Guild Wars 2

I think that tier loss should be a thing in every league as well, however I think that during leagues, a player’s MMR rating should be completely disregarded and matchups should be against random people in the same league as them. Sapphire shouldn’t be playing with ruby which I have seen regularly. Isn’t the whole point of a league in anything to only play against the other people/teams in the same league as you? This would get rid of losing on purpose to advance tiers and it would not affect matchups and although games would probably be unbalanced at first, those winning a lot would progress and those losing would not. This system would mean that leagues actually represent skill and would stop people reaching diamond through grinding alone with not much need for actual skill, like I have done.

I also solo queued to diamond. Emerald as surprisingly difficult for me and took forever it seemed to complete but after that I got through sapphire with no problems and thanks to an INCREDIBLY luck run of about 23 out of 25 Wins in ruby I made it to the final 2 tiers in 2 days and made slow progress to finally reach diamond in a game when I was matched with an ESL player in my team (when I saw that I just concluded to myself I had won that game, and did, haha). Now I am in diamond I have made no progress at all (win a couple, lose a couple, win a couple, lose a couple) so it seems that this is the league I belong in. I am now looking forward to a lot of fun, close matchups.

Apart from the occasional complete blowout game (I lost 500-0 yesterday and everyone on my team was playing the whole way through and we were against 5 solo players, lol!) I have seen more games since the league started where the loser has got between 400 and 499 points than before and I very rarely see a team get less than 200 points. I think I have had a lot of very fun and exciting games (going down to a boss kill in Niflhel, a Lord kill literally half a second before the other team reaches 500 points in foefire or just a game decided by a few points). Unfortunately it has seemed most of those games go against me but when I win those ones it feels brilliant. I have accepted that I will never make it out of diamond league based on the last few days of play so now I can just enjoy pvp rather than grind out leagues by playing 25 games every day.

I wouldn’t like to see a buff to Lord to be honest, if you are willing to risk a 5 man Lord rush and lose all 3 caps in the process I think you should be rewarded with the kill. Also, I think a significant buff to the Lord would make the game less interesting (no chance to rush Lord when 350-450 because it would just take too much time to kill).

If you were 10 points down, you lost the game. The individual score rule is for ties in the score (as in 441-441, not 431-441). If neither team gets to 500 in the 15 minutes, the team with the higher score when the time runs out wins.

I would much rather see a couple of new conquest maps than a new mode. Stronghold is not any good in my opinion and I can’t see another mode being better than conquest in gw2. I was thinking maybe a HoT themed map (maybe a tarir themed map, or even adapt the 3 blighting towers in dragons stand and use them as capture points). I would love to see gliding be a thing in new maps as well, of course the mastery would not be required for this.

From what I’ve seen so far, yes it is definitely possible to get past ruby in solo queue. I got to 16 pips from nothing today (I ranked up yesterday) by playing celestial auramancer tempest and to my amazement I must have won at least 80-90% of my games, many weren’t even close. I find it much easier to win on ele than I did on dragon-hunter which is what I played before. Not sure if I can maintain such an incredible win rate for the rest of the league but this has proved it is most definitely possible.

I have noticed no change since the leagues started in the pvp community, if anything I see less people raging/afk people than I did before- I regularly see people not giving up now from difficult positions when I did before. Just today I was 150-0 down in a game and we didn’t give up, kept trying and eventually won 500-400. Overall I think the community has improved if anything (it really wasn’t bad before leagues IMO).

I think that you can technically be any level, however at lvl 30 you will be doing so little damage in a level 80 event that it would be extremely difficult for your friend to receive credit towards the event and achievement.

Absolute best moment in pro league for me so far was without a doubt the last 2 minutes of orange logo versus more guns than roses in the last match on forest of Niflhel. That was absolutely incredible, the commentary made it all the better too. If that’s too long, the last 30-50 seconds would be fine, but a highlight video would not be complete without that epic match

In my opinion, there is a big difference between tanking MMR and joining an amber player so you can actually get a game. With queue time of over an hour in some cases, high division players really shouldn’t have to put up with that so I fully understand them taking in an amber/emerald so they can actually do what they turned on the game to do. Even if this is classed a cheating (it shouldn’t be), what exactly are the diamond/legendaries supposed to do when they can’t play the game for over an hour? If this is cheating there should be a way to let them play (maybe after 10 minutes the game just matches them with whoever is available? It better than not being able to play at all).
Of course I am not speaking from experience as I am only in ruby with no problems with queue times, but I don’t believe players should get punished for being the best (or even putting the most work into forming the divisions).

