Guild Wars 2

Since everyone is approaching this from the WoW / general MMO perspective, let me do it different: I have the same issue (no longevity, no reason to play), but I’ll compare it to GW1. (note that this actually makes a lot of sense since it was made by the same people).

I loved GW1. I loved other MMOs too, had a great time in Aion and RIFT, but GW1 kept me playing longer. There was no better gear to get, not even for looks, and yet I kept playing. The reason was the challenge. In GW1, what I used to do was switch to hard mode, grab a couple of NPCs, called henchmen and heroes there, and try to clear the missions, dungeons and zones on hard mode with the NPCs, without using consumables. There was a nice title system to keep track of how many you completed. I did this for years, from when hard mode was introduced all the way up to the pre-GW2 content like Winds of Change.

Now GW2. It’s been a month or two, and I have pretty much zero goals left, zero things that I haven’t already done. I completed 100% of the map and did every dungeon on nearly every path (I may have missed some, but give me a week and I’ll have them all) Now what? There is no hard mode, no higher difficulty for any of the content. All I can do is go back and do the same things I have already done.

So to the people who say they feel like playing another 500 hours: what are you gonna do? Repeat? Everyone will get bored eventually if that’s the only option…

I totally agree. Especially in the Orr zones the spawn rates are sometimes downright stupid. And not looking at the gorgeous world in a spot where I just killed a mob is something I unfortunately learned very early in this game…

Essarious Quw.8946:

at the end of the game I was seriously doubting Trahearne’s sanity after he frequently introduced me to people I had personally recruited and saved.

“Meet these two sylvari and this special artefact that you personally recovered with the help of an asura who now refuses to leave your personal instance. Don’t mind me whilst I just take the credit and pretend you weren’t even there or that I didn’t even send you to go rescue them to begin with. Also who are you? Since I gave you a title I’ve completely forgotten your name AHAHAHA” ¬_¬

LOL, this is exactly how I felt about it. To me this was the biggest flaw, that they failed even to make NPCs from your personal story remember your character.

(cuz it’s not just trahearne forgetting, carys and tegwen are also like “o hai nice to meet you”)

who needs a legendary when you can have this!

I really don’t see how it is too hard. I might be a slightly above average player, but I pretty much breezed through the whole story, solo, first try. And the lvl 1 – 60 story quests I even did while I was a few levels below recommended. To give an outline of my story: I play sylvari warrior, chose for the vigil, and direct assaults whenever they were possible

Tbh I would be sad if they made the story quests I played through any easier. Only a bugfix here and there would be nice.

SPOILER ALERT (as in the rest of this thread)

I agree with nearly everything that’s said in here, Gakvar and Siofra Crumble made some very good points.

I want to summarize what bothered me most in this mission:

- the stupid amount of poison shots that throw players around on the deck of the ship
- the cannons’ shield function does absolutely nothing in all the time the ship flies between dragons, all the dangerous attacks go right through and around the shields
- zhaitan does not have a HP bar, or not one my team managed to view
- related to the previous: firing on zhaitan shows no damage number
- zhaitan does nothing while players are firing on him, he’s one of the most powerful beings in existence and he does nothing
- the camera is beyond horrible in the final fight against zhaitan
- the turrets are weird / bugged (you can’t aim them, because they only have 3 modes (left / mid / right) instead of the continuous range that a regular treb / catapult has, and it says you can hold to fire further which isn’t true)

and last but not least:

- the loot sucks. How come that for the epic huge final battle in which I defeated a being more powerful than the gods, I get 2 blues and 1 green (and a wvw blueprint of choice)? I could have farmed random mobs for 2 mins and got better stuff….

Overall impression: rushed, the idea is good and the start of the mission is well worked out (the story is imo bad but not worse than in the rest of the 40+ story), but the zhaitan fight is the least epic boss fight I ever had. Fighting the champion troll in Sparkfly Fen felt more epic. There at least I had to press more buttons than 1.

