Guild Wars 2

Okay now you’ve lost me. I live in Scotland; why would I want to live the American Dream™? It sounds a bit daft.

citizankane.5723:

It’s not an exploit. It’s just a way to bypass poor design. If your one of the sheeple that believe Anet understands how to balance their own game, then sure I could see how you would label it as an exploit.

Whether or not the design is poor isn’t relevant – that this is a way to “bypass” the design is what makes it an exploit.

Celtus.8456:

I would like to see all pre-match buffing removed. Remove all boons/etc. and reset all cooldowns when the match begins. Then, if people still want to do a pre-game group buffing, it will need to be outside the gate (with the clock running) and with only their intended weapon sets.

Nah, I’m cool with it - though maybe not swapping out weapons or skills during the period. Swapping out weapons negates any relevant cooldowns - Staff Ele lightning field is 40s cooldown, so someone who keeps their staff equipped will lose out on a powerful control skill for at least the start of their first encounter if they pop it to buff the party.

EDIT: oh, and aye I’m totally okay with nerfing the hell out of LF-generating exploits and giving Necromancers a non-zero base lifeforce (and regen/degen to this when out of combat for extended periods).

cheese.4739:

Apparition.1576:

My posts, unlike yours, has statements to support my view/perspective.

<detailed post with statements to support view/perspective>

Apparition, you’ve spoken in this thread since I made my post – are you now just ignoring people who you can’t just dismiss as qq’ers or noobs?

Gervaise.4163:

Is there a way to quickly switch between windowed mode and full screen?

Alt+Enter on windows. Before I had glowy skins (or characters with torches) I had fullscreen gamma turned waaay up and hit alt-enter when going into a dark area ^__^

Yeah this has been an issue since queues were introduced. A simple audio notification would do - like we have for PMs or party changes.

Related: popups that steal focus, such as queue invites and those that pop up at the end of each Frac in FotM: can we please lose these? Make them flashier if you have to, but stop them from removing focus from other things - primarily the chat box!

Apparition.1576:

My posts, unlike yours, has statements to support my view/perspective.

I’ve made, um, quite a few constructive and organised posts about the map, my opinions on it, and what could be done to improve it if it *has* to stay - both in this thread and others. I’m certainly not unwilling to try different setups or learn how to counter enemies... but I have very difinite reasons for wanting this map gone so much.
I’m a bit sick of typing them out, but I guess I can copy a backup of this post somewhere I’ll remember this time.
Anyway, here’re a few of the biggest things I have against Skyhammer:

- Instant-death is something I will never find fun or interesting in the context of GW2 combat. -
The hammer can almost insta-kill alone on a squishy but it’s really the falling-to-death that I mean by this. It doesn’t feel fair to be CC’d into falling to my death, and I don’t find it nearly as satisfying to push/pull someone off as to get a good, proper kill on them. I pvp to fight players, not to get instagibbed by the floor.

- The map is not, and can never be, balanced between classes. -
CC (and mitigating its effects) is just one aspect of combat, and so some classes have higher amounts of this while others get more sustain or more damage or what have you. Combat is meant to be balanced around the profession’s overall set of skills, abilities and features - so when performance on one map is so incredibly focused on a small subset of these things, certain classes (and on top of that, certain build setups on those classes) are going to dominate at all levels of play.
- See also: Spirit Watch, Solo Queue -
Since orbrunning grants so many points, and only one team can orbrun at a time, it pays to bring at least one speedy and tanky character to do this while the rest of the team works on capture points. Not all classes are able to run builds like this, so the map favours certain professions (moreso than the general bunker-tastic conquest mode already does).
It’s rather less of an issue than on Skyhammer, aye, since it doesn’t constantly apply to the entire map - but in soloq, we can’t rely on choosing teams, so the one that happens to have better orbrunners is likely to have an advantage.

- The hammer is far too powerful when it can be held so effectively by one player. -
As has been said in recent posts, the hammer is an interesting mechanics... but I say that it’s still just plain unfair.
It’s an incredibly important thing to control, and is based at the single worst place on the map for CC abuse.
It does huge damage, plus CC, in an area far larger than any capture point - and this damage can’t be mitigated by any conventional blocks, evades or dodges. Squishy builds (usually reliant on evades and dodges) have their defensive abilities pretty much removed against the hammer shot.
The controller has clear views of the entire map - including the only way up to them.
There’s just no way the hammer is fair or balanced in its current state.
- See also: Spirit Watch, Solo Queue -
Hugely important secondary mechanic, shared by both teams, impossible for both to benefit from it at once? So the team that’s better at controlling the orb without decreasing pressure on capture points (i.e. has an orbrunner who won’t die) has an advantage. Potluck in soloq!

- It’s buggy buggy buggy. -
Um. Yeah. Bugs.
Gate to the hammer can instantly teleport players back (and apply debuff preventing re-entry).
The glass platforms mess with teleports, even when there’s sufficient ground to just run around them. They also spin round the camera when they break, for anyone even close to the edge of them.
It’s possible to fall to death and not even die - just be stuck at the bottom of the map, needing to beg the wurms to finish you off.
It’s possible to fall through the bottom of the map (not off the edge/down a hole) and get stuck in limbo, requiring relog.
The map is not fit for ranked play with this many bugs getting reported regularly - the gate and glass panels ones happen to me in most matches!

