Guild Wars 2

I’ve gotten nothing but greens and blues, how much magic find do you people have????

Why would a Charr be wearing Charr bones when there are so many human ones available around Ascalon? :p

It doesn’t look like your pet is lined up with you and your target properly there.

Justin ODell.9517:

Nabbo.2845:

But courtyard is excluded from that?

Correct. Courtyard is not part of the standard custom arena configuration.

Uhhh…. I’m 110% positive than on 2 different occasions today I clicked “play now” and got sent to a Courtyard map!

Not that I’m complaining, it’s fun, and if it’s a bug I’m not sure I want you to fix it :p

We’re a little short of cover conditions though. Bleeds stay on targets a lot less.

Rennoko.5731:

I am trying… I really am… but it is hard to break the habit of not wasting time with a life-blast in a condition build. When I get under pressure I absolutely forget to life-blast, so no burning.

Hehe, that’s exactly my problem too, too hard to break the habit of jump in, use 2,3,5, jump out :p
I have been practicing though and I’m getting the hang of it: if you manage to get it bang on cooldown every time, and you have just a little bit of condi duration, the damage is greater than before! However, once you get into the habit of that, other probems become apparent:
1. You’re staying in DS longer, and don’t generate enough LF to cover it
2. DS is almost always on cooldown, so very rarely available as a defensive mechanism.
3. Your dps is very low at the start of the match when you start with 0 life force! (C’mon ANet, change starting LF to 25% already!)

There’s solutions of course, maybe taking 2 spectrals in your utility bar and taking Spectral Mastery. Either by dropping Terror which is a terrible idea or by going 6 into Curses and drop Master of Terror. Though if I’m gonna go 6 in curses I’d like to be able to take the new GM trait, I really like it… Or taking Soul Marks instead of Master of Terror like Ventari did in the ESL cup earlier tonight, although he wasn’t even using Dhuumfire so not sure what the imperative for more LF generation was.
(Another off-topic sore spot there: c’mon ANet, merge a few of the 5 – FIVE!!!! – staff traits already! No other weapon in the game has more than 2 traits associated with it! If Soul Marks and Spiteful marks were merged and both in Spite Dhuumfire would still be viable!)

I disagree with you on duration though, 3" is good. I know you play more WvW so for you it’s a nerf but in spvp it’s a 50% buff! :p And with the buffs to +% burning duration gear you should be able to get as much burning as before. At a slight penalty to the durations of your other condis, but not a big one since general condition duration stuff has been nerfed.

Life-blasting in melee range is also rather unforgiving if they are not already CC’ed, as they can just jump around your side and the LB fails.

Agreed, casting time on Life Blast makes it ridiculously easy to circle strafe around it. Which is particularly annoying since htey made it do top damage only at short range! They should reduce it to 0.5" and give it a 0.5" aftercast or something.
In the mean time, the best thing to do is fear them to ensure it lands, though I normally save my fear for Path of Corruption since its projectile speed is a lot slower than life blast’s and they can just side step it. But once PoC lands I’m right in their face and usually at that point Life Blast has just finished casting so they eat it in the face before they can dodge.

I have found the junk condition sigils work really well with burning not up all the time, at protecting the bleeds.

Yeah, you’ve got a bigger variety to choose from there in wvw, I really wish they had given us sigil of tormenting in pvp!

Or Reaper’s Protection?

I’m having a bit of trouble adjusting, but slowly getting there. On balance, I think it’s only a slight nerf to Dhuumfire, while increasing the skill threshold needed to maximise DPS with the Dhuumfire/Terror combo, which are both good things.

The one thing I’m disappointed by is that I think Dhuumfire is still necessary for good damage with a condi build in spvp. The nerfs we got after Dhuumfire was introduced really show when you give it up. I do like the new traits, but for me the choice is between Path of Corruption and Master of Terror, rather than between Path of Corruption/Parasitic contagion vs Dhuumfire.

I don’t think it was ever unblockable without greater marks, was it??

I agree, 8v8 was a flustercuck and I’d never play it seriously, but it was fun! Don’t see why it was removed!

Also, due to the drop-in/drop-out nature of hotjoin, a 5v5 match can quickly fall apart by people leaving, whereas 8v8 you have a buffer.

Ostricheggs.3742:

There is nothing worse than being a player and realizing that you cannot do anything to another player simply because his spec is a hard counter. They’ve leaned in this direction for quite some time and it’s a kitten shame to see.

Exactly, and it was also THE ONE THING they said they wanted to change from GW1!

Of course “Build Wars” was never as huge a problem as people claimed in GW1, because it was a team game. If one enemy was a hard counter to your build one of your teammates would have something to take him down. But in GW2 the fighting is balanced around 1v1 and the conquest gamemode mandates splitting, so a hard counter means you just have to run away and get your team to send someone else to deal with that enemy!

Uhtameit.2413:

Allow me to explain : engineer is poorly designed. You need at the very least one kit to do damage. Let’s pick grenade kit. You then probably ought to take a stun breaker (against, most good engineers don’t) : let’s take the least worse, Elixir S. And then you have room for another kit (like ToolKit to get a gap closer, a very good block, or BombKit which is fabulous in team fights) or…elixir C, that isn’t even a stun breaker.

