Guild Wars 2

They added the spvp reward tracks to wvw, has it's own track for wvw armor. It's based off participation which works like the HoT zone metas.
Autoloot from a new wvw mastery line(need to own HoT), which also gives you access to a portable merchant where you can buy regular siege(superior might be in the works) and T2 foods and oils for badges.
Stability somewhat fixed to a middle ground version of old and new, should help fix the pirate ship meta.
Placed hit caps on some of the aoe type spells, static field limited 10 targets now etc.
They will be testing out server linking populations for matchups starting tomorrow, so a merge for wvw matchups but not a server merge. Will be interesting to see how that turns out.


Daily meta now gives 2g.

They fixed up dungeons rewards which gives twice the tokens now, and have a repeatable achievement for running 8 different dungeon paths(even the story mode counts apparently) to get 5gold 150 tokens of your choice.

Fractals got fixed up as well, legendary backpiece is now available, rearranged the tier levels and the dailies for them, also fixed an apparent bug with ascended drops rates and increased it a bit.

Then of course a lot of other changes to the HoT zones and stuff.

Was a pretty good update, so yeah the "We promise we've unfucked the game, please come back" patch.

What is the pirate ship meta people keep talking about

bixxby_sl said:

What is the pirate ship meta people keep talking about

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Ranged meta. Two groups standing at range and just hurling attacks at each other, like a battle between two pirate ships.

Game would be infinitely more fun if every single fucking zone didn't have retarded platforming / hallways with instant death. Whoever got them to put that in the game should have been taken out back and beaten to death with a boat paddle. God damn retards.

That doesn't chafe my ass as much as the abject inferiority of melee in the game. Feedback during combat has always felt really weird to me in this game. It needed the trinity. They kinda have that now I think, but a wholesale redesign of the system would be better.

Also their crafting is awesome in many ways but a fucking boring ass grind. Everything becomes about grinding the monies.

GW2 is the game I always go back to after the new shiney gets old. GW1 was the same way. HoT was a disaster imo, but Blade and Soul and Black Desert were fun fillers. Now that the April patch has fixed a bunch of the WvW issues, I find myself back at GW2. I haven't checked out the HoT fixes yet, but I hear they are very good also.

GW2 is very much a casual game. Easy to return to and forgiving if you forgot how to play. Which is especially helpful for an altaholic like me. But the most important factor is that getting to the action doesn't take tons of mindless grinding. You just jump in and start bashing the enemy.

Voting for what you want Anet work on next.


ArenaNet

WvW Scoring Improvements
Reduce the impact of night capping.
Lessen the gap between winning scores and losing scores so losing teams can still recover.
Adjust objective score relative to upgrade level.
Adjust score for capturing objectives.
Rebalance the score awarded for activities that don't reward points per tick.
Take suggestions from the community!

WvW Quality of Life Improvements
Add an option for reduced nameplate clutter.
Add cross-map team chat.
Add objective-summary tool tips.
Add a display effect for Righteous Indignation on map markers.
Add floating indicators when gaining points toward war score.
Add a WXP-gain sparkle trail.
Add a territory-control map overlay.
Take suggestions from the community!


I really appreciate their new transparency.

So I reinstalled the base game after not having touched it for 3 years, and after a little SweetFX love to sharpen things up, this game still looks bloody gorgeous. Downloaded the x64 Beta Client and zero problems so far. Runs smooth as silk with almost everything turned up except for the # of visible character models, and medium shadows.

Huge amount of QoL improvements since I last played, and got a whole lot of birthday presents in the mail for each of my old characters, so that was nice. =)

Think I'll pick up the Xpac and give it another serious crack from level one, since I've almost completely forgotten the story, as well as how everything works.

edit: Well, read the last 30 or so pages in an effort to "catch up" and I must say some really useful information in there. Thanks to all the contributors, heh.
Mind you the last few pages have changed my mind about picking up the Xpac just yet, so thanks for saving me some cash also!

This is a great time to get into WvW if you never have before. You can join with characters of any level, the merging of different worlds has created a much more consistent player population, and the addition of WvW reward tracks has incentivized a lot more people to jump in. Find the commander with a tag on his head, figure out what Teamspeak server your world uses, and jump in there. The balance changes to stability have been evened out in the latest patch, and things now feel pretty good. Also, they finally added autoloot to WvW, you have to level up Provision Master in the WvW skills.

Argarth_sl said:

So I reinstalled the base game after not having touched it for 3 years, and after a little SweetFX love to sharpen things up, this game still looks bloody gorgeous. Downloaded the x64 Beta Client and zero problems so far. Runs smooth as silk with almost everything turned up except for the # of visible character models, and medium shadows.

Huge amount of QoL improvements since I last played, and got a whole lot of birthday presents in the mail for each of my old characters, so that was nice. =)

Think I'll pick up the Xpac and give it another serious crack from level one, since I've almost completely forgotten the story, as well as how everything works.

edit: Well, read the last 30 or so pages in an effort to "catch up" and I must say some really useful information in there. Thanks to all the contributors, heh.
Mind you the last few pages have changed my mind about picking up the Xpac just yet, so thanks for saving me some cash also!

