The old legendary formula was fine. No need to change what already works, otherwise you get a disappointing mess like what happened here with the new legendaries.
Instead they should have focused on variety and quantity for every game mode.
How about 2-3 GvG maps (10v10) with a unique set of legendary precusors if you want your game to keep a strong population for the next 2 years?
How about legendary versions of the fractal weapons?
I think they forgot that people bought gems to finish legendaries.
There was so much potential with the old system where it didn’t take 2 years to implement 4 skins in the game.
I think the Living World 3 is actually the part of HoT that wasn’t ready for launch that we will finally get to play. Maybe the game will feel more complete when it is released.
It doesn’t excuse the lack of legendaries they announced however.
Ele has been systematically destroyed since the launch of the game. Starting with the RTL epic fail nerf. It’s almost a different class to play now, and it’s not as fun as it used to be. Remember when Ice Bow wasn’t completely useless? Remember when Tornado wasn’t useless? Remember when Meteor didn’t have a huge red circle everyone just dodge out of? Remember when the fire line was good? Remember when you had build variety in the old trait system? …The list take pages of skills and traits they completely ruined. Remember how naive we were when we thought HoT would have the first ele elite skill that isn’t useless?
There is just too many people not understanding the mechanics and complaining on this forum every time they get hit by an ele combo in pvp or WvW. And now since Anet didn’t sell HoT as planned and was an epic balance failure they take every poll and and forum statistics and just go with the majority in their nerf decisions.
I and many others have been chasing the RvR experience we had in DAoC for going on 15 years now, and everything has let us down. GW2 is the best/closest thing there is right now, but it could be so much more with the right attention.
It just needs more polls. You can never have enough polls.
I also returned recently. In pvp the class has been completely destroyed (that’s why I had left anyway), only bunker is viable and it’s boooooooring.
Overall the best years of the class are gone, staff in WvW isn’t as rewarding as it used to be. Meteor has been nerfed multiple times (now there is a big circle everyone dodge out of, and meteornado is gone, every other skills from other classes have been buffed), fire trait and water traits have been nerfed, and everyone else hits harder with less delay on skill cast. Even worse, they can cast in an instant from stealth condi-bombs that do more damage than an ice spike on a slow animation and long cooldown.
You can make hard content without making it frustrating. Guild Wars 2 raids are frustratingly hard because of gimmicks like timers that makes you restart a fight dozens of time until half your party rage-quit. The only outcome for failure to beat a timer should be a smaller reward at the end, the time you take should be an issue preventing you from moving forward, to the contrary.
That’s the reason why the vast majority just aren’t interested. They tried, and it just became frustrating, because even if you’re good, even if you kick kitten at dodging/healing/casting, if you take 5 seconds too much you have to start all over.
First things I notice:
1- Nerfed elementalist staff skills
What the heck are you talking about. Ele has the highest DPS in game, not just by far but, by way too much. Ele actually NEEDS a nerfing to bring it inline.
Ele only got the highest dps against enemies that stand still in pve. In competitive modes staff just plain sucks. Every decent competitive player know it’s all about burst output or steady condi pressure, anyone can dodge out of a staff ele slow animation. And compared to other classes with stealth and insane burst staff ele doesn’t compare.
I’ve been running everything on high at 40-50 fps on a Radeon R7 240. Idk what kind of toaster you people using, but if my outdated GPU is being able to run that, you people shouldn’t have problems as normally all of you have better GPUs than me.
I know I don’t have a good GPU, but still, at the same places where I was getting 45-50fps a year ago I get 20-30.
I don’t think you should be forced to buy a new graphic cards just because a game is poorly optimized or the code became buggy.
As for the rest I wasn’t complaining really, I just wanted to say that it looks like nothing noticeable has improved for WvW. I guess I’ll just play the new LS3.
First things I notice:
1- Nerfed elementalist staff skills, no improvements to any traits or sluggish skills, not a surprise
2- Condi bomb meta, thieves just roam around applying 4k+ condi ticks in an instant from stealth while your waiting for your slow skills to crit. Like what the hell is this supposed to be fun or balanced? It’s not how the game used to be.
