Guild Wars 2

Spvpers think wvwers get all the attention, and wvwers think spvpers get all the attention. The truth is both groups get shafted in favor of pve.

I don’t think many wvwers actually want the league system. It doesn’t make sense there. They are going to be significantly rewarding servers simply for their population and coverage, which is exactly what wvwers wanted to avoid. This league system is just another example of anet ignoring everything the community asks for and instead coming up with something out of left field that no one even wants.

I think the pvp devs have forgotten D/D exists. They use S/D to say the class is fine, and say they’ll be buffing staff to be more viable, but never any mention about the state of D/D. It is so rare to see a D/D in spvp/wvw now. Almost all eles have switched to the other weapons. I see as many staff eles as I do D/D eles. But are they going to give the elementalist the class wide improvements that are needed so all weaponsets can be viable? Nope. They’re going to give staff a couple superficial buffs and call it good.

The most depressing thing about this game is that it has so much potential but everything it could be is kitten ed away by these clueless, skillless, incompetent developers who shouldn’t have been let anywhere near a project of this scale. I think these guys will be in for a real surprise when an actual PVP mmo comes out and their numbers stop looking so good when they are actually competing instead of getting a free ride.

It’s nice that staff is getting some buffs, but I’m annoyed that they are limiting ele improvements to just the one weaponset. I don’t want to see the devs calling all elementalists perfectly fine just because they threw a bone to staff.

This is why I said I would wait for results before changing my opinion of anet. It isn’t hard to make a big post saying how much you care and how hard you work. It’s a lot harder to actually deliver on it. You actually think three months between balance patches is acceptable? And you actually expect people to believe you are dedicated to pvp?

Riot has the TM on Soon. Maybe you guys should submit a request for “No, that’s next patch.”

Balance changes are easy to apply. It’s the testing that takes time. You know. All the testing Anet does before making balance changes. Making sure they catch the big problems before they go live and completely kitten up the game. Real serious stuff.

Balance doesn’t matter for choosing what you play if you are just looking for what you enjoy. You’ll have more fun on a weaker character you like than a stronger character you don’t. Pick what you enjoy and play it, balance is always changing (even if anet is the slowest company I’ve ever seen in that regard).

The sad part about this is that, I think it was Jon Sharp, made a comment along the lines of ‘overall the spvp population is growing, so if some players leave, oh well.’ And the fact that among those players leaving are most of the best and most competitive players in the game doesn’t seem to matter to him. He just shrugged it off like it didn’t matter and they were just leaving for personal reasons that didn’t reflect upon the game at all.

That kind of attitude is why anet doesn’t get anything done that actually matters. They have their gameplan, and they stick to it 100%, ignoring everything the community asks for, and then they make up excuses for why it’s the players’ fault they don’t like the results.

Allie Murdock.8152:

In one year, we’ve seen Custom Arenas, Spectator Mode, Solo and Team Arenas, Paid tournaments come and go, Permanent stops, new maps, and many, MANY QoL issues addressed. Not to mention the many changes coming in from the Balance team.

You know why there’s a disconnect between your long list of stuff and players saying you haven’t done anything in the past year? Because with all those things, the game hasn’t actually improved very much.

Custom arenas? I mean I guess they’re cool and all, but they’re not much different than old hotjoins. You left out the most important feature people were looking for from them (turning off nodes).

Spectator mode? Does anyone actually use that outside of tournaments? It’s only available in hotjoins, which isn’t exactly the most competitive of modes and there’s no way to find the top players to watch them.

Arenas? Ya, that was an improvement. Solo queue was definitely needed. But there’s also a real feeling here of… why wasn’t this included at launch instead of the paid tournament system which never had a chance of success?

Permanent stomps? I mean I guess that’s cool; it’s good to get some fluff in pvp. Personally I’ve never even used a rank stomp. It doesn’t have much effect on the game.

New maps? I’m surprised you brought that one up lol. Have you noticed how well those new maps have been received? I think the general opinion of the newer maps ranges from neutral to infuriated.

QoL changes? Hard to say without knowing specifically what you are referring to, but I can tell you as an elementalist, every single time I play this game my experience is worsened by bugs and glitches. Every. Single. Time. So it’s hard for me to get excited about QoL stuff when these problems which have been reported since before launch are still there.

