Guild Wars 2

Finally got into what looked like a good DS map. On our way to the boss, crashed, lost all participation of course and then got dumped into an empty map. Can’t join on party mates because the map is full.

This a sweet, well conceived user experience for sure.

Siegelazer.

Classic.

There needs to be more incremental rewards for the long meta events especially.

They are on the right track with the chests you get as the meta progresses, but those chests need to be more consequential.

Playing the meta all the way through should net half of the hard to get long term currency (crystalline ore or whatever) that winning the meta does. So winning matters, but people that contribute to trying still progress…so people keep trying.

Also, the 200% participation is an understandable step, but it is too punishing. If I want to PvE for an evening, essentially I am stranded on one map because who wants to grind the 200% again? Guildie needs help in some other zone? Forget it. Need help at our EB keep driving off the hordes; love to but I have 200%. Also, if the megaserver asks me to move maps, I need to keep my established participation, losing it is absurd. Lastly, heaven forbid you crash, which never happens anymore, right?

coglin.1867:

Dawdler.8521:

Except that the major reason the border is a failure is because it actively discourages small groups. Everything thats been changed about WvW has made blobbing the most viable option and reduced the importance of small scale, roaming and scouting

How so? It might be helpful if you offered some perspective as to how you come to that conclusion.

1) Owning camps has been devalued. Taking camps that supply enemy objectives only slows the upgrade process, it doesn’t halt it. In addition, because upgrading no longer requires supply, and +5 isn’t generally available anymore, much more supply is lying around inside objectives than there used to be. So starving an objective of supply is more difficult. Supply starvation used to be a role of small groups.

2) The increase in supply cost of guild siege means you need more people to build the same amount of siege.

3) Not being able to carry 20 supply also means you need more people for siege building and/or it takes much longer.

4) Auto-upgrades mean in many situations, objectives have stronger walls/gates than before

5) Fortified gates take a very long time to break down with less than 3 superior rams.

There are more reasons, that’s a handful of the obvious ones.

If you have Glint as a legend and can’t find absurdly powerful uses for +50% boon duration, I don’t know what to tell you.

The F2 is awesome right now, please leave it alone.

When we’re told the new maps are the same size as the old, but the new take much longer to navigate because they are a maze and the old had open areas to run…..we’re not being trolled.

When the best thing that can be thought of for the middle of the new map, which is easiest for everyone to get to is a dinosaur adventure area with a laser show that rewards the side that was already winning……we’re not being trolled.

When waypoints exist to make getting to far away places easier and the only waypoints you can use on a map are right next to your spawn…..we’re not being trolled.

When auto-upgrades happen so fast with no player involvement you need to build multiple superior siege weapons to break through in a reasonable time, yet we’re told the new maps are better for small group play…..we’re not being trolled.

When the new supply system makes controlling camps and killing dolyaks an afterthought, things small groups used to do effectively…..we’re not being trolled.

Hammer 4 is insanely useful for WvW. Hammer in general isn’t meant to be a great close combat weapon.

Shiro’s dodge is great, energy cost is fine; it is one of the best abilities in the game as it stands.

Now that Fulgurite is account bound and required for Ascended item crafting of the new stat combos, when are WvW mobs or level up chests going to start dropping the component parts like they do for Bloodstone, etc?f

This is what I’ve been playing:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vlAQNApein3guNSuQ7JRboVlsP0rS4IaWJ4EdsklZlhdmb2RNgEewe6r/G-T1SBABUcCAgUJI7HCgmfAAZpcxZ9A4pJAT1f+SJFP7PAwRAIAACwMLz28mBO6RP6RP6R76CdmDdmDtMAFjB-w

I was using sword instead of mace, but running with all the might stacks all the time and not using the condition damage bugged me. I also like the mace skills quite a bit more, but sword definitely works also.

Essentially I keep F2 on all the time and swap between Legends.
Crit rate is 71% or so with Fury which I have all of the time barring boon strips.
2350 power with Hammer, about 3000 with typical might stacks
Using Mace I have 1000-1200 condition damage counting might

For defense I have -40% condi duration and less damage when cc’d
stun-break on legend swap and Shiro evades
those refuel dodge energy which also gives me two stacks of stability
+45% boon duration for everything, +75% might duration

The only thing I give up is I never use Impossible Odds because I always have F2 up, but I use the extra energy for Jade Winds activations.

