Guild Wars 2

sPVP isn’t regarded as good PVP:

• stale/bland metagame due to bad balance/constrictive design
• downed state in PVP turns a lot of people off
• conquest isn’t fun

WVW solo/group roaming is the pinnacle of this game’s PVP.

All the currencies should be interconvertible so people can do the stuff they enjoy.

30 skill points = 50K karma = 250 badges = 2 laurels

30 laurels per item

Nice to see WVW get some attention. IMO the sooner Anet gets that WVW is where the real PVP in GW2 is, the better.

The correct answer: is don’t use sceptre.

whiran.1473:

I think the market speaks when it comes to whether or not Guild Wars 2 has more “stickiness” with gamers over Guild Wars 1.

In under a year, Guild Wars 2 has generated over 3 million sales (as of last official count in January).

Guild Wars 1 had 1 million sales in the same timeframe.

That means that Guild Wars 2 has been 3x more popular than Guild Wars

this logic is wrong as the relative size of the mmo market at those 2 timepoints is markedly different. When market sizes and development budgets are factored in, gw1 is the more successful game

What annoys me most is that the nerfs are based on a game format that less than 1% of the game population is playing. I don’t think they should have nerfed so many things at once either.

Would like to see the general utility/usability of sceptre/focus/staff fixed, because they are crap. Ele trait choices are also the worst of all the classes I play.

bri.2359:

I presume this is viable builds, and this is very easy to answer!

Rangers – they have none!

Rangers are actually in pretty decent shape. Hint – use a melee weapon.

Eles OTOH….

Vayne.8563:

mjharrison.3209:

Vayne.8563:

SPvP has had a bit of rejuvenation from various sites that own private PvP servers offering tournaments and prizes. .

I’ve only seen a handful of custom servers and they always seem to be empty…

Right, because tournaments have schedules. They’re not random. It’s not like playing on a custom server the rest of the time nets you anything.

If spvp were popular, there would be people playing all the time – they aren’t, so why are all the balance decisions being based on a failed game format? Makes zero sense.

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

Rajani Isa.6294:

TheMightyAltroll.3485:

Tyler Bearce.3427:

I’ll make a fix for this. Thanks.

It would be nice if you also fixed the other 500 issues with the game, but I suppose a single bug fix and a thousand tooltip fixes a month is fine.

People like you making posts like this are why we don’t have more Anet devs (or devs for MMOs in general) willing to post on the forums.

Thanks.

Other companies are also able to create smooth content, why A-Net is not able to do that is a miracle for me.

Content creation at least takes significant resources, skill/trait balancing is mostly tweaking some numbers in a config file/script. There’s no excuse why Anet are sooooo ssssllllloooooooooowwww with balancing skills and traits.

Any plans for a spiritual successor to DAOC’s Darkness Falls dungeon in WVW?

Compared to GW1, the AI seems pretty appallingly bad in this game, my friend couldn’t get past level 10 saying it was faceroll boring. He’s right… why is the AI so bad in this game?

Vayne.8563:

SPvP has had a bit of rejuvenation from various sites that own private PvP servers offering tournaments and prizes. .

I’ve only seen a handful of custom servers and they always seem to be empty…

IMO Ele.

Weapons other than D/D are v pidgeonholed or are plain sub-par.

Utilities other than cantrips are bad. Conjures and glyphs are particularly bad.

Ele basically requires 20-30 arcane just to feel playable.

Base survivability is really bad so 15-30 water is virtually mandatory as well.

Calae.1738:

They are so few people playing, what do you expect?

Exactly. Only a couple of hundred ppl playing, you get what you get.

Why do you guys continue to make the majority of your balance decisions around sPVP performance when hardly anyone plays it? By any measure, sPVP has been a failed experiment, why does the rest of the game have to suffer through class balance decisions that are clearly 100% targeted at sPVP?

Eternal Battlegrounds, obviously.

ColinJohanson.2394:

We’re trying something very unique and different with Gw2 […] and constantly adjusting as we see the outcomes and find ways to innovate on what a true online world experience can be.

IMO it’s not worth it. It’s expensive in terms of resources and isn’t particularly engaging. Emergent, player-driven gameplay is the only way to achieve a truly living story in a game. There is more of a living story going on in each of the 50-odd constellations of EVE than in the whole of GW2, and that content is created by players for free.

Obviously the ship has sailed on what kind of game GW2 is, but IMO there is plenty of scope for experimentation with emergent gameplay within the WVW format. After all, it is the dynamic, unpredictable nature of WVW (RVR) that drives its core appeal.

