Guild Wars 2

Well because now people can pack air+fire sigil to 2-shot enemies, and people who still haven’t learned to dodge and use LOS are shaking their little fists in the air furiously.

Having said that, while I thinkt hat the effects of Reaper’s Protection and Runes of the Nightmare are not OP, I don’t think they’re implemented in a way that rewards skilled play. I reckon reaper’s prot should be changed to a trait which gives 10% life force whenever you are CC’ed (no ICD), and converts Doom (DS3) to a stunbreak. That way the fear proc is not passive, and it buffs the necro’s built-in defence mechanism (death shroud) rather than by giving an extra thing. Plus, it gives us an extra stunbreak with a fairly short recharge, and the choice on whether to use it defensively, or just eat the duration of the CC and save the fear to use offensively, introducing a tactical choice.

Nightmare runes should also be changed: I think unconditional procs are boring, hard to plan for, and hard to play against. Instead of “50% chance on hit”, it should be something like “50% chance when you suffer damage equivalent to 10% of your HP in a single hit”. Obviously with a reduced ICD to compensate. This makes it less likely to be just a random proc, and more likely to proc exactly when the necro needs it: ie. when receiving burst damage, which necros have few protections against. Frankly, I also wouldn’t midn if they were turned to a power set, as power necros have even fewer defences against burst damage (and they need them the most).

Additionally, I think Marks shoudl be changed so that their cast is more obviously telegraphed. by having the area marker appear at the start of the cast rather than at the end. To balance having made them easier to dodge, increase their base physical damage by making spiteful marks, and, ideally, also Soul Marks baseline (ideally also normalising the damage between the different marks, so that one of them doesn’t do 1,200 damage while another does 130) and reverse the mark of blood nerf.

I disagree with the O: I don’t think Reaper’s Protection is that powerful, due to its long recharge. In most cases, it will only proc once during a fight. I agree that completely passive trait procs which can inflict 3" (if traited with Master of Terror) of CC is bad design, because it doesn’t reward skilled play. However, there’s a reason the duration is that long: most other CC in the game is 1-2", and necro has little access to stability and very long recharges on his stunbreaks. And since Reaper’s Protection doesn’t actually break stun, it just CCs the guy who CCed you, the fear it inflicts has to be roughly equivalent in duration to the CC that got inflicted on the necro – otherwise, you will get burst down anyway as soon as the fear expires.

Therefore, what Reaper’s Protection does is prevent an enemy from opening on a necro with a stun/kb/immob and burst them down with impunity. Reaper’s Protection means that you have to either give yourself stability before opening on the necro, or be prepared to burn a stunbreak as soon as you get feared to be able to deliver your damage while the necro is still disabled. I actually think that’s a fair exchange, because, knowing that you’ll likely get feared when you initially stun a necro, you can plan counterplay to it, and it makes up for the fact that necros have very little defense against CC+burst damage, except popping into DS and eating it.

Where it might kinda break down is when Reaper’s Protection is combined with Runes of the Nightmare. The high probability and low conditionality of the proc (50% on hit) means they’ll most likely proc either simultaneously with Reaper’s Protection (which makes for a 6" fear, pretty lethal, but actually a lucky break as you can use one stunbreak to get rid of both fears), or very soon afterwards (which is worse, as you may have already burned your stunbreak on Reaper’s Protection!) Of course, the low conditionality of the proc cuts both ways: if you give yourself stability before opening on a necro, both Reaper’s Protection and Runes of the Nightmare procs will get wasted, and then you get to save your stunbreaker from when you fail to dodge one of the necro’s other fears.

But with a lot of people these days running full-on damage builds (thieves and mesmers in particular), with almost no access to stability, having 4 different sources of fear ruins them, even if 2 of them are on a massive recharge. I can see why it’s overpowered against THEM in particular. But against a warrior, or an ele with armour of earth, both those passive procs will get wasted if the enemy has half a brain and knows to EXPECT that the passive fear procs will hit them as soon as they open on the necro. Honestly, that’s fair and EXACTLY how it should be! You know how many mesmers I see running around with Lyssa/Mass Invis as their only condition cleanse? If you’re gonna run a glass cannon build don’t complain when people ruin you! Those fear procs are completely predictable and easily countered, you just need to bring the tools along to do it!

