Guild Wars 2

Nobody really believes the stat differences on Ascended items don’t matter. It’s just a lazy rebuttal. From our own play experience, we know the difference between Rare and Exotic matters. We don’t all stop at getting Masterwork items. Many players skip going the rare tier at 80 just to exotic and the further stat increases. Obviously these stat differences matter to people and they will matter more once the entire line of Ascended gear is out there.

It also really hurts horizontal players like myself. The time invest to get multiple sets of Ascended items with different stat distributions for different builds is simply too much for people interested in horizontal progression. The amount of time needed to get one set tip-toes the subject of grind by itself, but multiple sets is no doubt a grind and something we don’t want.

I ask this of people defending Ascended gear: Would it hurt you if their stats were normalized outside of Fractals? Would it hurt you if they became much, much easier to attain? Would it not improve your experience if these changes were made? What do you get by resisting a change for the better?

I would be very happy if they removed the stat differences on Ascended items or if the stat differences only applied to Fractals.

I say this having spent time doing Fractals and Dailies, along with blowing near 10 gold to craft an Ascended backpack. I wouldn’t care that I somewhat wasted my time to get those items if I knew I wouldn’t need to waste my time to get those items for my alts in the future. I would just be happy to have horizontal progression restored to the game.

I would be happy to know my friends who took a break from the game won’t be months behind me in gear. I would be happy to be able to refocus my in-game resources towards gear for multiple builds rather than having to forego that to apply all my currency towards Ascended gear.

Temple of Dwayna drop or Mystic Forged?

I guessed two right, made a little dough. Harpies seem to be the best bet.

I haven’t spent as much time in sPVP as I was hoping to before the game was launched. So count me as someone who was looking forward to the pvp of this game and had all his beta fears come true when it sort of fluttered out.

So as a GW1 pvp fan, my questions sort of pertain to the issues I saw in beta and the sort of things that would attract folks like me back to this part of the game.

A major draw for me in the first Guild Wars was the multitudes of ways to play each class and the way builds were made, tweaked and grew over time. GW2 is stuck in a meta of bunker v burst, with a touch of roamer, but roaming is normally tied to burst as well.

My questions then!

The two things that I saw getting in the way of build diversity and playstyle diversity was the singular Conquest mode featuring a Capture Point ruleset that made only two things vitally important: Staying on a point and Killing/Getting someone off a point.

The new map features a bit of CTF playstyle that moves away from this, so it’s good to see the game brancing away from Capture Point.

1. Will we see more variety of rule sets? Will there be more movement towards scenarios that allow greater build diversity? Will a map like Foefire be remade into a more pure GvG type map?

2. The other thing getting in the way of build diversity are the lackluster and uninteresting traits. I have felt a trait overhaul has been needed since beta. How far down the road is this change in coming? Will we see less vertical increase traits and functionality traits, and more traits like “bombs heal” “such and such reflects projectiles” which offer new ways to play with the class?

3. sPVP’s Conquest mode felt like the product of a compromise. It felt like you guys were trying to please casual players, pvp fans, esports companies, esports broadcasters, and esports watchers all at once. Do you feel the early e-sports focus was a mistake? It seems a better approach would have been to offer a pvp that wasn’t trying to please so many different needs and instead offer more variety of pvp, and then allow the community to become an e-sports tradition on its own terms. Did the e-sports focus get in the way of the joy of the sPVP design?

That’s a ridiculous parameter to set Phoenix. The game is full of small guilds with maybe 10 active members tops. The game is full of mostly dead guilds with 1-3 members who can’t get their friends to log in anymore. Those are small guilds. Small real friendly guilds.

Any guild that has 50 active daily players is medium sized at the least.

Don’t mistake absolute dependency for synergy.

Synergy is like the way that a certain healing class synergizes well with a certain melee class in pvp. There’s dependency there, but that’s not what causes the synergy. If you played BC Arenas, then you saw Warlock/Priest a lot or you saw Resto Druid/Warrior a lot, and Disc Priest/War/Shaman a lot in 5 mans. Warlock and Priest synergized because of fears and shadow damage synergy. Resto Druid/War worked because the Druid could help CC and snare enemies for the War to hit.

