Guild Wars 2

You mean HoH? /fifteen

@Hugh and Jonathan, I remember once around 2010ish reading an interview that Izzy gave to a fansite. When he was asked “if you could go back in time and give a single tip to your 2005 self about how to balance the game, what would it be?” his reply was “Split skills! I really wish we had done it sooner, I can’t believe it took us as long as it did!”

I’m not trying to say that Izzy is better at balancing than Hugh or Karl McLain or whoever – a lot of people were VERY angry with some of the balancing decisions made back then! :p I’m saying that he’s been through the same process, dealt with the same problems, AND ALREADY SOLVED THEM! Why are you guys still confuzzled by them?

Any company that, like ANet, has been in the same business for 14 years now should have put together a best practices document by now – why are the lessons you learned from GW1 not on it?

Hugh Norfolk.2798:

• How does that player feel?
• What questions is that player going to ask?
  * Is this a bug?
  * Why is it only different in PvP?
• Who is going to answer those questions?
• Are they going to try and seek out someone to answer these questions?
• Is the person they (if they do ask) going to know the actual reason for this change?
• Is that player going to stop playing PvP or GW2 all together?

Once again, you guys already solved this : when you’re in pve, your skill’s tooltip reads “Hugh’s Stance: gain 5” Fury". When you enter pvp (and/or wvw), split skills are briefly highlighted, the message “some of your equipped skills have been changed to their pvp versions” briefly flashes across the screen, and your tooltip now reads “Hugh’s Stance (pvp version): gain 3” Fury"! It’s so simple! I can’t believe it’s an issue for you guys when you solved it years ago!

I know you’ve had a lot of staff turnaround, including 2 of the company’s 3 co-founders, since those days – but a lot of the people who made those decisions STILL WORK THERE, albeit at different posts! It’s not hard to get them together for one day a week and get them to put together a “best practices” manual for employees that currently work at posts they used to occupy!

Asomal.6453:

Solution
- Just remove the button “Leave the Mist” from the PvP tab. Now you would be obligated to use the portal do LA, in order to leave the Mist.

That might actually be a good compromise! The only problem is for people who like to do a bit of casual pve while they’re waiting for their match queue to pop (which I sometimes do as well). However, if you click “leave match” as soon as your game is over (ie before you get kicked back to heart of the mists), then you do end up in whatever pve area you were before you joined the match, so it would be ok.

In fact, if ANet changed the behaviour of pvp matches so that they kicked you back to wherever you were before instead of sending you to Mists as default this would be the ideal solution!

Frenk.5917:

Xista.7391:

“Top 100”

http://www.gw2score.com/PvP/player/Chilli2976

Well, to be honest that is not really reliable. I checked myself and it says my highest rank is 97, while I have a screenshot of me being rank 80. Maybe it doesn’t calculte low data?

I think it’s only been going since February, was your rank 80 before that? Alternatively like Nexed said it might only poll the leaderboards periodically, but I find that unlikely as I think ANet’s API has push data.

PS. The owner of that site does post on these forums, anyone remember his username?

We’ll get some buffs for sure (probably axe, possibly staff), but realistically I’m also expecting a nerf on Lich auto, SoS, and possibly terror.

Underwhelmed: was hoping for a nerf to the 100% condition reduction on Berserker Stance. Hard counters are terrible game design: nobody in a pvp game should be immune to any other player’s main source of damage for 8/60". And the problem with Flanking Strike wasn’t just the low initiative cost, but the lack of counterplay: if they changed it so the thief was only evading for 0.25" of the 0.5% activation time it would be fine.

:-o

THIS! CHANGES! EVERYTHING!

Oh and bear in mind that faster knowledge-propagation and trickling down of the top-tier meta WILL also place an obligation on developers to issue more frequent balance changes.

Totally agree with Grouch that the meta is a trickle-down effect. Which is why it’s important that we get some in-game features to support people learning! You can’t expect casual players to go navigate the abomination in user interface design that is Twitch to find the few decent players who stream their games! What is needed is:

1. A better, instanced, and tougher tutorial teaching people conquest basics

2. In-game observer mode FOR TOURNAMENT MATCHES! Who on earth wants to watch hotjoin??? We need an in-game browser listing recent matches by high-ranked teams/players which you can replay, like GW1 Observer Mode had. For bonus points, you could do what Valve has done with Dota2 and allow people to play the audio of a commentator over the replay, so it essentially becomes like watching the match being cast on Twitch except you’re in-game instead, and you control the camera!

