Guild Wars 2

I feel like they really should swap the orb and outmanned bonuses.

All the outmanned bonus does is help bots. ><

You can find out more about how DB felt about the last matchup here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Dragonbrand-Maguuma-Sea-of-Sorrows/page/5

It looks like now sea of sorrows is absolutely stomping maguuma and dragonbrand, due to a huge influx of transfers. Ironic really. FA was able to beat sos last go around but I doubt that would happen again.

If there are 7 high pop servers with 24/7 coverage, that means tier 3 is always going to kind of suck, because one of those 7 ‘big’ servers is going to be beating up on two weaker servers without such coverage.

Unless of course those two other servers deliberately and continually try to ally and work together. I think that is arena.net’s idea, that the two ‘weaker’ servers will work together against the bigger server, but a lot of people seem to think that any kind of cooperation with another server is high treason.

At any rate, I think we can all agree the transferring is making a mockery of the rankings balancing system.

That and the scoreboard puts way too much emphasis on the overall score and not enough on what is happening right now. Also the orbs giving even additional bonuses to the most powerful realm is rather silly.

The server transfers are a horrible, horrible idea and should only ever have been enabled for a few low population servers.

Allowing people to bandwagon onto the highest performing servers FOR FREE is an obvious recipe for disaster.

The bottom line is that transfers are making a mockery of their rating system.
And yes, during the BG/DB/FA match BG was very aggressively trying to recruit guilds from DB. They succeeded to some extent and I remember a lot of people on DB not being happy about it.

R E F L H E X.8413:

One thing I liked about the coast was the pink crew.

“Pink crew move out”.

All of us in pink that was great. They really need to do away with team colors in pvp.

I agree. They should make the colors of the NAMES be your team, but let people show their dye colors.

How in the hell did Blackgate get paired with FA and TC? The population issues alone guarantee an uneven match.

Blackgate was walking all over DB/FA two matches ago and then proceeded to get a ton of additional transfers. I have no idea how they wound back up down in this tier, unless they can win only by outzerging their opponents and get stomped in equal fights.

Which actually, is basically what I see happening. Plus BG players seem to be poor sports and, after you’ve crushed them in even fights several times, will roll over you with their mighty zerg and then laugh at your corpse.

Tarnished Coast players have, on the other hand, been class acts. I think a TC vs FA matchup would be fun. Both servers seem to be fairly close in terms of population.

I can only conclude there is one ‘extra’ server with a ‘huge’ population, so the worst of them is going to be pushed down a tier and fight servers that can’t really compete population wise. Not much we can do except keep fighting and try out best.

And don’t get discouraged by the score – score is simply a measure of total activity. If you get a group together and get out there and fight, you can be very successfull.

I feel like some people think if the other server is ‘winning’ they are just going to insta die when they zone into borderlands or something.

The server score has no relation whatsover to how much fun your group will have in Wuvwuv

People need to get that into their heads. In fact, if the enemy server owns everything, that’s just more targets for you to hit. More karma and exp and gold you can attain. You just have to get good at avoiding their zergs and moving quickly.

You can go into wuvwuv when one enemy server is 150k points ahead and have exactly as much fun as if it was tied.

I also don’t get the people saying they want to leave servers and go to one that is ‘winning’. All that gives you is higher queue times. I don’t think I ever have to wait more than a minute or two for queues on FA, and I like it that way. I like the community we have here on FA and I think server hopping to ride the coattails of whoever happens to be ‘winning’ would not make you any happier.

Orbs discourage the losing team(s) from participating.

They need to switch the orb and outmanned bonuses.

The other issue is people just jumping off a cliff when they are about to die so you still don’t get the loot/karma from them.

As long as crafting is a source of exp it will not be profitable.

That is because the exp has a non zero value.

So the mats will always be worth more than the final product, because the mats turn into the final product + experience.

Mats are worth more than the final product because the act of combining them gives you experience.

The only POSSIBLE time crafting will be profitable is at the 400 level. That’s it.

Velladin.2578:

It’s supposed to be lengendary. People are not supposed to be running around with this by the dozen. People are so self entitled these days.

But luck based success is the very opposite of legendary.

Some guy could throw in four swords and get the precursor on this very first try.

We just fought dragonbrand last matchup (and got rolllllllled hard) and the drama there was guilds transferring from dragonbrand to blackgate. Blackgate went from being 3rd place by a mile to crushing all before them.

If more guilds transferred from dragonbrand to sos that server may not be in great shape.