I completely agree with you: engi’s weapon skills don’t do nearly enough damage, and as such they need to take kits in their weapon slots, and thus they don’t have room for cleanses etc. In fact, engis have probably the worst cleansing capacity in the game except for rangers. But how do you deal with this? Do you:
a. nerf SoS to the extent that engis and rangers can deal with it, and thereby make it completely useless against everyone else? Or
b. up engi’s weapon damage and give them more cleanses via traits (so they don’t take up utility slots)?
Personally I’d choose b. It’s bad design to balance against extremes. I do agree that SoS needs a shave, but the problems you’re having are mainly due to your class’s design and your build choices. Necromancers have similar design issues too you know. Virtually no stability, no vigour at all, no evades, no blocks, no invulnerabilities, and no ability to disengage from a fight not going their way. So yeah, by necessity I run with 2 stunbreakers (with corrupt boon as my third). You think I wouldn’t LOVE to carry Epidemic and Signet of Spite, which would be an utterly sick combo, or Spectral Wall? I do way less damage runnign with 2 stunbreaks but it’s a decision I made in response to the metagame, ie. the kinds of opponents I meet at my ranking. If you’re constantly running against SoS maybe you should do the same until either you stop meeting them or ANet fix engi or nerf SoS (or all 3). Then swap back to your current build.

Dodging the fear sounds extremely difficult to do. Sure it can happen but luck is involved on a few levels.

Actually I was just trying to be funny at Simon’s expense, but most people hit dodge as soon as they see me go into death shroud, assuming fear will follow a split second later

Dee Jay.2460:

That video is helpful but it’s still not a well telegraphed skill. Good luck seeing and reacting to such a skill in a team-fight with all the effects going off.

Come on, that decal is pretty huge! It’ll look better on your screen cause that guy has his HDR up so high it’s impossible to see the effect for the glow coming off it. They generally went overboard with particle effects in this game, and yeah, you still won’t be able to see it in team fights. Team fights in this game are an utter flustercuck and anyone who claims they can see what’s going on is lying. But that’s not an SoS problem.

Uhtameit.2413:

xD come on, I had better look for the animation than trying to listen for him stopping AA for 0.5s

Of course, but you might not see it if it’s a group fight with lots of effects around, that’s why I suggested it

I definitely know what it looks like, but any decent necro will use it when I’m feared, so I can’t dodge it regardless ^^.

Yep, and hence dodge immediately after using a stunbreaker, as you know he’ll either SoS or try and chain another fear (or both).

Not necessarily, when playing an engi the necro won’t bother plannifying it since I have kittenty cleanse he can put it whenever he feels like it.

Actually it’s ESPECIALLY important to plan it when playing against an engi because you want to land it when the engi is _just_above_ 25% health, so the conditions persist after Automated Response kicks in.
Anyway, you have Elixir C which is a pretty good cleanse, but I haven’t seen any engineer use it in MONTHS because they all rely on AR, Elixir S, and blasting their water fields for massive heals. I know you only have 3 slots and lots of cool utilities, but it’s all a trade-off right? If you’re having a serious problem against condi enemies maybe you should swap it in

Simon.3794:

thats right, all you noobs should l2dodge that insta cast

You mean you can’t?

Flumek.9043:

I have no idea how they could implement that into the mechanics, but the bigger the -duration, the stronger it is. At -100% it doesnt matter, you could have +100000% duration and it would be completely negated.

Above is tested and true: I already have 140% condition duration in my spvp build, and nothing gets applied on a zerker stance warrior. I’m not sure if it was intended, bnut the -100% duration definitely gets applied at the end, so whatever +duration you have is irrelevant.

Uhtameit.2413:

How do you dodge a 3/4s cast?…xD besides, that’s an issue on my condition engineer. 10s weakness, if you can’t cleanse it, means you will never dodge ever again.

Dude I get my DS3 fears and my Corrupt Boons dodged regularly and those are instant cast! Practice. It’s not easy but if you do it enough times it becomes automatic. Use auditory queues – if you stop hearing the scepter autoattack “swish” that means the necro is casting something else which is worth dodging. Watch for the huge SoS animation over the necro’s head. Make one and go into the mists and cast it a few times if you’re not sure what it looks like.
Also, it’s easy to know when the necro is going to use it. If you’re low and he’s got a lot of bleeds on you, SoS makes for a great cover condi, so watch out for it. If you’ve just used all your cleanses, and the necro knows it, that’s also a good time. If you have stability a necro might try to use Corrupt Boon on it to draw out your big stunbreak and cleanse, and then use SoS once you’re on cooldown.

But seriously, most people use corrupt boon+2 stunbreaks, so I’m surprised you’re running into it so frequently.

As to SoS being OP, I agree that the durations on some of those conditions could use a reduction. 10" of weakness covered 6x over is beyond ridiculous. Reduce to at least 8". But it’s not nearly as good as you think: if you lead off with it before drawing out the enemy’s cleanses it’s pretty useless, barely more than an inconvenience. It’s a clutch move used to ensure a kill, and you only have 1 chance to use it and make sure it lands. So I wouldn’t want to see it nerfed to the ground: it’s a skill that requires skilled play to be effective and with the amount of passive skills and automatic immunities running around in the meta right now skilled play is much needed.

sorrychief.2563:

It takes alot of effort but you can get outside the map and swim. . . even get into the enemy base on Niflhel!

