Guild Wars 2

One of the barriers that causes sPvP population to be lower than normal is that …

Well, look at the game from a PvE and WvW perspective. It’s thriving, huge amount of players around. If we want to increase sPvP population, we have to go fetch players where they are available.

Why don’t PvE and WvW players play sPvP? There are plenty of reasons. Some of them plain don’t like sPvP (mostly pure PvEer that hate all forms of PvP). Let’s not consider those. Let’s take the players that actually find some interest in sPvP.

They like PvE, they also are interested in sPvP. When they play in sPvP, they do not get a single copper, no crafting mats, nothing. Barely no achievement points, no ectos nada. Since they get less “rewards” for their main interest in the game that is PvE, they can’t help but feel like they are getting punished by playing sPvP.

An hour spend playing sPvP should be as rewarding for them as an hour playing PvE. It wouldn’t hurt the economy at all if done right, ie as long as they don’t get much more ectos/gold for the time spent than in PvE. ZKeys could very well be the way for it.

Why don’t you just kick already anyone not using a legendary? I’m pretty sure they’ll be more competitive than you for like, two weeks or so until you can actually craft ascended stats!

Paponzi.1637:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1lfd1y/so_heres_what_that_ascended_greatsword_costs/

Aww, only around 50g in mats. That’s perfectly fine. Not! I hope there’s no money required to play SAB at least :/

Ascended stats to exotic and give them the legendary option of stat switching out of combat.

Jabberwock.9014:

This is so wrong I can’t even comprehend how you could think this. Exotics are so easy to get they might as well be rare. You can easily buy multiple different exotic armor sets with different stats in one day, with a couple of hours of farming.

Let’s not be hasty, it takes like 3g worth of mats per exotic 80 part. With 13 items per set, not counting underwater weapons and using two 2handed weapons, that’s quite a lot already.

You don’t need AWs to be competitive

Indeed, in fact, you don’t even need to play Guild Wars 2. I’ll just switch over to a much more fun game : SAB and be done with it I guess.

Unless somehow crafting an ascended weapon doesn’t cost like 100g each in mats like it seems from the preview.

That new craft grind for ascended weapons really does not feel like it’ll set me hugely back in my quest for a legendary! Ascended items were supposed to be a stepping stone to bridge the game between exotics and legendaries, but now it feels like it’ll be a stumbling block instead.

How many exotics on average do we need to salvage to get enough Dark Matter to craft one ascended weapon? That’s some important information here :/

Hell Avenger.7021:

MikaHR.1978:

Hell Avenger.7021:

MikaHR.1978:

Man, i wish stats were way more simple since its obvious that there are so many people who dont get difference between square and linear function and are clueless how stat work in GW2, but at the same time feel like they should comment on it.

To be honest, I know the math of squared and linear function. However, I have no idea which stats is linear or squared. They don’t tell me anything on the stats page. Except higher is better, but nothing else

Took whole of 5s to find:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage

And i guess “critical chance” and “critical damage” are self explanatory.

Which should be part of the stats page explanation instead of on a 3rd party website. You think I dont know that wiki page exists?

You are aware that wiki is as official as it gets? You can even reach that page typing “/wiki Damage” in the ingame chat.

Falcon.6521:

Well – they could just replace the %MF find with either of the non-combat stats left, i.e. gold or karma. No combat impact and still a valid bonus.

Yes right, let’s identify an issue (non combat stat on gear and people using it instead of something else to leech parties) and do something completely meaningless to solve the issue (replace it with another non combat stat)

The difference between Celestial and the other MF stuff is obviously that ANet considers Celestial to be combat ready and the other MF stat sets to be deficient.

Remember that Celestial exists in sPvP too so they do consider the stat spread on that set to work for a pure combat perspective.

He probably means “Hide in Shadows” yes which looked like a skill meant to remove all DoT type conditions. Until a new DoT was added.

I think the “condition converted into boon” striping effects have their own rule that has indeed a priority based on the condition type. And the priorities might depend on the skill too.

Plain “remove one condition” effects do seem to all respect the LIFO order. Or was that FIFO?

