Guild Wars 2

I’m on the fence with statements in this thread. I generally don’t care for meta and play my own builds. That being said my ranger builds was almost meta without me knowing it.

But there is no “meta” really. If others are playing meta, then one can devise a counter build for that, that on it’s own may be weak, but when facing the meta build i can wreck it totally.

What i hope for is getting more pugs that are closer to my rank in hopes of them actually making basic, intelligent decisions (like capping a non guarded point, instead of running into a zerg battle away from any points).

Well guess i didn’t get invited. No more forum feedback for those backstabbers;)

Or did EU players got some invites as well?

Ok, we had our recent stability boon change from stacking in duration to stacking in intensity, which was a really good step forward.

Now the question that lingers in the back of my head is – will HoT keep it as is, or turn those stability stacks into break bar for player, meaning different cc skills will have diffrent results in bringing our stability bar down?

Cause i’m sure looking forward to that one change.

I recently watched interview from rezzed, where interviewed A-net employee (Collin i assume) was saying how racial storylines are bad, because you can’t experience the whole story on one character and later in the game you have objects (krait orb) or people you have no idea about, because you didn’t choose personal story relevant to them.

As a cure he proposes stortytelling to be in repeatable instances.
*No. No. Just no. HELL no. *

The personal storyline was great precisely because you couldn’t do everything at once. Each time I created a new char of a race i already have, i could at least look forward to seeing a new branch of my personal story, even if profession and starting map were the same. Also personal story introduced small, but still consequences of my choices.

And consequences of my storyline choices is what i want in HoT.
I don’t want a happy ending with everyone cheering happily if I went the “I don’t trust salads route”. I want asura, charr, humans and possibly norn being satisfied at the treason-free environment inside the pact, while much less numerous sylvari (cause i left some of them to die) to hate my guts behind the scenes as i chose to not trust modremoth’s potential minions.

I don’t want to be able to see all the story on one character, ergo killing any real choice and not having my choices influence further story at all. I want to make my own decisions and see their consequences through the story. So when i enter that place on another character i may select a different route, one with it’s own consequences and one that will be fresh to my other character, rather then “same old and nothing different after that either.”

Heck I’d love to see my choices have permanent effects down the road for my character.

For example trusting sylvari leading to uncovering some secret pathways sylvari spies got access to.

Or if i chose to not trust veggies, some new secret pact weaponry access granted in later story instances, because asuran researches wouldn’t trust a sylvari lover with such potent weaponry.

How dare you not mention Evon Gnashblade in the list of well written characters!
Ash legion already knows your whereabouts, meat.

Thorough review is an obvious expectation, so i didn’t even bother to voice that. But there are quite a few ppl who start by going over to the grade, and if it’s not high, they might just give up on reading further, and move on.

Let’s all remember that GW2 is a “in/out game” in it’s nature. Many leave to come back later, or leave again after a period of boredom. It’s those not fully invested players (and i believe their number is quite high) that will be on the fence about buying the expansion. And no small part of players in general, are players with a certain game mode bias – WvW, PvE’ers, or spvp crows. For a significant number of them one part of game being weaker in expansion is nothing major, as they’re into something else, for others quite the opposite.

A grade of overall grade of let’s say 7/10 will mean …“hm…maybe?”.

But for example, grades like;
PvE: 8/10
sPvP: 5/10
WvW 9/10

Will give a much clearer picture. PvE’ers and WvW will consider it a must buy, spvp’ers won’t be furious with being scammed, knowing what’s ahead. Much better grounds for making a decision, much less flames on forums later on, and much more people that would be willing to purchase a game.

Because we can forgive flaws in an awesome package. But we do not feel much of a pull to an overly average offering, that has no big issues, but nothing spectacular either. That’s our nature.

Perhaps you need to reevaluate what expansion is about. If you think about adding very little, even if that little is of high quality, then you’re doing it wrong.

And Courtyard is screaming for addition of at least one or better yet two good deathmatch maps.

How can I not call it a barren wasteland in terms of HoT content for spvp?
Right now spvp has 7 maps. HoT brings us…one. Sure it may be a new type of map, but that doesn’t change the fact is a one single, lonely map!
A tiny map at that, since it’s for spvp.

