Guild Wars 2

I used to play on Aurora Glade, it is a pretty good example of how it really isn’t “fight for your servers pride”. Not that AG doesn’t have server pride, but one week we had a dozen or so good WvW guilds and the next week we had 3 or 4 left. The matchups when I was on AG were often terrible.

I don’t see why the same thing couldn’t work in the EU servers. Although the merging would probably have to be based around country/language as well as position? Mind you I dread the thought of one massive German server – think of all that siege!

So in NA where I now play (after some 7 months in EU) we will have two leagues of 12 servers. Only three of those servers have any real ability (at this time at least, before stacking occurs in a serious manner) of achieving anything.

We all know numbers and coverage will win, so instead of merging servers (which would be a nightmare and isn’t required) why not have alliances of servers for the WvWvW leagues instead?

As an example (not entirely thought out as you can see, just floating an idea):

Tier 1 and probably Tier 2 – no change
Tier 3 and Tier 4 some servers are merged, only for WvWvW and during the season.

Or…

Rank 4 allianced with rank 12
Rang 5 allianced with rank 11
…and so on

Depending on the numbers and coverage (Anet has the figures) it might mean two servers or three servers are banded together by Anet to make an alliance server.

I know it isn’t perfect but what is the point of rank 1 playing rank 6 and rank 12 in a matchup? Where is the fun for that for any server? This isn’t the EPL where even the bottom placed team can beat Man Utd on a good day, the disparities are FAR FAR larger than that.

Yes it means that servers will have to work together, probably won’t have joint comms or communication already setup BUT… is that any worse than simply not being able to compete?

Zergas happen because Anet built the game that way, everything in WvWvW encourages zergs. Lets break it down:

- The zerg moves faster
- The zerg takes objectives faster
- The zerg doesn’t really need siege
- The zerg doesn’t really care about supply
- The zerg doesn’t care AT ALL about defending

Now factor in that the best rewards (champ bags, karma, WXP, XP) are fastest achieved by zergs. The downed system, the rewards system, the whole thing is designed for zergs. Then crucially we come to the last point:

- The zerg cannot be stopped unless by a bigger zerg

It is a vicous circle, one created by the devs.

Can we get someone at Arena Net who has a clue about what WvWvW should be about please. Is that really too much to ask? A couple of devs who realize there is enough PvE in the game and start putting the focus on where the FUN is in WvWvW (and in case you don’t know the fun isn’t karma training around in a massive blob, seriously you can do that crap anywhere in PvE).

What is the point of the leagues, we already know that 24/7 coverage wins games and 24/7 coverage will win the season. You announce this now and it will just be a scramble to transfer to other servers and I fear some some of the better guilds on lower tier servers moving up and destroying good communities

It all just smacks of desperation to appear to be doing “something” for WvWvW, I guess you probably only need to borrow a living world dev for an afternoon to code it up. Maybe not even that seeing as you can already control the matchups and just need someone to write the results down on the back of an envelope each week.

Not sure if that was a PR given to that site but “huge rewards”? What, we all getting a precursor? “WvWvW rewards” is an oxymoron and has been for some time. But way to go, you manage to reward the PvE players without even needing to play WvWvW (as usual).

This game is ALL about PvE. PVP is on life support, WvWvW has been hobbling on crutches for months begging for some medical attention and this latest announcement should see it admitted to intensive care, stat.

You want ascended trinkets – PvE (faster, and hey you can use your achievment points badges to get them cheaper if you just WP to WvWvW and leave). You want gold – PvE. You want achievement points – PvE. Skins – PvE. Crafting mats – PvE. Karma – PvE. Want a legendary? PvE, you get enough badges from your achievement chests now anyway. New content? PvE. Dev resources and devs that understand your part of the game? PvE.

Promises, promises, and more promises. New stuff is always on the radar but it is ALWAYS bread today and jam tomorrow.

The players that still WvWvW despite all of this, who enjoy the elements of WvWvW you haven’t dumbed down or ruined deserve more. Much more.

souless.1935:

Learn to critique.. half of you haven’t worked a day in your life much less in corporate organized development. Maybe you are missing something, maybe not…either way critiques minus the hyper drama is appreciated

I’ve worked for three blue-chip FTSE100 companies for a combined total of about 14 years until 13 years ago I launched (and still run) a successful software and web development business. I’d be happy to send you my Linkedin profile anytime you like. I understand the software development cycle and the difficult decisions that need to be made on any project better than most.

“Critique” never gets anywhere in a game forum, drama always wins. Learn to forum, the squeeky wheel always gets the grease

How many people do you think would still be playing PVE in this game if PVE had the same attention, rewards and updates WvWvW has had? The answer is not kittening many.

I think most peoples sense of frustration with WvWvW actually stems from how close they came to getting something that worked for the majority of the people that wanted to have real RvRvR.

While we all hoped for improvements that mattered all we got was PVE in WvWvW (siegerazers), buffed up siege for carebears, stupid WXP with pointless rank/abilities and (even after improvement to it) crap rewards. And we lost the orbs.

It really says something about the game that when content that is released that is MIND NUMBINGLY boring such as chasing round different zones killing the same mobs for hours is enough to virtually empty WvWvW.

WvWvW guilds are drifting away. Even on SoR try and find a commander in WvW, you might be lucky if there is one on a map these days. Go to an event you can see 15-20 in line of sight without opening the map. Good commanders who led WvWvW leave the game faster and faster.

