I just subbed. Well like 2 months but I didnt play last month. And finished levellign my sage, vanguard and scoundrel. And the reason i resubbed was becuase I thought "Guild wars 2 is a steaming pile of *********, I will go play the one game where I won't get disadvantaged by lag or annoyed by constant disconnects, aka SWTOR. Even if it is only like a few warzones a day." they are removing my main motivation to play it, i know this game has a GCD and is doable with 200-300ms ping but I dont wanna go back to that when I used to have 10-15ms ping so yeah. This is like warhammer again. Open with too many oceanic servers (i think we could support 1), and then instead of merging them into 1 like people want dump them and merge to US servers to cut costs. Guess im gonna have to quit online games or bite the bullet and go thru the pain of being a FPS neophyte. xx Kisses

I originally rolled on the US servers then transferred to the oceanic servers. It is definitely playable, it is one of the lowest latency US-based mmos i have played. like ~220ms, their servers based west coast somewhere like california near where the cable hits (not like terrible ncsoft games in texas, or tera on east coast). The gcd is very long in this game and melee range and positionals are forgiving so it is playable. None of this dodge/aim ****. [this is assuming their US servers havent gone to **** since i last played there] However... the reason I am playing this game is mainly just for the luxury of having 10ms ping. I noticed when i xferred here you could do stuff you can't do on US server like clutch break stun/pounce/hutball/run through before fire/harpoon/interrupt at last moment/etc, and it was easier to get off positionals and cc the other person in 1v1 first. It does make a difference maybe like 10-20% more melee dmge thru not out of range, and give u the advantage in getting off cc instantly. Maybe not a wise business move to announce this before the expansion, I might not bother to buy it now. At least they were honest.

Lol I did this to some guy today coz my cc was on cd. He was unlucky enough to be standing next to a pillar in voidstar.

I don't get ppl talking about ravage or w/e like it is some great ability, when they do it to me I just move out of range. The powertech/vanguard aoe (which more seem to be speccing these days) is the same, even though it snares you for heaps, it sucks, and only last tick hits very hard. Perhaps I should be levelling a sniper in anticipation of mara being nerfed? (I was considering tankasin or vanguard but they are a little dull.) After all they've nerfed virtually everything else. I don't think I can though, levelling in this game so linear/same/slow.

Has OP bought the recruit gear? I'm not sure what stats are like but I think they're comparable to champion gear? I'm still in champ gear doesn't seem too bad. When I look at the upgrades to BM piece by piece it's like less health str, poor stats (accuracy), and maybe 1 percent increased dmge. I agree that the system is stupid. Encourages people to leave losing wz. Im ok with no reward for losing side in premade or for reward for winning side to be a lot higher, but to get near nothing, making progress take twice as long... Problem is you can't control who you wind up with on your team with the pug q (and if you've just hit 50 not so likely to find ppl who will group with you). It's frustrating in alderaan when you have 2 points and idiots on your team run off to try to cap the third and lose it, or you're guarding one side in voidstar and the other gets capped with no one saying anything.

I don't agree with the ppl who say op is a great counter to a sentinel. Well in general I wouldn't recommend op, all they have is opening and not a lot of nice tools. Tanky assassin is far better. I don't really know what abilities make them so hard to kill because I am lazy casual player who hasn't bothered to find out but they seem to be able to take hardly any dmge off weapon attacks, and dodge/resist a ton. For ages. You can't heal off them easily because they will likely dodge, often cc on them will miss, and their dmge is still decent. They don't have the burst of an operative but get other nice things to compensate and are a lot more durable and useful. Well-played sniper is also good but like op they just suck too much in general play. Honestly though, why not just play a mara. 1v1 amazing, and in group pounce is great (although mara are really susceptible to cc. If the other team is stacked and there's a lot of sages you can get kb many times in a row, rooted, snared etc and the resolve is useless). I am kinda worried they will get nerfed though, they are already nerfing things on other classes which I never had a problem with.

gz you and your pocket healer do well against pugs. Escape abilities are working as intended. The 3 abilities you mention are on fairly long cd (1min45, 45, 2min for sage pull), what happens when they're on cd? Why don't the people you're fighting use their defensive cds (including cc)? You claim to be super outnumbered yet not cced so you can use your defensive ccs and still able to kill people on the other team? If they were putting out comparable damage to you surely you would be there for maybe 5 seconds and then almost dead, in which case your escape abilities don't really help super much. I contend that you're simply fighting pugs who are not assisting and making full use of defensive and cc cooldowns. I find it weird that no one is attacking your healer friend also. Ofc I am biased. I really don't want marauders nerfed to the point that you need a healer and guard just to q for warzone because you will get blown up by random pug rdps otherwise. ESPECIALLY because unlike in other games it's not like I can be like, ok no one is on in my guild and the enemy team line-up is too good atm (I will be totally unviable in wz) so I can go do pvp in illum etc.. because illum is woeful and the only pvp in this game is wz. I'm not sure how the rated wz will work in terms of objectives but I would probably just take a 3 tank 1 healer team and not even bring a marauder.

