Guild Wars 2

It’s always seemed weird to me that my guardian in plate armor can dodge much more often than my thief, due to easy access to perma vigor. My mesmer, ele, and engineer can too, but it’s the strangest on the guardian.

I’ll log back into my ranger when I can dps without using the most awkward weapon in the game, and am not reliant on a pet that can’t dodge or walk out of red circles. It’s also worth noting that even without these limitations, the warrior offers far better support and all of his damage is an AoE cleave.

MH sword is awful and takes control and responsiveness away from the player for no reason. I am perfectly capable of pressing forward to stay on my target if necessary just like I do with literally every other weapon, game.

Ursan.7846:

Vargs.6234:

The problem is that the world hasn’t changed.

But the world has changed.

LA’s Lion statue was destroyed and slowly rebuilt. Refugees had set up camps in LA. The Consortium has built a refugee camp in Southsun.

It definitely is changing. Slowly but surely.

Nobody is going to excitedly come back to this game because there’s a refugee camp in southsun, or because the LA lion statue was deleted for awhile but is back now.

The problem is that the world hasn’t changed. Aside from whatever small, hour long content of the month is going on, the world is exactly the same as it was on release. The only real permanent fixtures have been fractals (which are good) and southsun (which doesn’t serve any purpose). Anybody trying to return to Guild Wars 2 after a break is going to find that it isn’t any different from when they left because everything that gets added keeps getting pulled out.

Traveling the open PvE world with RtL was one of the most fun parts of this class. It wasn’t even as fast as some other professions, but it was more entertaining. There was absolutely no reason for it to be nerfed in PvE. All you did was make the game less fun and more tedious.

This is just getting comical. Half a year to spend a couple minutes changing a few values in a database somewhere to bring HoM skin pet health up to par with the pets they’re based upon, and immediately afterwards pet health is increased but it seems they forgot about the HoM ones again. We gonna be waiting another half a year for this one? White raven seems fine, at least.

My ranger is going to remain parked next to a jumping puzzle chest for the jumping puzzle dailies. It was a small boost, but the ranger doesn’t need a small boost. It needs a massive dervish-style revamp. The class does not work in PvE.

To me, RtL was a very fun ability used to get around the world as fast as my thief, warrior, or ranger. Outside of that it doesn’t have a whole lot of purpose in PvE. No, I would definitely not kitten my character by putting an entire 30 traits in air to put RtL back on the 15s cooldown that should never have been changed in PvE in the first place. It’s a great quality of life thing and a lot of fun, but that doesn’t mean much if it’ll make an already subpar PvE class even worse by sticking a ton of traits into a bad tree. Instead I’ll just not play my elementalist.

On the bright side, warrior buffs! I already play my boring 80 warrior all the time just because he’s so useful in the open world and in dungeons, and now he’s even better. Now I can continue to be bored on him at 110% efficiency, speeding my eventual departure of this game.

It would make a cool fractal if it counted as 3 of them due to its length.

We got a couple good dungeon encounters, but they’re temporary and there’s little incentive to keep repeating them. We got some very small bits of progress towards making the ranger worthwhile in PvE and have the ill-conceived thief revealed nerf reverted, but it’s been replaced by an equally ill-conceived elementalist Ride The Lightning nerf. The new gem store quiver is really cool, but has massive back placement issues. Fused Gauntlets are decent, but they’re unbelievably alt-unfriendly with their once per account ever limitation.

For everything good, there’s something bad. 5/10.

It’s a good fight, but the temporary nature of the content and lack of incentive to run it again makes it difficult to care. Seems like a waste of a good encounter.

showatt.9413:

Last Warrior Lord.7248:

Well better play my ranger or guardian before they get nerfed “for no reason.”

For no reason? I dunnoe about that, friend. As far as I can tell there are lots of reasons to nerf Elementalist…

And yet these nerfs didn’t really do a whole lot to the nerfworthy aspects of elementalist, while crippling other types of elementalists and making the class a lot less fun to play. Pretty much exactly like the 4s thief revealed nerf last month.

Is there any particular reason why fused gauntlets are once per account? I know arenanet likes making it difficult to play multiple characters with things like ascended gear + account-based laurels and character-based story completion/fractal levels, but at least you can get around those with a whole lot of time and effort.

