Guild Wars 2

With the proliferation of skills that grant super speed i had really hoped to see a faster meta develop. For years it feels like they’ve been working to speed up gameplay, reduce time spent doing nothing, and increase time fighting the other team… it’s felt as though they wanted the game to be interesting throughout the game… they wanted to hear battle cries of “it’s not over yet!” even when teams were down a couple hundred points… seeing the bunker meta develop is unfortunate… I think there was too little place for bunkers in the previous meta, but the complete 180 is just a pendulum of bad.

As I agree that yesterday fights where boring I don’t agree it’s the rev and mes meta fault
When thief thrown from the meta with no ability to handle 1v1 and rev with good mobility take their place and so many blocks immunity condi cleanse out there made build to favorite the sustain and support over dmg and tactic game play

But again seeing a fast fight with huge dmg can be boring also
Thus few thoughts to consider

I wish I will see condi team versus power team and not same build versus same build
Condi should have place to enable diversity is game style
Less bunkering and more support
Thief rework as this role can change the pace of game and not by just decap

Thief doesn’t need the 1v1 back, they just need better teamfight presence and utility.

Nerf stealth, buff their innate survival with more damage reduction mechanisms that don’t come with the side benefit of large, spammable spike.

I mean, it’s not like rangers are doing well either. No, druids are not rangers, they are a completely separate healbot class that makes them give up their offensive capabilities (in which mesmers and thieves always eclipsed them).

Necro of course is out of meta as well, anybody could see it coming, when revenant is doing unrelenting assaults that hit for same or more damage than a Gravedigger with the added benefit of evade frames and a teleport to your target while having the strongest mainhand sword autoattack in the game. So power necro is a defenseless pinball with slow animations that are easy to dodge, and condi necro is totally eclipsed by condi engineer.

Anastasis.7258:

Hi everyone, I’m Tarcis, the captain of Apex Prime.
First of all, I would like to make sure that everyone knows we are not depressed at all by losing today’s match.

In fact, we know that almost every teams in Pro League on NA are going to run this comp, which is 2 Sentinel bunker Mesmers, 2 Viper Revenants, and 1 Tempest. We prepared our kitten already and treating today’s match as a chance/practice to seek a weakness from this comp. Unfortunately, we didn’t pull out our A+ games and cannot seek any weakness in time.

The reason why I’m making this thread is because that I feel extremely disappointed when I play against this comp. It is not fun to play against, and I believe it is also not fun to watch. I do understand that everyone wants to win, but this just not healthy for this game.

You may say “Hey, The Abjured still beat double bunker mesmers comp”, but if you guys realized, Final Form’s comp is slightly different than Spookie, PZ, and Never Lucky. They have a druid instead of a tempest, and even with that, they almost pull a game from Abjured. I believe Abjured can still beat the comp like this, which us, Apex, has beaten this bunker mesmers comp in scrims too. But the fact that the skill requirement for this comp is just ridiculously low.

The comp isn’t unbeatable, but the fact that this bunkiersh comp can eliminate the mechanic skill difference between players is not cool at all. In this stage, I think everyone can just make a team and play with this comp, and will be able to compete with pro league’s teams.

EU are also running the similar comp but instead of 2nd bunker mesmer, they run marauder engi. In my opinion, both are similar but 2 bunker mesmers can be far more superior and more aids.

I know the balance patch will not hit until February, 2016, but imagine that if we or no one else can figure out a solution for this comp, what will we expect on the ESL Finals in Cologne? I don’t believe that anyone wants it and I also don’t believe that Anet wants it.

Just my personal opinion here, and sorry for the broken English.

Tarcis.

Donnu why Anet can’t figure out multiple mesmers with f5 can pull out around 16 secs of group invulnerability with a CD of 30 secs (alacrity), and let this went live.
That’s like 54% of time full group invulnerable. (plus it’s not like your group is always taking damage, so the gap between each time a group doesn’t take damage can be negated, making the invulnerable up-time more than the statistic)

Add tempest’s immense healing / support and we can see why this bunker set-up excels anything we’ve seen before HoT.

And they let permanent resistance went live too. lol..

Personally I think Well of Precognation need a complete rework.
Should change the “Evade” to “Block” so there’s actually counter-play to it.
This would also make PVE mesmer less affected by the change too.

Zenith.7301:

Thief doesn’t need the 1v1 back, they just need better teamfight presence and utility.

Nerf stealth, buff their innate survival with more damage reduction mechanisms that don’t come with the side benefit of large, spammable spike.