Arena would mess up class balance like it did in wow. Sure things are balanced in arena (sort of....) but in the other 2 areas of pvp, no. And I guess you have to look at, which of these areas would have more people aka paying customers playing, and I'm guessing it wouldn't be arenas. Other thing is with arena either they'd have to rebalance their classes a lot or they have to make it so you get no extra rewards from doing arena over other forms of pvp because I struggle to see how the average sniper would obtain the shiny new arena set as easily as inquisitor classes. I do see where the arena guys are coming from though. I am so bored of the same 3 wz and if you are someone who plays in a premade I imagine ordinary wz are even more boring. Illum is heinous.

Lol yeah healing is so hard. Maybe if resource management was a bit harder or there were proactive elements to it instead of just reactive, but this is not the case. Not that DPS is hard either, because DPS can tunnel vision to their target and their own health bar, and the occasional cc to help out team members, though more likely they will save it to protect themselves or to use offensively. BUt for DPS if you lose you can say well clearly you weren't effective, you didn't get any kills/kbs, you chose the wrong targets. Whereas for healer they can still say, oh look I healed, look at the numbers, when in reality they didn't prioritise the right targets for heals, they positioned themselves badly and spent 3/4 of the match healing themselves, they didn't pay attention to what was happening and tunnelled on the health bars when they should have been using cc, etc. A bad healer can go under the radar a lot more easily than a bad DPS, maybe that's why some people like it. I actually think a tank requires most skill to play to full potential. You have to pretty much fulfill the role of a dps in addition to paying attention to everything & continually switching guard (which requires paying attention to what is happening unlike say healing because it is like a preheal) and using taunts whenever possible. And it's not like youre immortal or extremely harder to kill than other players, at least compared to other games I've played. I think the healing change is bad if you don't factor in guard (altho scoundrels definitely needed to be on a similar level to sorcs) but if you factor in guard, yes a nerf is warranted. And for any healer who whines that they get shut down or killed by a single DPS player, um, it seems fair to me. 1 player = 1 player. If that DPS is attacking someone else you can (maybe too easily) heal through his damage and shut him down. 1 player's worth equals anothers. Oh but because I'm a healer I need more survivability because people always zerg me. So you think it would be fair if you could tank multiple people, longer than even a tank since heals are indefinite? You even have dps abilties you can use. Again, make friends with a tank, the sum is definitely greater than the parts in this game for healer/tank combo. And one furhter thing, tho I've sung praises of tanks so much, I don't actually play one. Just want to comment that though I personally often MVP healers and see them get MVP votes how often do you see people vote for a tank. To be fair they get more medals than other people, but all the same. I often see idiot sorcerers who are standing there and not healing the guy who is guarding them, even though it might take quite a while for him to die (I imagine they don't get guarded again lol). I just don't think people realise if someone has guarded them or taunted their attacker(s) or cced (ok maybe the latter is more obvious). I guess a lot of people playing tank class, even if theyre specced into it don't seem to realise the utility of tehse abilities either. BUt like i said, it takes more skill than healing to play properly

Nice vid, your name sounds familiar (warhammer chosen? wh? wp? maybe was a diff guy but i remember some loltank WP video. what happened to that shebali guy he make good videos)

I don't really see the point putting in a debuff. I mean it's a game, which people are paying for. If they leave the warzone it's cause they're not having fun & if you try to force them to stay with a penalty they will probably just log off/afk/get bored/ultimately quit.

The sorcs in this thread are really living up to the class stereotype gz

3% would get 9 for 62 or worse assuming 25% drop chance. So bottom unlucky 3% of people. Also, percetnage of people who will not have full BM after one month of doing all weeklies, dailies = 67%.

You're basing this on what? There's no combat log.

This was a stupid change which it seems they didn't really think through at all. It's also an indirect nerf/buff to certain classes gw bioware. Here are some examples: 1. Any class which has a crit modifier (usually 2nd top ability in their dps tree) will suffer more from this. Crit dmge modifier (eg 30% crit dmge on certain abilities) = crit and surge are worth more as a stat to you, and you get more bang for your buck than someone without the crit dmge modifier.. better scaling etc. Note this isn't sorcerers as most of them spec hybrid rather than up their dps tree and get big damage without relying on crit dmge eg. double channel ticks on telekinetic throw, extra damage on project. Note this isn't commando either as there is no crit dmge modifier in their trees afaik. 2. Dps classes who have crit dmge modifier: scoundrel, jedi shadow, sentinel, vanguard. All melee classes lol. Coz melee is so overpowered in this game. 3. Finally smuggler/operative healer (and I assume commando healer) have a mechanic such that alacrity is actually a fairly terrible stat for them. It reduces cast time without actually increasing resource regen rate... so you cast a heal marginally faster but you will have to wait to cast again anyway so get virtually no benefit. Also smuggler have only one cast-time spell they will use in practice anyway. Only option was to stack crit/surge. However now they've nerfed surge. Oh also, smugglers even get crit heal bonus too lol, so that's been nerfed too. This is indirect buff for the game's best healer, sage, for whom alacrity is actually decent due to much larger resource pool. Oh and shields can't crit anyway... 4. My main toon is not particularly well geared. Two of my pieces are even 45level. However my crit is near cap, my surge is near cap, my expertise is more or less capped (it seems to scale abysmally past 10%). It just seems like I have nothing to aim for gearwise that would increase my damage due to so many useless stats... crit, surge, accuracy, expertise. Apart from doing pve and simply stacking more str, power and endurance which I don't really want to do bc rng/time. Power is like only decent stat, but you're forced to get fairly useless accuracy/surge with it. I might look into defensive stats to see if they scale decently but ultimately all I care about is my damage or I would have played a tank, so pretty annoyed... tldr: Yeah obviously damage is reduced for everyone but some are hit harder than others. EDIT: ok so upon reflection I am wrong. I was thinking surge and the crit modifiers were multiplicative when it is additive (at least I believe so). Assuming 85% surge -> 70% surge, 35% crit it's like around a 4% avg dmge nerf regardless of crit dmge modifier (minimal difference between crit modifier and non crit modifier but actly marginally worse for sorc etc). However obv reduced dmge damage is going to be a big hit on say a scoundrels opening burst and a buff to any class which can heal/shield & the heal/alacrity stuff still stands.

