Guild Wars 2

This patch hasn’t even touched the meta. CD spam is still king, warriors still have too much control and sustain, certain classes have way too strong passive effects (spirit rangers, healing signet, dhuumfire) and certain classes still have too much boon spam (mesmers, guardians).

When shall we receive actual balancing?

Not too mention that there are some builds (particularly on Ranger) where it’s literally better to just stand and spam 1 than try to do anything else.

Here’s what I want to see in the next few patches:

Elementalist: buff a lot of the weapon skills, reduce cast times, etc. Heals are kinda crappy too IMO, especially for staff ele (given that almost all of the staff ele’s weapon skills have a long casting time). Also, some working into actually giving eles viable options for condi removal outside of speccing 30 points into water, and seeing some past nerfs (especially the nerf to RTL) getting reworked. ANet still needs to give eles a reason to spec heavily into other trees.

Engineers: make them less spammy? Idk, but I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen an engi with Bomb/Grenade kit that didn’t just faceroll his or her keyboard.

Guardians: eh… I’m not so sure about this one. Some of the power guard builds are starting to become really powerful. Too early to say on this one though.

Mesmer: I’m actually okay with mesmer right now; I’d like to see all of the classes have the same degree of strengths and weaknesses that mesmers have ATM. The signet heals for too little on a fairly long interval too be very reliable. Some builds are starting to become much more powerful now, however… Again, difficult to say.

Necromancer: condi damage needs to be reduced, Signet of Spite needs a longer CD (unless you have really good condi clear off CD, it almost always results in an instantaneous death- at least, in my experience), and/or necros have to stop being the worst faceroll class in the game. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a necro wait to use any of his skills before. I know that when I play a necro, I use all of my skills as soon as they come off CD.

Ranger: too many passive effects combined with tons of AI, screen clutter, and the incentive to stand in place while spamming 1 are all problems with this class.

Thief: I’m not even going to bother with these guys. They’re dead now. They have ceased to exist. I can beat them with any class, and with virtually any build. They are the most inflexible class in the game ATM, and the options that they do have (P/D and D/D / D/P) are so bad in the current meta for one reason or another that there is absolutely no reason to run thief. ANet really needs to rework this entire class, and actually start playing it, since they seem to think we use Hard to Catch as our main defensive skill/trait or something…

Warrior: still have 400 HPS, thousands of more health than every other class in the game excluding necro, inexhaustible amounts of CC, heavy armor, and the ability to completely faceroll the keyboard… And ANet seems perfectly fine with all of this.

Major balance patches are usually 2 months apart, so dont hold you breath on any big changes. Factor in ANet taking a Christmas break for the next few weeks, I expect the next big balance patch to be late February, possibly even early/mid March.

Serdoc.7261:

Major balance patches are usually 2 months apart, so dont hold you breath on any big changes. Factor in ANet taking a Christmas break for the next few weeks, I expect the next big balance patch to be late February, possibly even early/mid March.

And by ‘next big balance patch’ you mean tweaks to the heal skills they just made, right?

I wonder when new ladder system will come in.

I wonder when thief will be boosted.

If condition damage needs one more nerf for pvp, you might as well remove it from the game entirely, or delete the necromancer class. Because it will no longer serve any purpose in PVE. And all that for that Dhuumfire that they refuse to balance. Sure, nerf everything that was fine before, just because Dhuumfire causes so many problems (in pvp only).

Every patch you will ask same thing: “when is real patch coming”
answer will always be: next time

Actually after seeing a lot of “major” balance patches i believe that the “major” balance patch isnt coming cause Anet dont know, they cant, they are not good enough, name it whatever you like to bring a major balance patch..

If they try to make big impact changes probably they will destroy the game, they will make our PC explode or something..

So they make small not important changes..

Do you remember the “BIG” balance patch before 10dec, the one we had to wait cause the Pax event was on and players would be too “confused”..

Imagine what would have changed to the meta of pax event even if the 2 next balance patches went out before PAX…….
Y, a big NOTHING, every player would play the exact same thing..