And balance changes? That’s another one I’m surprised you brought up considering the recent events on the forum. Balance has not been getting better over time. It just hasn’t. The gap between worst and best isn’t smaller. There aren’t more viable builds. Certain builds are still complete must haves at high levels. And then the fact that balance changes come so incredibly slowly, and then were halted completely for months due to PAX. No one is impressed by the balance changes.

This is why you so often see players say nothing has changed in the past year. From your perspective, you’ve been working hard and adding tons of stuff, but from the perspective of many players, their experience has not actually improved from your efforts, and the things that more directly impact their enjoyment go largely ignored and unchanged.

This is also why you hear so many players say you completely ignore your playerbase. When people are asking for stuff like new game modes, more frequent and better balancing, improved incentives, reduced rank grind, leaderboard improvements, etc etc etc, you give us Skyhammer, torment, and burning. That doesn’t make people go yay thanks anet! It makes people collectively say ‘wut?’

Grats on being one of the first rr12s.

Churning Earth doesn’t need any buffs. It’s actually a really great ability.

Nice posts, but I’ll wait until I see results before changing my opinions. Words are the easy part.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Super Riceman.8702:

3. Add a way to spectate tournament games but make it delayed by 5 min instead of watching it live.

Since it’s late and I’m here, want to quickly debunk this one. This is like a year+ work minimum for an entire team of engineers, and may not even be feasible in our game engine.

Just to give some perspective on why stuff that often seems so easy to do, often times isn’t being done.

In general great thread though folks, keep the suggestions rolling =)

I don’t understand why your engine is such a limiting factor. Half the time a popular request comes up, the response is ‘our engine can’t handle that,’ or ’we’d have to completely rehaul the engine’. Since launch, so many things have been impossible because of the engine, or have required a massive rework to fix (culling).

Why didn’t you use a better engine? Why is it that this next gen MMO can’t handle the things that have been common place in games for well over a decade? It just doesn’t make sense. Did we get stuck with all these limitations for the sake of the overbearing graphics which most pvpers want massively toned down?

There’s no reason GvG has to be 20v20. It’s ended up there because most of the guilds doing it are transitioning from zerging/zerg fighting and simply don’t know what smaller scale fighting is like. I think if these people played 5v5/10v10 enough to acclimate they’d prefer it, because ya, 20v20 is pretty lame.

So many spvpers here trying to say how much more skilled they are than wvwers lol. I’m a hardcore wvw’er and only some to spvp when I need a break. I decided to do some solo queue a few days ago. While I sadly didn’t make it to top 100 like Xom did, I have been maintaining ~rank 300 playing only what is quite possibly the weakest build in the game right now (glass d/d ele).

This imagined skill superiority just doesn’t exist. I’ve been getting matched up against top 100s all the time, and it’s no harder than fighting top wvwers.

This is one of those things that shows how little Anet cares about the game. Even if they can’t be bothered to fix the water combat as a whole, there is absolutely zero justification for leaving underwater pet rez as it is. It is so unbelievably stupid for it to be the way it is, yet no one at Anet could be bothered to fix one skill that completely ruins any kind of water combat.

No.

The pvp devs don’t give a kitten about trying to improve the game. They know they have a guaranteed paycheck from the pve side of things, so they don’t even have to try. They do just enough to make it look like they’re working, and that’s it. That’s why this next patch is going to be a total disappointment. It isn’t going to have the changes that are needed. It’ll be another nothing patch. Just enough for them to say hey.. we’re doing stuff.. keep sending us that paycheck!.

NovaScience.1096:

Okay, it got deleted. It is in the past, what is spamming the PvP section of the forums going to accomplish? I’ll tell you what: Nothing. It’s done, it’s over. No reason to spam the forums.

-Hemophilia

Considering not a single thing has changed based on the posts here over the last year, if the expectation of such was a requirement for posting, we wouldn’t have much of a forum, would we?

I just want my mobility back. I don’t want a bunch of sustain or tankiness that forces me into a bunker role. I want to be what I was before, a highly mobile mage assassin.

