Guild Wars 2

Continuing to recruit, builds and training provided!

Trying to be concise, I would say that the top five issues facing WvW right now are as follows, and in order of their importance.

1. Make the WvW community feel engaged with and listened to. You’re starting out well, but there are three years of neglect to undo and it will take a lot of effort and a lot of time. Sorting the signal from the noise on these forums is going to be difficult, and you might want to do more rounds of commander interviews, but when the WvW population takes it as a given that ANet doesn’t care about them and finds a sort of bitter amusement in the Skyhammer event completely breaking the entire map four months after the release of HoT, something is very very wrong.

2. Make the PvP combat fun. This is mainly what the complaints about stability are about. Around a year and a half ago, the combat was free flowing and aggressive with an emphasis on frontline and pushes. People enjoyed that style and want it back. The current meta of oversized backlines bombing each other at 1200 range, while the frontline has trouble pushing because of snares, stability, and choke points is not one that people enjoy. We don’t necessarily need old stability back, but any balance or map changes should be dedicated to bringing back this style of play in WvW.

3. Do something, whether it be server mergers or an alliances rework, to address population and tier issues. Many WvW tiers are completely stale, with movement in or out of the tier being extremely rare, and repetitive matchups.

In the same vein, there is little action outside of the top couple tiers. Any player should be able to play WvW and have an action packed and fun experience, not wander around a deserted wasteland used only for daily achievements.

4. Bring the rewards in line with the costs. Until the advent of PvE raiding, WvW was the only game mode where players regularly needed to farm for more expensive sets of gear, sigils, and runes, while constantly using the most expensive consumables. All this while being by far the least rewarding game mode.

You could argue that PvE raiding now requires a similar investment, but the rewards are much more in line with the costs there, including regular drops of ascended gear to help with equipping characters and the potential for rare and expensive drops.

In HoT, WvW players need to venture outside of their game mode to farm the gear that they need to be effective since it’s not available to them inside the game mode at any price. Additionally, the new WvW upgrade system is a massive transfer of wealth from WvW players to PvE players. Scribing and the associated costs are borne far more heavily by WvW players than anyone else, with the main source of most scribing related materials being PvE; and high end WvW upgrades costing upwards of 10 or 15 gold each. Also insanely expensive guild siege, both in terms of gold and build times.

5. Adjust the maps and general flow of the game. I appreciate what ANet was trying to do with the new map, make it difficult to traverse to increase response times and offer a large number of attack points to empower smaller groups and split up the blobs that are far too common in the higher tiers.

However, when combined with other changes (tier 3 gates, the current fighting meta, commander attrition), defense and large groups were empowered more than offense and small groups, leading to the worst of both worlds, defense and large groups on a map that is not fun for them to fight on.

Evening out and opening up the desert map would offer many more open areas and fewer choke points to fight in, while lowering wall and gate HP can compensate for the reduced response times. It will take effort, but DBL can be made into a enjoyable map.

Hello John,

The reason that Saturday is much more active than Friday is that people are at work until Friday evening. Also, the last few hours of a match in WvW rarely matter for server placement, and as such are considered dead time by the majority of WvW players, with many people not bothering to log in even if they are available, and not in WvW even if they are logged in.

Thursday or Friday evening prime is the perfect time for reset, people can come home from work for the weekend and go straight into the action of reset during their normal play hours. Saturday reset harms all timezones and gives much less weekend play time during the most active part of a match, and afternoon reset is a poor choice as well since many people are busy doing things during the daytime.

If you want to help recruit PvE players into WvW, we do too. We’re the ones out on the front lines doing most of it, trying to keep the population up and the game mode alive through three years of neglect. It would greatly help us recruit those PvE players and keep WvW alive if ANet would stop getting in our way with ill-advised initiatives like arbitrary transfer locks and changing the time of the most important weekly event in WvW without even getting our advice first.

In short, I feel like changing the reset time is a solution in search of a problem borne of poor data analysis and inexperience with how the game mode is actually being played.