3. Team/Guild-based rankings and leaderboards. You know, firstly because it’s a team game, and it makes sense, especially if you’ll implement a tournament seeding system which will guarantee spots to popular/successful teams like some of the guests on last night’s podcast asked for, and secondly to make 2. possible.

It’s not enough to change how much power or condition damage Might gives, or to lower or increase the stat numbers Celestial amulets or Valkyrie amulets or whatever else gives, or to lower how much skill X scales with Power or Healing etc. What’s needed is a change of the scaling system for ALL skills and effects from a linear scale to a curved scale, to give diminishing returns. The current system just encourages building for extremes – ie either going full bunker or full burst, and it’s a balancing nightmare. It pushes every balanced build out of the meta because they can neither kill the bunkers, nor survive the burst professions.

I’ve never heard Zoose talk before and he really impressed me with how well he described the problems with the combat of the game. Particularly around the 30-35’ mark when he’s talking about skills with no counterplay. For anyone who doesn’t have the time to listen to it the lowdown is combat is too fast and too bursty, so everyone has to rely on instacast invulnerabilities and passive procs (eg mist form or Endure Pain) because they literally do not have the time to react to the opponent’s burst. I chuckled when he said “I don’t want this turned into WoW where everyone stands still with 4” cast times, but…" Well said Zoose, well said.

What do you mean during development? Autoatacks were already pretty strong during BWEs. Were they weaker at an earlier stage in development?

Anyway, I’ll be honest, I don’;t entirely blame them for not switching direction and doing it now. It would be a massive rebalancing job.

Elric Of Melnibone.4781:

Should players be ‘scaled’ in PvP to remove that advantage?

YES kitten . End of! This kind of thing is ridiculous and unacceptable in a pvp game. The argument has been made a thousand times on here, and the devs refuse to give us a good reason why they won’t do it! It’s a minor client-side tweak on the level of difficulty of bobbleheads to implement.

mooty.4560:

The game will never be an e-sport because it lacks depth at a fundamental game play level. Combat is too simple and has a certain twitch element to it(GW1 and MOBA players alike prefer more cerebral combat). Dodging and evasion has a nice feel but it prevents players from being methodical about skill choice and usage. In many cases you can avoid attacks without even being aware of them.

Conquest wasn’t the best choice as a general sPvP mode but it’s not terrible and could benefit from a few tweaks(i.e. multiple players affecting point captures). I think they chose it because of the popularity of alliance battles in the previous installment and because they feel movement is of vital importance to this game.

I think they’re aware that sPvP lacks variety and are working on bringing something new to the table soon. The courtyard map, however awful, is an indication of that.

Just my two cents.

I’m with you on the combat, but I don’t think the situation is unfixable: I think if basic autoattack damage were seriously nerfed right across the board, and the big damage skills became better telegraphed so as to make dodging them more meaningful, this could become a more tactical, cerebral team-game.

Unfortunately what we’re seeing instead is power creep all over, making combat even faster and burstier. This makes for fun 1v1s but utterly brain-meltingly incomprehensible tema fights.

My questions also apply to the EU or Chinese all-stars if you get to talk to them:

1. Why do you think the pvp community is so small? Which of the following do you think is stopping casuals and pve players from getting interested in pvp:
a. lack of great and unique in-game rewards?
b. lack of a pro e-sports scene?
c. pvp combat too fast-paced/difficult/brutal?
d. trait and attribute system too complex?
e. imbalances (whether real or perceived) between profession power levels?
f. matchmaking snafus teaming up teams of beginners against high-ranked players?
g. lack of variety in game modes?
h. conquest rules too obscure and arbitrary?
i. something else not on here?

2. What do they think is the one most important change ANet should do to get more people pvping?

This is good! Me and the rest of Europe will mostly be asleep at the time of course but I’m posting here to remind myself to watch it tomorrow

Speaking of tomorrow, wouldn’t it have been better to have held this tomorrow so your guests could react to the balance previews as well?

