Nighthawk.2401

There's a typo somewhere in here - "increased" -> "from .7 to .1" It's at .7 now, so is the .1 wrong, or is the word increased wrong? Thanks 🙂

Just to be clear, the new system is only better if you're making full use of it. The complaint is specifically about the fact that the old system was "front loaded", the bulk of the rewards were just for logging in, so you could keep up with most of them for a minute a day easily instead of needing an hour or two each day to keep up. (And I'm sure some are complaining because the new system practically invalidates alt-accounts as well, since they relied on the front loaded/instant login rewards to become valuable sources of gold and other items over time) On one hand, I do have a single alt account already, and it feels a bit bad to know that it was a complete waste of money since I've not used it much yet and the daily login rewards are nerfed to the ground for it. But on the other hand, I understand why anet would want to prevent buying-alts from being the most price-efficient way to convert USD to in game gold. I feel mixed about it since in the long run this will likely be a negative drain on my gold profit, but it'll also be more rewarding for my main account at least.

Hey! I'm very excited to see ANet giving some much needed love to the WvW gamemode - especially the rewards systems! 🙂 I've been hoping for a long time to see an update, since rewards are an important driver of player engagement when decided what to spend time on, and WvW had grown to have such a disparity in rewards per hour compared to other end-game content/gamemodes. And at the very least it felt bad to be obligated to stop doing the content I enjoyed most just so that I could spend more time farming in other areas of the game for the sake of being able to afford to continue playing the parts I enjoy later. Today's changes are definitely going in the right direction, and I look forwards to future changes as well - especially in helping support-oriented players receive credit for player kills which they're indirectly helping with. I'm wondering however, will you be providing us with any specific numbers/details to help explain how the new 'reward scaling' system is now calculated? So far I haven't been able to find specific patch notes on this topic, only a couple of broad statements about "better rewards for attacking/defending objectives, based on type and tier". Thank you very much either way, I look forwards to a bright future for all of guild wars 2, and especially my favorite end-game content, WvW! The direction the devs have been taking lately is very appreciated, especially the increased communication and pace of updates.

Just signed up and I'm looking forwards to playing! I encourage anyone reading to join in on the fun 🙂

The paragraph of commentary about the thief changes didn't mention anything about this, I would've liked to hear the reasoning. Everything else was a buff, and the commentary was entirely about positive changes. I personally feel that the community is too quick to blame "stealth" as this ominous boogey-man source of all problems regarding medium armor classes, especially thief, and ESPECIALLY deadeye, regardless of whether or not it was warranted. Just pointing out that a class has access to a unique mechanic does not automatically mean that class is unfair or that the mechanic is problematic. It's as rediculous as insinuating that guardian is unfair "because it has AEGIS", or "necro is unfair because it has *gasp* boon-corrupt!". People complain about stealth because it's the obvious unique thing that's easiest to see and point to, not because it's genuinely problematic. Deadeye is very reliant on stealth as it's only defense, it has no aegis, not a single block, and very few options for any evasion - all of which have rather brief durations and come with the opportunity cost of reducing your ability to trade back afterwards (ie: using initiative defensively means you have less ability to dps afterwards, where as other classes can use defensive abilities without it affecting their following dps rotation/combo) The insane burst from something like a sic'em ranger is already high enough to threaten to 1-combo deadeyes, even if they meld during the rapid fire, the entry into stealth doesn't cancel rapid fire, as it auto-targets every shot during stealth still. It's possible to double-dodge and still get killed in stealth to the standard sic'em combo. Being revealed by this now too will very much just be a "guess I get to choose: die, or back out to 2k+ range and do nothing for now" I'm fearful that removing stealth as a reliable defense will only further encourage deadeyes using mobility to back out of fights completely and break combat / run away / reset. My talks with players who roam have consistently indicated that deadeye's propensity to retreat and reset/escape and constantly break combat is much more frustrating as a defense mechanism than being able to stealth. I also really feel that this change is just overall unnecessary. The interaction of "the" stealth spec being the only spec in the game to have an optional answer for revealed-status just made sense, and felt like it was a rather well made and skill-expressive way to handle it, it wasn't easy to reliably respond quickly if you didn't predict what was coming. And it felt satisfying to get value out of even if it was rare. At the very least, if this interaction is being removed, it'd be nice to see meld get some other buff in terms of charges or cooldown or duration, or extra functionality to compensate, because it was already one of the weakest options when it came to fully-committed 1v1s. Dagger storm has been the better option for deadeye for a long time, as it deals with most of the revealing-specs better (ie: unlike meld, using Storm can actually stop you from taking damage from sic'em soulbeast LB-2), and the evade frames were more valuable into melee classes which can often threaten to outright burst you through stealth by just continuing their combo even if you stealth during it. The only reason I personally took meld was because in roaming WvW it was a more fun option to try to find value out of, and it opened up some cool highlight-worthy opportunities to get creative with it's usage. In sPvP where fights were more forced and I don't have the option to run away I always took dagger storm instead, even against the reveal classes, because as mentioned already, it counters their threats better and is more generally useful. (edit note: incase it wasn't clear, I'm coming at this primarily from a roaming-WvW perspective. though I'm using some examples from sPvP to highlight the differences between "more proper" fights versus open field roaming which is more free form and allows for backing up and just ceding objectives at times. Also, I do feel like the vast majority of the changes this time are very healthy and reasonable. There's a couple of other questions I have - mainly about the decisions that go into which skills shouldn't have their cooldown compensated at all when their corresponding CD-trait loses it's CD reduction, there's a few on other classes that are parts of core builds which are now getting effectively nerfed by a 20% CD raise)