The story is just very naive and predictable. Guild Wars 1 did a much better job there imo, but it’s just one of many aspects that are actually worse in GW2 than GW1…

Why does everyone feel like they should be able to get a legendary? There are lots of nice skins in this game, racials, dungeon rewards, vigil / priory / whisper weapons, and even some regular exotics look great. What’s the problem in playing without a legendary? The loss of bragging rights?

And now the negative points:

1. Combat is very, very repetitive. I spend 95% of my time using skill 1, because it kills everything. The “I swung a sword, oh look I swung it again” that we heard so many times from arenanet is definitely not improved.

2. Build variety is very limited. Because there’s only a few heal and elite skills, and weapon skills are all locked, there are only 3 slots (the normal utilities) that really give you some freedom to make builds. This might provide easier balancing for arenanet, but it greatly limits my interest in the game.

3. Dungeons are too hard. I always liked pugging dungeons, because you meet new people, which is part of the MMO experience. In GW2, I found pugging dungeons is a very bad idea, because even in the story mode lvl 30 dungeon I walked out with fully damaged armor while already having repaired once inside the dungeon. And that while I was already lvl 78!. I thought story mode was supposed to be easier, and reasonably completable with pugs…

4. Map travel cost is too high. As it is now, it actually discourages having fun, especially for people with little play time, because the travel cost can be higher than what you gain if you don’t stay for long. The reason I don’t do the dragon events anymore is that if the chest gives me blues/greens, I don’t earn anything because selling those blues/greens doesn’t give me more money than I have to pay for traveling to the dragon area and back to wherever I was.

5. Scaling doesn’t work well. In dynamic events, if there is a lot of people participating, I often see groups of mobs go down in half a second. I really have to try hard to actually get a hit on mobs before they die. In those cases, I always wonder if there is any scaling at all. Arenanet said that other people were in no way bad in GW2, that the events would scale so there was something to do for everyone… this is definitely not true atm.

6. The world is too big for the amount of content / people in it. On my server, I can already clearly see zone populations declining. This is to be expected of course, because the world is so big. But it’s not fun. In those zones, GW2 basically is turning into an regular (offline) RPG. People seem to be flocking to:

- straits of devastation (karma farm, “join the zerg”)
- the other two orr zones (karma farm and gathering orichalcum / orrian sapling)
- sparkfly fen and blazeridge steppes for the dragons
- frostgorge sound for the dragon and endgame resources too

The other zones are already a lot less populated, and at off-peak hours even empty. For the record, when I last checked my server had a “high” population status.

7. Mob density is too high. The only place where I can usually stop moving and take a breath without having 3 mobs on me, is on the water surface. Everywhere on land are mobs, and if you wanna run somewhere you always have to run through mobs. I really wish there would be a bit of a wider mob free zone around outposts sometimes, or that friendly guardian NPCs were stronger so they could keep some areas mob free.

8. Mob respawn rates are too high. Many times I founght through an area, just to turn around and find that to get out I have to kill every mob that I killed in the past 3 minutes again. A good example is a pirate boat with undead lying in the lvl 80 orr zone. I fought inside, to the lower area of the boat (must have taken 2-3 minutes max) and saw a chest. I opened this chest, but it summoned an undead champion captain. I was alone, so turned around to flee, and guess what, everything I killed had respawned. I died and was frustrated.

Let me emphasize that I have no problem with mob difficulty. In fact I think most mobs are too easy, I take down normal mobs in seconds and can avoid all damage if I want to. I also have yet to see a veteran I can’t kill solo. But even the weakest, stupidest mob gets annoying if there’s 1000 of them that respawn in 10 seconds (exaggeration for the sake of argument).

9. The personal story is not so personal, it’s not about your character. Your character is barely even seen as a hero anymore, all the glory goes to Trahearne and the Pact. Also, characters that I had helped in the lvl 1-40 storyline (Trahearne, Carys, Tegwen) didn’t even recognize me in the higher level storyline, they acted as if we first met (again). I found that really lame and immersion breaking.

