Guild Wars 2

Pandeh.5248:

I just wanted to tell you, look back to the week you started playing. How awesome woudn’t it be to have these laurels and such then? By the time causual players level to 80 they can get a Ascended item for simply just having fun with the game.

But now alot of you people are whining that you HAVE to PLAY the GAME for 20 days to get a piece of Ascended gear. I just don’t get whats wrong with everyone. You seem to want everything handed to you on a pillow.

Leaving aside the whole operant conditioning aspect of the new dailies…

Casuals, by definition, only have <10 hours per week to play, and often this means < 1 hour per day. Dailies take > 1 hour per day to complete. See the problem?

As a casual player, the first thing I have noticed is I’d need to spend close to 100% of my game time grinding the daily in order to complete it in a day/gaming session, not to mention the last thing I want to do with my gaming time is spend it doing stuff I’m not interesting in.

Thrumdi.9216:

Alarox.4590:

Modimor.4319:

Lol, always complaints about stealth classes in MMO’s

There’s a pattern.

Yeah, I’m surprised Anet added it to the game. Shadowstep would have been enough for the class to feel like a thief or assassin.

I agree. I think the class would have been a lot more fun to play if it were based around shadowsteps and exploiting dodges/evasion. Stealing other class’ skills could have been better too (like Arcane Thievery in GW1 for instance).

Well, I’m bored of playing the same kitten spec on my Ele because notwithstanding minor variations, it’s the only spec that’s worth a kitten

I can’t believe it’s been > 5months and weapon/trait/skill balance is still terrible and nothing has been done.

After much fuss about eliminating grind, skinner box grinds are everywhere you turn.

I don’t know anyone who uses conjures, and I am yet to meet a good player who uses conjures.

the OBVIOUS fix for conjured weapons being crappy is make them work with attunements. That is, activating frost bow replaces your water skills and you can switch to fire, use fire skills, and then switch back to water and the frost bow is still there.

There is no other way to make conjures viable short of making them deliberately overpowered just to get people using them.

conjures are in the same bucket of design fail as dragon’s tooth, the skill that is designed to miss its target most of the time.

Mirta.5029:

mjharrison.3209:

The lack of build variety is also a major concern.

It’s this part of your comment that makes me feel that we’re not playing the same game. If you’re referring to the huge amount of berserker geared warriors you meet in CoF then I understand that but to say there’s a lack of build variety is almost like saying that there is no difference between a guardian and an elementalist. I even have multiple characters of the same class in different configurations and I meet players in dungeons and fractals all of the time who often play very differently to myself.

Are there more popular builds and weapon choices out there? Sure but that’s more about what is simple/easy/overpowered or whatever at the time rather than what the game itself actually has on offer.

You said that this system has failed to work and that all it has done is made everyone go DPS. I find this statement to be untrue. Yes, pure damage is currently most popular but most people in an MMO tend to want to be the big bad DPS guy that kills all the enemies and makes his team-mates appreciate the damage he puts out. This doesn’t mean that other players don’t opt to go support, supply combo fields, remove conditions, tank or heal for the team (yes tanks and healers exist, they just don’t belong to specific classes) or devote themselves to controlling.

Look at it this way, the fire field is great for supplying a lengthened burn duration when people fire through it and provides massive amounts of might when people use blast skills in it. If you believe that the combo skills aren’t that useful then it’s only because you’ve never been in a group that knew a thing or two about using them. When playing with friends and guild mates, we constantly make use of everything you just said doesn’t happen.

It’s not a case of the combat system being flawed, it’s more a case of the players being used to a certain playstyle (might be why most dungeon groups are filled with glass cannons that die all the time)

You’re confusing playstyle variety with build variety. You can have the exact same skills chosen and gear stats and still play quite differently than another person; that’s not the point.

The point is GW doesn’t have much build choice because of the design choices that were made. Unlike WOW’s and other games’ talent trees, GW2’s talent trees bind trait choices to stat choices, and also strongly bind trait line choices to weapon choices.

e.g. if you want to (hypothetically) swing a GS and you like utility skills “X” and “Y”, you are obliged to choose trait line “Z” in order to have an effective build.