That’s awesome! How? Any videos?

I really don’t get why they nerfed the active: it had a massive cooldown, it had a small aoe which made it tricky to use (downed ally could get knocked out of the area), and its cast time was long enough that you had to cast it pretty much IMMEDIATELY in order to pre-empt a stomp!

Plus the way they nerfed it pretty much took it out of the game: I would have preferred they lowered the maximum number of targets (even down to 1), or lengthen the recharge, than to lengthen the cast time by that much – it renders it completely useless! I know it’s still short enough to get someone up provided the original stomp is interrupted, but if the stomper has stability then you’re gonna need to use corrupt boon to save your teammate from the original stomp, and if you try to use the signet after corrupt boon your cast time is STILL longer than the SECOND stomp attempt! OK, maybe you have a thief or mesmer cloaking them to save them from the stability stomp – but if there’s 2 of you trying to get a downed teammate up then it’s DEFINITELY faster to revive normally than to use the signet!

Honestly, I would rather it were brought back down to its original cast time and made an elite skill than use it in the state it is now! I’d expect a buff to the active or a reducction to the cooldown if that were the case though.

Bhawb.7408:

1) A pistol off-hand that “shoots” jagged horrors

No offence, I liked most of your other ideas, but ^THAT^ is just plain silly.
HOWEVER, I would totally go along with it if rangers got a bow skill that shot chipmunks!

In all seriousness, I really do wish they had given us weapon skills (or death shroud skills, or both) that summon weak, short-duration minions, like the mesmer’s clones and phantasms. Or at least traits that modify said skills to summon minions. Only having them as utility skills seems so half-hearted, seems forever consigned to be a niche build. I do appreciate that our minions are more powerful than mesmer illusions (even phantasms, which do a lot of damage, tend to die if you blink at them whereas necro minions have a bit of meat on their bones, albeit rotten, and can take a few hits), but I would rather have had weaker, temporary minions that were a more central part of the class design. Mesmer illusions can be specced to do anything: they can be a source of direct damage in themselves, they can be just fodder for shatter skills, they can be just meatshields, or they can create an effect on death. In many ways, mesmer is therefore closer to GW1 minionmancer, who, rather than having a skillbar full of minion-summoning skills like we do now, would have 1-2 summoning skills and the rest would be minion EXPLOITATION skills. Having spammable(ish) minions on weapon skills would allow for more interesting minion skills in the 5-10 slots (eg utilities that destroy a minion to create an effect, ranging from heals to gaining LF to putting condis on your target etc), and therefore bring it back closer to GW1 necro. That doesn’t mean that the utility skill minions need to go, as the sort of spammable minions I’m envisioning would be much weaker than those, and a full-on MM would probably invest in both.

I agree that corpse exploitation for minions shouldn’t return, as cool as it was fluff-wise. Firstly because in pvp it would suffer from the same problems it did in GW1 (you only get to use your summoning skills after the fight has been swung one way or the other by a death, which is disempowering), and secondly because in GW2 corpses tend to stay on the ground for less time.

However, you could have MINION CORPSE exploitation! Like the Death Nova trait. How about more traits like that? eg a master-level trait that summons 1-2 jagged horrors whenever a utility minion dies? Or a grandmaster blood trait that heals you whenever a minion dies (not by a fixed amount though: something like 5% of the minions original HP, to avoid people spamming lots of jagged horrors and getting infinite top-ups).

I also liked the idea of skills which sacrifice health to create a minion, and I would extend the idea to: how about skills that sacrifice health to buff minions in some way, like Order of Undeath from GW1 ? TheDevice’s idea of gaining “stacks” with deaths that you can use on minions was also interesting, but why not simplify it: how about minion summoning skills which consume Life Force instead?

Bumping this cause I really want to know if I should stow the pvp gear I want to keep in my locker and run around in basic white gear until the patch

Personally I have no attachment to this map at all, and underwater combat can go die as far as I’m concerned, but this….

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

remove the water,
fill it up with sand,
move the capture point into the ship!

….this has the seed of a promising idea! A Crystal Desert-themed map, with an abandoned, rotten ship in the centre? That would look pretty cool!

DiogoSilva.7089:

The removal of jewels, however, creates a new problem: it degradades the potential viability of hybrid builds. But there’s another solution to that problem, that won’t require anet to revert back the new amulet system: add more hybrid amulets. Because only two of them exist.

Why are hybrid amulets so necessary? Why did jewels added build diversity? Because they PREVENT EXCESS. That’s why.

+1 to this: the huge attribute gap between the burstiest and tankiest builds is the worst cause of imbalance in this game! By reducing the number of hybrid stat options by taking away jewels you’re encouraging people to go further towards the two extremes.

Sunshine.5014:

TL;DR: customization range is different from number of customizations. People agreed in the thread that they wanted more customizations, with smaller customization range. What ANet gives them now is fewer number of customizations, with big customization range.

