expires, so do usually a giat blob with the first boss right after activation.
It’s not the amount of people, but the average “strength” of each group, what makes the whole event more likely to fail or succeed, and this is exactly the concept the playerbase needs to grasp. Once there’s a minimum amount of players on a decently scaling event, the straightforward idea of “strength in numbers” doesn’t apply anymore and what is supposed to be a reinforcement can actually result on an overall performance loss.

Before activation, since there’s no way to measure how each player will perform, a fairly even split is the way to go. Once the event is running, however, boss HP status become a clear indicative of each group strength and provide enough information for new players to decide where to go.
This won’t necessarily be the fight that’s likely to fail. As I’ve already said, this is not about numbers but about averages, so every single character can be either an asset or a burden and it’s on the player to judge his own capablities.

Boss health bars would also fulfill another important role.
Defeated bosses pass one of their abilities to the remaining ones, making them harder and likely to take longer, so you want all of them to die as close in time as possible and might need to stop DPSing at 15% or so for other groups to catch up.

Even if the map chat is enough to call the status on each boss, HP bars would reduce the need of communication, which is something people seem to be asking for.

I’ve no problem with some projectiles being unreflectable, even with some obvious projectiles not being projectiles at all so WoR, feedback, swirling winds and the like don’t work on them and trivialize the fight, but so many attacks being just unblockable is becoming quite annoying.

Ohoni.6057:

Nobody is asking for even a slight reduction in challenge, just a reduction in the need for coordination between a bunch of players that don’t know each other and don’t care to.

All it takes to make the Boss Blitz event work is to gather every interested player in the central plaza before activation and position themselves close to the fence towards the sector where the boss they want to fight is. Those without any clear preference should reallocate theselves to make the distribution as evenly as possible.
After that, the event is activated and everyone goes to the boss they chose.

The amount of coordination needed to do this is almost nonexistant and can hardly be reduced.
If some players prefer to ignore this minor preparation phase and kill regular enemies for achievements or try some gauntlet fights until the event is already running, that’s a completely different issue and the only thing ANet could do to prevent it is to stop designing counterproductive achievements.

Yuta.9487:

What class do you play? a ranger by coincidence?

I have done it with my ranger past year and I do have to say the boss is too hard doing it with certain class(es). Pet would just instantly die and a ranger would have to go full zerk to deal eneugh damage as they do barely any cond dmg when ranging. Going full zerg without pet will leave a ranger vurnable to the max tho which results in bleeding to dead.

I do totally agree that the boss should stay the same (or even may be tougher) as I would just do it like that on my warrior, but it’s the mechanic of some classes that fail here. This is basically why I have pleed to imply a different pet mechanic where the pet would buff the ranger when stored in order to avoid such complications.

I haven’t tried with a ranger but Whirling Defense on axe offhand should do the trick for a non berserker build. It’s a decent damage source and she can realy destroy herself with retaliation.
Conditions/Traps should work too.

Naglifar.1684:

The few player who have reported the item drop for them … havee both mentioned they got it on the first few bags.

So Anet…

Why do some players get the item easily, while many others cannot?

The answer for this is really simple.
For each player that has invested a big amount of tickets trying to get something there are TONS of players that have spent a small amount of tickets completing the achievements or just replaying the easy fights on a daily basis for tokens.
If one out of 10k bags has a recipe (it’s probably lower than this :P) and you have a single player spedning 1k tickets and another 900 casual ones spending just 10 each, the recipe will go to one of the casuals 90% of the time.

That’s how lottery works. It doesn’t matter if someone amasses insane amounts of tickets, the big prize is likely to go for a lucky guy (one among thousands) that just had a few of them.

ESCUDO.8397:

It is ok that Gauntlet Chances don’t drop the items so easily because lets be honest, we’re looking at Items that costs hundreds of Gold, you can not expect to get hundreds of Gold for every 100 bags you get or everyone would be rich in no time.

That hundreds of gold value is completely set up by players.
The items themselves don’t provide any advantage and probably worth no more than a few silvers for NPC vendors. They’re just vanity items, and they’re high prized because they’re extremely rare and/or discontinued.
A loot chance increase won’t make people rich on a sudden because the market price of those items would just go down.