Combine this with the fact that while classes may be relatively well-balanced against each other, weapon skills and trait lines within classes are far from balanced, giving rise to the current situation where most classes have 1 or maybe 2 strong builds to choose from.

Your final comment merely echoes my point – the removal of trinity has made everyone into a DPS, because pure support roles are far less effective than speccing for DPS with a little support on the side.

Like I said, GW has minimal build variety and not a lot of playstyle variety – most people are using the same 1-2 builds per class, and almost everyone is DPS.

It’s just the same combat we’ve seen before, except everyone is DPS. Combo fields were a good addition but their effects lack depth and aren’t very exciting.

Replacing combat roles (“trinity”) with invulnerability on CD (dodge) IMO has not worked at all and again, IMO, downed state make the combat borderline farcical.

The lack of build variety is also a major concern.

The rest of the game is pretty good, they just need better game designers.

Dragon’s Tooth is a skill that’s designed to miss most of the time.

If that’s not bad game design, I don’t know what is.

If I had to choose again I would go Asura for Pain Inverter – AOE confusion and retaliation would be great for D/D or scepter + condition dmg.

That said, Sylvari Take Root elite is also consistently good in any situation, PVE or PVP, ranged or D/D, especially considering how crap the Ele elites are.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of posters who want to keep DS as it is are thieves… because killing someone laying on the ground in front of people while stealthed makes tons of sense… and I play a thief.

As for the poster implying that removal of DS would dumb the PVP down — GW2 is already hands-down the most dumbed-down PVP MMO ever made – they removed healing and made everyone into DPS, added auto-attack, reduced the number of button to press, added a downed state so you have to be killed twice…

Seriously how can you dumb down combat any more than they have? Besides, it’s not working, s/tPVP is a ghost-town.

Visiroth.5914:

mjharrison.3209:

crouze.3078:

Culling = server calculating what you will see and then send you the data.
pro: you can play with a worse internet connection / GPU.
con: calculating needs time and you have to wait longer for the data.

No. Culling = client – server comms are capped to a specific amount (5KB/sec), which means if there is a sudden spike in the amount of data required to be sent (such as 30 players from each side clashing at high speed or portalling in), then then server only sends as much entity information as will fit in that 5KB/sec, which in practise means delays in receiving player model/position updates.

I don’t know where you’re getting this number from, but in large fight I’m getting network utilization of 0.15-0.20+% on a 100Mbps link. That’s 0.15Mbps or 150Kb/sec. This is a far larger number than the 40Kb/sec you are claiming is the maximum.

The actual number doesn’t really matter, the point is, it’s capped, and culling occurs when entity property update payload exceeds capped bandwidth.

I assure you the number is not 150KB/sec however. That would be > the bandwidth of a T5 line with 5K clients connected… Typical numbers for MMOs are in the lowish single-double digits KB/sec (ie: 5-50KB/sec). FYI you need to look at process-specific bandwidth, not system bandwidth, specifically UDP traffic.

crouze.3078:

Culling = server calculating what you will see and then send you the data.
pro: you can play with a worse internet connection / GPU.
con: calculating needs time and you have to wait longer for the data.

No. Culling = client – server comms are capped to a specific amount (5KB/sec), which means if there is a sudden spike in the amount of data required to be sent (such as 30 players from each side clashing at high speed or portalling in), then then server only sends as much entity information as will fit in that 5KB/sec, which in practise means delays in receiving player model/position updates.

The core issue is that GW2 was designed badly – it has too much custom character stuff – all those facial and body properties you customised on character startup, plus all those armour and weapon skins all have to sent from server→client, and all have to compete with position/damage updates for bandwidth.

Default models allow the game to prioritise position/dmg updates more, but the core issue is still poor network implementation and/or poorly thought-out game design.