I am just as frustrated as everyone else, I’m tired of the same two maps, I’m tired of the carebear 3 button siege mentality and the karma train that never stops and certainly never fights. I’m tired of 2 rare drops and 1 exotic in WvWvW in 12 months versus more loot than I can carry in living world events (3 exotics and 5 rares in an hour in one memorable session). I’m tired of people ressing off Moas and other crap NPCs, tired of the downed mechanic, tired of Arena Net thinking that the crap they release for WXP ranks actually matters to anyone. And finally I’m jealous of PVE, though I rarely play it, who make me feel like an acne ridden red headed step child who they feel it is enough to hand a stale cookie to once in a blue moon.

Still, ESO isn’t far away. I’ll happily pay them the $15 a month instead of the stupid amounts of money I’ve spent in the gem store in orderto feel like I’m not some second class citizen to the guys who ran CoF to the ground or grind every day in some living world playground.

So Devon I thank you for that, truly – thanks for saving me from spending $80 – $300 a month on your game. You know where I’ll be and what you might need to do in order to get the people like me back. And if it turns out you don’t care, well then I guess we will both be happy

Traps? Seriously? Oh kitten off.

Like someone else said much better a few posts up wth are you doing introducing traps that break an entire classes mechanic? Are we also getting traps that unsummon pets? Traps that stop warriors building/using adrenaline? Traps that stop switching from F1 through F4?

The last thing this game needs is more bull like traps. Traps that steal supply? Give me
a kittening break.

WvWvW becomes more like an RTS every patch. Maybe next month just remove our skill bars and replace with “drop siege” “build siege” “place trap” and “teleport and turtle in nearest keep/tower”?

Now here is an alternative idea to traps – if you want to reduce someones supply you have to kill them using your character (not deploy something like a trap or siege and sit in a tower). Then you can loot their supply.

Devon I like you, you’re vocal and you get involved. But this kitten has to stop before WvWvW is just populated by the few fools who like this kind of crap.

Yes. I’d like to remove everything except rams and catapults. And if/when that happens I’d like you to go play something else.

Riverside… meh. The only way to get a fight off your server is to break in to the Lords room where you have a waypoint. Otherwise al you do is man the numerous arrowcarts or run away/waypoint/alt-f4 even sometimes.

I knew this week would be dull, but I didn’t figure for just how dull it would be. I can only imagine how dull it is for some of your players just standing on the walls by their ACs waiting for someone to come visit – I hope you rotate them, that kind of thing can lead to lots of derserters

Oeps Rolls Necro.2594:

Its can be so easy. Ask 10-15 hardcore wvw guild leaders about their thoughts about wvw before you change stuff.

SWTOR tried that and it was a disaster. I actually think it is a good idea, as long as what the guild leaders request is tempered against the entire WvWvW player base too. The game has to be enjoyable for all of the participants, not just the hardcore guilds.

The ranking system really has to change, and soon though. This isn’t the first time we have seen this happen. I hope it is the last.

Even t3/t4 in EU is as stale as month old bread although largley fairly balanced.

Logged in for the first time since patch tonight. Guild voice chat is now littered with the terms “arrow cart(s)” and "treb(s) instead of the more entertaining “form up”, “flank”, “push”, “fall back”, “dance on their heads”.

I’ve never ever seen so many overlapping red circles at Hills. At least 50% of the arrow carts defenders deployed were in places that could not be hit by any other siege. There is virtually nowhere on the walls you are not in range of the AC traited additional range so getting the first gate down (an event that took almost 25 minutes) meant very little.

Eventually putting up a treb in the very corner of the outer wall had some success but it was soon taken down by another treb. We tried this for another 20 minutes.

Finally when we had exhausted their supply we just ran to the north gate where they hadn’t had the foresight to build any superior arrow carts. We had no supply either so we just facerubbed a re-enforced gate till it went down.

Hills lords room is joke though, and 20 minutes later we took hills.

I can’t believe anyone had any actual fun, defenders or attackers. Maybe the 12 people on arrow carts enjoyed it – the other 50+ people on both sides were mainly standing around doing nothing and for once it was a relief to have to do a supply run and be portalled back in just because it was something to do instead of watching the minority of people hitting the same button repeatedly on their siege weapons.

Buffing an item damage by 80% while adding WXP AC traits combined with siege might on the cheapest siege item in the game when superior arrow carts with siege might were already very strong was crazy. Not giving any thought to how ACs are abused virtually every day with positioning and zoom hacks and ignoring the fact they melt any other siege was insane. Failing to address the issue ACs already have with being able to shoot through walls, stone ceilings and anything else in their way is simply lazy development.

At the very least the range extension needs to go to the very top of the WXP trait line, the damage buff from the patch needs to go down to more like 25% damage increase and they should have limited (very limited) damage against other siege. I would also prioritize making sure arrow carts work like projectiles should – if there is something blocking the path between the point of departure and the point of arrival then it should be blocked.

Lastly you want to adjust siege I’m all for it unless the game turns in to siege wars. Which it basically was tonight.

I guess we were somewhat lucky though tonight that people were bugged and siege kept disappearing otherwise it would have been even more boring (if such a thing is possible).

TogoChubb.3984:

First of all WvW is about your server accumulating more points by owning structures. Secondly it is about large scale battles over these structures and if those don’t work then alternative strategy applis. If you are not focused on winning the end game then I would be a little disappointed if I were on your server.

I’ve no idea what tier you are in but it goes like this in 4 downwards usually – you either choose to chase points by going to some BL and PvDoor or you choose to engage the enemy wherever they are. It isn’t of course as cut and dried as that – you could equally say you either choose to engage the enemy or you choose to just recap what they capped for the points… and so on.