I don’t accept what he said as an excuse for the state of the game. Basically his post can be summed up by ‘things take longer than you may want’. Fine. OK. So you can’t work as quickly as we would like you to. What does that have to do with the constant incorrect decisions being made?

The slow pace of changes isn’t the primary reason people are quitting. People are quitting because they wait forever, and then the change is really bad. People would be willing to wait if they thought their patience would be rewarded, but after a year of disappointments, a lot of people are simply giving up hope that the next patch or the patch after that will actually change anything.

My first though when I saw the title was:

Self Immolation – You save time by killing yourself when attuning to fire.

Darnis.4056:

is it the BEST ? No, but it certainly is not an ele.

:(

zone.1073:

This is not a critique but just my observation from doing arenas. I feel no map presence with eles. If an ele is on my team, I can’t rely on them to finish downed people like before, or stick on targets, or offer me support, because they are so busy trying to keep themselves alive all the time now. I always see eles struggling against the onslaught of conditions put out by necros and rangers that I feel like they aren’t doing much for me when they’re on my team.

If I see an ele on the enemy team, I know that I can pressure the ele easily now, so I always focus the ele and stick on him until he’s forced to leave the team fight. It has become a routine now. Ele in sight? Mark him. Stick on him until he’s dead – rest of the enemy team crumbles due to numbers advantage. These are just my personal observations from arenas so far.

I wish I could say this wasn’t true, but it is. It’s still entirely possible to win in solo queue, but it really comes down to trying to outmaneuver the enemy team rather than beat them straight up. If I end up against a skilled tanky dps, I lose every time. What I try to do is look for the weak point of a team, and exploit it. If there’s a squishy on their team, I stick on them the whole game. If someone isn’t quite up to par, they’re my target every time. Playing ele definitely makes you work on things besides the usual combat skills just because you have to find an advantage to have a chance.

fugazi.5139:

…was following up on your comment. You seem to be like a lot of other people. Settling. This lazy nonchalant attitude is what killed the PvP. You should work for them.

After how many negative posts about anet I’ve made on this forum, and how many downvotes I’ve gotten on reddit for daring to criticize them in that unbelievably pve fanboy heavy forum, it is rather amusing to me that you would say that.

There’s a difference between criticizing things that legitimately should be better, and just kittening for the sake of kittening.

fugazi.5139:

dreztina.4820:

Despite all the problems, it was at least nice to see GW2 in a real tournament setting.

You call that a real tournament setting? It was pathetic. Teams sitting next to each other like that. The crowd was so small. I have been in college lectures bigger than that. It was kitten just like the progress in PvP.

Ya know, there are so many legitimate issues to criticize anet about, I don’t think there’s any point in harping on the more understandable things.

I’m pretty doom and gloom about the ele class, my build in particular, but still, you guys are over stating the balance between these two classes. I’ve fought some insanely good thieves, and rarely do I feel like I didn’t have a chance to win. Usually when I lose, I can point to something and say if I didn’t do this, I would have won.

The only time I feel like I really lost to the character rather than the player is the perma stealth d/p thief that uses ONLY backstab. But those are really long fights and I only stick around for them in duels. If someone is cheesing that hard, I’ll just leave, and I don’t consider it a loss when someone is sitting in stealth for 95% of the fight, attacking once, then stealthing again. Even with that strategy, I’ve only encountered a few d/p thieves over the course of months who could abuse the build hard enough to win without me having a chance.

Ele has some really great tools for fighting thieves. It’s a tough as hell fight, but also fun. Thieves have some glaring weaknesses which you can exploit. Then generally only run one stunbreak, they are usually glassy as hell, and they have to manage their initiative. It’s really kittening hard to beat a top tier thief as an ele, but it’s true in reverse as well.

redslion.9675:

Xsorus.2507:

Rofl, I’ve been laughing at the Warriors on their forums arguing for weeks now that they’re perfectly fine because no one uses them in SPvP and I told them “Just because SPvP is filled with idiots who don’t catch on for month’s doesn’t mean your class is fine, I’ve created builds that they’ve picked up month’s later, whined about, despite counters already showing up and then gotten nerfed because of it”

SPvP will never be on the forefront of creating new builds, because its a dumbed down version of World vs World….People find a meta and stick to it not willing to lose their “ranking” while in World vs World, you’re more likely to lose fights and try something new.