Fused gauntlets, though? Nope. One per account, ever. I’d love to have these on a couple of my 80s but it is 100% impossible. Why can’t I just do the content again on another character and grab another pair?

Anet will find that this patch makes little difference for bunker eles in pvp, so they’ll nerf RtL some more in all game modes. Repeat forever.

Ljiona.9142:

Vargs.6234:

Anet’s balance team are extremely bad at their jobs. This becomes more and more apparent every single patch. Looking forward to seeing what bafflingly stupid change makes its way in next time. Maybe they’ll decide thieves are too good in pvp, and so will increase the damage thieves take from dungeon mobs by 50%.

I am completely baffled by why they insist thieves have to be the most powerful class. They do out of their way to make them more powerful while other classes get a 10 second reducing on a signet that they never will use.

Maybe people like you should quit whining for nerfs about things you don’t understand, then we won’t get garbage like this RtL change.

Anet’s balance team are extremely bad at their jobs. This becomes more and more apparent every single patch. Looking forward to seeing what bafflingly stupid change makes its way in next time. Maybe they’ll decide thieves are too good in pvp, and so will increase the damage thieves take from dungeon mobs by 50%.

Telling my friends that one new temporary dungeon has been added will not get them to start playing again. Telling them about all of the new permanent content that could have been added over the past half year might have been able to.

The new quiver floats about half a mile off my charr’s back. Even Rox has this problem, making it doubly ridiculous.

Danny.9812:

Vargs.6234:

Thanks for nerfing Ride The Lightning in PvE. You are terrible, arenanet.

It was not fair to other classes the traveling around map with it was insane.. They fixxed it so now its usefull but be made to get into combat.. If your read the patch noters right you ll see that when it hits the cooldown will be halved.. So there are your precious 20 sec cooldown again. So the only thing that is affected by it is map traveling.. and that was broken on an ele… Also ele has 1—% swiftness uptime anyways. If you play it right and know your class

Yes, everyone was furious that elementalists, a subpar pve class, could travel about as fast as warriors or thieves in open world PvE. The entire community was in an uproar. It’s so great that the cooldown was doubled. Let’s nerf everything. No fun allowed.

You people will try to justify anything, especially if it’s a class you don’t play.

Thanks for nerfing Ride The Lightning in PvE. You are terrible, arenanet.

It takes a stunning level of incompetence to completely gut one of the most fun and not even remotely imbalanced PvE skills in the game. Congratulations arenanet, you just made your game less entertaining for no reason. I already didn’t play my ele much because my guard/warrior are so, so much better in PvE, but now that the character is significantly less fun I don’t see much reason to touch it at all.

It remains to be seen whether they will take advantage of the split or will continue to stubbornly crowbar PvP changes into PvE. I’m pretty skeptical based on past events.

As for the question, PvP balance is undoubtedly holding PvE back. It’s one of the biggest issues this game faces. Along with temporary content, it is far and away the main source of animosity among my member capped guild.

You might wanna wait for tomorrow’s patch before setting up a build. Nades are the way to go right now. Who knows if that’s the case tomorrow.

Second guy is the only one I would have kicked. Doing it at the end was really unnecessary but if he was a big enough jerk then it is extremely hard to sympathize. If someone else initiated a votekick at that point I might have clicked to confirm it.

Since when is there some huge wave of elitism outside of CoF1 farming runs? Almost nobody is going to ask you to ping your gear, full ascended warriors/guardians only for some HotW1 run or whatever. Worst case you fill out a party full of thieves with your thief and get kicked because they want somebody more durable for their extremely squishy party. It’s not exactly common.

If you’re getting kicked partyway through all of your dungeons because you are really just incredibly bad and are causing the group to wipe repeatedly, what makes you think you’d succeed in a solo dungeon without anybody to carry you?

I can definitely say that temporary content doesn’t kickstart my interest in guild wars when I’m not currently playing it. I took a long break and whenever something new came out I didn’t want to get back into the game and relearn how to play just so I could blow through some temporary stuff in an hour. It’s very difficult to get my friends to come back to this, because when they ask what’s new I don’t have much to offer. GW2 is almost exactly the same as it was the day it came out, content-wise.