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Not sure if you get it if you didn't already have the expansion, but the game gave me a free 80 last week. It's pretty cool.

bixxby_sl said:

Not sure if you get it if you didn't already have the expansion, but the game gave me a free 80 last week. It's pretty cool.

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Yeah, you get a free 80 boost with the Xpac, but I haven't pulled the trigger yet. Have an 80 Ranger and a couple of 30s from 3 years ago, so going to tool around in the base game for a while longer to see if it pulls me back in.

edit: oh and if you were referring to the endless trial mode for the boost, yes it does sound very tempting.

Grim1_sl said:

GW2 is very much a casual game. Easy to return to and forgiving if you forgot how to play. Which is especially helpful for an altaholic like me. But the most important factor is that getting to the action doesn't take tons of mindless grinding. You just jump in and start bashing the enemy.

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I just never found the combat very fun. It felt like I was just mashing buttons that weren't on cool-down. Maybe I'm doing it wrong?

ShakyJake_sl said:

I just never found the combat very fun. It felt like I was just mashing buttons that weren't on cool-down. Maybe I'm doing it wrong?

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You were doing it wrong... sorta... before the june 23 patch of last year anyways.

There was counterplay in the game depending on the class you were playing. But they've broken that with the higher damage of skills and conditions, runes and sigils and trait/skills auto procs, and elite specs they've introduced into the game since. You're able to spam more conditions on a target than they are able to clear, or certain classes can spam boons faster than you can strip them off, it's turned into a spam fest of skills.

ShakyJake_sl said:

I just never found the combat very fun. It felt like I was just mashing buttons that weren't on cool-down.

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To me, where the combat system shines is in WvW. For instance, one of the few good aoe heals in the game using a blast on the large water field that a staff elementalist can put down. Stacking the might buff on a big group can amp up their damage significantly, and one way to do that is to blast a fire field. A big part of successful group fighting is knowing what combos with what, and coordinating that in voicechat. The core experience of grouping up behind a choke wall, blast fire for might and pop empowers, mezmers drop veils forward, frontline leaps in, guardians and warriors pop stability for the group so you don't get cc'd, then dropping static fields, walls and lines to catch enemies, reflect their damage, dropping necro wells and big damage spells to try and finish some of them off, then attempt to regroup and drop water for heal recovery is when it feels like everything really comes together. When you are just pew-pewing solo against some quest mob by yourself it is not very compelling. I've continued to play GW2 for the last few years but I hardly ever touch PVE except the occasional dungeon with a guild group or world completion for a legendary precursor.

ShakyJake_sl said:

I just never found the combat very fun. It felt like I was just mashing buttons that weren't on cool-down. Maybe I'm doing it wrong?

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BnS and BDO have much better combat. But GW2's not bad. GW2 has better RvR imo (except when they do stupid things like HoT) and almost zero grinding if you want to just PvP or RvR.

There are certainly better games than GW2 depending on what you want to do, but unfortunately the grind always seems to get in the way. I really have very little tolerance for it anymore.

Alpine BL are back!!!!!!!

They have a couple things running right now in the wvw forums.

WvW Poll 05/06: Reward Tracks
https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/foru...st#post6145462


Scoring changes won over QoL changes in the last poll on what they should work on next, so now the discussion on scoring changes, time sliced scoring.
https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/foru...-Scoring/first

I finally picked up the expansion the other day and I'm curious if anyone here really likes the new vertical style map design? I'm not a fan so far.

Hekotat_sl said:

I finally picked up the expansion the other day and I'm curious if anyone here really likes the new vertical style map design? I'm not a fan so far.

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I am sure they went all out with the heightdifferences because of the new Gliding and jump-shrooms feature in HoT and I do indeed like the gliding and jumping: it's fun to dive off something and glide, or get launched into the air. Where they went wrong is putting too few of the Vortexes that take your glider up on the map so that is has become kind of a puzzle(and a pain) to figure out how you can actually rise a level, having to use both shrooms, walking and Gliding. The teleports are few and far in between too. I am sure this was part of the "challenge" of the maps and or herding players into some sort of progression path through the zone, but I think it would simply be much more fun if you could use many more vortexes and actually be able to reach any level once you jump off a cliff and use them smartly.

I guess that would kinda make the jumping shrooms obsolete, but this is a typical GW2 flaw to me: because of implementing 2 new travel systems(i.e. trying too hard), they had to restrict it so that one did not obsolete the other, while if they just went the Gliding path, they could have made that more fun.

I dunno, I hate jumping puzzles too so maybe I just don't like having to constantly figure out how to get somewhere.

Edit: there's actually a 3rd system to travel the map, the tunnels (or whatever they are called). Too much, too gamey. Just let me gliiiiide!

Yeah, and I can't even glide or use the mushrooms yet. I was very frustrated yesterday and was determined to get a refund. I'm going to give it one more shot this evening because I want to raid, I'm hoping it get's better.

Do we have anyone from RR with open slots in some raiding guilds?