Soooo… even longbow/hammer is OP now?

Or is the problem about healing signet?

Personally I think the regen is the source of the problem with wars. There’s no reason it’s inherently bad for warriors to be able to hit hard, to cc really well, or spam condis. The problem only occurs when they can do those things and also be near immune to damage heh.

I don’t know how anyone hasn’t figured out by now how strong warriors are. They take no damage while hitting super hard and being virtually immune to both hard and soft cc.

The warrior is like Irelia from league. A class made to be unbelievably broken so that it could fight the other stupidly broken things in the game. All of anet’s bullkitten about not wanting power creep, and yet they constantly do just that. Instead of nerfing the stuff that’s a problem, they use RNG to pick a class and buff it up to godmode.

Ether Renewal. I don’t see any choice in the matter. It’s a sad state of affairs really. With the condi meta it’s required to run renewal, but with the popularity of perplexity runes and interrupt builds, using it without stability basically gives a guaranteed interrupt. kitten ed if you do, kitten ed if you don’t.

DevonCarver.5370:

bradderzh.2378:

We, the people of lower tiers, don’t mind testing our metal against tough odds. We do however mind it when the servers with the most players and best coverage gets the best rewards purely for the numbers reason only.

But as you said in another topic, wvw isn’t fair. All rank 12 has to do is throw enough matches to drop to rank 13 and get the best rewards.

So, as I’ve said before, we are still looking into ways to try and alleviate those problems, but that is also what WvW is like right now, so while this season will create new rewards and new incentives to play, it isn’t as though this is a brand new problem. We want to make it so that skill is more important than sheer numbers and we have some ideas. None of them are so easy/safe to implement that they are going to happen in the near-term.

It cracks me up that you keep talking about skill. Everything you have done since taking over has been to actively discourage skilled play in wvw and instead encourage zerging hordes.

This change is no different. What skill is there going to be in matchups that are determined 100% by population? Do you honestly believe the servers are ranked the way they are because of the skill of the players on them?

Epic fights indeed.

Gandarel.5091:

Change the title fast and make it less rageout/offending, because this is spot on and they MUST see this and consider removing hotjoin.

Or they could just fix how points are rewarded.

Honestly, build doesn’t matter all that much in solo queue. I’ve played it for a couple days using only glass d/d ele and am currently a little over rank 200. I know you’ve always been D/D Leafy, try going glass and see how it works out. I’m not saying it’s stronger than bunker, but it’s a lot more fun.

It’s unfortunate that spvpers never experience the competitive side of roaming wvw. The average zerger is bad of course, but the dedicated small scale roamers are as good as spvpers. Obviously skill levels vary by person, but I’ve fought people in wvw that could meet or beat anyone I’ve fought in s/tpvp. I’d think with all the reminiscing about DAoC there’d be more understanding about open world combat, but guess not.

I think at this point there aren’t any fair weather spvpers left. The people still interested in it have stuck through a year of this kitten, one more problem isn’t going to get them to quit, or at least not for long.

Despite all the problems, it was at least nice to see GW2 in a real tournament setting.

evilapprentice.6379:

It doesn’t matter how “great” the impact is, it’s there, and I’m uninterested. Others might feel differently, but that’s how I feel.

In addition, not strictly controlling the possible stat combinations can lead to crazy min-maxing, which isn’t as easy to balance as a limited set of options is.

The stat difference is almost nonexistent and citing balance as a concern when spvp is in the state it is is quite the joke. You don’t have to like wvw, but you should probably learn what you are talking about before acting like an authority on the matter.

evilapprentice.6379:

Lopez.7369:

People still come to this game for PvP. They just play world vs. world.

Unfortunately, WvW is more influenced by PvE than PvP.

Without the automatic gear balance, WvW is just like every other gear treadmill game.

I don’t think you have ever played wvw.

Watching this made me sad. There were actually points of excitement, interesting strategy, and a great level of skill displayed. And yet, it was still pretty bad to watch.

Every teamfight, the effects got so bright that I literally could not discern the characters in the fights. I couldn’t tell what skills were being used. I couldn’t see how the fight was going. I spent more time watching the health bars in the corners than I did the game itself. And the AI. Jesus. Two spirit rangers in the middle of a team fight and that was it. Couldn’t see anything.