- So yeah. -
I’ve not explained everything I think about the map, but it has far too many issues for me to ever consider it even slightly okay for ranked pvp.
I still do think that, should we continue to be told "nope, it’s staying in soloq rotation", we should campaign for just one thing:
Make the hammer deal its damage/CC to both teams - friendly fire would be incredibly easy for people to troll with, yes, but it would make soloq matches on the map infinitely more entertaining than the current 4v5s against teams of gimmicky builds (that are completely nonfunctional anywhere else in the game) with your fifth team member sitting afk in base.

Avead.5760:

Steinpilz.5078:

Does anybody use staff in pvp?

Yes but either as a full support with clerics or a hybrid with celestial/
Its actually really good!

Hi guys. Zerk Staff here, consistently in top200 EU soloq. Highest rank 17.

Not been playing much soloq recently (and getting frustrated quickly when I have tried it) due to the combination of being sick to death of Skyhammer, and more recently, sick to death of lagspikes. As you can see, the current leaderboard system with its non-permanent decay means I won’t lose my rank much even if I don’t play often - but I can certainly hold my own with my trusty Staff, and have held my highest rankings while playing several games a day.

Also do alright in teamq, but decent allies I find keep moving off to other games (or just giving up on gw with the complete lack of attention paid to pvp). If anything, Staff is more useful there since you can coordinate with allies and get a better idea of when/where to nuke and make full use of your various fields.

Zerk Staff is *so much fun* and I really wish I’d tried it sooner (only started running my build in about March this year). Cele may be more useful now, but prior to this all the support/bunker options I tried were useless.

206.127.159.255:0

Apparition: you’re trolling a bit too hard now; your posts are getting a bit too silly to be believable. You should pop back to the Warrior forum and tell them that nerfs to hambow and axebow have been confirmed, if you want more entertainment.

tanztante.6532:

if you still had pvp crafting mats, you could have crafted it from MF; but no, it has actually been forgotten by the devs. it will come back in some maguuma track, i am quite sure of that.

All PvP crafting mats were deleted automatically at the same time as unused glory was permanently removed.

Well, not quite, since I somehow still kept half a stack of free tournament salvage tokens in my bank while losing the other four or five stored there… but that was probably a bug. Probably.

I’ve considered this, but not yet run with it - I think we’re just too squishy for the LH.

It may well be worth trying after Feature Pack comes out, though! All CC skills proccing Lightning Rod means the launch, the second Static Field, and the ability to leap through that lightning field will all get that much more powerful in a 6/6/0/0/2 setup - with the Weakness from LR going quite a way towards mitigating damage from foes.

Conncept.7638:

Mattmatt.4962:

eeeeeh

Cheese, aura made through combo arent shared …

I’m positive it does, or at least it did because I’ve tested this many times before. Any time you apply an aura EXCEPT the resurrection aura skill in the arcane works with the aura sharing water trait, and everyone who gains the aura will also gain whatever buffs you gain from the aura through traits.

The share range is really short, and sometimes a little wonky, so it may seem like it doesn’t share on leap finishers, but it does.

Sorry, thoughts are a bit jumbled here, might tidy it up with an edit after this event.

It definitely doesn’t – I just tested again to make sure, doing leap finishers with a Flame Axe (both in and out of combat). I’m currently queued for teq and don’t have a dagger on me, so can’t test Magnetic Leap.

Most traited auras are shared, aye – Tempest Defence and Fire’s Embrace. Arcane Resurrection isn’t, no, and this is likely because it already affects another target besides the caster.

Combo auras are never shared (apart from the innately AoE Frost Aura from blasting ice fields)…. unless the Dagger’s Magnetic Leap can proc Powerful Aura? The trait description does say “Weapon Skills”, but then blast finishers from a weapon into an ice field don’t proc PA so it’d be odd if other weapon combos did cause aurashare to happen.

And yes, all shared auras (through PA procs or those fun, fun ice blasts) proc the Air and Earth auramancy traits. Wheeee! ^_^

aaand back to lagging badly while connected to 206.127.146.42:0

Tao.5096:

GuildWarsPlayer.5608:

If Elementalist could simply weapon swap, it would put the profession on equal ground with the others.

yep.

Also give Polymorph or Supply Crate similar skill as Elite right?

That would finally make ele be on the same balance level as other classes.

not.

Yeah um… this.

We can’t have in-combat weapon swap. Our weapons are already designed to be (and balanced around being) incredibly versatile. We’d be properly broken if we could combo together, say… focus fire field, scepter/focus blast finishers, then D/D blast finishers. FAir burst with the ability to swap weapons? Might stacking on one set then switching to Staff for an AoE nuke?

Some reasonable out-of-combat weapon swap would be really nice, sure, but if it’s ever to be implemented for Ele it might as well be done for everyone else too.