So I’ve been playing this game very intensively lately, leveled a char to 80, did roughly 80% of the world completion, did all the big dynamic events, did half the dungeons… it’s time to put together some feedback. For a change, let’s start with positive things

1. Big dynamic events are awesome. It’s just amazing to see that every time The Shatterer or the Claw of Jormag spawns, lots of people turn up to do the event. In fact, usually lots of people turn up 20 minutes in advance, to be sure they don’t miss it

2. Characters look really nice. The armor skins in this game are among the best I’ve seen, and the dye system is definitely the best I’ve ever seen. Every now and then I find myself taking screenshots of awesome looking chars.

3. Dodging is a fun mechanic. It is a skill requiring way to avoid a big attack, escape a fight or engage in a fight.

4. Water content is awesome. I really enjoy the huge, 3 dimensional depths with all kinds of fishes. Quaggans and their villages are really cool too.

1) guardian
2) thief
3) engineer
4) mesmer

warrior / ele / necro / ranger are pretty much equal imo but less strong than the above 4

Arcane.4950

Because MOBA’s have no PvE or WvE and additional features take TIME TO CODE.

Stop crying and just wait, its coming.

Obviously PvP and PvE content is worked on by different groups within Arenanet. So that MOBAs have no PvE is kinda irrelevant here…

Make it possible to preview armor without it automatically using your current dye scheme in the previewer. My dyes look good on my armor, but not on all the other sets in the game.

I noticed there is a feature to change the dye in the preview window, but it seems not possible to insert your unlocked dyes there. If I understand correctly you have to use dyes in those slots that are still a physical vial, so you haven’t actually unlocked them yet, which is just weird.

Malakree.5912:

- mesmer clones
- mesmer illusions

Just as a note, these are the same thing.

just as a note, they are not. Clones look like the player, have kitteny HP and don’t do much damage, illusions are pink / see through, have more HP, and can do lots of dmg.

There are definitely too many NPCs. Go for the pet or the player is a nice tactical element, but in GW2 “the pet” is more like “the 10 pets” . GW2 is the only game in which you can zerg with one player. We got like:

- ranger pets (these are still fine)
- elementals
- ranger spirits
- mesmer clones
- mesmer illusions
- necromancer minions
- rune rock dog / flesh reaver
- engineer turrets (they don’t move but are also extra things you have to kill)
- sharks (still the worst NPCs tbh)

The excessive amount of pets leads to:

1. you spend more time attacking pets than players, therefore pretty much play more PvE than PvP
2. it’s impossible to see what’s going on when 20 things are moving, shooting, dealing damage

I personally find it one of the few major dissapointing things of GW2 PvP. Until they limit the amount of NPCs to like 2 per player, I will never enjoy this game as much as I did other games.

It’s fine, every form of CC has counters. Getting diminishing returns / immunity would only be a big nerf on the weapon sets with CC, and require rebalancing for that. Abilities would suddenly be unreliable, since you never know how many times a person has alreayd been CC’d . This would give a more random feel to the game, which is (obviously) bad.

When they introduced that stuff in RIFT a few of my souls were broken for months, because they CC they relied on suddenly failed 80% of the time.

So please keep it as it is, and if you personally have trouble with CC, throw in another stability skill.

11. Make thiefs visible when they start reviving people. It’s pretty much impossible to prevent them from stealth reviving, since you won’t notice that they’re doing it. Arenanet claimed they wanted us to look at what’s happening rather than UI, and for stealth reviving, the only way to see it is to look at the HP bar of the downed enemy.
Also, it removes the tactical element of trying to interrupt or down the person who’s reviving, since you see no person who’s reviving. It’s an unfair advantage that only thiefs have.

keroksi.3076:

• Added the rank 30-39 wolf finishing move.

Now thats some new content for you. I tell you its ready to be esports now!

Lol, this post made my day.

It’s sad that they still didn’t even give info about what their plans are though. WTB pvp blog post…

A guildie of mine is playing some other game now cuz he got bored killing everything in GW2. Guess what, he was playing a quickness thief. It’s not a pure thief problem, quickness warrior can be pretty sick too, but I definitely do think it’s a problem that quickness enables these ridiculous dmg spikes. No matter what you spec against it, you’re never fast enough to avoid all the dmg, and if they get you down to half HP before you can do so much as target them you’re still screwed.