I mean, it’s not like rangers are doing well either. No, druids are not rangers, they are a completely separate healbot class that makes them give up their offensive capabilities (in which mesmers and thieves always eclipsed them).

Necro of course is out of meta as well, anybody could see it coming, when revenant is doing unrelenting assaults that hit for same or more damage than a Gravedigger with the added benefit of evade frames and a teleport to your target while having the strongest mainhand sword autoattack in the game. So power necro is a defenseless pinball with slow animations that are easy to dodge, and condi necro is totally eclipsed by condi engineer.

simple solution can be thief rework which enable him to win almost any 1v1 situation against bunker builds, like ignore blocking/evade, more poison, ignore immunity to dmg etc.. as anet state at the begginig of this game thief should be the best in 1v1 situation.
than you can see more tactic game play. send mesmer to sit on mid alone will result in failure maybe so more rotation by the enemy thief or back to power mesmer who can fight thief

the problem as i see it thief is out of the meta so less rotation and tactic games and more sitting on points

to see the sustain players sleeping in the down buff as they know they cant kill each other was true upsetting

The official statement posted is that the ESL tournament was devised by the marketing team to help promote gw2 to new players. It was even pointed out that this ESl tournament didn’t have anything to do with the balancing team. So to recap in brief..a tournament was designed without the balancing team. A tournament…without a balancing team…if you’re like me, it all makes sense now.

jayson.6512:

I think im gonna use this if a mesmer told me the L2P crap.

The ones crying and saying L2P are the ones hinging their entire “skill” on that broken as feck build. Ofc they’re going to cry “Nay!” when you call it like it is, because they know they’re going to have to go back to being skilled at their class when it’s balanced.

That being said I have refused to watch and be involved in any part of this sorry excuse for a “season” or “league” or whatever it’s supposed to be. If Anet doesn’t care enough to balance before it’s release, as they know they should, then I don’t care enough to give them my time or my views.

I don’t know the exact rules, but ESL should really look into prevent class stacking.

I know this came up before with the quad ele comp. Happened again today with the 3x Rev comp.

The double bunker mes/double rev comp is equally as bad and overall boring to watch. This really doesn’t showcase good player skill so much as abuse of broken mechanics to lower the disparity in player skill.

Also, seeing this is the exact reason why balance patches need to occur more than quarterly.

I always find it funny that Anet nerfed the druid / it’s new pets to the ground in less time than saying Lord Jebus, and yet, literal gods (Bunker Chronomancers, Revenants in general) are walking around untouched. And then there are berserkers / warriors in general. They are in a very bad state right now, it makes you want to bring them behind the barn with mister shotgun to end their suffering.

Lévis.5489:

I always find it funny that Anet nerfed the druid / it’s new pets to the ground in less time than saying Lord Jebus, and yet, literal gods (Bunker Chronomancers, Revenants in general) are walking around untouched.

Anet has a fetish of destroying ranger/druid.
This has become a trend for 2 years.

They even nerf Bristleback HP and make Staff AA requires a target, even though no-one in the forum ever complain/care about such minor issues, while leaving the broken specs alone lol..

This is the typical Anet we know about, no surprises.

Abjured won cuz the other team is lower in skill, ran only 1 condi-rev (other one was glint afaik) and a very weird ranger build.

To be fair, they made very good adjustments to their builds, like noscoc ran a smart alteration of the cele-signet nec (dagger instead of scepter which is used more atm, full bunker runes and crit chance instead burning on shroud1 to maximize power-dmg against diamond skin and perma-resistance). also Tokers Thief is not ideal, but if played very well, it can work, since some physical DMG is needed anyways (again against diamond skin and resistance), reveals aren’t as dominant anymore (less glint and not as many engineers with reveal, on NA at least) and the strong cleave is decent to wear down the bunkers (like chaith said in the interview).

The meta is the worst I’ve ever experienced and ANet needs to do sth. A patch in february would possibly be devastating for GW2 PvP. Yes, they’ve made a decision not to make a patch before february 2016, but this is getting out of hand.

I’d really like to see balance linked to the different game modes, so there are differences between, say CoR in pve, pvp and wvw.

People really don’t have that much of a problem dealing with this- Guild Wars managed to have hundreds of pve only and pvp skills and it worked just fine (along with multiple balance fixes and devs that understood the game mechanics).

Once you split the skills out- let’s face it, each area is effectively an instance, so coding can’t be that hard, Guild Wars managed it- then balancing becomes much easier.

