Guild Wars 2

L2P?

how about a ruleset that doesn’t include downed state/rallying? eg: as a custom arena option.

rune of strength IMO still a little too good. +7% dmg any time you have might is in practise a constant +7% dmg, plus the +20% might duration.

Summary
As a WVW player in a WVW-only guild, I would very much like guild halls to be implemented as an enhancement to WVW, by expanding upon & reworking existing WVW objectives and structures.

Goals

• add depth/freshen WVW
• provide greater incentive to retain captured structures
• introduce customisation elements/guild persistent rewards to WVW

Proposal brief
The various towers/keeps in WVW are rather lifeless, and I can’t think of a better way to bring WVW back to life than by creating upgradeable, guild-claimable structures within and around existing WVW towers & keeps.

Other areas like the skritt cave, centaur camp could/should become additional player mini-fortresses.

Eg:
Bay is easily large enough for 3-4 guild mini-fortresses (2 built into the mountain geometry, 1 underwater, maybe 1 more built into the back of the keep lord’s hall). Towers could house a single guild hall.

These mini-fortresses should all be separately capturable & claimable (by guilds of course). In general, player fortress/guild hall gates/portcullises should be equivalent to t3 doors, which auto-upgrade over time without consuming supply.

Potential upgrades (besides gates/portcullises) might include:

• guild heraldry
• guild accomplishments (statues, decals)
• protective siege, eg: well-positioned guild cannon(s)/ballistae
• player fortresses outside keeps might even have their own guild-only waypoint

The goal of all this should be to add greater value to keep and tower ownership, and increase the frequency of epic clashes.

To mitigate the loss of one’s guild hall, upgrades should be based on time only and customisation options be made to be persistent, such that upon claim, non-functional/aesthetic upgrades occur automatically (think guild “theme” that applies itself automatically based on that guild’s last set of customisations).

don’t worry, elementals (and glyphs for that matter) are pretty bad.

gem sales, duh.

and this is the problem with the B2P model: once you buy the game, the majority of Anet’s accountability to players to provide them with a fun experience is gone — their only financial incentive is to entice players to buy gems, not to create quality content per se.

Indeed, they are financially better off for the most part not created non-gem-store-related content so that non-spenders stop playing to save on bandwidth and hosting costs. Hence, bugger all effort devoted to balancing, WVW, sPVP.

At least with a subscription MMO, you can be sure that the company in question will bust their kitten to listen to players and make a serious effort to provide them with quality content they want to play.

PabbyGaul.9682:

Limit rewards

Won’t be enough. Servers actually have to stand a chance of actually winning.

Scaling PPT to active population when tick is calculated is the best solution as it means servers with a low but dedicated population can still beat a lazy, overstacked server like BG.

Moreover scaled, moving-averaged PPT also addresses the timezone/coverage issue – since points/pop at time of tick is all that matters.

Azumi.9572:

So what’s the point? WvW is dead. No competitive Tiers, dying and drying up population, less influx of casuals due to EotM being a much better fit for them, etc.

Edge of the Mists replaced it, basically. Pointless to worry about WvW at this stage.

People don’t play EOTM because it’s fun; they play it to farm. The rewards for karma train behaviour in EOTM are waaaay out of proportion.

The 2 big issues I have with ranger:

• pets need some innate AOE dmg reduction, like 50%
• traps need 900+ range, 600 range traited doesn’t cut it

both of these are from a WVW persepctive

annoying change is still bloody annoying.

Vayne.8563:

Take the NPE.

Colin came straight out and said why it exists. People choose not to listen or not to believe. Listening to what someone says (and seeing that it’s probably reasonable) isn’t making assumptions. It’s believing something someone is saying.

Group 1: They dumbed down the game because they think we’re idiots.
Group 2: They altered the game based on tests that they ran that said it kept people playing longer.

I’m having trouble picturing a meeting where devs say to each other, you know, our players are idiots, let’s make the game dumber. It’s not likely to have happened. People who are offended by the NPE are simply taking offense at something that was a logical business decision.

More like: someone at Anet pulls out some data that shows GW2 has only a 20% conversion rate (ie: 80% stop playing the game at or before level X), so the objective becomes: how can we make this higher?

What are some likely reasons why the conversion rate sucks?

1) the game is too hard/confusing
2) the gameplay just isn’t fun/differentiated/interesting enough
3) some of the mechanics/art is a major turnoff

Anet primarily chose #1, which is why the NPE was all about dumbing the game down a lot. They couldn’t possibly have data that this is the major reason as that data only becomes available after the changes are made so it was an educated guess on their part (possibly combined with some anecdotal data from paid testers).