Some rarity is required because the demand of vanity skins is limited and a huge supply would make them pretty much worthless. A hundred of golds rarity is, however, quite insane and force rewards to behave as a lottery.
The current system doesn’t cater netiher to:

A) Someone who wants the item
If the drop rate of an item is 1/100k, it’s unrealistic to expect anyone to directly work towards it. Even if a player spect 1k tickets, chances are still at 1%.
Most items are likely to be dropped to someone that isn’t after them and just used a few tenths of tickets (those gotten randomly at different events), because that’s where the game wide majority of tickets are.
The player that’s really after an item may just ignore the activity that drops it and start farming tons of gold so he can buy it from one of the lucky guys.

B) Someone who enjoys the activity and might like to farm his gold there.
The current lottery system doesn’t promote this either. It rewards a few lucky guys with an insane amount of gold, while everybody else gets asolutely nothing or even incur losses.
Even if the law of large numbers might actually show the activity as highly profitable, an individual won’t play an infinite amount of games. More likely, the sampling provided by a single player, even a dedicated one, will be lackluster at best when compared to the current drop rates.

A compromise between both should be possible.
Some exlusive rewards might be soulbound (so no market/farm value) and their drop rate reasonable enough for players willing to put some dedication on the activity to get them (we’re probably looking at 1/200 – 1/500 rates or so). This could be the case for the Chaos of Lyssa recipe.
The farm potential that gets lost with it could be covered by adding a lot of high rate common goods, like t6 materials or lodestones.
Items that are meant to be extremely rare and keep a high market price, like those returning from previous LS patches (even if I think that unexpected comebacks that make prices go down are actually good to control speculation), shouldn’t be always direct drops. Even if an extremely rare chance on a direct drop could still be possible, they should come in “pieces” for the most part, making the profit to be spread a lot more between players.

The current system doesn’t appeal anyone and make a quite interesting activity to lack a lot replayability outside of maybe daily completion for festival tokens (if these tokens are needed. I’ve little use for them outside Gauntlet Tickets, and I’ve no use for these outside of token farming :P)

Of course, since I really like the gauntlet, I would go hands down for a much more complex and elaborated reward system where harder fights are likely to be more profitable, just like you described.
I would love, for example, a Liadri reward that grows exponentially depending on how many additional orbs are thrown at her during phase 2. However, since this kind of things are really (and sadly) unlikely to happen, I would be fine just with anything that doesn’t completely look like a lottery :P

Most guardian builds don’t go above 10 points in Zeal. Having some kind of reliable soft CC source as a 20 Zeal point trait would require sacrifices on other areas, like blinds, vigor or condition removal.
If correctly balanced, I don’t think it would make offguards OP on a competitive enviroment; a team composition that allows the guardian to rotate with a nicely synergized spec would probably yield much better results than picking this trait. A Necro, for example, could benefit a lot from VoJ activation and stability (among othe rother things) while providing all the CC, soft and hard, the guardian lacks.
The trait could situationally be a great asset, however, for non-compeitive sPvP play (where rotations tend to be lackluster at best) or WvW roaming and I can’t see a reason for not having it.

Movement speed probably plays a bigger role on deciding if offguards are or not at competitive level. The offguard + necro combo, for example, might look decent (it’s probably awful, I’m far from a top sPvP player :P) but it’s extremely slow and just that might be more than enough to make it unviable.
The huge differeces on what every spec has to pay in order to boost its speed might be necessary for high level sPvP balance (I would still like to see some test regarding to this somewhere in the future), but at the same time there are crucial on deciding if a spec can properly solo roam or not in WvW.
I would like to see Swift Moa Feathers temporary boosted to 25%. This wouldn’t affect sPvP and would provide every spec/class the pretty much needed move speed to perform as a roamer just for the cost of the nourishment slot (100-200 points in the main damage attribute), which is much less build defining than the usual tradeoffs.
The idea of a PU Mesmer with a 25% speed boost scares me a bit, but in this case I think that PU itself would be the core of the issue and should be reworked at some point :P

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Zephyr_Sanctum_Supply_Box

There are some vendors at the bery beginning of Laberynthine Cliffs that trade them for materials.