I think the things that make GW2 so bad to watch could be fixed, but I have absolutely zero faith that anet will make it happen. I am once again disappointed not by the game itself, but by the fact that a game with such an incredible amount of potential is going to waste because of the studio behind it.

Details for those of us not watching?

Unfortunate but really not surprising. Anet just doesn’t care about the pvp in this game. Making pvp good enough to bring in money is hard and risky, making mediocre pve is easy and a guaranteed revenue stream for years to come. They’ll throw pvpers a bone here and there to keep up the facade, but it will never get anywhere close to the attention pve does.

Cyhann.2609:

Do you expect a dev coming into this thread and typing “ok” or something?

Considering the devs don’t post here, if expecting a response were a prerequisite for making a thread, this board wouldn’t have any posts at all.

Skyhammer is a terrible map. You should feel bad for making it in the first place. You know it’s a bad map for tpvp which is why it’s not in team rotation. I know you want to feel like you didn’t waste your time making it (which you did), but it’s time to stop forcing it on players. Leave that crap in hotjoin.

If a thief is killing you before you can react, react faster.

Detharos.3157:

Had a fun time solo roaming(running my kitten off ) in AR BL tonight. Was a pretty hectic time until I was lucky enough to run into Silent being his awesome self in his usual place.

There was a pretty crazy strong DR ele scout I fought at some point, he didn’t spike me. Dunno who you are, but you sir earned your self a new fan with that absurdly good balance of damage/tankability. Certainly one of the most imposing eles I’ve fought so far.

Was a good fight.

Maguumans shouldn’t kitten about being at a disadvantage. Being the weakest server in the matchup over and over and over is what made Maguuma what it is. Suck it up and kill some baddies.

saiyr.3071:

dreztina.4820:

Throwing a +1 for the Saiyr More Official post.

I knew you loved me <3

I always had a great fondness for kitten .

Edit: Wow lol. I spelled the guild with a 3 instead of the E and it was still censored. Anet really hates you.

Throwing a +1 for the Saiyr More Official post.

Might be a fun week.

Edit: Btw, a short story for Yarr. I was watching the gw2pvptv stream last night, and the streamer was roaming in wvw between tournament queues. He ran into a couple people from Yarr, a guard and a warrior. He got bursted and ran to camp guards. The warrior was a bit silly and tried to kill him with all the guards on him and ended up dying. The guardian waited out of range. Eventually the streamer worked up the courage to go fight him. The guard poo’ed on him pretty hard, but the streamer was able to get away. I said in the stream chat that Yarr was one of the better wvw guilds, and his reply was “he’s not actually good, he just has way better gear.” The streamer was in full exotics. I was amused.

Tellah.8073:

seriously its like an audience demanding angrily that a musician create better songs, and every time the musician creates something the audience erupts in boos and throws trakitten him, and then demands he go back and do it again, and this is supposed to go on for years cause they paid for a ticket one time.

Maybe the musician should stop making crappy songs then.

Ascended items are a grind to keep pve’ers playing, and anet really doesn’t care about the effect it has on wvw’ers. Don’t expect to get ascended weapons from wvw because it won’t happen.

I don’t think you tpvpers understand how much damage you would do to the already limited pvp scene if you removed hotjoin. If people wanted to play tpvp, they would. But they don’t. That’s why the vast majority of spvpers spend most of the time in hotjoins.

Trying to force them to tpvp so you can have lower queue times is both selfish and stupid.

FrownyClown.8402:

well like when i fight against T1 servers they are all horrible roamers so I kind of figured lower tiers might be more fun since I like to roam.

I used to be on Maguuma. When it was a middle tier server, it was great. Decent amount of roamers on most of the servers we were matched against. Then the population blew up and it became a t2/t3 server. The roaming went completely downhill. There were very few roamers on those servers, and most of them were bad, which is why I transferred to DR. There are definitely far more roamers and the level of competition is much higher. The downside is that it can be pretty dead at times, especially with the Living Story crap.

If you are serious about small scale roaming, then absolutely transfer. I would recommend going to one of the middle tier servers though, not one of the lowest. It will provide a better balance of action and competition.