(And, having mentioned warriors, I also disagree with the OP that it’s “harder than ever” for them to hold a point against a necro: with all the passive boon procs from Runes of Strength/Pirate/etc, there are now a lot more trash boons for our corruptions to get through before it can touch the Stability: it’s now pretty typical for people to have more than 5, and stability is bottom priority for all our boon corruption/removal skills! Moving Terror to Grandmaster would thjerefore completely kill the conditionmancer build, those extra 2 removals from Dark Path are now necessary to get that stability off!)

Poplolita.2638:

What is redundant is people like you who keep suggesting mobility for necromancer when it was clearly stated by anet that it is against their philisophy. You might as well ask them to give us stealth while you’re at it.

http://awesomegifs.com/wp-content/uploads/dead-horse.gif

Dude they also said that pvp will always be only conquest and they’re revising that history now. Let’s face it, if that dead horse is ever gonna come back to life it will be on this subforum! :p

What I don’t understand is why they made ascended mats (as well as weapons and armour) account bound! I don’t have the slightest interest in crafting, I don’t have much time to play and I spend it in pvp and wvw, and that means I can NEVER get ascended weapons and armour unless I get EXTREMELY lucky with a drop. Meanwhile every pve player is scrabbling for more ascended mats to craft their armour with and mine are piling up so I can’t even make a bit of money from them!

TBH it worked ok in 8v8, because with 60% more player slots and less than half the spectator slots it was a lot harder to manipulate a match.

Bhawb.7408:

Because mobility is not part of our design. Its like asking for Guardian to get a bunch of flat mobility (which they don’t have, their only decent mobility is towards targets or on weapon sets that have awful mitigation).

We are built to face tank, our profession’s theme is based on essentially face tanking, so give us the tools to face tank. I don’t want to play ele 0.5, I don’t want to be mesmer pt. 2, I want to be a Necromancer, which does not involve lots of mobility.

Saying it’s not part of our design is redundant, I know that, it’s the reason I’m moaning about this! And that’s not an argument for us not to have mobility, it’s just a completely arbitrary design decision, which doesn’t work anyway: our “attrition” is a joke, and our durability practically nonexistent. Also, saying Guardian doesn’t have mobility and then giving examples of Guardian movement skills just makes me wonder whether you even realise you’re contradicting yourself. I see plenty of DPS guardians running around with GS (there was at least one in TOL2 tonight in fact!), so I don’t get why you’re dismissive of it.

I think it’s plain that the developers’ design concept just doesn’t work. You can’t take a cloth class, give it no ability to disengage from a fight, give it no abilities that allow it to stay in a fight either (eg vigor, blocks, invulnerabilities etc), and tell them they’re supposed to facetank damage using only DS. Taking some tired, overworked developer’s fevered ideas from 3+ years ago and holding them as gospel despite them being completely idiotic is the very reason this game is bleeding players and alienating the ones still left.

@Olrun, the DDOS attacks aren’t happening right now but it’s clear their servers aren’t back up to 100% – this game used to be rock solid until a few weeks ago, and then everyone started reporting more lag and connection instability in pvp simultaneously! You can’t tell me that a disconnect in every single matchup, different people on different teams, are ALL due to player-side issues!

Evan Lesh.3295:

imagine what would have to freeze in order to have a fair resume: Exact player locations, even if you’re jumping over a gap. Persistent AOE effects. In-flight missiles. Every boon and condition. Capture point progress. Skill recharge. Its a nightmare. Just freezing score and position is not good enough in a lot of cases.

Evan, like VeeWee said in the OP, it doesn’t need to be PERFECT, it just needs to be better than what we’ve got now! Look at what happened tonight at TOL2! Even a pure score freeze would be better than nothing!