As long as Mesmer is getting PvE buffs I would've liked to see Mesmer get more tweaks in WvW to go along side this. Especially focused on helping it where it needs the most help: large squad-vs-squad gameplay. Ideally without overbuffing the 1v1/5v5 roaming options available. Stuff like either increasing target caps on some abilities, or trading off more power into abilities which already have high target caps for less power in abilities which don't. Mesmer recently lost it's non-target-capped shied skill which it used to contribute a minimal amount in 20+ man fights in WvW. It wasn't a strong class even with that, but now it's very much struggling to bring any value once fighting actually starts, and it's just a portal-bot which squads might have one of for getting positioning before the fight. I think it's a very reasonable take to say that a goal should be for all 9 professions to be welcome in WvW squads, but unfortunately, Mesmer, along with thief and ranger, and ele even to a lesser extent, have been neglected in this game mode, and are at a point where many guilds refuse to welcome these professions into their groups. I'm still disappointed that EoD didn't use the opportunity of adding 9 new elite specs to help out each profession with becoming more viable in the gamemode it struggled most in - including these professions which roughly a decade after launch all still fail to be viable in WvW-group play, and instead EoD's elite specs have a feeling closer to "9 walking Strike advertisements". Thank you for reading, I look forwards to a future where all players have viable builds available for all end game content, regardless of what their favorite profession is. (Which is intentionally phrased to not imply that all builds/playstyles need to be viable - but at a bare minimum, at least one should exist for each profession) I do appreciate the communication, and the actual changes here don't particularly affect me or my builds, so I won't comment on them.

Happened for me tonight on Fort Aspenwood, happened on both EBG and on one of the borderlands (TC's I believe, but likely happening on every map in all tiers) Every time it happened was around a major guild-vs-guild fight. We learned from talking to the other sides and to people in map chat that when it happens it's immediately crashing every player from all three teams who are within render distance of whatever triggered it. So there's sometimes people outside the fight who also get affected. It also means that people across the map are unaffected. As a result of this everybody on both sides of the fight also ends up counting as a death for everybody else, rewarding a lot of loot bags at least. No clue what actually triggered it thought. It seemed to be pretty rare, once every hour or two. And re-fighting the same groups using the same abilities was not retriggering this crash reliably, thankfully. Hopefully some of this helps narrow it down further for you 🙂

