Guild Wars 2

Estriella Faerie.4029:

Relativity.3264:

No more AR hardcaps
I’m skilled enough not to get hit. I can do a 49 with 0 AR. And yet, if I try to do a 40 with any less than 50 I’m toast. These AR hardcaps are just plain stupid. Who thought these up? If you need 55AR to finish a 40 you might as well remove all the agony from 41 to 49 since the agony will bearly tickle.

Completely agree here. What’s even worse is that now, with those hardcaps, people don’t even care to dodge anymore.
Before, even at max AR, you had to dodge on the higher levels, or you would die. If you had not enough AR, you could survive if you were skilled enough to dodge.

Now, you’re forced to have a minimum level of AR (because of insta 40 & 50), so much that you don’t take any damage from agony on the following 9 levels. So people don’t dodge, they just facetank the damage. And as you said, skill isn’t rewarded. It’s either you have the stuff, or you don’t…

THIS. SO MUCH.

its the only thing i absolutely hate about fractals and the game generally. Everytime i get to the boss level i feel that pure state of hate. It almost made me deinstall the game when i heard of it, if there wasnt my friends playing. Whoever thought this would be a good idea probably has no idea of… ned to stop now. It makes me too sad. Oh, and i dont want this post to be called non-constructive: Pls remove this hard cap and add skill cap (maybe related to agony resistance) instead. e.g. enemy aoe skill with 0.3 s time to dodge and +0.1 seconds more time to dodge for every 10 agony resistance.

This thread could be 1 year old, it would look the same. WvW will be as populated as it is today minus the normal decline of players the whole game (like every game) suffers from.

This thread needs more attention. Every bit of investment arenanet does here serves a better community and tactical gameplay, which results in more fun and game depth.
I especially love the suggestion with different shapes and duty tag. Awesome!

Why? People who dont stack wont use their supplies when u need them anyway.

eithinan.9841:

“troll it, troll it” i have my banner here" “…” “why didnt my banner rez him???” “capped, respawn”

Troll is a valid argument against it. Maybe the rangers frozen soil spirit evolved over the years and became foe-only, so that you cant troll your own team any more. Also, rezzing by walking and pressing F should still work. Frozen soil Just an anti rezz skills skill.

Gorath.5076:

pza.8024:

oh and @ OP:
a 40 people spike on one player would NOT be fun. no way to counter that.

Well if both sides did it It would certainly add a whole new depth to larger scale WvW.
I mean the bombing of an area with AoE that has replaced the ‘bubbeling’ under the Guardian Refuge of the early days, that is employed by most WvW guilds isn’t much different. I am merely suggesting to make an advance and progress from senseless AoE spamming to focus targeting.
I can only make reference to this, since I haven’t played any other organised large scale pvp MMO that deserves the name:
In DAoC there were ridiculously powerful ground target AoE s (PbAoE) that where used to demolish bigger groups.
But once people got the hang of it these were simply avoided and the casters slaughtered.
But that’s a different game. I am merely pointing out that there are alternatives to zerging and area control through AoE damage.

i think you didn’t egt my point.
for an individual player that gets focused down it’s not fun because you just cant avoid such a spike. right now, if you’re good, you dodgeroll, block, throw stuff and so on to protect yourself and you have a chance to come through the aoe with 10%life or so. this is because the current AoE-meta just simply isnt as spiky as a single target blob wold be.
what i’m additionally saying is that everyone else, who is not getting spiked, is not having as much fun, because they’re not losing any HP. With AoE’s everyone gets their kick while trying to survive AND have a chance to survive.

Input from: WvW & PvE Player, low experience in eotm, didnt read all these 300+ posts here.

Proposal Overview
More strategic value for EotM

Goal of Proposal
EotM is blind zerging, resulting in more WXP and loot than in WvW → randoms prefer the rewards of EotM (wxp, loot) over winning a weekly WvW match. Adding in strategic gameplay like in WvW or better would reduce amount of blobbing, reducing amount of revenue, increasing population of WvW again. Besides, it’s more fun.

