Guild Wars 2

Razor.9872:

This game was advertised as one that revolves around one progressing their skill, rather than one progressing their gear. HoT zones are a compliment to this philosophy.

Also, this is an MMO. If you find yourself in a situation that you are having difficulty advancing on your own, there is a legion of allied players willing to help. All you need do is ask.

It should be placated as the only true manifesto of GW2 or even Anet licence altogether. Could not agree more. +1 000 000

Orpheal.8263:

another one leaves the boat, again looses this game a big piece of its old spirit that can’t be simply replaced.

Bad days for GW2

Erm….the person leaving started at the same time as the person who is taking charge. Old spirit is still there

Djinn.9245:

IndigoSundown.5419:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-first-beta-weekend-event-begins-august-7/

“We’ve done a lot of work to balance creature difficulty, and we’ll be looking for your thoughts on the overall experience. Do you feel the need to use your entire skill bar in battles? Does teaming up with other players feel more rewarding? Do you find yourself wanting to change your skills and traits to overcome encounters? Warning—creatures will be more challenging than in the existing Guild Wars 2 world.”

As you can see, the intent in HoT was to present more challenging creature which are designed to encourage players to make greater use of their character’s builds than core mobs do, and/or to encourage playing with others. While I doubt that HoT forced the best players to do more than learn new mob moves, I believe it did raise the bar with regard to the minimum engagement with one’s character capabilities needed to successfully deal with HoT creatures. I’d call the XPac a qualified success in that regard.

Whether that is what the design intent ought to have been is another matter. However, the lesson for those who bought without learning what the XPac was intended to be is to exercise due diligence before buying. The information was — and is — out there.

It might have been mentioned that enemies would be more difficult but it certainly wasn’t emphasized. And what people expect from an expansion of a game they like is more of the same thing they already like. I certainly had zero idea that the expansion would be anything like it is. And I would not have purchased it if I did know ahead of time.

Of course it was. You were not maybe part of it bit the fact is that difficulty of mobs in HoT was tested beforehand in Beta weekends (3 betas occurred). And not just by Anet but also by players. Please don’t spread false information about the topic

Maybe the new skills displayed by white mantle mesmers are hints to new elite spec ?

Personally I ran GS/staff mesmer in a hybrid crits condipower setup with runes of aristocracy and the most defensive traits and utilities I could use. I did die once due to misclick but other than that it was fine

Fox.3469:

4 tips before starting hot maps:
-Make sure you gear yourself in lvl 80 exotic at least (metabattle or other build sites will often promote berserker gear, however if you are having problems, looking into more tanky statsets wouldn’t hurt. To the build guys best dps is always the most viable, it may not be to you)
-Have at least 1 ranged weapon.
-Do Silverwastes/dungeons a few times before going into the new zones and practice.
-Do not start HoT until you give yourself at least 1 week doing the pre-hot endgame.

HoT is more challenging then base game, but the fact you are dieing so much in personal story instances means you are doing something very wrong, they are fairly easy if you are decently geared.

What you are doing is basicly get to the story end, do none of the actual base game endgame stuff(dungeons/fractals/orr map farming: these all give exotic gear or higher), do non of the endgame stuff leading up to HoT (silverwastes/drytop: gives you money to get exotic or higher), jump into hot and expect to faceroll as before. it simply does not work that way.

So much this. I would personally add another tip to explore HoT arenas relatively easily: play a bit of PvP in hotjoin arenas

Nightarch.2943:

Releasing more weapons as part of Elite specialisations is not the answer. Elite specialisations should focus on modifying all current existing abilities is closer to the right direction. Also all the weapons should be available to nearly all classes regardless of Elite specialisations.

If they can’t do that then ArenaNet should allow for cross weapon transmutation one handed melee weapons with melee and one handed ranged with the one handed ranged. Two handed melee with the melee and the ranged with the ranged so on and so forth.

And why should they that exactly ?

Maybe as a next E spec, who knows….