I agree that it is not a jumping puzzle, in the most literal sense of the word, more like a jumping challenge. However as others have said it is optional, just like every other bit of content in the game tbh (what is the line that defines mandatory and optional content in this game?) because if you make the decision to get the skin, yes you have to do it, just like I have to do a lot of things I’d rather not in this game to get a reward I want but it does not force you to do it- every time you choose to try it you are the one making the decision.
Personally, I love the wintersday JP. I think it is really easy, much more so than the clock tower, the only real challenge is the time pressure once you know what to do, however I am very experienced with jumping puzzles. I don’t mind though, I can make myself a ton of gold from presents farming it

I like the idea of not losing pips to a close game, it would save the absolute agony I experience when I lose 500-490 when I am 1 pip away from tiering up. Those kind of losses really do dishearten me and sometimes after that I either just stop pvping for a while because I can’t face going back to 0 pips or i force myself to queue because I have already said to myself I WILL tier up that day but even when I do that I can’t put in 100% effort because I am so annoyed with myself that I lost to such a close score line.

This would also prevent people giving up, which I do see quite often because it would still give them an achievable target to aim for even when they realise they can’t win.

I will most definitely be watching it tonight, mainly because last week was the first time I watched a pvp event and I am now extremely hyped for any new events that get announced, I absolutely loved it last week and hopefully this week will be no different, I will be following until the end without a doubt.
As for the teams ‘exploiting’, do you mean how they can have multiple teams on the guild challenger leaderboard at the same time? I have seen a lot of discussion about that. To be honest though the players could do anything in game and I wouldn’t care, doesn’t make the pro league any less entertaining for me to watch.

I have noticed this too, I was stuck in emerald for a week playing at least 15-20 games per day with an awful win rate, featuring one run where I lost 20 out of 21 games. Now I am in sapphire, I have played 6 games and all were fairly comprehensive victories. I do agree that this is probably because the teammates are much better because before the game starts I see a fair amount of organisation and good communication throughout the matches now. I never saw this in emerald.

I used to say gg all the time after a match and the only time I didn’t was when I was very angry at the result and would rather just forget the game and move on (if I lost from a fantastic position for example). However now I only say it if I genuinely enjoyed the game and it was close and enjoyable for presumably both teams, because if everyone says it all the time, no one says it any of the time (it becomes almost meaningless).

I do see some people saying it sarcastically but they always make another comment afterwards so a simple ‘gg’ is never really sarcastic, so I don’t see the problem with people saying it if they enjoyed the game, regardless of circumstances.

I wish the service the OP mentioned was a thing, to be honest if I could I would just pay a great team to carry me into ruby/diamond rather than grind it out myself, lol!
Seriously though, it really scares me to queue when I am one pip away from tiering up because I can just see myself losing 4 in a row and going back to nothing. For example got to 4/5 pips 5 times to advance to emerald tier 3 before I got it, one of those losses was a 500-486 game when at one time I was 350-100 up. That sort of thing really does hurt.
What I suggest is that when you are at 4/5 pips, you can lose one game and not lose a pip, but if you lose a second you lose them as normal. This would only happen once per tier, additional times you get to 4/5 this chance is not given to you. That would make it a lot easier to take a loss at 4/5 but would not effectively make the tiers 4 pips instead of 5.

I was also wondering about these. I doubt they are completely meaningless to the even or they would just be part of the scenery (as in you can’t select them). I’ll try to get some people to kill them on my next try to see what happens if no one else has said what they are before then.