We want build switching! Previously used sets of traits and gear you can save, and quickly and easily switch to OOC. If you don’t have gear with exactly the same stats/upgrade components in your inventory, you can’t load the build, there we go.
Fancier things (like build sharing) could be dealt with later once we had at least this basic feature! -_-

Mattmatt.4962:

Cheese, aura made through combo arent shared ...

Blast finisher + ice field = AoE Frost Aura.

Leap finisher auras? Yeah they’re personal and they’re not shared by Powerful Aura... but (most of) the ones I create are shared automatically. I don’t take that trait in my build! ^__^

My standard trait setup for auramancy support staff is 0/2/2/4/6, with the auramancy traits in Air/Earth, Aquamancer’s Alacrity in Water so I can lay down fields more often, and Arcane Mastery + EA + EA in Arcana - with higher dps gear Blasting Staff might help, but for the vast majority of the stack-and-nuke fights it’s entirely unnecessary and I find lower cooldowns on blast finishers/stunbreak (Arcanes Brilliance, Wave and Shield) much more useful.
I really like it for with PuGs - currently running largely Cleric’s gear/Zerk trinkets but moving to Celestial as I create my ascended set. Might stacking, high fury/prot uptime, shiny heals. Wheeee.

Just need to watch out for Guards spamming light fields everywhere.

EDIT: oh, re-reading Mattmatt’s post it’s clear that you just misunderstood the questions being asked.

If you reapply one aura on top of itself (e.g. create a fire aura while you already have a fire aura active) it won’t stack - but the new aura’s duration will replace the old one’s remaining duration.

Rocketmist was asking if the boons applied by auramancy traits are reapplied if you overwrite an aura; as the buff isn’t being freshly applied in this situation - because one copy of it is alreay active - it’s reasonable to assume that the game might not proc auramancy traits again.

Rocketmist.5436:

Does this stack, like if you shared 3 people a fire aura with your signet active, and you have the trait that gives 3s protection, will you get 12s protection? Or are you talking about the buffs going to them?

…sort of.

I’m not quite sure about signets, but I expect they work similarly to my Staff auramancy:
Blasting an ice field repeatedly will boons for the first aura, and seems to ‘save up’ the boons granted for the other blast finishers’ auras – they get applied at about the time that the original frost aura expires.
If multiple procs of signet fire auras work in the same way, all boons will eventually be applied but they may not all appear at once if a second aura is created before the first expires?

I guess this is good for us, because it means that a quick boonstrip may only get the first set of boons (which will be reapplied a second or two later).
It’s still hella confusing.

chris.6583:

Are you seriously complaining about complaints?? does that makes you feel better than them??

…please stop complaining about the people complaining about people laughing about other people complaining about unreasonable things to complain about.

It makes you look like a noob.

You should l2p and FGS#4 more.

I already use Earth in my zerk Staff PvP build (Ice Bow is far too clunky, and I rarely trust my allies to use the second one well - but the signet gives great single-target control and has a short enough cooldown to be regularly useful).

I am very much looking forward to using it after patch!

An example situation that’s not too uncommon: Thief catches someone with a 1222222, blackpowders, stomps.

With blackpowder’s blind only being applied every 2 seconds, it’ll be much more reliable to get stomp-prevention off on the Thief by clearing blind with a #1 attack first.
Sure, most folks will struggle to prevent a stomp if the Thief immediately Heartseekers into the smoke field... but the increased ini cost means it’s riskier to spam that skill to get someone down, and it’ll take a moment longer to regenerate the ini to then leap -> stealth -> stomp after laying the field. Probably long enough to clear blind and rupt.

This applies to both sPvP and WvW - not sure which it matters more in, but it’s definitley widely used by anyone running D/P in both.

silvermember.8941:

You know, you honestly did not need to make a new thread for this. People are going to whine and cry but that is pretty much standard whenever something is nerfed, it is not a new phenomenon. They are going to cling to every trite and stupid reason why it is a turible idea and you are better off not worrying about it.

I mean what mmorpg forum doesn’t have QQ.

It’s spectacular in this occasion, though, because it’s not really a ‘nerf’ so much as ‘fixing an exploit’.

I honestly find it hilarious that people are so up-in-arms about clearly broken mechanics and unintentional behaviours getting fixed.

Was pretty surprised that more posts weren’t made about the teleport-FGS#4 bugfix, actually. Guess folks were saving up their qq for when this inevitably happened.

NeXeD.3042:

Basically you want it to be easier to target people, essentially making it "easier" maybe the current targeting system is the way it is to make it not quite so idiot proof ad force the player to be active.

No, it’s the way it is because it’s not been improved further yet.

We didn’t originally have player-priority - that was added as a quality-of-life feature and it’s pretty great, especially with all the adds running around. Taking it further and allowing us to choose not to tab-target adds at all? That’s just the next logical step.

It’s hard enough to reliably tab to a player when there are four of them all moving around and some popping in and out of stealth - having to then tab past a bunch of adds is just another of the big clutter issues that this game’s UI has.

