Guild Wars 2

Fenrir.5493:

tigirius.9014:

Trust me warriors don’t need buffs of any kind. They need nerfs especially in PVE.

Most hilarious quote ever.

Oh please. Everyone knows warriors are OP in PVE, that’s why all the PVE farmer groups run 4 of them.

I don’t think the changes listed will change much:

• 20+ arcane is still required for playability
• 15+ water is still required for survivability
• glyphs still suck
• conjures still suck
• EA is still a fair bit better than any of the GM traits
• staff still has 19/20 AOE skills
• sceptre still laden with crappy skills: DT, SS, fire #1, water #1

I can see S/D and signets being a little better, but survivability will be an issue.

Re-distributing the stun breakers is good.

More than anything, I would’ve expected to see trait changes that reduced the dependence of Ele on attunement CD reduction from arcane and dependence on 15+ water for sustain and condition removal, eg: Earth 30 = reset fire and earth attunements on using a signet, Air 30 = reset air and water attunements on using a glyph.

Pretty disappointing IMO if those are the real changes. I really hope they aren’t.

captaincrash.6528:

The closest thing Guild Wars 2 has to WoW, is it is by default W to move forward.

srsly?

• gear as core progression mechanic
• mainly auto-attack-based, auto-aimed combat
• skinner-box-oriented retention strategy (you would know them as dailies)
• GW2 hearts == WOW quests
• GW2 traits == WOW talents
  i could go on but that’s already most of the game…

Ostricheggs.3742:

I can understand why you’d prefer GW1 PvP. GW2 is something entirely different than a lot of MMOs have tried.

What? How is it different?

No dedicated healers? been done before. Dodge-rolling to mitigate damage? Nope, almost every MMO has had skills that provide temporary invulnerability. Aimed attacks? Nope, there’s hardly any in GW2 and there are several MMOs with fully-aimed attacks. The list goes on…

The combat in GW2 is actually not very original at all if you’ve played a variety of mmos before. The only thing I can think of in GW2 that I haven’t encountered elsewhere is combo fields, which I like, but IMO they could have been so much more than they are.

Ostricheggs.3742:

And I HAVE argued about downed state and why it’s good for the game. People aren’t used to it, people rage when they “kill” a player and he gets back up. Why people complain about it is beyond me because once you get past the initial shock of it you’ll realize it’s an incredibly balanced mechanic with more to offer the game with it than without it. That’s especially true given the lack of any dedicated healer in the game.

DS creates a whole bunch of problems and imbalances without actually solving any – it’s a pointless mechanic which has failed terribly, as evidenced by the spectacular failure of sPVP to attract players.

Downed state:

• interrupts the natural pace and flow of combat
• does not spectate well
• is not fun
• precludes skilled 1v2, 1v3 victories
• turns a close 4v4/3v3/2v2s into a whitewash because of ridiculous rally mechanics
• promotes instagibbing
• introduces imbalances that wouldn’t otherwise exist

DS should at least be an option on custom arenas. I’m willing to bet that DS-disabled arenas would be more popular than default.

• The core combat mechanics are bad/overly simplified.
• Auto-attacking is sufficient to easily get through 99% of the content.
• Skills are very generic. No choice in skills.
• Most traits are ineffectual and barely change anything.
• The AI is terrible.

If this game required a subscription, it would have died faster than AOC/WAR/SW:TOR.

Well, the fact that barely anyone is playing or watching it sums up what gamers think of it. By any measure, GW2’s sPVP has been a spectacular failure.

It’s not irretrievable but personally I nor people I PVP in other games with will touch it while downed state and conquest are not optional.

mesmers aren’t slow if you slot runes of the centaur.

combined with focus and the 15sec heal, you have 100% swiftness uptime.

then there’s blink and portal…

Honestly, just reroll mesmer. GS is a much better ranged weapon than anything the Ele has, and sword/focus craps on Ele D/D for burst at close range too.

I mean, it’s been nearly a year since beta and nothing has really changed for Ele. They don’t care.