3- WvW Reward tracks aren’t really interesting / WvW overhaul is barely noticeable, things are just as bad as when I left basically
4- WvW just a karma train, nobody fights anymore during the day, its like EotM took over
5- 75% of my GvG friends didn’t login in months
6- My framerate got way worse (lost about 15fps) for no apparent reasons
7- I now have 8 birthday gifts and enough leveling boosts for 5 players, along with almost 750 useless tomes of knowledge
8- No more celestial amulet in pvp? Whatever I’m not going to play pvp on ele without celestial if they don’t bother making zerk viable again, it’s just an insult to how fun the game used to be at launch
9- Stability buff isn’t noticeable
That’s pretty much it, all these polls, 2 season patch, but basically nothing changed in WvW from a gameplay perspective.
When the game was released for the first year you could use ether renewal while in mist form, it compensated for being locked down without being able to heal for 3 seconds. It’s just something else they turned upside down.
When I got my new MacBook pro about 1 year ago I was happy that my framerate went from 25-30 to 45+ at minimum settings.
Now it’s back down at 15-20 even at minimum settings. I just don’t get it. There is nothing I can turn down, and I have a i7 with 16 gigs of ram and 1.5 gb of video memory. Of course the video card isn’t good, but I was getting double the fps I am currently getting.
No ques, FA server, every BL 2 hours after reset. Ouch anet
I blame the new map…. wait…
It’s just history repeating itself, they promises of a massive WvW overhaul they couldn’t deliver and it turns out to be a few mini-tweaks released sporadically on a 1… 2 years calendar.
I said I would get back to the game when the massive overhaul is released, and I know it’s the same for my friends… so were waiting.
Repair hammer lol —> at the complete opposite end of what they should actually be working on.
You gotta wonder the purpose of this poll, as if they have the time to fool around with gimmicks when so many class skills and traits are completely unbalanced or useless.
So this is the first competitive map being added in FOUR YEARS. Sometimes you have to look at the results and realise that this is pretty sad. There is no pvp support in this game.
It’s not just pvp. The only new WvW map got removed (Like Raid of the Capricorn was). EotM was never implemented properly either and still has no objective worth fighting for. Work on the WvW overhaul? Who knows, it’s like they had never started and are doing the minimum.
The guild arenas had potential, but they have no scoreboard and are too small for gvg. GvG never had any support at all even if the name of the game is Guild Wars. Build variety is at it’s worse state ever and they seem to think it’s fine.
Living World seems to be dialogue focused instead of gameplay focused but we’ll see. Raids have no difficulty settings, have brutal timers and probably less than 5% actually play them. And even the legendary items they promised were cancelled. So much great content was just removed from the game but it should be permanent (SAB?). Fractal overhaul was a epic fail. Dungeons…
Something just seems not right when you look at the the potential the game had and where it’s at right now.
I’m excited for new content, but the return of Raid of the Capricorn without water just can’t be as fun as it was.
I think a trait system that eliminates variety and cause a mass exile can’t be described as “not broken”.
They should revert back to the system and balance as it was just after the day of the engi-turrets nerf, and rebalance the elite professions around that.
Hi. So I’ve played a few thousand matches in the 1 and half years since I’ve started GW2. Yeah, pvp is what I enjoy mostly in this game.
I just want to express my feelings as a “not so new” pvper: I’m getting really bored with the absolute lack of build diversity available.
I’ve had time to play through a good number of different metas, and it’s the same roundabout every time. The developers tweak this trait and that class, creating a new status quo, where unless you adapt and play the flavors of the month, you might as well go pve with that non-meta attrocity you barfed out.
Is it really that much to ask to make the elementalist’s scepter and staff builds stand a chance? Or the hammer on the revenant or the greatsword on warrior and guardian ?
I’m honestly not playing ranked anymore because I just cant see the same skills on my ele, necro and other characters, and I dont want to impose my “bad builds” on players in ranked. I’m so bored of this lack of diversity I’m already looking to better shores.