A change like this certainly wouldn’t stop players from needing to be ’active’ (whatever that means in this context) but it would definitely make AI-tastic builds feel that little bit less annoying.

SPESHAL.9106:

Here’s a better idea…

Why not allow stealth, immunities, and everything else contest a point???

Then, you will actually see which professions are truly OP for any PvP outside of “contest modes”.

This has to be done sooner or later because they’ve already mentioned implementing non-contest mode PVP.

If they don’t allow everything to start contesting a node, then it will be near impossible to balance the professions for both types of PvP.

Certain professions will either be very OP or UP depending on the type of PvP and corrupt the player base in each mode.

Of course, this is simple common sense…most MMO game developers are pretty stubborn and like to overthink even the most obvious and logical things. (Just look the ridiculous proposal to add torment to an auto-attack.)

The problem with this: contesting points while invulnerable is so strong…

…because it lets you contest points while invulnerable.

Invulnerability means a lot less in open terrain – it keeps you alive for a few seconds, sure, but in that time both you and your foe are free to move around and find the higher ground (or other tactically valuable terrain).
With capture points… neither of you can leave the point. There’s a limited space. Contesting it is really bloody important.

We already have WvW, with almost exactly the same skills and effects as PvP (higher stats, food/other buffs, a couple of slightly different effects). Invulnerability skills work exactly the same there – but in most important fights, there’s plenty of space in which to kite a foe who you can’t damage.

With conquest’s very limited area, that needs to be constantly contested… yeah, invuln gets stupid powerful. The player with invuln is safe, and and their foe has to be somewhere within a small circle and is much easier to land hits on.
Invuln skills have to have some downside to not become OP in such situations.

No matter how invuln skills are balance elsewhere, if they’re going to exist in any game mode that involves standing in a circle… they can’t also contest that circle.

Geiir.7603:

I’m in favor of either taking away all damage immunity skills of any sorts the ability to contest points, or give those skills and stealth the ability to contest. I mean, if a thief stealths and you don’t decap/cap then there isn’t exactly much space where the thief possibly can be, so how hard can it be to keep pressure on him with AoE damage, cleave or some cc? Just my two cents.

Didn’t stealth contest in the past, and you’d get 1-2 thieves holding a WvW camp against many more foes by permastealthing?

Rangers are getting Signet of Stone (finally) buffed so that the damage immunity is baseline for the Ranger.
Signet of Stone’s active effect is basically the same as Endure Pain.

I’d like to see both of these skills lose their ability to contest capture points - right now it’s far too easy for a Warrior running a glassy build to contest a busy point while dishing out dps. Giving zerker Rangers a similar ability? No, thanks.

You’ll want to keep Arcane Wave if you’re Staff - I’m also a fan of the Arcane Brilliance heal. They’re both blast finishers - and the Staff has four different types of combo fields and only one blast finisher on the weapon (Earth #2, Eruption - you’ll tend to need to precast it, then switch to another attunement and lay down your field on top). Stacking might through blasting fire fields should come naturally after a bit of practice, and if you ever need a proper burst of healing, blast a water field.

It’s probably not worth your bother bringing the non-elite elemental along, since your much stronger elite one should be recharged every time you really need to use it - but for an ally, the elite Glyph is preferable to the Hounds of Balthazar, in my opinion. It’s so versatile, with options for AoE dps or single-target dps or support or tanking, and the racial elites tend to have longer cooldowns than I’m happy with.

For your third utility... iunno, it depends what you want from it. Signet of Air is probably a solid choice for an open-world build - it gives a healthy passive speed boost, and has the shortest cooldown of all our stunbreaks.

If you’re going to run a legendary in sPvP, it has to be Kraitkin, Kamohoali’i Kotaki or Frenzy. When folks see you with one of those on Foefire they’re going to be seriously impressed.

Failing that... take Rodgort. You deserve some respect if you can stomp skilled foes while wielding that - or in the case of Mesmers, if you can be at all useful outside of a sloooow 1v1 decap with it.

style.6173:

That said, I don’t think warriors needed the adrenaline change. They just a small change. When under the effects of endure pain, it should be not possible to capture or contest a point.

I’m really hoping that with Ranger signets getting thier (admittedly much-needed) buff, extremely common use of the active from Signet of Stone along with all the Wars running Endure Pain will get this change to finally happen.
It’s an invulnerability skill, it should be treated as such – at present it’s far too easy for Warriors to contest a point for an extended period while running squishy builds that pump out dps.

There needs to be some downside to being invulnerable – everyone else risks losing their capture point, so why don’t they?

manveruppd.7601:

cheese.4739:

the PvP community definitely wouldn’t be happy if HotM filled up with non-PvP players when it became a better place to afk than LA.

Eh? Why? I can understand if Anet doesn’t want them going there to use bank access for free, but what do you care? Are they lowering the average l33tness of the place or something?