Given that my personal experience of the NPE involved close to zero confusion, you can understand why players in general were a bit shocked at the extent to which the NPE was dumbed-down.

Personally, the closest I came to giving up the game during my NPE was discovering downed state for the first time (I still hate it), and the inflexibility of the UI (I hate not being able to rearrange especially the combat-related frames, i still dislike the GW2 UI for this reason).

Corian.4068:

Here’s things I would be excited for:

• New weapon types/skills
• New skills
• New traits
• New professions

This is what players have been predominantly asking for for at least a year.

I would be excited just to be able to not use nearly the exact same weapon (staff), traits (arcane/water) and utilities (cantrips) i’ve been using in WVW since release because nothing else is good enough to be considered an alternative.

It’s obvious most of their resources are devoted to churning out low quality LS content, and leaving WVW/PVP/balancing to rot. As they have.

LS was the worst thing that ever happened to this game.

Elsdragon.5109:

People like to nitpick about something simply because it’s different from what they’re used to. They fail to see any merit in those systems because of this, which is the actual sad part in all this.

because there is no merit to the new system. that is what people are saying.

joshc.3129:

The double professions and large amount of skills in GW1 is what also kept the game really unbalanced and the double professions and the large number of skills that came with it is also what made a lot players shy away from the game because it was to overwhelming for them (hints* why Anet dumb down GW2).

GW1 was more balanced than GW2 for the simple fact that for any given build, there was enough depth in the game to come up with a build that countered it. As for dumbing down, well I think most people would say they went way too far in the other direction.

With the countless nerfs from Anet destroying entire professions and entire skill lines, 90% of the skills went unused because of nerfs or the skill effect was basically worthless.

So, exactly like GW2? Except that for e.g. Ele, 4/5ths of Ele skills/traits have never been worth using in the first place. It’s only been, idk, 2 years in which in a significant number of cases all they needed to do was tweak some numbers in a text file.

With the use of henchmen and heros many players just went for the very overpowered builds and did the game solo killing the player interaction part of the game.

Don’t forget many of the skills where just copy and paste skills meaning the base game and each expansion had skills that where the same when it came to doing the same effect just called by a different name.

Again, just like GW2.

That’s why Anet did away with the second profession concept to help new players not feel overwhelmed and focus on the quality of the skills rather than the quantity of skills. This also help prevent overpowered builds from creating chaos in-game and help keep the player interaction alive that was killed off early on in GW1.

So the alternative is relatively shallow, inflexible classes that are shoehorned into using their (often single) class mechanic? Can an ele make a decent single element build? nope. can a ranger make a build without a pet? nope. did warrior even care about their class mechanic? they didn’t have to until last patch. do condi necros benefit from death shroud? no, not really. etc etc.

Not saying secondary profs were a perfect design but in terms of game design depth, it was better than what we’re stuck with now.

All I hope is that the whole living story approach is discarded entirely. It’s not a story, nor it is good quality content. It’s just a vehicle for driving gem sales and I hate it.

What I hate the most though is the extent to which it has overridden the priority of creating any other content. WVW is basically all I bought this game for (well, sPVP as well but that turned out to be a huge disappointment) and the amount of new content that’s been added in 2 years is really disappointing, moreso because the content that was added was content noone was asking for and didn’t really add anything to the game.

The balancing in this game and rate of improvement in this game has also turned out to be spectacularly subpar – 2 years after release and the number of skills added and range of viable specs has barely changed.

So yeah, I would much prefer GW1-style large, episodic updates with real content I can actually enjoy instead of half-baked, rushed LS-style “content”. More than anything though, I just want other content development efforts to be normalised to some semblance of a reasonable pace of development.

Crossplay.2067:

Just to let you guys know, closing empty maps doesn’t save Anet money. Think about it. That nearly empty map is running on a server that will still be running even after that map closes. It’ll still be running even after 5, 10 or 20 maps close. If somehow they do have it programmed where certain servers shut off when no longer needed, the most it will save is electricity. Do you have any idea how little energy computers use?

You clearly have no idea about IT and modern server infrastructure, datacentre costs are huge.

create a downed state that interrupts the natural flow pace of combat where players are forced to play a mostly pointless 4-skill mini-game that is completely different from the main combat when they die. Then add obnoxious rally and rez mechanics that allow dead players to be rezzed in 1second and/or to rally from random tags on players/fauna.

mjasa.5821:

I cant even understand this solution of middle ground, it wasn’t broken why brake it now after all this time, just revert it back to how it was before patch, period, punctum!

agree, surely it’s a mistake…though makes me wonder why it’s not been hotfixed?

