[[Merged] Feedback about today's Icebrood Saga announcement]

Info for the event was sparse, so the community filled in the gaps with expectations. These assumptions were very public on ANet's own forums, so it definitely wasn't a secret. If expectations were unreal, then there should have been communication from the people who had visibility to this info.

GW2 is a great game with some solid devs, but this was a drop on the part of community relations. This is an announcement 2 years from the PoF release, which came out 2 years from HoT, so it's not unusual for the community to expect more, particularly when living story releases have never came with something as big as a full public event.

[So, what do you think?]

The stuff they announced sounds good and if it was just announced as the usual blog post, I would have considered it a full positive. It just didn't make sense to have an event for this stuff since there's not enough content to justify it. At most, this could have been a good streaming supplemental episode with the dev interviews.

I know they're desperate to build some hype in the face of WoW Classic, ArchAge Unchained, etc., but that's probably backfired. Right or wrong, when you build up excitement like this, people expect expansions, new games, etc.

But at least I'm not a WvW player. I really feel sorry for people who are invested in that area of the game...

[What's your "favorite" profession?]

@Arklite.4013 said:One of my favorite things in large in-game events is to click on people and see what profession people chose to get 100% world completion on. I'd love to hear what everyone's choice is. From observation I've seen mostly Guardians and Mesmers with the badge.

I've never really thought about doing that, but this finding kind of surprises me since Mesmers were the slowest profession for travelling, at least in the time before mounts and before they added swiftness to Signet of Inspiration.

I also never thought Mesmer was that great of a profession for open world (at least until it was expanded upon with the elite specs) since the clone system felt clunky against enemies with small health pools and there weren't many AoE abilities for event tagging.

Either way, this is probably a really old way of thinking since every professions has strong build options for open world now and mounts make all travel a breeze.

[Do you think the PVP has way too steep learning curve and it is dropping population cause of it ?]

@dagger dave.5201 said:No cause when you start pvp for the first time you get matched with other new players in unranked.

Only if there's enough other new players queueing at the same time.

As time goes on, there's less new PvP players, so that sort of matchmaking becomes harder. As that matchmaking becomes harder, the games for new players get worse. As the games for new players get worse, the less likely new players are to stick with PvP and keep playing.

It's something that easily turns into a self-perpetuating cycle.

[Should there be a counter to Invulnerability?]

I voted no because I don't think that invuln needs a counter, but there should still be limits. Renewed Focus is a good example because it's on a long cooldown, only has a short 3 second duration, and doesn't allow point capture, and since it's a channel, you can't perform any other actions.

[Will you be trying the new 2v2 map?]

Wondering where other people stand on this one, but personally, as interesting as this map looks, I can't see actually playing it when it's only available as hotjoin/custom map.

[Will you be trying the new 2v2 map?]

[(Spoilers) ANet Reveals Contents of 7th Birthday Gifts]

Players get a huge fancy pose, but because they described the "chair" as a "rock", there will be a never-ending QQ of "all we got was a rock!" from people (although hopefully most of this is at least somewhat sarcastic).

My favorite birthday reward is still the birthday blaster, but I think it's good that they don't go too overboard with birthday rewards. At some point, new players will just get discouraged and feel like they'll never be able to have the shiny stuff as veterans just because they picked up the game at a later date.

[An (probably terrible idk) idea for Daredevil's F1]

I really like the idea of there being a vault/evade instead of a port. This came up in another thread, but it's worth supporting here too.

Also, something else they could do to make it more interesting would be to change steal so that it no longer grants a stolen ability and instead steals endurance from the target. Maybe the target loses a quarter of their endurance and you gain a quarter of yours (bigger gain for daredevil, but at least it's not overpowered punishing to targetted enemies).

[Ranks Should Be Based On Skill, Not Luck]

People here don't understand basic mathematics and statistics.

Random factors may happen every game, but they happen to both teams. Sometimes the weakness of your own team is beyond what your personal skill can overcome. Sometimes that happens to someone on the other team. However, when you play enough games, this effect evens out and you're at a disadvantage just as much as you're at an advantage. The effect that will remain constant, however, is how more likely your team is to win with your contribution.

Play enough games and the randomness of good/bad teammates evens out.

[What Class do you like fighting Against, the most?]

Holosmith isn't as fun to fight against as it used to be, but it still has pretty good, clear tells, so fighting against them feels more like I'm trying to outplay the things I see happening rather than trying to fight against things that I am guessing are happening.

