Guild Wars 2

The more I play the more this patch isnt so bad. Balance has got alot better with the ele nerfs. Its just a shame this is offset by the (I presume bugs?) which means that rtl and mist form are uneffected by the orb. Also the orb shouldnt spawn for 10 seconds to give non eles a chance to reach it at the start of the game

Otherwise, yeh good balance changed. I will wait to see how the matchmaking shakes out but I am expecting to be annoyed by it matching too many solo q teams vs teams. As this has been my experience thus far.

The pvp devs arent bad. I just think they are underesourced.

i have no kittening clue what u guys talking about
ele didnt get nerf d/d is much stronger now they still have perma vigor 100%
their cantrips the same .
i heard somehing about seperated queues for premade and soloq it didnt happen
i am dissapointed next month is their last chance for me.

Lorienda.1349:

i have no kittening clue what u guys talking about
ele didnt get nerf d/d is much stronger now they still have perma vigor 100%
their cantrips the same .
i heard somehing about seperated queues for premade and soloq it didnt happen

I agree with Jex.

Lorienda.1349:

i have no kittening clue what u guys talking about
ele didnt get nerf d/d is much stronger now they still have perma vigor 100%
their cantrips the same .
i heard somehing about seperated queues for premade and soloq it didnt happen
i am dissapointed next month is their last chance for me.

guardians can get a high vigor uptime as well from the minor adept trait in honor called vigorous precision. It gives 5 secs of vigor on critical hits and has a cd of 5 sec, sound familiar? Difference between eles and guards is eles can run away (if not immobilized whiled doing rtl) from a fight and gain fury while guards have an inherent 15% damage reduction and can only get fury from save yourself. My friend would run scepter/shield or scepter/focus just to get vigor from the high hit volume of scepter 2.
edit:forgot to mention most guards have aoe heal on dodge so 1-2k heal on every dodge so its not too far from ele healing on dodge which is on 10 sec cd.

6 months after release and ANet is rolling back and removing features from PvP at a time when new and more features were not only expected but reasonably considered as long overdue. This is a “step in the right direction”?

They’ve mashed everyone, competitive and casual, into the same queues, with only an invisible MMR to distinguish between them, and removed the only queue that was dedicated to competitive game play, and this was a “step in the right direction”?

so which direction would this be because to me it seems to be painfully obvious that these were steps backwards.

I’d have to agree with our OP, this is going to take quite a long time for them to figure out proper balance within GW2. There are so many mechanics when compared to your standard mmo that it might just take years to get relatively close. From the numerous skills to the different ways each profession plays,(initiative specifically) there are so many factors to consider. We may not approve of how they balance but I truly believe there’s a method to their madness.

In my opinion, this game has the best combat mechanics and fluidity of any other game released within its genre. Perfecting each professions usefulness will take time and when we get close, it’ll be a glorious day for all of us.

If they put ladders and MM works well the only problem this game will have it will be the community, that it will be too little.

Of course, new game modes would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers.

What is up with mesmers invisibility? Did the patch bug it or am I missing something?

Let me get this straight, they didn´t add solo que, they added a fraking solo que BUTTON. Before you were able to que without the party, even in the 1 team vs 1 team paids. And you still can meet premades, the first time I solo qued I met a CN CRS pug. So please the only thing they added was a new map shish thats great. Oh and some minor balance changes that dont change by anything by the slightest. The current meta is still locked up hard because of the existence of those bunker Eles. Its face palming nothing more and nothing less.

OP talked with the devs on Skype after Xeph wrote his wonderful (now deleted) topic.

The devs convinced OP to write this topic, hoping his position would calm the community.

The OP obliged.

Community is calm.

Mission accomplished.

Dardamaniac.1295:

I dont know what happened..When the patch went live i read a nice post from Xeph saying that this patch was a joke.I asked him if he gonna quit this game and he said he will consider it.I always wathced closed at Team Paradigm.Today another member of Team Paradigm,(Phantaram)along with some other (Teldo,Gasmask) almost praised this patch.What happened guys,do you know something that WE dont know?3 more changes in ele and this patch become good in a night?
You used to have my respect now im gonna be more carefull to what you have to say

Probably they saw the rest of the patch notes.

edruviransu.1029:

Probably they saw the rest of the patch notes.