I just stopped watching the stream in disgust and disappointment: in nearly EVERY matchup so far, there’s been at least 1 DC!

I know that the server instability of the past few days isn’t ANet’s fault, but honestly, couldn’t you have postponed the finals of the biggest tournament you’ve ever held to date for one measly week until your datacentre had its kitten back together?

Hurray, a red post! You can always bet on Lesh!

Evan Lesh.3295:

Pause feature: Implementing this in an MMO makes my head hurt just thinking about it. I honestly see no way to do this without a significant rework to most systems in our game unless we implement a pseudo-pause.

While I understand how difficult doing this in an open world would be, surely each arena is a separate, isolated instance, so freezing its state wouldn’t impact the rest of the game? If you’re not already running pvp matches this way then I hate to think of the amount of wasted processing cycles and bandwidth!

If it really is impossible though, a pseudo-pause could be accomplished by implementing just 2 more commands: /freezescore and /settime. That way, if there is a disconnect, admins can effectively pause the game by pausing score progression. Players can still run around and fight each other but they won’t get any points. If node capping and decapping can also be frozen in that time that would be ideal. When the dropped player reconnects, the admin just has to reset the timer to the point in time where the disconnect happened and unfreeze the score.

RashanDale.3609:

-Staff gets its Ally-cleansing back

This is something we badly need, as we have practically no team support on our weapon skills now! Yeah it was an overpowered skill originally but I think the nerf was unjustifiably harsh.

Tadsoul.6951:

scepter #3 change it to work more like the trident skill feast however make it only 3 life force per target also have it remove immobilize

We definitely need better LF generation on scepter, and scepter 3 badly needs a buff.

warhorn

• #5 i feel if i could throw my swarm at a person could make it more useful for a range user

That would be a brilliant idea actually! Make it into a chain/toggle skill like Spectral Walk: the 2nd skill could have range 900 or so, and either a longer cripple or a 1" immobilize, but it would cause you to lose the locust swarm (and therefore the pbaoe cripple and LF generation – but ideally not the swiftness). This wouldn’t just make it useful as a long-ranged snare, it would also stop you from hitting random crates/critters/whatevers, and putting you in combat while you were running from place to place! Currently it’s useless as a speed buff because it puts you in combat and lowers your base speed by almost 30%!

How does everyone feel about the buffs to Mesmer scepter btw? I’m actually excited about the possibility we’ll have to apply more than 3 stacks of torment for once! You know, by eating up all of their stacks and sending them back…

Why are people saying we need defence not mobility? Are the two not intertwined? With the exception of guardians and engis, isn’;t every profession’s best defence the ability to disengage and reset the fight? Even with necros as they are now, aren’t our best tools for getting otu of bad situations Flesh Wurm and Spectral Walk, for all their imperfections? Sure you can extend the fight by going into DS or Plague, but that’s not gonna save you from dying, it’ll just keep your point capped a few seconds longer.

Also, even if Death Shroud or Spectral Armour or whatever were buffed, how much more survivability would that really give a d/d zerker necro? With no vigor, blocks, evades, and very little access to blind? If someone could 3-shot you before, well, at worst they can 4-shot you through protection.

Mobility, INHERENT mobility, which can be used either offensively OR defensively, is at the root of this game. Knowing when and how to use a movement skill is what separates the good players from the great ones. It’s the reason Mesmers are still being played in the top teams even though they’re in a much worse shape than necro in terms of power, and why thieves never disappeared from the meta even back at the height of the condi meta where if you caught them in your aoe they would melt.

The developers have been focussing on giving us snares instead of movement skills, which I guess is thematically appropriate, but there are problems with that:
a. our frequency of snare application just can’t keep up with the frequency of cleanses – especially if you’re runnign a power necro who has less access to cover condis
b. the high number of movement skills in this game render snares impotent (the max distance of charges is affected by cripple and chill, but you’re still moving faster than normal speed, and teleports/shadowsteps aren’t affected by snares at all)
c. our snares are mostly short ranged (with the exception of Dark Path, which is easy to outrun, and Chilblains, which has a very long recharge), meaning if you’re trying to keep a melee attacker at bay they work (barring movement skills, see b. above), but if you’re trying to chase someoen down they’re useless.
d. both pvp and wvw are inherently based on mobility, so having none sucks!