Kea.6380:

Tried this fight yesterday solo. I play a ranger and got totally owned. Died 8 times before I gave up. Pretty much every time I went in, either I get CC’d and died instantly, or I run in circle like an idiot then get killed by one of the AOE.
Today I just partied up with 3 other players and blew past that boss in about 25 seconds.
I guess Anet has intended this fight for a party.

Personally I complained first about the fight but I have to agree with this. How hard is it to open your LFG, with a description “LS last boss”. It is basically doing reversed CM

Sooo feedback: map design is awesome as always, story is also nice (though I rather felt lukewarm after the first boss) but overall I would rate it out an outstanding 8/10 and consider being it the best out of 4. Now the only big con I have found so far: the last fight story instances are too small for the difficulty you propose. I understand why because it is this freaking Caudescus who spoilers absorbed a large quantity of blood magic. However I do feel like the jade creatures are just too much in the 2 last fight instances of the story. On a mesmer, it is fine and rather engaging because you can double on your utility and you have an easy access to stability, blink and distortion. However I simply don’t know how I will be able to pull that off with a revenant. I would suggest to make the jade creatures spawn with the first boss of the story because there is enough room for it and I found the fight wayyyyyyy too easy even if I was playing with a squishy mesmer in dom/duel/chrono. And playing this build for the last fight instances was impossible so I needed to switch to chaos/insp/chrono.

Have you considered running some stability OP ?

Personally I am not gonna blame Anet….I am gonna blame braham for not taking down Jormag quick enough that we all know is responsible behind this awful pile of snow causing the power outage #icreateconspirationisttheoriesthataremuchmorebelievablethanreptilians

Vague Memory.2817:

Okay so multiple skills on 1 button is not okay. Well I’m seeing that in some PvP matches for sure. A lot of DHs are using it, and probably other people playing other classes too. My main is mes and I sometimes come across other mes who’s build I know and they are definitely using macros. Because I know the skill sets I know it is isn’t possible to do certain combinations as quickly as they do for insta kills for everyone they meet in 1v1. When you meet people who can pull off long combos in about 1 sec before you can react consistently that’s very likely a multi-skill macro at work.

Hmm not really. Maybe these players just have better keybinds than other players, as well as multi button mouses that can significantly increase the amount of keys you can press in a short period of time…..In a fast based action combat like this game, an optimal setup of the keyboard and the mouse is very profitable. Not denying of course that cheaters exist but with all this visual noise in the game, appearances can be very misleading as well

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Nice homage, OP.

The meta-farm is dead; long live the (new, tbd) meta-farm.
———————————

flog.3485:

You do realize there is more meta events besides AB multiloot, right ?

You do realize that none were as lucrative as “multiloot” — they might not even be as lucrative as uni-loot (the kind I always, just a single map), depending on how many grand/great chests you get).

I get distracted/bored too quickly, so multi-loot never appealed to me. That doesn’t mean I can’t see how loot-ful it was for those who enjoyed it.

As lucrative? I don’t know… I remember having some pretty good loot outside out AB even without doing all the meta event. Anyway I guess I was just lucky enough. Edit: I agree with your comment on multilooot. It looks so exploit-y and as boring as the chest run in silverwaste

DoctorDing.5890:

Multiloot, oh Multiloot. As your time ticks away I can only wish you goodbye, my friend.
You were fun. You were frantic. You were lucrative.
You were hugely entertaining.
You brought together players from many walks of life.

I’ll miss the superbly organised ones.
I’ll miss the chaotic ones.
I’ll miss the random ones.
I’ll miss “that guy”, who never quite grasped the concept and entertained us all in chat.
I’ll even miss the ones where the comms went mad with power. Kick, kick, kick.

Multiloot, you were my fool, my friend, my lover.
Well, OK, maybe not my lover but I’ll miss you anyway. <sniff>

And where will I get all my stuff stuff stuff now????

You do realize there is more meta events besides AB multiloot, right ?