To me the weak lines are air and earth. Fire does have its own share of crap traits, but it’s workable.

IMO the real issues with the class are:

• the crappiness of utilities other than cantrips (glyphs and conjures are really, really bad, signets cast too slowly, only cantrips break stun)
• the low mobility/defense of any weapon set that doesn’t have an offhand dagger.

Oldgrimm.8521:

if any utility skill can be used in slot 10

ill be happy to utilize lyssa runes

ill use the lowest CD and insta cast

wouldn’t work, lyssa only procs on elite skills. utilities aren’t elite, no matter what slot they’re in.

I agree it’s often the case in this game you have to pick the least worst elite, but not all classes suffer this fate – eg thief and mesmer have all good elites. These classes would still benefit greatly by having the option to build with 4 utilities instead of 3 + elite.

GW2 is widely criticised for its lack of build options. Several classes have basically 1 good build and everything else lags a long way behind (hello Ele).

One easy win that would make a lot of people happy and open up a lot of new builds would be allowing regular utility skills in the elite slot. The other thing to consider here is that for a lot of classes, the “elite” skills are worse than the utility skills.

In addition to highly specialised builds, eg: 4 utilities of the same type, 2+2 builds (ie: 2 utilities of 2 different types) would become available.

GW2 has a severe lack of skill depth IMO.

The lack of a resource system and a big reduction in the number of conditional effects (onConditionGained, onConditionRemoved, and the like) plus fixed weapon skills and ineffectual traits makes GW2’s skill system a mere shadow of the first game.

I can only hope the spectacular failure of sPVP is the lightning rod that kickstarts some major changes but i’m not holding my breath.

JahRo.6432:

Guild Wars 1 was pretty crappy at first, if I remember correctly, but after all of the expansions and patches it was great.

What made GW1 great IMO is the number of different ways you could build your character. GW2 is really a lame duck by comparison. No build depth at all because of how underwhelming most of the traits are. The rigidity of weapon skills also means that just 1 or 2 weak skills render whole weapons useless. Anet have proven themselves to be pretty hopeless at balancing as well.

IMO the game seems to be going nowhere, a hollow, cynical shell around a cash shop.

DAOC had no AOE caps, and it worked well. DAOC AOE however had falloff – targets closer to the geometric centre took 100% damage and targets at the extremities took around 50%.

WVW was directly copied from DAOC, and shares all of its characteristics, it’s certain that no AOE could also be made to work in WVW. No AOE cap didn’t eliminate zerging in DAOC because of the way /sticking and movement worked, but pure-balled-up zerging was a lot less successful in DAOC for sure.

In fact the more time goes on the more I come to appreciate the genius of game design in that game.

Some people here talking about efficiency and 10 hours+ of farming COF for gold… that’s effectively working for 1 dollar / hour – the opposite of efficient. It would be more efficient to work your RL job for 1 hour, buy the gold, and then play the game for fun. Grinding the game for gold is idiotic.

Skip all cinematics automatically please.

We’ve all tried it.

I’m not sure why you’d play a berserker Ele staff when you could just play a berserker thief D/D + shortbow and do more AOE damage + be able to take down single targets + be able to get away realiably. Or zerker mesmer for that matter.

I agree. I’d make the case it’s even worse than that, not only can you not realy play the class you want in a specific chapter of the game (general PVE, instanced PVE, WVW, sPVP) due to meta-game imbalances, but even within the “good” classes for a specific chapter there are “must-have” specs.

Clearly, the various game modes value different aspects of skills more than others, e.g. mobility is high on the list in PVP modes, but next to worthless in PVE game modes, and this makes things hard to balance. However, it’s also clear that many of these meta-imbalances are due to bad game design choices.

For example, hundred blades – a very high DPS move on a low CD that roots the caster in place. Great (best?) skill in PVE, crappy in PVP. Removing the self-root aspect of the skill and rebalancing the CD and damage component appropriately seems like a no-brainer. You can always add a new warrior trait that reverts the skill to its current state, and the implied requirement for immobilisation in the current skill could be retained through bonus damage to immobilised targets.

Another no-brainer – Ele staff. 19/20 skills on the thing are AOE, which pidgeonholes the whole use of the weapon into performing well at niche aspects of the game (zerg WVW, PVP support bunker), and making it crappy at everything else.

Conditions. A critical factor in higher end PVP but virtually irrelevant in PVE due to caps and being overshadowed by 4x zerk warrior 100 blades + timewarp.