Evan Lesh.3295:

Creating a sense of progression through the different PvP types is definitely something we want. Hotjoin is not structured enough for new players, while team and solo arena are too daunting.

Have you considered creating some special “newbie servers” for people to learn on? You;d have to restrict them to those servers until they reached a threshold (eg. rank 10), and keep everyone out.

I also really think you should consider the OP’s idea of creating a 3v3 elimination mode. The problem with pvp isn’t JUST the specific conquest mechanics like capturing points, preventing decaps, and all the secondary map mechanics – it’s also that the fights are incredibly faster than pve! Mobs in pve attack once every SEVERAL SECONDS! A thief in pvp can have you downed in the time it takes a pve mob to make their second attack! It’s a huge adjustment, and I think people would adjust faster if they didn’t need to also think about arbitrary map mechanics like standing in circles and turning them red to blue.
(Not that I think such a gamemode should be restricted to newbies. Just saying it might be good if they were restricted to TDM servers until they adjusted.)

Open spectating of rated matches requires a lot of back-end work to make it scale to any number of viewers and support delays to prevent abuse. It is also less of a priority than leagues and seasons. Especially since we still have authorized shoutcasters and streamers.

Twitch is a terrible way to watch matches though. Their interface is an abomination and their streaming quality terrible, even if you have a good connection. In-game match replays would be a lot less bandwidth-intensive for people on bad connections, and they could more easily follow the players they want to learn from. Moreover, you could take a leaf from DOTA2’s playbook and allow the audio from shoutcasters’ streams to play over the in-game replay – and that way the shoutcaster gets a viewer credited to his Twitch account too.

You had this technology in GW1. I don’t know how much your network infrastructure has changed and to what extent code from GW1 is reusable, but I’m sure some of the ways they figured out to solve those problems would be transferable to GW2, right? Most importantly, it would be a way to increase the visibility of PvP IN-GAME! I’ve been saying for months that tournaments should be advertised in-game (maybe an message either flashing across the screen or in your chat window when a tournament stream is about to start) – what better way to do that than to allow people to watch without even leaving the game? I know the real esports money is in advertising and the advertisers want views on external websites (since they can’t advertise in game), but unless you FIRST build a viewership you won’t get the views on external websites!

Amir.1570:

Nice try though, casual. Good chance that you’ve never played Axe or Mace mainhand and made it work to an extent

Since when has “casual” become an insult on these forums? It’s kittening me off no end, especially when the esports-wannabies who use it have, like the OP, never ONCE even made it onto the leaderboard since February according to gw2score.com – where do you get off thinking you’re better than anyone else?

cheese.4739:

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

I’m pretty sure LFG is cross-instance, so no problem there And, unfortunately, I personally get as much goldselling spam in HOTM as I do in LA, so that’s not an issue – I’m pretty sure goldselling accounts are botted: they cycle automatically between a few different maps, repeating their ad at intervals. HOTM is just one of 5 highly populated maps (along with the WvW ones) which are accessible directly from LA, so it makes sense for them to cycle between those. As for map chat spam, frankly HOTM has the worst whining and spamming of any part of the game, so pve players could only improve it.

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

Yeah, I agree that that’s the real reason, that’s what I said before. But that’s Anet’s problem, not ours. I don’t see how we would suffer from pve players hanging around HOTM.

Agreed: the GvG ladder in GW1 had visible (numerical) rating, and it worked very well. I’m not super keen on the Glicko ratings they’re using now, they seem very erratic, and not seeing why your rank moved (or didn’t move) after a game makes it feel random and unfair, even if it’s working perfectly behind the scenes (which it probably isn’t, frankly).