I say we keep the system as it is now with tweaks of course for next season but we create another queue for teams of 5 only…But whatever happens team queues will always be longer than duo/solo however

Tarir won’t die out. It is the easiest and straight forward meta event in HoT

Hmm it is a bit too late to call off an entire expac now that they have been saying that an expansion is in the state of “work in progress” for the last 6 months at least.

Hmm doesn’t seem like we are gonna get a new map this time. Nevertheless seeing divinity’s reach being attacked looks good on paper. I guess I am hyped !!

Healix.5819:

http://massivelyop.com/2017/01/31/guild-wars-2-head-of-the-snake-living-world-episode-coming-february-7th-plus-new-trailer-and-heart-of-thorns-sale/

So sad we can not watch the trailer…..

Yeah it was an enjoyable initiative. Nice comments, clutch games for most of the time, I was actually hooked on it for the entire afternoon (except for a little break for dinner lol), even though I don’t enjoy PvP that much....Congratulations to the winners !!!

AngryBear.8741:

Are fights uploaded somewhere so we can watch?

It is uploaded on YouTube

I just can’t agree with OP. Since my opinion is also based on felings and no fact I won’t go into all details but on a more general note I quite frankly find disturbing or even ridiculous that the OP goes into so much details right a few days after Mo gives us some details about the upcoming update. These kind of threads always pop up when the activity within the game is in a low point. There is nothing much to worry about imo.

Pifil.5193:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Or, the Devs might have thought, “Instead of just adjusting recipes, let’s give the players new content as a way to address the issue. Kill two birds with one stone.”

One never knows…they might have been trying to please us! =)

Yeah, maybe but the term used; a new “farm” for leather indicates to me that they are less interested in solving the problem (that they introduced at the start of hot) and more interested in giving us another grind to work past the problem.

And lest we forget, the change to insignia and leather recipes affected everyone, this new farm will only be for hot players.

Changing the insignia recipes to require 5 cloth and 5 leather and changing the Cured T5 and T6 leather recipes back to require 3 and 2 sections would actually solve the problem they created.

And next time there’s a glut of some material introduce one off sinks to take care of it but don’t do this. I’m stocking up on gossamer before the next expansion hits in case they “fix” that.

Who sait that leather farm will only be for HoT players ? Mo didn’t say it. From now on it is just pure speculation

OriOri.8724:

flog.3485:

What would be cool is a way to fight against condies in the dueling line without making it OP in conjunction to the inspiration line. Why not give the mesmer access to some resistance ? How ? I would scrap the adept trait that puts you into stealth at 50% health because I simply can’t imagine any reasonable scenario in which I would want to passively gain stealth at 50%. We could then gain resistance in an active and meaningful way such as: “when blasting a field, mesmers gain resistance for 3 seconds”. 7 seconds cooldown. The effect is not applied when your allies are blasting the fields for you but you can chain blasting fields to increase the initial duration of resistance.

Note that I am biased and hate the resistance boon with a passion. I don’t think it ever should have been introduced to the game, much less in its current state. So I do not want to see it added to mesmer. It was bad enough that it was added to SoI imo. I still think the best way to diversify our condi cleanse is to move menders purity to either domination or dueling. This gives power mesmer more condi cleanse and would do so much to lessen our dependence on the inspiration traitline

Ok. Thx for the heads up, care to disagree then but whatever happens (if it ever happens), I would be glad to not only rely on inspiration for some condi cleanses. Just sharing some wild suggestion there.

NICENIKESHOE.7128:

flog.3485:

What would be cool is a way to fight against condies in the dueling line without making it OP in conjunction to the inspiration line. Why not give the mesmer access to some resistance ? How ? I would scrap the adept trait that puts you into stealth at 50% health because I simply can’t imagine any reasonable scenario in which I would want to passively gain stealth at 50%. We could then gain resistance in an active and meaningful way such as: “when blasting a field, mesmers gain resistance for 3 seconds”. 7 seconds cooldown. The effect is not applied when your allies are blasting the fields for you but you can chain blasting fields to increase the initial duration of resistance.