I am not sure if this is really a bug, more like a suggestion…

.. but everytime I visit guildwars2.com, I log in, click “FORUMS” , and then have to log in again. This is very annoying when it happens a few times a day. Can you not make it one login for website + forums ?

Hello, I’ve been playing a lot of structured PvP, and here are the most important things I noticed that could use a change, with reasoning.

1. Tone down quickness. Damage in GW2 is already high, compared to for example GW1. Quickness enables incredibly high damage spikes, that should not be possible to be done by a single player. If it has to stay, I think a speed reduction would be appropriate (compensated by a debuff removal or extended duration).

2. Let players view their PvP armor on the character selection screen. PvE and PvP are so nicely separated in this game, don’t let the PvPers be annoyed by lvl 1 armor whenever they log in.

3. Remove the immunity on the thief spin-around skill they steal from warrior. It’s fine when a skill does high aoe damage, and it’s fine when a skill makes you evade all attacks, but both at the same time seems imbalanced to me.

4. Remove the sharks from “Raid of the Capricorn”. A lot of people complain about this map, but I think the main issue is the sharks. People don’t want to get killed by NPCs when playing PvP.

5. Remove the invulnerability from underwater downed players who reach the surface. Finishing a downed player underwater is currently extremely time consuming, because once they hit the surface, every 2 out of 3 attacks you do are negated by invulnerability (and on top of that they are healing from the surface). I think the time it takes to finish people is the main issue with underwater combat atm.

After points 4 and 5 are patched, I think the map could enter tournament rotation.

6. Punish leavers in hot join PvP, with a system similar to GW1’s “dishonorable”. First time you leave it’s fine (you can always have some urgent business irl, or a disconnect), but second time it’s a 10 minute debuff that prevents you from entering PvP. This would reduce the amount of players that leave matches just because they’re losing, and would therefore also reduce the chance that people who join a game join the losing side.

7. Give the same points to everyone in the team at tournament play. People have different roles in a team, and it’s very unfair that people with an offensive role always end up with the most glory. You play as a team, so you should get points as a team.

8. Increase the win bonus in hot join PvP. The only thing people care about is personal score, and winning is such a small part of that, that it’s better to get a high amount of kills and lose, than get a low amount and win. Increasing the win bonus might promote leeching, but there are ways to deal with that. (for example a system that gives “dishonorable” to people who stand still for too long, or stay in base for too long). If people start caring about winning, the quality of hot join PvP will be greatly increased.

9. Add a way to convert orbs into crystals and crystals into slivers (for example with a 10 to 1 rate). It’s very frustrating to have a stack of 200 orbs, and 0 crystals and 0 slivers. A system that totally depends on luck needs some sort of failsafe, to reward people who are forever unlucky. Else you get Aion-ish scenes of people quitting because of not getting what they want after a hundred tries.

10. Make dyes account bound. Currently, the systems allow for a flexibility with PvP characters that almost equals GW1’s : when you delete your char and make a new one, everything can be transferred over. PvP rank is account wide, armor and weapons are account bound, achievements are account wide… the only thing you lose is dyes. Would it not be nicer to have this account wide as well? Of course a change in rarity could be implemented, if the current drop rate is too high for an account wide system.

See title. I’m male, rank 22, prefer to play warrior but am up for learning any class. I’m looking for a guild that is english speaking, (somewhat) mature, plays PvP and is up for playing new PvP / esport content when it comes out.

madatom.5218:

you created great gameplay that is simply being underutilized in a very poorly constructed attempt at a “casual pvp esport” such a thing is an oxymoron, you cant make a casual game an esport at the sametime

I think all we need is ratings. Then casuals could get teamed vs casuals, and top teams vs other top teams. Everyone could have fun and challenging matches and balancing could be done for the top play. Arenanet only needs to actually care, and add stuff to PvP…

Tinantier.5964:

DemonNinja.1602:

THEIF / MESMER = win…. everyone is playing these two classes…

Mesmer has been shown to be the least played class so it seems unlikely that everyone is playing them – can we assume that these classes have handed you your behind a couple of times?

least played class overall yes. In PvP I think I have yet to see my first match without mesmers.