Everyone wants to win, but very few of us want to do something just to win that isn’t any fun. And PvDoor is not fun. Sitting in a tower checking doors is no fun either. Putting a ninja squad together is simply dull but at least it has some xp, karma and points attached. Bottom line though if you want to take on trash mobs followerd by a simple enough champ mob PvE is that way.

Sounds like a bad idea, really need to see the detail though.

The only real “zerging” is usually on t1 – t3 servers, the rest of us just have big guild groups and that won’t change. We may be running 25 people, but if we can all now attack the gate and guards with superior siege we will have taken that tower/keep before someone else can say “hey, is that tower contested?”.

Of course we use scouts, but nobody wants to be the guy sitting at Hills or Bay for two hours just in case a 24 man group shows up. I repeat, NOBODY. If you say you do want to be that guy then you don’t actually enjoy WvWvW you just have some weird need to please people and should seek help.

The real issue with WvWvW is we want more fights. People who enjoy ninja-ing towers are also slightly strange in my eyes. I join WvWvW for the battles – not PvDoor – and this is not going to help. Now I’m only going to know where there is a massive cullingfest happening, why am I going to bother heading to those orange swords?

I’ve never logged off Vent saying “wow what a great night, we ninjad all those keeps and didn’t see a single enemy player!”. On the other hand, I’ve logged off many times where we scored zilch and took nothing but everyone loved the massive open running battles, the small skirmishes and actually doing some, you know, player versus player stuff.

My first character rolled was a thief, I’d never played a stealth class in an MMO before and I wanted to try it. 1,000 or so hours played on it, almost constant QQ on the forums about it and three fairly heavy nerfs to the class I decided to roll something else to see what all the fuss was about.

I should point out I was already playing (almost exclusively) mesmer and necro in tPvP but really I don’t see a balance issue in sPvP, it is all about WvWvW (because if we look at thief in PvE they are just a joke, who wants a thief for FoTM? Dungeons? LOL).

So I rolled a mesmer – equally as good as a thief. I rolled a warrior – equally as good as a thief. I rolled a d/d ele – arguably better than a thief.

I still play my thief, I play with 46% crit chance and 104% crit damage, mostly s/d or s/p. I haven’t played d/d for 2 months or so. It has strengths, it has MANY limitations and stealth just isn’t as good as it sounds.

Pretty much all of the classes are capable of some amazing builds and setups, all of those builds sacrifice one thing or another for something else. Every time I read this thread it seems people think thief can have every trait point, every weapon, every utility skill.

What thief really needs is more attention to sword builds and the removal of the stealth combo with h/s and black powder. If you remove the ability to cnd/steal at the same time as well I think the rest is fine if/when culling gets sorted out.

On the flip side though enough of being able to be damaged by pets or hit by channeled skills in stealth and add in a defensive cooldown and I, for one at least, will be fairly happy.

Awesome, almost 5 minutes and at the end of it… wow. He rezzed a guy.

I thought everyone pretty much knew how to do this on a thief, simplest thing for Anet to do is just take away that combo field. Replace it with retaliation instead or something useful.

You are entirely right. While I don’t PVE, don’t want to PVE and don’t really care about PVE at all if WvWvW had been given even a fraction of the resources PVE has been blessed with I expect a lot of old friends who left would still be playing GW2.

I’d say you’ve missed a few things though – WvW rewards are terrible compared to PVE, far too many exploits (many still existing), orbs removed and never replaced, too small maps, the current reduction in number of active players in WvW (aka the queue bug), lack of a test server and infrequent communication from arena on WvW issues all play a part too.

Of course we all want the perfect game devs, who communicate all the time and bring us everything we want (ideally before we know we want it ourselves). No devs can live up to that, but (maybe stupidly) I bought in to the idea that arena.net were a different kind of game developer.

The next week or so is crucial: MMO game players are like a hive mind – once the rot starts in one section it quickly spreads.

Sigh. Why is WvW something that seems to get all the attention of a disgraced family member no one talks about. With two accounts I’m a member of several guilds that are solely WvW focused – and there are tons of WvW guilds out there.

Since the last culling change (a nightmare for approx 75% of guild members I play with) we are logging on less, playing less and (crucially?) spending less in the gem shop. Many of us were just hanging on with the hope February would be an improvement but already our numbers are falling dramatically.

Whole guilds in alliances just aren’t logging on any more. Since the recent culling “change” (read: disaster) we average 10 players per night at peak instead of 25.

WvW costs more gold and delivers FAR less reward than PvE. If I spend 3 – 4 hours in PVE running dungeons, fractals or Orr farming I’m likely to be 6 or 7 gold better off without even trying. But guess what, I don’t WANT to PVE and I was told I wouldn’t have to. Except I forgot, there is still gear I can only get from PVE that regardless of the stats is STILL an advantage.

WvWvW has had nothing in any update except a breakout event (waste of developer time in most serious wvw players opinions), some cosmetic changes to BLs and hey, guess what, sometimes a siege weapon will shoot a gift package or fire a candy cane! On the flip side we’ve had fairly major content and functionality reduced (orbs).

They have yet to even ADDRESS the reduced numbers in WvW borders where even tier 5 servers are getting queues of up to an hour at peak, 2 or more hours for EB. And these queues are despite numbers falling – there just isn’t the same capacity on the maps anymore. Yes I understand top tier servers are seeing queues because of transfer, but I don’t play on top tier servers.