Er…good idea, but mesmer only have one blast skill. And its on a very gimmicky torch 4.

Thematically I feel like mesmer isn’t suitable for resistance though. Transfer condi like arcane thievery sounds more mesmer-ish, regardless of how bad that skill is.

I made a mistake about what I was trying to say (English is not my main language sorry). I was more thinking about any combo effect that mesmers can proc by any field of effect whether it is an ally or yourself…But now that I think of it, there is so much combo field that you can proc that, regarding my suggestion, you should not be able to stack the duration of resistance then. Let’s not forget that we have access to CS as well

What would be cool is a way to fight against condies in the dueling line without making it OP in conjunction to the inspiration line. Why not give the mesmer access to some resistance ? How ? I would scrap the adept trait that puts you into stealth at 50% health because I simply can’t imagine any reasonable scenario in which I would want to passively gain stealth at 50%. We could then gain resistance in an active and meaningful way such as: “when blasting a field, mesmers gain resistance for 3 seconds”. 7 seconds cooldown. The effect is not applied when your allies are blasting the fields for you but you can chain blasting fields to increase the initial duration of resistance.

Common marketing strategy I would say: to get new players into GW, what do you use ? An add that display a free game or an add that says “Spend 45€ to get Heart of Thorne” ? It is only logical to use the first one since f2p players also get an inside game advertisement to buy HoT

Ithilwen.1529:

The issue is that the OP is not a typical case player. As such, he’s not a suitable case for an experiment like the one we’re talking about. That makes the experiment invalid ( in the logic sense of the word.)

The fact that an ESL player can climb through divisions is not relevant to the existence or non-existence of “elo hell.” It does validate “smurfing” as a strategy.

The idea of “elo hell” applies when: player of skill level that could be (for example) Bronze or Silver finds it impossible to climb out of Bronze.

I understand the motive of promoting “competitive” attitudes. I myself am trying to have a more “competitive” mindset as promoted by Helseth.

This experiment doesn’t prove it’s hypothesis, a priori, because it wasn’t set up well.

I am no top player, I have never participated in ranked before this season and I was able to climb out out of bronze easily. I also use subpar keybindings (such as mouse clicking my f2-f4 shatters lol) and I have been able to kill DH quite easily as well in bronze. How do you explain that ? I have bad news: if it is impossible for a player to climb out of bronze, it just means that a player belongs to bronze. Personally, I got out by mostly spamming my skills out of cooldowns. I am currently stuck in silver in a 1 win-1 loose situation playing in the same way as in bronze. What does it mean? It means that I need to get better in terms of mechanics and rotations if I ever want to get out of silver.

AngryBear.8741:

flog.3485:

AngryBear.8741:

Now do the same with necro and we will have something to talk about…

You should take a look at this particular thread in forums wher a player reached legend using core necro

And that proves that 1 (ONE) player in entire game can do it. Thanks for proving exactly what I wanted to say.

Your assumption doesn’t prove anything imo. You really believe that all PvP players who reach legendary are out on forums saying that they finally reached this tier ?

AngryBear.8741:

Now do the same with necro and we will have something to talk about…

You should take a look at this particular thread in forums wher a player reached legend using core necro

Ansau.7326:

flog.3485:

You know what is broken in chrono mesmers? It is the fact that it is possible to chain activate shatters imo. I think that another mechanic should be applied to the chrono line such as “When you activate a shatter, other shatter skills are deactivated for X amount of time”, kind of like a complementary tool to the internal cooldown of the shatters. Nothing too harsh, of course something like 1 second at maximum. I also think that chain activating shatters should only be possible under the effect of CS. And similarly enough I think that DH traps should receive the same kind of treatment.

That is already working as you pretend to, anet introduced it back in nov/dec 2012. Once you shatter, all other shatters are put into a 0.5s CD I think.

