Deniara Devious.3948

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

Arenanet finally updated the population counts. Currently there are just 4 full servers in EU: Whiteside Ridge Fissure of Woe Seafarer's Rest Augury Rock Baruch Bay is never marked full, because Arenanet doesn't want to close transfers to the only Spanish language server. Desolation is classified as "very high", but clearly lacking players. We are now in last tier 5 and quite likely to lose the match up, even with a link! Outnumbered often on multiple maps. Primetime offers queue to just one map. There is clearly not enough players for all tiers and I would wish just 4 tiers in EU, then all servers could have a link. I guess when determining population status Arenanet also counts those casual players who just log in to do their daily in WvWvW and then go to do other things. Compare that to a server who has a lot of hard core players, who stayed in WvWvW several hours per day. The activity levels are totally different. World restructuring beta weeks were a mess, but at least then there was much more players than now.

The worst WvWvW daily by far are those related to jumping puzzles or Edge of the Mists. Both of them literally contribute NOTHING to the actual game. Escorting dolyaks actually helps your side, so it makes sense. Just delete the jumping puzzle and Edge of the Mist weeklies and replace them with something like 50+ player kills, 10 camps taken etc.

The population status is becoming an utter joke. Riverside (RS) dropped on Monday's update from "very high" to "high". And according to Arenanet there are just 3 full servers n EU: Desolation, Whiteside Ridge and Fissure of Woe. I cannot comment the latter two. In EU tier5 Riverside (blue) has morning and noon blobs every single day 30-50 players and outnumber the enemies on pretty much every map. Yet, they are just "high" status and because of this activity Arenanet just lowered their status. And Desolation is supposedly full, when I am often online there is not even a single play AFK on the spawn of the home map. Nobody, except crickets! Arenanet: Please fix you broken algorithms! They are a disgrace and I sadly need to use your game as an example to my students, of how not to balance things.

The population status should be updated every week (but not on daily/hourly basis as would be too easy to game). Currently there are only 4 "full" servers in EU: Whiteside Ridge Fissure of Woe Gandara Desolation I am pretty sure the first 3 have much higher real activity levels than Desolation. And they probably have queue(s) on peak hours as well. Screenshot of week 01/2024 tier5 EU: I know GW2Mists doesn't have all the players registered, but according to this Desolation (green) activity levels are significantly below blue and red. No wonder, why we are losing the last tier. https://imgur.com/a/dU5fFoI Ayna

Full population status is an utter joke. According to Arenanet Desolation is "full" and we even have a link (Arborstone). I mostly play on mornings, noon and afternoons, sometimes on evenings as well. I can tell that on those times we are mostly outnumbered. If I can get 6-11 players on my squad as a commander, enemy is running 30-40. Yet according to Arenanet our opposing servers are NOT full. I can guess the population status either has not been updated for a long time or it is calculated using a wrong algorithm. If they count in the number of different players who log in at once, they are doing it completely wrong. I teach game algorithms at university and the proper way to calculate actual population is tally in all the active ticks per player. And do this on a weekly basis. Nothing else, nothing more or algorithms ends up flawed and gamed. Players are still transferring from server to another for easy wins. Having basically empty maps on your side is detrimental, especially for new players. Imagine WvWvW is not your main game mode and you enter your home borderland. You can roam there a long time without seeing any other players from own server. No tag, nobody else on your side. Enemy borderlands are even more likely to be completely void of players on your side. EBG has a handful. Even the spawn doesn't seem to have AFKs anymore. The game feels dead and yet Arenanet's flawed statistics tell "you are full" is both dishonest and misleading. Full should be full, like have queues on 2-3 maps. Having outnumbered "buff" on you should offer more incentives for the outnumbered side to keep on playing despite the overwhelming odds. The +5 pips was removed a long time ago for some unspecified reason. If playing on outnumbered map would give +1 gold per hour, I would have thousands more gold. Ayna (Desolation)