No comment either on how many of us are experiencing worse culling since the changes. I’d live with “it is a necessery step to better culling in the future” or similar, but the feedback to the week long test was largely negative and from my own experience along with guild mates on several servers the recent change is just as bad.

Yes I don’t pay a sub but I do support the developers and buy a lot of gems (I only do WvWvW, I pretty much NEED to buy gems and convert to gold if I want to be able to buy anything).

Looks like too little too late Arenanet. I had high hopes, now all I hope is I get in the ESO beta.

Ross Biddle.2367:

I’m conflicted. It’s better in some situations, and worse in others. I also like that I can see enemies super far away once they’ve been loaded.

I can SOMETIMES see enemies a REASONABLE distance away which I couldn’t before. The trade off is either my commander or my guild leader who I’ve targetted who is only 300ft away constantly appears and re-appears. I can’t see how this is an improvement, I need to decide who/what is important to me in the situation I’m in – the game deciding for me is a really bad idea.

On the subject of ideas how about we clear out all the mobs in WvW – everything from the mobs outside your spawn (moa, griffens, those skunk looking things I forget the name of) right down to the stupid chickens cluttering up camps etc. Keep the ones for objectives (maybe reduce the number but make them harder to kill, e.g. Krait) and skill points if you must but I’d clear the skill points out too.

Apart from solving the problem of people rezzing themselves off a passing Doe it has to be better for the server as a whole and culling. I mean I’m at Cliffside the other night and I can’t see half my own squad, I can’t see more than 25% of the enemy but I can ALWAYS see 4 wolves? Presumably those 4 wolves were prioritized by the game because they were biting my ankles, but actually the 2 invisible mesmers and 3 invisible warriors not 100ft from me were the real threat. By the time I knew THEY were there I was downed and spiked.

BLs are a warzone, the chances of any life being present bar the odd kittenroach would be slim. I really don’t need the server and my PC to calculate their position, what they are doing, render their models or do anything with them. Just remove them.

Much much worse for me.

I really hated the culling “test” and I really hate the new temporary solution, no surprise there. The core issue is culling hasn’t gone away and now we have additional issues:

1. Can’t see your allies, when you can see them they appear/disappear randomly
2. If you target someone, like your guild leader, the target drops off if they randonly disappear or if they go more than 300 range from you.
3. Half the time I don’t see any weapons rendered at all. For a player who switches weapons a lot I can’t even see what weapon I’m using.
4. It can be almost impossible to co-ordinate movement as half the time you can’t see the rest of your group.
5. Enemy zergs still appear “en masse” out of the blue

As someone who can’t go more than 4 weeks without upgrading something in my PC I tend to think from anectodal experience that those with lesser/bare minimum machines are in fact sometimes seeing an improvement. For those of us who play games seriously enough to invest in our equipment – well, we get the shaft.

The current state of culling makes me look back fondly to Aion for gods sake.

Oh dear. The December trial was simply horrible, we can only HOPE that the additional changes have a significant impact and improve it considerably.

I play on a high end system with SSD, I know I suffer less issues and culling than most guild mates as I’m usually the one calling out on TS a 30 man zerg is about to arrive on our heads because I see them first.

But, if there is no significant improvement from the December trials I won’t be logging in to play until things are changed. That week in December was horrible for everyone in our guild – regardless if they ran in zergs or ran solo/small group.

I don’t mind downed but I think it needs some tweaking.

If we take a 1vs1 as an example I might be able to down the player in 5 seconds. With them hanging on their bandage skill it could then take me a further 12 seconds to DPS the player to “dead”. If they are a high HP class and have either downed health pool food or trait it could take me even longer. And I’m not even factoring in any downed state skills here, just assuming the downed player is hammering his bandage key.

So lets move to 2vs5. We down two of the enemy 5 fairly quickly. That still leaves two enemy engaging us directly while it takes maybe 5 or 6 seconds in total to for one enemy to rez his downed colleagues.

The balance is off. Downed health pools are too high and the amount of healing provided by just one ally when downed is far too high.

I like the concept of downed, the chance to get back in the fight at the last minute by doing something special with a downed skill or your allies coming to your aid. But kitten it is just so cheesy at the moment.

I’ve got more than one account in GW2 (one for EU play and one for USA play) and I think I’ve killed over 15k players roughly between the two. I’ve had about 4 exotic drops and maybe a couple of dozen rares. Across both accounts I may have had 2000 badges of honor in total (can’t say for certain, I’ve spent some!). I always play in groups to maximise my loot and I’m DPS and a lot of AoE, so I’m probably up there in terms of getting most loot bags per kill. Issues for me in terms of rewards compared to PVE:

- After repairs, upgrades, food costs I can grind out maybe 30s an hour profit (very poor)
- Buying WvW armor with badges is SO much more expensive than dungeon armor in terms of time needed
- No option for ascended gear (I know this is being addressed)
- Loot bags at feet, I must miss at least 10-20% of loot in total. Either I die before I can loot or the battle moves forward. Personally I’m always on the move.
- Spikes. Wow, how many of those have I had!! How about you make spikes something we can throw in the forge for something useful, or replace them with some better loot!
- Low level loot virtually all the time. It sucks getting a bag full of lvl 20 armor, sucks even more after killing a group of lvl 80s to get lvl 70 stuff in your bag.
- Generally poor loot return even grouping and AoE spec compared to PVE.

I don’t want WvW to return massive amounts of gold, I just want to be able to only do WvW without having to run dungeons or farm events in Orr just to remain financially viable.

