Guild Wars 2

The placement is so weird too, my first thought was that the whole thing is misplaced. It went in line with the random hovering raptor model in the sky above SM…

Haven’t really been enough people online to really get a feel for it. We had an hour or so of larger fights with a few 3-ways. The actual fights were really fun. The sometimes confusing map layout and mechanics made for some great moments of surprise, strategy, laughter and facepalming; quite the refresh from the flat old maps. I really liked that aspect.

The biggest issue that we noticed was the size of it. It was really hard to find enemy groups and even harder to catch up to them, so the feeling of endless running and arriving late could get quite pressing. You really notice the loss of the two keep waypoints.

Overall through the short time we’d had the map, I am quite positive – I found myself feeling quite bored going back to the, by today’s standard, rather bland EB. Once people get their sceptic’s glasses off and start to play and get used to the map I think it can be lots of fun. Right now it’s still too unfamiliar and unpopulated to get a proper opinion.

Dreaming serpent.5197:

Corrosive Poison Cloud also destroys treb shots in kylo, yet to be tested in wvw, but should probably destroy siege shots (treb, cata, ext)

I can verify, CPC destroys siege projectiles in WvW. Did some major mortar-blocking while we were ramming a gate.

ZDragon.3046:

splatticus.1278:

Spot the error.

LOL not scaling with movement wtf xD

Well yeah that skills useless af

Well, the upside is that my very short and basic testing seemed to indicate that it’s only the tooltip that is wrong, the torment still works as it should. :P

Spot the error.

Arminius.7052:

So how did the higher tier servers originally get so much activity compared to the lower tier servers? Were they the original servers in GW2 and the others got added later (with occasional guilds changing servers mixing things up)? Or they were slightly better or the same at the start and people gravitated there as they had slightly more action (as I started without knowing / understanding the game and went in FC as my friends were there)?

The simple answer is ‘by chance’. There was no way for people to spread out at launch. You basically picked a server that had an awesome name or one that your community had decided was “your” server (in EU we had a lot of discussion about which server which country would pick as their unofficial home. FSP, for example, got a lot of Scandinavians and Dutchies). So what happened is that naturally the populations got imbalanced right from the start and some servers never really got off the ground. It was anyone’s guess how stacked a server was that early.

The second major problem was one that very recently got fixed: The distinction between pve and wvw in world population. As I said above, at launch people joined server based on community, not balance. This, of couse, also applied to pve. So what happened is that while some servers got a high wvw population, others saw a massive pve one. This made servers near or totally full all thanks to pve, so no matter how much people wanted to join or transfer to it for wvw, they simply couldn’t!

As time has moved on and the general population of the game has declined, people have started to congregate more and more on fewer and fewer servers, leaving those unfortunate lower ones to basically bleed out. That leaves us pretty much where we are today.

With that said, this is not a good time to judge the state of servers. The expansion is upon us and we’re in a sort of limbo where people are taking breaks as they wait for a release, and we have no idea what will happen when it does release. The recent change to how server population is calculated is the obvious first step in a plan by Anet to create a more balanced playing field in anticipation for the likely population boom following the release of HoT. New and returning players have no other choice but to populate the lower servers, boosting their population, while the ‘full’ status prevents the top servers from getting stacked even further.

The best way to balance rewards versus mindless karmatrain is to make the rewards WvW focused. That way, the farmers from PvE will have absolutely no reason at all to farm in WvW and at the same time WvW:ers get rewards they can actively use in the form of siege and whatnot. Yes, WvW:ers will suffer on the PvE end as well, but you can’t have the cake and eat it.

They can’t test everything en masse before HoT anyway. It would mean they had to give us all access to, well, basically the finished expansion client, and that isn’t gonna happen. We’ll have to deal with bugs at launch, just like all the times before in this game and all other games ever released. It’s not a problem unless you only plan to play HoT on launch day and never again.

Sounds like every other server. Non issue.

Rampant exploiting, people not playing, wvw turning into a big karma train joke. What a brilliant success by Anet.

