Guild Wars 2

Let’s put balance aside for a bit. Does anyone else feel like there is just way too much control and damage across the board?

It seems like most organized fights are decided by an assist train that just spams stuns, fears, and immobilize into a target as it helplessly implodes to too much damage. This even works on a guardian if an engineer or necromancer is involved.

Nerfing necromancers, particularly terror, would fix a lot of this. (Terror is the big problem in group fights because, even if the necromancer doesn’t have Dhuumfire, something else is likely applying burning.) But even before necromancers got buffed, I felt — and others I talked to did as well — that some of the burst put out by elementalists, mesmers, and thieves and condition damage put out by engineers was too much, even if every other class did the equivalent damage theoretically necessary to balance it out on a spreadsheet.

The buffs to weakness admittedly pushed this in what I see as the right direction, but it came as other classes got more control and damage, so it wasn’t sufficient in the big picture.

Just curious what others think. I admittedly don’t have all the answers for this question, and I’m not sure if there are any easy fixes.

engineer bomb kit= you don’t even need to target. Just round around in circles and spray fire bombs everywhere and then run off. I just had the pleasure of being part of spvp team where my entire team left. The opposition was 30 ranks higher than most people on my team. They consisted on engi, mesmer, necro, thief, ranger with longbow..traveled as zerg and destroyed everything through pure control and lockdown. By end of game it was 500-57..worst game I’ve played or seen. By virtue the other 3 members of my team left and were in starter armour, I’m guessing they won’t return.

Lopez.7369:

Let’s put balance aside for a bit. Does anyone else feel like there is just way too much control and damage across the board?

It seems like most organized fights are decided by an assist train that just spams stuns, fears, and immobilize into a target as it helplessly implodes to too much damage. This even works on a guardian if an engineer or necromancer is involved.

Nerfing necromancers, particularly terror, would fix a lot of this. (Terror is the big problem in group fights because, even if the necromancer doesn’t have Dhuumfire, something else is likely applying burning.) But even before necromancers got buffed, I felt — and others I talked to did as well — that some of the burst put out by elementalists, mesmers, and thieves and condition damage put out by engineers was too much, even if every other class did the equivalent damage theoretically necessary to balance it out on a spreadsheet.

The buffs to weakness admittedly pushed this in what I see as the right direction, but it came as other classes got more control and damage, so it wasn’t sufficient in the big picture.

Just curious what others think. I admittedly don’t have all the answers for this question, and I’m not sure if there are any easy fixes.

I feel that they’re having issues in the arms race of condition and condition cleanses. While they circularly balance that aspect, they continue to hurt builds that do not have as many cleanses or conditions.

I think burst has shifted from thieves to eles now, which is a bit more palatable as you can at least see it coming.

Let’s put this into perspective. When a group of people focus a target, there is a very slim chance that you will be able to react or counter (even if they didn’t use CC) if you are alone. If you are not alone though, then you or your teammates should be able to provide Stability or your own counter CC and focus fire to counter the enemy’s focus fire. It’s that simple but incredibly hard to execute.

The CC in this game is huge no doubt about that BUT you can counter it.

The overall pacing of this game has become too fast. GW1 had a very deliberate pace about it which many vets of the game enjoyed. The time to kill in GW2 has gotten shorter and shorter the more things got buffed to match whatever was too strong at the time. Sometimes bringing things up to par is a good decision but in GW2s cause it seems to have led to a ton of power creep. This increased pace also makes streaming much harder as well I’d imagine.

As for CC, in organized play you should always have a source of stability or ways to peel away from the fight. That being said one Well of Suffering on a point and see yah stability. This could be lessened by having much larger capture points and smaller AoEs in PvP.

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

engineer bomb kit= you don’t even need to target. Just round around in circles and spray fire bombs everywhere and then run off. I just had the pleasure of being part of spvp team where my entire team left. The opposition was 30 ranks higher than most people on my team. They consisted on engi, mesmer, necro, thief, ranger with longbow..traveled as zerg and destroyed everything through pure control and lockdown. By end of game it was 500-57..worst game I’ve played or seen. By virtue the other 3 members of my team left and were in starter armour, I’m guessing they won’t return.

As an engineer myself, I won’t find myself using bomb that often unless we both are in melee battle. If you stay range, I just simply waste one of my precious Ults slot. Also BoB is so easy to dodge, I really mean it. Oh and pre-made beat pugs most of the time. It is the match matching fault, and design flaw, has nothing to do with Class skills.

I could barely use bombs in sPVP as an engi, even while using a turret control build. Due to the activation time and long delay before hits, actually hitting someone with them is incredibly difficult. Most players are smart enough to just get out of the way which, by definition of a bomb engineer, is just moving about 5 feet to the left, and even then most bomb effects require enemies to stand inside of them to persist and be effective (fire bomb, smoke bomb, glue bomb).

Anyway, there is a lot of damage in the game. However, I’ve found most zerker builds to be somewhat lackluster. This is largely because the overall strength of any character in sPVP is roughly their DPS multiplied by their EHP, and zerker builds forgo survivability to just try and cap out DPS. It is for this reason that, when running a PVT necro, I’ll always win a dagger vs. dagger auto attack fight against a thief. The best zerker builds are the ones that attempt to avoid incoming damage, via stealth or evasion or stuns. Hence, why thieves and mesmers most commonly run pure DPS specs in sPVP.

I don’t think the issue is control so much. On pretty much any class you run, there’s always a limited chain of stuns and controls that you can throw forward, and to maximize this a player almost always does so at the detriment of their damage or their utility (the exception to this rule being terrormancer). The opposing enemies can counter-control you as well, and this here is yet another one of the necromancer’s weaknesses. The combination of one player controlling you while another player DPSes you down isn’t overpowered as much as it is good strategy. They’re doing overall less damage than if both players DPSed you down, but exchange that for more reliable damage and different weaknesses.

The big problem IMO is the lack of stability in the game. While we have stun breakers, they only work when you’ve already been stunned, and they don’t work against chain-stuns. As always, you can usually dodge or block or blind enemy stuns, but stuns tend to have quick activation times, making it hard to counter. Stability is only available in really short durations on very long cooldowns, making wholly unreliable as a form of anti-CC. If you wanted to go out and make a build that was largely immune to CC, it would be impossible to do it. This makes “spamming CC” an effective method in sPVP, since it can and will overload an opponent’s stun breakers.

Anet is already moving in the right direct with this. They’ve added 1 second of stability to various stun breakers. IMO, at least 1 second of stability should be on every stun breaker. Skills that grant longer durations of stability should have their recharges reduced, and their durations increased.