Guild Wars 2

I dont consider RS as an “immu”, but I get your point and I definitely agree that maybe this is too much

I hope it’s not considered “balanced” unless Anet intentionally removed warriors from competitive PvP.

I have to agree. Things aren’t that unbalanced right now; every class has a place except for war. Ever since the June patch however, the general game design of pvp has gone down the toilet, and this arguably got worse with HoT.

Skill floors on most classes were massively lowered; engineer is probably the best example of this. For 99% of 1v1s you know how they will play out before they even start, and most of the time they are stale mates if they involve druids, scrappers, tempests, or revs. What this means is that rotations and team fights are pretty much the deciding factors of every match. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in its own right, but complexity was removed from the game for really no reason by making the roaming job a snooze fest (either you have a guaranteed win, it’s a stale mate, or you get out when you are +1’d because you have plenty of escape and defense).

On the topic of team fights, I feel like these really took a dive with HoT. The amount of aoe cc and buffs in the game right now is crazy. AoE dazes from druids, for instance, don’t really scale properly in team fights. Interrupting people unintentionally with short cooldown dazes probably isn’t good for the game. I feel like the cc should be more focused on single targets. Scrappers scale with other classes that give super super speed in a silly way. Tempests are an even spam-heavy version of ele when it comes to team fights with little counter play to their large aoes. Either you stand on point hoping to get a bit lucky with the rng or you yield the point to them.

So what are we left with in terms of well designed spvp game play? Pretty much rotations, that’s it.

So what do we need to fix the problem, then?

Fewer defensive abilities? Fewer abilities that double as offensive and defensive both? Reduced damage on abilities? Fewer escapes? More specialized abilities and fewer “do everything you need” abilities?

As a d/p thief, I agree with OP. Hanging up my gw2 shoes for a few months, maybe longer. Just not fun anymore with the aoe cc spam. Nothing is more infuriating than walking up to a point only to see a dh trapper standing on it that I have 0% chance to beat 1v1.

Cogbyrn.7283:

So what do we need to fix the problem, then?

Fewer defensive abilities? Fewer abilities that double as offensive and defensive both? Reduced damage on abilities? Fewer escapes? More specialized abilities and fewer “do everything you need” abilities?

Pretty much.

Here is the BEST place to start:
- Fewer big procs that can’t be avoided. This is a big part of the reason why “everyone blows up when they run out of invulns” because that is when everything starts proccing, and you find yourself with a million condis/cc/damage hits that you could never even avoid. Not skillful to apply, and requires playing predictively to know when your opponents procs are going to go off so you can have a util ready.
- Fewer instant-cast abilities that aren’t defensive. Do you remember when, for the most part, the game followed the rule of “big effects have big animations/tells.”
- Hard mitigation (blocks, immunities, evades) on long CD’s
- Better balance between single-target damage vs. aoe, and melee vs. range. It seems like everything just cleaves nowadays or else it basically isn’t useful. This is why teamfights are such a cluster-crap.

Overall damage needs to decrease, and so does healing. A heal of 2k once meant something, nowadays it is only useful if you can do it every 5s.

Pretty much ALL of gw2’s ailments in pvp can be summed up in a single cause: power-creep.

BlackBeard.2873:

Cogbyrn.7283:

So what do we need to fix the problem, then?

Fewer defensive abilities? Fewer abilities that double as offensive and defensive both? Reduced damage on abilities? Fewer escapes? More specialized abilities and fewer “do everything you need” abilities?

Pretty much.

Here is the BEST place to start:
- Fewer instant-cast abilities that aren’t defensive
- Hard mitigation (blocks, immunities, evades) on long CD’s
- Better balance between single-target damage vs. aoe, and melee vs. range. It seems like everything just cleaves nowadays or else it basically isn’t useful. This is why teamfights are such a cluster-crap.

Overall damage needs to decrease, and so does healing. A heal of 2k once meant something, nowadays it is only useful if you can do it every 5s.

I agree with that sentiment, by the way. However, I don’t hold out a lot of hope, since it would require a lot of rebalancing work across every class, as well as across runes/sigils and traits.