Yeah I remember Sunshine’s thread too, and it’s pretty clear the devs misunderstood it: nobody in that thread asked for FEWER options! What Sunshine and others were saying was that the extremes should be brought closer together because it encouraged people to go either all-out burst or as tanky as possible. In fact I remember posting in there as well to point out how ridiculous it was that a lvl 80 warrior has 180% the base health of a lvl 80 thief – and how much more extreme that difference gets if the warrior was in PVT gear and the thief was in zerker gear!
Surely it’s obvious that removing the jewel makes things even worse in this respect? I’m really curious how you folks even got the impression that players were asking for this!

PS. Good luck with your move Allie!

JonathanSharp.7094:

Trust me, doing focus tests and watching new players play the game, our builds can be very overwhelming. You guys are experts by now, but you have to keep in mind that other players are not as advanced as you are, and removing pieces to the builds allows us to slightly lower the barrier to entry.

I’m not surprised that focus groups were confused by the game, but I AM surprised that the jewel was an issue in it! From my experience back when I was new I didn’t find the amulet/jewel issue confusing at all. Even back in BWE1, when I first zoned into the pvp lobby, it was self-evident to me that the jewel was just an optional piece of fine-tuning that, as a new player, I could afford to ignore. The visual design of the Equipment panel in the Hero window (where the jewel didn’t even have a separate slot of its own), and the fact that the amulets the NPC sold already came with a slotted-in jewel, were a pretty blunt “look you don’t need to worry about this now” to everyone.

I personally would love to see jewels come back. And not just because I’ve been using carrion amulet with rabid jewel for the past several months – I’m sure I’ll find some wya to cope. Only a few builds used them, but I think with the rune rebalancing, the ferocity changes, and the celestial amulet buff that more such builds would be possible. It’s a completely optional piece of fine-tuning that increases build variety without at all, imho, impacting new players’ understanding of the game. Seems a pointless removal.

I’m in favour of unlocks for gold/gems/skillpoints/souls of innocents/hearts of server programmers/whatevers, but I do think thjey should be account bound…

During Rup the team stated that when you first log in after the patch, your character will appear to be wearing the same armour they have in PvE. My question is: what happens to any pieces of PvP armour that your character was wearing just before the patch? Are they automatically moved to your wardrobe and converted to skins? Or will they get overwritten by the PvE gear?

In the case of necros specifically I think the best solution would be to always show their health bar ONLY in the party window. If it’s a case of letting allies know when the necro is low or not, DS is not a reliable indicator: not only is life force smaller than a necro’s true health pool, but it also degenerates pretty quickly on its own. To let allies be able to tell at a glance whether their necro is in trouble or not, therefore, have the party window always and only show their healthbar.

(The double healthbar on the target UI is pretty awesome though, that was a great change!)

I have no problem with unlockable traits – and if they introduced new skills or runes or sigils and they decided to make them too unlockable for gold (or any other currency), I wouldn’t have any problem for that either. As long as a beginner has access to enough variety to make a competitive build, unlocks will give them a sense of progression and something to aim for and feel a sense of achievement about. It worked absolutely fine in GW1, people couldn’t wait to run to the Priest of Balthazar and spend their faction on unlocks, and it works absolutely fine on the SCORES of f2p pvp games out there.

Anyway, the new healing skills they introduced a few months back also had to be unlocked, and nobody complained! Why is that? Could it be because everyone had hundreds of skill points saved since launch and didn’t mind, whereas now because they’re saying they’ll also be unlockable for gold you’re all feeling their evil hands in your pockets? I don’t remember seeing any posts that went “I’ve been doing nothing but pvp since launch so I have neither skill points to buy these nor gold to buy scrolls of knowledge with!” Face it, even the most hardcore of us still do a little bit of pvp, so we all have more than enough gold saved up to unlock these skills if you cba to go into pve to unlock them. And if there are one or two people who don’t, and end up buying some gems to trade for gold so they can unlock them right away, do you really begrudge ANet making a few bucks?? I for one though, even though I barely step into pve since I got my main to 80, will be unlocking them to pve, not because I don’t want them to have my money but because I find the extra time and effort will make the feeling of achievement greater, and maybe bring back memories of some of the epic elite capping expeditions I undertook in GW1.

In the long term I think it’s better for the health of pvp to have even more unlocks, and eventually I’d actually like to see the pvp portion of the game to be made f2p and funded entirely through unlocks.

Not super-stoked about the Death Magic redesign but I LOVE the new Spite and Curses traits! Might actually have to skip Master of Terror to get these 2!

Cogbyrn.7283:

I just don’t understand why all traits have to be over-the-top jaw-dropping half-court-dunking boomshakalaka to not get dumped on.

Actually Dhuumfire was pretty OP when it was first introduced and people still dumped on it :p Including me, cause it was so OP!

You realise that the silver we’re getting for a win is about 20x more than what the dyes you could craft from salvaging the contents of a tournament chest would have gotten you, right? With 100% less salvaging and mystic flushing and TP-listing required as well!

Plus, now you get a liittle bit of money EVEN FOR A LOSS!

The only reason everyone thinks they’re getting nothing is cause the living world story coincidentally ended at the same time as this patch so the bags stopped!

Tim.6450:

1. conditions ignore tougness and death shroud is lacking in condition removal.