The other things required are skill/build templates so you can swap easily between various modes and builds, and most definitely build and class diversity. They should not allow multiple of one class anywhere near a pvp match or tournament, especially given the current OP for certain builds.

At the moment the matches aren’t worth watching. You’d get a lot more players interested in pvp if you make changes now- if a new player can grab a build from a template and dive in, and then be able to switch back when they enter pve without having to manually change everything, it would encourage a lot more people to try. OK, they are going to be awful at first, but at least they will try and some will like it and get better.

PowerBottom.5796:

Abjured won cuz the other team is lower in skill, ran only 1 condi-rev (other one was glint afaik) and a very weird ranger build.

To be fair, they made very good adjustments to their builds, like noscoc ran a smart alteration of the cele-signet nec (dagger instead of scepter which is used more atm, full bunker runes and crit chance instead burning on shroud1 to maximize power-dmg against diamond skin and perma-resistance). also Tokers Thief is not ideal, but if played very well, it can work, since some physical DMG is needed anyways (again against diamond skin and resistance), reveals aren’t as dominant anymore (less glint and not as many engineers with reveal, on NA at least) and the strong cleave is decent to wear down the bunkers (like chaith said in the interview).

The meta is the worst I’ve ever experienced and ANet needs to do sth. A patch in february would possibly be devastating for GW2 PvP. Yes, they’ve made a decision not to make a patch before february 2016, but this is getting out of hand.

They said they’re going to do balance at Feb, but they already nerfed Druid/core ranger like 5 times in a month lol…

Chrono, DH, Tempest, Reaper has yet to receive any nerf whatsoever.

Honestly I wish we could form a pact in NA to agree to never use bunker mes and only 1 revenant. But of course no one will do that since its unofficial and there’s so much money up for grabs

i think they don’t balance the game modes in different fashion each other, is because wvw, which is pvp in pve gear and with pve skill set, so they just touch the multipliers a little and skip/save so much work and can have 3 games modes with less effort. Pvp only skills is something i doubt we will ever see

I really hope Anet does something about this quickly. However with their current communication, I don’t think it will. I shouldn’t get into a ranked pvp match and immediately get blamed for tanking because I play thief. Dear devs, have you ever played against a kittening alacrity well mesmer? It’s stupid – and half pf this other kitten you’ve added is just blatantly overtuned. Please don’t wait 2 months to make your pvp playable. What a joke it is, that anet is throwing 400k tournies for their clusterduck of a “balanced” pvp game. What a kittening joke.

1- Bunker is a viable role and archetype of pvp conquest for 3 years.
2- All bunkers condi clearer spec are dead.
3- CONDIS burst class are in Mayhem.
4- The only viable bunker in the meta is called to be destroyed.

Yeah… fine, that’s a great way to win or show how you can counter some builds and comp.

Bring back bunker guard, shoutbow or even a new bunker ele spec to be able to counter pressure properly to STOMP AND REZ. (wanderer amulet anyone???)

While we don’t have other bunker build viable… well, we feel the pain (err the Tic Tac). We rez, we stomp… we have a hard time to heal ourselve, it’s why we are paired with druids and ele.

And the comp can’t be played by anyone… it’s not working with people who are not able to “even fights” (every scrub think they need to +1 fights, it’s the kittening thief job, stop thinking your are Chuck Norris).

Another thing…

REVENANT are OP and should be NERF right now. This is the class that crushed all the other (except healing heavy build). Stop thinking about mesmers, we can’t kill kitten.

The OPness come from the VIPER amulet and should have the same fate has Wanderer (that was balancing VIPER btw).

Revenant in celestial are not good enough to counter all builds, like VIPER do.

But well… I know enough, you guyz always call to NERF bunkers… and then complain why the meta is AIDS and CANCER (used to call condis easy classes) because they nerf the guy that was keeping your toon alive (or rez).

Balance and fun makes an e-sport, not how many times you throw around the buzzword ‘e-sport’ and promote the hell out of it in and out of game. Right now we don’t have balance or fun.

Its funny all this drama about bunker mesmer when it was created to fit the meta and the current balance of the game… Meta and current state of the game forced mesmer to adapt to it current form or stay in the shadow.
If it wasnt bunker, normal/shatter mesmer was and still is currently worst than thief or warrior many ppl complain about…
Also i still remember everyone crying when mesmer “1-shot” (even if other berserker glasscannons) “everyone” and it was nerfed. Now bursts barely scratch anyone and sustained dps is lower than this bunkerish builds and survivability is, at best, insignificant.
Maybe you should complain about high dmg/ high sustain builds capable of sustaining most 1vs1 or vs2 while being able to pull off 600k-800k dmg per match and still having all those tricks (stealths, mobilitys, disables) and all those aoe faceroll effects/skills that are overtuned in a gamemode that is all about secure determined areas.

