Guild Wars 2

So, I’m watching the Tournament of Legends atm, my impressions are:

Guardian is in every team (ofc)
Engi is also extremly popular.

Almost no team without a Warrior did win.
Almost no team with a Mesmer won.

Well, honestly every team with that mesmer build was in a disadvantage, I mean going shatterer with GS and Staff? Makes little sense to me although I don’t know the class well.

As for Warriors: the build almost every team used is horrible imo; HamBow+Soldier amulet+Runes of strenght for everybody? Really? There’s nothing better at the moment for warriors? You definitely could afford going with the berserk amulet if you use warr.

So far I’ve seen very little new builds and originality and it is at least disappointing. The only team that really put something “new” is, as it was predictable, Car Crash.

I was very surprised not to see any zerker/condi warrior or turret engi or phantasm/condi mesmer; every single class was in most of the cases the exact copy of one another. I almost had the feeling that someone just said to teams before the tourney started: “so here are the builds to use for the tourney, have fun and don’t try something new; bye”.

Anyway the tournament is thrilling and exciting, although Car Crash are still the best imo, both for originality and skills.

It is odd that they are using Warrior in a way that seems less than optimal. I can see using Hambow, I can also sort understand soldiers because with Sigil of Intel if you swap then immediately land ES and combo from there you don’t NEED precision. Still, the Hambows were getting destroyed by condis to the point where I feel like they’re just convincing themselves it’s still the meta. More importantly they seem to not realize that Condi Warrior is ABSURDLY strong now. It lacks the AoE but combo it with a Necro using Epidemic and watch as the enemy team has to deal with 20 some stacks of bleed. As a condi War the only thing I have issue with 1v1 is MM and that’s because AI was bugged after the patch.

The Warriors in general didn’t seem to be dominating nearly as much as the condi spam builds were in team fights.

Dave Pare.2069:

Well, honestly every team with that mesmer build was in a disadvantage, I mean going shatterer with GS and Staff? Makes little sense to me although I don’t know the class well.

As for Warriors: the build almost every team used is horrible imo; HamBow+Soldier amulet+Runes of strenght for everybody? Really? There’s nothing better at the moment for warriors? You definitely could afford going with the berserk amulet if you use warr.

So far I’ve seen very little new builds and originality and it is at least disappointing. The only team that really put something “new” is, as it was predictable, Car Crash.

I was very surprised not to see any zerker/condi warrior or turret engi or phantasm/condi mesmer; every single class was in most of the cases the exact copy of one another. I almost had the feeling that someone just said to teams before the tourney started: “so here are the builds to use for the tourney, have fun and don’t try something new; bye”.

Anyway the tournament is thrilling and exciting, although Car Crash are still the best imo, both for originality and skills.

None of those things are surprising to any high-end player. The metagame that apparently exists at low-level play is completely wrong, because it’s built around very easy builds that only work against unknowledgeable players.

Lopez.7369:

Dave Pare.2069:

Well, honestly every team with that mesmer build was in a disadvantage, I mean going shatterer with GS and Staff? Makes little sense to me although I don’t know the class well.

As for Warriors: the build almost every team used is horrible imo; HamBow+Soldier amulet+Runes of strenght for everybody? Really? There’s nothing better at the moment for warriors? You definitely could afford going with the berserk amulet if you use warr.

So far I’ve seen very little new builds and originality and it is at least disappointing. The only team that really put something “new” is, as it was predictable, Car Crash.

I was very surprised not to see any zerker/condi warrior or turret engi or phantasm/condi mesmer; every single class was in most of the cases the exact copy of one another. I almost had the feeling that someone just said to teams before the tourney started: “so here are the builds to use for the tourney, have fun and don’t try something new; bye”.

Anyway the tournament is thrilling and exciting, although Car Crash are still the best imo, both for originality and skills.

None of those things are surprising to any high-end player. The metagame that apparently exists at low-level play is completely wrong, because it’s built around very easy builds that only work against unknowledgeable players.

You keep saying that in every thread you post. And you are still wrong.

Build-wise high level play isn’t any different than any other level of play. There is no such thing as builds that work exclusively at high levels and won’t also at lower levels.

Dave Pare.2069:

Well, honestly every team with that mesmer build was in a disadvantage, I mean going shatterer with GS and Staff? Makes little sense to me although I don’t know the class well.

The builds which Hellsetz and Misha used arent “100% pure shatter”. If I remember right, they both used Halting strike, so they can also deal some interrupt damage.

I think, if Mesmer wouldn’t have stuff like Illusion of Life, or Portal, probably nobody would use them in tournaments.
Mesmer gets only occainsally picked, because it can have some good support utilities for his team, but nobody picks a Mesmer “because it is so strong”.
You use it, because you can shift your team with portals, because he can stealth his allies or because of some condi removal.
All this is just to help the other classes to make a better performance.