30 illusions, 20 domination, 20 duelling, shatter traits
GS + S/F
feedback, MI, portal
zerker gear

best Ele build for WVW too.

Vayne.8563:

I’m going to start timing them from today and post my results.

please do, esp if you could note the specific achievement and location done. I agree some days’ dailies are quicker but on average, i’d say 45min. It’s not at all fun for me to “just” do the daily achievements, i’d rather have them done as part of something i want to do, eg: WVW achievements. These can take > 45mins, depending on WVW state.

Vayne.8563:

mjharrison.3209:

Olvendred.3027:

Stop thinking of GW2 like other MMO’s. You don’t feel like doing your daily? Then don’t.

You have to grind dailies, it’s the only way to get ascended gear… noone likes being weaker than everyone else, get real.

You can’t grind dailies. You can do them, but you can’t grind them…because they’re time limited.

The definition of grind is to do the same thing over and over again usually go get experience for leveling. But since daily CAN be done in 20 minutes, and since missing a day only sets you back a day…you really can’t grind them. In other words, as long as it takes you to do the five easiest dailies, that’s the longest you can “grind” for.

If you mean the game encourages people to do dailies daily…well, yeah, that’s sort of the point of them. It’s why they were made so easy.

If dailies are your idea of grind, there’s probably nothing more to say on the matter.

Grind to me is anything you don’t really want to do but are compelled to do due to game design/mechanics. For those of us with limited daily playtime, we’re compelled to grind the daily if we ever hope to keep us with the joneses wrt ascended gear, because (IMO stupidly) progress towards a daily expires daily instead of accumulating until complete.

BTW, most dailies don’t take 20min, a more realistic average would be 45min.

Zosk.5609:

Want real defense…. slow down door and wall destruction, add things like postern doors to towers…and if you wanna overpower something make it the Boiling Oil.

This. The effectiveness gap between players and ACs is still too large, raise the AOE cap of players to 8-10, and buff oil.

BakaOniiChan.9564:

mjharrison.3209:

I don’t think the matchups are the problem- the bandwagon servers (t1) are always going to have more people.

The problem to me still all comes down to game mechanics that promote and reward mindless zerging over skill.

Obvious things that should be tried:

• increase AOE cap, from say 5 to 8-10
• divide objective rewards by number of participants
• buff outmanned bonus, scale it better

UM how is SoR a banwagoning server?

Don’t take it personally, all the t1 servers are bandwagon servers, it’s why they’re in t1. Eg: when SBI was evacuated just prior to the paid server move, roughly 2/3rds of old SBI went to SoR, other 1/3rd went to JQ. Other servers have similar stories.

I don’t think the matchups are the problem- the bandwagon servers (t1) are always going to have more people.

The problem to me still all comes down to game mechanics that promote and reward mindless zerging over skill.

Obvious things that should be tried:

• increase AOE cap, from say 5 to 8-10
• divide objective rewards by number of participants
• buff outmanned bonus, scale it better

Olvendred.3027:

Stop thinking of GW2 like other MMO’s. You don’t feel like doing your daily? Then don’t.

You have to grind dailies, it’s the only way to get ascended gear… noone likes being weaker than everyone else, get real.

Mirta.5029:

Just going to point this out – there are no MMOs with infinite content. There simply can’t be.

Wrong, UO had effectively infinite content; EVE has effectively infinite content. Both games are still around, and in fact, EVE is 10 years old and it is still gaining subs.

Vayne.8563:

mjharrison.3209:

Sliekery.7862:

I don’t think there is any thing “wrong” with the game. People just expect to much.

GW1 had an amazing depth to skills, skill interactions, and consequently, to build depth and player choices. To me this was the game’s #1 appeal.

This game has very little depth by comparison, and very few real choices — all GW2 skills basically differ only by dmg coefficient, cooldown, and animation – conditional effects are rare and traits across the board are really underwhelming on most classes.

It’s reasonable to expect a sequel to have similar mechanics to the original game, but this is not the case here. At all.