If you are willing to pay that much for tickets, you can always buy mats on the TP and then boxes at Cliffs for tokens (and a “small” chance on a rare… :P).

Groonz.7825:

I was using up my 90+ tickets from last year and got around 100ish gauntlet chances bag, only got 1 ticket of the pavilion. Not worth doing really (I just wanted to use up the tickets).

You may consider yourself lucky. One Favor of the Pavilion is probably enough to buy back those tickets (you can buy mats on the TP and get Zephir Boxes with them for the tokens) and even get a small profit.
There’s people that have used hundreds of tickets without getting absolutely nothing but the usual single festival token.

Activating a gambit uses a gauntlet ticket that could be used for an additional fight, so they’re no more than time savers that allow you to get the profit of several fights on a single one.
During the original gauntlet they were used for farming. Since players could buy unlimited tickets directly with gold and every reward bag granted a small silver profit, gambits allowed to speed-up the process and achieve a really good gold/time ratio.

Currently, gauntlet fights reward tokens and bags.
Tokens are daily for each fight, so there’s no point on gambits. Bag farming could benefit from them but, since buying tickets require account bound tokens this time, the farm itself is very limited.

Unless you have tons of tickets saved since the original gauntlet, gambits are worth for little more than achievements.

Xae Isareth.1364:

About 50, nothing here.

After I beat Lladri, I don’t see the point of repeating this. Judging by what drop rates Anet has had in the past, it’s probably something like 0.1% chance to see the recipe.

0.1% chance would be a recipe every 1k chances opened. It wouldn’t be that bad.

We are already over 700 gauntlet chances opened just in this thread and we haven’t seen anything but tokens, not even a single rare returning LS reward, which are meant to be more common than the recipe :P

Esmee.1067:

All of mine turned into 1 token aswell. How did you guys get that many (like 100/100?) When I did a boss twice I got no reward at the end so I assumed a daily lock, or is it simply a prevention of repeating 1 boss over and over?

The chest with tokens is daily for each fight, but you should always get a gauntlet chance (and another one for each gambit used), even repeating.

Single Token 24/24.

It looks like a lottery.
Gambits are the only way to farm large amounts of Gauntlet Chances, and each gambit still consumes a ticket. Tickets, on the other hand, cost some silver and good amount tokens, while the gauntlet itself doesn’t reward any gold and only provide tokens once a day.
Even if you reinvest every token you get, you barely get 45 tickets a day, so you’re not just gambling your gold (1.9g per 45 tickets) but you also need to farm tokens like mad somewhere else for a reasonable chance of getting something.

Gameplay wise, I would say that managing blinds, blocks and evades to prevent as many hits as possible is the most interesting part.
Unfortunately, open world enemies are weak enough for several hits to be easily endured, and since some of these defensive moves will reduce your damage output, you’ll eventually find yourself rotating damage moves and using little defense besides the usual blind on VoJ activation.

I’m fairly sure there’s something weird with the MMR when you play again after a long break.

Some time ago I had to stop playing for a month or so. I was ranked around #200 EU in those days and had been having a quite good overall experience with tPvP.

When I came back, however, I got a top50 match for my first game.
Playing with people far above my skill level and not having touched the game for a long time, plus some technical issues with my mouse, the game was lost, as expected. In fact, I completely ruined it for my team.
I knew leaderboard decay wasn’t supposed to affect my MMR and I’d been matched with top players before, probably cause of the lack of pupulation, so even if it wasn’t a pleasant experience at all, I put it down to bad luck and moved on.
Hopefully my MMR would had been hit and I would get more appropriate matches in the future; and here’s where the real problem appeared … after playing and LOSING a SINGLE game, I was suddenly bumped to #32 EU, where I absolutely don’t belong (I’m not even sure if I really belonged to the place I was ranked before the break).