You do realise that the “rest of the patch” you mention was just a quick additional nerf they added with a follow-up patch after the whole community went crazy, right?

leman.7682:

OP talked with the devs on Skype after Xeph wrote his wonderful (now deleted) topic.

The devs convinced OP to write this topic, hoping his position would calm the community.

The OP obliged.

Community is calm.

Mission accomplished.

Got any evidence to back up this claim? Even if this was true, I’d consider it a win that Xeph got to talk to the devs regarding his topic.

leman.7682:

edruviransu.1029:

Probably they saw the rest of the patch notes.

You do realise that the “rest of the patch” you mention was just a quick additional nerf they added with a follow-up patch after the whole community went crazy, right?

Odd how the elementalist I play with was complaining about his fury uptime before the follow-up patches, then. Had we known of his prescience, we’d never have had to leave someone on back point before.

I would like to agree with the OP, but I have one major pet peeve after the patch.

With regards to rangers, they flat out nerfed Empathic Bond. While I’m not saying I agree or disagree with this, I’m making this reference in terms of the fact that in the PvP state of the game, they specifically said that they are not going to do any “whack-a-mole” style nerfing, and that they would rather increase the amount of options a class has to make builds.

However, the actual implementation of the Empathic Bond nerf shows that they are just fine with nerfing a trait that reduces effectiveness of most of rangers viable pvp builds, while in return providing no improvements to anything of significant that could provide more build versatility.
This is essentially exactly what they said they weren’t going to do in the state of the game.
So personally I see no reason to trust anything devs say until something goes live and there are patch notes. And even then the community has to go back and test everything possible to make sure there are no missing notes that weren’t typed up.

leman.7682:

OP talked with the devs on Skype after Xeph wrote his wonderful (now deleted) topic.

The devs convinced OP to write this topic, hoping his position would calm the community.

The OP obliged.

Community is calm.

Mission accomplished.

The <1% of the game still playing stPVP might be content (for today) but virtually none of the changes materially affect WVW, where the real PVP happens.

This patch does nothing to address the real issues the game faces which is an extreme lack of intra-class balance amongst weapons/skills/traits. If anything, thee changes will push more Eles towards tankish D/D, because any other spec is just objectively worse.

mjharrison.3209:

The <1% of the game still playing stPVP might be content (for today) but virtually none of the changes materially affect WVW, where the real PVP happens.

This patch does nothing to address the real issues the game faces which is an extreme lack of intra-class balance amongst weapons/skills/traits. If anything, thee changes will push more Eles towards tankish D/D, because any other spec is just objectively worse.

Wrong. The patch pretty much lowered the strength of all ele specs to be sure, but saying tanky D/D ele is the only viable spec is just not true at all. As it stands, S/D is still better on extreme ends of the spectrum for DPS and pure tanking power, while D/D provides good team support via Aura share with strong lockdowns and overall skillset. With the healing nerfs it might be a little dangerous to get too squishy with D/D builds, whereas with S/D dps you can burst from a safer distance.

mjharrison.3209:

leman.7682:

OP talked with the devs on Skype after Xeph wrote his wonderful (now deleted) topic.

The devs convinced OP to write this topic, hoping his position would calm the community.

The OP obliged.

Community is calm.

Mission accomplished.

The <1% of the game still playing stPVP might be content (for today) but virtually none of the changes materially affect WVW, where the real PVP happens.

This patch does nothing to address the real issues the game faces which is an extreme lack of intra-class balance amongst weapons/skills/traits. If anything, thee changes will push more Eles towards tankish D/D, because any other spec is just objectively worse.

I think tPvP, Where u create teams with a balance between damage, pressure and survival and make tactics to win from the 5 enemies is real PvP. Zerg vs Zerg with random classes in WvWvW is not real PvP.