Proposal Functionality
Some Ideas that could lead to a more strategic gameplay:

• Add a reason for defending, especially own, e.g.: Waypoints only usable by one server, special defensive measurements → more difficult to break in → more time to react (which is needed, since bad communication on EotM) OR upgrade for automatical highlighting on minimap of any attack on stuff of your side.
• make internal communication easier (since there’s barely no TS): that could be e.g.: possibility of commanders to paint stuff on the minimap for everyone in a special colour, paint could stay for a couple of minutes and be erased per hotkey.
• (unique) rewards for holding own stuff at/until the end of a match → more tactical gameplay
• unique positions to make it easier to defend

Associated Risks
EotM could become less popular amongst those who dont care about strategy but want only rewards. those players would either learn to like strategy (and eventually move back on to WvW) or move back to pve.

agreed to op. it steals the fun from those who are playing upleveled. playing upleveled is having a hard time already it doesnt need enemies to know and focus them even more. have a heart!

edge no, soil yes. i can already see them war banners used for nothing

that’s why its a kit. also, retal affects you just as much now.

He back stabbed the Turret.

i stopped reading here. standing still & afk-pistol 1 would have killed him, too.

Heezdedjim.8902:

1,999 players could all go AFK for half an hour until the fight was over. It was great fun

seems legit. i do have more fun when afk, not on the computer.

oh and @ OP:
a 40 people spike on one player would NOT be fun. no way to counter that.

the easy fix to this would be to put the selfdestruction button on the utility slot instead of the f-slot and the overcharge abilit on the f-slot instead the utility slot. selfdestruction doesn’t have a cooldown, so this would circumvent the engine limitation, if there is one.

Maiden England.3491:

well the reason ele waterfields are better is because they last much longer. in a group of this size the guardians/warriors will all blast together, so engi isnt needed for blasting either.

you mean, if an engie is in the group, a warr/guard doesnt need to throw out his cooldowns. i’m speaking of 6 blast finishers and 2k healing power > 3 warrs stomping a waterfield.

also a good group doesnt regroup for more than 3 seconds, which is the time our waterfields last.

They definetly were not made by anet. Not their kind of phrasing, inaccurate and misinterpretable like no patchnotes before. Also silly dumbkitten in it, like totally op kit refinement. They would be silly if they leaked something to see the feedback, say they are not real and then release it anyway because the feedback was good. They would lose their credibility.

With Healing turret you can heal almost like a devoted ele, bombs make you almost as strong as a melee, mines and minefields make a good substitution for nullfields, blocks from shield and toolkit make u as tough as a melee. We lack support, because apart from fire fields, cc, alot of blasting, and boonstrip we cannot offer much more to the group.
In the end the engineer is pretty ok in zergs.

next suggestion:
More AoE damage deals it full damage divided by half the amount of targets hit. No more target # caps.
hitting multiple targets would additionaly help triggering stuff.

example: lava field hits 10 balled targets per tick. it deals for example 2k damage per tick, would result in 400 per target.

result:
Pro:

• AoE would still be useful against both single and multitarget, but more against multitarget (in comparison to beeing completely useless against 1 target, but OP against multitarget)
• blobbing would become less due to no additional safety apart from group buffs, which would still affect only up to 5 people. and habit.

Cons:

• huge nerf to aoe, which would need to be compensated by buff of AoE damage skills, which would be a HUGE amount of work to be done at once. and lotsa QQ to deal with.
• huge buff to retaliation, since no more cap for aoe. so to avoid making retaliation be a must have in blobs (to protect them) retaliation would need to be nerfed somehow. -> huge balance problems for other game modes. -> huge workload for devs.
• would need overhauling ALL skills and traits -> won’t happen.
• weirder mechanic. not casual-friendly.

that’s way more cons than pro’s.

go play spvp?

wvw was never thought to be an even battle. it’s enough that you can beat a group of 30 players with your 15 players.

just imagine a team in spvp would QQ becuase they can’t win a 2v5.

^this.

pza.8024:

pza.8024:

And why the heck should 10-12 people be a stronger group than 40? In which universe would this be balanced?

why should 40 unskilled mouth breathers beat 10-12 skilled people? Have been in plenty of fights where our small 12-15 man group has won against twice as many enemies. 3:1 we can hold our own pretty well but eventually they wipe us. We only end up losing because for every 1 we kill 2 more join the fight and eventually we just cant keep up.

Yeah i suppose, you’re at least twice as good as any other player. every zerg of 40 people are just noobs compared to thy.

10% bleed duration =10% bleed damage.
10% burn duration = 10% burn damage.