Warrior used to be like this, particularly way back in the Hambow days, but's it's less so with Spellbreaker. Still, I'd put it up there near the top regardless.

[On the Eve of GW2's 7th birthday, some thoughts from Hasan Minhaj]

@Westenev.5289 said:I mean, as a consumer not on a first name basis with any of the developers, why should I make up stories and assumptions about the inner workings of Anet, simply because some dude throws the games name around in a potentially unrelated rant about what happens in other companies?

TL;DR; I'm here for the game, which I enjoy. If I have to rethink that relationship, or be a little more considerate of anets situation, that position had better come with a paycheck.

You might want to re-read the post. No one is accusing ANet of anything.

[On the Eve of GW2's 7th birthday, some thoughts from Hasan Minhaj]

Yea, I definitely hope that the stuff described isn't happening at ANet, but I think there's also a motive for gamers to encourage good environments for developer working conditions too: Developers who are happy with their job and are allowed to explore their passion without getting overworked, exploited, etc. will produce better content. I hate downtime between updates as much as the next player, but I'd rather have good quality content than uninspired cash grab stuff that's forced through by devs who have lost their drive to be creative.

@Knighthonor.4061 said:I believe people sleep on the potential that a Gw themed game app could have. Yeah Anet's version was crappy according to NCsoft's evaluation,

But there is lots of potential there for a cross platform, cross interaction gameplay. I haven't seen such a thing done in a out of the box innovative way yet. Closes was Dust /Eve cross game interaction and imo that was flawed for other reasons, mainly its limited innovative creativity.

But the room is there for this. I have some ideas for this myself.

Reply to the wrong thread?

[New 2v2 map but..]

Oh yea, 2v2 is already in the game right? I've honestly never tried it since there's no queue for it.

[What is with the obsession with Condi play?]

Condis wouldn't be nearly as obnoxious in this game if the attacks had better tells. I mean, you can outplay someone in a power build by watching their animations and avoiding the attacks, but with condis, almost everything has such a subtle movement or is part of constant spam (like mesmer clones) that countering those builds seems having the right counter build with cleanses/resistance than actually outplaying your enemy.

[Old school PvP please?]

@Sampson.2403 said:Y'all consider the fact that you might just simply be bored of playing the same thing for so long?

Just multi game or take a break instead of asking the game to change maybe?

Nah, that's not really related. I enjoy Conquest, but the game would be better with more ways to PvP than just Conquest sPvP or World vs World. There's just a lot of potential in the game that devs haven't tapped into.

And the devs will always be making new content. The feedback here is just to allow devs to understand what type of new content is desired and how to prevent them from putting work into something that people don't enjoy.

Besides, what's wrong with asking for new stuff to be added to the game?

[New Guild decorations! Boats!]

@"Cronospere.8143" said:https://imgur.com/8FJ8MXl

Here is an image with some kind of size reference.To build them on water i suggest using racetracks and delete those after.

Edit: Link doesnt work when clicking on it, no idea why..

You have to choose the link from Imgur that has the .jpg or .png or whatever extension at the end. If you edit your post to use this link instead, it should work:https://i.imgur.com/8FJ8MXl.jpg

Question about the boat though: Does it move or is it stationary?

[Old school PvP please?]

@Tom Hsiao.9705 said:I’m really not a fan of the gw2 PvP just base on capturing points...can we at least have one mode in rank that’s death match like GW1?I could play GW1 PvP all day because it was more engaging and fun unlike gw2 people just teleport away to capture points...like what is the POINT of PvP!!????? This is worse than MOBA game concept....many times I see my teams just scatter around trying to capture points,,. It is so lame and extremely boring...Literally everyday I just play 1 PvP game to get my daily I’m out because it suck so bad...Maybe there are some people really enjoy capture points but this is the most boring PvP game I have ever played...Probably the worst PvP mode in the market...please fix this!!

I mean isn’t it a wake up call nobody is going crazy for GW2 PvP... you don’t see massive fans tune in to watch the PvP game or tournament for a reason...Not sure if any dev will ever see this... or care about PvP in this game enough to make a change...But if you ever see this..thanks for reading.... I have been waiting since the game launch and still waiting... :'(

I've been wishing for this since day one. The devs have generally lightly experimented with PvP outside of conquest mode and give up on those experiments fast.