In this situation, I would have needed to make my way to an appropriate ranking (where I would be matched on statistically fair games) through losses, many of them. Needless to say that this would have not been a great experience neither for me nor my teammates, not even most of my enemies, and I haven’t touched soloQ since then.

Nowadays I queue solo for teamQ when I want to play tPvP. Being matched against premades is disgusting, but it doesn’t happen that often atm and it’s still much better than what I would have to suffer on soloQ (I also get better rewards and can completely avoid skyhammer, which is a huge improvement on its own :P)

There wasn’t any specific problem with Liadri. The fight just emphasised many of the design issues the gauntlet itself had.
Even if all the hanging cage thing might sound cool at first glance, it doesn’t matter how cool some idea is when it affects so negatively the player experience.

Having a zerg farming right below you achieved nothing but a performance drop, which was quite weird for the only intended PvE combat skill test in the whole game. Even in the absence of a zerg, the unnecesarily huge size of the area was enough to make low profile computers to suffer.
IMHO, the gauntlet should be somehow instanced. According to some other parts of the game, like the submarine path in CoE, the “falling into the zerg” effect should be possible even this way.

Cage walls were probably the biggest issue, which was reproduced again several months later during the marionette event (can’t know if the issue was addressed or not, Marionette cages were just too close to each other).
We usually stand on isolated platforms during jumping puzzles and most of the time there are no camera issues involved. This is a problem entirely caused by walls, invisible or not.
IMHO this kind of walls should be avoided, even if it means that players might fall off to death (could also be prevented by using a low heighted wall around the platform, which wouldn’t create any issues as long as there’s a slight elevation on the camera angle). I don’t remind being able to knock off any NPC, wall or not, on my entire game experience, so I guess this shouldn’t be a problem.
If walls are needed to prevent interaction between platforms, a big flat invisible wall in the middle of nowhere should be enough.
Any other texture, like vertical chains, can also produce this kind of effects an should be avoided. Finding a solution for this without granting players an escape route might, however, be trickier than expected :P

Floor textures were also a problem. As I previously said, there was no epicness at all on being able to spot a zerg fighting below, just annoyance cause the FPS drop. A few big simple metal plates could work better.
Ideally, asura platforms, like the ones on the thaumanova reactor fractal end boss, could do the job without requiring a single vertical chain. On the other hand, it might not be the best option lore wise.

Even if I really hope to find that devs have learnt from previous mistakes and most of these QoL issues have been fixed, I’m quite afraid we’re going to get pretty much the same gauntlet we played last time :S

A true double teaming has never happened. Whenever SFR has felt some server was too close, they just have shifted the focus towards it and let the 3rd server go piranha and do half of their work, apparently oblivious of which one would suffer the focus after a turnaround.

Even if letting SFR win is arguably the best option at this point (Deso and BB can easily tie for 2nd place if they want, while a different approach is much more likely to backfire than produce anything better), the truth is that both servers have behaved this way for a long time, overfocusing each other for a completely useless 2nd place (the 3rd server on this matchup has always come 1st in tier 2 on the next week, achieving exactly the same score) and serving the tournament to SFR on a silver plate (a deserved win, in any case).

Deso and BB have perfectly played the puppet role every single time it has been required and are the only ones to blame for the current situation.

a t s e.9614:

Aedrion.6483:

a t s e.9614:

I don’t think we need more CC spam. If you’re struggling with the guardian it is sadly an l2p issue.

How contructive.

I play guardian at higher level tPvP often fighting teams that are top 10-30 in the leaderboards for some mysterious reason and I find that while knowing the class and timing your skills can compensate for mobility or inability to snare reliably to some extent, the actual complete lack of soft CC – cripple, chill – for a 90% pure melee class is rather significant. Note how every class in the game has access to a form of soft CC on a multitude of weapons/utilities, but the guardian hasn’t.

You can argue L2P all you like, versus a skilled engineer or spirit ranger, that makes duelling nearly impossible because they have very good mobility and the guardian can only catch up with them so many times. In most cases, it turns into a battle of attrition due to how those builds – and other similar builds – work and the guardian will lose in 80% of all cases simply due to lack of soft CC.