I had a run of 12 consecutive losses today and before I finally got my second win of the day, I had won 1/15 games. Can anyone beat that?
Seriously though, I don’t know if this is me being matched up with pre made teams all the time or me being literally the worst player in the game but it looks like I will never progress past emerald league without getting a decent team which is a shame in my opinion.

There really isn’t a two hour wait for the TD meta event. To be completely honest it’s more like half an hour of actual waiting if you get in a map trying to organise. While the two hours is counting down you could be defending tarir, killing the mouth of mordremoth or doing outposts in verdant brink. There’s loads of content to do in that 2 hours. It is only a wait if you choose to stay in TD.
I would say, for someone not interested in anything else, a one and a half hour wait would be better (one hour do do events, half an hour to organise), but I think the wait is good as it gives me time to do other stuff and it also gives enough time to organise the event, which is essential with events as hard as the chak gerent is.

I voted for verdant brink. Had I not been reading the forums recently, I would be very surprised so many hate TD, it’s my favourite, followed by auric basin. Those two maps are a lot better than the other two. I don’t really see DS as a zone as such, more like a giant meta event. VB not great. IMO it is the only completely unrealistic map (HUGE cliffs and sections of land with no connection to anything else with vines at the bottom that kill you if you touch them. That said I don’t mind verdant brink too much and I really like the events there, however scenery-wise It isn’t as good as the others.

While I understand why most people dislike the map (I hated it at first), I have to say, I love tangled depths. It is by far my favourite of the HoT maps. I really like the confusing layout and I also like how there is actually underwater areas there, that’s actually one of the main reasons I like it.
Then there’s the meta. The chak gerent event is my favourite thing I have tried in gw2 so far and I am saying this without having completed it yet in 10+ tries over the last week. It is extremely hard- harder than the triple wurm- and the feeling of tension through the event is perfect. Just a few hours ago I commanded rata novus lane and we killed the boss with less than 10 seconds on the clock, only for ogre lane to fail by about 3%. I was annoyed that we were so close, but I loved the whole experience of it- getting updates from other lanes, reporting on each boss’s health, giving each other advice. Those events are what I love more than anything else in gw2, the ones where it really, really means something to succeed. I would like it if more events this hard and indeed maps this complex are added in future.

Overall I would rate HoT a 6/10, I do enjoy a lot of the content, especially tarir and chak gerent (even though I have never got that one done). I just love the big fights that split people up into 3-5 groups that can’t help each other unless they change ‘lanes’ when people are all working towards one big objective (marionette/ vinewrath style, I think that Anet have made a fantastic decision adding more of those fights to the game).
However, there is simply not enough content. I had completely run out of new things to do over a week ago, yes I play an awful lot but that’s how much I played before HoT. Although I really like the majority of the expansion I can’t give it such a high score when there just isn’t enough content to keep me busy for more than 3 weeks. That said, I would give it more like a 9/10 if the amount of content wasn’t involved in my rating.

I agree there needs to be dailies for the new maps. I am really enjoying the new zones (especially tangled depths and auric basin) and I find it quite inconvenient to have to go back to old zones that I have no interest in to get my daily complete. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a big issue as it only takes 10 mins to get my dailies done, but I would love to be able to spend that 10 mins in the new zones rather than the old ones.

Levelling masteries really is a chore. I play a lot and I still don’t have a single one completed (gliding is my furthest along at lvl 5 and halfway to lvl 6). I know, you get them by playing normally without having to grind, but tbh I just want all those abilities instantly, if I wanted to work for things I would level a new character. A good thing to do I think would be to allow tomes of knowledge to level masteries. Even if it was 100 tomes to get from nothing to lvl 6 in a mastery I would still do it. I have tons saved up and that would be a brilliant use for them.
You might think this would make people stop playing sooner if they had everything instantly, but I don’t think so. Of course I would never quit this game (I am pretty addicted to it, haha) so it definitely wouldn’t affect me, but for other people if they see leyline gliding locked behind 13 million xp or something like that amount, they might just not even bother with that, do all the new events once and then leave because I can guarantee that it is impossible to get all masteries maxed out without repeating a lot of content several time over. I am not saying give us everything instantly, just let us use tomes of knowledge for our masteries or even just reduce the xp needed slightly, it would really reduce the feeling of grinding I get from levelling them.