Evan, as some have described, the problem is generally that left-clicking on a target model does not always select it. I can think of two possible reasons why this could be the case:
1. the selection “hitbox” on a character might not be exactly the same in height as the character
2. target selection is not handled entirely client-side, so is subject to client/server lag.
Obviously I don’t know how your game engine works internally, so I have no idea if either of these is the case. I’m just guessing because that’s what it feels like sometimes: you click on an Asura’s head, and it’s not selecting, you then click on its torso and it does. Also, charr with huge shoulderpads: you click on their shoulderpads and the charr isn’t selected. It just feels as if the target box is smaller than the model, or that the character isn’t exactly where my client is displaying it. I realise this isn’t exactly your area, it’ll probably be either a network programmer’s or an engine programmer’s job depending on which one (if either) of my guesses is right, but if you know how targeting is handled you’ll be able to tell who to send it to.

Of course, there are also other issues why effective click-targetting is difficult in this game (particle effects obscuring character models, no body blocking meaning targets can clip into each other, massive character size disparities meaning a character can be completely obscured by anyone standing next to them, tiny Asuras and fast movement with a lot of teleport skills mean clicking on someone is harder than a headshot with a railgun in Quake 3, camera issues when you’re close to any wall where the camera zooms right up against your own character and you can’t see anyone else), but this issue isn’t related to them: it’s that even in ideal conditions you sometimes click a target and they don’t get selected.

I, like everyone else, use tab-targeting 99% of the time, but there are problems with that too. High number of AI things in pvp is one of them, andc there’s not much you can do there, but the even greater problem is that tab-targeting only selects targets within your field of vision. If someone’s right behind you they won’t get targeted, even if they’re on-screen. So you try to click on them, and you select yourself instead. Tab targeting would be much more effective if it cycled through ALL enemies in range, whehter your character can see them or not. And we wouldn’t need to bother you about fixing click-targeting. :p

Bhawb.7408:

Dark Path will never become a ground-targeted teleport. It was like that in beta and its too strong without hammering the skill with other nerfs.

As I’ve said before though, turning it into a ground-targeted skill would require you to lead your target, making it less reliable to hit and thereby inherently nerfing its combat effectiveness unless you’ve had years of using the rocket launcher in Quake 3 or something. Remember, it’s a really small aoe, and it doesn’t stay on the ground like marks do: it wouldn’t be as easy to hit with it!

Breaking Bad.6241:

The best middle ground would be Random Arena from GW1. You press Play and within seconds you are in a fair 4v4 random match.

That’s not how I remember it… you would press play and within seconds you are in a 4v3 fight because someone quit on account of his team not having a monk. And this would happen 3 times before you get a team with a monk. And then it would be a smiter. Until you rerolled to a monk, and then the first game you joined your team would have 2 more monks in it.

Granted the team comp issues would be less pronounced in GW2 but you would still get people ragequitting 2 minutes into a match because they think the other team is using OP builds, or they think their teammates are useless, or they just entered a match and went afk for some reason. And then everyone else would be stuck in a 5v4 match for 10 minutes, because conquest to 500 points takes longer than the simple elimination of Random Arenas.

So no, if it’s to be a truly casual game mode hotjoin has to be “hotjoin” – ie. drop in/drop out. And for that to work there needs to be a bit of a buffer: 5v4 is not only unwinnable, but a total slaughter. 7v8 is far less so.

I don’t play hotjoin except to practice new builds, so I have literally no horse in this race, but it seems to me that this problem only started (or at least got a lot more widespread very suddenly) when 8v8 was removed. That could be for two reasons:
a. 7v8 is a lot more forgiving than 4v5, and
b. it’s harder to manipulate auto-balance to get you ont he winning team when there’s 16 players in a match rather than 10.

If that’s the case, wouldn’t bringing back some 8v8 arenas alleviate the problem?

I realise this suggestion wouldn’t do anything to fix 5v5 arenas, but I read someone else’s suggestion a few pages back that I think would work too: instead of removing spectator mode, make it so you forfeit rank rewards and reward track progression if you go back into spectator mode before the match finishes. So in other words, once you pick a team, you have to stick with it unless autobalanced to the other team. Dropping back into spectator mode means no rewards for you.