If you think I’m a scrub, by all means, add me on friend list and we’ll duel.

If you want to duel no problem , I will not add you just come to a custom duel arena. I didn’t call anybody a scrub but again asking for buffs on top tier class makes no sense. Every team has a bunker guardian, if the same guardian could spam CC while being mobile, I don’t see how it would be even possible to kill him

This doesn’t make any sense.
For a very long time, bunker guardian has gravitated around the same builds (0/5/30/30/5 or 0/0/10/30/30), which have proven to be top tier and absolutely don’t deserve any buff.
I can’t see a reason, however, to not provide buffs / additional options on other underused traitlines/weapons. A source of soft CC on, lets say, 20 Zeal, would hardly have any effect over current bunker builds.

Movement speed boosts never stack with each other.

Swift Moa Feathers being boosted to 25% would be enough for me :P

Svarty.8019:

Replacements for garbage downed-oriented traits, specifically:
…

• Resolute Healer

This is actually a usual pick in sPvP :P

It’s always possible to complete at least 5 daily achievements through sPvP.
On top of the 2 sPvP-only achievements (matches played and captures/kills), things like evader, condition applier and condition remover are almost automatically done, while leveler and recycler are attained easily through reward tracks.
A few achievements are, however, arguably tough to be compelted in sPvP and may be required to complete the daily. Daily kills and, specially, reviver often require a large amount of games. So does “skill point acumulator” if not saving scrolls/tomes for the day it pops.
I would probably reduce “daily reviver” to no more than 5 and merge the “daily mist invasion defender” and “daily player kills” achievements, making “daily captures” always available.

Dubsweeper trolled me when i tried to stack in a corner >.<

Atoss.1056:

What I would change is the points system, 1st server – 4 pts, 2nd – 2pts, 3rd – 1pt. I think it would give more reason to actually go and attack the 1st place, than accept that 1 server is strongest/most covered and the fight goes on for 2nd spot or any lower. (at least in EU)

Whichever server that gets the 3rd place on tier 1 is likely to win the next matchup on tier 2 and end up scoring as many points as the one consistetly achieving the 2nd place on the highest tier.
From a scoring point of view, there’s actually no point for tier 1 servers on fighting for anything but the 1st place. It’s the only placement that can make a difference.

The current system has a few issues, like some servers being encouraged to underperorm and lose on purpose at some point.
For example, a server that can win in t2 during the 8th week and then probably get the 3rd place in t1 on the next matchup, might prefer to end up being second in t2 and then play again in the same tier, were a win is likely to happen, effectively trading a 5-1 for a 3-5 and adding 2 extra points to the final score.
Nothing in the system promotes, however, a competition for 2nd/3rd place (unless on the 3rd tier of the league, obviously).

The system you propose doesn’t solve the losing on purpose on problem (a 4-1 is still worse than a 2-4). In fact, it encourages it even more, since an elevator server gets better results (4-1) than the one consistently hitting the 2nd place (2-2).
Winning the matchup is encouraged, yes, but that also happens in the current system. Once the winner of a match has been decided, however, your system would favour the server that gave up earlier or bring up a completely unhealthy and counter intuitive situation where 2 servers try to achieve as less PPT as possible. With the current system, even if pointless for scoring, we can have at least these servers fighting for pride.

It might happen. It’s the kind of content that might keep the western playerbase entertained while granting the eastern one some time to experience the core content before releasing a new story plot.
On the other hand, a festivity that conmemorates the victory against Zhaitan/Dragons sounds a bit weird for an entire playerbase that has barely started playing the game.

Ropechef.6192:

something to think about…

I see all the time the notion of adjusting mob AI to be more “intelligent” or (insert random what not here)

It is already done. It already exists. the problem is that it is some of the most hated, and despised portion of the entire world of Tyria. Day in and day out there is an equal number of complaints, moaning and whining about a “smart” AI. a low power fast hitting self buffing and group buffing and dodging and moving AWAY from the LoS spot…

the Underground Facility.