Compare that to new WvW map which is huge and easily has the same amount of content, if not more then the alpine borderlands had. Now that’s what i call an expansion worthy upgrade.

So if I look at it from birds view:

1 WvW – rougly same amount of new as we had of old.
2. spvp – 20% new compared to old and i’m being generous here (1/7 is not 20%, but it’s a new game mode, so i added few % for fairness).
3. PvE – too little info to tell.

That’s my main reason for my request for reviewers to tackle each game mode separately in their final grade for the expansion.

I want a specialization. I’d prefer druid but it matters little. As long as I finally get to see how much new vs base class they actually bring.

The content of upcoming HoT seems very..mixed bag so far, so here’s my request to people who will do public reviews of it:

Rather then wrapping it up in one grade, give it 3 grades -one for each game mode additions.
One for new PvE content and changes.
One for spvp part
And one for new WvW map.

Because i honestly feel that while in certain aspects the expansion delivers diamonds (new WvW map), in others it’s barren wasteland (spvp) and I shudder at thought of all this being “averaged” into one grade that will not fully flesh out the great pros of xpac, while also mercilessly jab at it’s gaping holes.

Hey, that’s actually pretty helpful tip, cheers mate:)

“Good evening sir, how may i help you?”
“Evening ma’am, i need a loan for a specific purchase.”
“Of course sir. What particular amount of money do you need?”
“Around 40 bucks.”
“Sir..are you sure you want to loan that much? Loans like this are usually given only under mortage…”

Oh please don’t. Next thing that will happen is arena net mode agreeing, then after that disaster will strike in form of next PoI being 55% time about cute charr, rather then actual significant HoT content reveal…

It seems i need to make my statement clearer here.

I don’t hate the person that was gone. I myself sometimes suffer a dc, or sudden rl situation that cannot wait. What i hated was the other 3 people in my team just rolling over and throwing in the towel without any will to fight for it.

Good riddance i say. Finally non generic looking WvW map.

Thing is i’m a shortbow.

Owned WeeWee. My favourite:) One of the reasons i chose to main a ranger in spvp and not engi was not having to see this guy in my profession forum all the time.

As for entangle it’s just fine. I had people evade or block mine all too often. It’s hardly op, and as for LoS? It’s an aoe, ofc LoS won’t matter.

Also engies underpowered? Am i reading this right? Those guys with:
20 second unstoppable turret megaheal?
Best blocking skill ingame? (gear shield)
Tons of condies of all sorts save torment?
Near unkillable turrets for anyone who is not packing serious power aoe?
2 skills for price of one as their job mechanic?
More cc then chinese militia during riots?
And maybe just one skill, but a reliable boon strip which rangers get none of?

riiiiight….

Get your sausages out, cause flames are gonna be high in this one. Today was a good day for pvp – four wins in a row was sweet.

Then this happens. I get a team that because one man bailed/dcd/whatever quit and forfeited the match. i was alone vs 5 of opposing team. Well that didn’t end up well obviously. A loss is a loss, hell i got more losses then wins on my record. But losing cause my team lacks a spine to finish the fight is just revolting.

Now that i vented here’s my suggestion for a-net. Dump the win-lose reward system. Instead go with rewards based on amount of match points gotten by each team + some extra for the winners.

if game ended in 500:415 that’s a pretty close one and exempting winner reward the losers will get progression and glory close to that of winners.

If they suck and got pulverized then nearly no reward for them.

Infact the best scenario according to me would be if there was only one reward pool for both teams and depending on match results each would get a matching part of it.

They would each have to fight for who gets the bigger piece and just how big of a piece it’ll be.

Would encourage the losing side to actually move their rears, rather then just ley there and help the other team win just to end it faster.

I’ll say it right of the bat. The stability changes aren’t good. The idea is fine, but the implementation is lacking.

Here’s the deal. You have 3 game modes and stability changes can’t work with each one.
As it stands now (check warrior forum for chinese gw2 stability change discussion) stability skills give too many stacks in most cases. Problem here is that in PvE and sPvP that means stability is still the untouchable boon, unless you run into a zerg of cc spamming mobs/players. Taking stability off your opponent with cc is like climbing mount everest using your ears to do the lifting.