ZudetGambeous.9573:

The most exciting and anticipated update is one that makes you completely forget about the actual game and places you in a mini game that removes all skills, all story, all items, and all other aspects of the actual game and people are thrilled about it….

I already noticed that on SAB mk 1 release.

But it’s still fun no?

All that is a problem of excess spam. This game major problem IMHO is the lack of energy system to prevent people from using skills on cooldown, or plainly too short cooldowns.

The original intent seemed to be that, “autoattack is boring so we don’t want people to do that too much, they want to use real skills!”, followed by “our skills have such low cooldown, we’ll tune them so that they don’t really do much more than autoattacks”. Same for cast times. “They slow the game too much! People don’t want to wait for their skills to take effect!”.

And what we got as a result? A game where most skills are casted so fast and spammed so much it’s has to read what the other players are doing. So, if it’s hard to react to what the other players are doing, how can we rise above them and win? By speccing in ways where we do not CARE what they are doing! Brilliant.

Let me just put as many evades as I can on my thief. No need to evade specific attacks, I’ll just evade 70% of the time at seemingly random. How can I counter that spaming thief?

In a sense, it is a direct result of the readability issues in the game. It’s far too hard to understand what’s going on so the best builds are those that say “meh, I don’t care, I’ll just do something and be done with it!” S/D dodge spam is a good example here.

Normal dodge, like a necro has for example, you cannot spam them like that because there are some stuff that is more worth it dodging than others, but once you get as much evades as a S/D thief gets, you go beyond that. Since everything people do hurts more or less the same, except for a few specific skills, it makes more sense to say “I’ll evade half his attacks by pure spaming” than “I’ll keep my last dodge to evade his big hitter”.

rsq.3581:

Hence why I added Necros to the list of hard to read professions that are worth playing for a bit in order to understand. Engis have big red circles for bombs and are throwing things at you with grenades, so easy enough there. Rangers are already so broken it doesn’t matter if you dodge; you should just run away (joke).

It might not be a bad idea (hint hint, anet) to include the spells that gave you the condition damage rather than just the damage itself in the death log so that people can learn from their mistakes.

Yeah, the thing is that, someone said that the Necro meta was created in part to counter the heavy dodge meta that the S/D thief represents best.

In a sense it’s true, dodging will not help you much against all the spam the current classes are capable of. Especially when some of their damaging conditions are “proc on crits” things that you cannot dodge and put into cooldown.

rsq.3581:

When you die in a game, click on the information icon to see which attack/spell hurt you the most. Then learn the casting animation for that attack

Greetings. My death log is exclusively composed of :
- Burning
- Bleeding
- Poison
- Terror

What should I dodge?

tolunart.2095:

LOL I’m not going anywhere. This isn’t a debate, the new gear (which hasn’t even been put into the game yet, congrats on pre-kittenstorming) isn’t going to be “fixed” because it’s what Anet wants it to be.

ANet wanted MF gear too, doesn’t mean it wasn’t in need of fixing.

No, that’s not how it works. Ascended gear is about 2% better per item – in other words the Ascended Sword is 2% better stats than the Exotic Sword. So if you have Ascended in every slot, your set is 2% better than someone with Exotic in every slot. If you only have Ascended in one slot, then your set is 0.15% better (2% x 1/13).

That of course assumes that Ascended is 2% better than Exotic, I haven’t checked the numbers myself.

Ascended weapons got both better stats, AND better base damage. When they “accidentally” released the ascended stats for legendaries back in November, we could see it meant around 8% more base weapon damage which translates exactly into 8% more direct damage DPS, before taking into account the extra power, precision and crit damage.

Carzor Stelatis.9435:

I’d be very, very surprised if Utility Infusions still work. A refund of 20 laurels for anyone who has one would make much more sense, and would also not contradict the ‘no more gear-based MF’ announcement.

You know, it’s not as if you lose any amount of meaningful stats with that infusion anyway.

Mortifer.2946:

check the name of the new screenshot:
3298908-Account-Magic-Find-139×79-crop.jpg
it is here delete your MF gear

Why delete it now, when you can delete it later when the patch drops?