One thing that’s always hit me with Anets decisions since gw2 launch is that they seem more like enthusiastic, hasty fan ideas rather than thought-out professional content. To me it seems like there’s either internal issues regarding who greenlights what, or a general inexperience and naivity among everyone and they simply don’t know what to do. Things like this event simply cannot be the product of a professionally laid out plan.

“Active WvW player” in Anet terms is probably anyone who’s made it to around rank 300 since launch. I think we all know how casual-minded Anet is in these situations.

The real question is rather ‘has anyone ever not been raging uncontrollably at the kittenedness that is minions?’, because of how broken they’ve been since launch.

Sign me up. I simply can’t run with BM at the moment because the risk of accidently hitting some random stuff with your dodge is too high. Hell, some random stuff running into that mark you left behind 30 seconds ago is infuriating enough.

Do like everyone else has been doing since launch and learn how to use your mouse cursor. If that’s too hard for you, then the problem is with your lack of skill, not the mechanics of the game. Making all those traitable ground target skills in the game baseline is one of the best things Anet’s done, please don’t petition for them to reinstate those kittened traits.

Still CoCo with some newly added carefulness after the fact. You know the vulnerability is coming, prepare for it and change your strategy accordingly. The change still sucks, but the added level of difficulty is so far managable.

They might be able to find some tiny optimizations to the condi and boon system to reduce processing strain, but I think we’re gonna have to get used to an increased amount of lag. The condi changes were the first step; before we know it they’ll add more boons and more condis with feature packs and expansions, creating even more lag every time until it’s nigh on unplayable. The GW engine simply cannot cope with the amount of information that wants through, and nothing shy of a complete redesign of it will ever fix things.

This needs to be higher up. WvW is beyond broken right now; so much that it’s pretty much deserted because any fighting turns into 40+ guardians with perma-every-boon-in-the-game and an ungodly amount of skill lag that reduces it to a Wave of Loot spamfest of never before seen proportions.

Siege is useless because gates melt so quickly. Any defensive siege is pointless because Guardians are literally immortal if they’re running Altru Healing in combination with shouts, symbols and other boon procs that are currently hitting a lot of allies, if not all of them around you.

This is not an issue with condis or aoe cap. It’s straight up Guardians being completely broken because of their skills, their synergies with spreading boons and the fact that boons seem to have no allied cap.

Reaper is already doomed to be a niche pve spec. They gave nothing to it that would suggest a necro would be able to survive in a melee setting in anything more than simple 1v1.

Shadow.1345:

I don’t know why people are QQing so hard over Consume Conditions when you can just Dagger 4 or Plague Signet 10 stacks of vulnerability onto an enemy after you have healed.

To give you one scenario that will now completely kitten a necro up after the change: retreating. Imagine you and your group decide to retreat or just back away. Currently, just like every class in the game, a necro can cleanse whatever conditions he has on him to get away and/or out of combat. After this change, he will cleanse whatever he has on him, but he will also get new conditions on him from his own godkitten heal. This is… well, guaranteed death for the necro. He will not get out of combat, he will be lagging behind, he will be focused and he will die. There’s no feasable way that anyone can “just transfer it to an enemy” because that means getting in range and consequently dying. We’re losing one of our only means of escaping. This is not trivial in anyway.

The Warriors in their class forum seem sort of oblivious to the rest of the classes. There’s quite a bit of “OMG Anet why you nerf us to the ground” and “OMG we need this super powerful trait as baseline or we’ll suck” threads going on there. Like, can we have Close to Death made baseline please? It’s very important for many builds.

I’m fairly certain that going into downed state is an integral part to Anet’s idea of the necromancer.

I was hoping the WvW meta could be experimented on a lot more with the changes, but the CoCo disaster pretty much forces the well builds to go BM with the well trait to make WoB remotely useful. Of course, one could live with the new CoCo, but it’s a bit like intentionally nerfing yourself for the sake of diversity.