In WvW however zergs are common day feature, and having your stability skills cough up decent amount of stacks does make sense.

No matter how you slice it, it’ll either heavily underperform, or offer no real change at all depending on amount of stacks.

What is lacking here is boonstrip. If stability skills are to be generous with amounts of stacks they give, then more professions need to have access to reasonable, controlled boonstrip. And by reasonable i mean no sigils that activate who knows when, or traits that activate once again who knows when as long as your opponent is burning. This is bad design, people.

Boon and condi quequing are mechanics that are easy to control on one side, and should have equally controllable counters on the other.

Currently mesmers, thieves, necros and engis are relatively good in boon stripping departament, especially necros.
But guardians, warriors, rangers and elementalists are in the dust for all i know. And yeah, rangers are bolded out because other 3 are literal boon machines for party and selves while rangers aren’t doing that hot.

I’ve been wondering – will we get new conquest and deathmach maps that aren’t in the stronghold formula? And speaking of stronghold, is it just gonna be this one map, or will there be more?

Cause you know…spvp isn’t exacly overflowing with content right now…

Maybe it’s just me, but isn’t it time for our bianual feature pack drop? Yet i don’t hear much news about that happening…

Maybe no ability to stomp while cloaked? Do it like you do fighting – one stealthed shot then fight revealed, or just leave the scene.

I vote it makes their next initiative using skill cost double;)

I posted about downstates being OP? Oh do quote, i dare you.
Memser damage too strong? Oh do quite i dare you.
Me on a ledge? i double dare you.

It’s no rocket science that when you’re downed you’re the guy who’s knocking on death’s door, and not the one stomping you, but still in 1v1 situations being downed should always mean a fighting chance. Small one, but a one non the less. Yet we all know too well about:

- mist form stomps
- elixir s stomps
- stealth stomps
- stability stomps (hi guardians and warriors)

Stability stomps are getting fixed. I’m glad devs realised that having 1/3 of your character’s game mechanic (control aspect) completely shut down by a single boon cast was ridicilous and are making ammends.

I do take huge issue with mist form and elixir S stomps – transformed characters should not be able to perform stomping. Let alone when that transformation gives them invulnerability.
The very idea of both those skills is “you can’t hurt me, but i can’t hurt you either”. Stomping should be no exception. If ele is so bend on successful stomp he can build for stability or try to blind me, or reflect my attack if it’s a projectile.
Sure it’s somewhat a tradeoff given the large cooldown sacrificed for the stomp, but that does not change that it’s uncounterable for those who cannot run like hell from their downed spot, and against the skill’s purpose.

Stealth is , most broken of all, as characters who can’t see stomper can’t target him with their skills. And that wouldn’t be half as bad if in such situation they could at least cast those skills at spot of their choosing or around themselves if it’s aoe (yup talking ranger’s thunderclap). But no. 100% kill. Sure eles, thieves and mesmers can move out of stomping zone before it lands. But what about rest of professions? Though luck! And unlike others mentioned here, stealth is dirt cheap in terms of downtime, to a point even longbow rangers can use it without a single worry in the world.

So please a-net, take a look at this and curb this to a point where ensuring a successful stomp require some thought and successful struggle between defender and attacker, and not just one button press after “F”.

yeah. When i play certain very vindictive dungeon runner, i can’t get past how simple, intuitive and well thought out combat controls are there.

While in gw2 i get the feeling half of the bloody battle takes place in menu options where you have to select/deselect one option after another to get something that vaguely reminds responsive almost non player hindering controls.

Sounds hectic, right? Well here’s the thing. We all know how condition warfare is botched in pve boss encounters, unless you’re in a small group that knows what it’s doing. And that’s a horse that’s been beaten to burgers now.

What has not been addressed as far as i know, and is a thorn in my side, is how direct damage gets all those % boosts not only via traits but also via boss mechanics. When you manage to knock wyvern out of air your damage triples. Wanna bet it’s just your direct damage that triples? I sincerely hope a-net won’t forget about condis and that gets 3x boost too.