Rant over
The new trait system killed build diversity. I told the devs as soon as they announced it (as many other people did) and they replied to me: “It’s too soon to tell.”
Well now time has proven that (1) I and many others were right and (2) they unknowingly destroyed their own gameplay variety. It’s quite clear that the new people responsible for class balance do not play the game actively else they would have understood why it was important for certain class to have stats points linked to trait lines, and why the original developers were just more aware of class mechanics.
They ignored warnings and went ahead anyway with the misconception that “All stats were equal for all classes”, and rendered the same amount of stats to all classes independent of builds and weapons, it was a huge experiment destined to fail from the start. Just a terrible, terrible idea. Hundreds of unique and original builds ceased to be viable that day as Anet were praising their new stat system and some of us were redefining the meaning of double facepalms. What a failure, and ultimately the reason why so many of us took breaks from the game.
Since then they just tried to fix what they broke and 1 year later they never succeeded to make the game as interesting and varied as it was before the trait system change.
What’s more important, in my mind, is just how much will LS3: Ep 1 contain when compared to LS 2, and will it include a new playable area like the SW in addition?
Well it has to contain a new area and was presented as being bigger than LW2. I mean it has to provide content to keep coming people coming back 3 months later and it’s certainly not an instanced single-player story that will do that for a MMO.
It’s probably a part of HoT that they didn’t have time to finish, just like SW looked like a part of HoT they released early.
Personally I was one of the person that wanted expansions, and now I regret it since HoT. I think regular episodes was just more fun. I may reinstall for that.
I wished they were more communicative. The trailer contained a bunch of spoilers and didn’t say anything about the content. With ESO for example you know half a year in advance what the dlc will contain, the amount of armors, dungeons, explorable areas, etc. They have teasers and present the content to the community months before it’s released.
Anyway at the moment this is really positive as they are finally moving away from raids.
I liked the underwater combat. I just don’t understand how that map can be better without underwater combat. Would have been better to make a GvG 8v8 or 10v10 map and just bring the old map back in my opinion.
I find this the best MMO I’ve played and I’ve tried most of them – even Black Desert and some off ones.. but one thing (the only thing) that GW2 seems to lack is using desired spell effects that are really enjoyable for one weapon.
My favorite is the staff but it seems really out of wizard character and not fun to have to roll backward to put a good dot on something.
Would love it if we could move one ability from one weapon to another – provided it was a balanced move.
Black Desert wizards have the coolest spells I’ve seen. .but i could not stay there, since Guild Wars 2 trumps it on every other front.
Wish List: customized skills please!
:)
It was like that a few months before they released the game. That was how GW1 was designed. There is an old beta video of a staff elementalist with phoenix and meteor shower on his skill bar. It’s even the reason why the animations don’t match the weapons used (fireballs don’t come out of the staff, skills fx come out of the empty hand, etc).
They decided to lock the skills with weapons very late in the development.
Companies have to look 5-10 years ahead. There is no way that they aren’t setting up the foundations for GW3, unless they are taking a chance with a new IP.
I think it’s the focus on the Chinese release, the new player experience along with the dumb-down trait system/broken balance and free to play game but super expensive expansion that derailed the development of the game and lowered players appreciation.
In comparison to how good Verdant Brink is it’s quite clear that less energy and time went into developing the other maps.
Expansion would have been amazing if it would have been released with Silverwaste and Dry Top map + Living story content for these maps and a few dungeons, then Verdant Brink would have been the climax of quality in the middle of the expansion.
One of the problems with HoT was that starting from Verdant Brink afterwards every map just got less interesting with no multiplayer instanced content at all beside unplayable raids.
The game used to be so amazing. Series of MANY bad decision has drastically altered and ruined the flow of the gameplay that WvW was intended to have.
When the game was released it was possible for a group of 10 to beat a group of 30 if they played better. Now only numbers matter, which is why so many people left and are playing other games.