I would also love a new game mode, but make no mistake: standard game models is HUGE! Clearly this feature pack is gonna be smaller overall than last April’s, where we got the new rewards and they rebalanced every single rune and sigil, so I don’t think pvp is getting less than any other game mode. I mean, WvW is just getting purple commander tags! :p

No don’t get me wrong, I’m perfectly sympathetic: I haven’t had time to play for nearly a week, logged in for the first time again yesterday and the servers crashed during my first match! I haven’t logged back in to check if I’ve got a dishonourable stack – I probably don’t cause the match was near its end when I got kicked out. But I saw that the game was unstable so I just quit. I know the system isn’t perfect but if you get disconnected for TWO MATCHES IN A ROW it’s really hard to get a ban because of server instability!

Let’s talk plainly: I very much doubt anyone who got disconnected two games in a row was careless enough to queue up for a third match. The people who got a ban because of the server crashes yesterday probably already had 2 stacks of dishonourable, because they had ragequit matches sometime in the preceding 3 days as well. I see plenty of people running around with dishonourable in pvp/hotm: they ragequit matches they can’t win, but when they have 2 stacks they wait for one to expire before doing it again. They try to play the system, but it backfired on them. It would be a gross misallocation of resources to come up with a pardon system for people like that. (Unless the entire system was being overhauled anyway of course.)

Maybe I’m wrong in your case, maybe you did queue up 3 times in a row during last night’s instability. But I’m sure you’re in the minority.

Not saying the players are at fault for the servers conking out yesterday, but why on earth did you keep playing when you saw there was network instability? I mean, ok, maybe the first disconnect was a fluke, so you queue up again when you log back in, but once you got 2 in a row why push your luck? I think it was pretty thoughtless and I personally wouldn’t like other pvp features to get pushed back to implement a pardon system for people who should’ve had more sense to begin with.

Come on, Flesh Wurm might be good, but only in comparison to all our other stunbreakers. It’s range is VERY small in real terms – 1,200 in a straight line, but the teleport line isn’t direct like it is with Spectral Walk or other professions’ teleports: it’s along the ground, meaning travelling distance around obstacles is counted into the max range. By contrast, other teleports like Mesmers’ Blink can target a point 1,200 away in a straight line. You still need a path along the ground to that point (you can’t target a ledge across a bottomless chasm), but that path isn’t restricted to the 1,200 range like the Wurm’s path is: only the target point is range-restricted.

And while it may be useful in spvp (although it requires preparation, and setting it up at a safe point basically nullifies the Wurm’s offensive capabilities, making it nothing more than a very limited teleport/stunbreak with a cooldown substantially longer than other such abilities), it’s pretty much useless in WvW because you’re constantly on the move and you never know when and where you’ll meet an enemy. If the cast time was substantially shorter maybe you could put it down just as you see someone in the distance, but as it stands it’s a wasted utility slot.

Hey nooooow, don’t be so negative! We finally got cleave, or at least 2/3 of it, after only 24 months of asking for it! Anet are clearly listening! Come on guys, what’s our wishlish for June 2016?

ArrDee.2573:

Anet is too slow to balance! 1 patch every half year! That’s just thuper insane in the membrane! Anet wants to make everything perfect! Well newflash frands! You can’t balance perfectly! It can only be good! And everything good can then be made better! And then you keep making it better! Biweekly! Even monthly! Hell at this point Vee Wee will even take a patch every 2 months! But twice per year! Bad! So bad! So very bad!

Motherflippin’ yeah!

SkylightMoon.1980:

GW1 pvp was massively more successful than gw2 pvp currently is. It was an actual esport and had a pretty big community. You can find pvp finals videos on youtube with 300k views. I don’t know what the twitch stream numbers were like.

That was the amazing thing about it: Twitch didn’t even exist in those days, Youtube had only just started up in the same year GW1 was released, live streaming of events was practically unheard of, and the only popular e-sports games were FPSs and fighting games. Anet was the ballsiest company in the frigging universe back then: they weren’t trying to establish their game as an e-sport, they were trying to establish e-sports! AND build the whole infrastructure up themselves from the ground up! 300k views on youtube? I guarantee you that’s only a fraction of the amount of views games got on the in-game observer mode (introduced 8 months after launch – we still can’t view tournament matches in-game 24 months after launch in GW2!). They were big events that bound the community together, and even people who almost never played GvG would watch them, just to see what the pinnacle of the game looked like!