In GW2 terms, a Hammer Warrior and a Support Ele can synergize well with blast finishers in water and fire fields for both healing and might stacks. Now change the Hammer Warrior to a Hammer Guardian and you have similar synergy, but the Guardian’s light fields may start to overwrite the Eles combo fields and you have more to worry about when trying to work together in synergy. A Phantasm-based Mesmer with a Staff synergizes well with a condition Necro because the Necro’s massive conditions boost the iWarlock’s damage. They are not absolutely dependent upon each other, but their synergy is very good.

I don’t play a staff Guardian while leveling my Guardian, but when I step into WvWvW, I put on Staff and Scepter while changing my utilities because my solo style of all-melee hammerbros doesn’t work as well with large WvWvW group fights. Meanwhile, the poor damage of staff that keeps me away from it while soloing isn’t a problem when I’m running witha group, but all the buffs and control staff provides really comes forward when I have those others around me.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Geikamir.6329:

How bout give everyone equal stats and let skill and effort decide who deserves to win/move through content?

Because, generally speaking, those games tend to turn away far more people than they keep. They can be beautiful, wonderful games . . . but if people can’t play them then they won’t.

I don’t buy into that. I feel the trend is moving far more towards horizontal than vertical progression. TF2 very active and the biggest online gaming phenomenas are MOBAs based around easy to attain progression and longevity established through the gameplay and variety of choices rather than power levels.

There is coordination and depth, but not every encounter in the game reveals that these things exist in the game.

I would like to tell every “no trinity ruins the game” person that they’ve been playing trinity based games for many years. When you’ve been playing games based around one set of rules, you get extremely familiar with those rules and can recognize and negotiate an encounter very quickly due to this familiarity. On top of that, many of the MMO games based upon this ruleset have add-ons that tell when to do what, what everyone else is doing, and how to basically play and read the encounter. If that’s not enough, you have detailed websites with boss encounter diagrams and suggestions.

A non-trinity based system is instantly unfamiliar after all of that and everything you are presented with will not parse as quickly through your mind as a trinity-based system and encounter would. However, do not mistake a lack of familiarity with a system for the absence of a system.

darkace: This has nothing to do with entitlement. The term entitlement bares a different meaning and condition than how you are using it.

stof.9341:

Jornophelanthas.1475:

source: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Guild-Quest-Update-concerns-me/first#post1398267

The bold text is my own emphasis. Apparently, a blog post is coming. So it’s time to end the “this issue is being ignored” argument.
(I’ll repeat my prediction that this blog post will bear Chris Whiteside’s name.)

Also, I’ll repeat that the post linked below (on page 14 of this thread) is well worth reading:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/New-guild-missions-opinions-concerns/page/14#post1522077

You are aware that post was done a month ago, long before the guild missions were released and he was talking to a concerned player that predicted small guilds demises due to an unbalanced system?

Yes, it’s important to note this. Anthony’s comment was made pre-patch. I don’t know why it doesn’t line up with the reality of the situation now, but it was not an after-the-fact response.

Behellagh.1468:

etiolate.9185:

Behellagh.1468:

MMOs have time sinks/gated content and will always have time sinks/gated content because unlike single player games, their income relies on players hanging around. Some have monthly subscriptions, and item shop or both but they rely on having an active population spending real money to keep the servers up, the content fresh and the bugs patched.

Complaining about them is like complaining you have to dribble the ball in basketball or that you can’t use your hands in football/soccer.

I don’t really see why a non-sub MMO like GW2 needs gated content and artificial time extenders. Those are elements born of needign people to keep subbing. GW2 doesn’t need that. This game relies off of Gem sales and Box sales, neither of which rely on constant logging in. I realize online worlds need people, but the game has people playing it. That’s not an issue.

In the end, this shift to behavior manipulation leaves me perplexed.

But they need to keep players playing. An item shop source of income is dependent on a large active player population because they only need minority of those players to buy the proxy currency to use in the shop. A large active player population is also attractive to other players because MMOs simply aren’t as much fun if you can’t play with others while an empty MMO simply won’t retain new players for very long as they wander an empty world (last man on Earth syndrome).