I think its a really strong build, thanks to people on these forums that have helped with good ideas.

Roiling Mists means when you have Fury it increases your crit chance by +40% not +20%. It doesn’t make your crit chance 100% (which would be sort of good..).

I’d look at the Shiro evade abilities, stability on dodge, extra stack of stability when you get it, Melandru runes, Saffron bread and a pocket cleanser or two.

Cogbyrn.7283:

Of course there are some well-founded arguments and complaints posted on the forums, but in general it is a nightmare around here.

To be fair, the nightmare is one fully earned by the effort level Anet has put into WvW issues going back a long time.

Of course much of the complaining is over the top, just like some of the white knighting is laughable, that’s the nature of the forums. But honestly, no one could say with a straight face that as the developers were releasing all of the WvW changes with HoT they were really thinking “This stuff is going to improve WvW and be more fun”

They’ve already essentially admitted as much. We’re all waiting to see what they do now that the focus is supposedly on WvW. Sadly, they’ve made they’re situation extremely difficult because the things that are very hard to change (the map) are arguably the biggest problem.

We’ll see, hopefully they do a good job with their WvW review and make substantial, positive changes. In the meantime, its pretty fair for people to take them to task for what has happened to date.

DevilLordLaser.8619:

I suppose the issue is that PvP in games like this is infamous throughout the Internet for being full of toxic, villainous trolls who thrive on the humiliation, denigration, and eventual flight in tears of anyone who is not a top-tier tournament-worthy Internet Hardcase.

Now, I get that legendaries should be legendary, I do. I even agree, and I can sympathize with PvP sorts who want to be able to work towards legendaries whilst still drinking the blood and tears of their enemies and /dancing on their corpses…but you’re never going to get people to say “it’s okay” to force PvP in a game where forced PvP has been, time and time again, strongly rejected by the player base on the strength of being an original core tenet of GW2.

Telling people “It’s okay that you have to subject yourself to psychological damage to try for a Legendary” is, somewhat ironically…not really okay.

That was true at one time, but with all of the other vertical progression games and “meta” builds, I’ve found nowadays the PvE community in most games is far more toxic than the PvP crowd. Of course there are bad apples in both, but the worst experience in GW2 pre-patch was doing dungeons or fractals with a random group of people.

Having to do PvP or WvW isn’t going to matter though, because the tokens are tradable and legendaries don’t need nearly enough of them it seems to keep up with the amount that are created. Its going to cost a trivial amount of gold to buy the WvW or PvP stuff you need because supply is going to vastly outstrip demand given how few tokens are actually needed.

I was hoping playing WvW a lot would let me sell the tokens and buy things I needed from game modes I didn’t enjoy as much, but the income stream will just be a trickle.

I was just asked by the server to switch because the map I was on had become empty. I did and lost all of my participation that I had at that point.

This can’t be intended behavior right?

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

Burtnik.5218:

Theres something wrong with it.

First one is not enough spores at nuhoch lane
Second is the boss hp..to even get it down you need a map of everyone wearing zerker gear and even then i honestly doubt its enough.

Out of all events its the olny one which wasnt beated yet. Even organized groups fail it.

The more people you bring the more health the boss is going to get because of hard scaling. Everything in the new content is better off to be done with fewer people rather than more.

Don’t bring more people, bring less. Ideally 5 – 10 and the boss will die much more quickly assuming the players that are present are wise enough to use CC when break bars appear and to dodge AOE’s when necessary

This solution seems like its own problem.

I understand the concept of scaling of course to keep content from being trivialized by sheer numbers. But, on the other hand, part of the “metagaming” of an encounter shouldn’t be managing the size of the group to hit the scaling sweet spot, especially in open world encounters.

Ideally of course an encounter should be equally difficult for any given number of players, except that its inherently more difficult to find 50 people good at something than it is to find 5. So encounters should probably scale at slightly less than a linear amount.

If everyone’s answer is to limit the number of people involved, a reasonable case can be made the scaling is overtuned.

Eldbrand Charging.8902:

LOL, your complaining about a Meta, wait for Raid’s to come online then you can start complaining about being to hard.