If I had spent all that time running between events in Orr and killed 15k mobs there I dare say I would have easily achieved the 200g in bank title, as it is I rarely have more than a handful of gold (unless I buy Gems from Anet and trade it to gold).

Almost 15k kills. I’ve had a total of two level 80 exotics drop and maybe a dozen rares. I rarely PVE and I use a lot of siege so by the time I’ve repaired, upgraded some keeps and dropped siege I’m lucky if I can clear a few silver profit an hour in WvWvW.

I always play in a group so my loot is maximised and I run with a big guild with maybe up to 30 of us in WvW at most at any one time. Average play time is around 2 – 3 hours per day for me, and I just asked in guild chat none of us have ever seen a pre-cursor drop, most of us have had less than a handful of exotics and a good dozen of those asked are at over 20k kills.

I’m actually pretty tired of people leaving WvW groups to do CoF runs or fractals because they are “broke”. When you add in the time needed to farm badges for the WvW armor compared to the time taken for dungeon armor WvW really gets the shaft on rewards and it needs to be looked at, hopefully in the Feb update if not before.

Piken Square in EU, good guild, strong community, well skilled.

Whiteside Ridge close runners up (they have some highly skilled players it was a challenge to fight, they just need more of em).

Honorable mention to Gunnars Hold – some great people on that server.

For NA… hard to call, Garnished Toast were good and fair while I liked the spirit of Ehmry Bay.

Rednik.3809:

I can sum up his post in more compact view.
1) Stay here and swing your weapon, thief surely will be stay infront of you and die from laugh. And if you trow some aoe, you instagib him in no time, regardless of his position. Thief still alive? U bad bro, go roll bunker guardian.
2) Use channeled skills. Even melee weapons have ton of them, just launch some 100b combo, thief will be automatically pulled and slaughtered. Thief still alive? U very bad bro, go roll bunker guardian.
3) Survive initial burst and bam, autowin. And you better be bunker guardian, just in case.
4) Go somewhere else, with less thieves around. And take bubble of bunker guardians with you, this game is all about teamplay. Also, you can roll a thief.
5) If some thief kill you regardless of your class, build and skill, it’s fine, he just run with some very clever spec. Try to roll bunker guardian.
6) Still losing? It’s all Anet fault, blame them, not thief. Anyway, bunker Guardian still available.

It is true, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. Not that it will make the slightest difference but here goes…

1. Thief is either doing 2 things if backstab thief, running or getting behind you. If running it is harder but STILL counterable but assume they aren’t running yet so they are getting BEHIND you. They have 3s to get there if traited, so even the slow witted should be able to work out where they are going. Sword/dagger is also going to try being behind you for the daze. Not rocket science right?

2. GW2 is an interesting game where you don’t need a target to actually attack something. You might not have noticed. Channeled skills and pets will still hit. Don’t have any on your favorite weapon set? Not running with a pet? This point isn’t for you.

3. A glass cannon thief is likely running with 14k health (zerker gear with some vit on trinkets) or less and no defensive cooldowns. Compare that to, say, a 25k necro with “two” health bars and high toughness. Seriously, the thief has probably been hit by AoE already unless you are 1v1 in the wide open or you played well and got a hit or two in or used reflection or whatever else you have. Can’t deal with that? No one here can help you.

4. No. Take your own thieves with you, nothing excels at beating thieves like other thieves – particularly good at beating glass cannon thieves are any other type of thief. Again, not exactly string theory is it?

5. Again, no. Game is extremely well designed, even a guardian (which I mentioned once in reference to another poster but you like to bring up all the time) can spec in a dozen different ways. Key point is that going all or nothing in to one spec leaves you vulnerable, so thieves just like any other class have multiple vulnerabilities whatever spec they are running. Crucially though they are even MORE vulnerable than other classes because they don’t possess defensive cool downs and have a very low health pool. Your current spec might be ideal to beat some of them… or not.

6. Actually it is more than likely to be your fault, not Anet.

A well played s/d thief is harder to catch and kill, very good ones who have played a lot of sPvP will destroy you as easily as a backstab thief. Most of you don’t know it yet but I guess in time you will – backstab thieves are just so popular because Anet most recent balance changes pushed more of them to the simplest build. I run duo with a guardian all the time. Only time we EVER got frustrated was a good s/d thief who ran rings round us. Fortunately he was nice enough to beat us over and over again during an hour or so which gave us a few clues on how to beat that spec.

Honestly, you need to learn and adapt OR take the rough with the smooth. If you are really struggling that bad, post your class and link your spec – unless you are a ranger in which case no one can help you as that class needs buffed.

I’m also pretty tired about Thief QQ. It is literally beyond a joke. I’m not going to type L2P for people but seriously, if you DON’T know here are some tips:

1. Stealth is NOT invulnerability. So here is the thing, you can use AoE when a thief stealths or you can (if you have one) just swing whatever weapon around. You won’t see the damage but you will likely kill the thief, they do tend to stealth at the last moment. Thieves get targetted by other theives ALL THE TIME, and I can’t count how many of them I’ve finished as they lay downed after coming out of stealth.

2. Stealth is NOT a get out of jail free card. So here is the second thing, you can use channeled skills that as long as you start when you CAN target the thief will continue to hit them when they go in to stealth. Same applies for your pets. Buggy game, but hey that is the way it is.