Remember what happened when ANet changed the karma gain from bottles without warning? They reimbursed the lost karma If on the other hand you delete your gear now, you’ll lose out on everything.

Lucentfir.7430:

Dystopiq.5218:

It could be because of this.
:P
http://puu.sh/49pDO

XD I think those kid’s parents still thank you.

Those kid’s parents, as part as the local heart quest, encourage you to pelter their kids with snowballs to harden them :o

Bushido.2184:

Starcraft. Dota and LoL. Counter-Strike. Those games are truly ‘too competitive’, with a priority of balancing for the 1% and the competitive scene, yet still are played by massive amounts of casual players that still deem it fun.

This misses the point though, those games balance the game for competitive mostly, but they don’t spend most of their attention for that. There’s still plenty of game modes for more casual etc…

Bushido.2184:

Not to mention that GW2 also has more than 1 mode of play, WvW and the overshadowing PvE behemoth that’s already a casual’s paradise.

GW2 sPvP is a completely separate game than PvE and WvW for all that matters. The goal of paying attention to more casual PvP players is to build a healthy population of potential “pros” and spectators and game interest in general. But since PvE and WvW are SO separate, so much different, they don’t work for that.

Worse, a PvE player will try PvP and will notice he’s “wasting his time” since sPvP doesn’t given anything for him. At most, he can get bags for cheap if he farms a high rank and dyes.

My ideal meta? Something where when two people fight each other, no matter what builds or traits, the fight is not over in 5s, but the fight WILL be decided in 20s at most, short of one of the players disengaging if he can. IE, the death of the builds that just won’t die.

That and something that has a big room for team fights that matter. I want to a game where positioning is important, so much that the two teams face each other uneasily, then a clash starts, then people fight, then one team is dead and the other collects some rewards.

The dungeon is perfectly doable solo. I even got the “3 min to save that guy” achievement on the first run without even trying.

That’s an interesting point. I’ll delay using the gun until I see them stop somewhere. Currently, I use #1 as soon as they spawn and I can target them.

I find the little golems far easier when people stop getting into aggro range of mine. It’s just a matter of spaming the submission rifle #1 attack on them and they’ll suicide on the boss in 2 cycles usually. When you do that well, the golem will just stand on the spot waiting for you to recharge your submission ray.

But when someone gets into their aggro table, the golem will run to him systematically between two cycles and you’ll lose your progress.

Roe.3679:

In a 1v1 situation it doesn’t matter as much, but in a group it matters quite a bit. If one player puts on 10 stacks, everyone around, whether it’s pets or a whole team, does ten percent more damage.

Is it that strong? Assuming you put 10 stacks on someone with 20k HP (rather high bunkerish build already), and that your team actually kills it with 100% direct damage (ah! as if that happened in the current meta), then those 10 stacks of vulnerability are equivalent to 1800 free damage.

Consider that the thief pistol #2 skill puts 10 stacks for 3s doing little damage, and compare it to the thief dagger #2 skill, Heartseeker :p

Vulnerability is definitively something which cannot be tuned correctly both for PvE (1M HP bosses) and sPvP (20k HP players)

Kuzzi.2198:

stof.9341:

Btw, I think you owe me a new mouse. Those stacks of karma bottles hurt XD

Given how gracefully Colin has been granting us all what we asked for today, I wouldn’t be surprised if you had a new mouse in your mailbox in a few days.

Naah, too much of a can of worms

Besides, the new system makes hoarding bottles useless anyway so there’s no more need for those mad clicking sessions to drink 3-4 full stacks of bottle at once.

Edit: except maybe with Orrian box opening spree.

ColinJohanson.2394:

I’d recommend not using your karma consumables yet, give us a day or two to try and see what options we have available to help mitigate the issue.

That’s far too late already :/

Btw, I think you owe me a new mouse. Those stacks of karma bottles hurt XD

That misses the point entirely :/

Besides Ascended armor is coming very soon and it WILL be time gated.

I also like how you propose to sink tons of gold into an exotic armor set (btw, one of the best set for condition damage is Rabid and cannot be crafted), then for exotic runes, then put then in the armor, and then? We talk about the cost of experimenting.