And that fewer people are likely to be around for any one lfg, if a lot of the shard isn’t PvP players? And spam in mapchat? PvE players are rather more likely to attract goldsellers, too – right after the megaserver update, HotM and WvW maps were the worst places for goldselling spam, I guess because they’re easy to get to for new characters. I don’t think we really want that again, if there’s new incentive to constantly spam the map.

Really, though, I’m coming at it assuming that the main reason we don’t already have this (and the reason we lost our Forge) is because the devs thought it would be too easy for PvE players to pop in to access things. This is why I want to find ways to restrict that access for people who’d just come in and leave, but keep everything free (and simple) for PvP players in the PvP hub.

Esplen.3940:

Mmm, I’d like to note that the Guild Registrar gives access to the Guild Bank, not the Personal Bank. You still have to go to “Your World” or an upgraded Keep for access to a Personal Bank.

This was what I thought – but there’s a small drop-down menu in the upper left corner (just above the list of items in your inventory) from which you can select your personal account bank. Open your inventory in a seperate window, and you can move things about.

Stephapanda.5804:

Why everything in this game always has to revolve around PvErs baffles me. A reasonable request was made for a bank with many fair reasons as to why there should be one in the first place. Now it "shouldn’t happen" because PvErs. Give me a break.

You open your response saying that I’m clearly not reading things, then completely ignore my post - and the several others that I’ve made in this thread. Please read my whole post this time - you’ll probably find that we actually want exactly the same things (though you may disagree about how best to implement changes).

A few things that you seem to have missed:

I am very much in favour of a bank in the Heart of the Mists.

I am very much against making this bank require payment of any sort from PvP players.

I noted (with an edit) that it’s always possible to access the trading post in all WvW maps - though I was unaware until this thread that it was possible to access the account bank in WvW (if repping a guild with a bank upgrade). That moving things to inventory appears to require the use of two windows is... strange, but as this access seems to have been pretty common knowledge for a while I guess it’s not an exploit.

I was already aware that it’s possible to leave WvW to return to original location.

I was also already aware that it’s very rare for all WvW maps to be full, apart from occasionally at reset... or during WvW seasons. Gunnar’s Hold (certainly not a full pop server) regularly had queues for all four WvW maps during peak times last season.

Another thing to note (that I’m not sure has actually been brought up yet) is that WvW has a pretty low inactivity timeout, and Heart of the Mists doesn’t. While this isn’t important for people quickly popping to the bank, it *is* for making the place easy to hang out in.

The high inactivity timeout, in combination with the current ability to port in from anywhere and straight back out to where you came from - is why the restrictions are "because of PvErs".
With a bank in HotM, PvE players could just port there from their favourite farming spots, hang out with friends, use bank/TP/etc... then instantly port back to where they were. This is why we’re unlikely to get bank access in our PvP hub unless it involves some restriction to make it inacessible to non-PvP players - or at least less desireable to use than a port to a city or a banking consumable.

We want the bank and hopefully other things for the benefit of PvP players, yes - but ANet likely don’t want to give PvE farmers (another?) easy place to pop to for bank access, and the PvP community definitely wouldn’t be happy if HotM filled up with non-PvP players when it became a better place to afk than LA. The majority of discussion in this thread has been working out how to stop PvE players from swarming the PvP hub, not how best to pander to them and create shiny things for them.

The latter half of my post actually considered ways to add restrictions that would stop PvE players from just popping by; I mention the purchasing/earning access thing (which I’m against) and then another solution, which doesn’t impact on PvP players at all: removing the ability for players to return to their original PvE location. No longer can PvE players pop in and out again, so we don’t have to worry about a bunch of PvP lurkers invading the PvP space... and no daft tokens or rank requirements or tracks that need fiddled about with.

tl;dr: I want my bank access! I want the Forge back! I want a trading post! I just don’t want the Heart of the Mists filled with non-PvP players!

Zaxares.5419:

(You could of course just turn it off, but that kind of defeats the purpose of Standard Models.)

Aye, then you’re just fighting two identical tiny Asuran or hueg Norn Mesmers!

(this actually doesn’t happen that often… but I still occasionally run into premades consisting of lll l ll llll l l and their friend ll l l lll l iI llll)

Shockwave.1230:

2-3 seconds of a 15 minute match is now gamebreaking?

How about if you’re holding mid, and you get an unexpected burst in your face because you expected bunker? Let’s say someone’s running dps Guard with a Staff, so they look like their team’s bunker when between points but pull a surprise medi+GS burst out of their bum when they get close?
Boom! Lost control of important capture point, when you saw a foe you should’ve recognised from earlier encounter in the match. Now their actual bunker can come in and hold it.

There’ll always be player names I guess, but I still feel that for identical classes we need something unique on each character. Armour shade was my first thought, but different armour pieces could work too. Hm.

Definitely not tied to ‘build’ though (be this traits, amulet, weapons). Just…. no.

Yeah, things like bank access tokens/contracts and similar would still be occasionally useful for convenience in dungeon/fractal instances, but would lose an awful lot of their value related to general open-world use.