Everyone who ever complained about thief and everyone who ever complained about berserker meta … congratulations. This is what happens when you make berserker less viable. Thief is nowhere to be seen in espurts while it was the de-facto burster and point capper.

It’s gone, and all teh thanksgiving goes to the anti-berserker baddies who never their heads around it and wanted to play this yawn fest.

It’s so bad, I don’t even login lately. Wanted to watch Pro League last night from bed … fell asleep … on the freaking VoD. It was so boring. The commenters were bored to death. There was literally nothing happening. Just bunkering.

Idk if ANet cares about people’s opinion but i’ll say mine for what it’s worth. I don’t play league of legends or dota myself because i’m not good enough and i don’t want to be shouted at. And honestly i dont want to put the effort to get good at it, but that’s besides the point. My point is that, even though i don’t play those games for various of reasons, i enjoy watching the matchups of the top streamers. I get everything that happens on the game. Granted those games are rather simple and they are more of a strategic games than action games.

But boy oh boy do they contain action. One slip up and one guy wipes the whole enemy team on a killing spree. This is bloody and it is also fun to watch.

Do you know what was the most memorable moment of sPvP I had so far? When oRNG were losing pathetically versus Abjured but somehow managed to down 4 of them and totally flipped the game.

Yes that was in the old berserker meta. But it was kittening brutal. It was spectacular. It was >>> fun <<<. The only issue this meta had was the D/D cele. You didn’t have to screw up the game to cast D/D ele aside. You managed to cast away the turret engi without crippling the game.

Make what you will out of my rumbling.

Can I suggest that Anet ‘could’ have most PvP skills balancing for each classes separate from PvE.

— Yes, that’s an overhaul on most of the skills and it’s output power for each skills in PvP mode.
— Yes, that requires saving a lot more data per account in their database.
— Yes, it is a meticulous journey trying to figure out the fine line between playable classes and PvP non-meta (a kind way to say, unplayable) classes aka daredevil ironically — a set of skill sets that first looked like it was all for PvP.

The face of the community has spoken for balanced patches, we already know the problem exist. How to solve it will be the greatest feat. PvP as we know it is broken. However, no one enjoys a huge nerf after every PvP balancing patches, because PvE is completely different from PvP in terms of cooldown timers, damage ticks, skill rotation, mechanics, hell — even the community — I could even say the same for WvW if the WvW community pushes that too.

I’m sorry if this is not where I should write this thread but I’m very displeased and am afraid that if I write this after the balance patches it will be way too late. PvE players most often than not get the short end of the stick. That is not to say, don’t do balance patches whatsoever, I’m just suggesting — keep them separate.

Edit:

Zenith.7301:

It’s that simple. Hire more class developers because clearly you are undermanned on that front, SPLIT PVE/PVP balance, and do more meaningful balance patches more often.

Apparently someone beat me to this thread.

Anastasis.7258:

Hi everyone, I’m Tarcis, the captain of Apex Prime.
First of all, I would like to make sure that everyone knows we are not depressed at all by losing today’s match.

In fact, we know that almost every teams in Pro League on NA are going to run this comp, which is 2 Sentinel bunker Mesmers, 2 Viper Revenants, and 1 Tempest. We prepared our kitten already and treating today’s match as a chance/practice to seek a weakness from this comp. Unfortunately, we didn’t pull out our A+ games and cannot seek any weakness in time.

Tarcis.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3vw9a9/pvp_tarcis_apex_primes_captain_speaking_up_about/?ref=search_posts

ESPORT:

Eu Helselth kitten Bag of a Lord simply say to NA PRO Team this:

LordHelsethThere is a difference between peasants and kings -2 points 2 hours ago
Id love it if na could wait till after they run the optimal setups before talking about the meta
Mesmers w bad utils, no scrappers, fresh air eles.
Theyre at the same point ppl were in monthly on eu before proleague started
These setups have counters, you just didnt see them last week on eu proleague because everyone of the top teams faced weaker teams they didnt need to reveal stuff vs

So what, NA? Do you have a counter to that easy comp?

Guess The Abjured got one. What about APEX? PZ? Zero Counterplay?