Or sorry poor player, that set of 2g piece runes you put into a 4g piece armor parts doesn’t work that well, you’ll have to destroy one or the other and try again!

That’s 12% of damage if you assume the bleed build is using non condition damage armor in the first place and only green trinkets with a condition damage stat.

What about the runes? No runes either? Those can be incredibly expensive.

Are you running naked? Where are the stats from your armor and weapon? You only mentioned the condition damage you get from trinkets.

Navzar.2938:

two pre infused rings unless he ran fractals, in which case earning an extra ring would be no problem.

Of course, if he doesn’t run fractals, he’ll probably be unable to come up with the materials used to infuse the ring anyway.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

And the bolded part is where people go wrong. Its no one’s fault but their own because they didn’t bother to make an informed decision. They made an assumption and it bit them in the kitten.

Nobody cares about it because once you reach level 80 there’s no useful information in it. And all the important info highlights in red when needed. There’s the level requirement which if you are buying endgame items, you kinda expect it to be level 80. The item quality, nobody even looks at the line, they just get the info from the item color. Lastly, there’s the item type for weapon and armors which is usually visible in other ways.

Hence, this block of info is mostly useless and people are conditioned to not even take a look at it, unless it turns red.

I don’t think Unique turns red when you already have the same item equipped.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

So we should be a WoW clone?

So, once the argument that “unique is a rather widespread mmorpg term” fails we resort to “I don’t want to be a WoW clone!”

This isn’t game mechanics we are talking about but terms and familiarity. You can be different for the sake of it but you’ll just have to admit you are making it harder and more confusing on your users for that decision. Nobody makes a MMO where the “Wizard” is a melee heavy armor direct damage class with no spells and the “Warrior” wears thighs and sings songs of valor to motivate his companions during fights.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Or perhaps people should read the text when they mouse over it?
Or check out the wiki and when they see terms they don’t recognize?

Again, informed decisions when making purchases. Its not really that much to ask of people. Especially when so many people have complained before about such things.

Yes. The “Unique” word is placed in a uniform block of white text nobody reads because nobody cares about in the first place and this wouldn’t be the first game to use the term just for flavor for the most expensive/rare items.

@OP : nag the GW2 support about your purchase. They have been known to reimburse users in your situation. This is also the best way to get them to fix that mess since this kind of issue just causes extra support costs which means lost money.

Vayne.8563:

I generally look at the totals of my stats and I generally weight them. On some of my characters I’ll weight to power, precision and crit damage, on other characters, power, toughness vitality, depending on their ability to survive. When I want to change stuff, I don’t worry about exactly numbers, I slowly change one piece at a time, raising on stat at time.

Except it doesn’t work at all when you want to try some completely different build like going from a direct damage to a condition damage build. The later will feel completely useless until you’ve replaced the majority of your gear.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

stof.9341:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Actually, yes it does. I can think of a bag specifically that it labeled as ‘Unique’ and you are allowed to have only 1 on your character. You can’t even carry one from mail to your bank, if you have one equipped. Unless this was changed between when I played last year (January through July of 12) and now.

Exactly, in WoW Unique means you CANNOT buy two of the same item and waste money/tokens that way. It doesn’t mean the same than in GW2.

WoW actually uses the term “unique-equipped” for items you can own more than one but can only equip one at max at the same time.

However, its not a waste. You can infuse them to be different items, at which point you can wear both.

Or, as they are account bound, you can buy with the intent for multiple characters.

Its not like they cannot be used. They simply cannot be used for his original intent. There’s a different. Informed shoppers know and understand this.

It’s a waste if your goal is to have two infused rings since if you do that, you are back to square one. They cannot be used if you don’t have alts.

And in all that, WoW uses the term “Unique-equipped” and not just “Unique” to be more clear. So it IS wrong to say that the term is used by most major MMOs since WoW population by itself makes it most major MMOs just by himself :p

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Actually, yes it does. I can think of a bag specifically that it labeled as ‘Unique’ and you are allowed to have only 1 on your character. You can’t even carry one from mail to your bank, if you have one equipped. Unless this was changed between when I played last year (January through July of 12) and now.