I can accept Consume Conditions on the basis that it slapped 10 vulnerability on me while casting, to then be consumed upon the skill activating. Sure, make me vulnerable while casting, but for god sake, the skill is based upon consuming conditions. It’s completely kittened to make it put additional conditions on me. Especially since it does this simply on the basis that it now has to be a corruption for whatever reason.

Plague makes you a cloud of disease – if anything, you should be immune to conditions while in it. While this is pretty overpowered, it sure as hell makes more sense than making it kill you.

This is a bad time to be talking about coverage. When the expansion hits, there should reasonably be a pretty big population spike, which is gonna throw all the population issues into a chaos. I suggest people either transfer right now if they’re now happy, or wait until HoT comes and observe what happens before jumping to conclusions.

The server statuses are still fairly consistant with how they were before mega servers, so it’s a reasonable assumption that is simply depends on how many players on that server are online at the time. It doesn’t pay any special attention to game mode, it simply counts anyone having his characters on that server – which is why servers with very low wvw activity can still be full; they simply have a high pve population.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

I ran numbers earlier and a typical Rabid build in exotic gear would have Plague nuking you for 8,784 damage from your own bleeds. This is not counting any bleed duration or Might outside of Hemophilia, so it can very easily be much higher.

-“Yeeeaaah, allies, if you could stop killing me with your aoe might that would be greeeaaat. Thanks.”

A few months before they started fiddling with the cap we got 84 people on tag just after porting into a seemingly empty border on our side. We did this because we saw the chance of getting a decent estimate at the time. With people reporting a queue at that point, the cap would most likely have been 85-90. If it’s actually a simple fixed value, that is.

Lunacy Solacio.6514:

Have you ever seen PvP communities?
Besides, it’s already possible to get the name of anyone you fight, so it isn’t exactly anonymous…

Haha yeah. Sure, it’s not all roses, but I’m giving the game the benefit of a doubt. WvW is a lot more relaxed in its competitveness, so it shouldn’t get as kitteny as PvP can be. Besides, a lot of WvWers across servers are already friends and know each other from before thanks to transfering back and forth. That and the regularity and consistency with which you meet each other all contribute to a much more friendly atmosphere. It’ll simply become easier to get to know more people and create a much more living community in what is becoming a more and more stale game.

I don’t see the loss of anonymity creating much more toxin. It’s not like there’s anything stopping people from being kittenbags to each other as it is right now if they want to. Overall, I’d value the benefits over the downsides. You’ll never escape the idiots, but that doesn’t really justify having everyone be faceless dummies either.

To give a some kind of analogue to people; Imagine if the teams in your favorite sport were all completely faceless. The only way you could identify the players on the field is by their role or position. How engaging would that be? Would you be interested in that sport?

Yeah, I’ve always supported the idea that we, or rather our characters, shouldn’t be anonymous. It does help the community knowing who you’re fighting; forming friendships and rivalties or just simple recognition of players you’ve faced often is a great thing. The anonymous nature now makes it feel a bit like we’re fighting NPC’s since our communicative abilities are next to none. Hell, it might even remove some of the toxicity in the community if it feels more like a real person you’re fighting.

Running zerker scepter in WvW. Find a target who has every condition in the game on him during a fight, pop feast, enjoy the hilarity.

While I personally don’t enjoy commander focusing, I do enjoy the added level of strategy it creates for us to actively try to counter it. So for the greater good of the game I don’t want it “fixed”. Dumbing down is bad.

WvW isn’t a gamemode made to farm loot. Go PvE for that, or EotM. WvW is supposed to be more akin to your classic deathmatch game combined with an RTS where the reward lies within winning or losing the matchup and the fights. How well Anet has accomplished this is a perfectly valid question, but it’s beside the point.

More loot in WvW is a bad thing for WvW. Once the focus in the gamemode changes from competition to farm, the gamemode is “dead” and all that remain is a bunch of bored PvE’ers changing up their usual SW/world boss farm with a gate-bashing karma train. Recoqnize this? Yeah, seems strangely similar to EotM, does it not?