Yes, but it was not my experience that the world was empty at some point and the need for these artificial time sinks existed. If there was a problem it was that Orr or FOTM had too high a rewards advantage over other areas of the game. Changes and improvements to incentives has improved that. The gating of some of the rewards isn’t the big draw to those improvements, but the immediate reward. I’d still do dailies if it was karma, gold and laurels, even if Ascended items weren’t tied to laurels.

Improving the drops on meta bosses has spread traffic out and we aren’t all living in Orr now. That was accomplished without the time sinks.

Also, many of us came to this game to escape this behavior manipulation stuff. Whomever these practices brings in, it also begins pushing some of us away.

Behellagh.1468:

MMOs have time sinks/gated content and will always have time sinks/gated content because unlike single player games, their income relies on players hanging around. Some have monthly subscriptions, and item shop or both but they rely on having an active population spending real money to keep the servers up, the content fresh and the bugs patched.

Complaining about them is like complaining you have to dribble the ball in basketball or that you can’t use your hands in football/soccer.

I don’t really see why a non-sub MMO like GW2 needs gated content and artificial time extenders. Those are elements born of needign people to keep subbing. GW2 doesn’t need that. This game relies off of Gem sales and Box sales, neither of which rely on constant logging in. I realize online worlds need people, but the game has people playing it. That’s not an issue.

In the end, this shift to behavior manipulation leaves me perplexed.

Hsinimod is mostly right. When you reach a point during an event that is the critical zerg point, the amount of players attacking removes the need to strategize and play smart. You can just overcome the obstacle with brute force. The Shatterer with just 8-10 people is actually a bit challenging. With 30-40 people, everyone just sits int he same spot spamming attacks and letting the AOE cap protect them.

Fighting a Champion with two or three players actually involves all the elements of combat and depth the game has. Certain dungeon encounters show ways to play cooperatively and with smarts. The small scale sPVP shows these elements.

However, if all you do is spam 1 ikittenerg, the reason you aren’t finding any combat depth is because you are in the worst situation to be in if you’re looking for depth. Though, even then, I had learned and discovered the tricks and nuances of combat in the game leveling up my first character. If you’re still clueless at this point then there certainly is a player-error issue going on.

ANet does need to find a way to make fights interesting and challenging once the amount of players becomes a brute force zerg. Grenth’s temple and the AC redesign shows some of their early work on improving this.

sacredninja.5236:

You do have a valid point, but anet will not release add-ons or expansions or expansions like Factions.

And may I ask which guild and on which server? I left my current guild to explore others, maybe it is because of the guild I was in ( a guild full of inactive players).

The game is already getting content additions on a monthly basis. More content is coming at the end of this month and the end of the next month. That is what is implied by a growing living world.

You sound like you read a poorly informed and sensationalist article written on Colin’s statement and got swept up in the author’s nonsense.

As someone who is not happy with the state sPVP in the game, I think the guy in the OP is mostly clueless. He gets a lot wrong and a lot of what he says sounds like the sort of hand-me-down opinions found mostly in WoW PVPers.

Just to put forth some examples:
“99.999999% of the PvPers who were “hardcore” in GW1 and some new people who came into GW2 were expecting Arenas when it came for structured PvP, and instead we got shoved with battle grounds and node capping right into our throats and it tastes monotone!”

No, the GW1 players wanted GvG or a Halls-like tournament. We wanted team battles, but we weren’t asking for arena. Arena was always a testing ground for build ideas, but never a serious part of the sPVP game in Guild Wars.

He’s right in that Conquest is very monotone and was worn out back in beta, but his call for Deathmatches and Dueling isn’t the battlecry of all serious PVPers.

“Yeah – that is a problem of not having a healer in arena. Classes with most escapes and burst will prevail in the arena environment where classes even with amazing sustain damage, and condition control will be left behind.”

The lack of a healer is not a problem with GW2’s combat. There is a lot of ways to heal and escape damage, and there are ways for you to prevent damage on your teammates. If you had straight deathmatches, you’d probably would see more shutdown/cc mechanics and not just straight burst or straight defense builds. Even in the current game, when 3-5 people fight at a node, good teams/players don’t die in a flash unless they are glass cannons stuck in a bad spot.