Vilkata.4725:

OP, I think one of the problems is that you’re viewing a downed player as “defeated” and being upset that the defeat is being taken away from you if they get up. A player isn’t dead until they’re dead, if all you do is get them to downed then you haven’t won yet. That’s like taking a thief down to 50% HP and then getting upset that they were able to use their utilities to escape the fight. Downed is part of the game and you need to plan for it if you expect to win in a tough fight.

Why then not just give people more HP then? Why is combat in your last 15% HP (ie: DS) different from the combat for your other 85% HP?

The core question is: is the combat in DS as good as or better than the combat while you’re standing? Clearly, it isn’t, and if it isn’t, what is the purpose of it?

Not to mention ridiculous things like rallying off random mobs around you while downed.

ThaOwner.7560:

news flash, wvw is not a solo gametype

says who? solo should be as viable as group and zerg.

Xsorus.2507:

Giving everyone In combat Res was always a bad decision…

Even in Games like DAOC were you could keep ressing in combat, they gave you a massive penalty for being ressed…..

They also didn’t let any random person do it either..

Things like Downstate, AoE Caps, Nerfs to AoE damage, Narrow Maps is why you have such a prevalence of zergs in this game

Its also why 10+ year old games like DAOC are still superior vastly to the crap released today.

This. I think most of the pro-DS posters never played DAOC or warhammer and simply don’t realise how detrimental DS really is on solo/group/zerg dynamics.

It should be hard, but possible, for a group to take down a zerg, else WVW will be nothing but zerg. The game would be better, and more fun, if GvG combat existed alongside ZvZ.

Current DS mechanics heavily favour zerging and that’s why DS should be changed. It shouldn’t be possible for 2 people to rez someone faster than they can be damaged down and while in the middle of fire and arrows raining down. That’s ridiculous.

I don’t see how anyone can take pvp in this game seriously with something like downed state. Who would want to watch it?

Noone good uses conjures because:
1) they lock out your 20 skills and the 5 skill you gain aren’t any better.
2) they consume a valuable utility slot

High level:

• remove downed state from all PVP zones
• create a pool of weapon skills and allow players to select their weapon skills from that pool.
• allow players to choose a utility skill in place of the elite skill slot.
• reduce ascended gear stats to exotic level and make infusions agony resist only
• eliminate live story events and redirect those resources into balance/bug fixes
• remove magic find gear
• increase AOE target cap to 8 targets.
• reduce burst generally and replace with greater utility, eg:
  • reduce quickness from 100% dps increase to 25% and remove its negative effects and make it a boon.
  • reduce heartseeker damage slightly and make it require aiming. make steal interrupt and allow it to steal the ability it interrupts. add additional utility, eg: apply cripple, chill, or bleeds from steath instead of just backstab.
  • reduce 100 blades damage but make it usable while moving
  • remove mind wrack and add a reduced amount of shatter damage to the remaining 3 shatters in addition to existing effects. fix phantasms so they don’t shatter and attack at a normal attack speed and pursue targets like a normal pet.

Staff is a fine weapon for running around with the zerg.

It is, however, a horrible weapon for roaming around solo or in small groups because it’s totally designed around AOE. No decent single-target damage options, no traits that make it anything but a zerg support weapon.

Staff lacks versatility.

Troponin.4081:

Trust me when i say this, you don’t want to pick an element and stick to it. It will turn completely monotonous like most other classes. Save for the mes, in PvE, all other classes are two button playstyles. Be thankful you get more than two for a 10 mins boss fight. Zzzzzz

The point is that there should be a choice. Currently, there is no choice, you are forced to attune swap often, and consequently, virtually forced into 10+ arcane.

IMO putting points into an element should decrease that element’s CD, with arcane continuing to decrease all elements’ CDs.

eg: for 30 Fire, 10 air, 20 water, 10 arcane, CDs would be:

• base CD 12sec, -1sec to all elements due to 10pt arcane.
• Fire 8sec CD (-1sec 10pt arcane, -3sec 30pt fire)
• Air 10sec CD (-1sec arcane, -1sec 10pt air)
• Earth 11sec CD (-1sec arcane)
• Water 9sec CD (-1 sec arcane, -2sec 20pt water)

fishergrip.4082:

There is no “strongest class” because each is strong at different things.