I honestly don’t know how Anet lost their edge like this, why they turned their back on everything that made GW1 great (I’m not talking just about gameplay style, but basic features like guild ladders, multiple gametypes, observer mode, frequent balance patches, and all sorts of things!). A lot of the people who were in charge of those aspects of GW1 still work there, so I can only assume there was a change of management philosophy and company focus.

Bhawb.7408:

Mark Katzbach.9084:

We’ll be covering mesmer and elementalist this week.

Basically, Necromancer is on the very last preview. Meaning, there is a whopping 4 days for us to give them feedback in change. Or, in more realistic terms, we are absolutely stuck with the changes they make for the next 6 months with no chance to give them feedback on how those changes might affect us.

Dude, I think the real problem here isn’t that necromancers get their balance preview last, but that balance patches aren’t frequent enough! Personally I wouldn’t give a kitten if they made a complete balls-up of the Sept 9 patch if they fixed the most egregious mistakes a week or two later! I think that, rather than trying to draw their attention to the narrow concerns of necro players alone, we should be hammering it into their heads that EVERYONE wants more frequent balance patches. I don’t think we should be distracting from that message.

cheese.4739:

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

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

As title. Could be a mail, could be an on-screen message appearing momentarily, could be a bright gold unfilterable message in the chat window. Notify players in-game when sign-ups open and close, when streams go live, when tournament results are out.

MarkPhilips.5169:

Btw it could be good compromise, if u are a human character, standardize model doesn’t cover your character, weapons and armor.

No. That’s not fair. In that case you’d be penalising everyone not playing a human, as humans will have more customisation options than them.

Plus, this isn’t just about tiny asuras being invisible. It’s about people going into pvp with cook’s outfits so you can’t tell what class they are. It’s about massive shoulderpads which your weapons clip into so you can’t see skill animations. It’s about looking at an opponent and being able to SEE AT A GLANCE what class they are instead of having to look at the target display!

That means one distinctive armour skin for each class, and I’m happy with this meaning a bit of a loss of individuality if it improves pvp. It’s worth it if I’m able to tell warriors from guardians and eles from necros without even needing to target them. In the future, I can see them “vetting” 2-3 additional armour skins per class and let us choose between them, assuming they are also profession-appropriate and highly distinctive. Maybe for instance necros could choose between tribal and dry bones, or eles between Flame Legion and stately – stuff that’s recognisable from a distance and easy to tell apart. But that would be a bonus for me: I’d be happy to stick with 1 skin per class if it improves the game!

That’s great! Now if only they’d allow us to export that data to a file so we can actually do stuff with it.

Well when I say stupidly tanky I mean you can take 220% more punishment than anyone else before dying… but that’s not to say you WON’T die, because, well, with no vigor, evades, blocks, or invulnerabilities, you WILL actually take that punishment, whereas anyone else would just be able to get away and reset the fight.

Yeah it’s been more laggy in the last couple of weeks. I thought maybe it was just my ISP, but all my guildies have been complaining of the same thing, and some of them live in different countries than me. Something up with ANet’s servers, or maybe the latest update changed up some network code? Or is Cthulhu chewing on the transatlantic cable?

IsilZha.3608:

You just described the polar opposite of balance and called it balance. The rest of my team being bad is one thing, but the downed state artificially caps how effective I can skillfully play against multiple opponents.

Not really: what it caps is how effective OP specs can be vs multiple opponents: if it was pure skill that let you down 2 people while 1v3, you wouldn’t have been in a 1v3 situation in the first place!

The OP has clearly never played a necro, but I do agree that LF needs a rework. Having ALL your durability come from a 2nd health bar is extremely difficult to balance, especially 1v1: when it’s empty you’re basically a sitting duck, and when it’s full you’re stupidly tanky!