I first thought the best way to deal with it would be to only allow folks to *enter* HotM from LA... but later someone mentioned the leaving restriction instead and that makes so much more sense. We should be able to enter the PvP hub from anywhere, and if that involves abandoning a PvE area, so be it!

tanztante

first off, I personally cannot understand the need for some sort of restricted access at all. like it has been stated over and over: you can already go to the mists and get free bank+tp access by using the LA portal. you can also go to the borderlands, that’s also free, although sometimes there’s a queue, but then again, you can walk up to the nearest asura gate and go to any city you want - also free of charge.

tanztante: using the PvP window, it’s possible to enter the HotM from anywhere in the open world... and leave HotM to exactly where you started, be it the top of a jumping puzzle or next to a contested waypoint in Orr.
The Heart of the Mists is a pretty unique map in that you can stay in it while logged out (unlike WvW/instances/PvP maps) but it’s not considered part of the open world.

Yes, the WvW maps also allow you to return to your previous location, but as you say they can have queues and there’s no guarantee of access to what you want outside of your home borderlands (where crafting/banking/tradepost are aways available). EDIT: okay, trade post is always accessible, but that’s about it - and that’s most likely because players using the trade post are constantly sinking gold away.

If players go through the portal to get to LA, they lose the ability to return to their previous location, since their open-world location is then set to Lion’s Arch.

If we had free-for-all bank (and/or tradepost and/or mystic forge...) access in HotM, it would, as some have said, become a PvE hub for players with characters parked in good farming spots.

One way to stop this from happening is putting restrictions on access to any NPCs in HotM - a one-time fee or purchase; a rank requirement; a small transaction every time it was accessed; something linked to reward tracks giving regular access to PvP players.

Another way is to put a restriction on the ability to enter from anywhere and freely return to exactly the same spot - this is my favourite solution to the problem, and it could easily enough be implemented is by only allowing players to leave HotM through the Lion’s Arch portal (having removed the ’Leave the Mists’ button from the PvP window).
With this in place, the PvP hub couldn’t be used for ’perfect’ access to utilities - anyone who entered, in an attempt to do so, would only be able to exit to LA... where they could’ve just waypointed to get at the useful NPCs anyway.

Eurantien.4632:

There is no way of telling that right now besides what weapons they are using… Isn’t that enough?

Yeah there aren’t many builds that run with similar weapons, so in (most) cases what they’re holding – which will be easily identifiable, with standard models – should give you a basic idea of their build.

The Mesmer problem still exists, though – two completely identical players spamming clones everywere? It’s bad enough that their icons can completely obscure the action on the map – it’d be really nice to have tinted hues for ally and foe icons, and foe armours, if there are duplicates on the team.

Lostwingman.5034:

Sagat.3285:

cheese.4739:

Fire Shield: yes! A blind, or that retal, would be pretty nice - we have enough access to burning, and plenty of ways to gain might, but relatively few useful defensive options related to fire.

So other classes shouldn’t have access to burn and might aura just because ele has enough? It’s good seeing people seeing people care about aura but at least keep an eye on all the classes that can gain fire aura instead ele especially in party when ele shares a fire aura when I’m using condi necro it’s great in www.

Why not had more lighting fields maybe on engi.

Maybe a defined ele class skill type shouldn’t be a combo result as well then?

Anyone with an Ethereal field and a Leap or Blast finisher can get Chaos Armor... but that’s a Mesmer effect, not a general effect that Mesmers just happen to have good access to (including a weapon skill).

Other classes can create Ele auras with combos, sure, but that doesn’t mean the auras themselves shouldn’t be based around what’s good for Ele (while making sure they don’t get OP in the hands of others). The Fire Shield really does stick out as the only offensive aura, and it really would be nice to have some defense on the Focus’ fire attunement (or maybe even properly defensive signet builds with that Fire IX trait!).

To obtain a Fire Sheild without an Ele present, you need a fire field and a leap finisher. The only classes that don’t have the field but do have the finisher are Mesmer and Thief - and neither of these has a lot of access to burning. The rest (Guard, War, Engi, Ranger) can apply ample burning themselves.

As the only way for a Necro to reasonably get a Fire Shield is through an auramancy Ele... I don’t see the access to either might or burning as all that relevant.
The Ele should be able to stack hefty amounts of AoE might anyway, and while the extra damage applied by a condi-spec’s burning is significant compared to non-condi-spec, it’s pretty likely to get overwritten by other folks’ conditions if you’re in a party all sporting these auras?

Brewergamer.8357:

cheese.4739:

The issue here is that we can freely travel to and from HotM without losing our place in the open world - not just down to the waypoint, but the exact location.
Adding bank and TP would mean that a large number of waypoint costs could be ignored (by people popping to LA or otherwise wp’ing to use such services) and certain gemstore items/high-value tradepost items (perma/single-use bank access etc.) would lose a lot of their value (so bring in fewer gem purchases/be less of a gold sink).

I remember when people like you were telling me “NO!!! COSMETIC UNLOCKS WOULD MAKE ARENANET GO BANKRUPT IRL!!!!” we have the wardrobe system and everything is going fine.

Once again, people can ALREADY teleport to the mists and use the Lionsarch portal to get instant, free access to a bank and trade post. Your argument is once again invalid.