I don't bother with the daily/weekly anymore. Takes too long. Problem is either you get 1. zerg v zerg, really boring as a melee, really stupid healer has to tag stuff to get kill instead of heal (stalemate), or 2. zerg v smaller groups, after a while the small groups just leave (this is a very short transition phase) or 3. zerg v nothing where you go around in circles or wander to cap back other objectives but still never find anything [in an acceptable timeframe]. Bc all the stuff is in the middle you can't wander around as a smaller group or a solo player and still get kills (cause most of the time there won't be anyone anywhere except mid, it's just not worthwhile to roam). I realise pvp of this sort does require more patience, and for me anyway usually has bigger rewards, funner fights etc, but the ratio of doing nothing/boring zerg crap to interesting stuff is just not good enough.

I think he does have a point with the healing. Yeah sure if you play against crap pugs you can get high healing through your hots etc as scoundrel but in a more competitive situation where the enemy team assists and there is more burst damage on a single target you're not going to be as useful as a sage who can bubble and burst heal better. Sage bubble, big heal may buy enough time for the focused guy to escape or for your tank to switch guard to him. I also feel sage have better survival and are less susceptible to interrupts due to high number of heals. THe RNG mechanic for upper hand procs is just stupid on a healer. I also have this bad feeling they're going to do something to triage :/

I don't have heaps of free time to spend on this quest, and tbh even if I did, I have better things to do. Illum daily/weekly = now undoable. I'm actually on one of the more populated servers (harbinger). I play at offpeak time, though there is still a decent population of oceanic players on during this period. Either there will be like 2-4 groups republic or 2-4 groups empire. There is very little conflict. Either way it is way too slow and boring. Zerging outnumbered players or getting zerged or wandering around for ages trying to find a smaller group of empire, but never succeeding because why would they go anywhere but mid 95% of the time? Also, earlier when the quest was doable, or on weekends when more players are around, IT STILL SUCKS because it is just 2 full ops fighting in centre.

Nope, it was a slight nerf not buff.

You've gotta mouseover and SS how many killing blows you get tbh to get any accurate picture of how effective you were in that warzone.

It's ok on the girl sentinel apart from making her look a bit chunky around the middle. I like it cause pretty much every other armour piece for sentinel has hood down URGH.

this.

The video/numbers was kind of depressing tbh in terms of the numbers you were getting :3 I think I will stick with my knight.

Yeah the pvp gear is a lot better than the gear you have coming in to 50. And yeah the RNG system obtaining it is a pain. Overall there needs to be an overhaul. But there's also a second problem. A lot of the pvp gear has trash stats on it eg. accuracy (which is broken), anything which isn't crit surge, alacrity (which eg for an op healer = terrible). Also a lot of the set bonuses are fairly trash compared to the pve sets. eg. the rakata gear for BH/commando has bonus increasing crit chance of tracer missile by 15%. 10-15% damage boost/reduction from pvp gear is not that great when say the rakata gear will give you much superior damage. Particularly if you are a dps class. The crit bonus alone would make 2 pieces mandatory for many commandos. And even if you plan to use the pvp expertise gear you will probably still need to get pve gear to rip mods out of to get better stats. Or hope you get many, many gloves in pvp bags. tldr: pve raid gear > pvp gear So amusingly their pvp gear system with expertise etc manages to really annoy a lot of people at the same time as not even managing to achieve what it is intended for.

I only mvp vote healers if they're good. Many are terrible. But I think their complaint with medals is valid. To actually get kills in wz or Illum you have to tag stuff, which requires a gcd. In that time you could have healed someone instead. Someone might die in the time you take to tag a couple of people. Also, tagging at range costs resources for sage. I am ok with the extra medals tanks can get for protection, tho I guess is a bit unfair in premade situation. Seems they are just trying to get pug tanks to guard and use their 30% dmge reduction abilities which imo many don't even know exist.