Let’s ESPORT rolls hard and please, show to the world you can break a COMP. It would not be the first time, right? (oh and please stop kittenting over Bunker role, it’s clearly CONDI gods REV / REaper that killed marauder/berserker – warrior/thief meta!)

Dal

Perhaps Anet should have waited another month on season 1 until the meta revealed its true form. Then balanced accordingly. Then release the season.

Zenith.7301:

Thief doesn’t need the 1v1 back, they just need better teamfight presence and utility.

Nerf stealth, buff their innate survival with more damage reduction mechanisms that don’t come with the side benefit of large, spammable spike.

I mean, it’s not like rangers are doing well either. No, druids are not rangers, they are a completely separate healbot class that makes them give up their offensive capabilities (in which mesmers and thieves always eclipsed them).

Necro of course is out of meta as well, anybody could see it coming, when revenant is doing unrelenting assaults that hit for same or more damage than a Gravedigger with the added benefit of evade frames and a teleport to your target while having the strongest mainhand sword autoattack in the game. So power necro is a defenseless pinball with slow animations that are easy to dodge, and condi necro is totally eclipsed by condi engineer.

condition engineer has been out of the spvp meta since before June (though that killed it) and condition scrapper isn’t worth running. Condition reaper is much better than condition engineer and power reapers don’t have to use GS and that’s honestly the least of their problems in the meta.

You are right about rev being too strong. Why bring a condi necro when Mallyx shiro rev has so much better mobility, permanent resistance, and better condition application on top of all their broken sword 3 and shiro skills? Necro just has better CC, but bunker mes can cover the CC needs for a team

There’s just too much stuff avalible to majority of professions and new Durability runes don’t help.

Everything can stack a lot of boons, has tons of CC, can fart decent condition damage just by weapon swapping, brings multiple active defenses. This leaves out “basic” professions like Warrior who still needs to land some hits when everybody blurs, teleports, evades and blocks. No wonder condition damage became more reliable – you can barely land any solid power damage anymore on new meta builds.

What this game will need in order to become enjoyable in PvP is shaving. Shaving amount of blocks, evades, CC, conditions, condition cleanses, passive procs etc.

It needs to slow down. Make each use of cooldown count, each condition that you get be significant and condition clear a decision to make.

Cheers,
Rym

Jourdelune.7456:

Dal

Hey Dal! Im Fortus, the ele!

Cmon man, you know our bunker builds are broken, together with the condi rev of course. Personally I dont mind to keep running this cele ele but I would much rather be able to kill (and be killed) than to have the snore fests we currently have, like the 2 games yesterday where once an enemy mesmer got to one of our points we needed 2-3 people to kill him, and then by the time we managed to kill the other one, the first one had respawned and gotten to mid again.

If the option is between blowing everything up in a split second vs a bunker meta, i prefer the bunker meta.

But then again this is what you get for removing bruisers from the game.

Apolo.5942:

If the option is between blowing everything up in a split second vs a bunker meta, i prefer the bunker meta.

It saddens me that the two are so consistently driven further apart.
What ever happened to aiming for a nice middle ground where fights are long enough to allow plenty of back-and-forth counterplay, well-timed dodges, careful cooldown management and mindgames between builds that are actually capable of killing eachother?

They seem to be under some delusion that simply adding more, more, more of everything will make the gameplay more action-packed and engaging, while in reality it just lowers the skill ceiling of the game and makes combat frustrating.

ResJudicator.7916:

An easy hotfix would be to make some combination of Mesmer Shield4, Precog Well, and Csplit not have point contribution. (Not necessarily all 3).

Otherwise, a direct nerf to bunker mes survivability would unfortunately screw over the few remaining non-bunker mesmers. I think it’d be better to nerf the bunker mesmer’s ability to hold a point indefinitely via rotating evades and blocks.

agree 100%.

Fortus.6175:

Jourdelune.7456:

Dal

Hey Dal! Im Fortus, the ele!

Cmon man, you know our bunker builds are broken, together with the condi rev of course. Personally I dont mind to keep running this cele ele but I would much rather be able to kill (and be killed) than to have the snore fests we currently have, like the 2 games yesterday where once an enemy mesmer got to one of our points we needed 2-3 people to kill him, and then by the time we managed to kill the other one, the first one had respawned and gotten to mid again.

Bro! Nothing new there.

I did this with bunker guard, bunker staff ele, bunker decap engi, bunker mesmer, bunker necro, shoutbow (or some op dd ele).

Bunker is an Archetype of the META. Bunker can’t kill anything. Serious competitive team need to cap and protect their bruisers/dps. It’s where bunker shine.