EDIT: I wanted to also include that people can also already teleport to WvW and get instant, free access to a bank and tradepost.

You seem to be completely missing the point, so I’ve highlighted the important bit: going through the portal isn’t just the minor inconvenience of a loading screen, it also sets the player’s open-world location to LA, so they can’t instantly port back to where they were – they’ll have to pay waypoint costs and maybe run for a bit to reach their target destination.

Brewergamer.8357:

You are VERY uninformed and need to actually discover things before you go posting acting like you know things when you don’t.

Please don’t be obnoxious to people – especially about their ‘ignorance’ when you’re not even reading posts properly before replying to them with sarcasm and unpleasantness. This thread has been surprisingly civil so far, and it’d be great to keep it that way.

manveruppd.7601:

More importantly, bank items and TP access items don’t kick you out of instances like dungeons or fractals, which porting to the Mists would.

This is kinda true… but between dungeon paths the party always has to leave the instance, and folks could pop to HotM then to bank stuff.
Fracs does involve completely leaving the insance, aye… are they party-based now, or (still?) owned by the player who first entered the fractal hub? It’s inconvenient to leave the map, but relogging character does just plonk you in LA anyway so access to HotM isn’t all that relevant.

Lord Kuru.3685:

style.6173:

esports will be a fail until we can get balance updates faster than once every 5 to 6 months. The balance team really needs to step up their game.

Wasn’t the last balance update in December; over 8 months ago?

Feature patch in April counts – runes/sigils are a serious chunk of balance, and a number of skills and traits were changed too.

We even got hotfixes for Strength runes and ILoveMyParrot runes! Not nearly frequent enough balance patches to stop the meta from getting stagnant again (especially in soloq, where strong individual builds stand out all the more) but it’s much better than nothing at all.

Aaand with feature patch coming in September… that will have been 5 months between proper balance patches. That’s too long.

Sins: I totally didn’t know about the Guild Registrar having personal bank access - thanks for that!

Can folks remember what things were like during the WvW seasons, though? Queues were definitely up much more often during those, though I can’t really remember by how much.

It really needs to lose *all* instant-death mechanics to be fair in any way at all.

And the hammer? Both Spirit Watch and Skyhammer have a single, shared secondary objective that’s important throughout the whole match. These are easily the two most disliked maps for competitive play.
It needs to be much, much less powerful - or include some risk. I like the idea of friendly fire applying to the hammer shot, so that allies caught in the AoE are affected in the same way as enemies.

...oh yeah. And the bugs. All the ones relating to glass panels (which shouldn’t exist/be breakable anyway), along with the gate bugs, really define this map as one unfit for purpose.

Stephapanda.5804:

runeblade.7514:

Because it is a free bank. Players can just port to HoTM and go straight back to the last place they went to.

... And the same can be done by porting into WvW, but I haven’t seen anyone EVER complain about that. Like, not even being sarcastic. I have yet to see one complaint about it. Look, we’re back to square two!

Actually WvW has been brought up several times in this thread - on the higher population servers, at peak times, all four WvW maps with bank/crafting/TP/forge access are usually full and require queueing. The worlds with the most players *would* gain quite a lot from this particular don’t-lose-your-map-position bank.

Add to that the fact that in all maps apart from home borderlands, it’s entirely possible that your bank won’t be accessible due to lack of upgrade/enemy holding keep (and that the mystic forge isn’t guaranteed in[b]any[b] map...) and it becomes much more relevant that there would be permanent, free, always-available banking and forging and whatever else we got in the HotM.

Really, unless we pay for it (ewwww no, I hate this, please no) or we filter by PvP rank (which won’t really help; it really doesn’t take that long to hit 80 now), the only way to stop people from using HotM as just a use-anywhere banking/forging station is to gate entry or exit from it. This can be by charging to enter or leave (which doesn’t fix the ’get back to exactly where you started’ problem) or by only letting them freely move in one direction (can enter from anywhere/leave to LA or can only get in through LA/leave to... LA).

My favourite solution is definitely to allow players to enter from anywhere in the open world, but only leave to Lion’s Arch - through the portal in the HotM, or through the button in the PvP window that currently returns players to their previous location.
It makes it impossible to just pop in to ’use the facilities’ (and those who try to will just end up in LA where everything already is anyway), but regular customers who are there for PvP won’t have the inconvenience of mapping out and in again whenever they want to manage their inventories.

EDIT: oh, I forgot about the other method that’s been suggested - give PvP players tokens through reward tracks with which to access HotM conveniences. I’m against this because it’s unnecessary hassle, and would be a nuisance to balance - how many matches/how frequently in each track do these tokens get awarded? How many uses do they have/how long do they stay valid for once used? I don’t feel that it’s worth the effort of making bank access ’fair’ through this system when there are, in my opinion, much simpler ways to go about it.

The same is true of Mesmer GS #1 and Scepter #3 beam skills - they’ll hit all foes that are between caster and target, but none behind them. You need to target a farther away enemy if you want it to hit multiple foes.