- This is probably the single most important change that the SPvP community needs whether you realize it or not. Not only does this make sense, but since SPvP is already isolated, not one change you make here effects the rest of the game. The way it currently works the devs expect us as players to think about the rest of the game before giving changes to a specific game type, however this way of thinking will never create good balance and the reason why is the majority of changes people suggest are obviously only made and will work for Spvp. WvW and PvE are very different in terms of balance and changes for one often conflict with the other two making the change almost meaningless to begin with.
The Lesh Prince recently developed some tech that makes skill-splitting more feasible than it was previously – you’ll see some PvP (and PvE) splits in the next balance update. It’s important to understand that changes will still need to be global, but we’ll definitely have a bit more flexibility moving forward.
Keeping parity between modes when possible is important to us – but when it’s not feasible we’ll look at splits.
edit: that clickbait though
So what you’re telling us is that Ice Bow will be usable in pvp again? Thank god.
I think people misunderstand the result of this last poll, the result is:
“Show us you can actually modernize WvW”
Anet will have to make DBL balanced with the other maps, or add a third map which is the true solution, it will force them to actually work on core WvW systems. Finally they get told out loud that 3 copies of the same map isn’t something people want 4 years down the life cycle.
Only for that the poll result is gold, even if it’s to see them fail because they aren’t willing to invest the proper resources. At least we will know where the community stands and how comited Anet is.
Can’t wait to hear them say… “ah well we said 75% but it’s 74.9% so we wont do anything you want, please buy more gems.”
I don’t even wait for them to say anything. I just toss some money now and then and hope things stay the course, and do what I can to make it better for people i play with.
I mean – the communication alone is much better (plus 1), the notes about direction and polling (plus 1) … I’d rather stay this course than what most had to go through the first few years.
And Lol @ the last note of your post something
I feel that we have to somehow just live for the present and forget those bad memories of old …
These polls are just meant to slow down the release of the overhaul. Mark my word: when the overhaul is ready they’ll hold on it and launch it with the next expansion.
The ele will never be as fun as it was when the game was released. As absurd as it may sound, the game was better balanced a few months after the release than it is now.
Yes the Ele had insane aoe damage, but the thief could press 2 keys and kill it. It was just perfect and satisfying to play. Now everything has been flatten and normalized, passive play (conditions) has become the norm, and I left mostly because of that, and also because of many other things done wrong everyone has mentioned.
I think everyone still playing this game have forgotten or never known how good it used to be before.
Funny is that I would prefere more to pay to play the game like it was at the start than pay to play a new expansion
I don’t think it’s funny, the gameplay was more tight and visceral. You could heal and summon elites in mist form, Ride the Lightning across the landscape on a 16 second cooldown, damage wasn’t capped like it is now. Ice bow wasn’t useless. Focus could reflect WvW siege. You could meteornado It was WAY more fun.
Sometimes good gameplay is more important than map variety. Look at the success of games like Rocket League, simple but amazing gameplay is just more rewarding.
Can’t wait to hear them say… “ah well we said 75% but it’s 74.9% so we wont do anything you want, please buy more gems.”
Instead of them averaging the numbers to 75% which is what they should clearly do in this case and deliver the massive overhaul they promised in the first place.
Actually how many people asked them to mix borderlands just to make Anet change something?
WvW was dead everywhere beside tier 1 (and peak times tier 2) like 6 months before HoT’s release. Even when they did the PvE server merge there was a content drought.
The new trait system completely destroyed the fine class balance they had achieved before HoT was released.
It’s just that HoT was disappointing from a gameplay and content perspective so more people left. I mean, an expansion without any dungeon, raids that are impossible to do for 95% of the players and postponed or cancelled content, how do you expect to keep your players? Specially when you start giving infractions to players who aren’t satisfied and are simply voicing their opinion. Even ESO dlc has dungeons and armors crafting for every new maps and do not make you pay for things that are never released.
The server merge may seem like things are improving, but honestly it’s just something that hides how low the population is now comparing to at release.