I really think we should get more access to boons and other sustain mechanics, and have life force become just an energy bar that powers DS skills.

Yeah I’ve accidentally been caught by that when I was roaming in WvW while waiting for the queue to pop! :p It’s our fault though: you can still switch in the 2 minute pre-match AND in the 10" from when the match starts until the gates open. Just push “go” a few seconds earlier!

@Liewec: spectators, you yourself, and your teammates will always see your characters as you designed them, as will any enemies who don’t have the standard models option enabled (which I believe will be over half the people you play with, as only the people really serious about winning care enough). So why do you mind what you look like to everyone else? Bear in mind also that, while ASuras are the biggest (lol) problem, they’re not the only one: huge Norns that teammates can literally HIDE INSIDE and obscure large bits of the screen are also kinda ridiculous.

Re: Malthias’s Skyhammer suggestions, I really like them! Turn it a 2 or 3-level map, with features on all levels. Top level: mid point. Middle level: side points. Lower level: Skyhammer portal. There should be good access between levels so that people can use them to sneak around them map and bypass enemies. Jumppads need to be much wider and more sensitive, and they should also not be directional: atm the direction you’re moving in influences the direction the jump pad will launch you in – they should instead launch you to a predetermined point, and not be affected by player movement.
The Skyhammer platform is a horrible place to fight on. I know they did it like that so that whoever’s holding the hammer would be easy to knock off and neither team could hold onto it for long, but in practice if someone with enough stability and/or knockbacks gets there, they can prepare the ground with turrets/marks/whatever and become extremely difficult to shift. It should be wider, with fewer panels, and getting knocked off ikt should drop you to the upper level (where mid point is).

Sins.4782:

I’d like to add that adding a bank to PvP does not devalue bank items in PvE. Bank items have the advantage of having 0 loading screens, and do not detract any time from whatever activity you were doing beforehand.

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

Liewec.2896:

Exile.8160:

why would anyone care what your enemy thinks.

because “Foegore the Giant” should look like this…
not some skinny rank 1 human!

Let me guess, Foegore is the tiny white-haired asura, right? :p

I’m just jumping in to repeat that this will be the greatest thing ANet has done for pvp so far, so thank you again!

I don’t think the OP is right that people who themselves play human avatars will now have an advantage, as watching ally animations isn’t nearly as important as watching enemy animations (especially if you’re an organised team on voice comms). However, I think it would be nice to have the option to force standard models for allies too at some point.

I think the devs made the right choice to not make standard models visible to shoutcasters. High end pvpers want to be visible and recognisable to promote their image, especially if they’ve got “esports” ambitions, so forcing them to all look alike would drive some of them away.

Dunno how this thread got derailed into downed state, but GW2 needs a revive system exactly BECAUSE it lacks a trinity: getting a kill in a team fight doesn’t need the kind of team-coordination you have in other MMOs, where one person needs to snare the target, another person has to shut down the enemy’s healer, two people need to deal the spike damage, and your own healer needs to cleanse debuffs from them to make sure the damage lands. That kind of coordination just isn’t necessary to down someone in GW2, but when you’re dealing with stomps and revives it IS necessary, because different classes have varying access to stability, stealth, aoe healing, boon removal/corruption etc, so trying to get your teammate revived or stomp out an enemy is the ONLY time when every different profession in a team fight has a specific role only they can perform.

Oh and to the guy who downed 2 players 1v3: I’d say the downed state system worked exactly as intended there. The game would’ve been very unbalanced if it allowed a single player, however good, to carry a team in which your other 4 teammates were so useless that they couldn’t send 1 more person to help you while you were 1v3!

There’s so much intelligence and plain old common sense in the OP’s suggestions! (Which makes reading his posts in what I imagine is his Vee Wee voice – high-pitched and frantic, like a Smurf on Shrooms – even funnier!) I agree with almost all of them so there’s no point in just repeating them, but I’ll just quote this ONE BIT that ANet really needs to take to heart:

taking your time to find the perfect solution is not helping! Make a change! If it doesn’t work out, make another change! Just do something! Not changing things means things don’t get changed! It’s so simple!