Ultimately, people who are whining about loot are fundamentally missing the point of WvW and should either stop and realize that it might not be the game for them, or try to change their views on it to find fun in other things than those that are not there. The worst thing you can do is to try and change it into something it’s not supposed to be.

Baruch deserves all the hate they get. They are the crowning champions of running away and PvD’ing empty towers with 70-man blobs and ganking lone roamers 10-1 outside spawns and keeps. It’s excruciatingly boring to face them in a matchup.

Curo.2483:

I’ve actually seen that treb placement used a few times, including on my own server. Never found out how to do it myself though.

As with every spawn area, you cannot place siege inside them. You can, however, throw siege from the outside into them. With a little creativity, you can find a few useful spots for this on both the borderlands and EB.

Anyhoot, I have yet to find one which isn’t fairly easy to counter, though, so this “exploit” really isnt a huge issue; it’s siege in a defending position just like any other, just counter it. It’s not like you can freely throw siege anywhere you like. I’d certainly count issues like broken line of sight and players being able to take down siege through walls with their skills bigger problems.

TooBz.3065:

Oh Absolutely, its a terrible way to do it! I don’t think they did it on purpose. I just think that their bad idea had some good side effects. TBH, I don’t expect them to properly balance WvW. I don’t think they even consider it.

Well, from the way i see it, anything they can do to ease balance in wvw will be good for the whole game.

As we all know, they balance things around pvp, but what stacks are currently doing is actually hindering balance even there. They may not ‘care’ about wvw balance, but they will at least never go so far as to make it completely broken; no class will ever become utterly op/up to the point of everyone else quitting. But as long as we have stacks, anything they do over in pvp for balance gets completely screwed up over in wvw because of it and they then have to consider that when balancing pvp. It just creates a big, unnecessary mess that doesn’t have to be.

Eles losing some damage from this because they now have to go a bit tankier is straight up an effect of that mess. Better change it now than creating an even bigger mess after HoT.

TooBz.3065:

So, if you think the disparity between the HP of different classes is too big (which I do) then you should be in favor of any generally applicable buff that reduces the impact of that disparity.

Core balance is a whole nother beast, but I will say that balancing it through stacks would be an absolutely mind-boggling bad way to go about doing it. Hence why I think a removal of them will be a good thing in the long run for balance. They’re cancer, and they need to go.

the krytan assassin.9235:

i’m NOT saying that removing the guard stacks is a bad idea, i’m saying that anet has balanced WvW around having stacks. If you suddenly remove the guard stacks effecting some classes more then others, you’re creating a disbalance which should be compensated in some way.

Yes, it’ll create some chaos initially, but it’s a required step to getting closer to actual balance. Stacks are a huge pain in the kitten from a balance perspective since they don’t affect everyone the same, nor does everyone even have them to begin with.

With all the changes HoT is bringing, it’s even harder to jump to conclusion about things. Anet knows much more about the future than we; this change might make a lot more sense given the information we don’t know yet. For all we know, all our current gear and builds could be rendered obsolete in wvw when the expansion hits. Good thing is neither we nor Anet have to worry about guard stacks when it does.

So everyone should chill the kitten out and see this as a necessary evil to a possibly greater future that would’ve been completely impossible as it is now.

the krytan assassin.9235:

yes, 18-19k, add DS to it and you’re on 33k. The 2.5k hp isn’t gonna make a difference between getting the required HP to survive or not for the necro and normally not needed at all for a necro to survive. This means it’s almost a pure 8-10% dmge loss of ele compared to necro, without the necro losing anything of their surviveability. Also you’re making the statement that ele relies on active defense, i wonder how you want to pop those skills if you’re getting 1 shotted by thiefs without the extra vitality though….

All this is telling me that stacks are fundamentally flawed by design since attributes have different meaning for different classes. No one should have to – nor be able to – make a build require guard stacks. Which again is a good point to removing them and letting everyone readjust around this, instead of having an obviously broken system in place.