Removing bunker from the game, would destroy the game balanced. Actually, since we only have a couple of viable bunker build over all the bruisers trash, I say the game balanced is already destroyed because people like you, simply say this is boring.

Actually, CONDI BURST REV AND REAPER destroy all berzerker/marauder builds… this is what cause the boring games. Not Bunkers, we where of all meta and will be until that game cater to casual gamers who want rewards without thinking and working for it.

Boring is destroying your game balance? Please think before writing.

Dal

OP, you basically wrote how 80% of the meta are low-skill builds. Not only the one you mentioned

Celtus.8456:

Balance and fun makes an e-sport, not how many times you throw around the buzzword ‘e-sport’ and promote the hell out of it in and out of game. Right now we don’t have balance or fun.

Because League of Legends is such a shining example of a balanced game right?

Terrorsquad.4802:

OP, you basically wrote how 80% of the meta are low-skill builds. Not only the one you mentioned

He’s pro, so he must be right.

Crinn.7864:

Celtus.8456:

Balance and fun makes an e-sport, not how many times you throw around the buzzword ‘e-sport’ and promote the hell out of it in and out of game. Right now we don’t have balance or fun.

Because League of Legends is such a shining example of a balanced game right?

LoL is light years ahead of gw2 in terms of balance and fun. Josre said it perfectly.

Anastasis.7258:

Hi everyone, I’m Tarcis, the captain of Apex Prime.
First of all, I would like to make sure that everyone knows we are not depressed at all by losing today’s match.

In fact, we know that almost every teams in Pro League on NA are going to run this comp, which is 2 Sentinel bunker Mesmers, 2 Viper Revenants, and 1 Tempest. We prepared our kitten already and treating today’s match as a chance/practice to seek a weakness from this comp. Unfortunately, we didn’t pull out our A+ games and cannot seek any weakness in time.

The reason why I’m making this thread is because that I feel extremely disappointed when I play against this comp. It is not fun to play against, and I believe it is also not fun to watch. I do understand that everyone wants to win, but this just not healthy for this game.

You may say “Hey, The Abjured still beat double bunker mesmers comp”, but if you guys realized, Final Form’s comp is slightly different than Spookie, PZ, and Never Lucky. They have a druid instead of a tempest, and even with that, they almost pull a game from Abjured. I believe Abjured can still beat the comp like this, which us, Apex, has beaten this bunker mesmers comp in scrims too. But the fact that the skill requirement for this comp is just ridiculously low.

The comp isn’t unbeatable, but the fact that this bunkiersh comp can eliminate the mechanic skill difference between players is not cool at all. In this stage, I think everyone can just make a team and play with this comp, and will be able to compete with pro league’s teams.

EU are also running the similar comp but instead of 2nd bunker mesmer, they run marauder engi. In my opinion, both are similar but 2 bunker mesmers can be far more superior and more aids.

I know the balance patch will not hit until February, 2016, but imagine that if we or no one else can figure out a solution for this comp, what will we expect on the ESL Finals in Cologne? I don’t believe that anyone wants it and I also don’t believe that Anet wants it.

Just my personal opinion here, and sorry for the broken English.

Tarcis.

Thank you for the heart felt letter and for being a good sport about loosing and thank you for echoing what we all know deep down, whne it comes to playing to win the current meta rips all the fun out of it because it’s an unbalanced mess that reduces the winning strategy to “build wars” with a team config that’s all about who gets the first shot in and starts the rotation. If you want to know where great games die due to bad design. GW2 PvP is a good example to look at. It will make a good case study for what not to do in years to come.

In my perfect world, the game designers responsible for this and the QA testers who let it though should be metaphorically burned at the stake (terminated and then black listed in the industry). Is that too harsh? I don’t think so. Prior to HoT release GW2 PvP had grown in popularity because it had become balanced and fun to play.

ArenaNet failed to consider the balance they were destroying with making the Elite Specs OP and playable in ranked. So many possible decisions fumbled. Someone was also stupid (sorry there isn’t a better word) to decide to pump all this money into ESL Pro League the same year HoT rleased and the meta reset from Elite Specs.

It’s all a study in horrible management, horrible design by a company who continues to miss opportunities to make things right. On the low end of the spectrum you have soloQ players raging because they are just food for premades trying to gain rank.

Pro ESL players are saying the competitive meta is kitten. The question really is what did ArenaNet get right this year? Just how much of the competitive PvP side of the game have they destroyed and of course how will they deal with this internally. Will they take proper action and stop the hemorrhaging? Or will they just let the money coming in from Gem store transactions and HoT licenses guide every decision.