This game is officially out of the competitive pvp scene..
Casual friendly “pve killing huge dragons-breaking doors and taking castles” game

Dardamaniac.1295:

Actually after seeing a lot of “major” balance patches i believe that the “major” balance patch isnt coming cause Anet dont know, they cant, they are not good enough, name it whatever you like to bring a major balance patch..

If they try to make big impact changes probably they will destroy the game, they will make our PC explode or something..

So they make small not important changes..

Do you remember the “BIG” balance patch before 10dec, the one we had to wait cause the Pax event was on and players would be too “confused”..

Imagine what would have changed to the meta of pax event even if the 2 next balance patches went out before PAX…….
Y, a big NOTHING, every player would play the exact same thing..

This game is officially out of the competitive pvp scene..
Casual friendly “pve killing huge dragons-breaking doors and taking castles” game

I feel the team responsible for pvp is directionless.

Aza.2105:

Dardamaniac.1295:

Actually after seeing a lot of “major” balance patches i believe that the “major” balance patch isnt coming cause Anet dont know, they cant, they are not good enough, name it whatever you like to bring a major balance patch..

If they try to make big impact changes probably they will destroy the game, they will make our PC explode or something..

So they make small not important changes..

Do you remember the “BIG” balance patch before 10dec, the one we had to wait cause the Pax event was on and players would be too “confused”..

Imagine what would have changed to the meta of pax event even if the 2 next balance patches went out before PAX…….
Y, a big NOTHING, every player would play the exact same thing..

This game is officially out of the competitive pvp scene..
Casual friendly “pve killing huge dragons-breaking doors and taking castles” game

I feel the team responsible for pvp is directionless.

they are shackled by big pve

Did anyone notice that, no matter how much the meta evolves or gets nerfed, the combat in GW2 always revolves around some sort of spam?

Condition spamming, AI spamming and CC spamming are more “recent”. They were, exceptions aside, underwhelming before, and the moment they became good, they became spammable.

But before them, we already had clone spamming, stealth spamming, boon spamming, aoe spamming, auto-attack spamming, etc.

No matter how hard Anet tries to balance their game, the meta always revolves around spamming what is strongest while (obviously) ignoring what is weaker.

This is no longer a problem with the balancing team, I think. It’s not a problem about “Anet not knowing how to balance this game”, because to be fair, they did make some mistakes, but they also made several steps into the right direction, yet we are nowhere at a better place.

The real problem with this game’s balance, is the lack of a solid, universal mechanism that can ease the game’s balancing and control the pace of combat. I’m talking about the classic and proven Energy System + Cooldown System combo, folks. If GW2 had an energy system like, say, GW1, “spamming” would be a high-risk/ high-reward strategy, and toning down the pace of skills usage would be a valid strategy instead of suicide.

Anet took way some of the funniest systems found in GW1 (like cross-classing) because they were a balancing nightmare, yet they’ve designed an alternative system that is insufficient at keeping the game balanced and at an ideal pace. In the end, no one gets satisfied by this.

You guys really don’t understand this. There is no such thing as balance patches. Think about it this way… the game has been our for a year and 4 months. Should we really still need this many balance patches? If the goal was a balance patch, then the whole ANET methodology is a complete fail.

Instead, I think these are changes to change up the meta, get new skill usage, and to keep the game dynamic. That’s more of the goal regardless of whether it is called a balance patch.

style.6173:

You guys really don’t understand this. There is no such thing as balance patches. Think about it this way… the game has been our for a year and 4 months. Should we really still need this many balance patches? If the goal was a balance patch, then the whole ANET methodology is a complete fail.

Instead, I think these are changes to change up the meta, get new skill usage, and to keep the game dynamic. That’s more of the goal regardless of whether it is called a balance patch.

Balance is a bad word for it, yeah.
But most these threads aren’t really talking about balance so much as ‘spam/cheese specs are bad’.

Which is entirely a meta/gameplay deal.
Whichever word they use for it, the concept is entirely true, spam-mindless specs won’t ever improve this game, a game that desperately needs help.

Yet Anet has been pushing for spam-mindless PvP lately.