If it would help to get direct feedback from some actual WvW players, the server leadership of Blackgate would be happy to happy to sit down and discuss this, and I’m sure that we could scare up most of the leadership from the other servers in the upper NA tiers as well.

Please reconsider the change to WvW reset. The transfer lock is already slowly strangling the OCX and SEA timezones, particularly given recent events in NA.

Changing reset night like this will make things even worse for our friends and will wind up forcing more guilds and players out of the game by halving the most active period of play.

The Princess Doll Tonic is the greatest thing about this game. Any problems with it need to be bumped to Priority #1. Nao.

Mez got into an altercation with ICOA recently after they got fed up with him trolling map chat and slagging off our commanders. Mez vowed that he’d “destroy” ICOA, if posting false info in the matchup thread is the best he’s got I doubt they need to worry.

FEAR classing up the joint like usual.

gebrechen.5643:

What happened to KISS?

Last I heard part of KISS transferred back to EU and the ones who stayed folded into IRON. Don’t exactly have firsthand knowledge on if that’s accurate or not though.

Hammerguard.9834:

I know you want to hear the rest of the story but you’re going to have to wait, sir. My imagination needs time to come up with all these elaborate schemes to keep the story interesting.

PS: It’s not my imagination.

SoR had a sizeable lead going into EU, and ate a 2v1 for most of the day as a result, BG edging into the lead late in NA, now that BG is in the lead we have been the subject of a 2v1 across all three borderlands for the past four hours. I don’t see what is complicated about this.

Wow, asking OCX for help Tarkus? Whatever happened to that neverending stream of trash talk about them we heard from you on BG TS?

Reslinal.2359:

Tarkus.4109:

Reslinal.2359:

You probabely should read the posts before posting as no one is arguing for stat buff:)

You should have read some of the previous posts and threads about this earlier where people have argued for the stat buff. Note that I also said in the post that the bloodlust changes didn’t encourage small team play, it encourages more of the blobbing that people complain about. In that larger pop servers would get it for the buff, if not to split off into smaller teams – I was basically saying that it was intended to split the zerg but failed in doing so.

Hmm..as far as I can see, most if not all posts in this thread is arguing ANET should not remove the ppt on stomp and should remove the stat buffs, mind link to who your posts are responding to?

As for whether bloodlust buff split the zerg or not, guess different players have different experiences since I certainly see more havoc groups running around since the bloodlust change.

Tarkus is just in this thread to troll and see if he can torch a few more bridges behind him because he noticed a lot of Blackgate posters in the thread. Same stuff as he’s been doing ever since he transferred to JQ and made it his personal quest to offend every single last player on Blackgate.

As for bloodlust, making WvW more about combat is certainly not a bad direction for ANet to take, but if they’re going to do so they need to stick to their guns a little better. Developing by forum QQ is a very bad method. Also, making major changes to the scoring system three days before leagues start was probably not the best move.

The way things work in Tier 1 (at least theoretically, even Tier 1 hasn’t always got the dedication or coverage to pull it off) is that when a commander wants to hold an objective, they will drop defensive siege pre-sited to cover positions that attackers will try to assault. Defensive siege generally consists of arrow carts and trebuchets.

They will then leave 1-3 people behind to scout the objective, depending on which objective (bay is a lot harder to watch than a tower), and how many people they can get to accept scouting duty (not many people are willing, even in Tier 1). The scout’s job is to refresh the timers on the defensive siege emplacements and watch for an attacking force. If they see any substantial forces approaching, they’ll contact a commander via whisper or teamspeak to turn back the attackers, and crew the defensive siege to help delay the attackers until the commander can arrive.

NS sure seems serious about their PvF, looking to take SoR’s crown.

Carighan.6758:

Bloodgruve.6038:

Build diversity? Every build now has 25 fewer points to work with because of the Illusionists Celerity change. All has been said already. My Mesmer is sidelined until something else is done.