The ele will never be as fun as it was when the game was released. As absurd as it may sound, the game was better balanced a few months after the release than it is now.
Yes the Ele had insane aoe damage, but the thief could press 2 keys and kill it. It was just perfect and satisfying to play. Now everything has been flatten and normalized, passive play (conditions) has become the norm, and I left mostly because of that, and also because of many other things done wrong everyone has mentioned.
I think everyone still playing this game have forgotten or never known how good it used to be before.
I think Anet kinda lost it. Asking us if they should give up on content they definitively spend a lot of time to craft just because of their constant avoidance that the problem is the core WvW systems, not the map.
Fix the scoring system, fix the broken skill balance and trait system, merge all the servers in 3 alliances, make all maps available in WvW and remove duplicates. All that Desert BL really needed was a better waypoint system and removal of the huge giant rocks in the middle of what should be battlegrounds.
Does Anet really need us to tell them that it’s simply too much to have 12 copies of a map that can hold twice the population of a single tier? Like seriously.
The elementalist doesn’t need an HP buff. Just needs the useless skills to be fun to play again for me to come back to the game, specially the boring tempest stuff.
Over 18k hp most of my build setups and the numbers are pretty good. I know it’s possible to do even more damage if you sacrifice all defenses (I was there in the times of 15k meteornadoes) but my build was optimized so that I could maximize damage modifiers while still having pretty good hp and armor.
You still get 1-shot by mesmers in GvGs anyway no matter whats your hp.
That was a really fun video to watch actually! Music isn’t up my alley but I can definitely appreciate the footage.
Well thanks, that was a nice thing to hear as it took a lot of time to put together. I just wanted to put some of my best memories from the last months playing this game. I’ve had 1 of each class but Ele is the only class I ever found really interesting.
It’s not easy to find a heavy metal song with someone singing goodbye at the end…
They’re still making money from it with the F2P model, but it’s a different audience.
But most of the core players since the release like me are playing other games and waiting to see if Anet brings more endgame content to this game before coming back.
The fact that I didn’t play this game since last December but still come here to see whats happening speaks a bit about how much the core players feel they have invested in it.
A GvG system, new dungeons, difficulty settings and an unnerf to rewards/drops would save this game in my opinion, but it just feels like Anet is taking forever just to get anything done. They’re probably focused on developing their next game and are just trying to milk GW2 as much as possible.
The sad truth is that the game was better 2 years ago than it is now. The new trait system completely ruined the class balance and a lack of vision ruined the game in general.
The elementalist doesn’t need an HP buff. Just needs the useless skills to be fun to play again for me to come back to the game, specially the boring tempest stuff.
Over 18k hp most of my build setups and the numbers are pretty good. I know it’s possible to do even more damage if you sacrifice all defenses (I was there in the times of 15k meteornadoes) but my build was optimized so that I could maximize damage modifiers while still having pretty good hp and armor.
You still get 1-shot by mesmers in GvGs anyway no matter whats your hp.
It just seems to me like these polls are a way to delay everything substantial for 1 more year. Then they’ll probably announce that it’s part of the next expansion pack.
Just implement the map rotation on reset (weekly) instead of of making months of surveys and having people argue on things they can’t even try.
Every good suggestions, like having 4 different maps, are completely ignored anyway.
You have to admit that having 3 copies of the same map is pretty stupid, specially when you have designed 4 maps and only 2 are available in the scoring system.
The 3 copies of the borderland only worked before they ruined the map by removing the orbs and replacing them with nothing at all. The entire dynamic system of the game was lost at that point and all that was left was a siege game like the others.
Even ESO managed to integrate a “capture the scroll” mechanic without cheaters deciding on the fate of their game.
I’m almost certain someone at Anet looked at the poll and was like:
“I’ve worked 1 year photoshopping this background image for the desert borderlands and now you want me to start over and make a background image that will fit with 2 different maps? I was just 3 months away from being ready to release it”
And then the other Anet person said:
“Ok we’ll scrap the previous poll and invent some new type of democracy or something, keep up the good work.”