Oh really? I never really noticed. Mea culpa then.

You know what is broken in chrono mesmers? It is the fact that it is possible to chain activate shatters imo. I think that another mechanic should be applied to the chrono line such as “When you activate a shatter, other shatter skills are deactivated for X amount of time”, kind of like a complementary tool to the internal cooldown of the shatters. Nothing too harsh, of course something like 1 second at maximum. I also think that chain activating shatters should only be possible under the effect of CS. And similarly enough I think that DH traps should receive the same kind of treatment.

JOHNNY.7364:

This is what people on stream are talking about. The whole forum is full of people crying over DH’s.

I play rev, warrior, Mesmer and Druid and have no problem against dragonhunters. I am pretty sure it has something to do with skills and knowing other classes. If you know how to play a class, you know how to counter is. Also don’t try to kill dragonhunters when you play a class you don’t master. Play some unranked matches and learn your class. Maybe go duel someone that’s good on dragonhunter and learn how to counter it.

100% agree. I would also add that DH are sooooo slow as well and that good rotations outplay them pretty easily. Personally I have won my games against stacked DH’s

Glad you enjoy it. Of course it got a lot better….Some are getting real salty because they finally discovered their true level of PvP.

Well that is weird to me because I easily got out of bronze and I have barely encountered duos. I have been on teams with duos that I have lost as much as I have been against duos that I have lost to. I started with a terribad record of 2 wins for 8 losses in placement matches and I now have a record of 18 wins for 14 losses in ranked and I have hit silver just yesterday. All games solo. Granted I am not PvP centric player…..Maybe I should have been more specific: are you bronze, gold, silver or what ? To me, it feels like the system is working fine

What tier of PvP rank are you part of ?

As far as mesmer go, I could agree with a reduced range for portals….But other than that, there is not much to nerf again (unless the OP wants to remove mesmer from ranked arenas altogether). As for the other classes, I just don’t see anything that is OP from my point of view because I consider these other classes have very obvious tells of what you need to dodge, block. Perhaps it would be better to state in the OP what is your mained class and why you feel like mesmer, warrior and thief are OP.

Awful, yes. Mind you, I personally have nothing against players who “want to have fun” as I occasionally do just wanna have fun. But this sort of “fun” should stay in hotjoins I think

Hmm I don’t think it is worthwhile to rebuild everything from the ground up because in the end most people don’t leave because it is unbalanced, most people will leave because there is no content….If they do so, I don’t see how they could rebuild the professions while adding content to the game unless there is major break in content updates which the game already experienced twice. But obviously it is true that the game needs updates in terms of balance which isn’t any different than any other game.

I would say: try to avoid DH as much as you can. If you have enough confidence in your skill then you could try to go 1v1 against them but don’t expect to actually beat them unless they are poorly skilled. At the very least, you could try to contest a node and impede their own rotations within the map. Generally speaking I would only target a DH if I am +1ing a teamfight

If you wanna play core classes for PvP ranked I suppose OP, you should take a look at forming a duo with someone self to support you

Interesting idea, except you won’t have a new F5 shatter skill. This F5 is part of chrono line, it doesn’t necessarily mean that every new elite will have a (different) F5

Curunen.8729:

flog.3485:

Curunen.8729:

FJSAMA.2867:

Increase sword aa chain speed by ~30% like they did with thief sword in January 26th (increasing attack points / decreasing aftercast delays).
Thief, war, rev swords aa chain takes ~1.8s to complete. Mesmer sword aa takes 2.5s.
At least we could use boon strip more often/faster ending this chain.. Maybe it could payoff to be in melee range with a light armor class smashing 1…

For me this would be far more insteresting than increasing damage… Cause raw damage is there, but like someone said, we dont have moddifiers to support it (and mods dont affect all our skills like phantasms)

I like the idea of speeding up the AA chain – it would incentivise getting to that third hit for boon strip.