I’d argue the game needs a lots more onConditionRemoved- and onConditionGained-type abilities here, as well as more abilities with additional effects/damage based on the presence or absence of certain conditions. There is a too much of a gulf between condition-based and power-based damage, and more conditional effects (pun!) would be a good way to bridge that gap.

There are other examples.

These issues have been around since before the release of the game, and volumes have been written about them, however the game designers continue to play the laissez-faire card when it’s been obvious for more than half a year that these issues exist. I’ve come to the conclusion they simply aren’t very good designers. Claims of being ultra-passionate and listening to the community etc are not borne out by 8 months of continued inaction.

Same reason nobody uses Ele conjured weapons — using them is super clunky.

Conjures and banners should be instant-cast, swappable weapons that you can freely swap back and forth.

Staff needs to lose some AOE skills for starters (or have traits that sacrifice some AOE for more versatility).

19/20 skills are AOE (earth #1 is the exception), it’s not a balanced, well-designed weapon at all.

→ break the homogeneity problem of COF speed clear groups.

• buff + nerf 100 blades: reduce damage by 25%, but make it usable while moving.
• give slave driver a knockback.

Ensign.2189:

Balance is not particularly good, and there is not enough build flexibility for a metagame of counter builds to evolve naturally.

Very little effort has been put into balancing the game, with most of the ‘buffs and nerfs’ we see really being bug fixes at their heart, with balance implications of secondary concern. I cannot blame them for this, because bug fixes are important in the long run regardless of balance implications, and their game is very, very difficult to balance – more so than the original Guild Wars.

Honestly, I wouldn’t even look at balance right now in their shoes. They have major design problems with many of their skills and weapon sets, and weapon design is the core of their game. They need to get the play patterns of their different characters and sets into a reasonable shape before they even start thinking about balance concerns.

As for sPvP, balance is the least of their worries there. The format has major, major structural problems, and if they don’t feel like addressing those they’re honestly wasting their time.

By far the best post in the thread. GW2 has major design issues with class/build diversity – for most classes there isn’t any.

The game design is too rigid. The linearity of skills being completely bound to weapons and trait lines being completely bound to weapons/utility skill types/stats has to be broken. Other design constraints are even more baffling – why are Ele’s forced to change attunements frequently just to perform at baseline effectiveness? There’s no good design reason to limit the whole class to exist within that 1 mechanic… silly.

GW2’s floundering PVP situation is more a function of poor game design rather than balance IMO – shifting some numbers around isn’t going to fix the problem – players will continue to select the best weapon + the best trait line(s) + the best utilities, and due to the aforementioned ultra-tight binding of weapon and utility to trait line and stats, only a tiny number of “good” builds can result. Case in point, 8 months after release and the metagame has not changed at all.

They don’t need necessarily to remove the cap, just try raising it to ~8 instead of 5.

lemora.1304:

This the first and only game I’ve ever seen, where people would see a bunch of AoE coming their way and yell “AoE’s are coming! Quick! Everyone stack together!”

Does that make any sense?

It’s funny because it’s true.

Siphaed.9235:

Top AoE classes:

1) Elementalist

2) Necromancer

3) Engineer

4) Ranger

5) Guardian

FYI this list is nowhere near accurate. My thief does more AOE damage than my Ele, my necro is about equal or slightly better than Ele too, and mesmers probably do even more than both. Engie must also be near the top too.

re: cap, I think they should trial raising the cap to 8, possibly for WVW only. 5 is too few, the prevailing strategy to deal with player AOE in WVW is to stack up, which is just ridiculous. The AOE is already marked on the ground in red kitten

Given how it’s been 8 months since and many skills/traits/builds are still crap and need work I’d love to know how they can justify something as involved and resource-consuming as super adventure box.

Mayhem.1935:

Acelerion.6820:

Wvw isn’t nearly up to daocs level if you just want fights.

And yes the general skill level is terrible. However, zerg busting and seeing how many people you can 1vx is a good time. Being in the 4/5/6 tier range helps a lot, its a decent middle ground to not finding fights and getting zerged all night.

This. If you feel you are good go out and roam solo/duo or small party. I find this much more enjoyable because of variables not found in spvp. Also, i dislike the gear configuration in spvp, entirely too pigeonholed for my taste.

This. WVW is much more unpredictable, freeform, and there’s a lot more ways to participate. You are wrong about the skill levels though, I just don’t think you’ve spent much time in WW yet. The general skill level in hotjoin is pretty kitten bad as well.

There are great 1v1s, 1v2s, 1vX, 5v5s to be had in WVW.

toggle: disable downed state

I don’t think I know anyone who played both games who doesn’t think they ballsed up the skill system & core combat mechanics in this game. I mean, dodging and combo fields are good, but are in no way a substitute for the diversity of skills & depth of combat mechanics in GW1.