The consequence will be shrinking of PvP in the game. Smaller prize next year, less interest overall. ArenaNet may try to blame the game’s age for it or scape goat the problem to something else, but we all will see though the lies (one only has to look at Star Craft II to see when a game is well designed for e-sport it becomes timeless)

Time will tell, but there will be fallout from some of these horrible decisions ArenaNet has made.

rchu.8945:

Terrorsquad.4802:

OP, you basically wrote how 80% of the meta are low-skill builds. Not only the one you mentioned

He’s pro, so he must be right.

If hes pro then i am pope..

Ara.4569:

Can’t you, pro players, protest ? Like both teams of each match refusing to fight ?

You could still have a winner by running internal matches to determine the team that will cap a point on stream. That would require trust, while there’s money to win, so I don’t expect much…

But I expect absolutely nothing from Anet for the next 2 months, and that’s just infuriating.

They’d lose sponsers, which means they lose money.

Plain and simply put:

There needs to be a more frequent schedule for balance patches to the game and a serious, consistent look at how players are using the skills provided to them for each class, with the effort to ensure an equal amount of effort is put into each fight by all parties involved and that said effort correlates to win rate.

A player who has split second reaction time or predictive intuition when it comes to strategy should not lose to another player simply because that player specced their class rotation so that merely memorizing a specific button pattern causes them to not die.

Anet, I’m being frank here, for everyone that is listening. We need more people on the balance team, because we know its a heavy job and several things need to be looked at. Waiting half a year for classes to be rebalanced is not working , especially when you are implementing several new mechanics and sigil /rune sets every pass and are obviously interested in marketing this as e-sports. We need more frequent balance patches with fewer tweaks comprising them so that we can incrementally adjust the classes based on how easy it is to compete with them and how easy it is for them to handle both common and uncommon fight scenarios.

Just upsetting the game balance every six months and then being for the most part silent used to be irritating, but it’s slowly just becoming disappointment. At this point, I can just log in when the game says “theres a balance patch”, see if there’s a class that has a rotation or skill combination that allows easy wins either by spike or attrition, and know immediately that that’s going to be the flavor of half of 2015 or whatever year.

Also, if the devs are not doing this, can you please get together with the developers of the other class and see how your skills interact with each class? Some of the classes are being disadvantaged because other classes are gaining ways to exploit their weaknesses at the same time.

The twitch stream was pretty depressing too… No professional conduct, players being late to the match, a meta so boring its just about who gets on cap first and denies all points because of this slow and bunkery meta. twitch chat was pretty bad too, everyone spamming how horrid the team balance was, all the pro teams abusing the rev/mes comps and such save for abjured, viewers making jokes about the whole game… this “e-sport” has become more of a farce than i’d ever seen

it’s garbage. Anet is not the company to make a good e-sport game, everything about the tournaments and the game balance is so… off.

also, the stream hosts’s commentary are not very constructive to the hype, since its all such a wash of skill rotation garbage on screen. They just state the obvious cap flips too late after caps get flipped.

Ara.4569:

Can’t you, pro players, protest ? Like both teams of each match refusing to fight ?

You could still have a winner by running internal matches to determine the team that will cap a point on stream. That would require trust, while there’s money to win, so I don’t expect much…

But I expect absolutely nothing from Anet for the next 2 months, and that’s just infuriating.

this! +1

CANT YOU PRO PLAYERS JUST GO ON STRIKE?! – all of you make an agreement and just demand a fix?

Anet is clearly ALL about the money so this will hit them the most – the kittening wake up call ANET !

VladR.9827:

Ara.4569:

Can’t you, pro players, protest ? Like both teams of each match refusing to fight ?

You could still have a winner by running internal matches to determine the team that will cap a point on stream. That would require trust, while there’s money to win, so I don’t expect much…

But I expect absolutely nothing from Anet for the next 2 months, and that’s just infuriating.

this! +1

CANT YOU PRO PLAYERS JUST GO ON STRIKE?! – all of you make an agreement and just demand a fix?

Anet is clearly ALL about the money so this will hit them the most – the kittening wake up call ANET !

I’m pretty sure players refusing to pretend the meta is okay would notify someone with some decision-making power that this could potentially hit their pockets.

I guess.

VladR.9827:

Ara.4569:

Can’t you, pro players, protest ? Like both teams of each match refusing to fight ?

