Guild Wars 2

The time to live seems incredibly short for every class except bunker guardians. I’m wondering if this is exactly how Anet envisioned or if some of the burst mechanics will be toned down (mostly haste seems to be the issue.) I’m also getting worried because everything I read from Anet suggests that every defensive option is looking for additional nerfs (stability, protection, regen, etc.)

Its sad, but I think there’s a greater average Time to Live in most FPS’s than in GW2 pvp currently. I would like to see greater health pools across the board to allow for more interesting fights. If I wanted to play a 5-6 hit death game I would just load up an FPS.

Am I alone in this? It just seems weird for PvP in an MMO to feel so volatile that missing one dodge means you are gone.

I would like it if fights lasted longer. If you get caught slipping you get merked in this game kind of like an FPS if you’re anything but a bunker.

However I’m not sure if more health would be the correct solutions, because Bunker Guardians would become Gods, lol.

Maybe for glass cannon builds. I don’t have an issue on my support oriented or defensive oriented builds (which most of my builds are).

The problem is 8v8. 1v1’s would be virtually non-existing and just promote zerg fests even more.

Actually, in WvW I had a 1v1 fight against a mesmer that involved skill mashing and doding like crazy for over 4 minutes. Quite fun and close.

Depends on what you’re up against. Glass vs. glass ends very quickly. Bunker vs. bunker obviously goes on forever. Balanced vs. balance tends to last for about a minute usually. Glass vs. balanced can often times end in seconds one way or another, though. Conversely, balanced vs. bunker takes forever at best. Some gap shortening between the extremes would be very much welcome. I think ANet said they wanted fights to typically last 20-40 seconds or something. It would be excellent if they could get the game to this point, with glass build fights lasting a little less, and bunker fights lasting a little longer. +-10-15 seconds? Pipedream, I think.

I battled a pretty good elementalist yesterday for quite a while. Had her downed quite fast because I had the jump on her, but was stupid to kill a mob that came close and she rallied off it. After that we danced for a good couple minutes before the third party crashed in and decimated us both.

I generally play a Guardian, so I’m not sure how qualified I am to respond to this.
On the few occasions I play Elementalist, I do tend to die quite fast, but I probably should tweak my build somewhat (Using Water and Air traits, with a dash of Arcane).
I’ve also tested Thief a bit, so I could show it to my friends, and I found that if I played like my Guardian, I’d die a lot, but if I used more “hit and run” tactics, I’d get quite some kills and stay alive. It was a quite fun playstyle.

In general I think it’s fine. But the extremes go a bit far on both ends.

A Bunker Guardian for example is too hard to kill while maintaining acceptable damage while Thief glass-cannon Backstab builds can practically kill any “normal” spec within about 3 seconds.

It’s funny because at the beginning, in the beta, it looked like GW2 had the longest duel times, with fights lasting for minutes. Now I haven’t been playing sPvP much since, so is it really that bad, is it really seconds? :S

Yes, burst is incredibly strong.

I was really hoping the TTK would finally be longer in an MMO. =/

zerospin.8604:

It’s funny because at the beginning, in the beta, it looked like GW2 had the longest duel times, with fights lasting for minutes. Now I haven’t been playing sPvP much since, so is it really that bad, is it really seconds? :S

5 seconds. Basilisk Venom 3 seconds. Cloak and dagger + Steal = 1 second. Backstab = 1 second. Throw in assassins signet somewhere since it’s instant.

I think fights in many cases go on TOO LONG, actually.

PVP should be fast-paced and punishing when you make a mistake. When you can live for minutes at a time, there is such a low skill cap. You can be lazy and slow and still live for forever.

Think about competitive FPS and RTS and Dota games. You die in .1 to 2 seconds in a normal shooter. This promotes constant awareness and extreme “twitch” skills. This gives the genre a high skill cap. This is the opposite of long TTL pvp in an MMO where you might be pressing as little as 1 button every 1.5 seconds.

When you think about RTS, you might think to say “what, games last 20+ minutes!” but remember that a player isn’t controlling a single unit. A good RTS player must spend as little time as possible on a single unit or engagement. APM is incredibly important, with good pros reaching 300+ APM. Everything is rapid fire, an engagement or harass must be responded to in seconds or you will lose. Again, this is the opposite of long TTL MMO PVP.

In Dota games, we have the comparison of Dota vs. LoL. In LoL the average nuke damage:HP ratio is much smaller than Dota’s, which promotes longer TTL. Also, towers (PVE) are much stronger and harder to penetrate, which promotes easy escaping. As a result, LoL games are often slower paced than Dota and have 20% of the players doing PVE (jungling) for the first 10-20 minutes. In comparison, a Dota game will often have players constantly ganking (roamers) or trying to engage right from the first minute. Fights and kill counts can be as high as 1/minute in some pro games, and everyone must be much more “on edge” due to the lack of a free blink and the existence of TP scrolls.

GW2 PVP can be even more slow paced than LoL, when everyone isn’t facerolling around in glass vs. glass fights. In fact it rewards this by being a king of the hill objective type!

If the developers want this game to become an esport, they need to make sure that kills can happen at any time, on ANYONE.

I’m not saying that they should make damage unavoidable, but a mistake needs to KILL you, and for that we need damage builds to be good.

Being able to backpedal around for 1 minute pressing whatever comes off cooldown is just as kitteneeing a Thief coming towards you in your peripheral vision only to find yourself downed about 2 seconds later. This is no hyperbole as I’ve done it countless times today on my Thief.

Ideally even a player who is jumped by another should have enough time to react and use at least a few abilities before going down.

Ideally 1v1s should last at around 10 seconds between two DPS focused players and not surpass 30 seconds in any case. This gives players time to use at least a handful of abilities while leaving room for counters, dodges and tactics.