Please don’t forget to include condi damage for any spikey damage opportunities when fighting the bosses

Oh and….kicks dead horse …fix that condi cap in pve boss encounters…

It looks horrid. What if enemy has said stability shielded by other boons? Necro uses spinal shivers or corrupt boon and it’s most likely down. Guardian…uses stability for himself at best.

Why the hell we gotta register and login to your website just for a chance to forward our questions? Angry Joe came here and collected them here, you should too.

Now that aside, here are my questions:

1. specializations – how much new do they bring to the table. How many new traits, skills. How much of base profession do they replace when activated and how much of it do they keep (roughly)?

2. spvp – so far we’ve seen one stronghold map. Will there be more maps for spvp and if so will they all be strongholds or will there be more conquest and deathmatch ones?

3. base professions – are they getting some rehauls while they’re at it? Like fixing traits, useless skills, new traits and skill incoming?

4. Mastery system. Will be be able to have all masteries maxed on our account once we clear the xpac content enough, or is it designed like that traits and you’ll be rather having your own “mastery build” made from finite pool of mastery points?

5. I’m getting totally mixed signals about development’s progression. How far like in % (roughly) is the xpac done? Half way, 80%, 30%?

I hope you won’t drop the ball like joe did and let their pr talk get you off the track and asking the questions we posted here.

With incoming defiance change (and a certain pvp match) it hit me just how odd boon strip currently is. As it stand now, ability to rip boons of your opponent is rather exclusive one owned by few professions and skills that grant it are few and far between.

However once landed it does not discern betweeen stacks of a given boon, or boon itself. It simply rips it off. That leads to some lol easy counters to elite skills in some cases, as many elites grant stability so their user can actually use them, rather then be the ragdoll.

They way i see this should work, is that boonstrip should strip a set amount of boon stacks independent of a boon. So if your opponent has 13 stacks of might, 3 of regeneration and 2 protection stacks, a 10 stacks boon strip would leave him with 3 stacks of might and untouched regen and protection.

To compensate for that, boonstrip would be much more accessible across the board then it is now. Sure it requires some work, as might with it’s easy to get, and high to cap stacks would become the perfect shield for stability or protection. Then again might is not exacly the best boon to part with…but that’s for more rested minds then my own atm to work out.

Feedback welcomed:>

DanteZero.9736:

… Warriors, come out and playyyyyy.

Casey Jones, is that you?

won’t masteries provide us all with means of vertical travel?

Hi everyone, having some hard time against bunker eles i run into the “chill them!” approach. But there’s one thing i don’t know about chilled and need verified.

When a person is chilled their skill cooldown goes up by 66%. But how does that work?
If a chilled character uses a skill that has 10 seconds cooldown, then cleanses the chilling off after one second, will he still have to wait 15.66 more seconds for next cast?

Or will it only affect the first second of cooldown when chill was actually applied and after cleansing it’ll be 9.66 seconds more?

I feel you man. I’m suffering from exactly same thing here. I’m wolf rank, yet today nearly every team i got matched with clearly didn’t have basic knowledge of our pvp map costing us defeat after deafeat. Imagine skyhammer where i held the cannon and enemy held all 3 points. Where is my team you ask? Engaging in some pointless skirmishes everywhere but capture points.

In temple of silent storm the only guy on my side to show up on the spot when tranquility and stillness spawned was me. List goes on…

Yet another epic game where my ground targeted aoe took few seconds to happen because i couldn’t find the cursor.

Dear a-net, i’ve just about had it with that ninja cursor of yours that in heat of battle is impossible to locate on more then one occasion. It’s not a major world changing, fix, so pretty please do something about it.
Especially with the widely tauted challenging content that’s to come with HoT. I wanna die when i screw up, not when i decide to slot aoe skill on my bar…

Gems vs online money transfer is no difference money wise for a-net.

However most people who think of buying HoT with gems are delluding themselves.
Something as insignificant as dark wings backpack made gem to gold prices raise by 50%. And we’re just talking here a piece of visual gear, not to everyone’s liking mind you.

If HoT was in gemstore, gem prices in gold would skyrocket so hard, you’d prefer to just buy it with your own, real life money, rest assured of that.