This arguably makes Shadow Arts Deadeye better at 1v1s and small-party fights, but comes at the cost of severely removing the "stealth fantasy", every trait that had any ability to buff stealth duration/uptime was completely removed/reworked, Shadow Arts no longer enables stealthing more, it just makes stealth better when you do use it. I liked a number of the deadeye changes, but I would've liked it more if they left at least one of the extra-stealth traits in, instead of removing all three. I personally enjoyed the permastealth DeadEye build that I've been maining for years, not because it was good, but because it was fun. It was objectively bad at fights and could only prey on a handful of builds - all of which get countered even harder to a more serious build. DE has very polarizing matchups and hard loses or hard wins to different specs in 1v1s. And running the full-stealth build was objectively bad because it didn't give you any new matchups you could win, and only made more you would lose. This change likely makes shadow-arts less meme and more viable for a serious build - but the meta 1v1 build for a while hasn't run shadow arts anyway, so it's still as good as always (arguably even better with some of the other trait changes) I never understood the deadeye complaints though - daredevil is the meta, deadeye itself is the worse spec for roaming, for group play, and for sPvP, and for PvE. The complaints have always been focused from the players who main the few specs which Deadeye hard counters, and every build has things it counters hard, they don't all deserve nerfs.

I'm saying this entire comment as politely and reasonably as I can, I would truly appreciate it being read and considered: I thank you very much for the follow up, it addresses a lot of what the initial post here did not, and it does so in a way which gives me some hope. Not being able to halt the update the day before it goes out does not surprise me, and is very understandable. I'll just have to wait and see how the next update and ensuing communication do to remedy this situation. You say it'll be a few weeks, which is fair, just don't let that turn into a few months please 🙂 Some people clearly overstepped a line (by a lot) over the weekend, which is very much not something to be tolerated, but much of the rest of the feedback from people who were reasonable adults about it still came in at a heated level for a reason. These are players who, at the end of the day, are being very passionate about something they enjoy because they also wish to see this great game succeed. It just feels bad to see so many classes getting slapped with nerfs, mains from each of those classes are left wondering why it feels like the nerfs are coming from a data-driven perspective, from developers who otherwise don't play (or don't play enough / at a high enough skill level) to fairly judge the nuances of these classes. Community feed back is great, but an important part of balance should be having a good representative/advocate for each class within the company, someone who understands the shortcomings, weaknesses, strengths, and intricacies (and ideally, bugs) which players of that class have to face daily. It feels like nobody at ANet has my class's best intrest in mind, and someone who doesn't know the class - or who plays the class in a very limited way (using one elite spec only, with one playstyle/gamemode in mind) was making the decisions, and nobody was there to stop them and explain how nerfing one problematic spec through the core traits it uses would effectively be deleting the already-weaker / less-common alternative spec from the game. For transparency, I say this as someone who mains druid in WvW squads, and mains deadeye in solo roaming WvW, and isn't particularly interested in PvE (I did my EoD strikes the other day for the first time, that was enjoyable 😄 but y'know, I'm very much interested in WvW more so). My comments speak to both of my professions, but also to my fellow Mesmers who are very much barely tolerated in the wvw guild/squad community - and have now had their strongest large-squad utility removed from the game. And to my fellow elementalists, who have never been able to overcome the wall that is cleanse-scrapper keeping them from being viable supports - and the DPS cliff which they are kept at the bottom of time and again because of PvE balance reasons. All four of these classes are definitively the worst performing options in large-squad/guild WvW content. WvW guilds straight up kick players from some of these classes because of it. And all four are being nerfed in WvW again now, because of PvE or even sPvP balance reasons. Warrior, Guard, Necro, Engi, and Rev have all had places in WvW squads for years now, and while I had hoped that EoD would introduce specs which allow the other four classes to enjoy this beautiful endgame content - it fell short on that. And then I held out hope for the big summer balance patch, and it really is just a kick in the face to see our gamemode forgotten entirely at this point. Getting someone informed enough to play devil's advocate against any change in the internal discussions which drive balance changes is a powerful tool which ANet is lacking. I ask kindly that you keep this in mind for when you start assembling a more complete/dedicated balance team. (And this includes looking at how a change targeted at one gamemode will affect other gamemodes) And I can say, I'm relieved to see the recognition that a dedicated balance team is sorely needed is finally being admitted. No knocks against the developers who have tried their hardest, but it isn't fair to them, and it certainly isn't fair to the community, to ask people qualified as software engineers and hired and paid full time as such to then be doing the game-design decisions on the side - where it competes for their time with their other duties. Balance team needs more opportunity to play the game with the classes they're making decisions about.