I’m personally of the opinion that, while necro is OVERALL in a decent place right now, DS is incredibly unbalanced as a survivability mechanic. A necro with a full life bar is incredibly tanky 1v1, but if you have no life force (such as at the beginning of a match) you’re easy prey to pretty much anyone. This was a conscious design decision by the devs: you get no escapes, no vigor, no blocks, no invulnerabilities, very little stability, but you get a second health bar. But I don’t think they realise just how situational that is from a balancing perspective, and I don’t think it’s even possible to balance such a mechanic. And while I also like the thematic idea of necros becoming more powerful the more you wail on them, DS doesn’t really accomplish that: it’s not as if you build LF as you get hit, except when under the effect of spectral skills, and it’s not as if DS skills are significantly more powerful than your utility or weapon skills. In fact, since most professions will use chain-CC to burst you down, they will lock you out of 4/5 of your DS skills anyway.

IMO Death Shroud should work more like warriors’ adrenaline: it should be faster to build up, and faster to burn down. DS should not be a transformation, but rather its 2-5 abilities be bound to F1-F4 and require life force to activate. Then necros’ weapon skills and utilities reworked to provide the kind of extra survivability that having that extra effective HP used to provide – ie. make necros work more like everyone else, and therefore easier to balance!

Kuju.2153:

. I still think DS #2 should be a skillshot to give Necro a small 600 range teleport option

OMG I would necrogasm so hard if they made that change! Dark Path is a great damage skill, but with its slow projectile speed it’s pretty terrible as a gap closer (which was what it was intended for – I can literally outrun the projectile with swiftness!). With that one change they could turn it into a decent gap closer, an escape, or even a general mobility skill, which necros seriously need right now. I’d even take a cooldown nerf to 20" to have it targeted!

Let’s face it, with all the passive boon procs in the game now, our boon corruptions have become much more situational than before. So many times I cast Dark Path on someone who only had Stability and Vigor on them, and by the time the stupid thing landed he had also given himself 2 stacks of Might, so they and the Vigor get removed but not the stability! (And of course 10" later he had 20 Might stacks back anyway.)

I’m coming to the conclusion that more regular removals of fewer boons like shatter mesmers can do is more useful than Corrupt Boon.

If Shrouded Removal also prioritised Immobilise it would be better than a stunbreaker in some ways – I get chain-immobilised more than get chain-feared or chain-stunned in pvp these days.

Wow you guys have been busy! Saw Rennoko’s and Blackmoa’s boon removal threads as well., great work! If any of you are on EU I’d be happy to help test our condition removal skills.

Yeah I have very fond memories of some of the profession-specific quests from GW1, especially the pre-Searing ones. Necros and elementalists had the best ones too, as they had whole huge areas they took place in which looked incredible and the other classes only briefly got to go into. The Wizard’s Tower now floating off the coast of Kryta for eles, and the Ashford Abbey catacombs for necros, which are still around but they’re in ruins now. Oddly enough they looked a lot more atmospheric back then than they do now, and I’m not sure why. You’d think catacombs would look even creepier when they’re in ruins, but I preferred their look back in GW1. I think it’s nothing to do with their condition but simply due to the fact that a lot of the architecture in GW1 was way too big for human-scale. As in there were stairways where each step came up to the waist of your character, that kind of thing. It gave it a more epic feel, like the place had been designed by some titanic beings and you’re just an interloper. Plus you could zoom out further and appreciate how puny your character looked in all that supersized gothic architecture.

Helly.2597:

I think this goes along with a larger issue, lack of ability to move around the ui. It would be nice to actually be able to move parts of the ui around freely instead of either one or two options or no options in most cases.

Is there a reason this hasn’t been implemented?

Amen! Please make the UI elements movable and resizable! Another one of those things I miss a lot from GW1, where we had it from day 1 – can’t understand why it wasn’t implemented here

EDIT: I’d go as far to say that if there’s ONE feature I want from this game this would be it. I value it higher than new game modes or replays or guild rankings or anything, as it’ll improve our lives not just in pvp but everywhere.

If you didn’t want it necro’d you should’ve brought corpse disposal

holodoc.5748:

Rotations are imho not the most important part in sPvP because of the vast diversity of builds which can break up the “math”. A quick example – bunker builds.