I’d love it if they gave LF condition transfer liek the underwater version has, but it’d probably be OP evne if they reduced the damage massively

Some amazing suggestions, thanks guys.

The only thing I’m unsure of is the immobilise suggestion: I do think it’s seriously overpowered as it is today, but I think allowing you to dodge during it would nerf it completely. Maybe just go back to not allowing it to stack in duration?

Two pieces of friendly advice for ANet staff:

1. Pop-ups work! MMO players are like hamsters: they’ve learned to click a button and get a reward, and there’s a certain satisfaction and release of endorphins that comes with having your rewards pop up in a dialog box in the middle of the screen that you have to click “accept” to get. Your PvE design bros have realised this, which is why you get a nice bouncy chest whenever you do a boss event, a big lavish popup whenever you do your dailies or map-completion in a zone or a personal story quest. It’s completely fake and manipulative, but giving people things in a popup window that they have to click to accept makes them feel more rewarded than if the reward magically appears in the inventory. My theory is that if you’re forced to click to receive it, it makes the reward more tangible, which is a necessity when you’re dealing with imaginary stuff that only exists in-game.
So yeah, you took away the bouncy chests, gave us a pretty generous reward in gold, plus MASSIVELY increased the rank points, all pretty great! But they’re just listed in tiny print at the bottom of the end-game scoreboard, the money gets added to your wallet automatically, you get kicked back out to the mists, and what is there left? No big splashy pop-up, no endorphin rush from clicking accept, only the adrenaline comedown from the match and a feeling of emptiness… :p

2. Wean people off gradually! The silver rewards we’re getting now are objectively worth more than the contents of the chests we were getting before. But when, until 2 days ago, we were getting the silver rewards, AND the tournament chests, AND the living world rewards. The living world storyline coincidentally ended just as the tournament chests went away, so losing both the chests and the alliance bags makes people think that we lost too much too suddenly. Especially since the silver gets awarded automatically so it doesn’t give that endorphin rush of the pop-up that I talked about above, making people feel like they’ve lost everything. You should’ve kept the glory removal for next week’s patch instead.

tl;dr: put the silver and rank point rewards in a bouncy chest! I know it makes no real difference, but you’ve been training us like hamsters that rewards come in bouncy chests for 2 years now, so when you take them away people run around in blind panic. There’s plenty of studies done by psychologists that confirm what I’m saying, and there are loads of evil slimy toads talking about the “gamification” of corporate culture, which basically means programming cubicle-drones to do repetitive tasks for regular incremental rewards just like WoW taught us we can be hardwired to enjoy doing many years ago. It’s too late to deprogramme us now! Just plug us back into the Borg collective and give people bouncy chests to make them happy! :p

infantrydiv.1620:

2. Remove hotjoin, keep custom arenas. Why? Hotjoin is a mess and is a terrible place for new players to try and learn the game. It is not uncommon to see a full team of rank 40-50 players against eight 1-20s. The games are invariably blowouts because even if both teams have even numbers of players, you can still join the one ahead by 200 points. The new unrated queue with a hidden MMR would serve as a much better place for new players to learn the game and feel like they are participating in something meaningful.

I just needed to post again to say that while I agree with your other suggestions I don’t agree with this one. Hotjoin is indeed a mess, but the reason it’s a mess is because it’s so casual-friendly (being able to switch teams, no penalty for leaving, etc). And the game desperately needs a casual gamemode, somewhere where complete newbies can jump in to simply hit stuff and practice their rotations, somewhere where you can spend a few minutes while your tournament or WvW queue pops, and not worry about being penalised for leaving when it does, somewhere where people don’t need to worry about quitting mid-match (when their newborn wakes up and needs changing or the doorbell rings cause their pizza is here) because someone else is bound to drop in and take their place.

I agree that it’s a horrible place to learn conquest, but it’s a fun and casual way to play gw2. Not every game mode needs to be about training a new generation of newbies to become leaderboard-topping Conquest Superheroes.

I agree with the poster above me who said the “Play Now” button could be made to drop you in a server according to your rating. That would improve how uneven the matches are.

I liked your other 2 suggestions, but I believe that if ANet implemented your 3rd suggestion (guild-based rating), then your 1st suggestion for an unrated match becomes unnecessary, as you would just be able to change guild tags to My Smurf Guild [nub] when you wanted to play a casual match

Rickster.8752:

Thedenofsin.7340:

I wish I could, but it doesn’t make any sense.

Decap engies have destroyed solo queue and the bunker meta makes team queue equally painful. PvP is a lot like this now

It is amazing how 1 spec (decap engis) and the bunkery meta have destroyed this game. That is so true. Warrior and thief are the cause of the bunkery meta. Thieves can overcommit and still get away from even 1v4 situations. And warriors do everything. High mobility, high damage and massive survivability. It really is a horrible state of affairs right now.

Decap engis in solo q are just devastating to the whole solo q concept. And the bunker meta has destroyed any tiny bits of fun which remained in team queue.

Well that’s not a balance problem IMHO, it’s a problem with the gamemode. If decap engis were nerfed someone somewhere would find another build that just knocks people off the point and everyone would run it. That’s why we need new game modes. Or, in the short term, at least maps with bigger capture points like Foefire’s.

