Deniara Devious.3948

I happen to have a large collection of old films on Bluray and DVD and I purchase usually 50+ books per year. I can watch an old long classic like Cleopatra (1963, over 4 hour film!), but I find the GW2 dialogue dull and uninspiring. Uninteresting bland character design and bad writing is boring and obviously there should be a skip button, like most of the other games offer. How they are expecting people to replay this alts? Snooze fest #2, #3...?

I feel the original Tyria maps still have the best map design in GW2. You can explore them all without going through the story and they are so nicely designed you can replay them. The expansions and most living story maps have been disappointing map design and I don't understand why to gate content behind story, which has slowly moving NPCs and dull dialogue and convoluted story, which makes me fall asleep. I rather read a good book or watch well-written film or TV series, but seriously GW2 writing & stories are not that level. There is a very good reason why many other games have a "skip" button. New maps, new abilities, new monsters are all good. Forcing players to play through story = bad.

Defense events at least contribute to the WvWvW, so they can stay, but maybe the threshold what counts as defense should be lowered a bit. Often even if you kill enemy players, you won't get tower/keep defender. I would rather see completely useless jumping puzzle and Edge of the Mists (EotM) removed from the WvWvW weeklies at Wizard's Vault. Jumping puzzle or EotM doesn't contribute anything to WvWvW. They are purely driven by rewards, EotM is dead and empty anycase, because the map was an epic fail and the opposite of fun to play. In fact I use it as an example of how not to make a multiplayer map in game design lessons.

The best way to solve this problem is to seriously limit the application of boons, especially boons on team mates. There is something wrong with the game design when you see large amount of players having almost all the boons of the game on them most of the time. They can just stand in the damage circles and take very little damage. Combine this long range pulls, which work through walls and obstacles as well. This leads to game play where people are afraid to engage enemy blob, unless they enjoy numerical advantage. And the side with numerical advantage can just pull the smaller side players inside their blob from range, making even defense a pain. Defense was nerfed too much. Excessive boons are also a problem in roaming. Just look at willbender and several thief builds. They have lots of boons on, while tons of mobility and burst, ability to engage and disegnage at will, yet being reasonable bursty. This is simply broken and not fun to play against. Toxic to this game mode. Some roaming builds have 20+ might stacks all the time giving balanced stats like celestial too power. Take way all that might generation and celestial will no longer deliver much any damage.

Please give us our old servers back. 6 weeks of alliances was imbalanced match ups every single week! Massive point and KDR differences.

There has been for 11+ years complaint how stealth is abused in WvWvW, yet nothing done about it. I still don't understand why revealed in only 3 seconds in WvWvW, but 4 seconds in pvp, even though in big open maps stealth is far more powerful in WvWvW. Obviously revelated should be 4 seconds in WvWvW and stealth should be capped to max 8-10 seconds, meaning no permanent stealth for any profession. Fighting against excessive amount of evades, mobility., stealth or teleports is simply not fun. The other side can just reset the fight and soon try again. Creating such one sided game experiences (one side has fun, the other side doesn't) is not good game design. There has been countless of threads of requests to nerf Willbenders or other overperforming elite specs. What did Arenanet do? It just keeps buffing guardian, even though guardian has always been the most popular choice. There has been countless of threads to nerf the boon ball meta for years. Nothing done. Even more boon spam via the elite specs. The scoring is done so that there is no incentive to attack the strongest side, so there two stronger sides often both double team against the weakest one, creating bad game experience to the outnumbered side. So maybe Arenanet has been listening to the wrong people? Ayna PS. I have never asked for new maps (instead to asked to remove the Desert bl from rotation) nor alliance. I just want better balance and existing maps to be fixed and get a nice big lake + central island (without any guild claim/guild aura) instead of the ugly ruins area (where almost nobody plays).