I will point out I experienced no queues for any of the borderlands last night on FA during EST primetime. I don’t know if Maguma is imagining we have hour long queues to get into wuvwuv all the time, but it’s really not the case At least for me! Others experience may vary.

Was nice to see maguma out and about killing people and taking stuff. I even saw a sea of sorrows player! (farming kraits )

Was his name Brave Sir Robin?

No class should be killing another in two seconds. Quite a few classes currently do way too much damage. The thief is the worst offender, but not by as much as you’d think.

What makes thieves truly overpowered are the rendering issues in wuvwuv.

Theives. The delay in rendering makes them absurdly overpowered. It takes more time to draw them than it takes for them to restealth. As it is they are the hardest class in the game bar none to actually kill, while simultaneously killing people within just a couple seconds.

Mesmer’s are annoying too, but at least you can kill them if they screw up and you catch them.

The 3rd skill takes a long time to be ready. The engi #2 interrupts only one person AND pulls them closer to you in the process. The guardian #2 interrupts everyone AND pushes them farther away.

The engi #3 skill should be their #2 skill, basically.

A think bunkers holding specific points requires a lot more strategy than everyone just running around in glass cannon mode.

Bunkers are supposed to counter glass cannons, not the other way around.

You want people who stack lots of condition damage and turn boons into conditions to take down bunkers. naturally bunkers will bring condition removal too, but this makes them weaker to glass cannon types.

phaeris.7604:

Lets look at downed state button 1 damage:

Warrior : Damage 122 throw a rock at your target.

Thief: Damage 134 : hits 3 target apply a cripple to all 3.

Ranger: Damage 92 with a 213 bleed

Necro: Damage 69 with a 92 heal component.

Mesmer: Damage 202 with a 5 second confusion (damage 65 on skill use)

Guardian: Damage 73

Engineer : 128 with a 233 bleed +chill+weakness

Elementalist :damage 195 +vulnerability.

I can see the recast time on throw rock is 1/4 of a second…but really?? Compared to everything else? Just wow…

Wow. The guardians #1 skill is absolutely abysmal.

Engineer’s #2 skill is undoubtedly the worst of the lot..pull the person trying to kill me… CLOSER.

This MIGHT have some applications in a team fight where you still have allies nearby and you’re trying to peel off a friendly or something, but in a 1v1 fight or any pve this is just mind bogglingly bad.

It could be they just aren’t rendering. wuvwuv is having horrible pop in issues since the update on the 8th.

No one on FA here condones exploiters or hacking.

however the sad fact of the matter is that exploits and hacking are absolutely rampant in WuvWuv right now.

Someone from sea of sorrows has hacked our orb no less than FIVE TIMES. I have nothing but respect for the sea of sorrows guys and am sure this is a lone idiot acting without approval of the rest of the server.

The same is true of any hacker you see on FA. The problem is that we have almost no tools to find, catch, and report these hackers.

It’s a big problem that one or two unsavory individuals can totally ruin the wuvwuv enjoyment for an entire server’s worth of people.

I also know that it sucks to be behind and still have someone on the server in the lead hacking your kitten away when you do get your act together – that was happening to us on FA last match up -and it is indeed highly demoralizing.

I don’t know what else to say except it sucks, I’m sorry it happened, we definitely don’t condone it, and it’s been happening to us too.

I know it hurts worse when you’re already struggling to come from behind as well.

Arena.net REALLY needs to step up their hack prevention/detection in wuvwuv. It’s absurd right now.

Frankly I would just emergency disable the orbs until they get it sorted.

They soul have left symbol of wrath alone and taken retaliation off of it. Make it grant fury or something instead.

Arena.net heard our complaints that teams with mesmers had an unfair advantage by being able to use portals to be perma – invisible, and have levelled the playing field by granting perma invisibility to all professions.

Scourge.2173:

Anonymity.3602:

If he hits you once you can see him for a minimum of 4 seconds.

That is of course if the game decides to render the Thief before they re-stealth

Yep. With the player culling/delay in rendering issues, theives stealth is utterly, totally broken in WvW.

The time it takes for them to render is about the time their debuff to prevent restealthing lasts. They can just phase in and out of stealth, resetting the rendering delay each time.

All that proves is that four days ago, salvaging wasn’t affected by diminishing returns.

Guess what?

Four days ago, neither was the mystic forge.

The ironic thing is FA just got out of a match where we got TRASHED (3rd place) by the server that was in third place getting a ton of transfers haflway through the match and leaping to first

Things should settle down a bit once all the transfers are done.