Capture the Flag mechanics - Spirit's Watch is the closest thing we've seen to the flag capture from GW1 GvG and it was always unpopular because it just randomly tossed the capture mechanic to a small map in the middle of a conquest game. This was incredibly unbalanced early on because the travel distance for capturing the orb is tiny on such a small map. This led to burst movement abilities becoming too powerful and instead of realizing that having a substantial travel distance for capture mechanics is the best way to allow players to react and strategize around escorting of orbs/flags, they just replaced all player skills with 3 generic skills in order to band-aid the map.

NPC/Lord Battles - Legacy of the Foefire was the closest thing we ever saw to the GvG fights in GW1 and while it has been a reasonable success off and on throughout balance patches, it's always been restricted in how much the lord mechanic really matters for most games since the team size is small and just focusing on the conquest objectives is still the major focus of the game.Stronghold was put forward as a sort of hybrid between GW1 GvG and MOBAs, but by adding in so much focus on NPCs, few players really enjoyed the game and devs were never able to balance the game mode in a way that didn't leave 100% pure rush strategies as superior. Now it's just a dusty relic that's been long forgotten, but never fully removed, despite a pretty hefty initial investment.

Deathmatch - This one is particularly sad since the fix is so obvious. When the devs added this to the game, they kept the point scoring and continuous respawn mechanics from Conquest, which was a huge shortcut that made the gameplay awful. Instead of mirroring the way that most of GW1 did deathmatch in Random Arenas or that WoW had done it with Arena, the continuous respawn just constantly led to games where a bit of actual good gameplay would start before one team inevitably gained the upper hand after securing some kills and then just snowballing and spawn camping until the timer ran out or score hit 500. If the devs would just turn off respawns or at least put in a killable NPC in charge of respawns, then games wouldn't drag out and be so miserable for everyone.

Devs have dabbled with aspects of what they think players liked from GW1, but they've always either shied away from fully commiting to replicating the experience or tried to shove the whole package into a small map when large area of effect abilities and flashy skills already make PvP a clusterfuck of a mess. However, I still hope that they learn from this and don't just give up on giving PvPers something different than Conquest.

[VB empty]

Honestly, I'm surprised that VB was as active as it was for as long as it was. It's been quite a while since HoT was new content and while meta events have kept those maps pretty active, VB is one of the least popular.

[Which class needs a nerf asap?]

@Ganathar.4956 said:

@"Dahkeus.8243" said:Eh, I don't think Holo is as bad as a lot of people say it is. Mirage still needs some of the stuns brought under control, but beyond that, I don't think that there's any major outliers in terms of build performance as bad as we've usually seen in the past.

Honestly, what I'd like to see most in the next balance patch is for the devs to finish the goal of adjusting elite specs to have some disadvantage to core specs and balance around this. Ele still doesn't seem to have any disadvantage with their elite specs and Druid has had so many nerfs recently that the pet damage reduction just pushed it completely out of viability. Thief swipe also needs something to make it more unique, such as an evading leap mechanic instead of just being a shorter ranged unblockable steal.

Did I read correctly? Are you claiming that ele doesn't have any trade-offs in its elite specs? I swear there are so many blatantly wrong statements in the forums by people who do not understand the professions that they are talking about. If you understood anything about how core ele is played and the differences with the elite specs you would not be making such a claim. Let's see if I can make you understand.

Weaver might have the biggest trade-offs out of any spec in the game. Maybe the new chrono trade-off is comparable, but I do not play that spec enough to say for certain. First of all, you have the 4 second global cooldown on attunements, that you get instead of the 10 second cooldown on the attunement you swapped from. The benefit of this global cooldown is that you can swap back to the same attunement much quicker than before if you want to. However, if you want to cycle through all of your attunements and then go back to your original attunement, then you take way longer to do this as a weaver. A weaver needs a full 16 seconds to cycle between all attunements (4x4=16). A core ele only needs 10 seconds, which is the cooldown of the first attunement you swapped from. Weaver also has the dual attunement mechanic that gives the spec access to dual skills, but those also come at a cost. Your #4 and #5 weapon skills are always those of your last attunement, which means that there is a 4 second delay if you want to use your #4 and #5 skills to react to something. A core ele has no such delay and can just reach the skills instantly by swapping attunements with no global cooldown. There is also the matter of your single attunement #3 skills being inaccessible unless you attune to the same element twice.