Would also be nice to see some short duration extra durability on cast for the ileap clone rather than it melting instantly in for example traps.

Just chiming in but I wanted to ask: why not spec for some quickness if you want to boost the AA chain ?

But that’s only for niche traits/skills. Sword AA shouldn’t be reliant on quickness as a quality of life fix – rather quickness should only enhance what already works well in the first place. And currently sword AA is a little slower than it ought to be in the first place given how it is intended to be used.

I understand your argument but I kinda feel like Anet is not on the same page as you. But as long as we don’t increase the damage of the auto-attack I will have to agree with you. Edit: why not simply put the boon strip on the second auto-attack ?

Curunen.8729:

FJSAMA.2867:

Increase sword aa chain speed by ~30% like they did with thief sword in January 26th (increasing attack points / decreasing aftercast delays).
Thief, war, rev swords aa chain takes ~1.8s to complete. Mesmer sword aa takes 2.5s.
At least we could use boon strip more often/faster ending this chain.. Maybe it could payoff to be in melee range with a light armor class smashing 1…

For me this would be far more insteresting than increasing damage… Cause raw damage is there, but like someone said, we dont have moddifiers to support it (and mods dont affect all our skills like phantasms)

I like the idea of speeding up the AA chain – it would incentivise getting to that third hit for boon strip.

Would also be nice to see some short duration extra durability on cast for the ileap clone rather than it melting instantly in for example traps.

Just chiming in but I wanted to ask: why not spec for some quickness if you want to boost the AA chain ?

Your list seems very similar to some habits of players I have encountered in bronze tier 1, OP…….

Happy Festivus to you, Mr. Costanza. LOL

IndigoSundown.5419:

Astralporing.1957:

TexZero.7910:

Also sounds like your blaming the mode for the fault of the people. Instead you should be putting the fault directly where it lies, the people you associated with.

The people were, for the most part, completely fine as long as no raids were involved.
(also, i generally do not tend to blame people for things that aren’t their fault)

If raids brought out bad behavior, then the potential for the bad behavior was already there. I’m more inclined to ask people to accept responsibility than I am to assign blame. However, if someone gets nasty over failure, over who got the desired virtual reward or whatever other myriad bones of contention you might care to name, then they got nasty. If you want to deny them the responsibility for their behavior by excusing it because of the game mode, that’s a curious choice.

For content to offer meaningful talent to skilled players, it has to be to some degree hard. That means there has to be the possibility of failure. Failure tends to bring out the worst in some people and the best in others. Also, avarice, impatience, jealousy, egotism and other demons can dog cooperative efforts.

Easier content may mean those behaviors don’t come out. Does that mean there should only be easy content? No. In a game genre that survives by attracting multiple distinct player types, it means that players should recognize that if they don’t want to risk exposure to conflict in a game, they should avoid harder content except with people they know don’t carry that kind of baggage.

So why don’t they? Two reasons. They want the virtual gewgaw and they want convenience. That’s all these debates ever come down to.

So much true but personally feels it is one bit incomplete. I would add a third reason: impatience

Personally, I think that knowing how far the portals can be put from one another without an UI is a good thing. It makes the battle appealing, it makes having skill relevant and we should not dumb down everything. It was even worse before as we could not see how many seconds were left to drop the second portal. That was way too much restrictive before and now we have a fair usage of portals

Personally being in bronze currently I say the best way to win is to adapt to the skill and composition of your team. I would advise you to evade DH and scrapers for example (those were my hardcounters for me). Otherwise, I think it is also good to go on a 1v1 on close or far with you portal on mid to at least decap the nodes and then go back to mid to help your team particularly if you have no DH or scrapper or ele on your team. If you have a decent thief, I don’t think you need to push for far but rather become that +1 or go into those 1v2 battles to turn the tides of the battle into your favor on close and mid. Other than that, play close attention to the map and watch some top pro player twitch stream like helseth or drazeh or Sindrenner^^. I found their streams quite helpful.