ALL of the things you are all asking for in a mob AI exists already in that single fractal. and it murders 90 percent of the playerbase.

think about that

It has been a long time since my last high/mid level fractal run, but I don’t remeber any dredge dodging, nor I’ve noticed them attacking faster or LoS-ing on a different way than any other enemy.
They use AoE buffs and that’s a nice thing. However, from what I’d read, they tend to reapply them instantly if stripped, which makes the whole mechanic pointless.

I don’t think dredge AI is better than usual.
They’re just annoying to fight for several reasons like inmunity to blind or CC spam (which isn’t a bad thing on its own but becomes really annoying when you have to fight craploads of dredges at the same time, which is quite usual).
And then, specific of the underground facility, we have really anoying events like the clown clar or even the bomb event, that make us fight dredge spawns over and over for ages.

CC, healing, defense, … all of it can be improved through a better encounter/AI design.
Full offensive setups could (and probably should) still work, with developer just making sure that there’s enough smart/skillful gameplay involved on pulling it off and tweaking a encounter when some easy and widely used tactic that trivialiazes it is detected.

Cheap solutions, like changing dodge from a full invulnerability to a damage reduction and/or universally increasing enemy attack speed (some enemies may use a bit of this though) would probably ruin (even more) the PvE part of the game for many players (myself included).
Anything that shifts importance from dodge / active defenses to passive defense / healing would be a terrible mistake IMHO.
I would be fine with favouring things like control, that can benefit from a good timing and coordination (this would still require a huge redesign of encounters).
Armor, on the other hand, is a 100% passive thing, and healing behaves mostly as a sustain source which works the best spammed or as part of a “rotation” and can hardly benefit from good timing. Favouring this would hit the “action based” part of the combat and achieve nothing but shifting the “meta” to “the highest DPS with enough sustain”.

A trinity-like gameplay still exists as an option.
It’s just clearly suboptimal for farming and something you won’t see on PUGs because the required specs and sinergies are different from the META ones.

AC is perfectly doable with a full lvl35 group.
Players probably need, however, a deep understanding of each encounter, the comabt system and the charcaters themselves, which is something that often requires several runs and would push new players far beyond lvl35 (and not exactly through a pleasant experience).
On top fo this, some of the tactics used by lvl80 groups might not work at their best.

Short answer: Because that’s what ANet wants to.
http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/c/4032636 from 24:00 to 25:00 makes it clear.

I can’t see the point, however, on having the combat system designed and balanced for small scale PvP if their features are not going to properly work for the main focus of the game.
The game could have worked without sPvP; it could even have worked without Dungeons… The game wouldn’t be for me, that’s for sure, but at least it would deliver a much better game experience to the playerbase it’s aimed at.

Destromestro.9428:

I’m Just trying to find out if there is anything out there that’s connected to the PvP rank or if they have any future plans with it.

Completely removing it was the original idea, so I wouldn’t expect anything but what actually is.

I’ve bought 100 of them from Tigg in Lornar Pass camp just a couple hours ago.
In any case, it seems like they gran less than a 25% speed boost, probably a 15%-10%.

This is the most useful thing I’ve read in these forums for months.
Thank you very much Sir.

Swimsasa Stoon.8936

Aka you can rip a boon on every third hit

The trait has a 10s ICD.

eleshazar.6902:

So say example A of your algorithm failing:

List at start for a 3v3 (20, 5, 4, 4, 2, 1)

According to your algorithm the team comp would look like this at the end:

Team A: (20, 2 ,1) = 23
Team B: (5, 4, 4) = 13

Seems fair right? There has to be more to your algorithm for Solo Q because this one seem awfully barbaric…

I’m pretty sure that MMR doesn’t work around those values/ratios. The ratio between beginners and top players is probably between 2:1 and 3:1

Radmage.3741:

Vargamonth.2047:

Ostricheggs.3742:

Vargamonth.2047:

I don’t really think we should look at Balthazar runes as the source of the problem. Incendiary Powder has always been somehow broken gameplay wise. Some Dhuumfire-like rework, compensated over another skills/traits, could probably achieve a much better results than just nerfing the runes.