I think it’s a powerful trait that will enable a lot of minionmancer bunker builds, but, as with the ranger grandmaster, it’s a trait meant to fix problems inherent with the mechanic it’s improving (in the ranger’s case the slow projectile speed of longbow making it too easy to dodge just by strafing, combined with their illogical decision to make it only do maximum damage at maximum range, where it is easiest to dodge!). The reason necromancer bunkers aren’t as good as guardian or engi bunkers is because the latter can heal while invulnerable/blocking, while the necromancer’s only approximation to an invulnerability skill (death shroud), blocks all healing. This addresses that particular imbalance without fixing the underlying problem, so I’d much rather Death Shroud was reworked completely.
I’m still happy though, reworking DS would be a major project which the devs still aren’t convinced is necessary, so this is a good medium-term solution!

Rennoko.5731:

I have mixed feelings about the retrait without TEMPLATES. Being forced to click and reclick, and click again to swap out best in slot traits per encounter or fight or whatever is going to be irritating. Having templates would be so nice.

Totally agreed we need templates, but that would be another major feature, and considering how much more complicated a character build in GW2 is than in GW1, where it was just 8 skill slots and 4 numerical attributes I don’t begrudge them the fact that they weren’t able to fit it into this update.

Also if they ARE gonna do templates I’d much rather they prioritise doing them for pvp, since in pve/wvw most of your stats come from gear anyway, and being able to swap your trait allocation around with a template would styill leave you with lots of work swapping bits of armour around. In pvp since gear is free you’d be able to use a template to switch everything up instantly, so the benefit would be greater.

I dunno, I really enjoyed playing a touch necro in RA before they changed Aura of the Lich! It was hilarious to catch people off guard with it, and the beauty of it is if there was another necro with some lifestealing on the opposite team tehy could kill you with one Vamp Gaze! :p

Thedenofsin.7340:

These values are stored either in a flat file, database or as a constant. It’s a one-line change.

You’d think so wouldn’t you? But it took them over a year to discover the bug, so maybe the bonus healing power is coming from somewhere else.

Pyriall.5027:

An 8% reduction would have been a “shave” 5 months ago.

I think it’s fair to say the “shaving” approach has been on hiatus since the last incremental balance patch in December – all warriors now have a full length beard

Well I wouldn’t be so certain they ignored it… Maybe it caught their attention and they looked into it, but still couldn’t decide what to do about it. Maybe the solution is technically more complex than we realised (not just for the asura size issue: how do you restrict the amount of rank points earned on Skyhammer without affecting any other map?) Or maybe they considered it but thought it wasn’t taht serious a problem. If it’s the latter then it’s up to us to change their minds.

Considering how often this issue was brought up I thought this thread would get more responses, but I guess everyone’s too busy whining about the removal of chests… :p

Slim.3024:

Healing Signet change does in fact not meet the criteria (it’s a balance change, not a fix to an unintended behavior). However, if we are to believe the designers, the Spirit of Nature passive healing is overperforming due to a bug and in return does meet them and should have been fixed.

It’s probably too complicated a bug to qualify as a simple “hotfix” (which I assume is something that can be fixed simply by editing the scripts rather than requiring a programmer to devote time to it).

Anyway, I thought those leaked patched notes were determined to be fake?

I thought magic find only affected drops, and not stuff you got from chests or loot bags? So basically only mobs in pve. So I assumed if we got chests of loot they wouldn’t be affected by magic find.

Was watching a Mistpedia tournament recently and Blu mentioned they banned Asura characters. Honestly I can see why (or rather I CAN’T! IT’S TOO SMALL! :p ), and I believe there is a general consensus that the size differential between various races makes it harder to follow what’s happening in combat. This is especially the case since there’s no bodyblocking and an Asura could LITERALLY CLIP INSIDE A NORD and be completely invisible! Between that and the excessive particle effects it’s too easy for smaller characters to become simply invisible and add an unfair element to combat.

Additionally, I really absolutely LOATHE the “feet-to-feet” targeting mechanic. For anyone who doesn’t know what I mean, line of sight in this game is drawn from your character’s feet to your target’s feet. This leads to many absurd situations, where you can see your target, you know your character can see your target, but you’re still getting an “obstructed” message because your character’s eyes are apparently in his toenails . I’ve been playing since BWEs and I’m still not used to it, and I frankly don’t want to because a world in which I’m staring at people’s feet is a dark and terrible world I do not want to live in. Unless of course I’m playing Quake and shooting at their feet so I can launch them into the air and then hit them mid-air with a second rocket.

So I’m just asking: how difficult (technically), would it be to make everyone the same size while in pvp? Would it be simply a matter of scaling, or would it involve a massive amount of work and redoing every race’s running and casting animations from scratch? Cause if it’d be easy I really think we should get together and ask the devs to do it!

Once that’s done, how hard would it be to make them shift LOS to eye level, since everyone’s eyes would be on the same level? Any programmers reading this willing to comment?

Apart from minor improvements to the minimap pinging/drawing system, I can’t imagine getting on with anything more complicated in terms of systems that have menus, additional skills, or typing. It’s too fast-paced a game. Some thief will pop out of stealth and burst you down while you’re typing.