Which one is better is only is defined by which one deals more damage in each case. I doubt youll be doing great bleeding damage, not more than burning. I didnt take into account caps, because its difficult to compare since very often enemies run condition duration reduction through melandrus or food.

ok, so you just missed out the double damage and highly increased survivability (as tough as many characters) and increased threat. also i HARDLY think you’d ever pick your turret up to save it from going into cooldown. the reduction of range is just necessary for enemies to counter it. Because due to the good amount of pressure they would be getting, they would either have to concentrate on destroying it, or just get out of the range.

Malchior.5042:

Uttar.2341:

snip

This is a very accurate assessment, and I like the potential solutions listed by Uttar as well.

I think we’re all aware of the controversy regarding retaliation (especially in balled up groups or zergs). We need to be like Uttar here and come up with solutions to solve the problem.

^so much this. Gotta love Uttar’s post. Also i completely agree with everything he said.

@terkov: i WISHED they would implement this, but it’s probably just not possible due to the way the engine works. i wish it wasn’t so limited.

Anymras.5729:

The damage adjustment wouldn’t, due to increased rate of fire, be a nerf, actually.

i didn’t say DPS, but for sure damage. rifle turret NEEDS a dps boost. a strong one. people need to fear that turret and not just out-Healing-Signet their dps.

Increased on-destroy + reduced range = “Well, I guess it’s not like I was playing anyway.”

i didn’t get what you mean here.

The Overcharge should also fit what the Turret is supposed to be. A Rifle Turret might, instead fire more slowly, with each shot dealing more damage and possibly Dazing or dealing knockback (though they could telegraphed with a laser sight).
Thumper Turret’s regular attack makes the suggested 600-radius Cripple redundant, besides.

yeah i overthought that ability. cripple is not the way to go. since the rifle turret sounds good as sustained flat dps it should be adding to this gameplay. like, say, it’d litteraly “overcharge” for 3 seconds (not attacking) and then release a projectile which deals heavy damage, killshot-like (not as strong though). that overcharging would need to be visible to be able to dodge it but should be strong enough to down a low hp enemy completely. maybe along with a damage bonus for low HP enemies.
This would make a welcome addition to the available skills a sustained dps character has, and not making it too strong for spike builds, since its main dps comes from its regular attacks.

Bombsaway.7198:

There would be soooooo many unintended consequences of changing stealth at this point the way people are suggesting.

Not saying that a change wouldn’t help, but this is a longer term over the horizon fix when the thief is the primary focus class. Right now, you have rangers, elementalists and warriors getting reviewed.

This is one of those areas where a hasty fix would be a very bad one!

definetly agreed. I’m really one of the players who would be looking forward to see the stealth mechanic changed, but it must be a better system than now.

I’ll just save a dev from posting this:
keep the suggestions coming!

we need to find a good way.

The build looks more like a duel build, sind it lacks AoE and direct damage for zergs, aswell as support for small groups (only elixir b and HT). for solo roaming grenade/bomb kit is imo really strong against NPC’s, and i wouldn’t want to miss that out. but that’s fine.

my suggestion:
leave out burn on crit, you already have alot of burning (pistol: 12s for 11.5s , f4: 17.5s for 9.75s)
Add in kit refinement with med kit, which is both a better healing (double heal with tools 15) and instant casted magnetic aura for 5 seconds with 25% uptime.

switch sigil of agony to either hydromancy, geomancy, earth or smoldering.

It would result in this Build

build is just theorycrafting. didn’t test it.

don’t forget to keep in mind 1v1, 5v5, spvp, pve, open world bossfights and dungeons.
so any change to wvw will have to be accepted by players who specialized in those areas.

The problem is not the amount of AoE skills.
Its blobbing and therefore the effectiveness of AoE skills.

retaliation is as dumb play as AoE is and even promotes blobbing. no solution at all.

^this is wrong.

• retaliation also affects quick attacking single target players.
• retaliation is already more than strong and promotes blobbing and zerging.

nerfing aoe’s would promote zerging, blobbing and the need of arrow carts even more.

most people here assume that only because you have “outmanned” it means you’re on the losing side. this is not even often the case. most of the time there’s a jumping zerg on your side, which just capped the entire map and hops over to a different map, leaving randoms on the map with the “outmanned” buff. you own the entire map, yet the enemy on this map is stronger.

beeing able to build up defensive siege faster & defending it more efficiently with an outmanned buff will make the comeback of the enemy fraction on his map more difficult and the need for this buff more than often crucial for own defenses. This will promotes flaming.