It seems the “pro” here in question just hasn’t wrapped his head around GW2’s combat fully and is speaking out before he really should.

“You can not see damage, healing and other raw numbers that is actually HUGE when it comes to player growth. How do I know that I am doing something right?! Engaging the right fights or have decent positioning if I cannot see my progression with damage?! How do I know my rotation is right if I du not see damage?!”

This is where I began to see he was just a ranting fool. No, you cannot see damage or healing as an end-match tally. You still see the damage numbers as they’re happening. That’s the only real effective damage in the game. So seeing your total damage/healing is not all that useful. It’s just some ego-stroking that isn’t really relevant to your results. If you are engaging in the right fights then you should know this by the map situation, player situation and score. Seeing your raw total damage numbers has NOTHING to do with whether you picked the right fight or not. You could put up a lot of numbers picking fights where it’s meaningless or you could put up less damage numbers engaging a fight at the right time with a small burst of damage that quickly ends the fight. You could put up a lot of overall damage numbers by surviving a long time in a 1v2. In all these cases, the total damage numbers are irrelevant to the question of whether you picked the right fight or not. They’re completely useless in that regard.

And rotation? Again, sounds like someone with little GW experience and a lot of bad WoW experience. The closest thing the game has to a rotation is a combo of skills you use for a burst or effect. You know you’re doing it right if all the skills land. An end-match damage readout is irrelevant to the proposed question.

So while I’m finding the spvp mode in this game lacking and not up to par with what GW1 had, the post copied into this thread is not proof of what’s wrong or of anything other than the player’s limited scope of PVP and their own atrocious grammar.

Match-ups get stale, people get bored, stop queueing.

The battle is over a piechart. The scoring system isn’t interesting and adds little drama. There’s not much of a comeback mechanic. There is no final, win-condition mechanic other than the piechart.

Kill two birds with one stone. One week out of every month jumble up the matchups within 1 tier of each other. Then change the scoring system and win condition to something new. This way you can test out different scoring mechanics and different ways to play WvWvW while also freshening up the matchups. The outcomes of these weeks don’t apply to server ranking, but will have some other reward. Their purpose is to have a way to test out new ideas and keep the matches from dying out under the weight of their own monotony.

One week, you could have the win condition be owning Stonemist plus 4 keeps. Each time you attain this goal, you get a point. Most points win.

Another week, you could split the week up into sections. Weekend prime time, weekend off-peak, weekday prime-time, weekday off-peak, and Stonemist caps. Winning one of the categories grants you a point. Most points at the end of the week wins.

Another week, you could have Stonemist closed off the entire week. Instead, you have a special supply turn in inside your home Borderland’s main keep, and your EB’s main keep. Supply turned into there goes towards a special siege and buff that is unleashed on Thursday at noon. From Thursday at noon until Friday at 4pm pst, Stonemist Castle is open to be invaded. You then put forth all your built up special supply to capture Stonemist Castle, which is now worth 1,000 points per tick.

Boom, WvWvW isn’t stale anymore.

The bounty NPCs are a cakewalk with a large guild. One bounty gave us some trouble, but the rest were zerged down.

The Missions themselves could really use a UI notification. They’re hidden away behind two tabs. Even something like a notification on the guild menu tab the same as you get when you have something waiting for you on the Trading Post would help players find the information and status a lot quicker.

BiS means a lot. Sure, you can do many things in lower quality gear, but people don’t want to do such. Players want to see their character at the character’s peak and that involves best in slot gear.

Honestly, I never saw a problem with getting a set of gear rather quickly. It’s very important to trying different builds.

Even considering that, they could still make the items very expensive on karma so that it requires having put in plenty of effort, but by making it cost karma, it makes the items more universally attainable.

FateZero.8536:

Just one question, is the reward per character or per account?

Per account.

You only need to kill one bounty target to get the personal bonus. Killing all the targets gets your guild the merit rewards.

You do not get extra rewards for completing higher tiers. The only added reward is more merits for your guild, but that too is capped at a certain amount per week and per Mission. At tier 1 in Bounties, completing the Mission gets your guild its 15 merits. Completing tier 2 gets your guild its 20 merits. Completing tier 3 gets your guild its 25 cap merits for that Mission. You get the max amount of the tier you complete, but they do not stack.