That is bad no matter what wording you use.

style.6173:

You guys really don’t understand this. There is no such thing as balance patches. Think about it this way… the game has been our for a year and 4 months. Should we really still need this many balance patches? If the goal was a balance patch, then the whole ANET methodology is a complete fail.

Instead, I think these are changes to change up the meta, get new skill usage, and to keep the game dynamic. That’s more of the goal regardless of whether it is called a balance patch.

Funny when you think about it. One year and four months later, after at least three major balance patches (June 25th, Oct 15t, Dec 10th) and the game is far from balanced.

How much god kitten longer..

style.6173:

You guys really don’t understand this. There is no such thing as balance patches. Think about it this way… the game has been our for a year and 4 months. Should we really still need this many balance patches? If the goal was a balance patch, then the whole ANET methodology is a complete fail.

Instead, I think these are changes to change up the meta, get new skill usage, and to keep the game dynamic. That’s more of the goal regardless of whether it is called a balance patch.

I believe that is an astute observation. The core problem with these ‘meta shake up’ patches are that they wind up creating a profession or meta that prevents many other builds from being viable.

Something that might help is toning down auto attack damage in spvp. Shaving off some power and conditions duration for condi builds so they can’t stack a bunch of bleeds with just auto attack. I think there should be an investment into runes or traits to make auto attacks more potent unlike how it is now.
Another thing is changing cast times and animations for some skills as of right now their are some skills that are very powerful with fast cast times and barley a hardly noticeable animations. Arenanet has done some of this kind of stuff in the past to fix some of the problems but i think it needs to be worked on further.

Lopez.7369:

Condition necromancers don’t show up in tournaments anymore.

All of my experience in tPvP says otherwise.

They should just rollback all balance to March 2013 and start over from there, lol.

Lopez.7369:

vashio.6297:

Something that might help is toning down auto attack damage in spvp. Shaving off some power and conditions duration for condi builds so they can’t stack a bunch of bleeds with just auto attack.

Where does this sentiment come from? Condition engineers and necromancers rely on No. 2-5, which are mostly ground-targeted attacks, for a vast majority of their condition damage and utility. Ranger is another story, but that’s more a problem with the class than any of its particular builds.

I understand that it’s possible to “spam” and get some results, but I think the sentiment is wrongly placed solely on necromancers just because they were once ludicrously overpowered. The reality is any class except maybe mesmer can spam and get results. That’s the nature of the game. The skill differentiators for necromancer and every other class are positioning and situational awareness, not how difficult it is to press those buttons in the right order.

Very true that engi and necro don’t really rely on their auto attacks(maybe auto attack don’t need to be changed). After thinking about certian classes that do have auto attack weapons but then they usually have skills that are mainly utility. Not sure what i was thinking when i posted that lol.
I think the main problem is just that skills just need more noticeable animations that set them apart and some having a longer cast time for the more potent skills. This would help people in doing more counter play and hopefully slow the game down a bit so casters can notice what people are actually doing in the match and commentate. Hopefully with this in teamfights wouldn’t be so chaotic and a blurr over your screen just trying to notice whats going down.
Also i think the capture points should be a bigger then which they are now so people can’t just throw their aoe down so easily on the person that is trying to bunker. In return the bunker could try and kite aoe going down instead of always just having to face tank it. Possibly allow other players that aren’t bunkers to have a better chance at survival on capturing and holding points.
This is what i think would help the game if you have criticism about it this type of change i would enjoy reading it

vashio.6297:

Something that might help is toning down auto attack damage in spvp. Shaving off some power and conditions duration for condi builds so they can’t stack a bunch of bleeds with just auto attack. I think there should be an investment into runes or traits to make auto attacks more potent unlike how it is now.
Another thing is changing cast times and animations for some skills as of right now their are some skills that are very powerful with fast cast times and barley a hardly noticeable animations. Arenanet has done some of this kind of stuff in the past to fix some of the problems but i think it needs to be worked on further.

A great idea would actually be to make auto attacks be the only thing that scales with power.

That would completely toss up the meta, crit heavy specs would be spike specs since it’s the only way hard hitting abilities can scale in dmg, power heavy specs would have constant good dmg and you could save your abilities (evades/leaps/exc.) for their utility instead of needing them for dps.