Raids are supposed to be hard.

Open world meta events are supposed to be doable with a random batch of players, not your hand selected leet crew.

Decado.9304:

Haegar.7530:

not only are there not enough people on the maps, I cant even level my specialization or masteries effectively in wvw… I only play wvw!! I’m stuffed!

I give it 4 weeks. Then I’m off…

tragic, really!

I find wvw reasonably good for masteries. 2-4 hps per wvw level and with boosters the levels come fast

WvW doesn’t do anything for Masteries, does it? You can get hero points from WvW levels by exchanging Proofs though.

Its funny, according to the UI we do get regular experience (not just WvW XP) when stuff gets killed, but I don’t know where that experience goes. Just another in the long line of incomplete and poorly conceived WvW mechanics.

Nephar.3746:

the big dimension is a plus to discourage zerging, cause it is no more efficient to zerg when small groups spread around can achieve something and the zerg take too long to reach and disrupt them.
the vertical layout is too confusing.
my feeling atm when i enter is that i need a mount and a gps…

That might be true, except now it takes 3 superior rams to take a tower without boring yourselves senseless waiting for the fortified gate to get knocked down.

A huge map is great for small groups if the intent is avoiding fights, which I don’t think is really the goal. But even if you made a bunch of small groups, they can’t take anything that matters in a reasonable timeframe because everything is upgraded.

I swear they were thinking, we’ll get people to fight by making capping slower, which is a reasonable concept at least. The problem is they made response even more slow by making a huge map and taking so many waypoints away. So now the pace of the game is absurdly slow and boring because you spend so much more time running and/or trying to find the enemies.

The only positive for WvW I can find so far are the sentries marking dots on the map. That is the only thing that makes finding fights easier I can think of.

I can see some benefits to Jalis, but sadly I think Shiro is the go to front line legend right now.

Inspiring Reinforcement only serves to show the enemy the best spot to put their AoEs. They’re going to apply cc and damage on that spot if people are standing there much faster than the stability is going to pulse.

Shiro + Unwavering Avoidance + Enhanced Bulwark means 2 stacks of Stability whenever you dodge and you get the Shiro shadowstep and stunbreak that also wipes out impairing conditions and gives you endurance for more stability.

I’ve also never had any luck playing front-line full ‘Zerker, but to each they’re own on the gear front. I have liked Hoelbrak runes so far.

Dwarven Battle Training hits one person with a 10 second ICD.

Nostredeus.3105:

Just so you know this kind of list is not actually that helpful for a QA tester. It’s great that you have put in the time to list the problems but without a description of a situation in which they occur that a tester can replicate and use to reverse engineer the contributing factors it makes the bugs take much longer to work out. If you know even one specific example of the circumstances which gives rise to any of these bugs then state it and put it in a bug report ticket. QA teams are ridiculously efficient at squashing bugs if you can help them replicate them.

As feedback from a QA resource trained and paid to do the job this information is horrendous.

As feedback from a Customer that pays you to use the software the information supplied is wonderful.

A 3 second cooldown might be ok, but this skill really needed a CD of some kind unfortunately. It was absurdly good for chasing. I loved it the one night I had with it, but it seemed a foregone conclusion it needed a CD.

hypehype.9047:

This is my tanky wvw build

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vlAQRAsX8unXNuNSqJ7JRBlZlsfyrS4QZVJYrcsklZlhNma2RNgDewe6q/G-TFiEABCpM7hTCApKBXR9HqUaAgZODeCAks/AA-w

I don’t have time to do a write up but in short the goal is to keep your stability up when you are fighting as there is no point having high health/defence if you get cc. my runes and sigils are still being tested

basically you get stability every time you roll, you need endurance to roll you can get endurance from shrio’s riposting shadow and skill tree vigorous persistance and enduring recovery. with facet of nature active you can get 8 seconds of stabilty with one roll, (warning FON has an up keep of 2 the max up keep you can have is10, that means you cant use impossible odds so if you want to run away from combat make sure to deactivate FON)

I use shield for the extra 2 heals, because they nerfed phase travle i use an axe to close the gap with axe 4, but axe 5 is a good cc skill.

the rest is self explanatory

I had given up on the stability on dodge stuff so far, but planning on keeping Facet of Nature up fulltime and using them is pretty clever. Time to work on the build.