Blood~

Or you simply play without that trait. It’s not necessary, and builds work mighty fine without it. Ofc it’s a very strong trait, but hey, that’s why it’s 25 deep into one tree.

Get off that horse dude, seriously. There’s more people around these forums with design or development experience than just you.

For situations like IC, there are two correct ways and one incorrect way to address them. Did it need to be addressed? Yes. Did ANet address it in the worst possible way that they could have? Also yes.

Correct way the first is if the trait is (nearly) universally taken, then absorb it into the base numbers and put something different in its place that makes for an actual choice. Correct way the second is to restrict access, but apply countervailing buffs to affected skills, or other traits which affect said skills, so that specs which lose access will remain at the same overall power level. There were many buffs in the patch, but none aimed at counteracting the effect of losing IC.

The incorrect way is to restrict access with no countervailing buffs, as that has the effect of a significant classwide nerf to all specs other than those which retain access.

Unless you’re trying to argue the position that virtually all mesmer specs other than IP Shatter were that overpowered and in need of a significant nerf (and good luck doing that without becoming the laughingstock of this forum), ANet screwed up big time on IC, no matter how you slice it.

Further, I would like to note that the IC change was not in the leaked set of patch notes which now appear to be from a late beta version. This means that the IC change was likely made at the last minute and likely poorly thought through.

The problem with relying on iWarden is that it’s A. melee and B. stationary, so it has problems with getting blown up in a lot of fights. Phantasms that keep some distance between themselves and their targets (Sword or Staff for single target, GS for AoE) tend to survive much better in fractals.

I only tend to use iWarden in situations where it’s anti-projectile abilities are important and there’s a relatively low amount of melee around, for instance the imbued shaman fight, harpies in uncategorized, or some spots in dredge.

I was only talking about the missed attacks/reduced damage issue in my post above, but yes I agree the attack delay is a big deal and cripple is very important. Returning to the miss chance issue again and completely ignoring the damage difference, the HUGE difference between the berserker hitting at least once and getting a cripple off on your target and having the berserker completely whiff a pass and not cripple at all is another reason I don’t think the miss chance is an intentional nerf.

Excellent work, but I have to disagree with your conclusion about the GS. Either the attempted fix didn’t work, or the fix hasn’t been implemented yet. I say this for two reasons.

First, the random missing on the berserker is present nowhere else in the game, and the high variance of said missing is inconsistent with having sPvP be balanced. Since the changes to the GS that introduced the miss chance bug were because of sPvP, I highly doubt that it’s intentional.

Second, there are still other phantasms that hit just as hard as the pre-11/15 berserker according to your own testing. If it was intentionally nerfed to reduce mesmer damage output, I have to think warlock and swordsman would have been hit as well. Yes, they are single target rather than aoe, but aoe is much less important in an sPvP format compared to others.

Please keep up the good work though.

In large fights, it can be difficult to pick your clones and phantasms apart from the goings on and figure out exactly what you have up. This can make it difficult to make decisions about shattering, which abilities you need to be casting, etc.

To help out with this, I suggest that the three illusion counter circles on the mesmer UI be filled with a different color depending on whether that illusion slot is filled by a clone or a phantasm (e.g. light purple for a clone, dark purple for a phantasm). Better yet, fill the circle with an icon marking out the type if the illusion is a phantasm, or just a solid color for an illusion (e.g. a weapon icon for a phantasm spawned by a particular weapon, shield for a phantasmal defender, etc, and the current solid color for clones).

This is obviously not an earth shattering priority but I think it’d be a solid quality of life improvement for mesmers.

There was no change listed to the phantasmal disenchanter in the patch, and the listed range (900) remains the same, but if I try and cast it on a target more than about 300 away, I get target out of range. Anyone else seeing this?

Posting for my friend, as his account was hacked the morning (PST) of 9/2, email changed, and he can’t login.

Account: BlackNBlue.7892
Ticket: 120902-012622

Thanks.