Strongest aoe? Ele

As the owner of an Ele and Necro, I’d lean toward necro as the stronger AOE due to epidemic + stacked wells + marks, whereas Ele is better at AOE control/support IMO.

Don’t underestimate Thief shortbow clusterbomb spam + AOE poison + AOE weakness + dagger storm either.

daydream.2938:

Statistically:

Theif is OP: Hot join player, free tourny pugger.
Thief isn’t op: premade tourny player, paid players.

Like I said, the design is clearly broken. Nerfing HS and instagib in general and then buffing thieves so there are alternatives is the obvious right thing to do.

Khalifahaze.6045:

mjharrison.3209:

Khalifahaze.6045:

mjharrison.3209:

Khalifahaze.6045:

With a lack of healers in this game downed state is one of the few things that can counter burst, being able to have 2+ people rez a downed target is a great thing in pvp. Removing downed state would only make competitive pvp a joke.

No, because removing downed state would allow Anet to rebalance burst. Burst is only in its present state because of downed state. Downed state permits burst to not be game-breaking; remove downed state, you can remove the burst.

A condi cleave comp can melt people equally as fast. I just don’t think you realize how terrible pvp would be without downed state due to no healers in this game. Anyway that’s not the point of this thread I’m not here to argue.

Not really, because only 2 of 4 damaging conditions are stackable.

But once again, if downed state were removed, the game designers would be free to rebalance TTK/TTL by either tuning down condition damage scaling, or making condition cleanses more readily available.

FYI, the game does have healers — eery player is a healer; your basic premise is wrong. The game is balanced around the existence of downed state, if you remove it, survivability obviously needs to be tweaked upwards to maintain the same or higher TTL.

Why completely remake the game when there is nothing wrong with downed state? Some abilities of certain classes could be changed, but not downed state as a whole. Sorry if you are unable to grasp how to deal with downed state and the extra elements it adds to pvp.

Every class is certainly not a “healer”. One heal that doesn’t even fill your health unless you are completely stacked into +healing does not make one a healer.

Just doesn’t make sense to me you’re pushing a complete game redesign when that is a very unrealistic thing to ask for. I can’t remember the last time many people were complaining about downed state, it’s definitely a select few.

It’s not a complete game redesign, it’s all existing functionality (health reaches zero, you go direct to defeated state), and then editing some XML/JSON/property files (skill co-efficients) or even just simply scaling HP across the board by 10-15%.

As whether it’s justified or not, I think any objective analysis of GW2 PVP clearly shows that it’s doing badly. Really badly when you consider this was supposed to be the focal area of the game.

In beta, there were tons of people that did not like how central downed state was to GW2 PVP, and now, nearly 6 months on, the PVP population is a fraction of what it was at release, and it is still common to see people posting about they feel it ruins the combat or the various imbalances it creates. You may say the proportion of DS haters is small but the scary truth may be, those people simply stopped playing the game or like myself, have deliberately stayed clear of stPVP because of how much it ruins the flow of combat. I say this too as an Ele main, the class with the strongest DS and ready access to invuln & stability stomps. It’s not a L2P issue, it’s a “this is a stupid design for a PVP game” issue.

It seems a reasonable question to put to the devs to ask whether they feel downed state has been an net improvement or detraction to the game under the circumstances. As to actually removing it and rebalancing around not having it is totally doable and not a major effort.

Khalifahaze.6045:

mjharrison.3209:

Khalifahaze.6045:

With a lack of healers in this game downed state is one of the few things that can counter burst, being able to have 2+ people rez a downed target is a great thing in pvp. Removing downed state would only make competitive pvp a joke.

No, because removing downed state would allow Anet to rebalance burst. Burst is only in its present state because of downed state. Downed state permits burst to not be game-breaking; remove downed state, you can remove the burst.