I’m warrior, and don’t have any trouble with thieves. Just don’t play full glass cannon build and you’ll see that you don’t actually have to die in 1 second. Guardians and mesmers are a different story, near impossible to win 1v1…

Duckzor.4327:

uhm. sorry but who really gives two kittens about this.

A lot of people do, actually. This needs to get a change, either what the OP suggested, or an option where you can set what to display.

Nkrdbl.8160:

The better ones are called arcane slivers and they only drop from gold chests.
- Per http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Arcane_Sliver
“They have chance to be salvaged when using a PvP Salvage Kit on rare PvP weapons and armor found in gold reward chests.”

This is not true, I got a lot of highest quality items (which can give slivers) in silver chests. I didn’t salvage all, but from the ones I did, I got 3 slivers.

EoNxBoNx.9213:

Trying to fit them all in at launch would have only slowed the game down when it could have been released.

Which is what they always claimed to be doing, with their “when it’s ready” …

so epic how again and again someone takes greatsword glass cannon to tournaments, fails bad, and then posts on the forums how warrior has no role

If you can’t find a use for 100 blades, I seriously doubt your skills as a “PvP veteran” …

I just think the skills need a change. Every class has some class specific ability, like warrior can rally for some seconds before certain death, elementalist can use vapor from and gain movement + invulnerability, thief can stealth… these are fine. But the interrupts are too imbalanced at the moment. Guardian gets AoE knockback, while warrior gets only single target knockdown, and elementalist gets no interrupt at all. This should be fixed. Skill 2 should be a “fair” skill, if one class gets an AoE knockback, then the effects of the other classes should at least be AoE interrupts as well.

Mayama.1854:

Thats how the mesmer is designed, it gives you multible bad choices. Kill the phantasms and get damaged by confusion or dont attack and get damaged by the phantasms.

This reminds me of the GW1 mesmer, there you could attack and get damaged by empathy / backfire or not attack and get damaged by wastrel’s… but getting damaged by confusion in GW2 is a lot less bad than empathy and backfire were in GW1, so I would just ignore it and attack.

2v2 or 3v3 doesn’t make sense, this is a team game, it should be 5v5 or not implemented

alcopaul.2156:

Death Match Promotes a Rock paper scissors gameplay especially if the game is based on character customization and builds. Death Match would only work if all the players play 1 generic character.

If team size is large enough (like 5v5), every team is likely to have at least a rock, a paper and a scissors, and then this shouldn’t be a problem.

See I think standing inside objective points should never give you glory, since that would only promote both sides grabbing a point and then standing in it with the full team. I know currently defending is always less rewarding, but I think for hot join, that can’t really be fixed.

I do like this map, but I understand the qq about the sharks. If they remove the sharks, this could enter the tournament rotation. Underwater PvP is fine, it may be not totally balanced but neither is land combat. That’s no reason to remove it.

In my opinion this needs to be changed:

Hot join:
Winning should be awarded more here. The currently given point distribution would be fine, if only winning was more important.

And most important:

Tournaments:
Every team member should get the same amount of points here. It’s absolutely ridiculous that one of my guildies gets 300 points, while I get 50, just because I had the role of defender while he was capturing and killing. You play as a team, you should get points as a team.

I would love to see this implemented, but 5v5 rather than 2v2 or 3v3. I think we should stick to the same team size for competitive formats. The downed state fixes spiking / focus fire, since it means the first person to get targeted is not out of the game yet, but only downed. Downed state also fixes the problem of it being over too fast without a healer class, I think it would last just long enough to be fun.

On a side note, yes quickness needs to be fixed, I agree that it has no place in this game. Same thing goes for moa in its current state. If those 2 things were changed, I think 5v5 death match could be amazing. Especially in tournament format. Or even bigger tournament, like HA in GW1