You could still have a winner by running internal matches to determine the team that will cap a point on stream. That would require trust, while there’s money to win, so I don’t expect much…

But I expect absolutely nothing from Anet for the next 2 months, and that’s just infuriating.

this! +1

CANT YOU PRO PLAYERS JUST GO ON STRIKE?! – all of you make an agreement and just demand a fix?

Anet is clearly ALL about the money so this will hit them the most – the kittening wake up call ANET !

+1

But what gerenties other bad meta will arise
I see ppl hate condi as it’s not fun like pure direct dmg
But also 3 ppl zerging doing fast dmg can be boring eventually

The game needs more tactical decision making and not pure build excellence

I vote for 1 class for each team.
Also maybe each player must fill in 1 role so no for 2 bunker or 2 condi or full sustain party like
Roamer
Dmg dealer
Bunker
Condi dealer
Sustain
Support
Etc
Or some other variant
Than the game can be more interesting

messiah.1908:

But what gerenties other bad meta will arise
I see ppl hate condi as it’s not fun like pure direct dmg
But also 3 ppl zerging doing fast dmg can be boring eventually

The game needs more tactical decision making and not pure build excellence

I vote for 1 class for each team.
Also maybe each player must fill in 1 role so no for 2 bunker or 2 condi or full sustain party like
Roamer
Dmg dealer
Bunker
Condi dealer
Sustain
Support
Etc
Or some other variant
Than the game can be more interesting

I like the idea, but it will be really hard to implement or enforced.

Crinn.7864:

Celtus.8456:

Balance and fun makes an e-sport, not how many times you throw around the buzzword ‘e-sport’ and promote the hell out of it in and out of game. Right now we don’t have balance or fun.

Because League of Legends is such a shining example of a balanced game right?

In comparison to GW2, yes, yes it is.

Both games are only comparable when you look at LoL’s oldest/ most outdated champions, with their passive effects or skill animations that are hard to grasp intuitively/ visually, their spammy nature, restricted counterplay, etc.

But those outdated champions have been getting reworked over time, and the ones that still remain are either purposefully underpowered (so that they don’t ruin the game) until a rework, or, when viable, are given high priority for said rework.

Crinn.7864:

Celtus.8456:

Balance and fun makes an e-sport, not how many times you throw around the buzzword ‘e-sport’ and promote the hell out of it in and out of game. Right now we don’t have balance or fun.

Because League of Legends is such a shining example of a balanced game right?

There’s op specs that arise from time to time because they’re always adding new heroes, but at least they deal with them reasonably quickly.

So for the most part yes. It’s a solid example for GW2 to look to.

Thanks for the post Tarcis.

Its good that you posted this. I wish Anet will do something about this because frankly if they wait for 2 months, they may have lost too many players by then. There are players in this game that only PVP and 2 months is a long time to be in this situation.

Spartacus.3192:

Thanks for the post Tarcis.

Its good that you posted this. I wish Anet will do something about this because frankly if they wait for 2 months, they may have lost too many players by then. There are players in this game that only PVP and 2 months is a long time to be in this situation.

namely me :<

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again; there should be 1 class per team limit at the very least in ranked.

Pros:
• Would help balance out matches placing more balance to a team comp than abusing a meta class.
• Adds a strategic element to teams, to build not around a meta, but the teams weaknesses & strengths

Cons:
• Queue times. Not sure how big of an impact it will have on solo players.

The above would resolve so many balance issues. Yesterday we ran into a 3 DH / 2 Druid premade and my god did they abuse traps. While we did end up winning by killing lord in the last seconds, it still was insane how much they abused the system. A 5 man DH in stronghold is a guarantee victory.

This by no means any disrespect to you Tarcis, but for years meta builds have existed. D/D Ele meta team builds is a perfect example of that. This is the first time any top tier team spoke up. Is it because there is more at stake?

messiah.1908:

But what gerenties other bad meta will arise
I see ppl hate condi as it’s not fun like pure direct dmg
But also 3 ppl zerging doing fast dmg can be boring eventually

The game needs more tactical decision making and not pure build excellence

I vote for 1 class for each team.
Also maybe each player must fill in 1 role so no for 2 bunker or 2 condi or full sustain party like
Roamer
Dmg dealer
Bunker
Condi dealer
Sustain
Support
Etc
Or some other variant
Than the game can be more interesting

The first part I agree 100% with, the 2nd part not so much. What you just described in the 2nd part is GW1, and those were 8 person teams; which was great. But GW2 was build around the concept that all classes can do all things to some extent. For that to work Conquest would be all kinds of screwed up.