So you’re suggesting nerfing IP to compensate for balthazar runes… This isn’t the best choice but I’m afraid it’s the route a-net will take. God knows they don’t know kitten about their own game because they implemented these horrendous runes to begin with.

Anyways, nerfing the runes would bring better rune diversity to engis and accomplish the entire purpose of the rune rework to begin with. Leave balthazar how it is and there’s just one rune so incredibly superior to everything else that it’s just a bad joke.

I’m suggesting changing IP from an automatic on-crit proc to something different, like applying 1s bruning on every Posion Dart Volley hit or 4/5s on Blunderbuss, so it can be actively avoided/mitigated, and compensate it by improving other condition sources, like increasing the bleed duration on pistol autoattack by 1s/2s or/and increasing the chance of triggering Sharpshooter, without touching the runes at all.

if you want to dhuumfire it, then make it apply on tool belt use

Yeah, it could be some kind of buff (like incendiary ammo) that triggers on the next attack after using a toolbet skill (and is lost if blocked, evaded, …), and this way it could be rebalanced and even work without ICD.
There are probably several options to rework it and several ways to compensate the loss of an ensured hit.
If IP becomes avoidable and compensated through other not burn related damage sources, then Balthazar runes won’t be so OP anymore. They would still be powerful, but that’s reasoable IMHO for any burn heavy condition build, like Krait / Strength are for Bleeding / Might stacking ones for example.

Ostricheggs.3742:

Vargamonth.2047:

I don’t really think we should look at Balthazar runes as the source of the problem. Incendiary Powder has always been somehow broken gameplay wise. Some Dhuumfire-like rework, compensated over another skills/traits, could probably achieve a much better results than just nerfing the runes.

So you’re suggesting nerfing IP to compensate for balthazar runes… This isn’t the best choice but I’m afraid it’s the route a-net will take. God knows they don’t know kitten about their own game because they implemented these horrendous runes to begin with.

Anyways, nerfing the runes would bring better rune diversity to engis and accomplish the entire purpose of the rune rework to begin with. Leave balthazar how it is and there’s just one rune so incredibly superior to everything else that it’s just a bad joke.

I’m suggesting changing IP from an automatic on-crit proc to something different, like applying 1s bruning on every Posion Dart Volley hit or 4/5s on Blunderbuss, so it can be actively avoided/mitigated, and compensate it by improving other condition sources, like increasing the bleed duration on pistol autoattack by 1s/2s or/and increasing the chance of triggering Sharpshooter, without touching the runes at all.

I don’t really think we should look at Balthazar runes as the source of the problem. Incendiary Powder has always been somehow broken gameplay wise. Some Dhuumfire-like rework, compensated over another skills/traits, could probably achieve a much better results than just nerfing the runes.

There’s just no clear agreement on what the “casual” term really means.
For me, it always has been something that had nothing to do with difficulty but with time/schedule requeriments.

A game that offers an arguably short time to reach max level and get BiS gear, provides A LOT of open world content with a quite friendly loot system and where even most dungeons are arguably short time wise (all of it true for GW2, until ascended gear / LS / maybe fractal releases at least), will always be “casual-friendly” in my book, even if it has some quite punishing gameplay wise parts.

I also read as much as I could about GW2 before purchasing it, and it seemed to offer me no grind, dungeons aimed to organzied groups and a PvP that was meant to become an eSport. ANet probably played the ambiguity card quite a little bit :P

Zeal and, to a minor extent, Radiance, are in a quite poor state.
They offer really nothing but passive buffs (which work for PvE, where stacking damage multiplier plays a huge role on buildcrafting, and for little more than some all-in burst build for PvP) and minor improvements to currently lackluster utilities.