Unless a company learns from it’s mistakes. Guild Wars 1 lost tons of people to the impossibility of balancing a game with that many skills and cross profession mechanics. They did annouce, well prior to launch, exactly how skills would be handled. It’s different because they found they’d lost control of the skills in the old game. Imbagon paragons, spirit spammers, perman-sins, 600 monks, sabway and team discord builds proved that.

And this game is better how? At least in GW1, the breadth and depth of the skill system allowed people to come up with counters over time, and at the end of the day, balanced builds/comps always prevailed over gimmick builds. In any case, dumbing down core game mechanics to the point that GW2 has because balancing is hard is a terrible idea, as witnessed by abyssmal sPVP participation numbers, and it sure hasn’t expedited the balancing process either.

As the saying goes: if you design a game that any idiot can play, only idiots will play it.

ColinJohanson.2394:

We’ve been playing around so far this year with a lot of different concepts to see what works for a living world game

The most successful aspect of the game – WVW – succeeds because it’s unpredictable & emergent, unlike the majority of the rest of the game.

I really wish you’d experiment with more emergent gameplay elements, and re-introduce GW1-style skill capturing. I’m really sick of playing the same spec on my Ele because all the other weapons & traits are clunky, pidgeonholed, and/or outright ineffectual.

Sliekery.7862:

I don’t think there is any thing “wrong” with the game. People just expect to much.

GW1 had an amazing depth to skills, skill interactions, and consequently, to build depth and player choices. To me this was the game’s #1 appeal.

This game has very little depth by comparison, and very few real choices — all GW2 skills basically differ only by dmg coefficient, cooldown, and animation – conditional effects are rare and traits across the board are really underwhelming on most classes.

It’s reasonable to expect a sequel to have similar mechanics to the original game, but this is not the case here. At all.

You only need to look at the spectacular failure of sPVP and the ultra slow place of improvement in this game to realise there is something very wrong with this game.

More than anything I just want to be freed from 20+ points in arcane. Anything less than 20 arcane feels wrong and plays like crap. IMO rework the bonus.

just want to say thanks to all the TC who kept coming back to redvale to supply us with a continuous stream of easy kills/badges for the past 30mins or so.

JonathanSharp.7094:

I totally agree on bringing all classes to the same level, just want to make sure we do it correctly/over time and not do wild improvements/reductions everywhere and then have to revert them.

Quite frankly I think most people would rather see much faster changes, even if they need to be corrected at a later time. The rate of change is too kitten slow, it’s ridiculous.

There are still far, far too many “mandatory” traits, and plenty of other that are close to useless. Unlike skill balance, trait choices can be measured objectively by popularity – anova, regression models, the tools are all there.

Another obvious move would be making 5/15/25pt traits a choice instead of being fixed.

who cares about legendaries, just play the game.

Skill & build diversity.

No stupid downed state ruining PVP.

Elite skill capping.

chronus.1326:

The biggest problem that tells the most about this game’s future is not the actual content, but the lag at which ArenaNet realizes and deals with missing basic components, and inherently wrong systems.

They have completely screwed up priorities.

It takes them months to implement almost mindbogglingly basic things like the titles displaying under the names. Things that should have been there since conception. Mistakes that only amateurs make.

These are ameteurish mistakes.

It’s like as if the team’s collective creativity and intelligence suffered some kind of a stroke and was reduced to the thinking capacity of a banana. Who knows why? Maybe some people who were crucial in the creaion of the original game already left? I do no know, I do not follow dev drama.

But very fact that a lot of basic things are still missing from the game and we, again, have to resort to 3rd party sites like gwlfg.com instead of having such things incorporated into the game… the very fact that for the developers it was not trivial that these things should be implemented is what speaks volumes of the game’s future.

It’s like only the creative department is still intact, because seemingly everyone else is doing a helluva poor job.

But popping out world events is not gonna save the game. You have to make big changes, or you can kiss the game goodbye. And you have to tell people about the upcoming changes, because with saying that you do not plan to make expansions, you just destroyed a humungous ammount of enthusiasm.