Talking about “rotating” doesn’t mean doing a fixed ring-around-the-rosey around the map. It means reacting and pre-empting your opponents movements with whichever members of your roster can do the job best. You should listen to Grouch interviewing Helseth on Ready Up a few weeks ago for examples of what I mean, since he explains it better than I could (in fact he was talking specifically about how his burst-heavy team rotates against bunker-heavy teams, so an apt response to the example you used).

The most important thing imho is for players to actually know how to properly play their profession. Rotations don’t mean anything if you are a high DPS player yet you don’t get to chance to unleash all that damage.

Exactly, and part of that is knowing where to unleash that damage on. Pushing buttons on its own isn’t that hard (although I often wished I had 12 fingers like that pianist on Gatacca when playing elementalist).

xbutcherx.3861:

Narcarsis.5739:

I like skyhammer

You play necro fo course you like it, Anet 1021 posts and counting please delete this map already.

I play necro and I still hate it.

I confess, I didn’t even know about the Indiegogo campaign until just now. I think it’s great that the community came through for Blu, he definitely deserves it with everything he’s done to keep this game’s pvp alive!

But I have to say, I’m pretty disappointed ANet couldn’t help him go as official shoutcaster. And I’m pretty disappointed that, when I googled “send blu to gamescon”, all the forum threads I clicked on talking about the fundraiser had been deleted! What’s that about ANet? It’s fine that you don’t want to stump up the money, but what have you got against other people doing it? So far it looks like only the reddit thread links to the fundraiser is still up!

Some teleport skills also do it. I’ve had it happen from Dark Path, Phase Retreat, and (much more rarely)Flesh Wurm.

It would be nice to have confirmation that the devs are at least aware of it! I know it’s probably something extremely difficult to pin down that’s causing it so I’m not angry that it’s not fixed, but please let us know you’re listening!

JonathanSharp.7094:

Phira has it right. Once we have the key features we need for the core of the game, we’ll look at doing other game types.

Just curious, when you say “key features for the core of the game”, do you mean in terms of combat mechanics, or ancillary features to support pvpers (like leaderboards, replays, etc)?
And, if you’re allowed to say, which two features have the highest priority in your development pipeline?

+1 OP, don’t rambo a guarded point, go help out your teammates. It almost doesn’t matter what you’re running if you’re tujrning a 2v2 into an outmanned fight.

Blizzard would certainly not have fixed it within 2 hours. If you got stuck in WoW, best you could hope for is to get a GM to manually teleport you somewhere else within 2 hours!

Still annoying of course, and I’ve been getting a lot more of it since the Feature Patch in April. Please fix!

Just to point out there are a few good mesmers, thieves, and warriors streaming, but only one good necro and I can’t think of any ranger streams.

You know how much of a schmuck I feel playijng a CHARR elementalist?

Well deserved dude, keep the dream alive and give em hell

Waffler.1257:

Can I have railgun accuracy, # of gauntlet humiliations, and k/d ratio reported for last 20 games?

+1, and also the Q3A announcer! :p

Thanks for the reminder, I always get the time zones confused! :p

Lukin.4061:

And again – make an option “View all enemies as humans” thats it, who wants to play as a rat can still do that, but without any advantage I would bet on a decrease of asura population…

This would be by far the easiest thing to implement. Probably a lot easier than scaling people up or down.

I don’t think it’s an ideal solution, as the game loses a lot of its personality, flair, and customisability. But there are many well-established precedents in competitive gaming (“Force Models” to Sarge option in Q3A and QL for instance).

If you’re gonna do that, may I suggest you take it one step further? Not only force race to human, but also force a specific armour skin for each class, to make them easy to distinguish at a glance without having to look at the target display. For instance you could force all necros to dry bones, all mesmers to heritage, and all elementalists to exalted armour, and hey presto, instantly recognisable!

I know some people would hate this (I myself think it’s not ideal), but if you make it an option you enable in settings, and it only affects what YOU see on YOUR screen, the people who don’t like it are not affected in any way.

Evan Lesh.3295:

. Replays and match history can live side-by-side. You don’t want to have to open a recording every time you want to see if you won or lost your last 5 matches.