I think the difficulty of most adventures seems very good. some a bit too hard and a couple are WAY to easy (I got gold by an absolute mile on my first try on salvage pit). Most are good though for the difficulty, for example I had a lot of fun running the leyline run adventure over and over and over until I finally got gold by 1 second. It felt brilliant and that is why I think the difficulty if good. If they were easier I would just rush them all and never do any again and if they were too hard I would just not bother trying for gold. They seem just right for pretty much every one I have tried.

To be honest I was convinced that trahearne would die before HoT even launched because the majority of players didn’t like him (don’t have a clue why, I was indifferent to him like I am to most other characters, I can’t say I dislike any character though). And when we found only Logan and Zojja in the first 2 pods in mission 15 that 100% confirmed trahearne’s fate to me. Something I still don’t understand was why he was hidden so far away and even above that helix thing when L and Z were much easier to get to. Didn’t make much sense to me other than for giving that as a reason (an excuse, even) for why we could save the other 2 but not him. Overall though, very good storytelling throughout the expansion, though it should have been longer in my opinion. That will definitely be fixed for me in living world season 3 however.

I only play warrior, but I can say that I am really liking berserker, there is still so much of it I have to try too, namely the torch. I played it on my condi sw/sh + longbow warrior and berserk mode and the new burst skills were great. I think torch would be fantastic with my build.

I don’t like the idea of the CoF farm and I will not do it because it is, although Anet said it wasn’t an exploit, definitely not playing the game as intended and I would rather level my masteries through normal gameplay. It doesn’t even matter to me at all right now though, because I will not be playing any central tyria content at all for a LONG time now HoT is out.
I would like to see the farm gone and all exp drops removed so people can’t farm it, but that is mostly because I have played 8hrs a day since launch and only have a mastery rank of about 25 and then I see people on rank 60+ who have farmed CoF.
If it is left in game though, I won’t mind because I will get the masteries eventually I am sure and I don’t really care is other people want to play the game like that if they want to.

Maybe just a tab for taxis to maps would help more, while I am usually looking for a taxi when I am looking in the open world tab, I see how it would be frustrating for someone looking for another type of thing.
If that is still a bit inconvenient for finding the right taxi, that tab could be split into a couple more sections based on the nature of the event you are trying to find.
Overall, yes, the open world tab has been a bit of a mess for a while, full of taxis to different maps and it could be hard to find the right group and splitting it into different sections would be very helpful.

Personally, I am VERY glad to have rushed through the story. It gave me so much more freedom to look at map chat, read ‘spoiler’ threads on the forum and not restrict myself with what I let myself see. If I finish the story in a couple of days I can go back to normal and look at whatever I want because I have already seen it for myself.

I am also glad to be in the process of rushing all the achievements in the new maps. This is because I have always wanted to be one of the first to achieve stuff since I got this game and HoT is no exception. AP is extremely valuable to me and is the only real long term goal I feel I still have with how much I have played already. Admittedly, I will never be one of the very first, as in top 100 kind of players, but at least being in maybe the top 5% is very good for me.

Another reason I like rushing through stuff is because after I have finished, that is when I can really explore and take in the beauty of new zones and do events for fun, not just because there is 5AP for finishing them all.
OP, I see why you don’t like rushing through and taking in the new zones (which I think are amazing), but for people like me who feel a need to be one of the first to do every new thing released in game, it is necessary to rush so then we can do what you are doing, just enjoying the expansion, after we have finished.

Although I have not got past the blighting towers yet (did it for the first time yesterday) I agree it was absolutely amazing. I think that Anet have made a fantastic decision to add more multiple-lane fights like marionette. That style of battle is the best thing I have done in gw2 so far. I went to this zone after I finished the story (which I will not spoil here) and although I was pretty disappointed by it, this zone completely changed how I was feeling about HoT at that time.
Looking forward to playing it a lot in future and hopefully reaching the end boss soon.