Come on guys. Twice-annual balance changes just aren’t enough. Who are you afraid you’re gonna upset by trying to fix things? Are you worried someone’s gonna sue you because you nerfed his overpowered build and he lost some multi-million dollar first place prize at a tournament? What prize pool? What tournament? The pvp playerbase is tiny, you can only improve things if you start actively and regularly tweaking!

Just saw it too (here )
THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU!

Archaon.9524:

Meanwhile Dota2 international has 10 millions dollars prize pool…

Well to be fair that was mostly crowdfunded by the playerbase…

Bhawb.7408:

A nerf to SoS, probably upping its cast time to 1s and having its visual apply at the very start of the cast.

That would be a pretty good and even-handed change. Unfortunately I suspect they’ll nerf the number of conditions it inflicts and their duration instead, because it’s less work than getting an animation artist to redo its animation… :/

ArrDee.2573:

They should change Combustive Shot to be a targeted projectile! If the projectile hits, the fire field spawns with the target at the center! Hire me plz Anet!

Edit: They should also remove the burn that the field applies and make the projectile apply a flat 4 second burn! Yippee!

Agreed.

Stonewall.9467:

Let’s just all go back to gw1 and gvg our hearts out…. Please?!?!
I vote Anet re skins gw1 pvp, and sells it as a new game… The combat, competition, and depth that game brought is still ignored by every other game maker; even Anet who invented the best pvp game ever (gw1) ignores it
On a side note… I miss Underworld and FoW

Honestly, if they re-released GW1 pvp as f2p with microtransactions for either skill unlocks, faction boosts, and cosmetic items (armour skins), it would seriously make a lot of money. Not GW2 3 million boxes sold levels of money, but easily enough money to pay for 20 people to work on maintaining and balancing the game and still be massively profitable. Especially if they let those of us who already own it to transfer our accounts over to the f2p version with all our unlocks and titles intact – the hardest thing for any f2p game to do is to establish itself and gain a critical mass of players, and GW1 already has an established playerbase in the seven figures, tens of thousands of whom were hardcore pvpers and would AT LEAST log in, try it out, and play a few games!

I’m sure they could find a way to make the pve portions of gw1 profitable as f2p too, but it wouldn’t work quite as well.

I remember 3-way matches (and even 6-way ones) from Tombs back in GW1, and while they were fun they were a kittenaotic tbh.

cheese.4739:

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

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

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

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

Yeah it’s ridiculously well telegraphed, but since it can almost 1-shot a target I think that’s a good thing. It would be seriously OP if it was hard to dodge, nobody would stand a chance 1v1.
If, otoh, you’re in a 2v2, you can get your teammate to immobilise or stun your target right after you start casting your burst, and then that makes it a lot harder for them to avoid, don’t you think? They’d have to blow a lot of defensive cooldowns or eat a 3-bar-burst full in the face, and you’d definitely be able to refill those 3 bars way faster than they’d get their defensive cooldowns back. Don’t you think that makes it viable?

I’m very much in favour of this if it’s AN OPTION. Same size character for everyone , and same armour skin for every profession so that they’re immediately recognisable. Every competitive game that has different classes makes those classes recognisable in silhouette, no matter how much you customise them. You can buy all the special costumes for your Ken in Street Fighter but they’re still immediately recognisable as Ken, and you can give any amount of silly hats to your Heavy in TF2 but they’re still unmistakeable. Same for things like LoL and Dota2, and the game that did it best of all imho was GW1, where, even though each profession had dozens of different armour options, they were still recognisable from maximum draw distance: not only because of the consistent styles in armour (eg all necros looked kinda gothy in some way), but also because the body pose and animations of each character model were consistent within classes no matter how much you customised them. In GW2 otoh, animations are internally consistent not for each profession but for each race, which is completely unhelpful in combat.