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Here is the patch note from March 26, 2013:

• Automatic camera rotation while defeated will no longer restart after the camera is moved.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-March-26-2013/first#post1856151

So, I’m confused about why there would be a middle ground. Just re-enable the previous feature that was ‘broken’ in the patch.

this problem still persists. it is extremely irritating.

Svarty.8019:

Avadore.4196:

DAOC had no AOE cap and had long duration crowd controls that a small group (8 man) could take out large forces. It was fun and the imbalance was not as a big of a deal.

Don’t try to rewrite history. These long duration clipping-range AoE mez/stuns were the bane of the game and ruined the fun for many as they stood there looking stupid while an 8-man group used /assist macros to pick them off one by one or massive PBAoE spam to kill them as a group. This was horrible and unfun.

FYI what you said only applied to terrible players who didn’t pan, interrupt, or move in response to obvious tells, no unlike how baddies can’t dodge obvious telegraphed attacks in this game. Yes DAOC was far less forgiving to terrible players than current generation games are, no question.

Back on topic…

Gully.7358:

It’s the reason why people stack on tier 1 servers, it’s simply the easiest way to get rewarded.

Focus on better reward system for the people who do a lot of work with less then 5 or 10 man groups, add some more objectives and I have a feeling the population will actually spread out a little better while making more servers be more competitive.

This! Alliances as described won’t solve the core problem, which is that stacking/zerging is by far the best way to win and get rewards. The scoring absolutely is part of the problem/solution and i really think trying to factor it out of the discussion as a separate system is the wrong way to go.

IMO, the scoring system has to upscale/downscale with the number of participants or the objectives/rewards need to upscale/downscale. Or both. A simple change that would make a huge difference is changing the scoring per side to:

PPT = held_points * total_players_all3_servers / (3 * current_players)

Eg: server1 has 500 players across all 3 maps, server2 has 250, server3 has 250. server1 would have to hold 1.5x the number of points per tick to remain even with servers 2 & 3.

Rewards would need to be scaled in a similar fashion to reduce the incentive to stack servers just for the rewards.

Note that this scoring system also “fixes” the timezone problem, as the core change is that PPT is determined by the playing population at time of tick, not just by total points.

Current and total players should be effectively calculated as a moving average to avoid exploits oriented around mass joining/leaving of WVW prior to tick calculation.

Personally I think the problem lies in the extent to which GW2 encourages server stacking through design flaws.

• AOE cap of 5 favours larger groups
• downed state/rally greatly favours larger groups
• tournament strongly encourage server stacking (cough blackgate)
• objectives too easy & too rewarding, encourages stacking

Before going down the more drastic routes of merging or capping, I’d strongly urge Anet to try removing or diluting the incentives you created for people to stack/blob in the first place.

Other things that could be considered:

• weaker/less numerous side gets free/instant initial upgrade, or auto-spawned ACs, extra cannons etc.
• guards scaled up across the board (way too easy) and extra upscaling guards on the weaker side(s).

have noticed increased skill lag across the board in WVW. Ride The lightning is unusable – it even overshoots barely-moving grey fauna targets.

Realms were way less unbalanced because there were no cross-realm transfers. You could re-roll on a different realm but it had to be on a different server and then you had to start from scratch.

Servers population are unbalanced here because Anet decided to sell out the quality of the game for transfer $$$. Simple as that.

Other things. Keeps were harder/took longer to take in general — losing half your frontier keeps usually took hours/days not 30 mins, mainly because keeps (and towers) were well defended. I can remember being in keep siege attacks/defenses that went on for hours.

Darkness Falls was a combined-PVE/PVP dungeon that was only accessible to the realm with the most keeps/towers, which effectively served as a counter-balance to any 1 side greatly outnumbering the other 2. IMO, DF was the real masterstroke behind DAOC’s RVR – in addition to its role as a RVR population balancing mechanic, when DF changed hands the race was on to clear the enemy realm out of DF, which provided some of my favourite PVP content in the game.

It’s also worth clarifying that DAOC was a game where a single, organised 8man group could wipe disorganised zergs by themselves due to no AOE cap, which also made any population disparity seem like much less of an issue. Also, no downed state in DAOC.

In short, DAOC had several counter-balances to population disparity or any 1 side becoming too strong, where GW2 has mechanics & incentives that strongly favour server stacking (tournaments, easily-taken & well-rewarded objectives, waypoints) and ever larger zergs (downed state, AOE cap).