While we’re at it let’s make our arrow blunt tipped so they don’t hurt poor mobs and pvp opponents too hard. I mean bows aren’t meant to kill stuff, right?

Going beyond 40 bucks for an x-pac is pretty suicidal, unless you’re Blizzard. So i’d say it’ll be 40$.

ah nice to see someone who gets the idea;)

As mentioned above that “5 seconds stun” locks you in it too. It’s nothing like moa, that has no side effects for mesmer himself.

You know, you can just write tl;dr instead of making assumptions outta thin air.
I clearly stated the mechanics of tackle, and how they differ from stun and knockdown.

I disagree. If anything it’s the spvp that shows the glaring flaws of those skills. having ress skill in pve on 3 mins cooldown timer is bad, but how often do you have to ressurect someone in pve to the point that it’s a must?

In spvp deaths are all over the place and ressing a teammate under fire actually matters and may determine the outcome of the game. And it’s here where all those underperfoming traits and skills fail the hardest. Pve has it’s own set of issues mostly stemming from crappy AI.

It gets better – in spvp “Search and rescue!” is on a freaking 3 minutes cooldown. Yup 180 excruciating seconds. Same as spirit of nature, except spirit of nature can quickly insta ress 3 ppl in a 600 radius, and that’s 2 times during it’s live.

Seriously, whoever is taking care of ranger balance in a-net, clearly hasn’t done any spvp or had the idea “let’s try these less used utilities and see if they make any sense in there!”. Cause this one most certainly does not.

If they didn’t want mursaat suspicions they would place a big black rectangle in the center of the screen when HoT trailer showed characters entering the temple;)

I was thinking how cool it would be if my ranger’s pet could jump down from higher spot into selected enemy and attack it like in real life – that is full body attack going for target’s throat with enemy wrestling to get it off him. And so my idea for this new cc – tackle;!

The idea here is that you (or your pet) would tackle down an opponent and neutralize him, but at the cost of being locked out of normal combat yourself. As long as the cc works, neither you nor the target can move and use your regular skills, but you can use a punch auto attack for some medium/small damage while your target is defenseless himself.

The other benefit of using tackle over much less troublesome cc would be longer duration then for example daze or stun (let’s say 5secs for self made tackles and 3s for ranger pet doing the tackling on average) and inability to free yourself with a stunbreaker.
Tackle is either stopped during it’s startup animation with blinds, blocks, interrupts, evading or stability, or you’re in for some up close and personal never asked for.

Any skill that would be a tackle should be a leap (and leap finisher ofc), with rather visible tell, but not the longest one ever. This is a cc meant for quick reaction and stopping a disaster before it hits. Like stopping an enemy player that is about do down or stomp your teammate. catching and pinning to the ground a stray opponent that is about to get to strategic point.

A 600 range and 3/4s cast time seem fair to me.

Ps. i can already imagine the “punch” animations for attackers. Asuras jump stomping their victims, Norn wrestle stomping, charr clawing their victims, humans dealing normal punches, and sylvari…hmm who knows?

I want a-net to give us new pvp achievement “bird hunter”. For every wings backpack player killed you progress on this achi:>

Seriously though, we got so many “crows” and “ravens” in there now I’m glad they shut it off. Little more and it will turn into agry birds, or “bird wars 2”.

Their steam is now into demo, which will take roughly next 10 days. After that they’ll likely get back to feeding us some actual new tidbits of info.

If we look at silverwastes and dry top which are said to be the closest to what HoT will bring you can see they;re build to last. Many may rush through them, but to get everything they have to offer it’ll either take some hardcor e playing and a lot of it, or a looong time of casual, but constant play. So i think for the speedies there it’ll be 2 months or so, for regular folks half a year to year, depending on their pace.

In Silverwastes i can’t do what should be most natural to a ranger – climb a wall to snipe mordrem from above, yet having my pet down below getting their attention and using it’s skills in direct combat. Nope, pet doesn’t get the idea of door/teleport outside the wall. It just stands next to me, being useless…

Maybe i’ll try guard shout before i enter fortress, that i’ve yet to test, though it’s a waste of a slot skill..

I got a petition of my own: More Evon Gnashblade!