So if you complete tier 1 then your guild gets 15 merits. If you complete tier 2 then your guild gets 20 merits. If you complete tier 1 and tier 2, then your guild still only gets 20 merits.

Karma is the most universal currency for any part of the game that would use Ascended gear. It is also a currency with excess amounts found in a large percentage of the audience. An excess found in the population at a likely larger percentage than any other currency.

WvWvW players have currency and earn currency. Open world players have currency and earn currency. Dungeons reward currency. Guild Missions can reward currency.

So why is the playerbase chasing gated content instead of using the most universal reward to get these items? I could understand if Ascended items only mattered to FotM, but best-in-slot gear matters to the entire game. So why is the system used for the entire game not the system used to attain Ascended gear?

Different insignias that top out at a level that can be attained by a fresh 20 is still horizontal progression in the same way exotics and runes in GW2 are attained by a fresh 80 right off the bat.

tigirius.9014:

Fortuna.7259:

thisolderhead.5127:

Anyone not paying money to the gem store is a free loader, paying gamers are still subsidising your game play, I still think paying customers are better than you.

Actually, not quite.

The subtle reality is that your so-called “free loaders” are providing a service to the game company. They are providing “user-generated content” that makes the game more attractive and entices “big spenders” to spend liberally. In exchange, the game company provides them “free” entertainment.

Sorry you’re wrong. There is no user generated content in this title. Simply joining a group is not content creation. The only games that have that have a foundry system. Unless AN makes a foundry program for user created DE’s players are not creating content at all, they are using the content.

Most MMOs, especially GW2 and its DE Open World strategy, rely on the worlds being populated with people as part of the attraction. MMOs without others to play with tend to dry up. The people who aren’t rapidly buying gems are still filling WvWvW with battles and the open world with friends to do events with. The game depends on their existence.

Yeah, I would like to see this map reworked into a new type of match not centered around Conquest.

For awhile I thought that changing the side points into capturable assault/defense stations would be interesting. Increase the health of the gates on keeps and allow capturing the sidepoint to create a cannon and cannon NPC that fires on the door to speed up getting to the other team’s base. If you capture the side-point closest to your base then it spawns with two rifleman that defense the point, and a repairmen who repairs your door.

The middle node could be a flag point like in the original GvG that adds points to your side. Of course, killing the Guild Lord would be an automatic boost to 500 points that would end most matches.

It feels like they misunderstood what the people wanted.

We did want more content for guilds and more challenging content that required coordination. We did want something that made being in a guild interesting.

However, we didn’t want gated progression and 2nd class citizen status. We didn’t want a situation that created conflict between people’s private guilds and the larger guilds. We didn’t want smaller guilds excluded. We didn’t want content that took weeks to access. We didn’t want artificial time extenders. We didn’t want more ecto sinks.

So what was the purpose of these threads? It seems all the feedback on Ascended was mostly ignored except “we need more ways to get Ascended gear”, and even that has been poorly handled. The problems it causes for horizontal progression players hasn’t been commented on. The fracturing of the playerbase has been repeated now. It just seems like every good argument was dumped in one place and left to rot.

I would say the same about the WvWvW night-capping thread. The same boring scoring system exists in WvWvW. Various discussion went on for a long time and nothing was made of it.

It feels like these discussion threads exist only to hide the complaints and bury the issues.

The hilarious thing is that not even the large guilds are doing the content yet because of a 72 hour queue, 50k karma start up cost.

This is pure artificial time extension tactics.

PTS is needed just as much for player/developer relations as it is for game testing.

This change was a good move. The move towards more non-cap point maps is also a good sign. I like what I’ve been hearing.

The area could use some new enemies. Crabs get a little tiring. Undead get tiring as well, but you can mix it up by just making Risen Chickens or Risen Moas and Risen Warluses.

I find it telling that SBI has had an increase in participation since dropping down to a more ‘livable’ bracket. I would conclude that more people play if they feel they have a chance to win or do something of any meaning.

If ANet just removed the score and allowed the map situation to dictate interest then it could help overall participation.