But thats just my opinion i guess, as more people play WvW then tPvP. I’m just used to GW1 PvP.

jcbroe.4329:

I would like to agree with the OP, but I have one major pet peeve after the patch.

With regards to rangers, they flat out nerfed Empathic Bond. While I’m not saying I agree or disagree with this, I’m making this reference in terms of the fact that in the PvP state of the game, they specifically said that they are not going to do any “whack-a-mole” style nerfing, and that they would rather increase the amount of options a class has to make builds.

However, the actual implementation of the Empathic Bond nerf shows that they are just fine with nerfing a trait that reduces effectiveness of most of rangers viable pvp builds, while in return providing no improvements to anything of significant that could provide more build versatility.
This is essentially exactly what they said they weren’t going to do in the state of the game.
So personally I see no reason to trust anything devs say until something goes live and there are patch notes. And even then the community has to go back and test everything possible to make sure there are no missing notes that weren’t typed up.

empathic bond was a bug fix more than a nerf. it wasnt intended to just wipe condis, but to transfer them.

Ayraswag.3761:

hplee.2839:

OP, how much gold did Anet pay you to say anything nice about them on this forum?

lol i thought this aswell tbh

hahaha same thought here! OP do you just think we buy it?

Noctis Assassin.4035:

Lorienda.1349:

i have no kittening clue what u guys talking about
ele didnt get nerf d/d is much stronger now they still have perma vigor 100%
their cantrips the same .
i heard somehing about seperated queues for premade and soloq it didnt happen
i am dissapointed next month is their last chance for me.

guardians can get a high vigor uptime as well from the minor adept trait in honor called vigorous precision. It gives 5 secs of vigor on critical hits and has a cd of 5 sec, sound familiar? Difference between eles and guards is eles can run away (if not immobilized whiled doing rtl) from a fight and gain fury while guards have an inherent 15% damage reduction and can only get fury from save yourself. My friend would run scepter/shield or scepter/focus just to get vigor from the high hit volume of scepter 2.
edit:forgot to mention most guards have aoe heal on dodge so 1-2k heal on every dodge so its not too far from ele healing on dodge which is on 10 sec cd.

guards cant kill most classes 1v1, guards cant pressure targets like ele/follow them
guards mobility is not even close to ele
when guards out of cd’s they rae pretty much dead cant say the same thing about ele
so dont even tell me that bullkitten guardian is like ele cuz its obv not.

Ele still has to be nerfed. Still hard to deal with for less experienced teams versus a double or tripple ele comp.
And what Lorienda said, Guardians are dead once CDs are off. I also sacrifice a good amount of survivability in order to pressure targets.
I also cannot understand how RtL for example does not have any movement speed restritctions.

To be honest, most of last patch’s critics are geared toward what’s missing, namely the visible ladders along with the zillion competitive features the game lacks 6 months after its launch.

And with regards to the recent forum activity, I think we already have quite a vocal feedback on what was not in the update.

But if you look at what is actually in it, what was changed, I don’t see how it’s not a step in the right direction. If anything this post balances some of the negative feedback by shedding some light on what’s good in that patch.

It may be a tiny step for us, but it means a lot for the devs if you think about it. The initial 8-team free/paid tournaments system was brought down. The stuff they took months to build is no more. All the architecture and the systems behind, phshht!, all gone – or so.

One way to look at it it to think ArenaNet have absolutely no clue what they’re doing. They’re just pressing some random buttons, doing and undoing stuff on a wimp and hoping for e-sports to arrive.

Or you could say ArenaNet learn from their mistakes and try to build the game toward e-sports.

It may be freakingly slow, players may have gone but I’m sure it’s not too late for a very simple reason: no competitive PvP game that may appeal to MMORPG lovers has come out since launch:p Gw2 still has the best gameplay in this category, second only to GW1.

Too bad there’s no competitive structure yet :p :p :p

Vonethil.7160:

Lady Sara Goldheart.2764:

Ele still has to be nerfed. Still hard to deal with for less experienced teams versus a double or tripple ele comp.
And what Lorienda said, Guardians are dead once CDs are off. I also sacrifice a good amount of survivability in order to pressure targets.
I also cannot understand how RtL for example does not have any movement speed restritctions.