Zanther Deathbringer.4762:

BassHunteR.7246:

They finally are achieving their goal:
Killing wvw mode once and for all

Most people on the unofficial wvw forums (the serious wvw’ers) disagree

Nothing proves seriousness like posting on unofficial forums.

1. Make auto-upgrades consume supply. Camps are the new sentry point because there is no incentive to get them. They don’t feed upgrades and you don’t even need them for supply for offense most of the time because the objectives you take are filled with supply because they didn’t need it for upgrades.

2. Add waypoints to the side keeps back, make them late in the upgrade cycle.

3. Turn off the dinosaur event.

4. Have objective do one structural (walls) OR defense (the cannon line of old) upgrade at a time.

5. The big one – the new map needs a complete overhaul. Way too big, way too convoluted, way too many narrow paths. Its beautiful, but we want to worry about other players, not navigating the map.

Some great points being made so far in this thread.

Zietlogik.6208:

It doesnt work in WvW because bags are dropped in WvW and they count as mini-chests, the autoloot only affects dead creatures, if you could physically loot corpses in WvW instead of the little bags, then it would probably work.

They could certainly make it work.

Thank you for the change.

The vendor wasn’t turned on with the patch.

The OPs idea is fine.

In addition, the upgrade should require dolyaks not have a timer and should take at least 50% longer. Upgrading walls/doors and cannons/mortars at the same time is too good. Ideally make them separate steps effectively doubling the time or at least increase the timer 50%+.

While you’re at it, give us the “Hills” and “Bay” waypoints back too, its ok if the keeps have to upgrade for a while before they become active.

Can you actually find another player?

I’d love to have sat in on the meetings to not allow waypoints in the side keeps.

“Hey guys, I have a proposal, let’s remove the Hills and Bay waypoints”

Pros guy: “Umm, we won’t have to code them.”

Cons guy: “Hmm, that would result in a lot more running through empty terrain, give less incentive for long term defense and make getting to any potential fights in the south half of the zone impossible.”

WvW Team Lead (haha, yes I know): “Hmm, more running, less fighting other players, easier karma training, and hey people may stumble over our sweet PvE stuff while they run, a clear win for the idea. Cons guy, you buy the beer.”

ColinJohanson.2394:

Hey folks,

Lots of passionate feedback and discussion in here on either side, and a friendly reminder that constructive feedback helps us make better games (please do keep it constructive!) We don’t always get every detail perfect the first time, but I like to think one of our strengths is we’re always open to and listening to feedback from our community and making good decisions based on that feedback.

Ultimately, we’re thrilled with the parts of HoT everyone is enjoying. Your passion is awesome, and it’s part of why we all love creating this game. In particular, in game we’ve seen a really positive reaction to the game from folks who are busy playing, which has been really cool to see.

While we never like to rush and make snap decisions, in particular with a game that’s basically been out less than three days; I think there are some fair points in here for us to discuss. Much like other feedback about HoT, we’ll be discussing this as well!

Thanks again!

My full birthday booster I popped for my revenant expired last night right before I went to bed, so I played for about 24 hours this weekend. Not having access to the Elite spec made the HoT content completely unenjoyable, who wants to see so much of the new content with the spec you don’t want to play?

Saturday afternoon, I decided to just give up on the new stuff and on getting old world hero points one at a time and just went to Edge of the Mists. Just following the zerg in EotM for another 20 hours or so with boosters, I should have enough hero points to make the spec I want and then play the new stuff.

The new stuff seemed pretty fun, when it was there for long term goals like exploration, masteries and legendaries. Making me spend 30+ hours in EotM before being able to experience HoT seems like it can’t be working as intended though right?

Lastly, you’ve done so much to make this game alt friendly in the past; it is a real strength of the game. I can’t imagine devoting this kind of EotM time for each alt is where you want the game to be.

Merkin.8412:

P.S. You are not over 40. Guessing more like 14.

Man, I wish.

Merkin.8412:

Most will miss the mark.

The true problem does not exist in the product but with the market.

Those who think will understand the sentiment of this age old quote of Aristotle;

A friend to all is a friend to no one, and thee loudest voice is that of the annoying minority.