Voice is the way to go, but the expense associated with it would mean it’d probably have to be a subscription feature. And then what happens when someone who doesn’t have it joins your team? Also, would anyone even buy it considering most guilds already rent VOIP servers, and it probably isn’t costing them very much since it’s split between all their members?

Vash Past.4385:

Just my two cents but well….
With all this talk still going on after years about how to do PvP correctly, I don’t really understand why the PvP models from the original GW game are not given a shot in any way shape or form. <snip>
Do I like the actual skills/movement/combat in GW2? Absolutely. I just wouldn’t call it Guild Wars, since there is no more balanced PvP combat or Guild fighting literally at all. Guild wars, no guild fighting. Guild wars, no guild fighting. Guild wars, no guild fighting. See, doesn’t make sense. I would call it like ‘SteamFantasy Point Capping Wars’. There. I said it.

Thank you! I could write REAMS about why GvG was so balanced and exciting, but you did it for me and I already wrote another long post so I won’t. :p

John Corpening.9847:

What seems to have happened is that for a lot of players Solo Arena became a way to never have to think about making a team. This is in large part because a player could gain some fame from the SA leaderboard. As a result, a lot of highly competitive players did not move on to Team Arena and as teams inevitably broke apart many of those players drifted back to SA and made it their thing. So this area that was meant to be the next step for potential new hardcore players became the end goal for many existing hard core players.

That’s exactly what happened, and I’d go further and say SA is more hardcore than TA. I’d guess that fewer people play SA, and that’s the people who want to be at the top of the leaderboards, and can’t get a team.

The competitive casual group is a very important, and very large, part of the PvP ecosystem. They are the people who have taken or want to take that step out of Hotjoins but are not ready to be running the meta builds, to be looking for animation ques, or take on specific roles on a cohesive team comp, etc.. Most of them want a more competitive atmosphere but really want to keep it just for fun. Some of them will develop further and will become the next group of top tier players.

Well in any other online game, “competitive casuals” would have a place they can thrive: the lower rungs of the leaderboard! If a game has decent matchmaking they’ll play against other puggies and they’ll have a fun game.

Sadly, in GW2, partly because of the vagaries of your Glicko system, but mostly because of the low population, it was far too frequent for top-tier premades to get matched against PUGs of beginners. This caused shouting on the forums, leading you to introduce solo arena.

I’m sure you know what I’m gonna say next: splitting the already low population into 2 was not the best idea! The queues got longer, the rank mismatches got worse, and pvp went through its lowest ebb for me.

The low pop problem these days is a lot better, thanks to Wintersday bags, so I think TA is a healthy environment. There’s enough folks playing that low-ranked casual PuGs will get matcehd against each other. It’s a safe place for people just coming out of hotjoins to fight against others of their skill level. Solo queue, otoh, is a different story: the queues there are still long, the rank deltas wider, the amount of 4v5s higher, and the playerbase more abusive. I would be tempted to say “no wonder these people can’t get a team”, but if I play enough solo queue I become like that too, so clearly it’s the frustrating environment that turns peoeple into shillbottles! :p

So honestly, I would seriously consider merging the two queues back together. The only people who would mind are that small (but vocal) subset of highly competitive solo arena players for whom their ranking is the only thing that matters, and who aren’t able to get a team to achieve that ranking with. Everyone else would win from the increased population.

There are a few things you can do to reduce the fallout from this:

1. Introduce GUILD-BASED RATING. This is important for everyone who ever wants to try out a new build, or mess around casually, without jeopardising their ranking. It’ll allow people to play as a team under a guild tag whose ranking matters, and then switch to a “smurf guild” whose ranking they don’t care about if they want to mess about casually on join solo.

2. Autostart the next match for winners! Any team that wins a match gets automatically invited to join the next one. Repeatedly playing with the same people will help you get to know them and encourage the formation of teams. It’d be technically easy to implement, and you could apply it even if you didn’t follow any of my other suggestions – you could even apply it to solo queue.

3. Rewards for consecutive wins! This would encourage PUGs to stick togehter if they’re having a winning streak.

4. Merge NA and EU pvp. I don’t know if this is technically feasible but the increased population could only be a good thing.

The problem is that they step out of Hotjoins and enter a highly competitive SA environment or they solo queue into TA to potentially face premades. From my experiences as a player, the latter option tends to be a better choice. I have often found groups grateful to pick up a fifth, willing to offer guidance on what they want me to do given my build and accepting that I’m a pug and probably not very good anyway. The attitude I often see in SA is that if everyone in this random group of pugs isn’t top notch then RAGE!.

That’s been my experience too: I was very vocal in my opposition to solo queue when it was introduced, but it turned out to make the game better for me personally because it drew all the most obnoxious players and made team queue a better environment for me to join solo! :p

nekretaal.6485:

The wurm doesn’t teleport you on the z elevation axis.

Thus means that any little bump or rock can get in the way and fail most of your teleport. The wurm is more like a leap than a real teleport.

But do note that, unique among minions, the flesh wurm attacks stealthed thieves.