Like i said in another thread:
Retaliation could be nerfed along with the nerf of AoE damage and increase of maximum AoE targets. that would mean

• effectiveness of aoe against small groups reduced (due to not reaching maximum targets)
• less blobbing
• more incentive for small groups
• same retaliation damage from zergs

Let’s get it on Paper:

What are people complaining about:

• Blob fighting, low incentive for small groups
• AoE too strong compared to singletarget skills
• (from other thread) retaliation is too strong in a zerg

possible solution:

• nerf damage of big aoe
• increase number of players affected by aoe skills
• retaliation damage reduced

result
Pro:

• small groups will be harmed less by big aoe’s due to lower damage
• big groups will be punished by aoe the same way
• small groups get less damage by aoe
• users of big aoe will get punished by retaliation as much as they are now, due to lower retal damage but higher target cap

Con:

• retaliation damage is nerfed for small scale fights aswell
  (asuming it’s not possible to make retaliation damage based on the damage dealt)

i believe i overdid that damage nerf a littlebit. i looked up the pistol damage again, and found it definetly should do more than that. i was thinking it should do less than #1 rifle itself, since if would basically double your dps if you just stood next to it and pushed #1 with the rifle. that’d be too much for a utility slot.

the overcharge should EXCLUSIVELY be a situational skill. otherwise you just spam it while your turret is out and try to keep it on cooldown. so it should either come with a tradeoff (like 100% more damage on next attack, but no more attacks for next 3 seconds) or just a skill you don’t always need (depending on situation or enemy proximity, like thumper turrets current one). it should definetly be painful.

HP and armor should be a “medium” untraited pet – since you can have up to 3 of them and they’re immune to conditions. nonimmunity to CC would make it easier for enemies to counterplay – not much though.

I agree pets urgently need to be stowable. Yet a ranger should be stronger if he uses his pet, like every other class is stronger if it makes use of its core mechanic. So whatever the ranger lacks right now, give it to different pets and fix their AI and lacking evasion.

Thats all he needs.

Well i prefer the effects as they are rigt now. The trait definetly needs a tweak but the effects are at least more interesting as the old ones, which just copied skills u had anyway.

We can let turrets explode for blast finishers, traited knockback and damage. Devs could use this as a base.

I’ll try something to see what you think. Tell me your opinion.

Rifle turret:
Cooldown 30 seconds, 5s when picking up. 3s channel to place it. Can be used on the move.
Fires pistol #1 damage, traitable with target pierce, without explosion or conditions. Traitable with bleeding on shot.
Attacks per second: 1.0, range: 600
Overcharge: fires 12 shots in a circle around the turret, 600 range, each bullet crippling for 1 second. 30s cooldown.
Toolbelt skill: same as overcharge, but from your character.

15k health 3k armor, trait for -10% damage received & 10% more damage dealt.
Immune to conditions but not to CC. They can be pushed around.

Pets will not get replaced so dont waste your time. Instead make a short list of pet improvements that would turn them useful in every situation. This is your job guys.

Dabrixmgp.4758:

Outnumbered should remove the AoE cap. At least then 10-12 people might stand a chance against 40 man zergs.

And when u suddently have 14 people and lose the buff you’ll get completely wrecked. Sure. Time to blame the ranger who just joined! “Get off the server. We were doing fine until u came!”
And why the heck should 10-12 people be a stronger group than 40? In which universe would this be balanced?

Yeah you’re right. I just had a wierd thought there. I believe i should stop posting after 1 AM. With this issue beeing solved this thread can be ignored now. I feel quite ashamed to have written the above.

Upcoming changes:

• Every 2-handed weapon will get an additional sigill slot, making every weapon combination have access to 2 Sigills.
• Sigills of the same type (but different name) will not share cooldowns anymore. That means that using two sigills that trigger different effects on weapon swapping will work simultaneously.

[s]In affect this means that any class that has the ability to change real weapon slots during battle will have access to these effects. This does not include Elementalists and Engineers though. As result, they will only have acess to two sigills of the same type, while other classes will have access to up to four sigills of the same type.

A majority of players will see this as a nerf to both classes, no matter what else you do to make up for this. And nerfs always tend to weigh heavier than any buff.

Before this update goes live i want to give an idea on how to simply avoid this issue, without any big effort or effect:

Reduce the internal cooldown of each on-swap-sigill from 9 to 5 seconds. This will affect only Engineers and Elementalists, because other classes can swap weapons only every 10 or 9 seconds (only with 6 runes of the warrior, if this stays) anyway. Both Engineers and Elementalists will have the same amount of weapon swapping effects as the other classes, only less choice, due to limited sigill space.