Just remove Desert BL from rotation, but don't score it differently. It is not a fun map to play due so many reasons that is impossible to fix it e.g. distances between keeps + towers is too large and it has visibility issues and way too many exploits (which have never been fixed). And it is not a learn to play issue, I thousands of hours in WvWvW, mostly in Alpine and Desert BL and the latter really sucks. Similarly Edge of the Mists is failed map and there should be any weeklies related to EotM or WvWvW jumping puzzle. Both EotM or jumping puzzle contribute the WvWvW. Ayna

The elite specs trade offs are of course just a marketing slogan, not a real design principle. To put it simply elite > core. It is pay to win after all. And Arenanet loves to "balance" some of the elite specs by nerfing the core (it did that to engineer so many times I lost count). I personally play almost solely core classes & I even use core only consumables & core only stat selections etc. Yeah, you read it right: core ranger with core pets, core engineer, core elementalist and so on. Let's even take some cheap core food, like mango pie or the cheapest possible core runes and sigils. I know these are suboptimal builds. Ayna PS. I have 10k WXP rank (diamond legend), but those ranks are really just matter who much you played. Not display of skills.

This is an extremely disappointing patch. Areananet still did not address their favorite children: excessive stealth and willbender (and other broken builds) in WvWvW. Boon ball is a strong as before. There has been many threads about these, so I won't go into detail, why are bad for the game. But instead Arenanet decided to nerf the shortbow engineer, as if that was a common WvWvW build. Do the developers even play their own game? Their communication with the community and through these forums is close to zero. Converting the testimony of heroics is a painfully slow. At some point I just stopped it and I had like 85k heroics left. Why not just automatically convert them all into jade heroics for all? Why I would need to spent long time just clicking and converting them? I hate such click management "game". If the old heroics can no longer be used for anything, why not just auto-convert them instead of requiring us to do gazillion clicks to do that? We have tons of useless currencies, like badges, karma etc. Why not actually give us legendary weapon reward tracks, which do NOT require pve masteries etc? I don't mind if WvWvW legendary weapons have same skins as pve ones and would require lots of gold, materials and do the reward track many times. Just give us something worth having to buy with all these junk currencies?

I don't think instadown mechanisms are particularly good game design. It is just matter of reflexes, not brains or strategy. Dodge an attack or die. Does this promote smart game-play or just mere reflex test and bind dodge key e.g. to your extra mouse button (what I have done) ? Secondly the open world pve in this game is superbly easy if you have full ascended geared level 80-level character. I play a sub-optimal core engineer build, with zero block skills, invulnerability, no stealth, no evade frames. Full core build, including core consumables. I can solo a lot of the level 80 group events both in pve and WvWvW (e.g. take a keep). It is not just Tyria which is easy, in fact the expansion open world pve maps are easy as well, especially the latest one. In fact I would argue that some of the Orr maps (Tyria) are slightly harder than Secrets of the Obscure, which has tons of large mobs, but the huge-sized enemies do next to no damage: If you have some sort of protection & condi cleanses and heals you will do fine. The difficulty of the expansion maps (HoT, PoF, EoD and SoO) is never combat, but sometimes it is travel. For example I never liked Tangled Depths or most of the other Heart of Thorns maps due excessive vertical design and difficulty in navigation, but the actual combat in those maps is not challenging. You can just AoE nuke all the mobs and ranged pewpew and strafe most of the champions. And you really don't need mechanist for that. Pretty much anything will do. I was even showing my son how you can steam roll pve content in this game using core elementalist using only core weapons (staff!), core consumables, core everything. I mean you cannot choose anything worse than that?