In case you did not know, that was what was keeping people here.
That maybe you will fix all this **** in a huge update in the for of an expansion.

And you killed that hope.
Nobody is buying the “this game will become GW2.5 and GW3”.
People are thinking that you were deprived of fiancial support and you simply have no money to make an expansion.

People know exactly how this industry works.

QFT. Screwed up priorities. Arrogant developers.

Fernling.1729:

Paul.4081:

http://www.xfire.com/games/gw2

Guidelines

9 viewers, that doesn’t even count. Does anybody even use xfire anymore?

Says 2200 players…. More than enough to draw reasonable inferences.

Build diversity in this game is so bad you need to play 3 chars just to experience the same level of diversity I’d expect to have from 1 char.

• remove downed state in PvP or at least make it an option in CAs.
• balance weapons, traits, build diversity in this game sucks
• new game mode that doesn’t involve standing in circles

The biggest issue I see with B2P is the company has far less incentive to listen to players and to upgrade their game regularly. Once they have your money, why should they care about you? In fact, to maximise their profits they’re better off if you stop playing.

Eg: who can truly say the whole ascended items thing was not a carefully calculated move to kitten off a chunk of their casual player-base in order to reduce operational costs, as well as introduce grind for more hardcore players who are likely to spend money in the cash shop?

It is certain that in a B2P game, your value as a customer is entirely spent in the moment of purchase, whereas a P2P they need to work to retain your business.

Something I certainly can see with GW2 vs other P2P games – the pace of development here is really slow and players are rarely listened to. There have been posts with 1K+ posts here since release about various aspects of the game that should be changed. These are routinely ignored and rarely even responded to.

Not saying B2P is bad, only that there are definite downsides as well as upsides and you’d be foolish to pretend otherwise.

Rangers are fine, the problem is the pet.

Kugkug.8795:

GW2 pvp shows an amazingly large disconnect between the designers’ perception and what casual pvp’ers want.
[…]
spvp. Gets old rather quickly and lacks a compelling reason to keep doing it. Lacks that “hook” that gets you addicted to it forever.

I hope it gets better. Regret buying this game honestly.

This could not be more true. I came to his conclusion before I een came to these forums and it’s obvious that the designers care way more about their ideas (and egos) than they do about what players think.

By any measure, sPVP has been a spectacular failure – not because of a lack of competitive features (that only affect a small % of an already tiny group) – it’s because the PVP aspect of the game is not designed very well.

You forgot the most-needed ones:

• turn off rallying on kills
• turn off downed state

LordByron.8369:

If you see an ele with a staff btw you know that 90% it won t bring much to the party in any area.

Are you sure you’re playing GW2? Staff Ele is amazing for group support.

Shame it sucks at everything else.

Vayne.8563:

Rift, when I was there, made ZILLIONS of changes all the time. Multiple times a week. Do you have any idea how many times I logged and had to respec because they completely changed my skill and skill tree. At one point it was twice, three times a week.

They try stuff that doesn’t work and then they make more changes that don’t work and they finally may make a couple of changes that do work, but they’re not going free to play because the world is full of people playing that game.

Rift has some of the worst updates I’ve ever seen for a game. They had to do a full apology for their first big world event. As bad as the karka event was, the Rift world event was far worse.

Rift makes a lot of changes, and that’s part of the problem. They were new to the MMO space and they were trying to find their way. And in making all those changes, there was never any chance of balancing anything.

Slow, steady change is the very best way to update an MMO.

What? Class balance patches for Rift were awesome – they always acted really quickly, they were the right changes, and they generally buffed more than they nerfed. The big downside of Rift IMO was that it wasn’t very casual-friendly. Random world PVP in Rift was particularly awesome.

Viable to me == performs at a reasonable level in WVW solo roaming and small-group situations.

On that basis, for Ele, only D/D Ele with cantrips is viable. S/D is fine vs baddies who can’t mitigate the DT burst combo, but it falls off hard versus better players. Staff is only good in a zerg/siege situation.

Overall, Ele weapons and traits are pretty kitten awful.