A condi cleave comp can melt people equally as fast. I just don’t think you realize how terrible pvp would be without downed state due to no healers in this game. Anyway that’s not the point of this thread I’m not here to argue.

Not really, because only 2 of 4 damaging conditions are stackable.

But once again, if downed state were removed, the game designers would be free to rebalance TTK/TTL by either tuning down condition damage scaling, or making condition cleanses more readily available.

FYI, the game does have healers — eery player is a healer; your basic premise is wrong. The game is balanced around the existence of downed state, if you remove it, survivability obviously needs to be tweaked upwards to maintain the same or higher TTL.

I don’t care for explanations too much, i would rather see hard data, like Valve does for TF2.

daydream.2938:

Thats my point about the nerf thief threads. thieves are annoying wvw, and hotjoin. I get that, but if u nerf em they would become underpoewred in proper tourny play.

then the design is broken, pure and simple.

Khalifahaze.6045:

With a lack of healers in this game downed state is one of the few things that can counter burst, being able to have 2+ people rez a downed target is a great thing in pvp. Removing downed state would only make competitive pvp a joke.

No, because removing downed state would allow Anet to rebalance burst. Burst is only in its present state because of downed state. Downed state permits burst to not be game-breaking; remove downed state, you can remove the burst.

Lots of people hate downed state in PVP. In the almost 6 months since release, there have been very few real improvements in the game and many of the game’s balance problems (eg: AOE) have downed state as the root cause.

Has downed state been a failed experiment with respect to the extent it disrupts that natural flow&pacing of the combat and the balance problems it has created?

Is it time to remove downed state from PVP zones and focus on balancing builds/skills and the numerous aspirational features planned?

Well I play a thief (plus Ele plus necro) and IMO all the things I thought were a bit OP before I made my thief I still think are a bit OP after as well:

• heartseeker is skill-less and does way too much damage considering it’s a gap closer and it’s spammable and it’s a leap finisher
• spammable C&D → stealth is a bit ridiculous with the number of shadowsteps already available.

On the flip-side:

• backstab is fine
• pistol needs a little love
• traps and venomshare could stand getting some love too

Sepreh.5924:

I play a dd ele. Necros are actually a pretty scary class for us. One of the things to realize is that bunker DD ele build rely on boons. That being said, a decent counter to a dd ele would be along the lines of:

1. Cast corrupt boon. Will completely disable the ele if he is booned up
2. He will probably switch to water attunement to try to get rid of all his conditions, thats okay
3. As soon as he switches (theres an animation), use dagger 3 to immobilize
4. Again, he will probably somewhat freak out and use water 5 to get out, if he already hasnt
5. As soon as that happens, use fleshy’s knockdown and go to town

I also play a d/d ele and necro, and yeah, well-played necros are hard. necros have ready access to all the key conditions that d/d ele’s struggle with: cripple (sc#2, flesh golem), chill (sc#5, grasp), poison (sc#1), immobilise (d#3, ranged pet), knockdown (golem).

The real key is just dodging their key skills: ride the lightning, burning speed, and churning earth and just generally trying to kite them in a circle. Save fear circle/ds#2 for either churning earth or when they’re on top of you.

I love PVP but I won’t touch sPVP for as long it has downed state. I’m sure there’s a good chunk of people who feel the same.

things i don’t like:
- condition build with minimal condition duration…
- no healing power and…
- lack of heals on focus
- lack of mobility on focus
- on-crit effects with low crit chance

i’d like to like focus but the lack of mobility, heals and crappy fire skills kill it.

I think scepter hasn’t been well-designed as a weapon at all. None of the skills really complement each other, and key damage skills like Dragon’s Tooth and Shatterstone have been left in a borderline unusable state.

In no other game can I think of skills that have been designed to miss or fail to apply their damage in most cases. At a bare minimum, these skills should be improved, eg: shatterstone could apply a 1s chill, or DT could drop twice as fast (and re-adjusting the damage as needed).

I realise Anet are trying hard to make skills require a degree of skill to get best results but all too often the result is creating a clunky, barely usable skill that just pisses everyone off.