EverythingEnds.4261:

So, I’m watching the Tournament of Legends atm, my impressions are:

Guardian is in every team (ofc)
Engi is also extremly popular.

Almost no team without a Warrior did win.
Almost no team with a Mesmer won.

Lets put some misconceptions to rest, i just finished going through the EU ToL.

First off, Guardians are not in every team. Two games a team did not have a single Guardian. They got destroyed both those games however.

Secondly, Engineer is not extremely popular. Infact its the 2nd least popular profession. Only Mesmer was played less then Engineer.

Third, Warriors not being in a team didnt lead to a big deviation in wins or losses.
8x a team did not pick a Warrior, and 5x that team lost. Its there, but not a massive swing.

Fourth, Mesmers didnt lead to an big swing in losing matches. 9x did a Team play with a Mesmer against a team with no Mesmer. In 5 of those games the team with the Mesmer won.
If anything, statistically speaking, Mesmer have a better “winning edge” then Warriors.

There were 19 games. With 10 player slots per game (5 per team) that means we have a total have 190 classes picked. If we see all profession picked evenly, we’d see 23,75 for every single profession.
Use this number as a gauge, picked more then 23.75x means the profession is over-represented. Less and its underrepresented.

Now for the popular professions:

1# Guardians
There have been 19 matches, and we’ve seen 40 Guardian picks. That average out at more then 1 Guardian per team. And indeed several times we’ve seen 2 guardian picks.
Only twice did we see a game where one team did not have a Guardian, this team lost both games by a significant margin.

2# Warriors
Almost as popular as Guardians, we’ve seen 37 Warrior picks through all the games. Thats just under the 1 warrior, per game, per team average. Sometimes Warriors didnt get picked, sometimes picked twice in a team. A lot of Hambows btw, a lot.

3# Thieves
A thief was picked 26x. Making it the 3th most played profession upto this point.

4# Rangers
Maybe it will surprise some people, because a lot of people are convinced that rangers are garbage. But it was actually picked 21x, barely beating out Necro in popularity.

5# Necromancers
A close follow up to Rangers, it was picked 20x.

6# Elementalists
Ele’s got picked 18x total through the ToL so far. Making them one of the least popular professions.

7# Engineers
Despite what people seem to think, not a popular profession so far at all. Picked a meager 15x it is the second least favorite pick.

8# Mesmers
Picked an underwhelming 13x. Despite seemingly not contributed to an increase in team losses, its obviously the least picked profession upto this point.

Ok, I have to admit, I was wrong with engis.
And thx for providing this statistic.

But how Mesmers are handled is just sad.
Especially in the last match, it was really ironic.
Hellseth always tryed to evade 1 vs 1s, which is somehow ironic, as everybody sais Mesmer is such a strong 1v1 class.
Also, in teamfights, the Mesmers are usally the ones which are focused first, and as soon as there’s a thief in the opposing team, the Mesmer will also have a bad time in teamfights.

Or the Mesmer elites, always never provide anything “big” to their teams, while still having insane CDs.
Not to mention, how often the “absolutly OP” Moa Elite was used in those matches.

In terms of Mesmer, PU is useless in this game type, Phant as a 1v1 back cap still gets pushed off point by the amount of condis, condi and condi shatter are kind of meh in team fights and 1v1. The only somewhat viable build is shatter and that needs a buff. Outside of portal you can replace it with a thief which does more damage (and let’s not pretend the point blank AoE of a shatter is much cleave that makes up for single target) or PW thief which is the same playstyle with instant setup instead of multiple cool downs into a resource that dies.

No one at a higher level falls for clones or predictable burst that requires that much set up might as we’ll be the new 100b. But surely now with all the PvErs who don’t know how to play mes will get bashed again because they don’t know how to fight it. And A-net will never do anything about it.

look at my signature guys, gg anet, gg.

This happens time and time again on league of legends, when tournaments go on…
Some pro players plays a non-standard champ in a lane… does really well (perhaps because he’s level of skill allowed it? Perhaps he plays well… you could say at a professional level…?)… all the scrubs watching the tourny go “I wanna be just like him!”, then you begin to see an increase of said champ in every game you play and people completely and utterly blow with it… But hey! A pro played it, did well… means if I do the same thing I will do just as well!

Wonder how the gw2 community will react in terms of watching the tourny…

Mesmer is not in the best spot right now, but the top 3 teams all had a mesmer. That still says something.

PhDusk.2590:

Mesmer is not in the best spot right now, but the top 3 teams all had a mesmer. That still says something.

That says, that on high level play, portal is rly important and usefull if you are coordinated well enough.

And yet the winning team, TCG had fresh build for warrior, a Mesmer, D/D Ele obliterating everyone, standard Guardian and S/D Thief.

I think most teams post patch are picking what’s comfortable for the sake of minimizing mistakes.

Some classes have become incredibly strong post patch, I.e engineer, however due to the risk of doing something “new In a tournament environment” few are playing them.