I agree with you Bai. Handling with multiple Eles is hard for even experienced teams.

I can say the same about multiple guards, or most other top end classes. This is a ltp issue…

Swim.6830:

Vonethil.7160:

Lady Sara Goldheart.2764:

Ele still has to be nerfed. Still hard to deal with for less experienced teams versus a double or tripple ele comp.
And what Lorienda said, Guardians are dead once CDs are off. I also sacrifice a good amount of survivability in order to pressure targets.
I also cannot understand how RtL for example does not have any movement speed restritctions.

I agree with you Bai. Handling with multiple Eles is hard for even experienced teams.

I can say the same about multiple guards, or most other top end classes. This is a ltp issue…

Ele moves so fast that whatever u do u can’t keep up.

“This is a ltp issue…”

Seems legit.

Top teams know how to handle it.
It does not make the meta any better.

Guards can bunker a small point much beter than ele and has beter team support so i think its not fair to compare them in that way.
And there are classes that can catch an ele, warrior and thief….
Also apart from staff our range abilities are kitten and very easy to avoid.

guardians tank damage, eles kite you around the point until all their cooldowns are up then run away, and you can’t punish them for pressuring your node.

Oblivion.8307:

guardians tank damage, eles kite you around the point until all their cooldowns are up then run away, and you can’t punish them for pressuring your node.

Why cant you punish them from pressuring your point?? :O
Oh i know..its because classes with enough mobility to chase the ele like the thief are pigeonholed into a stupid burst build
Eles is not the problem any more imo.The lack of builds for other classes is bigger issue.
YOU CANT keep nerfing when there are so crap stuff that you could buff while also creating more viable builds..if anet had some balls

kostbabis.8791:

Oblivion.8307:

guardians tank damage, eles kite you around the point until all their cooldowns are up then run away, and you can’t punish them for pressuring your node.

YOU CANT keep nerfing when there are so crap stuff that you could buff while also creating more viable builds..if anet had some balls

1 Word, engineer.

I’m not holding my breath. I don’t see how anyone can believe that, in one month, they are going to fix what they haven’t been able to fix in the last six months. Maybe they will add a ladder, or one other thing that players have been asking about, which won’t change anything at this point. The only thing that would surprise me, is if they drastically changed all professions to make more builds viable, but we all know that’s not going to happen.

daydream.2938:

jcbroe.4329:

I would like to agree with the OP, but I have one major pet peeve after the patch.

With regards to rangers, they flat out nerfed Empathic Bond. While I’m not saying I agree or disagree with this, I’m making this reference in terms of the fact that in the PvP state of the game, they specifically said that they are not going to do any “whack-a-mole” style nerfing, and that they would rather increase the amount of options a class has to make builds.

However, the actual implementation of the Empathic Bond nerf shows that they are just fine with nerfing a trait that reduces effectiveness of most of rangers viable pvp builds, while in return providing no improvements to anything of significant that could provide more build versatility.
This is essentially exactly what they said they weren’t going to do in the state of the game.
So personally I see no reason to trust anything devs say until something goes live and there are patch notes. And even then the community has to go back and test everything possible to make sure there are no missing notes that weren’t typed up.

empathic bond was a bug fix more than a nerf. it wasnt intended to just wipe condis, but to transfer them.

The transferring could never be directly implied from the ambiguity of the description, although I do agree that my common sense implies that the effect was not working as intended. The nerf is that it only wipes 3 conditions now instead of all.

Now the argument can be made that that effect was overpowered. I am not in a place to disagree with that.

The issue I have with the change isn’t the change itself, but the fact that they made the change without making any changes to increase build versatility. Before the update, people were running trap rangers and BM rangers as the most viable builds. After the patch, people will be running the same exact builds with less ability to wipe conditions.
The dev team just did a nerf in the same style that they were quoted as saying they were going to avoid. That is the part that bothers me.