PS: With how bad the PVE AI is in this game, almost anything is “viable” in PVE.

Rednik.3809:

Downed state is anti-burst mechanic, and absolutely necessary in game without specialized healers. If brainless glasscannon know only how to unload burst and cannot finish the job – its 101% l2p thing. Don’t want l2p? Go QQ more, no one cares.

DS is a pro-burst mechanic as it takes a fixed % of your HP to be reserved for DS.

Is it really more fun to throw rocks than use your normal skills?

Motoko.2875:

Ostricheggs.3742:

Motoko.2875:

Vandal.8029:

Motoko.2875:

Please don’t try and make GW2 PvP look complicated. The gamemode itself is terrible. The downed state is terrible. You trying to make it exciting is just sad at this point.

Please don’t try and make your opinions of GW2 look like facts. I’m sorry that you think everything is terrible but that doesn’t do anything to support your argument.

I’m not saying that GW2 is a complicated game, but the down state does add an opportunity for teamwork and quick decision making. Why try to make it even less complicated?

I don’t have to make them look like facts – The fact that GW2 PvP is dead within 9 months of the release of the game due to the mass majority opinion that it is “terrible” does the job for me.

Why try to keep a mechanic in a game mode that the majority of players dislike in the first place?

Correlation does not imply causation. There are plenty of reasons as to why GW2 PVP is not as popular as it should be, the downed state is not one of them. I could say that the reason why the game is dead right now is because of dagger offhands, but we all know that’s simply not true.

What you’re asking for is a reversal of years of work on the game. The downed state works as it stands and is (almost) perfectly balanced. A sudden removal of the downed state would literally kill the game without massive changes to both classes and game type. To have such a huge overhaul when the game is so close to achieving something resembling what it should be would be incredibly stupid.

Yes, there are plenty of reasons as to why GW2 PvP is not as popular as it should be. The downed stated is just one of many things that add to the terrible state of GW2 PvP and make it so unbearable.
Regardless, the PvP section needs a massive overhaul anyway. Putting years of work into creating something stupid and worse than its predecessor is just plain stupid and a waste of time and money.

Exactly. There is no doubt DS has contributed to sPVP’s spectacular failure, the only question is what %. It would certainly be worth exposing a no-DS option in custom arenas to let the players decide.

Nialiss.6459:

Well if, for whatever reason, they remove the downed state, I’d end up only ever playing my thief in PvP. It would be stupidly easy to kill everyone in 2-3 seconds. The downed state kind of stops that from happening at the moment.

Like the other guy said, the basic idea would be to add a fixed % of DS HP to basic HP when removing DS.

Ostricheggs.3742:

What you’re asking for is a reversal of years of work on the game. The downed state works as it stands and is (almost) perfectly balanced. A sudden removal of the downed state would literally kill the game without massive changes to both classes and game type. To have such a huge overhaul when the game is so close to achieving something resembling what it should be would be incredibly stupid.

You are clearly not familiar with software engineering. It would be less than a day’s work to take downed state out, then another week to test it. Disabling features is much much faster than writing them, building assets for them, etc.

As for being close to something, the level of interest in sPV kitten till abyssmal. There are auction house streams getting more viewers.

Gw2 was kitten the day downed state was added.

Ralathar.7236:

rhodoc.2381:

Conjureds need more revamp/rework on mechanic than buffs or tweaks.

Actually they are not too far off from viable. With the changes I’ve listed I’m sure they could become viable in at least WvW and PVE. sPVP will always be it’s own very select beast.

I think you’re very wrong. Case in point: noone ever uses them in PVP (except FGS which often gets used for its mobility skills). As others are saying, conjures need a mechanics overhaul – they are just too clunky to use in current form. The consensus position seems to be that they shouldn’t lock out other attunements and IMO that seems pretty reasonable.

I agree the charge concept needs to go.

Sunflowers.1729:

Seeing as so many classes (Engi, Necro) have a ton of bugs, and every class has a lot of utility skills that just flat out suck, I doubt conjures will get a major rework anytime soon.