That explains why hambow ect is still prevalent.

I can’t say I blame them, if only the tournament was 4 weeks from now, Im sure you’d see a higher variety in builds and comps.

Bowflex.4502:

I think most teams post patch are picking what’s comfortable for the sake of minimizing mistakes.

Some classes have become incredibly strong post patch, I.e engineer, however due to the risk of doing something “new In a tournament environment” few are playing them.

That explains why hambow ect is still prevalent.

I can’t say I blame them, if only the tournament was 4 weeks from now, Im sure you’d see a higher variety in builds and comps.

It seems like the teams that are taking advantage of newer specs are getting rewarded. That being said if the tourney had taken place later we probably would have seen 3/5 players using condi.

It’s true burr, less power builds, way more condi, and longer matches

BurrTheKing.8571:

Bowflex.4502:

I think most teams post patch are picking what’s comfortable for the sake of minimizing mistakes.

Some classes have become incredibly strong post patch, I.e engineer, however due to the risk of doing something “new In a tournament environment” few are playing them.

That explains why hambow ect is still prevalent.

I can’t say I blame them, if only the tournament was 4 weeks from now, Im sure you’d see a higher variety in builds and comps.

It seems like the teams that are taking advantage of newer specs are getting rewarded. That being said if the tourney had taken place later we probably would have seen 3/5 players using condi.

Everyone knows at this point that you have no idea how to handle conditions, doesn’t mean anything for the rest of the community that actually knows how to play the game.

The winning team had a mesmer, elementalist and played without hambow and spirit ranger.

Meta is changing.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Congrats-to-TCG-for-winning-the-EU-Tournament-of-Legends

Something that’s also important to recognize is how some classes that have easy stealth access (thief/mesmer) aren’t able to reach their full potential in a point capturing scenario. When you’re fighting a player using stealth in WvW for example, they can go in and out of it as much as they need to. When trying to capture, protect, or contest a point, stealthing removes you from affecting the point. This can be problematic. To me, a visible player is a player on equal footing as me. I just fought a team in ‘yolo’ q that didn’t have a Guardian, and we came out on top. Guardians do have awesome, sometimes unnoticeable perks about them

mrauls.6519:

Something that’s also important to recognize is how classes that some classes that have easy stealth access (thief/mesmer) aren’t able to reach their full potential in a point capturing scenario. When you’re fighting a player using stealth in WvW for example, they can go in and out of it as much as they need to. When trying to capture, protect, or contest a point, stealthing removes you from affecting the point.

And this is why balancing across all game modes will be a mess, because the win conditions for each mode are so different.

Maybe separate the different game modes then. Death matches, capture the point, and any other type of game mode they release can be separate from one another. That means people can build for them differently

Wait..are you telling me the team that won was not a full condition team?!

#condispamisOPamirit?
#datguarddoe

With runes of strength and cleansebot eles back in the meta, condi isn’t looking so strong .

Solori.6025:

Wait..are you telling me the team that won was not a full condition team?!

#condispamisOPamirit?
#datguarddoe

Note that most of the teams were running what was basically an updated version of last patches meta while the winning team ran a comp that was really strong against it. Most apparently wanted to play it safe and it didn’t pay off.

I was pleased to see all of the guardians doing well. The guard forum has been totally cluttered by invalid complaints lately.

BurrTheKing.8571:

Solori.6025:

Wait..are you telling me the team that won was not a full condition team?!

#condispamisOPamirit?
#datguarddoe

Note that most of the teams were running what was basically an updated version of last patches meta while the winning team ran a comp that was really strong against it. Most apparently wanted to play it safe and it didn’t pay off.

So what you are saying is condispam teams have a counter and the winning team basically did that and won?

Solori.6025:

BurrTheKing.8571:

Solori.6025:

Wait..are you telling me the team that won was not a full condition team?!

#condispamisOPamirit?
#datguarddoe

Note that most of the teams were running what was basically an updated version of last patches meta while the winning team ran a comp that was really strong against it. Most apparently wanted to play it safe and it didn’t pay off.

So what you are saying is condispam teams have a counter and the winning team basically did that and won?

No, what I said is that there where not many teams that made heavy use of condi. Many were still running mostly power-based builds and TCGs team was really strong against that. I didn’t watch every game but most teams I saw didn’t have more than 1 condi spec. There was actually a surprisingly low number of Engis and an unnecessarily high number of Warriors. Hambow isn’t all that great now that people have finally started to figure out how to fight them.

I’m going to guess that the NA tourney is going to have a different meta than the EU one did because they’re going to have more time to experiment.

How many eles were there? Last tourney I watched, there was not a single one fielded for any amount of time.

Conncept.7638:

How many eles were there? Last tourney I watched, there was not a single one.

I think around half the teams in the Ro32 had an ele, and a team with a d/d ele won the tournament. 2 of the teams in the semifinals ran eles as well