Oh for sure, I didn’t mean “instead” of history, I was just hijacking Mikei’s thread to ask for something I wanted

Mikei The Mighty.8690:

I do think however this kind of update would be pretty far off, as they would need to create an internal recorder for all type of PvP, then have a way to store a certain amount of games… i doubt even ArenaNet has the ability to store EVERY PvP match played. Or maybe give players the ability to save certain games? You have the option to save say 10 games, with gem store purchases being able to increase your save folder.

Nah, they already have the technology, Spectator Mode is already in, and they had the ability to record them in GW1 so shouldn’t be hard to repurpose that code. In-engine replays don’t actually take much space, but I agree that the best compromise would be to allow players to save replays offline for gems.

Zirith.6429:

only problem is replays are way harder to make for a 3d game where a gw1 and dota 2 are 2d.

Nope, GW1 was 3D, GW2 uses the same graphics engine in fact, just spruced up. And dota2 has 3D graphics too, it just forces a top-down perspective.

<3 (fifteenchars)

I don’t think the long cast time would be a problem if there was any bodyblocking in this game- as it is you just can’t keep anyone at melee range in your sights because they just run through you! If you’re gonna have 1" cast times at least check for facing at the beginning of it!

Wait, why are the sandwurms not eating you dude? AND WHY ARE YOUR EYES SO BLUE???

MUAD’DIB! MUAD’DIB! MUAD’DIB! MUAD’DIB!

I agree that it’s not a terrible map, definitely leagues ahead of Skyhammer! It could work in team queue, but I think scoring the orb should be worth only 20 points if you own the point, and 10 if you don’t (doesn’t sound like a lot, but remember, you instantly decap an enemy point too!). It’s not as masterfully balanced as Legacy or Temple, but it’s not as bland and dull as Forest either. :p

In GW1 you could watch in-game replays (Spectator Mode-style) of all recent matches (as in within the last 1-2 hours) by top-100 guilds. It’d be great to have something like that again!
And, having watched the DOTA2 championship over the weekend, they have something even cooler: they have in-game replays that let you play a broadcaster’s commentary over it! And they let you choose between following the broadcaster’s camera or just move around on your own following whichever player you wanted! That was pretty cool I thought – you could listen to Blu or Jebro commentating from within the game and never have to endure the godawful Twitch interface or their abysmal streaming quality ever again!! And if Blu missed a cool play by focusing on another point on the map you can just override his camera and watch the fight you want!

Decrypter.1785:

Not sure if troll OP gw1 was way more demanding than this , so nope

Come on, not in terms of individual mechanical skill. In terms of teamwork, yes, certainly, GW1 needed a lot more team co-ordination. But GW2 combat is a lot more fast paced and intense, and needs twitchier reflexes.

The problem is this: there’s a certain threshold of actions-per-minute above which normal people just can’t play the game AND keep an eye out if their teammates are in trouble AND co-ordinate team plays in combat. GW2 is very close to that limit, and this makes team plays difficult.

It’s a tradeoff: the individual combats are more fun, but there’s less scope for teamwork. And, of course, it makes it harder to watch, because people mostly watch team sports for the teamwork. You get the very rare occasional footballer dancing a ball past 5 defenders and scoring a ball all on his own, but mostly he’ll set up a nice pass and another player will bring it in. It’s all about the teamwork in real sports just like in esports.

I don’t think GW2 is that far from being watchable though. It just needs to be slowed down a little bit. (It also needs to have the excessively bright and busy particle effects cleared up, the huge size disparities between characters evened out, and every single casting animation reworked to be easier to see, but those are topics for another whiny thread.)

Yeah but if you slow down skill usage surely that will make fights longer anyway? Even if you increase the damage on cooldown skills, making the cast times longer will just make them easier to dodge or interrupt.

The pace of fights really needs a lot of work. At the moment there’s far too great a delta between the burstiest and the tankiest builds. Full-on bunkers have so much healing that the only way to beat them 1v1 is to burst them down before they can even activate their healing. Meaning bursty builds need to have so much damage that anything less tanky than a full-on bunker can be burst down even THROUGH all their healing! That’s far too dramatic a difference, and it means fights will even be over in 2" flat or will drag on for ages and be boring, depending on the stats of the participants. Not to mention that it’s a balancing nightmare!

I’d love it if we got endurance-stealing like you suggested a few months ago though!