I am in my 50s and my reflexes certainly are much slower than when I was around 20. Plus I have several small kids around me, which make the gaming even more "exciting". And even in my youth I was much slower than most people and I absolutely sucked at sports requiring aiming or fast reflexes. Despite all my flaws, I still love roaming and I always use my own sub-optimal builds, which almost all are core builds, I tend not to use anything from the expansions except mount and gliding. I also tend to shy away from evades, invulnerability, blocks, stealth and shadow step as they are feel like cheating from my behalf. I use same build in pve, so I don't need to memorize too many builds for each characters. This important. I consider pve is boring, because in pve you basically only die when there is an boss fight which has an instant kill mechanism, everything else you can pretty much face tank and aggro as much mobs as you desire. Clearing camps efficiently: 1. Stack the NPCs e.g. behind a building. 2. Kill the scouts first, as they blind & poison you. If it is an upgraded camp, then next kill the zealots. 3. Interrupt the lord heal skill. 4. Have build, which has enough AoE and I mean lots of spammable AoE. AoE blind is wonderful as their next attacks will miss you. 5. Spam your attacks, if your build is decent you don't need to use much any heals. 6. If it is t3 camp assisted by hylek & dredge mercs (only found in EBG), you might want to bring a friend. These camps are possible to solo, but if often takes 2-3 minutes at least and this is long enough for the defenders to appear. Practice 20+ h with your new build in pve first. Try to solo some so called "difficult" content in pve to learn the rotations. Time your stuff. Try to make a build, which can kill all the camp guards + lord in 1 minute. I find this 1 minute is critical. If you can flip a camp <1 minute, usually enemy isn't fast enough come to defend it. Similar rules apply to soloing towers. Taking a tower alone will take a bit longer. I would say 3-4 minutes to get the lord down. Soloing keeps takes roughly twice that amount, plus time break down double walls/gates. Stone Mist Castle would take probably closer to 8-10 minutes to solo with a suboptimal core build, but I have never been lucky enough to do that undefended. SMC will always have defenders within 5 minutes, so you are out of luck trying to solo it. I hope this helps, Ayna from Desolation

Short answer for the second question: No. I am playing one of the worst and least played specs in the game: core rifle engineer. I even use core consumables and core stats armor and weapons (aka poor man's hard mode). Despite having under-optimal build I can still solo t3 camps, towers or even keeps if enemy defenders don't show up. In big zerg situations I can be useful by providing lots of AoE damage (4 kits!) and heals & condi cleanses with medkit and elixir gun. Path of Fire gives you one of the most important things: access to a mount and you get gliding from Heart of Thorns. More important is that what kind of server you are on. If you end up on server with no link in EU and you are outnumbered 24h7 on all 4 maps, then good luck! Arenanet is open how it determines the population status and doesn't reveal the true population statistics. So players can just guess which 3 servers end up without a link.

Measuring K/D ratio is a not a good way to determine initial tiers as this might place solo servers in tier1. A better would be to tally kills + deaths (KD total count). But the best would be to measure total active ticks per players and this should be also the only way to determine server population status. Let me explain: After each 5 minute tick ends, the game records how many players on each side (also those AFK in spawn would be counted). Then tally all those ticks together at the end of the week. If one server has a super active player who plays 200 ticks (1000 minutes) in a week, he will count as much as 10 players who play just 20 ticks each. Any other way and we will actual player presence imbalance. My home server Desolation is once again without a link. And to make matters worse we were placed once again to tier1 after the relinks. First two weeks were of course losses and in fact all the 3 servers without a link lost their match ups and then again. We are 3rd on our match up and maybe dropping again. I hope once again relinks will not lift Desolation up to tier 1 and give us no link. This has happened way too many times. This is basically a recipe for 4 weeks of losses. At least those servers who don't have a link, should be placed in tier 5. Why there needs to be 5 tiers in EU anyways? Ayna