I was really disappointed with the mordremoth fight. I was saying to myself the whole way through ‘surely this can’t be the last boss’ and when it turned out it was, I just didn’t know what to think.
Of all the things an elder dragon could be I only wanted Mordy to be one thing: massive. It looked more like a random mordrem in the open world than an elder dragon… Hugely disappointing. There was also no sense of closure to the story, it was more like ‘the dragon is dead, that’s the end of it’, there was no instance after where you saw the aftermath and everyone’s reactions.

Stepping away from the negatives, the fight itself was very well designed and had a good feel of importance to it and although mordremoth was a huge HP sponge, it was challenging with a few different phases. Gameplay-wise I liked it a lot.

Dashingsteel.3410:

I expected the elite trait line to cost the same as other trait lines. After all the elite is no better than regular professions. The mastery system is what should take a lot of time.

i can’t comment on the elite specs, I haven’t even looked at them yet.
As for masteries, I agree they should take A LOT of time (they are account bound) but my complaint with them is that you are forced to do certain masteries to continue the story and even to obtain skill points even though you can reach them without.
Masteries themselves are very well designed and I like them, but the way they are used to gate the story… I have never felt as frustrated while playing the game as I did when I realied they were needed for the story.

I like the story a lot as well (hope I finish it very soon) but I can’t say it’s the most amazing thing ever. That said I probably would have thought it was the greatest thing of all time if I did not watch the HoT launch trailer, that thing was so epic that I let myself get too hyped for the story and it inevitably did not live up to the incredible level of unrealistic hype I created for myself (so far). This was my fault not Anet’s so I can only thank them for a story that is great and most definitely better that living world season 2.

I have to agree with the OP about gating the story. The story was literally the only thing I was really excited for in HoT and I have to play seemingly endless events to progress it (I am at the point where u need itsel poison lore as well). I really have to say that gating the story behind masteries was a really, really bad decision that I wish Anet hadn’t made. I rarely say negative things about the game because I like it so much but this annoyed me so much that I can’t see any positives with it.
That said I have no problem at all with gating some open pve behind masteries, that is what they are for after all and I agree with them doing that. Just in future I sincerely hope that I can just play the story and afterwards focus on other things.

I am 99.9% sure there will be a download of some description tomorrow, what we don’t know is how big it will be. This is because we don’t know how much of it is already downloaded through previous updates So it could be of any size really.

As someone who literally just finished my thirst slayer an hour ago (what timing to see this lol), I have to agree there needs to be some title involved with it. I don’t mind repeating the same things over and over but that achievement was just awful. I did 5 stacks of the drinks per day so I got it before HoT so I wouldn’t keep putting it off. To be honest I think that achievement shows more commitment (or at least ability to tolerate sheer boredom) than a lot of other things that award titles. And exclusive skin would be nice too (maybe a beer mug backpiece?). Just anything so other people can see at a glance that I have accomplished that achievement.

Here’s a stupid bug that I remembered having once a few months ago:

I was playing pvp on my warr and I was fighting on a point against another person (can’t remember which class), I wasn’t doing too well so I activated rampage and for some reason the second I activated it, a clone of me appeared that could deal damage, cc my opponent and everything that copied every attack I did. I ended up killing the guy and he got (understandably) quite annoyed at me but I just explained that I had literally no clue what happened and everything was ok eventually, which was good. I thought that bug was hilarious but I have never seen it again after that.

I have played for 3,234 hours over 905 days since I got the game.

I really disagree with exploration gifts being tradable, that takes away from the whole point of them although it is a shame for people speculating about the new legendaries, but with that always comes a certain amount of risk.
Personally I am glad that the new ones don’t need gift of exploration so I can use the old ones to make kamohaoli’i kotaki and frenzy (I was holding off from making those in case there were new aquatic legendaries) and also make the new axe with my maguuma exploration.
Even if you have no interest in the old legendaries, make a couple with your gifts of exploration anyway and then sell them on the TP, I believe there is a nice amount of profit in that for some legendaries.

Donari.5237:

Suffish, I hope you’ve been reading the thread, but to make it very clear: If you bought from the GW2 site and had a code emailed to you you need to go to the registration page to enter the code. If you bought in game you’re already upgraded.