Exactly, in WoW Unique means you CANNOT buy two of the same item and waste money/tokens that way. It doesn’t mean the same than in GW2.

WoW actually uses the term “unique-equipped” for items you can own more than one but can only equip one at max at the same time.

Btw, you know that there’s 50% chance (probably more even) that when you double click on your second copy of the ascended ring, the game will swap it with the first copy and then you end up with two soul bound items you cannot use at the same time right? The current situation is just a plain support nightmare with so insignificant real gameplay effect I don’t understand why ANet still insists to keep it.

Algreg.3629:

this topic again? Yes, the game does a bad job in warning you. Still, unique is a rather widespread mmorpg term. What totally eludes me is how people can work towards a huge goal like an ascended item and not take the time reading up on them.

It doesn’t mean the same thing in WoW, which other big MMO use “Unique” in that fashion?

DigitalKirin.9714:

Strangely enough, if you look up after the tree shakes its head… you’ll see some green eggs flying at you.

This is GW2 we are talking about, all I see when I look up is my Norn backside

Movespeed isn’t exactly selfish. In many dungeons, part of the time spent is actually just moving from A to B with little to no fights. Not much but still. Moving faster would actually help the group complete the content faster.

It could work. Not only it could work but it’d fit with the name of the Traveler, Explorer and Wayfarer sets.

The problem of that boss is much of what’s wrong with GW2.

Dodge is the first, dodge is evil. Dodge isn’t a dodge really. A dodge is some kind of quick movement skill that allows you to avoid an attack by not being there when it happens. Not in GW2.

In GW2, dodge is an invulnerability button with a movement side effect, and the movement part is often more a bother than it helps. Look at Subject Alpha where we fight him on a wall so that we can “dodge in place”.

So, the problem with TA F/U tree. The tree shakes, then a little later adds pop. What kind of alien logic is it that “dodging” would prevent the adds from spawning? None, which is why nobody does it. You don’t dodge out of some attack, you “make sure you are invulnerable at the moment the invisible projectile attack that spawns spiders hit you”.

ilr.9675:

You’d be surprised… have you done the new Dwayna Priest lately??

There are some people that didn’t turn off the horrible post processing effects yet? :p

I had issues with that achievement. I deleted every single non player sent mail from my mailbox, then the hint appeared because I have enough player mails in the queue to fill my mailbox with them.

If it doesn’t work for you, it’s probably a non player mail left, delete everything and get 11 new mails again maybe ?

Yamsandjams.3267:

Get it from WvW. Very inexpensive that way, especially if you’ve got some achievement chests under your belt. Although dungeon farming can be good for your cash reserves anyways, but then that’s tokens you can’t spend on weapons or on rares to salvage into ectos.

You can’t get the weapons from WvW though, only the armor pieces.

You can get the weapons too. It’s not even hidden. The weapon vendor doesn’t have tabs for each stat set though, they are all lumped together in a single tab.

This is sPvP we are talking about. The counter is just to stand in the capture zone and cap it since invisible players do not count.

Daishi.6027:

DotA 2 has classes that are pure passive and auto attack to win yet somehow feel more fair than rangers.

Granted, those couple heroes are boring and mostly not played for that :p

Ceraldor.3160:

99% of the people state they have 50%+ of the time temple (with 6 maps in the pool)

87% of statistics are made up on the spot.

A thread called “Why is it always temple” will attract the 1% of the players that got Temple 5 times in a row. What is there to wonder here?

This particular champion patrols the area around the Skill Point by teleporting from patrol point to patrol point.

And then he oneshots who he finds :p

Defektive.7283:

We’ve tested the double sigil of paral with stop watches, doesn’t stack.

Since the stun duration is rounded up to the next second, wouldn’t a +15% stun do the same result as a +30% stun when applied on Skull Crack anyway? Both end up under kitten rounds up to the same value.

Question 2, how does Sigil of Paral interracts with Runes of Melandru? Assuming they stack additively, +15% -20% ends up to a net loss of 5% which rounded up means Melandru counters completely Paral and returns Skull Crack duration to 3s. Would using two Paral for a total of 30% actually counter Melandru this time?