Tempest trade-offs also exist, but they might be a bit less obvious. First of all, I feel like I should mention that you need to wait for 5 seconds after swapping to an attunement if you want to use your overload. This in itself is not a drawback, but it does ensure that by the time you start casting your overload you will likely have already used all the weapon skills of that attunement. Upon use, overloads put their attunement on a 20 second cd, which is twice the normal cd of 10 seconds, instead of having their own cd unlike something such as beastmode of soulbeast. What's worse is that the full 20 second cd applies even if you are interrupted, which is not difficult on a 4 second cast. This is a huge trade-off, especially when you consider that you have likely already used all your attunement skills. If you do not swap to another attunement and stay in the same attunement instead to "cheese" this cd you are left with the terrible ele auto-attacks. Even after this, you could always argue that you are not forced to use an overload as a tempest, which means that is better than core because it has the option to use or not use overloads. However, this is not entirely true. If you do not use overloads, your tempest minors basically do not exist, except half of your grandmaster minor. You are giving up all your minor traits if you choose to never overload. Also, consider that if you have a DPS tempest that never overloads and a DPS core ele, the core ele will easily outDPS the tempest. If you do not use overloads, tempest is simply not that good of a trait line. It would be outclassed by core ele in so many ways. Which means that you need to overload and you need to take the trade-offs. The exception is with some variants of support tempest, but even then you want to use your overloads fairly frequently.

You can argue Weaver to some extent, but the argument is only against being able to swap to the other half of an attunement and even then, the cooldown for swaps is reduced by the elite.

Tempest is the biggest example of not having a penalty for swapping from core. All functionality of core ele is the same, except you get a bonus mechanic when you sit in an attunement for long enough. Your argument about there being an indirect penalty for not using the mechanic doesn't hold any water. By that logic, Druid should have never been nerfed since a druid that doesn't use celestial form is also wasting their traits. Same goes for a berserker that never uses berserk mode.

But the actual point of my post is that the balancing in the direction of the philosophical goal is incomplete. You can nit pick about what parts of that are or are not complete, but that arguing with a tree because you can't see the forest.

[xxxxxxxxxx]

@Aza.2105 said:I disagree, trade offs are a great change. Its how the game was designed originally. Each profession had trade offs. With the introduction of elite specs, what happened was the elite specs filled in the gaps each profession had. Effectively removing the weaknesses they were designed with. Its no coincidence that the massive power creep happened when elite specs were introduced.

Agreed with this. The direction of these changes is spot on, not only for good balance, but also to the original intent of elite specs. However, until the devs do more changes to get these trade-offs consistent across professions and builds, it's going to be a bit of a rough experience.

[Why is Skyhammer in the competitive rotation?]

I'm not much of a fan of Skyham since it's just not a particularly fun map, but it doesn't feel as wildly imbalanced as it has in the past. I actually wish it was just kept as an unranked map because as cheesy as the knockback insta-deaths were, it was actually pretty fun that way for casual games that wouldn't affect rank.

@"LolLookAtMyAP.8394" said:I don't get why it's not "Press [ ] to interact" for the jump pads. Run up to it while spamming interact 10/10.

As comical as it would be to see people flung away when they try to revive an ally on a jump pad, I don't think that would work (There's never been a press-to-interact option for anything other than "f" and they wouldn't add a new hotkey just for this map).

[Which class needs a nerf asap?]

Eh, I don't think Holo is as bad as a lot of people say it is. Mirage still needs some of the stuns brought under control, but beyond that, I don't think that there's any major outliers in terms of build performance as bad as we've usually seen in the past.

Honestly, what I'd like to see most in the next balance patch is for the devs to finish the goal of adjusting elite specs to have some disadvantage to core specs and balance around this. Ele still doesn't seem to have any disadvantage with their elite specs and Druid has had so many nerfs recently that the pet damage reduction just pushed it completely out of viability. Thief swipe also needs something to make it more unique, such as an evading leap mechanic instead of just being a shorter ranged unblockable steal.

[Shadow Portal bug]

@Obsidian.4910 said:

@Dahkeus.8243 said:

@FuGoo.6495 said:++visibility

Visibility here doesn't matter. Reporting the bug either on the bug forum, or better yet, using the in-game reporting tool are the best ways to get a quick resolution.

oh woops my bad, first time posting a bug hehe. Il try the bug forum instead! c:

Awesome, thanks. The more bug reports, the more likely we are to see a fix. =D

[Core vs Elite balancing - buff core or nerf elite?]

A little buff/nerf to each is probably idea, but it's really hard to judge on a case by case basis. I mean, in some cases, elites are so strong, you almost never want to run core if you can avoid it, such as Ele. In other cases, core builds are even stronger than elite builds, such as S/D thief in sPvP. I mean, even some elite specs have been nerfed so hard that they're behind under-performing core specs, such as Druid in sPvP.