That’d more normalize dmg (while vastly improving gameplay) which allows a more consistent time to kill (averages in the past year have jumped around from 1s to 1+ minute). It’d give the spastic combat pugs love (in spike specs since you can randomly get obscene bursts) without letting them be OP or overrun the meta.

Sooo much needs to be done and so little happens.

Now I see two ways to manage spam.

1) A resource system. Not just cooldowns but a system that allows you to prioritize certain abilities under the pressure of a limiting factor. For example this can allow for a change from an offensive allocation to a defensive allocation of energy based on the situation. Thus how a kit is used is influenced by the situation while also giving the developers a tool that can be tweaked to control the games passing.

As a side note I believe Gw2 avoided resources because they felt it wasn’t fun for PvE players to have to wait between fights. To me this seems a bit silly and doesn’t look to understand the issue. Sure its true if you have a traditional mana system where it is a slow and gradual decrease in mana where after a couple discrete fights you need to stop to replenish. That is a system that doesn’t play a role of molding ability usage until running into a raid boss and generally slows down the rate at which normal mobs can be encountered. But there are other resource systems like energy from league of legends. This type of resource is much more dynamic, it rewards successful play such as kennen’s energy return on stun and really when compared to Gw2’s pure cooldown system I would imagine the time it takes to get everything fully ready is still about the same.

2) Skills that can be optimized given certain situations. Skills with longer cast times can fall under this category along with ones that increase in effectiveness based on positioning. CC I would also include, however this depends on if it plays a tactical role in how other skills are used, such as the opponent having important skills that can be interacted with. Generally there needs to be a couple layers in place to prevent a skill from being spammed.

Now I find Gw2 undermines these two points. Obviously there is no resource system aside from endurance. However with the mess it is currently in it isn’t a resource that can be interacted with very well. But really that is another long topic, relating heavily to how telegraphed abilities are vs how much active defense is necessary. Obviously a complete mess with evades occurring more frequently then every 3.5s and skills that can’t be identified until they show up in the chat log.

The presence of identifiable, large attacks also acts as a limiting factor towards how CC and active defense skills can be optimized as these are skills based heavily on that recognition. So as much as I would classify active defense and cc as skills worth holding onto the skill visibility limits this. Then many of the other weapon skills function as stand alone skills with discrete effects. There is no real range to their effectiveness based on how well a player set up the encounter. I just don’t see much of a push/pull interaction between players in creating setups for their damage.

For example lets take warrior axe #2 and change it so it adds to point 2). The direction I see this skill going is as a setup attack to amplify damage against heavily armor targets. Now it should take some effort to land itself so a heavily armored target has the option of increasing their prioritizing of stopping this skill. So I would say something like this:

3/4s cast, 8s recharge, your next 3 attacks against struck targets ignore 30% of their armor above baseline. Sadly there is no real condition in this game that fills this role and how the leveling system was done creates a requirement for a baseline clause.

Balance is not important when there are still design issues, the biggest one being the pet AI and implementation. Then there are design choices giving someone low risk high reward strategies, like stealth or innate sustainability. Also, a design decision has been made so that ranged builds are inferior to melee builds due to being safe. Various other things.

And the biggest culprit of all, REFUSAL TO SPLIT PVE AND PVP

My warrior build has COMPLETELY changed…I think the meta is still the same but everythings tuned quite nicely atm…nothing too OP. At least from my experience.

Make an ele.
Go to tPvP with people with a good MMR using said ele.
Delete that post.

To be honest I also think this game would have been much more fun with a mana bar for most classes but it is waaaay too late for that now.

Honestly, i do not see what makes the pro in gw2 so pro. Game is easy enough to play. Perhaps team coordination but individual skill is not that high because the skill ceiling is rather low

Chokolata.1870:

Honestly, i do not see what makes the pro in gw2 so pro. Game is easy enough to play. Perhaps team coordination but individual skill is not that high because the skill ceiling is rather low

Agree. The real skill is when you play in a team, as a team.