3. Insane damage per second DOES mean “glass cannon”. I don’t care what you say, if you are hitting what some poster on here laughably called a “bunker guardian” for 4-7k (I say laughably because the poster doesn’t play sPvP and doesn’t actually know the specs and traits for a bunker guardian) then you as the thief are specced all out assault and made of glass. Thief does not have any fancy defensive cool downs other than stealth, and I already pointed out how weak that actually is. So if you can survive the “coming out of stealth burst”, just like most MMOs, and know how to play YOUR class you can likely win because if you don’t know the thief shares the lowest HP pool.

4. WvWvW is a team game with team objectives. I suggest you learn to live with it, your server also has good/bad/excellent thieves running around too. If you think WvWvW is all about just what happens in your tiny bubble you are playing it all wrong. Learn your class, roll a thief for sPVP, learn to use defensive cool downs, roll/dodge and use YOUR skills appropriately.

5. Rock paper scissors STILL applies, to every MMO but more so in GW2, so many ways to spec within one class. If you can beat some thieves with a particular spec don’t be surprised if another thief can destroy you. So many choices for most classes, less so for thieves however.

6. After three rounds of nerfs to thieves the last major balance patch pushed MORE of us in to backstab builds. You may as well forget Anet riding to your rescue and dumbing down the game to suit your limited knowledge of other classes. Seriously. The next major balance change will likely put soft caps or limit crit damage overall, that means to everyone. I will personally have a rueful smile the day that happens as my thief won’t be taking 14k kill shots and other enormous spikes. But I will still be causing people to run crying to the forums on my thief

And finally, from every dev interviewer of Arenanet I can recall the classes played by them in WvWvW were predominantly Ele and Warrior. Some mesmer. Any Anet tag I’ve seen on a class in WvWvW in my personal experience has been Warrior. interestingly I don’t see any devs QQing, just getting on and playing the game.

So many complex suggestions. Instead why not just remove the cap? Oh and make it a ninja fix, I’d like to think of these idiots running around spending gold for absolutely no benefit.

CRrabbit.1284:

I highly doubt the culling issue can be fixed easily since it’s more like a game engine problem. Therefore, skill/trait change sounds more doable to fix the unbalanced situation right now especially in wvw.
Main complain comes from thief’s benefit/risk ratio which caused by stealth.
How about this way:
1, nerf all thief’s skills damage (e.g. 50%);
2, change trait skills and increase trait bonus (e.g. 200% if you max it to balance the skill damage nerf).
So if a thief want to get the deadly power to burst someone down quickly, then he has to go for high damage trait, but consequently he won’t get out of battle easily. It’s more like an assasin-like build — you die or I die.
And if thief want to get out of battle easily, then he shouldn’t have enough damage to take someone down. So it makes thief-like build — I come and go when ever I want, but what I do is just annoying you but not killing you.

You just broke PVE, but whatever – I’ll bite, sure lets do it. But I’ll also want warriors HP pool, heavy armor and a couple of defensive cooldowns in to the bargain because I no longer have ways to avoid the fight or mitigate damage and we have the lowest HP in the game.

Then it seems only fair to throw in some more weapon options (dual wield swords and something that hits at 1200 range for a start) and fix pistols.

Finally to round out the class I’d like to be able to choose from new skills that can, say, create clones, drop wells, summon pets, blink etc. And something brand new too.

And THEN… I want to drink everyones tears when all the QQ merchants are still coming on here to complain about thieves whatever happens to them:)

Nid I pretty much love you and Jessopia for what you do for GH server. But for every person like you two there are 10 idiots.

I have seen first hand the trolling directed at certain guilds and individuals and in all honesty it actually makes me feel like quitting the game entirely. It seems like there are entire guilds some days in WvWvW whose sole purpose is to troll and bring the drama – and who never seem to do anything else, much less fight.

I’ve reported several people for abusive comments to others. I mean abusive, not sledging or voicing displeasure. Most of these comments I reported in game I couldn’t repeat here and if I did I would probably get a forum ban. They were that bad, some of the worst I’ve seen in 20 years of gaming and they weren’t even said in anger or the heat of the moment.

How is it good for a server when 3 or 4 people can constantly harass a guild or commander enough that the commander turns their icon off or the guild just switches borderlands? And all the while 20 others just stand there and let it happen, with maybe a couple at MOST who are prepared to confront the trollers? How can it be good for GH when a guilds members don’t want to jump in WvWvW anymore because of the actions of a minority?

In a game like GW2 it is ridiculous: there are 4 BLs, no one is forced to do anything one guild, one commander or even one co-ordinated Teamspeak decrees. And transfers are still free. Blaming individuals, guilds or commanders is frankly laughable when even at the best of times the whole WvWvW experience is like herding cats.

GH has seen far too much drama with guilds since launch. The sooner it stops the better for everyone IMHO, but I don’t think everyone on GH will agree – some just turn up for the drama.

It has nothing to do with “knowing the timing” of culling or rendering by the way, how would we “know the timing”, we have no kitten idea of when we become visible to YOU, we only know when we are visible to ourselves. Never have I seen the game cull my own character.

Bottom line – every time I’ve been concerned at the damage in my combat log be it from whatever skill you like (100 blades, kill shot, volley – kitten even imagined burden and a dozen other hard hitting skills all classes have) I simply opened my browser, read about them and if I still wasn’t sure of my counter rolled one and for 15 minutes headed to the mists. Then I needed to weigh up how the counter might need to change my spec and then – guess what – I had to FIGHT a lot of those classes. Over and over and over again. It wasn’t easy mode, I had to (gasp) – learn how to play.

Buy you know what I’m used to that, I’m usually the guy in every MMO that picks the most borked class and while the rest of my brethren take to the forums to cry rivers I’m the guy who just gets on with learning to play my class (and every other class) so I can beat them all.