I did not know about the thieves! :p I suspected that it doesn’t work on the z-axis, but I wasn’t certain because it works if I put it on the ledges next to the side-points on foefire. Those are actually on the same elevation as the points, but there’s a gap you have to jump over, it’s not contiguous ground. So no z-axis difference at all? Not even if the Wurm is LOWER than your level?
EDIT: also, what about walls? If you put it round a corner does it work? Or do you also need direct LOS?

For the past couple days I’ve been running Plague Signet as my only stunbreak. The idea being letting me leave dagger at home and take warhorn instead for aoe unblockable daze – it’s almost like having a second Reapers Mark when it comes to stomp preventions! I can’t say it’s been working out for me just yet but I’m gonna give it a few more days to practice.

Sol.4310:

You need to do in-game poll, there is very large amount of players whom refuse to read the forums at all and play PvP.

You guy’s need to check out what Dota 2 does, after I think it’s 3 games they have quick popup and ask you to rate, E.g. how was your team communication. This helps Dota 2 dev’s find where the problems are and work on ways to improve it.

That’s a good idea actually! Even something as simple as a mail with a link to a strawpoll would do.

I’ve always used SW as my stunbreak in pvp because the swiftness is always handy when playing with pugs. I know a lot of high-ranked necros prefer Flesh Wurm instead and I’m not sure why, as there’s a lot of restrictions on how it can teleport you. So many times I put it up on a ledge so I could blink out of trouble if I get jumped on by a warrior, only to pop it and find out that it teleported me to the foot of the ledge instead of on top of it and now I have a wall behind me and nowhere to run! I suppose the high ranked peeps know the maps well enough that they’ve learned the best spots to plant it so the teleport will work, but I haven’t figured them out yet so I’d rather stick to SW until I do.

If Phantaram (whom I’ve actually seen using both SW and Wurm once) or any other high-ranked necro is reading this I’d love a few tips on where to stick my wurm (insert rim shot here).

Allie Murdock.8152:

Removing Spirits would be a pretty big change to the class. Additionally, they are part of the “spirit” (sorry, had to) of the Ranger. I do think the idea to add it to the pet is interesting, though I’m not sure how it really makes sense (the pets aren’t the ones drawing from nature, it’s the Ranger).

Do you have any thoughts or ideas that wouldn’t necessarily remove them, but maybe help to lessen the body blocking as you said?

Yes, there is a way: make them not function as summoned creatures anymore:

1. Make the spirits smaller so they don’t occlude vision. You can maybe make them a bit brighter in colour so they’re still visible and identifiable.

2. Remove the nametag and make them untargetable by enemies. Also serves to reduce screen clutter and wear and tear on our Tab keys looking for the ranger. Enemies will still be able to see that a spirit is in play by seeing both the spirit (albeit in mini-form) and by seeing the buff icon on the enemies

3. In exchange, since spirits can no longer be targeted and killed by enemies, the passive effect should be made weaker to balance them out.

However, this doesn’t solve the main problem with spirits, which is that they’re “one of those builds” (like minionmancer or signet warrior) which just rely on passive buffs and/or AI, and that makes for boring play both for the person playing the build and for anyone fighting them. I much preferred Spirits as they functioned in GW1, which was an unremovable effectthat affected both friends and foes equally. This enabled preparation and tactical play: you both got the effect (whether positive or negative), the difference is your team had prepared for it, so you were changing the rules of the battlefield in your favour.

Sadly I don’t think this would work as well in GW2 a. because the game doesn’t have as many rules/moving parts for spirits to modify in that way and b. because the pvp is much more pug-friendly by design and you can’t really expect solo arena teammates to be prepared for your build.

However, there is one way you can make GW2 spirits function a bit more like GW1 spirits, and that is:

4. Make the ACTIVE effect affect both friends and foes. This promotes active, thoughtful, and tactical play on behalf of the ranger, as they have to decide when activating the spirit’s active is in their favour. For instance, if the ranger just got jumped by a thief, maybe activating Sun Spirit’s active is a good idea, as he/she won’t mind getting blinded too in exchange for avoiding the thief’s burst. If an enemy is only a hair’s breadth from getting downed but you just can’t do that last little bit of damage, maybe activating the Storm Spirit’s active is just the burst the ranger needs to finish the enemy off – be careful, don’t also kill an ally by accident! If your team has a downed teammate but the enemy doesn’t, OF COURSE you’re gonna activate Spirit of Nature’s active to revive them, and you don’t care that the enemies will also get a minor heal.

5. In exchange, make active area effect larger and reduce recharges on actives. Just to make sure that the actives are THERE when you need them, as use will be completely opportunistic and twitch-based (which is also why you have to reduce the duration of the activation animations – the skill might be instant but the spirit itself sure takes its sweet kitten time!) so if you’re gonna force then ranger and their teammates to eat Call Lightnings when activating a utility skill you gotta at least let them have the skill whenever they need it!

tl;dr: make spirits completely untargetable, reduce power of spirit passive effects, increase area of effect and reduce recharge of active effects in exchange for them affecting both friend and foe

Rickster.8752:

5 man teams are just too many if you want to try hard in this game. Which is the reason I just mess around when I play this game (which isn’t often) for a while now.

5 is not too many, I never had any trouble getting 8 together for gw1 whether it was friends and guildies or random pugs – the reason you have trouble finding 5 in gw2 is because most people have quit!