Chokolata.1870:

Honestly, i do not see what makes the pro in gw2 so pro. Game is easy enough to play. Perhaps team coordination but individual skill is not that high because the skill ceiling is rather low

Used to be a time where i’d have answered :
Builds and classes aren’t hard to use, the difference comes from timing your attacks and counters, clever positionning… etc

Now it all comes down to whoever has the most hard hitting on demand AoEs or AIs to do the attacking part for you while you can safely and peacefully focus on maintaining yourself alive.
Almost totally negating the need to position or “aim”.

I thought devs said they were looking for a way to reduce AoE effectivness litteraly months ago.
Still waiting for that to even start to happen.

Single target attacks are in such a bad position considering you have to track your ever evading/bumping/stunning/blocking target, fighting against the camera in a crippling/freezing/blinding/life sucking landmine while being showered with death by heatseeking/hitbox blocking/instant reaction AIs.

Why in the world don’t we just start at the little cat starting point by toning down AoEs effectivness and AI reliance… ?
I know some of you will say the issue comes from the game mode, but even out of this the issues will persist.

Chokolata.1870:

Honestly, i do not see what makes the pro in gw2 so pro. Game is easy enough to play. Perhaps team coordination but individual skill is not that high because the skill ceiling is rather low

Sure.. if you always hit 100% of your abilities, and your enemies find it impossible to read your attacks & dodge any skill shots. :P.

Nobody, and I repeat, NOBODY, even the ‘top players’ have totally mastered the game to the point where they never burn dodges badly, or miss attacks. Personally, I do noob crap like missing my grenades on long distance targets, and I often foolishly pump strong attacks into people who are able to dodge my attacks all the time.

If Korean fighter-game genre veterans played this game competitively, we’d all be completely doomed. Nobody in this game is even close to playing it at the skill cap. We’re almost all lazy, and almost all of us tend to be very predictable. Myself included.

Arganthium.5638:

Not too mention that there are some builds (particularly on Ranger) where it’s literally better to just stand and spam 1 than try to do anything else.

Here’s what I want to see in the next few patches:

Elementalist: buff a lot of the weapon skills, reduce cast times, etc. Heals are kinda crappy too IMO, especially for staff ele (given that almost all of the staff ele’s weapon skills have a long casting time). Also, some working into actually giving eles viable options for condi removal outside of speccing 30 points into water, and seeing some past nerfs (especially the nerf to RTL) getting reworked. ANet still needs to give eles a reason to spec heavily into other trees.

Engineers: make them less spammy? Idk, but I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen an engi with Bomb/Grenade kit that didn’t just faceroll his or her keyboard.

Guardians: eh… I’m not so sure about this one. Some of the power guard builds are starting to become really powerful. Too early to say on this one though.

Mesmer: I’m actually okay with mesmer right now; I’d like to see all of the classes have the same degree of strengths and weaknesses that mesmers have ATM. The signet heals for too little on a fairly long interval too be very reliable. Some builds are starting to become much more powerful now, however… Again, difficult to say.

Necromancer: condi damage needs to be reduced, Signet of Spite needs a longer CD (unless you have really good condi clear off CD, it almost always results in an instantaneous death- at least, in my experience), and/or necros have to stop being the worst faceroll class in the game. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a necro wait to use any of his skills before. I know that when I play a necro, I use all of my skills as soon as they come off CD.

Ranger: too many passive effects combined with tons of AI, screen clutter, and the incentive to stand in place while spamming 1 are all problems with this class.

Thief: I’m not even going to bother with these guys. They’re dead now. They have ceased to exist. I can beat them with any class, and with virtually any build. They are the most inflexible class in the game ATM, and the options that they do have (P/D and D/D / D/P) are so bad in the current meta for one reason or another that there is absolutely no reason to run thief. ANet really needs to rework this entire class, and actually start playing it, since they seem to think we use Hard to Catch as our main defensive skill/trait or something…

Warrior: still have 400 HPS, thousands of more health than every other class in the game excluding necro, inexhaustible amounts of CC, heavy armor, and the ability to completely faceroll the keyboard… And ANet seems perfectly fine with all of this.

you seen too many movies;)

funny how nobody mentions elementalists….. I think Anet actually succeeded in making them disappears it seems.