Fractals were a good addition. I spent a lot of time on them and still do. Anyone who just joins the game now can still get as much out of fractals as I have. But there isn’t much else.

Sokar Rostau.7316:

I have really noticed that it is usually the overall group, and not any individual class that makes or breaks a dungeon. Sad to say, since I play one, the Necro is the only class that I am hesitant to run a dungeon with if there’s more than one of them in the group, and that’s only because of the way Conditions work which often means one of the Necros is contributing very little.

With that said, bad players are bad players, regardless of class.

I find this goes double as a thief. I can be very effective if there are a bunch of tough frontliners alongside my D/D self to help spread the incoming damage around, and someone spamming regen really, really helps keep me in the fight. In these situations I feel just as useful as my guard/mes/warrior, pumping out damage that would make 100 blades blush. If everyone in the group is ranged or are other squishy melee classes, I can’t really take the heat and it’s awful. Meanwhile I am much more capable of being the sole melee character on my guardian or warrior and can slot them into any group setup just fine.

The main ones for me are:
1) Splitting PvE/PvP/WvW skills very, very frequently. Split traits too if necessary. Split as much as possible. A little temporary bit of player confusion is so much better than the absolute mess of balance we have going on right now, where players in one realm are punished unfairly, harshly, and frequently due to problems in a completely different, unrelated area of the game.

2) Remove the condition cap, give everybody their own burn/poison stack. Make damage against destructibles take into account your conditions, even if it just increases the flat damage rather than making a graveling mound bleed. Conditions characters have massive problems that non-condition characters don’t have to deal with, for no reason.

There are plenty of other issues but those two are far and away the biggest as far as I’m concerned. Everything else can wait.

As a guy with an 80 of every class, from a dungeon perspective, easy to hard:
Warrior
Guardian
Ranger
Necro
Mesmer
Thief
Engineer
Elementalist

This is purely based on ease of use and not necessarily effectiveness. I wouldn’t consider any of my characters to be my main, though my guardian gets priority on ascended items since he’s the only one with a decent personal fractal level. I don’t play necro/engineer/ranger much though, because they’re pretty bad. I also try not to play my mesmer unless necessary because it’s the only class I don’t enjoy.

Thieves are pretty middle of the road in dungeons. They definitely aren’t a must-have class that people hope to have in their party like War/Mes/Guard, but if the person playing it is capable enough to deal with being a squishy, melee-focused class then they can hold their own okay. Stealth and black powder make some sections easier. Bad thieves, however, are utterly worthless, unlike a bad warrior or guardian. I’d even take a bad necro, ranger, or engineer over a bad thief – at least they’re much less likely to die immediately.

I wouldn’t call thieves good, but I wouldn’t call them completely terrible either.

Sometimes I wish I didn’t have an 80 of every class, because inevitably there will be stupid PvP changes that make one of my PvE characters less fun for no reason. This time it’s elementalist. So I’m not really excited.

I don’t like signets. Your skill bar in guild wars 2 is already quite small, with many abilities only being used very rarely/situationally or not at all. Then you add passive signets in there for more buttons that you’re encouraged not to press.

SPvP nerfs being applied to PvE is just about the most consistently frustrating thing in this game. I have to imagine they’ve lost a whole lot of potential customers after their class has been nerfed again and again due to the balance of some game mode that very few play.

Much like the thief revealed change last month, they really don’t know what they’re doing or how it will affect anything beyond the one issue they’re focusing on.

lordkrall.7241:

So, because people jump on the bandwagon and buy gear for the Flavor of the Month build ArenaNet should not balance the game?

A rather high number of people most likely think before jumping on the whole “OMG THAT BUILD IS THE BEST I MUST USE IT!!!” thingy, and therefore don’t spend a huge amount of money on a overpowered build, since it is quite logical to assume that said build will be changed sooner or later.

Okay, let’s all pick really garbage builds and gear around them. That way, since our build is awful and doesn’t synergize with anything, it won’t get nerfed! Except wait, that’s not true. Bad builds get nerfed constantly because anet doesn’t think about how their nerfs will affect other things.