For open world pve content any class and even core builds are perfectly viable as this game is as easy as it gets. Guardian and ranger are probably the easiest to play. Guardian can be easily specced to have plenty of sustain (some of it is passive) and still have good damage. Ranger pet makes it pretty easy to solo champions as the champion will focus the pet and you can just kite and pew pew from distance. I have shown my son how I can just use a non-optimal core build, to solo called "hard" pve content (some of the expansion maps, level 80 group events) with some of those professions are rarely play. Press skills on cooldown or just use random skills and the ranger, necro, guardian etc. will just skim through. Bind dodge to extra mouse button and press it when you feel like it or big boss is about to hit you. Engineer actually requires the most work, even more than elementalist. For core elementalist choosing both glyphs of elementals and using fire elementals on them is the easy way for open world pve. You can get massive fire AoE damage, big part is more or less of passive. Everything around your character just melts and dies. I don't recommend this build for other game modes.

All these changes are are bad. Removing 25% movement speed from mech legs is really bad and it already offered 33% condition duration on cripple, chill and immobilize = vital for WvWvW survival. Arenanet still never listens to its players and keeps nerfing the core engineer to "balance" engineer. Core engineer has never been overpowered, it is the elite specs.

Weird. I am using a desktop PC, which is 11 years old. The original graphics card died years ago so I fitted Nvidia 1060 (ASUS 1060 Strix) with 6 GB RAM to it. I can easily get 60 fps in full 4K glory (3840x2160). Yes, 11-year-old PC runs this game fine in 4k. Note: I use vsync on and I only have 60 Hz display, so 60 fps is fine for me. I mostly play WvWvW. I am typing this on a Dell work laptop, which haw awfully bad thermal design. CPU can hit 100% and start to throttle in mere 15 seconds of heavy load. My work laptop got a bit better after setting BIOS to setting, which minimizes fan noise and temperature. Yes, it runs a bit lower frequency, but that is fine of Guild Wars 2. I also had a Dell service person replace the thermal components, as this laptop was running extremely hot. Lesson learned: Don't buy Dell or expect them to run games. The 6-year-old Dell was fine with GW2.

1. Population imbalance. Especially problematic in EU, where there is 5 tiers and 3 servers end up without a link. Some might be stuck to last tier as red for weeks. 2. Desert borderland (red) should be replaced by Alpine borderland to give equal treatment. Desert map is simply a design failure and not a fun map to play. Red also has slight disadvantage in EBG. 3. Stale meta (boon ball in zergs, Willbender + other overpowered specs dominating roaming). In general the problem is the overperfoming elite specs and excessive amount of boon. Might generation is way too easy for many specs. Then with 20-25 stacks of might celestial specs can hit way too hard. Take away might stacks, then their damage won't be excessive anymore. In zergs ther problem are builds which can share boons with others. This can lead to excessively long fights and very difficult to kill groups as they have almost every single boon in the game 100% uptime. 4. Stealth is badly implemented in this game and should be capped to max 10 seconds and there should be 4 second revealed (stealth is far more powerful in WvWvW compared to spvp). Fighting against opponents with ability to stealth at will again and again is not fun. Even when you win, it just feels like a chore. 5. Some of the consumables (endurance duration, condition duration), relics etc. should be toned down 6. Exploits!

This! I don't have the official statistics, but I would not surprised if guardian is the most played profession. Engineer and revenant are probably the least played professions. The latter is because it requires paid expansion. Guardian has always been in the meta. Since the game was launched guardian commanders and guardians in the zerg has been most numerous (besides necromancers). Many guardians specs like Willbender or Dragonhunter also perform very well for roaming. Currently Willbender and Deadeye are probably the two most broken specs in roaming. Harbinger, Soul Beast and certain ele and rev builds come next. The problem with willbender is that it has no inherent big weakness. It has great damage, superb mobility (very few can outrun it) and good sustain - all in one package. One out of those three should go. Since mobility is built-into the spec, then it should be either serious nerf to damage or sustain. Arenanet should also ask a serious question: Are they doing anything that the fights should be entertaining for both sides? Obviously some fights are not fun at all. E.g deadeye sniping you from far and the moment you damage him, vanish with stealth, soon come again. Revealed should be 4 seconds in WvWvW and stealth should have a maximum duration, like 10 seconds. Ayna