These transfers are generally planned well in advance, so I don’t blame the guilds doing the transferring at all. Glad to have the ones that transferred to FA onboard

This has been a strange matchup. I feel like FA spends most of the day fighting maguuma, and then sea of sorrows rolls in and takes everything at night :p the points are pretty close but the two leaders aren’t really fighting each other because they aren’t on.

Maguuma seems outnumbered but has been putting up a fight. I think if we combined all three servers we’d have a pretty mean team with good all around coverage!

There have been TONS of orb hacks and exploits this match. I’m not going to bother trying to tar entire servers with the hacking brush, just that we have personally watched our orbs get hacked multiple times.

There are not sufficient reporting tools for dealing with orb hackers: the name of whoever picks up the orb needs to be broadcast so that you can report these flying supermen. I know both sea of sorrows and maguuma are full of quality players who would deplore anyone on their server who is hacking – but we just aren’t able to find out who on their server is hacking.

I will also say that, as Viperwire has said, that when there are hacks and exploits flying thick and fast, the team that is already behind becomes even more demoralized. FA was in this situation last matchup. It’s really hard to get people to come out and fight and give their all when they are losing and can have all their hard work undone by a few hackers.

Arena.net really needs to crack down on this stuff.

As far as the mesmer thing goes, barring video of them jumping up where they shouldn’t you’ll never be able to tell if it was an exploit or if they just hid inside and then portalled in friends later (which as far as I know is completely legitimate)

There’s no reason to not give it exotic stats.

People are still going to buy it only for the looks (which is the entire point of it being so expensive)

It’s just silly that such an expensive long term item has poor stats on it.

Ryth.6518:

In regards to End Game.

I think a lot of people rushed too quickittenhrough GW2. That’s just my opinion but most have been programmed by WoW to rush to the end.

Go look up WoW patch notes and see where the end game was…it was a hamster wheel of grinding reputations and a few dungeons. After launch, look at the list of what they had and how long it took…

-Maraudon was introduced a month after launch which was a mid level dungeon.
-Dire Maul was introduced 4 months after launch as an end game dungeon.
-Battlegrounds were introduced 7 months after launch
-Blackwing Lair was introduced 8 months after launch. The first raiding content.
-Zul Gurb was introduced 10 months after launch. The first 20 man raiding content.

And so on…

So basically, for the 6 months of the game after launch, you had only Stratholme, Scholomance, UBRS as end game content and 1 raid with Onyxia.

You seem to have forgotten molten core in there somewhere. That said, the GW2 end game model is completely different from WOW’s end game model so I’m not sure it makes sense to compare them. WOW’s end game was all about grinding dungeons forever to get the best gear. GW2’s end game is about getting the max stat gear pretty quickly, then moving on to wuvwuv or achieving cosmetic ugprades like legendary weapons or dungeon skins. or getting more sets of end game armor – I think I want about three full exotic sets, for different purposes.

I agree with almost all of your post. But this part

End game content should feel like I’m adding to my character long after the completion of the storyline. Map completion, collect materials for a Legendary item, WvW/sPvP, and dungeon running does not sate the end game urge at all. My character hasn’t made much progress when I finished my storyline. By the time I finished my story line, I had all my exotic gear that I wanted. Ever since my character hasn’t progressed much.

is a deliberate design decision.

The ‘end game’ is cosmetic upgrades, legendary weapons, and wuvwuv/spvp.

If you don’t like those things, make new characters

GW2 has made a conscious decision to change the ‘end game’ mold by giving characters max stat gear rather easily once they hit 80 and earn some money. You don’t have to grind dungeons for months to get the best gear, like in WOW.

You can still grind dungeons for months, just for cosmetic ugprades.

Or, you could be trying to get another set of exotic armor. I think in GW1 the idea was to have one set of each type of armor so you had maximum flexibility in making a pvp build.

You sort weaponskills by default by cooldown. This is also the order in which new players learn the skills. This is fine.

However, as the recent change to guardian greatsword skill cooldowns shows, when you change cooldowns, this has the effect of re-arranging the order of the skills that players have become accustomed to.

If this starts happening frequently (and I can guarantee that we are going to see more cooldown adjustments in the future) having to relearn where all your abilities are could be rather annoying.

The ability to let players choose the order of their skills already exists in game – with utility skills.

Can we branch that out to weapon skills as well? Even ignoring possibly changes to order from patches, there are a couple skills I’d love to switch the order of. If players could change the order of their skills it would allow more customization and also mean that if arena.net changes the order in which new players learn skills it needn’t inconvenience existing players.