Strang.8170:

killcannon.2576:

Look at the racials. Human racials sorta suck, Asura racials suck less.

What are you smoking? because i want that too.
Only remotely useful racial asura have is radiation field, and glyph of storms is a lot better than that.

I really really wish my asura could have the human elite reaper of grenth instead of the useless ele and asura elites.

But skills aside, asura is superior choice, because they are awesome and most importantly their dodges are awesome.

Wth… Pain inverter is excellent…

What I hate most about staff is all the delay on all the core damage abilities – earth 2, fire 2, water 2. It makes staff not viable for 1v1 and pidgeonholes staff into AOE/support.

There really ought to be a trait that eliminates or reduces the explosion/damage delay on some or all of them.

Yes, Ele elites are pretty terrible, and yes, I would much rather be able to slot another utility. It’s this kind of lack of freedom & choice that make GW2 such a frsutrating game to play IMO.

Tornado – slow to cast, weak damage, easy to kill, extremely situational. Should be instant-cast and either move faster, be harder to kill, or do more damage.

Fiery Crapsword – Terrible for all the same reasons the other conjures are terrible. Giving up access to 20 skills to gain 5 is plain stupid design. Conjures all need to replace the 5 skills of their respective element not all 20 skills.

Elemental – it’s at least usable in a majority of the game, but again, not very exciting, and less powerful than most of our utilities, mainly because of how underwhelming glyphs are. Doesn’t need a change per se, but all glyphs need to cast faster and/or have better trait support.

Suffice to say I’ll be continuing to use the racial elites until new elites are added or the kittenty current ones buffed considerably.

Oglaf.1074:

AoE isn’t the problem.

Elementalists are the problem.

Soloing parties full of people with their D/D bunker build.

D/D bunker struggles to kill 1 let alone 5 players, hence “bunker”. If a D/D Ele is killing people he’s not bunker specced and is fairly hard-countered by ranged damage + slows/stuns/roots/poison.

It’s funny to think AOE is judged to be a problem when Ele staff is 19/20 AOE skills and plenty of Eles regard it as crap.

plasmacutter.2709:

Oldbugga.7029:

The structuring of a character needs to be a series of PLAYER choices, balance of attack, defence and avoidance. BUT IT MUST BE A PLAYER’S CHOICE. It would be wrong for a whole heap of passive abilities appear to mitigate AoE or any particular type of damage for that matter. Passives do NOT involve player choice and can exacerbate the original problem if not very carefully constructed….and they do not give the player any sense of reward for making the right choices whether they be skills in building a character or when abilities are used.

That said the devs need to make sure that all professions have the right mix of active/closeable/skills to enable those player choices to be obvious and meaningful.

Exactly.

This is the same issue causing D/D ele to be too suvivable while preventing viability of other ele builds.

water line has too much personal passive regen.

it involves no skill, none of them are active.

people should be required to think when they play, and flat-nerfing AOE will not do that.

Water grants regeneration, there is no other passive healing. D/D Ele healing is almost all active — D2, D5, heal on attune to water if 15 water, heal on dodge if 30 arcane and in water.

I have no idea how any self-respecting game designer came up with the current iteration of Dragon’s Tooth… it’s terrible.

How do you land DT with any consistency vs decent players?

Apparently using stealth to skip trash is fine, it’s using AOE to kill said trash that apparently needs nerfing.

Saweth You Him.9047:

So while an aoe nerf is being discussed armies of 20 golems are still being portaled to reinforced gates and destroying them in 3 seconds with time warp and capping a tower or keep much faster than the waypoint resets so no oppurtunity for resistance can be made. And then the golems are waypointed to safety. 2000 supply worth of siege portaled to a gate then waypointed away.

Not to mention AOE is already so gimped because of the 5-target cap that a defending side could not take those golems down before they get the door down.

In the field, as a bunker Ele I will routinely stand in AOE as I can comfortably outheal the damage long enough to stall a push or halt a rout on our side using counter-CC. The idea that AOE is too strong in WVW is laughable.