Since I dislike AI to be a viable option, I have no problem with Spirit Weapons being next to useless (besides SoA for some PvE encounter). They still take up room for build diversity though, so both traits and utilities themselves should be eventually reworked
Signets are in a better state, but related traits are just awful. Perfect Inscriptions is lackluster and 100% passive, while Inscribed removal doesn’t really work as a meaningful condition management and is also quite passive since more than half of the sigils are extremely timing dependant tools (2 CCs and a resurrection). Signet Mastery is probably the best of all, and it’s nothing but the usual CD reduction adept.
A really decent signet related trait (cast time reduction, quickness on signet use, …) could be enough for a bit more of build diversity to appear.
On top of this, Zeal minors being about Symbols feels kinda weird when most symbol traits are in Honor and the weapons improved by Zeal (Focus, Scepter and Greatsword, which saw its symbol CD extremely increased for realiation balance long time ago) are among the less symbol reliant ones.

The biggest problem is, however, about devs pushing for condition guardian to become something.
There are too many burn realted trait scattered around different traitlines, like trying to encourage several different flavoured condition/hybrid builds, when there has never been a competitive one.
The worst part is that most of Guardian condtion applications are instant/passive (on Nth hit, on block, …) and any additional condtion source through Runes and Sigils would pretty much behave this way too.
A viable condition guardian should be achieved through an eventual weapon rework/release, with the most dangerous moves being actively avoidable. The passive trait approach just can’t deliver a decent build (if condition Guardian ever becomes viable this way, it will be also a quite toxic spec) and devs should probably focus on improving the Guardian as a power based class for now.

Health pool realted complaints have already been adressed (even if in a wrong tratiline IMHO :P).
Movement Speed / Soft CC are the other frequently requested improvements and could probably be provided without major issues. Chosing the right intensity and traitline/tier to allocate them is where balance kicks in.

A DPS guard deals tons of damage, but I don’t really know if it could really work on a “highly competitive” scenario. You can get quite high on SoloQ leaderboards, but maybe not the best option for an organized team (specially if the team doesn’t want to adapt to running one).

If you want to give it a try, I’m currently running a GS/SwFc 2(II)/1/6(I,X,XII)/1/4(II,IX) Triple Meditation build (all but Merciful Intervention) with Berserker Amulet and Pack Runes. Still deciding if I prefer “Defender’s Flame” over “Focused Mind” and messing with sigils (dat hydromancy nerf >.<).

You shouldn’t hold a point alone on a bunker guard.
Guardian usually is a bunker/support spec; if you’re alone, you pretty much lose the support component and end up on bunkerish build with next to zero counterpresure, which leads to your enemies attacking you much more freely and works against your defensive capabilities.
As a Guardian, you want to stay where the teamfight happens. You can solo bunker a point for a while if needed, but some of your teammates are meant to go there if attacked in a reasonable timeframe (which doesn’t always happen, it might even be quite rare, if you queue solo).

If you want to hold a point alone, there are better options. Elementalist, engineer, warrior, necromancer and ranger, all of them, offer better builds than a bunker guardian for this job. Even a DPS guardian is probably far better than a bunker for side point holding.

Things like Ferocity and Vigorous Precision changes were already known, but I expected the nerfhammer to somehow hit other builds too. The patch notes look, however, like an improvement for many condi specs.

The rune/sigil changes (still shocked at the Hydromancy nerf), the new traits … it’s like ANet wanted us to play some kind of retaliation + passive/instant condi proc aberration.
I would love to see what’s going on inside balance team’s heads, because none of this make any sense.

Guardian condition removal depends on the build and requires a decent trait/utility (even rune) investment, but it’s usually quite good, at least for the most popular builds. Most of the removal is also AoE (with decent radius), so it can’t be at the level of something like Cleansing Ire for 1on1 scenarios.
Even with that, guardian is still on the low tier HP pool, so condition damage hurts, and is mainly a melee class, which often eases the condition application (engineer bombs and nades, mesmer on clone death procs, …).
It’s a quite resilient class against condi bursts, but has a quite bad time against bunkerish builds and constant reapplications.

I think the class is fine balance wise. If I could ask for anything, it would probably be about something outside of an specific rune set in order to get a speed buff for WvW solo roaming (every swiftness source is currently on supportive, and quite lackluster for solo roaming, utilities and weapons).