I didn't really expect anet to pull a patch the day before it goes live, but really man? You heard all our complaints, and the take away is "we need to explain better" ? How much ego can the team have. Just admit there were bad changes instead of doubling down on them all being good and that it was just misunderstood. Ranger, Mesmer, Thief, Ele - the four WORST classes for large-squad WvW gameplay are all getting nerfed in WvW. I had hoped EoD would release specs to help each class out in the game mode it struggled in. Instead the expansion was much more of a strike/raid advert. These classes didn't get anything to help them in WvW zerg/guild play. And now, after waiting months for a huge balance patch, we get this huge joke which literally is nerfing all four. Even in solo WvW content, Celestial roaming is still meta and untouched, the only competing power based builds are being nerfed across the board, reinforcing the meta that people have been complaining about for months. It's clear as day that the balance team doesn't care about WvW, or is just entirely incompetent at it, and I'm so sad that the game mode which convinced me to buy GW2 on launch has been relegated to the dumpster. I agree that anybody calling for death or violence has way more than crossed the line, and many of the one-line quotes taken out of context are really not that bad. But there's a lot of valid criticism about the patch itself which I really hope ANet addresses - and addresses fast... not in another 4-6 months.

Can I just kindly ask for my account to be banned from the game? I don't want to play anymore if the devs are going to treat the player base like this. It's not even just one class. Both classes I play are getting ruined. And I don't even play a lick of ele and I feel bad for them reading this. Same for mesmer. And don't get me started on warrior. I main ranger and thief only, and both are dreadful outlooks. I spent just shy of a thousand dollars on this game over the past year - by no means "a big whale" - but certainly more than the average player. I thought after EoD the outlook was pretty good, alliances was on the way, and a big rework was on the horizon for the summer. The big rework turns out to be a big joke. I'm done with this game, and you're lucky my purchases are long enough ago that I cannot chargeback them any more.

Wow, did someone at Anet get ganked by one too many thieves recently? Jesus those nerfs are rough. It'll make them less annoying, for sure, but I think they're going to need compensation in some other way if this is the direction you're committing too. All of the "buffs back" are only to PvE, you're really leaving them out to dry in WvW/sPvP Not the biggest fan of a lot of other class changes either, but this is pretty extreme.

I've been wondering about this too. It's been available every year since 2016. This was going to be the first year I finally bought it 😞 ANet, why are you making it so hard for me to give you my money? I want to pay you. Please put this item back in the store so I can.

I don't RP, but I've run into one large group in the middle of divinity's reach that I was surprised to see. It was the first time I'd seen a group using say/me instead of private channels (at least, first time in many many years) I never thought about it before, but having a dedicated RP channel that's either the same as say chat or map chat, but explicitly for the purpose of roleplaying could be neat. (or being able to toggle RP and then using your existing channels with that toggle on, yeah), since this would let people talk publicly (potentially advertising their group to other nearby players who may be interested in joining) but allowing anyone who's not interested to just turn it off instead.

There was no "nothing would get me to try dungeons" option, so I put other on the last part xd Not interested in them, nor fractals, nor raids, nor strikes. WvW player here and I wish my favorite gamemode gave a fraction of the gold per hour that this "under rewarded" gamemode does.