Conjures already flat-out suck. They’re the worst of all the utilities on the classes I play regularly (ele/thief/mesmer/necro/warr). At best, they are novelty value.

Edit: Simply increasing the duration of conjured weapons won’t make us use them. The problem is that we need all four attunements to be able to survive, and conjures lock us out of them.

Exactly. In order to justify giving up 20 skills and a utility slot for a conjure, the conjured weapon skills need to be amazing (which they are far far from currently), or they need not to lock out attunement switching.

Zoomhack, downed state, rally mechanics.

Instant cast.
Don’t lock out other attunements.
Fixed.

The whole idea of giving up 20 skills to gain 5 mediocre skills is terrible.

One of the big “hooks” this game lacks is that it doesn’t have enough depth to make theorycrafting interesting. The lack of the secondary class as well as tightly constrained utility types and weak traits means that builds are really limited in scope. Then only 1-2 of those builds are good enough to be viable in most classes.

KarlaGrey.5903:

Well, I dare say GW1 is more alive during any solid weekend event than GW2 usually is.
The screen shot below was taken today.

Wow nice.

Downed state is another example of a mechanic that was introduced for casuals/baddies but has had a dramatic, negative effect on the quality of the game’s PVP.

Yet they didn’t even bother to include a downed state disable option in custom arenas. Considering how many posts have been made about how bad DS is for PVP since beta, you’d have thought this would have been one of the most obvious candidates for turning off in a custom arena.

Inter-class balance has always been mostly fine, it’s intra-class balance that’s really bad.

That said, the recent sledgehammer nerfs to Ele have made it a lot less fun to play in other areas of the game.

XII.9401:

The spvp current state is simple..they removed healing classes and replaced them by self heals and revivals of fallen allies.

The self heals resulted in OP classes that are just impossible to beat with other classes given the same skill level on either side. It also resulted in lack of team synergy and boring bunker or stealth fights. Don’t believe me? Go into the dueling arenas and see players who know how to face roll through the abilities play..boring as hell.

Even the top teams you don’t hear them focusing on a target by doing cc combos or chains or purposely burning their counter boons and removing them. All you hear is :hes going down hes going down! Im down im down! revive me!

They Fallen state simply rewards bad players and casuals. Any player here who played his class has run into the situation where he downs one or two out of 3 players and still ends up losing because of the downed state.

The problem is, even after they remove the downed state it won’t help because some builds and classes will go down insanely fast and this will result in people playing bunker/tanky builds and resulting in even more fighting. The downed state was introduced to compensate for lack of healers and removing it at this state of the game will only force people to go down the tankier even more boring path.

I think removing healers was an original idea which was:

Great for PVE since you are not at the mercy of a healer’s whim or gotta wait for one (anyone remembers wow dungeons/raids?)

And which overall was a bad idea resulting in:

-In people who loved playing the healer class avoid the game
Team based competitive pvpers avoid/leave the game since arenas are just 1v1 or 1v2 in competitive tourneys given the node capturing mode. Even if deathmatch is introduced eventually, you will feel a lack of synergy between group member as everyone is doing his own thing.
boring pvp
-OP classes
-Rewarding bad players via downed state
-Turning a potentially great pvp experience in wvw like DAOC into a pve zerg fest instead and alienating the open world pvp/DAOC crowd.

I just hope future games learn to avoid these mistakes.

I also agree the problems with GW2 PVP are systemic, and not fixable with minuscule balance patches once per month. There have been massive threads since beta on how detrimental downed state is to the whole PVP experience, and yet they didn’t even bother to include an option to turn it off in custom arenas. Then there was the arrogant assertion that everything was balanced despite again, massive threads complaining about instagibbing and bunkering. And now instead of measured tweaks every month we have huge sledgehammer nerfs/buffs.

In the end the spectacular failure of GW2 sPVP derives from IMO the unwillingness of the dev team to listen to players. About everything. The removal of a resource system, the inclusion of downed state, emphasis on DPS over all were all things that were heavily criticised in betas and in previous design disclosures, but none of these concerns were ever taken on board.