Regardless of the number of times information is posted here on ways to deal with thieves a lot of people just refuse to listen. Sure it would be great if culling wasn’t an issue, it would be great if you played the most OP class in the game and didn’t have to worry about any other class ever killing you. The first isn’t happening any time soon and unless you get a job as developer at Arenanet neither is the second

For the record, even without a glass cannon build my thief dies all the kitten time. The OPs class excels at killing me, anyone who can channel a skill excels at killing me because stealth doesn’t break channels. Warriors and mesmers can destroy me and often do. They don’t even have to play much above my standard to do it either. Anyone who spends 10 minutes figuring out how a thief works can kill me. Well, possibly not rangers.

It honestly doesn’t matter if thief was designed as 1v1 killing machine because the vast majority of forum posters complaining about other classes are not helping themselves. They want Arenanet to help them instead, and the chances are by the time the dev team cave in and nerf thief for the 4th time the players calling for a nerf will have moved on to the next flavor of the month MMO and will be complaining at whoever is developing that game.

Threads like this make my brain hurt. All good changes, all better than before. Yet a tiny vocal minority are already up in arms complaining about random DCs and at most a couple of silver repair costs? Big deal, in WvWvW everyone suffers in a small way from your DC – maybe update your drivers, settings, ISP or rig and do everyone on the server a favor?

Honestly, learn to play the game and use counters. Failing that take it to the thief section where there are entire threads where you can indulge yourself in a massive whine fest for failing to understand how the game and the individual classes work.

Thief has been nerfed three times, get over yourselves.

Nice stuff, glad it is coming so soon! Thanks! Kitten!

If you could just add auto looting badges plus badges only being available from kills (and not mesmer portal taxis or “no fire” agreements between servers at jumping puzzles as they are usually gained at the moment) I’d be over the kitten moon.

And maybe paid transfers too to stop servers collapsing as some currently are.

Big update for WvWvW in February still?

urdriel.8496:

Krathalos.3461:

urdriel.8496:

buff to cluster bomb?? is a joke?? you can hit people for 5k easily + spam the skill, and you really want a buff?? ……

They just nerfed it. Only people you’re hitting 5k+ easily is on glass cannons with 0 toughness or low levels in WvW.

is a nice joke im lvl 80 full exotic toughness with ranger(2400 armor) and cluster hit me for 5k and you can spam it….

You can spam it? I wonder how. If you are a ranger you won’t be standing next to me. Roll a thief, got to the mists and try it out. It is the slowest to hit skill in existence.

I seriously despair of people coming on the boards for a good whine when they clearly don’t understand other professions skills. No surprise the same people get owned over and over again.

Anyway back on topic, I like everything about the SB for thief right now, I would like to see a trait to spec for 1200 range on it though even if it was 30 points in to a tree.

Absolutely terrible change because I can only assume that the recent skill lag and general lag goes along with whatever you changed for culling. It would still have been a bad change because although it was bad not being able to see your enemies not being able to see your allies is often as bad – if not worse.

This isn’t a fix, it is just moving the deck chairs around on the titanic. Pointless.

I’m basically grinding without realizing I’m grinding towards a legendary. I just dump all my stuff in the bank/consumables as I go along. I don’t have a target, I don’t really even know what legendary I might eventually get. I’m just enjoying the game. If I play it for long enough at some point I will have all the stuff I can get from WvWvW and I will decide if I want to do the PVE part to actually get the legendary.

Ascended… I have no intention of grinding dungeons for that stuff. I like the fractals, they did a nice job, but PVE dungeon grinding is not for me. They really dropped the ball when releasing this without a way to get the same from WvWvW.

ajm.2931:

My proposed changes:

1) thieves get a new ’Detect stealthed player" ability. long cooldown, works like some of the temp powers tat just leaves a trail or somesuch, tempory map marker. helps with portal bombs and stealthed players. (gives thieves something “thievy” to do)

2) Portals are limited to twice the players going through as the AoE limit. Can be traited to increase, but increased capacity increases casting time. (trating for both AoE limit and Portal capacity)

3) Portals have easily differentiated exit and entrance colors. (you can at a glance tell if it’s an incoming portal or outgoing portal)

4) Mesmers can “traceback” other teams portals, an elite skill that lets a Mesmer switch a portal direction. Effectivly closes the portal for the bomber and lets the opossing team use the portal in he other direction for half the original portals capacity. (I’m less convinced on how to make this work in a balanced way, but welcome comments)

Some nice ideas, I wouldn’t give detect stealth to thieves though (maybe rangers at a push). Instead just take away the ability for mesmers to stealth. Simple.

LOL at the “stole” comment, anyone who played DaOC has been crying for years for someone to bring something similar back. The studio head openly admits the influence and what they were aiming to do with WvWvW.

In reality, WvWvW doesn’t need much anyway. First and foremost it needs a method to achieve ascended gear and removing kitten jumping puzzles (make the siege drop thank you very much Anet) but if people are going to suggest stupid things (like flying mounts for kittens sake) then I for one can wait a lot longer than February.

I enjoyed fighting WR players, small numbers but highly skilled. I got my kitten handed to me a number of times by their small groups which is unusual. Those looking for a new server would do well to consider WR.