I still enjoy the aspect of the game that is created by the open world and dynamic events. I enjoy the sudden merging of players and the spontaneous cooperation. I also enjoy exploring the world of Tyria. ANet has created one of my favorite worlds in any game.

Rewards outside of Orr do not seem to be as good though. If I want rewards that will actually matter then I need to Orr zerg. The rewards I get from Champions, Vets and Chests around the 1-70 zones are still worth some copper or 1 silver only. They are all uninteresting rewards as well. I don’t get anything for my alts other than crafting materials to help level them. Mot of the reward I get is just from the joy of discovery of a new nuance, mini-dungeon or hidden away area of the world.

declan.3968:

tic.7425:

I’m sorry, but how much more effort did you put in more than I? Other than deciding to join a large guild that is? My (very) small guild takes a lot longer to do things with our limited amount, so i would actually think we are putting more effort in than you.

I suppose though, that if you still feel that way, I could go drop $40 at the gem store to buy some more “effort” and then catch right up to you.

I don’t believe the question of effort in this thread has to do entirely with the player base.

/shrug

The guild I run with is a 100 man Malaysian guild, we only recruit from 1 forum and rarely within the community. The most important thing is doing weekly WvW, running dungeons and fotm everyday and cultivating a fun atmosphere.

You have a small guild, good for you. Things like this should be something to work towards, not handed on a silver platter.

Small guilds aren’t asking to be handed the whole feast of Guild Missions. We’re talking about the initial mission and the difficulty and time it would take to unlock it.

AGAIN I SAY

You know you can still create content for large guilds to strive for without making it extremely difficult for small guilds to just get their feet wet with the content?

You realize you can have progression and rewards for large guilds without walling off small guilds from the initial mission?

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

I know there have been some concerns about Guild Bounties being in the Art of War line. Our goal with this system is to give guilds activities and long-term progression that they can accomplish by working together as a guild. These missions are meant to be difficult and challenging to not only unlock, but to accomplish.

We would also like to make every guild upgrade line valuable to every guild. Currently, Art of War is very focused on PvP and WvW, but our plan is to continue to add more guild upgrades in the Art of War line to accomplish this. These Guild Missions are the first step. Along with this system, we also added a number of new guild upgrades that guilds can earn.

In the end, our goal for all of this content is to give guilds new goals and challenges to accomplished once they have researched deeply into each line, as well as require guilds to have researched multiple lines to unlock some upgrades. We expect guild members to have to work together as a guild to earn the influence needed to unlock these new missions, as well as overcome the challenge of the missions themselves.

In the future, we plan to continue to add more guild upgrades, as well as continue to add challenging guild missions, as we don’t want guilds to run out of goals and accomplishments they can achieve.

~Izzy @-’—-

You know you can still create content for large guilds to strive for without making it extremely difficult for small guilds to just get their feet wet with the content?

The mentality is going to become that if you want to do this new content then you don’t rep/partake in a small guild, because the whole of the content and rewards resides with large guilds.

Basically, there is no wisdom in gating the first mission behind a research wall beyond the grasp of most small guilds. Gating further content beyond easy access makes an adequate amount of sense. Gating the initial content beyond that wall hurts small guilds and makes a meaningless difference for large guilds.

In a way, this feels like a possible repeat of the FotM and Ascended gear mistake. The level resitrctions separated players who wanted to rise in level from playing with others at low levels, and the reward increase at higher levels increased this behavior. The fact that FotM was also the only way to access Ascended gear also pulled people out of the world.

The restricting of access to the first mission behind AoW 5 will keep many small guilds out of starting their own mission. Of course, they can join in another guild’s mission, but guild specific parts of that mission and more importantly guild-tied rewards will not come to them. This will draw people out of small guilds.

I have two large guilds I belong to and I’m sure they can do the guild missions, but I have a small guild of my own for the purpose of playing with real life friends. We have no area of research above level 3 and zero influence spent in Art of War as WvWvW is not of importance to small guilds.

The rest of my small guild hasn’t been playing the past two months and the guild missions were something I was hoping to use to get some of us playing together again. If the first mission type is restricted behind a level 5 Art of War research wall then it’s unlikely that my friends and I will ever do them.