Take heart, for the amount of money Anet has made off this glorious expansion far outweighs the undying kitten of the common millennial forum warrior.

God bless the queen!

I’ve over 40 years old. All I want to do is play the new content with my Elite spec rather than play through the content to get the spec. It seems like a pretty reasonable request.

Aeolus.3615:

Kanebrake.6192:

grifflyman.8102:

The new WvW map is what people have been asking for…

Absolutely incorrect. This new map is the exact opposite of what people have been asking for.

How so?

It makes people harder to karmatrain, it gives more objectives, more places to scout, more to zergbusting when other group gets scouted, more strategies, more places to pull of players/groups into cliffs , less brain dead PVD, where 1 player could capture stuff w/o much effort.

The old BL’s were nothing less nothing more than off time karma train PVD zones.

Also it gives more room for improvements.

The new maps are much more difficult to navigate making it more difficult to engage enemy players (if you can ever find them).

There are way too many PvE elements.

It takes longer to get from place to place, time spent running typically is less enjoyable than time spent fighting enemy players and there is more running now.

On our tier (very low), the auto-upgrade system means more objectives are upgraded. The combination of more upgrades and more competent and numerous NPCs makes doing anything but taking camps more difficult for small groups.

Being unable to waypoint “Bay” and “Hills” makes response and defense on your home BL much slower, which means less fights.

There is nothing in these maps to discourage zerging.

Having a very large number of opportunities to fall to your death and then have a very long run back to the action isn’t enjoyable.

Its a large-scale PvP map, all we need are some objectives to get the players to the same places, a little bit of terrain flavor to make the action feel different in different places and reasonable sized, easy to navigate maps to make dying a penalty but not something that interrupts the game too much.

These maps are not good, and it was said when they were unveiled by a lot of people.

Its so simple.

Don’t gate what lets you personalize your character abilities. (how you play)

Gate status symbols, achievements and progression intended to provide very long term benefits (masteries).

I’ve never seen a game expansion do such a terrible job of recognizing this concept.

Cletus Van Damme.2795:

Guild of 493 members, 150 online, hundreds more logged in since launch. Not one person has talked positively about this Hero Challenge situation.

We ain’t a wvw only guild either

We had 55 online at one time last night, more of course during the evening. Not one person thought gating elite specs in this manner was a good idea.

Gaile Gray.6029:

DarcShriek.5829:

The mastery system as only been available for 15 hours. Your complaining about it being forever is just pure over dramatization. Congratulations on being awarded the William Shatner award for dramatic excellence.

First, thank you for saying, in your first sentence, my very thoughts: “It’s been less than 16 hours, and that’s ’forever?” Secondly, thanks for a smile. I’d love to see the statue that goes with that award.

Its really disheartening that this kind of response is the best we can get.

This design paradigm is a complete failure. It is reasonable to want to play the expansion content with the elite specs rather than having to play through so much of it using our old specs.

Rauderi.8706:

Swagger.1459:

One question to keep in mind folks… “Is it fun?”

MagicBall.0008

Could be better.

It feels like the one real expectation that was being defied is using/training the new specs during map exploration. Not after it’s all done.

Said it before, but I’m reiterating, if they could remove the need to buy off the other training tracks, this would work out reasonably. There isn’t any need to force us to play the game. We bought the expansion so we can play it.

Perfectly stated.

The content is what you play, the elite spec is how how play it.

Having to play a large portion of the new content with your old spec of the last three years is absurd. Having the new content invalidated isn’t the point, not being able to play it with the elite specs is the point.

Six months or a year from now, they’re going to lower the cost in hero points to buy all the HoT elite stuff.

The people that want to do the challenges or get 200 WvW ranks still can. The people that voluntarily shell out money to be able to play the content with the new skills rather than experience it all with their old specs can do that too.

Ayrilana.1396:

Xernth.8561:

Looking at the progression tree, when I spend 60 hero points on Herald, I’ll be able to equip the Legend and a shield if I want, and the Legend will have no Heal, Utility or Elite skills as well as only 1 of 6 traits? What an awful decision.

Plan your build out before you allocation points and you’ll only need to farm 120-220 hero points (12-22 HoT hero points).