I would prefer to see the AOE 5-target cap removed and only then look at reducing AOE damage based on distance from the geometric centre point/line of the AOE that same way DAOC did it. eg: centre of the AOE = full damage, close to edge of AOE = half damage.

WVW desperately needs mechanics that punish zerging/balling up so that more group-based strategies can flourish, or at least have the tools that they can counter zergs through skilful play. I find it ridiculous that the current game mechanics reward/encourage zerging/balling up/turtling in order to mitigate already woeful AOE damage when every other area of the game seeks to punish this behaviour.

Calae.1738:

If GW2 fails theres really nothing else. World of Warcraft, Star Wars the Old Republic, Tera and The Secret World are all the same crap. GW2 was the only thing that stood out to be different. It got 3 million people because it was different.

Rift is good if you have the time for raiding. The different souls really do give you tons of options in how you want to play… the complete opposite of GW2.

It also has to be said that TERA did action combat way better than GW2.

Also there is still: EVE, darkfall: UW, and the elder scrolls.

First up I have to say I think custom arenas are a terrible idea and just another way to milk the player base for cash.

However, if it be possible to disable downed state in a custom arena, then I’ll eat all my words and will be the first one to sign up.

GW2 is an order of magnitude simpler and dare i say dumbed-down compared to GW1, it’s not even close. GW2 traits are supposed to be where the complexity comes back in, but in practise, it just doesn’t work, the traits are straight out of the WOW design book and by and large don’t have much of an effect and more importantly, don’t interact much with other traits or skills.

In general, GW2 combat is just too simple. Dodging out of a red circle or exploiting a combo field is not complexity – and despite combo fields being perhaps the only real innovative aspect of GW2 combat, the effect of exploiting a combo field is pretty minimal (water fields being a notable exception).

The fundamental reason that GW2 is too shallow though is simply that the attack surface is too small – there is only health pool and DPS.

GW1 skills costed energy, and managing/denying energy was a major facet of the game. In addition there were enchantments, hexes, as well as conditions, and many more conditional effects based around them – entire builds could be based around conditional effects, eg: prot monks.

Moreover, there’s a severe lack of choice in GW2, again because traits are largely ineffectual, and the fixed nature of weapon skills. It’s pretty boring. At a minimum, traits need major buffs across the board, and a lot more conditional effects added, and we really need to be able to choose our weapon skills, the fixed weapon skill system is a total fail.

AOE is already ineffectual in WVW because of the 5-target cap; siege is the only thing that matters.

I’d prefer to see the AOE target cap bumped up to 10 targets and then scaling coefficients looked at.

Dee Jay.2460:

Mug could have its damage reduced, agreed.

But leave Backstab alone.

Heartseeker needs to be more expensive and less efficient. Leap finisher, auto-targeting, 450 range and lots of damage for 3 Initiative is just too good.

As a thief player… ^ this. Mug is stupid high damage for a t1 trait, and HS is stupid good for its low opportunity cost.

because higher tier servers = higher rewards, right?

enjoy your hours-long queues, lol.

War Machine tucking tail and leaving to farm PVEers in a lower tier is the root cause of SBI’s downfall. SBI had a great community, and while i don’t blame people for leaving because we’re no longer anywhere near our former strength, i’m sad to see it dying.

I actually find my wellbombing necro to be generally more powerful in WVW than my Ele… Ele is way better at roaming.

Yet another “problem” brought about by downed state. If downed state were removed from PVP zones and HP and burst re-balanced around not having a downed state, the game would be so much better.

Downed state creates problems where no problems exist.

On topic, AOE does not need nerfs. There are already red circles on the ground f.f.s.

In WVW, AOE needs to be buffed I think – specifically the 5-target cap needs to be raised or removed. Downed state and 5-target AOE cap promote balling up and zerging, which is the exact opposite of what player behaviour should be being rewarded.

AOE is not a problem, it needs buffs if anything, and AOE-mitigation traits handed out to classes that need them (eg: thief: “take 35% less AOE damage while moving”).