There’s nothing saying that eles will be underpowered after this, they might aswell simply have been slightly too powerful as it is now. Going full berseker while getting a large percentage hp increase from stacks isnt even remotely balanced, to be honest. Should necro be getting an equal relative percentage increase to damage through applied strength? No, stacks going away will be better in the long run.

the krytan assassin.9235:

The thing is that we actually DO give valid arguments why removing the buffs does not mean that evry1 gets the same…. like already pointed out in earlier posts this will decrease the ele dps compared to the necro dps by around 8-10% which is actually a very big difference, so i see enough reasons to riot actually.

Well, necromancers lose 250 vit too, leaving them with 18-19k hp if going full glass. Elementalists aren’t exactly in a bad spot balance-wise, so saying that stacks were mandatory for them makes no sense. Eles rely on active defense, necros on passive; they should not have similar hp pools.

I find the stack removal good. They’re pointless buffs anyway that only serve to give people unfair advantage. They’ve also been a source of pressure on players to not die and always chase down guards like rabid dogs instead of focusing on more important things.

Another thing is that the relatively small buff the stacks give is greatly applied when a whole map blob has them, while the losing side gets a perpetual penalty for getting wiped. Bags and bragging is enough reward, there’s no need to punish the losing side.

With them gone, no one is nerfed and no one has gained anything. If you feel that you’ve been nerfed into the ground for losing those 250 vitality and 100 offensive points, you have bigger issues with your playing ability that you should probably work on first. No one ‘needs’ stacks. Instead, be happy you no longer have to chase godkitten guards all over the place before fighting just to feel ‘optimal’.

Well, there’s always the odd chance that those shouts are engineered to harm enemies rather than buffing allies, given our overall theme. It’s still a form of support, though, just not straight forward like the other classes.

As a necro, I’d say we’re middle somwehere. We have a ridiculously easy role spamming wells on queue, but defensively we are royally screwed running zerker gear with no stunbreakers; no stability; no blocks or evades; no invuls; no escapes/leaps and no vigor for dodges. We literally only have positioning and Death “Two hp bars zomg amazing” Shroud to save our squishy kitten.

Admittedly, that takes us surprisingly far, but sometimes in a blue moon you just really wish you had something to actually avoid damage or unstun you… I mean, if I took stunbreakers or defensive utilities, I’m left with what – spamming marks on the enemy? Yeah, what a great contribution I am to my server now.

Fat Disgrace.4275:

even the wall’s like venom share

New feature: Venomshare applied to walls now immobilize people moving on them or around them. You know you want it. Oh yeah.

Wolfey.3407:

To my understanding, EOTM was meant to be a playable queue for players to mess around and earn wvw stuff while they wait. Since it’s a queue with multiple over flow maps, it would make no logical sense to have it award anything of any major importance to normal wvw.

If anything, I do wonder how playable it would be if the Queues were restricted to your current match ups only. But, I think that would make the map unplayable for servers like Kaineng and other low tier servers who have a hard time keeping a queue on EB or their BL.

Maybe remove karma from event completion?

or Restrict it down to tiers?

It might very well have been the idea. As a random overflow it does work as intended, I suppose. I agree that changing it to server specific wouldn’t be a good idea from a population perspective either, we simply don’t have the playerbase to support that. Not even in the top tiers, honestly.

I was replying to why it ‘fails’ as a WvW map. I don’t fully agree that it has to to with players or the map itself, but rather with human psychology, making the map a bit of a catch 22 for Anet. We want a global overflow queue for WvW, but we also – as humans – want it to be ‘national’ and persistant enough to build a community to care for enough to not simply karmatrain the map while semi-afk. It just doesn’t work.

Changing rewards is tricky too. Take away from EotM and the farmers might go back to invading regular WvW because it will once again be more profitabe. Removing all PvE rewards from the entire WvW mode and replace it with something more akin to PvP rewards maybe? None of the serious WvW:ers give a rats about the champ bags and karma anyway, it’s just a nice little bonus we’ve come to live with. Making that little bonus something that benefits WvW more than PvE could perhaps help with the farm issue.