I think it took me all of thirty seconds to move from having 2 greatsword skills to having 3 greatsword skills.

it really didn’t matter that symbol of wrath functionally did nothing for me at low levels. I just spammed 1 until I unlocked the #3 skill.

We have thousands of level 80 guardians who somehow survived the grueling difficulty of having a rather useless #2 skill, I’m sure future players can manage the same feat.

Your NPC help literally stands around doing nothing in many of the storyline quests.

Like…the one where you retake claw island. I had a huge party of norn adventurers I recruited. They wouldn’t attack any of the risen except directly inside the cap points on the ramparts.

They also wouldn’t attack the undead dragon at the end but would attack the grubs he spit out.

mighty heros indeed.

The guardian trait that refreshes virtue of justice on killing an enemy is largely useless in those storymode missions where you fight lots of enemies that give no exp/loot, because the skill only works on enemies who give exp.

This is an understandable design decision, and I can also see why you would make some of the waves of monsters in story missions not give exp, but the two together remove key parts of my build.

I would much rather they change the boon granted by the symbol than increase its cooldown so drastically. It really messes up the (already sub par IMO) symbol builds compared to more popular builds.

Also, re-arranging the skill order is just silly. Put it back how it was.

I don’t care if you reduce the cooldowns…leave the abilities in the order they were!

I spent over 100 hours and killing more than 10,000 enemies ingraining the skill order locations in my muscle memory.

And now you’ve decided to arbitrarily re-assign them. That’s not cool at all.

Can you give us the ability to reorder skills on our own at least?

If they want retaliation to be a situational ‘punishes multi hit’ abilities, it needs to do more damage as well.

The damage it does if you are a support guardian is pretty laughable and eminently ignorable.

kesayo.6031:

I’m a new player and have tried warrior, elementalist, ranger and mesmer (all only up to about level 20). The other day, a saw a guardian solo a champion with at least 4 adds in a level 15 area. I couldn’t tell what level he actually was, but he was being leveled down to 15 just like me. I have never been able to solo a champion. Heck, I can’t even solo a veteran if there are adds. He took them all down without even breaking a sweat.

Is it fairly typical for guardians to be able to solo champions with adds for most areas? Or do you think he was only able to do this because he was much higher level than the area and kept his skills and gear stats? Or maybe all classes can do this to some extent when they get good enough gear and stats and wander around lower level areas?
Just curious, because he made me want to roll a guardian.

I think every class I have played is able to take out a veteran and friends once you get the right gear/traits put up.

High level players in low level areas (1-15 areas, specifically) will basically two shot most monsters there, also. There is downscaling of course, but they are still very strong.

This quest is still quite buggy.

The ‘defending the docks’ portion, the risen are yellow and non aggressive to you at the beginnign. Though they seem to kill your NPC allies, but they won’t aggress them if you rezz the allies.

Additionally the risen knights at the entrance to the docks perma spawn – so that when you have ‘secured the docks’ and trahearne tells you everything is secure, you stumble into a giant flying pack of risen on your way back into the fort. They aren’t aggressive, but still, very immersion breaking.

There is also one gray risen defender asura standing next to one of the cannons, all by himself, on the docks.

Additionally, if you aggro a group of risen and run away, it looked like as they leashed back, the quaggans and kraits and risen would fight each other.

Then when you finish, a cutscene pops up of the pact fighting undead. If there is supposed to be a voiceover or text for this, there isn’t any. It doesn’t explain what is going on.

However after that finishes, the cutscene with you and trahearne starts and trahearne says “I’m glad Zhaitan knows our names and faces now” which is a huge jump from where you were seconds ago it seems to me.

Also most of the mosntesr do not give exp or loot, although a couple do.

I find it hard to care very much about WvW until they fix the free server transfer shenanigans, and things like flying hacks and player culling.

That said I enjoyed the initial part of the DB/BG/FA match. Servers seemed to all be competitive with each other.

Creslin.1758:

Rhyno.7084:

For the 500th time, the complaint about mesmer AoE is in regards to DYNAMIC EVENT FARMING.

We have 1 weapon set that tags mobs acceptably, GS+Sword/Focus and it just BARELY gets the job done.

Shatters? Feedback?

I just really don’t see the problem here. Mesmer is not the BEST class at tagging mobs in DEs, but it’s not the worst either.

Nope, it is the worst.

Tagging monsters in DE’s has to be done with abilities with little or no cooldown. Shatters do not fit this description and feedback obviously only works on monsters which actually live long enough to shoot projectiles.

An engineer can tag tons of mobs by hitting ‘1’ on his grenade kit, which has no cooldown at all and a 1500 range.