Housing:

1. Is more to do and another way to personalize your characters
2. Great for community building.
3. Can be incorporated into multiplayer. There is no reason why housing has to be something that you sit in alone and never interact with others.

The barriers to build diversity in all aspects of the game are mainly the boring and uninteresting trait choices, along with the never-used trait choices that are a bit too situational. There needs to be more traits that expand or provide new playstyles and less simple vertical increase traits. They should outright remove functionality traits like increased range on ranged weapons. Those sort of perks should be built-in already.

The other barrier to build diversity mostly exists in WvWvW and PVE, and that’s the time investment for attaining the multiple sets of gear needed to properly play different builds. As more Ascended gear comes in, this issue becomes drastically worse.

Not a fan. The confusion on Trident was the only decent confusion playstyle. All the effort and work to run a confusion playstyle in land combat is often not worth the payoff. If you can’t keep confusion up then the conditions based Mesmer falls apart. Trident could keep confusion up, making condition damage matter.

Just compare it to a condition build for about any other class. Many have multiple conditions they can cycle through while also having a reliable way to apply bleeds. All the Mesmer reliably does is bleed now. You can stack vulnerability, but that works better in direct damage builds. Otherwise it’s a intermittent confusion and bleeds.

The other thing is that if you weren’t condition based, the confusion stacks from Trident still mattered. This made Trident useful to power based Mesmers in the same way harpoon is useful to condition Mesmers due to stacking bleeds. Now Trident is very lackluster because bleed stacks are only a very minor part of power-based Mesmer damage.

LukeTheQuke.4079:

Alright but I’m not really talking about level cap / meaning of level at all here. I mean the way they built the skills and traits, they feel like they belong in a PvP environment where burst and movement is key whereas PvE demands durability and sustainability.

PvE is very much about movement. Generally, the ideas that work in pvp in this game tend to work in pve as well. PvE mobs must obey the same rules we do. So if you restrict a mob’s movement, that mob can’t get to you to hit you. If you put up a reflection against a ranged mob then it will nullify that mob’s damage. If you blind a veteran before a big attack then the attack will miss. If you don’t move out of the way of a big slam move then you’ll pay the price.

As for sustainability, I am not sure what isn’t sustainable. Everything is as sustainable as it’s cooldown. The removal of a mana pool makes most everything sustainable except elites. You don’t stick in one place hitting your biggest attack over and over because that’s not the way combat works in pve or pvp. You move, counter, and hit.

There is no server pride at this point. Maybe in the mid-pack of servers, but free transfers lasted so long that they created a mercenary mindset that is the start of the paid transfer server mindset now.

I am somewhat curious to watch the impending fallout of burnout amongst the merc-minded, but I think the way WvWvW has been raised harms the game’s future and that does not amuse me.

It should be stickied because it’s part of the many issues driving people away from WvWvW at this point.

Right now, WvWvW is a mode stuck between its casual nature in design and its hardcore treatment by players. It breaks up and recreates server communities, then proceeds to do it again. It’s contradictory state drives people away from the mode. It has no interesting winning condition.

Had the same thing happen to myself and a party member. The debuff keeps ticking on you even while dead. My guildie and I were unable to loot the chest afterwards because of this. We had to exit out to Lion’s Arch. Even returning to the lab did not remove the debuff.

It’s not a treadmill until they add another tier. Until then, they can claim that is was merely a mistake to release the game without Ascended gear in already. If they add a new tier above without adding levels then it certainly is a treadmill in nature.

What I take issue with is the idea that they can do both vertical and horizontal progression at the same time. There’s a huge problem with that theory in the fact that horizontal progression is based heavily on different builds and testing out different options. In order to do that, you need more than one set of armor at a given level. You need your damage armor, your support armor, your condition damage armor, or your whatever. I already have two exotic sets of head, shoulder, chest, gloves, pants and boots.

While getting one set of exotics is easy enough, getting multiple sets to do multiple things is a bit harder. With exotics, the time investment to do such was at just about the sweet spot for horizontal progression. If you wanted to try out a build other than your usual build and the build required different stats in order to work best then you weren’t punished for wanting to progress in a horizontal fashion.

