The Official Forums

If you were in last weekend's beta then you should already have access to the official forums for Guild Wars 2. The forum offers an easy, sleek design that allows you to communicate anything and everything about GW2.  It is a great resource, and if you access you should really take a look.  Many of ArenaNet's developers have responded to lots of critical feedback.  The site even offers a Dev tracker that allows anyone to see what they are saying. If you are at all interested in Guild Wars, you need to look below:


What's Been Said:

-A sell all junk feature has been added to the game.

-AOE's and the number of targets

This is a general rule of our skill system. AoE attacks hit up to 5 targets. AoE buffs or heals can heal up to 5. We cap it at 5 because its the party size and lets us reign in the balance on AoE without impacting most normal situations. WvW is the one place where this shows up, but we believe the alternative is worse. Hope this helps…

And Jon later continues with the smart-aoe targeting the game has. This was actually pretty interesting.

It prioritizes targets.For enemies:1) Your selected target assuming they are in range.2) enemies based on proximity to you.For allies:1) party members based on proximity to you2) non party members based on proximity to you.Hope that helps.

-Crowd control and the shorter duration in Guild Wars 2:

Our CC tends to be shorter in duration because long durations are simply not fun for people who get hit with them and end up stunlocked till dead. On the other hand, almost every profession has access to at least some form of CC between stuns, knockdowns, knockbacks, chills, etc.Everyone will need to learn that one of the keys to GW2 combat is WHEN to use your CC, and not just hit it as soon as you engage so you can roflstomp the target. Trust me, knockbacks used on people ressing can turn entire fights.

-Adressing concerns over the Norn Personal Story:

We can certainly examine the norn content and learn from our mistakes, whether or not we have the time and resources to make radical changes before ship. Changing the flow of a story involves almost every department in the studio, from design and writing to programming, art and animation. Simple dialogue edits and re-recording VO impacts cinematic conversations, so we can sometimes justify going back into the booth to change story elements but it’s more difficult to overhaul plot, and it also means more work for the animators.

-PvE balance is being readjusted.  In the beta, there were some mob types that were significantly more difficult than others in very close proximity.  There were also some very hard phases to personal story while there were other parts that were very easy to complete.

Since there’s a lot of topics and discussions on this, I figured I’d make a post to let you guys know that we’re listening to your feedback on the matter, and there are valid points on both sides of the issue. In general, we’ve been fairly happy with the difficulty of the game in most places. However, we’re still in the process of working on PvE balance, so a lot of things will probably be adjusted and changed in the upcoming weeks. Here’s some of the areas we’re looking into updating:

1. New-player experience
: It often takes people a while to get used to GW2 combat and learn to avoid attacks and learn what their skills do and how they work. We’re looking at slowing down the rate in which we introduce different enemy mechanics so that new players have more of a chance to get accustomed to the game.

1. Event scaling
: We’re looking at ways to make the scaling on a lot of events work better for large amounts of players.

1. Monster balance
: Some enemies are significantly more difficult than others while others aren’t very threatening- we’re working on updating the balance for both of these categories so that there’s a more consistent difficulty level between various enemy types.

1. Individual quest and event balance
: Some events and personal story quests can be overly difficult, and we’re looking at identifying these places.

-Melee vs. Ranged Combat is being greatly looked into.  The quote is below:

Hey all. I wanted to talk about this a bit since it is a hot topic here and also on the internets. The intention is that both styles are viable. Certainly right now Melee is more difficult than ranged. There are some things we will try to do to address this, but I think the more you play you would find they are closer than you think.

First what’s already there:
1) Melee does more damage. Melee damage is simply higher than ranged damage across the board.
2) Melee has more control. With a few intentional exception Melee has a lot more control than ranged.
What Melee needs:
1) defensive tools on more weapons, particularly on lower armor professions.
2) ai needs to favor Melee a bit less than it currently does.
What else:
Finally because of the more action based nature of combat Melee needs to be taught better. Effective Melee requires skills that translate over from FPS games which are notoriously harder on casual players. You have to wasd to move, constantly aim with your mouse camera, and hit skills on 1-5.
Some tips:
If you have learned any good Melee tips that you think we should pass on to newer players feel free to post them here. I’ll start with a few tips of my own.
- If you don’t have mouse look on when using a skill you will turn to face. I sometimes let go of mouse look as I activate to help me aim through the chaos and then click it back down in between attacks.
- Melee has a lot of hard hitting skills and good setup. Utility skills Can really help set up big Melee attacks. Bulls charge on warrior, scorpion wire on thief, judges intervention on guardian.
- know when to run. No matter what you are not a tank. You have to move in and out avoiding damage. If you have to soak damage try and bring boons like Protection and Regeneration or conditions like Blindness and the very undervalued Weakness.
Thanks for reading this all. Rest assured we will keep working on this and just keep in mind the subtle differences in GW2 combat that take a while to sink in.
Jon