I often liken server choice to supporting your football team – sometimes you choose one that wins all the time, sometimes one that loses more often than not. But if you chose wisely both can be enjoyable, so I understand why people consider their server “home” and wouldn’t leave. I’m not sure if something like GH/AG/WR core wvwvw guilds on one server would ever happen because lots of people won’t want to leave home and it would be awful for those that didn’t leave. But I don’t doubt it would be one HELL of a good server

Portals are an interesting mechanic, but they do need some changes. For a start – like a few other things in game – visible effects like portals should be color coded (like red for an enemy portal and green for your own portals). In the midst of a fight no one really has a clue who put down what. Different sounds for placing friendly and enemy portals would help too.

In addition I think it should be difficult to place the second portal, so for a start a mesmer should not be able to drop the second portal in stealth or for as long as the revealed function lasts (3 seconds?) after coming out of stealth and the exit portal itself should take a couple of seconds to drop.

Finally if a group can’t get to the exit portal by any other legitimate means then it shouldn’t be possible to drop an exit portal. For clarification I mean if a mesmer hides inside then they can’t portal the group through walls and a closed gate. I remember an Anet dev saying something similar a month or so ago.

The problem in a nutshell I see with portals is they are far too easy to drop in order to bomb, provide little risk for the mesmer and virtually ALWAYS come off. I can count on one hand in about 50 hours of WvWvW the number of times a mesmer was killed before dropping a portal. And that is running with an organized guild who are constantly paranoid about being portal bombed and as such always looking for the mesmer.

As a member of an organized guild we do a lot of portal bombing, our guild leader and commander is a mesmer. It isn’t hard to get any sensible pug to join in, so anyone who says they require team work is dreaming.

Most battles are now who gets the portal bomb in first and who gets it right. Getting it right is usually do you have the right classes with you using the right skills. Not hard, and if you don’t have the ideal classes with ideal skill set no big deal, it very rarely means your bomb will fail.

The most fun I’ve had in weeks in wvwvw revolved around a 70 minute battle trying to take back a camp near our spawn. We actually fought in the open, we flanked, we pincered, we used kitten near everything including siege but what we DIDN’T use was a portal bomb. It was a TON of fun.

Whatever you might think I doubt Anet had in mind the constant portal bombing that we see now when they planned WvWvW. Something has to change but I honestly wouldn’t like the entire mechanic to be removed.

Something that powerful (in essence capable of changing any battle, any offence, any defence) really does need to be much more difficult to pull off.

Thanks for all the good fights this week AG and WR. Will miss UNTY/FURY in particular (some awesome battles latter part of this week) but also some very skilled players on WR.

Awesome fights tonight, portal bomb versus portal bomb at Titans for a while and then @ Vale was a classic, open, 1 hour 10 min battle for the camp which is probably some of the most fun I’ve had in wvwvw.

I discovered another limitation with culling and the game engine tonight though – so many UNTY and FURY dropped bags it couldn’t show them all at once

Seriously though, props to all AG tonight for the fun. Special mention to UNTY for being such good opponents.

Loving GH right now, place really feels like home. Win, lose… its all fun in the end

Heero.3149:

We even gave you guys a flame ram in return for the ones you built for us, Hope to have see you guys again and have some more fun later on

We noticed, I was desperately trying to use it then realized you had built us one and I thought “awww, how sweet of them”. Once you have experienced the tactical genius of building and using flame rams in the middle of nowhere there is no going back, you will be doing it all the time now. You will wonder why most people only use them on doors.

Some fun against UNTY and FURY early hours on EB tonight/this morning. We beat down FURY only to run off to a camp to find ourselves facing UNTY at one entrance and FURY at another. Lots of fun entailed for the next couple of hours, although a bit too much hiding then portal bombing for my liking – we need more all out fights!

Interestingly we didn’t see AG mass capping on other borderlands as we usually do at this time, just goes to show that PvP is much more fun than PvDoor. So while we were outnumbered almost all of the time and didn’t gain any points on the tick we didn’t seem to lose much either.

Some really nice fighting this week.

WR – you guys have some exceptionally skilled players running around in small groups, a real challenge from some of the “borg zerg” servers GH have been up against recently. Wish I’d taken note of some guild tags to give props but I was too busy getting the kitten kicked out of me.

AG – nice numbers, pretty much all the time. Not sure what has happened to UNITY lately, pretty much one trick pony tactics over and over again. You guys lost some of your core players recently? Maybe I keep running in to you at off peak times though.

Friendly wave to BaQ, assuming you are the long standing guild of other games I’m remembering.

Note to all – Teabag moves when you outnumber a group 8 to 1 is pretty lame. Save it for when you achieve something, otherwise it just makes you look immature

And in closing – having run with KISS for maybe 25+ hours this week I’ve never seen any of our guild ALT-F4 on downed. So note to devs – can you hurry up and stop perma-invis thiefs being able to delay camp caps and add a “no log out in combat” feature so we can carry on simply getting on with the fighting please

Nice post, thanks for the clarification. I wish though that with major balancing patches someone could take 10-15 minutes for each class to outline why changes were made. After balance patches like the last one sometimes I feel like I just took my car in for service and when I go to collect it a feature has been removed or changed. No explanation, except maybe “the designers looked at this model again recently and decided the original wasn’t what they intended”. Thief is a pretty good example of this, thief players generally have no idea what your thinking is behind recent changes.

Implement anything like this and watch the keep trading begin…

Like most have said – the current initiative cost is far too high for the reduction in damage, something else needs to be adjusted. Maybe the range or the duration of the cripple, hell I’d settle for it only hitting two targets and give me the kitten damage back.

Excellent post, well reasoned and thought out. I’d like to think it would get some kind of response from the dev team.