Tagging mobs in the farmed De’s relies upon abilities which are ranged (the monsters will usually die before they get to melee) quick to cast ( the monsters die very very quickly) and have low cooldown (monster waves come very quickly).

Mesmer abilities fail on all these counts. I mean, if you’ve ever been competing for tags at one of the dynamic events in Orr, you’ll know what I mean. There’s no time at all to have a clone spawn and run over and detonate. In fact, often the monsters are dead before they are even targetable just from the blizzard of ground targetted aoe spells falling on their heads.

A guardian sucks at tagging monsters at range, but is still better at tagging than a mesmer in these situations.

The rendering issues should absolutely be fixed.

For sanity’s sake some sort of TEMPORARY limitation on mesmer portals should probably be introduced while they work on the rendering issue.

As far as I’m concerned sneakily teleporting people past walls and cliffs is exactly what the portal is for.

Voodoo Tina.4180:

Typical three pull is to first clump them up – if something is ranged drop feedback on it and pull the other mobs there. Run to the edge of feedback and phase retreat, roll forward, roll back (for deceptive evasion clones), let then stack a few conditions and shatter when the target is at 30%. Usually the conditions will drop them seconds later. If anything is standing, blurred frenzy and its done. I still have chaos storm, phantasms and utilities if I need them, but on a normal pull it isn’t necessary.

As an engineer, when I want to AOE, I press the ‘1’ button a lot.

When people say a mesmer has no aoe, they mean in comparison to the other classes.
After all, all melee attacks are aoe. A mesmer has to work much much harder to create much less potent aoe than other classes. I’m not saying this is necessarily a problem, ,a mesmer has other strengths.

The orbs are probably the thing people blame the most while also being the thing easiest to fix.

You shouldn’t make people feel they are at a huge disadvantage in a fight compared to the server in the lead with three robs.

Kraigan.6057:

Just for the record. Suspicious stuff happens to our orbs and altars daily. We just don’t come to the forums and make blanket statements in multiple threads repeatedly. If you think your server doesn’t do the same crap, you’re wrong. Note that I am not condoning this behavior, I’m just saying stop acting like this is something specific to DB. I hope solutions for exploits concerning the orbs are rolled out soon.

I’m sure that’s true. However I think you’d agree that when exploits are flying thick and fast, it is going to demoralize the servers already behind even further, even if all three servers have been harmed by exploits exactly the same amount.

I’m thinking the idea to allow server transfers between battling servers was a huge mistake, as was the decision to not show the names of enemy players.

Now, ,when one person exploits, the entire server gets tarred with the same brush, because there is no way to tell who they really are. And everyone is paranoid about swarms of enemy spies dumping their supply (which really does happen).

It definitely allows a few bad apples to poison the atmosphere and ruin the match for three whole servers.

I’ve lost track of how many orbs have been hacked by an individual on dragonbrand. Three of FA’s and 2 of BG’s?

I have no doubt that the rest of DB finds this behavior abhorrent and repellent, but it definitely makes people much less likely to come out and fight.

Not only do the orbs give poorly designed huge boosts to the person that has them, why spend time and money defending/taking something that will just be taken in 10s with hacks?

I happen to think orbs are not implemented very well to begin with (the bonuses they give are far too powerful) but with the absolute epidemic of fly hackings letting single individuals in a couple minutes ruin the balance of wuvwuv for three entire servers…some sort of immediate emergency action must be taken.

Just disable the orbs and leave them disabled until a method to deal with the hacks can be found.

I would also like it if the downtime could be used to make the orbs have a bonus that doesn’t lend itself so well to snowballing.

Also, when orbs do come back, it should say in map chat the name of the person who has picked up the orb, so that in the future the specific people exploiting (if future exploits are found) can be reported.

As it is people can generally only blame a whole server, which is not ideal.

Scorpio Shirica.1286:

Not sure that’s a hack, that’s a mesmer portal…

You did not read the original post properly.

The mesmer portal was at the keep. The hack occurred at the garrison, which was never breached in any wya.

If you use smartcast, you turn your ground targetted aoe attack into a mouse cursor targetted aoe attack – at which point there is no reason it couldn’t be autocast .

I would like the ‘atuo attack’ #1 ability of my grenade kit to use both smartcast and autocast at the same time.

I don’t like having to press ‘1’ a million times each fight. Imagine having to press ‘1’ twice each time you wanted to swing your greatsword on a warrior or guardian?

I would like my engineer to throw grenades as fast as he can, to where my mouse cursor is.

Individually both pieces seem to work just fine, but I’d like to get them both to work at the same time