I think a couple of piercing arrows/bolts also behave like this, although most will just carry on along their trajectory after hitting targeted foe rather than stop like the beams.

Okay, so I like your idea for Shocking Aura, since we’re kinda lacking in decent rupts for that new Air GM... maybe move up the Glyph trait and give it some actual functionality (AoE pair of boons or something when you cast a glyph? Nobody would be taking it until other Glyph traits were added anyway ;p ).

For Frost Aura... it’s effectively already accessible to Staff, with a blast finisher + ice field (also those summoning Ice Elementals but they’re... less reliable). I don’t think it needs much more accessibility, being on two weaponsets already.
I really do like running auramancy traits and blasting ice field on a stacked group - can get very high protection/swiftness/fury uptime and still maintain high might stacks, and don’t need to take Powerful Aura for it!

Fire Shield: yes! A blind, or that retal, would be pretty nice - we have enough access to burning, and plenty of ways to gain might, but relatively few useful defensive options related to fire.

killahmayne.9518:

Everywhere else it is completely useless.

Oi! It lets you do the chilling part of Goemm’s Lab really easily since the condition doesn’t affect you (which would both chill you and put you in combat). Not having to time some jumps for that jumping puzzle is great!!!

(there are actually a few other PvE places where it’s useful – like world bosses that spam fear – but yeah it’s not practical to take with you in the open world compared to just about anything else)

Quick Mouse.7635:

Muchacho.2390:

Are the negative modifier also capped at 100%?

I believe the resulting +/- duration is capped at +/-100%, but anything before that still counts. For example, if you have +133% duration and your foe has -100% duration, the result is +33% duration. However if you have +133% and your foe has no condi reduction, you will only hit +100% duration. Similarly, if the resulting duration is greater than -100%, the resulting condi duration will be 0 seconds.

I highly expect this to be the case with conditions as with movement speed – speed buffs are capped at +33% (and I think the slowest you can be made to move, without being immobilised entirely, is with chill at -66%), but higher values are still used when calculating actual movement speed – only the strongest buff and debuff are compared, and if someone running with +100% buff (effective 33%) gets chilled they keep their max speed.

If you manually leave the arena match at the end (in the same way as you leave Hotjoin - with the exit icon in the corner or through the PvP window) you’ll be taken back to where you started.

You’re only pulled to HotM if you wait it out until you get kicked from the map.

Brewergamer.8357:

Once again.. no one that has the slightest bit of intelligence is going to waste gold on using a bank in the mists if they can just use the portal to Lionsarch and use that bank. It’d be a waste of effort on Arenanet’s part to implement such a complex system if it won’t be used. Just put a bank and tradepost in the mists. Stop trying to overcomplicate it.

The issue here is that we can freely travel to and from HotM without losing our place in the open world – not just down to the waypoint, but the exact location.
Adding bank and TP would mean that a large number of waypoint costs could be ignored (by people popping to LA or otherwise wp’ing to use such services) and certain gemstore items/high-value tradepost items (perma/single-use bank access etc.) would lose a lot of their value (so bring in fewer gem purchases/be less of a gold sink).

While restricting travel to and from HotM wouldn’t really matter on most worlds (where there’s at least one WvW map always open to travel to that can provide some or all of the useful stuff we want), for higher-population ones with very active WvW communities the HotM would possibly become a far too convenient stop-off point – this is likely why we’ve not been given them already, and why our Forge access was removed.

manveruppd.7601:

cheese.4739:

I’ll briefly repeat my suggestion from earlier in the thread: just don’t let people portal straight to Heart of the Mists from PvE; make them use the portal in Lion’s Arch.

We should be able to join/queue for games, and edit our PvP build, from anywhere in the open world, but have to waypoint to LA and then to HotM to access the bank/TP/whatever in HotM (that we could’ve just used in LA anyway).

I agree with you that the pvp build window should be integrated as a tab in the pvp window, but I think it’s important for players to be able to jump into HotM from anywhere. Helps them find people to play with, test builds on the dummies while they’re queueing. And it encourages new players to jump in and try it out.

I think that Asomal.6453’s suggestion from earlier (be able to go to HOTM from anywhere, but only leave through the portal), would work better, but only if pvp matches were changed so they dump you wherever you were before the match started when they ended (ie. HOTM if that’s where you entered from, or pve if that’s where you were when the queue popped).

Restricting access in one direction sounds reasonable enough – though the current system for leaving matches (can only leave Hotjoin to where you came from; if you manually leave at the end of a ranked match you go back to where you were; if you wait a bit after a ranked match you are automatically taken to HotM) is quite reasonable in my opinion.

Another option: add a ~5s waypoint charge to leave HotM and return to where you started. Portal to LA is always there (and free), but the option to immediately get back to wherever you were is still available – but expensive enough that it’s usually cheaper to have just gone to LA for TP/bank/forge if that’s all you planned to do.

Can y’alls stop complaining about the lack of new ones, now?

Unless it sucks and gives no good loot, of course. Then I’ll happily join in with the complaining!