I still hope the GW2 designers come to their senses and add back some of the diversity and depth of the previous game, because this game has a severe lack of it.

Dariroch.6482:

Asglarek.8976:

mjharrison.3209:

Number #1 on my wish list for WVW would be a Darkness Falls (DAOC)-like dungeon in WVW, accessed from the regular game world, which has entrances on all 3 WVW servers but only 1 server is allowed access to it at a time. Access can be obtained by WVW objectives only, eg: whichever server holds the most of (SM + borderkeep garrisons). When ownership changes hands, it becomes a hotbed of PVP as the new owners clean out the old.

The important thing is to populate it with high-end PVE content/rewards, and keep it PVP-enabled so there is risk.

The Darkness Falls expansion is what killed DAoC.

I hope you mean Trials of Atlantis… beacause a lot of people loved Darkness falls. Having the incentive to have more keeps/ towers than your opponents for better PvE farming/ some really fun smaller scale pvp was awesome and fun at the same time.

DF was not part of an expansion, so yeah he’s mistaken.

The nice thing about Darkness Falls (besides being great PVE/PVP content) is that it also functions as a reverse-undermanned bonus, i.e. it removes some number of players from the strongest WVW side, which narrows the power differential between strongest/weakest server in the matchup.

Number #1 on my wish list for WVW would be a Darkness Falls (DAOC)-like dungeon in WVW, accessed from the regular game world, which has entrances on all 3 WVW servers but only 1 server is allowed access to it at a time. Access can be obtained by WVW objectives only, eg: whichever server holds the most of (SM + borderkeep garrisons). When ownership changes hands, it becomes a hotbed of PVP as the new owners clean out the old.

The important thing is to populate it with high-end PVE content/rewards, and keep it PVP-enabled so there is risk.

s/tPVP is < 1% of the game pop, naturally it gets a tiny slice of the development budget.

because it represents < 1% of the game pop?

I think staff needs better single target damage – lava font should go back to doing damage on its first tick, and flame burst should have a small amount of direct damage added. Lightning surge should be instant cast as well, at 1.5s cast-time it’s useless.

I think the weapons are just really poorly designed IMO. There is no rational design justification for why 19/20 staff skills are AOE on a class with no weapon swap (and don’t get me started on how crappy and clunky conjures are). At the very least there should be trait(s) that sacrifice AOE capability to gain single target DPS/solo capability… the present state is just stupid.

Then there’s Dragon’s Tooth, a skill that’s designed to miss its target in the general case. That’s like designing a car with a 5L petrol tank… useless for 90% of the purposes for which it was built. Appalling design.

Yes. Nerfing quickness was definitely a good change. 100% DPS increase is/was far too much.

I think DAOC had a lot of unconventional elements to it that are still best in genre even today. One of them being RVR of course, but other things, like DF, positional/reactionary melee styles, class variety, and hard interrupts still stand out to me as brilliant pieces of game design.

The things I miss most about DAOC RVR / dislike about GW2’s WVW:

• Darkness Falls. That place was just epic. Great for PVE/levelling, great for PVP, great fun cleaning it out when ownership changed hands, great feel.
• Zerginess. GW2 promotes zerging too much through mechanics like ultra fast rezzing & rally mechanics, 5-target AOE cap, towers/keeps being too easy to take. WVW would be much better served if the basic player group unit was in the group range.
• Map layout. DAOC had it just right, both the WVW maps feel like a game level instead of part of an actual world. Basically, the WVW maps have been over-engineered.
• AOE. I really hate the 5-target cap, it essentially rewards stupid play, and it makes siege weapons too good relative to players. I’d like to see it raised to 8 at least, if only for WVW.

I still think conjures should not lock out your attunements – FGS should replace only your fire skills, not all 20 skills. Or conjures ought to last until dropped, one or the other. In their present state, conjures are terrible.

Yargesh.4965:

People who have lots of money use the TP. There is no limit to what you can put in, just put at a price no one will pay. I am sure that there are people with tens of thousands of items that are stored this way.

This. It’s a ridiculous restriction. The trick is to list your stuff at a high, but not ridiculously high, price. You win either way.

The issue you describe has been pointed out by Eles over and over since beta.

I’ve also suggested the exact same solution you proposed a number of times on this forum.

Ele is a really frustrating class. It requires 20+ points in arcane just to play, and if you want a stun-break and a butt-saving skill (again, required because of low HP, low armour), you have to take one or more cantrips, which in turn obliges you to spec in water.