Zenguy.6421:

Players: mostly PvE , some WvW, least in PvP.

Content updates: heavily PvE, some PvP, a little WvW

Class balancing: heavily PvP, some WvW, a little PvE

This is accurate.

Gravelings seem fine to me. I’ve died to them a few times, but no big deal. The only really offensive part of AC for me is the ghost eater room, which seems to bug out 80% of the time when you enter the area. Then there’s the ghost eater itself, which requires far too much coordination for the boss of the first explorable dungeon. Stick that in Arah or something, and clean up the trash mobs in there while you’re at it.

I’d like to see the numbers on what percentage of players participate in spvp/tpvp on an even semi-regular basis. I have a feeling it’s quite low.

When did anyone even say anything about RtL range in this thread? And even if they did, what is this slippery slope fallacy garbage? No, people are not going to be clamoring for flesh worm to have 50,000 range just because RtL keeps 1500 instead of 1200. Not that anyone who has posted in this thread even cares. What are you even talking about?

Also reconsider the RtL change in PvE. It serves absolutely no purpose but to nerf fun. There is nothing even remotely overpowered about RtL in that setting. Honestly, it should go back to 15s. Makes escaping fairly easy, but escaping in PvE is already a joke for anyone.

If you’re really concerned about the mechanics being different and confusing people, then make it 15s when hitting a target in PvE and 20s if you don’t. Same concept, different numbers.

Every single patch there is some pvp nonsense that ruins something for one of my characters in pve, without fail. Usually a bunch of it. Most players don’t even do spvp. It’s extremely frustrating and makes me lose interest in this game.

The RtL change is really annoying and better be a pvp only thing. It’s just about the most fun thing in the game for traveling in pve.

Nikkinella.8254:

Looks like the whining thieves finally got their way. I can’t wait till they finally get hit by nerf after nerf so they can see what its like. Well I was looking for a reason to quit this game and go back to Aion once the Bard class comes out. Looks like I have my reason now.

Are you kidding me? Thieves get nerfed constantly.

You can do things as a ranger but if you’ve ever played an actually decent class you’ll find that it is embarrassing how poor rangers are in comparison.

Speaking from a PvE dungeon perspective, with an 80 of each of these:

Thief shortbow is an amazing secondary weapon, but you’re really bringing yourself down if you don’t switch to melee whenever you’re able to. It has nice utility with its shadowstep and blast finisher spam, and functions as an acceptable form of AoE if you’re running mainhand dagger.

Warrior longbow is a great choice for fights where it’s too hot to melee, or as something to swap to when you’re low on health. If you primarily use longbow people are going to be annoyed because you aren’t living up to half the potential you could be with Axe or Greatsword.

Ranger is the only class that can really primarily use a bow. Shortbow, in particular. Unfortunately, rangers are pretty garbage in dungeons, offering no support outside of sometimes putting up a small, stationary regen circle in an oftentimes very mobile game where regeneration is pretty easy to come by and doesn’t stack, alongside some unimpressive damage that’s reliant on an AI-controlled pet that can’t dodge.

It’s just CoE armor.

Taking the sub boss out of Dredge is a great idea. It isn’t an interesting encounter and it sucks up a whole lot of time.

Race: Charr
Gender: Female
Class: Elementalist/Mesmer/Necromancer
Armor: Flame Legion Gloves

With CoF gloves equipped, I do not hold my weapons properly. My character uses the same animations that I would use if I was unarmed, without any weapons equipped at all. Mainly this means that my fingers don’t grip my daggers and are instead open palmed, with the weapons just kinda floating there. Staffs have the same sort of problem. It’s difficult to get a good angle on it for a screenshot, but it’s pretty annoying.

They’re just a bunch of big, dumb, personality-deprived lizards. The only thing compelling about them is what they might look like. I hope future expansions don’t all focus on the dragons as much as GW2 focused on zhaitan and his army. They just aren’t interesting and don’t offer anything relatable.

Lupicus feels like a fairly Souls-y boss.

As soon as you get a sword and a pistol. Spam black powder and autoattack everything to death. All you really need to dominate most of open world pve.