The fastest way for you to check if you have been swapped to a HoT account is to look at your character selection screen. Scroll the avatars to the end. If you have 4 beta slots, you’re in. Those slots will vanish as of launch (or possibly in an earlier patch) but they should still be there right now.

I have been reading the thread, and I checked and I do in fact have 4 beta char slotswhich means I will be able to just download it. I bought from the gw2 website btw.
Thanks for helping everyone because I was very worried I would end up in a disastrous situation where I would have been unable to play which I know I will not now!

Thanks for the help! I have already pre purchased so there will be nothing more to worry about.

When I was commanding EotM before I was too experienced at it, I used to always go an extremely complex and long route from the statuary to I think Tytone perch, whatever the tower in frostreach is. Of course, you could just go over the bridge and it would be a short distance away but no, I decided it was best to go a way over twice as long (can’t even remember how I did it now) and only realised when after a few circuits of EotM people started making comments like ‘why go stupid route?’. Entirely funny/stupid on my part.

Being a veteran player, it may seem quite silly to some of you that I am asking this but I need to know, with launch being so close (can’t wait!!) how will actually downloading HoT work? Will it just install automatically when it goes live or will I have to enter a code of some sort to get it? Do we even know yet? I have never bought an expansion for anything before so this is all new to me. Thanks in advance

On this topic I have to agree with the OP, world completion is THE most boring activity in the game by far.
In my honest opinion it is the most difficult grind for me to do just because of how dull I find it. I don’t mind farming one bit but when I did world completion for a second time I could only manage one map every two days because I couldn’t motivate myself to do any more even though I am usually capable of champ farming for hours at a time without getting very bored.
What I believe the main issue is with world completion is the renown hearts. Without those I believe world completion would be much more pleasant (I found myself not minding world completion in Orr). In my opinion they take too much time and offer very little in return. My suggestion would be that once you have done all the renown hearts on one character, they are done forever, although you could still choose to do them again on a new character if you wanted. I am not sure of how possible that would be but I do believe that on people’s second and third world completions, when they have already seen the world (which was incredible to see the first time through), it would offer a much quicker way to get extra gifts of exploration after a person first does world completion and is no longer interested in the actual activity but is interested in the end rewards.

I have to say that I don’t agree with you, OP. You could say that bolt does not fit on a warrior but I personally think it is the best skin in the game so I use it all the time. If it were to change how it looked based on which prof used it I would be hugely disappointed because I wouldn’t be the skin I went through the most long, unpleasant grind I have done in any game to get it (not that leges being very hard to get is a bad thing). Also, I could want my necro to use bifrost and sunrise (as a reaper) with shiny armour. Yes it would not fit the theme of a necro but that’s what I like about this game, the ability to make your chars look how you want, nothing like their profession even.

For your first point, I think the legendaries are perfect, and as many have said, nothing can please everyone. I want my legendaries to be the most flashy, unrealistic, in-your-face things you could imagine. If I wanted to make a realistic character that fits the profession there are many non-legendary options for that, although I do understand you want realistic skins that really stand out which I also believe there should be more options for. However I see it as important that legendaries are VERY flashy and not necessarily fitting of any profession.

I got kicked once because we died on bloomhunger and I didn’t use wall of reflection. The funny thing was, I was running a warrior! I think they though I was a guardian because I was running bright blue luminescent gear, spirit smith backpiece, with bolt/Flameseeker prophecies because I have had other groups think I was a guardian because of how blue I was, lol.

I suppose it could be that there are less weapons in the collection so they want it to be not too easy in relation to the normal collections to finish. However, as it has already been mentioned, it is mainly because they would essentially be free if they costed 1 ticket (which they effectively do if you get them all).

2 people walk into a restaurant. To their surprise it is totally empty. After a while Rytlock Brimstone comes to take their order, they tell him what they want and he goes away. A long time passes and nothing has been given to them so they ask Rytlock why they haven’t got their food yet, to which he replies “We serve no one!” (If you watched the HoT launch trailer you’ll get it).

It’s awful I know but it’s the best I could do!