Hopefully you can pick them in any order, if so, then yes that will help. When picking traits, at any given level can you just buy one of the three that you’re going to use, skipping the other two and getting the next tier?

(I haven’t leveled a toon without Tomes since they changed everything)

Looking at the progression tree, when I spend 60 hero points on Herald, I’ll be able to equip the Legend and a shield if I want, and the Legend will have no Heal, Utility or Elite skills as well as only 1 of 6 traits? What an awful decision.

I still don’t understand the rationale of making me play the vast majority of the content in the expansion just so I can BEGIN to play the class I paid for with its skills and traits unlocked.

All I want is to play my Herald in WvW, having to either do all of the PvE content or gain 200 ranks as a Revenant to do so makes so sense.

I’m so amazed I’m almost speechless. Thank you for this enhancement.

So, because there are some people willing to sit in a captured location and scout, you’d like to change it to require EVERY location to have a scout to remain captured? Of course your scouts can’t actually scout anything because they have to regularly return to the circle or it becomes uncaptured.

It sounds like a really terrible idea. The concept behind NPC defenders is to allow the players the enjoyment of doing something other garrisoning an objective. Even dedicated defenders and scouts can be much more useful than just standing in a circle.

The solution is obvious; have reset on Saturday for a week or two so you can fix bugs then move it back to Friday so the quality WvW time is Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday instead of Saturday evening, Sunday and Monday.

The old system made me do dungeons, fractals and a bunch of pve map completion I had no interest in if I wanted a legendary; there was no “play the way you want” unless your “want” was their pve content.

Reading the new system it looks like there will still be some of that, but there might be a lot more currency based stuff that is tradable. If that is true, and it is reasonably balanced, it would be a huge win for playing the way you want. I’d love to be able to play WvW a ton and sell the WvW currency I don’t need to PvE guy or PvP gal who are doing the game modes they enjoy and buy their excess currencies.

Now, I fully expect to be completely disappointed when the specifics are released, but for now I’m mildly optimistic. One person’s gold sink is someone else’s ability to play the content they like if the currency is tradable both directions.

This isn’t rocket surgery.

The quality of the WvW experience degrades the further we get in any given week away from reset. People are more inclined to play WvW in the manner it is intended (competitively) close to reset and play less competitively as the week goes on.

This is especially true the actual 24 hrs before reset, which is “karma train day” or guild missions day, “community everyone play one class night”, etc for people that enjoy WvW because its not a competitive environment.

With reset on Friday, the entire weekend is a fun environment with the down days being Wednesday and Thursday. With reset on Saturday night, the down days are Friday and much of Saturday. You’ve already stated that gameplay is heavier on Saturdays than weekdays.

The big problem is, you’re looking at the wrong metric. The justification is Saturday is when most people play so it should be reset. This is the wrong metric because Saturday is already a good day for WvW in the current environment. What you are really doing is wrecking the environment on Friday night to make Monday better, which it should be fairly obvious isn’t good.

If you need to do this for a few weeks because of the expansion, I think you’d have received a much different tone of response. As a permanent change, it is terrible.

Lacrisma.1540:

“Sir, after three years of ignoring them and luring AP hunters into their gamemode, the WvW community still hasn’t died down!”

“But… we gave them the Stability change, how are they even still playing? I mean, they crash at least every two hours and have massive queues on their map, how is that possible?”

“We don’t know, sir. What should we do?”

“… do it.”

“No.. you can’t… this is.. are you sure?”

“UNLEASH THE PVE BORDERLANDS!”

….
….
….

“They are not happy with the new borderlands and the EBG changes, but they still seem to hang on to WvW!”

“But the verticality! The dinosaurs! The mechanics that kitten on everything WvW! How can this be?! We even denied the existence of WvW players!”

“If I may… There is still one thing”

“What is it?”

“Reset. They still have the reset to be excited for.”

“…ruin it. Now.”

“With your permission we’d change it to saturday. This would double the queue. With this, we could also rub salt in the “this gives us more time to look into WvW problems”wound"

“You can do better.”

“Let’s change it to noon for EU players then, no drunk reset and they will be disconnected when leaving for lunch, facing at least a queue of 100 when they come back.”

“Good. Come back when you’re done, we need to talk about your promotion.”

Perfectly said.