But the time investment for Ascended gear and the availability of access to the items is not the same situation. ANet realizes this and acknowledges it by their own bit by bit release of Ascended gear. By the time there is a full set of Ascended gear out there, the time investment involved will be high enough that it will actively discourage build experimentation at optimal level.

Of course, you can say having best in slot doesn’t matter, but we all know that anyone who plays games at a more than casual value would not agree. People want best in slot to see their performance at the optimum level attainable. That is the nature not just of MMOs, but in about any genre out there.

So in the end, Horizontal and Vertical cannot coexist, because the time increase of vertical progression gets in the way of the ease of variation of horizontal progression.

Yes, these sort of write-ups are important for understanding the game. There is actually a lot to process on the battlefield and learning to decipher the concepts listed in the OP in the active battlefield is what will improve your play and help you understand that it’s not a zerg but a busy ballet.

Every time I log into Stormbluff Isle, I get put into Lion’s Arch overflow. The only time this doesn’t happen is like right before the crack of dawn.

Dedalus.3065:

If it’s like other games, then that means that I can rent a custom arena and adjust the settings as I want and then I can make it so that other people can join in and play. Someone will have to pay, but you won’t necessarily have to.

I can see that, but this may continue to hurt the game’s spvp community if the preferred modes aren’t officially supported. Conquest mode is the product of compromise. They need to admit it’s not the future of the game.

It would be wiser for the health of the community to support the breadth of modes people want, to let people pick the game type they want and care about rather than to only officially support a single game mode. They are trying to force everyone into something that the community is luke warm about at best.

They can’t just push out these other modes behind a pay wall or behind the limitations of someone paying for the server and expect the spvp to take off. The community will wonder if they’ll balance around these other game modes, if new maps will take into account the modes people want or will everyone be stuck trying to work around this strange devotion to cap point.

That seems to be the message from the Q&A talk. Conquest mode is one of the major reasons that the game’s spvp meta is so limited. There’s many threads that have discussed this and explained why. The game doesn’t just need more depth of features, but breadth of modes. Leaderboards for a map type nobody cares about aren’t going to turn things around for the waning pvp population.

So people ask about CTF, Deathmatch and GvG. All we hear is these things are being looked at but will probably be in custom arenas and that custom arenas will cost money.

So paying will get you the modes you care about and want to play, while not paying will leave you with bone-dry Conquest mode.

That sounds terrible. I have no PR swerve and spin I can put on that. This will kitten people off.

UnknownFreak.2805:

etiolate.9185:

New bug?

Shattered Strength is not gaining benefits from Illusionary Persona, while traits such as Rending Shatter do. Can anyone confirm whether SS was gaining the fourth charge before or not? It currently does not count Illusionary Persona as an Illusion Shatter, thus the overall nerf to Might gain is larger than the patch note states.

etiolate.9185:

Shattered Strength is not gaining benefits from Illusionary Persona

Not a bug, but cause it say shattered clones, and your character is not a clone, that’s why I think you only get 3x might for shattering 3+self

Advent.1387:

Well Just logged on yesterday after the nerf and for me this nerf is really irritating as I spend a lot of my time running WvW with my guild and that dumb GCD is a pain when fighting multiple opponents. Not sure about everyone else but for me it was irritating me more and more as time went on, not to say that it is completely game breaking but for players with fast reflexes like me having to wait for that GCD to run out feels like a lifetime when you are tryin to string shatter combos

Yes it is a bit annoying, but I have a feeling I was able to make a shatter#1 and #2 at same time today, got a feeling of that. Cannot say for sure, cause I was 6x confusion after me making shatter #1, or that I was 4 conf from shatter #1 and then +2 for shatter #2

I thought about that, but Rending Shatter has the same wording kittentered Strength but does gain benefit from IP.

“Rending Shatter Shattering illusions causes vulnerability for 8 seconds to nearby foes.”

“Shattered Strength Shattering illusions grants you 1 stack of might per illusion (10 seconds).”

Shattered Strength does not currently gain any benefit from Illusionary Persona (another big part of the shatter build). Is this new since the last patch or an old problem? Unless I wasn’t paying attention. I think its new as the four charges were part of gaining the 25 might stacks beforehand.