ANet dug themselves into a “too much of everything” grave, and crawling out would require an overhaul.

Cogbyrn.7283:

BlackBeard.2873:

Cogbyrn.7283:

So what do we need to fix the problem, then?

Fewer defensive abilities? Fewer abilities that double as offensive and defensive both? Reduced damage on abilities? Fewer escapes? More specialized abilities and fewer “do everything you need” abilities?

Pretty much.

Here is the BEST place to start:
- Fewer instant-cast abilities that aren’t defensive
- Hard mitigation (blocks, immunities, evades) on long CD’s
- Better balance between single-target damage vs. aoe, and melee vs. range. It seems like everything just cleaves nowadays or else it basically isn’t useful. This is why teamfights are such a cluster-crap.

Overall damage needs to decrease, and so does healing. A heal of 2k once meant something, nowadays it is only useful if you can do it every 5s.

I agree with that sentiment, by the way. However, I don’t hold out a lot of hope, since it would require a lot of rebalancing work across every class, as well as across runes/sigils and traits.

ANet dug themselves into a “too much of everything” grave, and crawling out would require an overhaul.

I completely agree with this. Everything about it. It feels like they just got carried away and now it’s too far gone. Toning everything down would also let them cut back on visual noise (because big damage is supposed to mean big tell).

I wouldn’t really call the meta “balanced” when 2 classes out of 9 are completely out of it.

But yes, there are definitely heavy hints of power creep in this meta, and the fact that it’s also not equally distributed between the professions makes it even worse.

It’s not balanced else you would be able to use pre-HoT builds in competitve spvp and not be a grass stain.

Yea, this is my least favorite meta in a long time (at least for Conquest). I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is. Here’s my best guess though:

1) Warrior is completely not even viable
2) Thief is in a very bad spot as well
3) Engi seems to be viable due to playing like a DD ele
4) Overall conquest meta still seems to be very focused on tanky bruisers without any room for high dps/highly mobile builds.

I wasn’t a fan of the cele ele meta, but at least before HoT there was a bit of room for classes like D/P thief to shine…kind of…

Warrior has just needed help overall. I know it’s a hard class to balance since it’s easily a low skill cap beast or a free kill, but something big needs to change for this class mechanic wise. Small shaves don’t seem to be the answer here, even if that is a wise balance philosophy overall.

Thief either needs to be toned back to be a solid roamer/1v1 class again or will need an alternative viable build. If venoms got the right kind of buff (not simply more buffs), I could see this being worthwhile. They at least need a stun break.

Other classes seem to be primarily affected by how strong celestial or celestial-like builds (such as soldier’s) are and would probably be better addressed by a change to those amulets.

I like it. The bursty meta was boring IMO

Not to mention all of the passive procs that happen. There’s just so many now, you can have a passive completely cancel an enemy’s massive burst and you wouldn’t even know.

There’s so much avoidance spam as well that it’s just mindless and there’s no “good timing” you just have to hope your stuff lands which it won’t half the time.

And then they not only put blocks/evades on everything, but the massive amounts of damage.

Look at Scrapper Hammer, every single attack 2-5 is a massive attack with low cooldown, like massive backstab damage, AND they give evades or block or reflect.

Like what the hell lol.

GW2 suffers the same issues as WoW. Power creep and over-reliance on op abilities.

Healing and active defenses should be reduced. In turn, spike damage from abilities should be as well, while auto attack damage should be increased — this will lead to a playstyle where lost health will stick, fights will last longer and generally a player with more situational awareness / better positioning and use of limited skills would win, rather than one who can spam more.

Devolving the game to spamming all the keys is what killed wow pvp. I’m seeing the same pattern repeated here, and I hope the devs back out of the ‘spam’ trap before it ruins another game for good.

Zeghart.9841:

I wouldn’t really call the meta “balanced” when 2 classes out of 9 are completely out of it.

If you gave both Thief and Warrior Portal, they’d be in there same as Mesmer is.

Gotta keep things in perspective.