Virtute.8251:

Deli.1302:

Arrow carts don’t require line of sight. If you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it can’t see you.
Always keep moving. Maintain constant water fields and blast them. Clear condis.
Almost all the time, the people who die under ac fire are the ones that stand still.

Yes, they do. It was added relatively recently. You get a “no line of sight” error when trying many of the shots that back-of-wall and other clever placement used to accomplish.

And like I said, it has some leeway in it. It’s not a literal line-of-sight. It’s just trying to prevent things like building one inside a tower and firing directly onto the opposite side of the nearest wall, as was done in third-party software zoom unlocks.

btw this isn’t true, i recently saw a TC group build an AC under the cliff to the left of bay north gate and then proceed to AC down the door treb near the lake, completely out of any conceivable LOS.

jingkangtan.6752:

isit me or RTL overshots alot?

RTL has been broken for over a year now.

The current implementation is so bad it frequently overshoots a stationary critter. The dev team appear to test only with local servers with single digit latency and so don’t realise how broken it really is with real-world latency.

@devs: try connecting to a euro or asian server from the US and then use RTL in WVW a dozen times and tell me how often you can hit your target. The implementation of RTL that shipped at release did not overshoot, it was introduced when RTL impl changed some months after release.

Arbitrary restriction is arbitrary.

I would like a pet-less option.

“Grants you and your pet 20% chance to ignore projectiles and AOE damage”

…then it would be worth taking.

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

I can see the point here. Ranger pets have a a magical ability to draw all foe and upset specific builds..whoever, this can be micro managed with how you control your pet. I can see why some players may want to opt out of having a pet, but this also makes 50% of traits useless now and 40% of your utilities have no purpose.

Unless the GM trait that removed the pet made it so that any trait or effect that would be applied to your pet applied to you instead.

Solved.

Djinn.9245:

If this camera garbage is to stop “spying” in WvW, obscure vision of dead characters in some way or something. What happens there shouldn’t affect the rest of us so badly.

it’s not. i’m sure it’s just a bug and/or it’s a bad merge from the chinese client repo.

I reported this as a bug and encourage everyone to do the same.

It’s extremely irritating in WVW to die mid-fight and not be able to watch the rest of the fight because the camera force-pans.

How did something like this slip through QA?

I strongly support time-limiting the defeated state but the forced camera pan has got to go.

Devildoc.6721:

scerevisiae.1972:

Devildoc.6721:

Dirame.8521:

Devildoc.6721:

The way I’m seeing it, enjoy lightning rod while you can, it’s going to get nerfed. The potential for bursts is really high and people will cry about being melted by Eles almost instantly. Lightning Hammer and Tornado make lightning rod deadly. Static Field + Gust will also be dangerous.

We’ll see an internal cooldown or gutted damage in a month or two max.

Lol, it doesn’t deal THAT much damage geez. The only way a Staff Ele would kill someone is in a combo where he goes, Static Field -> gust -> Lava Font -> Unteady Ground. And that’s a hard combo to pull off if your enemy can dodge.

Well I see no way to hide it, it’s going to get nerfed so..

okay there’s no ICD on lightning rod so there are some combos you can do that will trigger it multiple times for massive burst damage.

Static field + Gust an enemy INTO static field will trigger Lightning Rod twice, and it can do about 8k damage almost instantly that way.

Tornado when it hits will hit someone for about 4k (electrified tornado) + 3k (Tornado’s normal hit) + 4k, for over 10k damage every 3s to 5 targets, and that’s not even 25 stacks of might and all that.

Lightning hammer … the burst from that will kill people almost instantly. it’s about a 20k burst in 1s.

ROFL. Exaggerate much?

not at all.

That’s not even 16k and it’s at least 5seconds of casting. And it’s on a lowbie PVE mob.

….

TBH I have been suggesting that since release. People are just sick of beating a dead horse.

T raw.4658:

All other burst isn’t 1500 or more range away

T raw.4658:

That much damage that fast from that range is game breaking.

thief steal into 10-12K backstab + 5-7K spammable heartseekers says hello.

…

So like many people, i dusted off my ranger in light of the buffage and took her roaming as well as zerging in the BLs.

Now. While I can see a bit of an improvement in zerker LB’s usefulness in countering increasingly zerky ranged light armour classes (hello Eles) to the point that my guild might consider allowing them into our regular WVW raids, rangers are still very sucky in the AOE department, and pets are still more of an impediment than a benefit.