To me it makes more sense too. Why am I gaining 99% PvE loot playing 99% WvW? Hell, throw me more siege, skins, traps or whatever you want instead, I’d have more use for it. Elaborate/rework the badge system and I wouldn’t even need gold for gear.

I’d still argue that the biggest fail of EotM is the fact that it builds absolutely zero sense of teamwork, belonging or “nationality” to a server and each other for the players. Regular WvW manages to keep its sincerity because the players have a home server to feel proud of, to fight for and form a tight community around.

EotM, with its system of throwing everyone into a mix creates nothing for players to actually care for, so it turns into a mindless farm. You know no one around you, the game only lasts a few hours and you’ll have new, unknown and random “team mates” soon again. Why the kitten would anyone do anything but karmatrain in that environment?

WvW relies on server communities. Take that away and you have mindless, meaningless PvE with PvP aspects that no one is gonna bother with no matter how well the map is designed.

Yeah, a few of our projectile skills – like Spectral Grasp and Reaper’s Touch – are so inconsistent and buggy that Anet might aswell update their tooltip to say “Has a high chance of failure”.

If I understand things right, it will be removed from trait lines and distributed on gear instead.

From the blog post about Specializations:

Where Did My Trait-Line Stats Go?

We feel that separating build choices from stat decisions provides greater build flexibility, so you’ll no longer gain attribute points through a given line. Where will these stats go? Here’s a quick summary:

• Base player stats will be increased from 926 to 1000.
• Base attribute points on equipment will be increased so that all the gear in the game will give higher stats than it did before. This should account for most of the missing points.
• Each profession’s attributes will be updated to have half of their functionality be part of a specialization and half of their functionality will be a baseline for that profession. For example, elementalists now have a base attunement recharge of 10 seconds, which is reduced to 8.7 seconds when the arcane specialization is equipped.

These changes should keep the total stat numbers roughly the same as they were before, even though you’ll get them from different places. In addition to these changes, the need to unlock skills and traits will be removed from Player vs. Player entirely, and you’ll automatically have all the specializations available to you whenever you’re in PvP.

I know it doesn’t mention the bonuses specifically, but one would assume they include them. Alternatively, they haven’t decided yet and therefore intentionally left them out.

Aktium.9506:

splatticus.1278:

I wouldn’t mind if the Ritual of Life change is put in effect. I mean, getting a free Well of Blood just by quickly touching a downed ally seems pretty sweet in WvW. Rallybots are our best friends suddenly! /awaits the nerf bat assault of doom

You realize you can already do this right? The only change to the trait is the added 10% revive speed. It still has a cooldown and it will still have the coldown in HoT.

They said during the stream that they’re changing it so the well spawns when you start reviving, meaning that you can simply press your interact key to revive for half a second to get a free well and then cancel and carry on with your business. Currently you have to go through the whole reviving process for it to spawn. That is quite the difference, especially with the number of necros potentially using it in a typical zerg situation.

I wouldn’t mind if the Ritual of Life change is put in effect. I mean, getting a free Well of Blood just by quickly touching a downed ally seems pretty sweet in WvW. Rallybots are our best friends suddenly! /awaits the nerf bat assault of doom

I’ve always had the idea that necro, with its severe lack of active defense, instead needs to punish and/or make people think about actually targeting us to begin with. Thematically, this would be best done through your classic thorns-style of defense.

Something along the lines of Spiteful Spirit, but greatly expanded on, even making it our primary defense together with Death Shroud. From simple things like damage return on getting hit to buffing allies/debuffing enemies around you when you take damage.

The primary idea is to make the enemies reconsider whether they should attack the necro or not in any given situation. I’d also like it to be tied to Death Shroud, so that it’s at the same time a semi-active choice by the necro itself aswell as not making him completely untouchable.

It fits us thematically aswell as mechanically. If we’re supposed to facetank without active defense, we need ways to make it less of an obvious choice for the enemy to simply gank us down and carry on, like our situation mostly is at the moment.