Only on-swap sigills will need this kind of change, since other effects such as on kill effects or static bonuses do not benefit from weapon swapping more than they do now.[/s]
Edit: this thread was based on wrong assumptions and can be closed.

it will have potentially the least impact on both engineer and elementalist, thats for sure. This is due to their lack of ability to swap weapons in combat, making them have a maximum of 2 on swap sigils working, . Warriors, rangers, necros, mesmers, thieves and guardians though wil have up to 4 on-swap sigills working at a time.
the remaining question is if a build with 4 on-swap sigill will be useful. only time can tell.

from the abovementioned post i can see:

• rangers will get their power builds buffed → welcome to pve, rangers!
• elementalists will get their condition builds buffed – welcome to pvp, eles!

i would kill to get a trait that procs quaggan shaped balloons :O

so… what you’re saying is, “give us the ability to kill a zerg with a handful of people”?

that means winning with 10 against 30? sounds stupid, doesnt it?

now don’t tell me you don’t mean it like that. because if you the buffs aren’t strong enough for you to win such a fight, it’ll have the exact same result as now: you’ll get killed.

If you’d buff the outnumbered buff more, people will start complaining about teammates joining wvw, especially newbies and afk. I can already people shouting “You’re taking away my exp and stealing my repair gold!”… with additional buffs it’d be “we could have won that 10v30 fight if you were not standing afk in our base, removing our outnumbered buff!”

If rangers could open portals in jp’s or give u perma protection and lots pf stability and healing, there would be no hate and racism.

Not rangers are the problem. The newbies playing them are. l2p ranger, noobs. there are plenty noob mesmers, guards, eles and engies which keep on kicking enemies too. The Ranged fact doesnt matter at all.

wow, this thread is so full of agony and class racism against a class, just because it has an ability to annoy other people (which almost every class has btw) in pve.

• noone hates guardians because POTENTIAL op support
• noone hates mesmer because everyone already got helped out in a JP by their portals.
• noone hates warr cause “ME WARR ME SMASH YO! oh, n btw luk my 100b damutsh”
• noone hates necros because… wait, everyone hates necros that fear people off of the the aoe on walls in wvw. but they have plague, which saves their image in wvw.

yours sincerely,
innocent engineer.

nope. it’s on landing.

Spicyhash.7605:

All skills/utilities besides stealth skills (dagger 1, shortbow 1, sword 1, pistol 1) should be disabled like they are in plague/death shroud.

^people yelling at people using smokefields and shadow refugee’s deactivating their skills yeah.

^+1

the game is just not stationary enough for stationary turrets. ask rangers. even with mobile pets/spirits their minions lack survivability due to not moving away from aoe. in case of spirits, they’re kept way out of the damage source, which in case of turrets, would be just stupid.

new meta = new equipment required = keeps people farming stuff & goldsink = increases value of gold = increases value of gems = more temptation for customers to buy gems for real money.

the point is, they could achieve a better customer satisfaction by simply fixing their stuff.

@OP: All i see is “QQ, dey nurfd my stuffz, nao i cnnt pwn with that exploit i found in that forum nemore”.

gawker.8340:

5. Barrage
Firstly, the name is impressive. To think that one girl/guy can fire so many arrows as to literally “barrage” their foes shows mastery of the bow. The skill is only held back by it’s low DPS, small radius, long channel time, and stationary casting requirement. The range of barrage is farther than any AoE skill, and acts as area denial whenever needed. Barrage triggers on-crit sigils very well and provides sustained cripple. It’s a reliable siege killer, much like Elementalists but not as efficient.

first of all: thanks for sharing your ideas. helped me making up my mind about the longbow.
secondly, i’d like to comment the abovementioned quote:

barrage existed in GW1 as an elite skill already, firing a whopping 6 arrows at once and very common in PvE. that’s where the name came from.
You should play an engineer, and try out the grenadier trait to see what’s a real 1500 range area denial. with some traits you’ll get up to 6-7 conditions on top of a good amount of damage and it’s constant, without the need of standing still.
of course you should not compare a weapon skill of one class with an utility skill of a different class, but you get an idea what’s possible. it’s just… i wouldn’t call barrage a strong area denial. it’s often not even worth channeling for all its duration. just too stationary and clumsy.

A.E.D.’s F-Skill is melee. have fun!