Taken together, I think rangers still have a way to go in terms of improvements to AOE and/or support capability in order to be even remotely accepted in the GWEN fold of WVW-viable classes. Certainly not “OP” as some are claiming anyway.

Barrage in particular deserves a change due to the relatively low amount of damage it does compared to how much retaliation damage is typically taken due to the numerous small hits. Pets could (should?) potentially provide the necessary support capability, but without something like baseline 50% AOE damage reduction, I just can’t see it ever happening, even a bear and maxxed pet traits gets melted in seconds in a zerg-v-zerg clash, and pet-swapping as a pet survival mechanic doesn’t really cut it.

Devildoc.6721:

Dirame.8521:

Devildoc.6721:

The way I’m seeing it, enjoy lightning rod while you can, it’s going to get nerfed. The potential for bursts is really high and people will cry about being melted by Eles almost instantly. Lightning Hammer and Tornado make lightning rod deadly. Static Field + Gust will also be dangerous.

We’ll see an internal cooldown or gutted damage in a month or two max.

Lol, it doesn’t deal THAT much damage geez. The only way a Staff Ele would kill someone is in a combo where he goes, Static Field -> gust -> Lava Font -> Unteady Ground. And that’s a hard combo to pull off if your enemy can dodge.

Well I see no way to hide it, it’s going to get nerfed so..

okay there’s no ICD on lightning rod so there are some combos you can do that will trigger it multiple times for massive burst damage.

Static field + Gust an enemy INTO static field will trigger Lightning Rod twice, and it can do about 8k damage almost instantly that way.

Tornado when it hits will hit someone for about 4k (electrified tornado) + 3k (Tornado’s normal hit) + 4k, for over 10k damage every 3s to 5 targets, and that’s not even 25 stacks of might and all that.

Lightning hammer … the burst from that will kill people almost instantly. it’s about a 20k burst in 1s.

ROFL. Exaggerate much?

Just to clarify: my main objection is the placement of the button not its existence per se – it takes up space in the most valuable area of the UI.

warr has just been spoilt with 100% adr all the time without needing to spend a single utility or trait slot. now you need to devote some part of your build to adr generation.

this is still a far better position than e.g. Eles, who need to devote 4 trait points to both water and arcane plus 1-3 utility slots just to make use of their class mechanic and survive.

YACAM.

(yet another clunky anet mechanic; see conjures)

S/F lacks CC, mobility and heals in WVW, it’s just about the worst spec possible you can run.

It’s broken. If they can’t fix it they ought to just rework it entirely. You shouldn’t be CCed just for executing your default attack chain, it’s ridiculous.

Disappointing they still haven’t fixed sword #1

Metrics are only good when the right things are measured and the right conclusions drawn. Otherwise they just paint the wrong picture.

Word on the street is that Anet management are overly obsessed with their graphite dashboards and the continued misreading of same is why the game continues its march into mediocrity.

The AH now features a rather large and obnoxiously-located “GET MORE GOLD” button, which is of course, intended to lure people into buying more gems.

I don’t really have a problem with microtransactions in general however I do have a problem with a giant “PAY TO WIN” button eating up a large chunk of the most valuable screen real estate in the auction UI.

Moneygrabbing should not trump good UX design.

Vayne.8563:

Anet is improving the game based on data they have that we don’t. Why would we have that data.

Anet needs to communicate why they do thinks better. I think that’s very important. I see this as by far their biggest weakness.

As the saying goes: if you make a game any idiot can play, only idiots will end up playing it.

pdavis.8031:

scerevisiae.1972:

RubberDougie.2750:

I’d let a 6 year old play this. I was playing DOOM and Killter Instinct at 6ish.

you’d let a 6yo callously murder peaceful races for fun/profit? some parent.

How else am i to train him to ruthlessly rule the world with an iron fist of doom? Evil dictators don’t happen overnight you know.

Why wait until 6 then?

what game metrics won’t tell you (assuming you’re measuring the right things and drawing the right conclusions in the first place) is the extent to which dumbing down your game like this is likely to trash the GW2/Anet brand.

With the pace of non-LS-related changes being the worst in the industry (not an exaggeration, it’s terrible), the value of the GW brand is already in the toilet. This will only make it worse.

RubberDougie.2750:

I’d let a 6 year old play this. I was playing DOOM and Killter Instinct at 6ish.

you’d let a 6yo callously murder peaceful races for fun/profit? some parent.

Hilariously bad. Whoever thought those changes were a good idea needs a good hard punt out of the gaming industry.