Duels obviously last longer than actual sPvP fights so don’t take them as a standard.

Eh, seriously the higher in skill the two players the longer the fight. I’ve played glass cannon duels where they last longer then a minute. Especially in regards to burst builds, you skip the burst and you have avoided most of the game. The only time TTK is short in this game is when you are overwhelmed by sheer numbers or are caught by a burst combination. Most serious duels between two people of talent are pretty long (30 to 60 seconds), regardless of builds.

Well, the bunker Guardian has other issues that are causing it to last too long in fights. The reason I suggest a larger health pool is to extend fights but also reduce the effectiveness of protection and critical hits, both of which are the reasons you see complaints about thief and guardian.

No balanced build should ever go down in <5 seconds to any build, not even glass cannon builds. Otherwise there’s little to no point in running a balance, you are either a bunker or a glass cannon, and from the way the Anet devs have been talking, they want to remove bunkers and focus the game entirely on glass cannons and maximizing your damage.

Haste needs to be nerfed
Weakness needs to effect crits in a big way to help “counter” the glass cannons
vulnerability needs to be stronger to “counter” bunker builds
An increase in Health pools accross the board would also help

I think with those changes you would see more varied builds, a greater TTL, and the silliness of bunker guardians and insta-kill combos go down a bit.

I have the distinct feeling these guys are going to “look at things” for months until everyone’s had enough. The solution is easy tone down som more durable builds and double hp’s. Good thief’s are downing people to fast even with max toughness.

If everyones damage would be like necromancers, game would be so fun. But I already dont care about PvP, I just go with the flow. Devs yappin about changes yet nothing has been done so yeah, whatever.

What? Fights should last few seconds as a show of skill? How cute, what about the majority of the world population who simply has not available an USA – UK or Germany quality connection?

If you use two identical players on fast paced specs, the game turns into “my ISP > your ISP”.
I can see a LAN game being so unforgiving, but a MMO?
Also, who did not experience server lag in prime time? Going to call skill “my server lag < your server lag” as well?

All of my friends have already quit the game due to this issue. Its impossible to enjoy pvp at all when you are heavily punished for not running glass cannon. If you stack defensive stats you go down in 2-3 seconds, and it takes you longer to kill the enemy then it does for him to kill you. You might as well pump everything into offense so you can stand a chance of getting your combo off to drop him before he gets his combo off to drop you.

Might as well remove all of the classes from the game and give everyone guns and call the game counterstrike.

I haven’t found the TTK too bad unless a really well played Backstab thief jumps me when i’m on a build with say only ~1000 toughness, then it’s just full to dead literally in a second. Those occasions are few and far between though.

This rings true to me in the case of burst and numbers. Once I went up on my guardian (balanced not bunker build) vs another guardian who was using a similar build. It was a re one on one and it got down to after a minute and a half to spamming downed skills. Happened the same with necro I fought down to downed skills. Now in each one of those instance we went after it again with more players around. Dead in 4 seconds. The burst is really overwhelming only in mass. One on one you realize even vs burst if they miss is skill it will likely take a good while.

TheGuy.3568:

. One on one you realize even vs burst if they miss is skill it will likely take a good while.

Right, but if they don’t miss, you are dead. If they do miss, than you have a slight advantage to get some damage in before they try their combo again.

In higher numbers the problem is multiplied like you said. Since you can’t survive the burst the only thing you can do is deal as much damage to try and down a player before you go down, and since doubling or tripling your health and armor only gives you a couple more seconds of survivability you are still better off playing glass cannon.

Offense is so much better than any defense in this game that its become silly. There isn’t a “counter” to high damage builds right now, except another high damage build.

Has everyone forgotten what a stunbreaker is? If you’re running a balanced build and you have your stunbreak available you shouldn’t die in 3seconds. For the record, 3 seconds is really a small eternity, and allows a great deal of time to break stun, dodge and assess the situation.

edit: and I know immobility is popular, but every class has some kind of block or damage mitigation you can use.

i honestly think glass cannon vs glass cannon should be a very twitch, fast paced thing. will punish people for speccing glass cannon until they get it thru there thick heads to spec more balancewise.

tho there are still things out of line regardless

These forums have some strange issues, I have lost the ability to quote people.

The issue with stun breakers is that even if you are on your A-game and pop your stun breaker and quickly dodge roll away, you’ve only avoided part of the combo. So at your best case scenario, you’ve maybe broken even with the high DPS’er who has taken out your stunbreaker and is either switching to his second stun, or using his disengagement abilities to start the fight over.

Elyk.3947:

TheGuy.3568:

. One on one you realize even vs burst if they miss is skill it will likely take a good while.

Right, but if they don’t miss, you are dead. If they do miss, than you have a slight advantage to get some damage in before they try their combo again.

In higher numbers the problem is multiplied like you said. Since you can’t survive the burst the only thing you can do is deal as much damage to try and down a player before you go down, and since doubling or tripling your health and armor only gives you a couple more seconds of survivability you are still better off playing glass cannon.

Offense is so much better than any defense in this game that its become silly. There isn’t a “counter” to high damage builds right now, except another high damage build.

Right now the devs seem to be targeting bunker classes so I would expect this trend to continue. Personally glass cannon and me don’t mix really well. I honestly don’t need to win every match but I would like to stay alive long enough to contribute and usually do but once I had 3 thieves jump me and there wasn’t too much I could do 3 on 1 yes any combo of players and class should win the numbers game but I think making TTL slightly longer in mass would make for better pvp. I by no means think the TTL in pvp is broken its just a little short imho.

Elyk.3947:

These forums have some strange issues, I have lost the ability to quote people.

Reload the page a couple of times. This bug happens to me frequently.