Guild Wars 2

I thought it might be helpful to make a post letting anet know exactly why the pvp community is upset. Without going into detailed points of balance, the issue simplifies to this: the current meta is not fun to play in, and even if it was, most players like a change of pace now and then. Me and several others in the community continually get the feeling that anet does not understand how un fun it is to play in this bunker meta, which is why I made this post to clearly state that for them. This is why we want to know so badly when the next balance patch is coming, because we would like to have fun again.

I’ll sum up what I don’t like that way :

Bunkers can outsustain DPS while non bunkers tent to die instantly to burst. Both are unfun.

The burst is tuned to stand a chance to beat bunker sustain, but doing so it just melts glassy specs. All that stems from the fact that the sustain in this game is too strong.

There is no such thing as the “PvP Community”.

The forum community is not the same as the PvP community and thus there is no real consensus on issues. In any case, the PvP community will always be upset because their expectations of the game did not match the reality of the game. I don’t blame them, but you would think after a year of it would be apparent.

There is a PvP community. Most of the top players in the game talk to each other regularly.

Just speaking for myself here, I don’t enjoy getting on the forums too often because it’s often not very constructive and pretty troll. : P

Me neither, friend. The main reason I am making this post is because a lot of my friends that I normally pvp with have basically stopped pvping, and gone to pve until the next balance patch. And these are pretty hardcore pvpers, who have stuck with it through a lot.

There are a lot of people who love this game.. But I’ve never heard of game retaining players with 1 – 2 “balance patches” a year.

The quotes are there because it is inevitable that a huge balance patch will over-shift certain skills, one way or another.

And then again. We will have to wait 6 months for another “balance patch”.

my normal pvp-experience:

- enter the mists
- great the 2-3 remaining ppl on my friendlist of pvp players and none in the pvp guilds im in, cause there is nobody left
- queue for soloq and either wait several minutes or go into hot join and play the game to get the pop up always during mid of the match.
- first soloq game normaly is either spiritwatch or skyhammer

after playing first i do this 2 additional times. from 3 games per day to get the daily normaly 2/3 of matches are spiritwatch or skyhammer. occasional some days kyhlos seems to be the must play map. after done this 3 times im already sick of the actual state of the game and with the completing of my daily i logout. only a couple of times in a month the first 3 games where enjoyable and fun so i continue until i the “unfun” starts again.

i’m not really upset about builds in general because what the hand giveth, it can randomly take away more…and in the hands of anet, much much more.

but i am upset that i can drop 300+ ranks down the leaderboard in the span of an hour due to 3 back-to-back 4v5s on the same map in soloq. i know its yoloq and all, but seriously? this still happens?

stof.9341:

I’ll sum up what I don’t like that way :

Bunkers can outsustain DPS while non bunkers tent to die instantly to burst. Both are unfun.

The burst is tuned to stand a chance to beat bunker sustain, but doing so it just melts glassy specs. All that stems from the fact that the sustain in this game is too strong.

Good post. I agree

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

He’s constantly trolling the forums, Aeroxe. Just ignore him. There honestly isn’t any reasonable way to call people like you, David, and I out of touch legitimately. You don’t see him in any tournaments.

Yes because anyone disagreeing with your view of the game is a troll? You are a genius at reasoned arguements well played.

If you are one of the tiny minority who doesn’t get kittened off with the downward spiral that is this game then congrats. But the critical people on the forums reflect feeling in game more than the game lovers. This game gets such abuse in game that it is astonishing. I have never seen anything like it. Go to any other game and type “this game sucks” and you will get abuse and “why are u here then”. If you do that in pvp on this game, either in team q or solo q in the top 1000-2000 then you won’t get many people saying this. Most will agree with you.

When the hardcore players lol @ how fail the game is then there is problems. So it isn’t just the forums. Don’t pretend it is because you just prove yourself to be out of touch when you say such things. And you reinforce what anet thinks. They think we are happy with how things are and the forum QQers are a minority, rather than the truth which is we reflect the majority in game ESPECIALLY at the highly rated level or solo and team Q.

What point is positive feedback when it is unjustified? If something sucks then we should say it sucks and leave all fanboyism aside. The community on this forum does a good job of that. We say it like it is. We call out Anets mistakes. Personal attacks on staff are NOT cool. But saying when they do stupid things IS cool. I would want honest feedback on how I delivered in my work. So should they.

Everything would be fixed if they allowed all hats wearable in-combat!

oh.. more hats plz!

I’m only still playing cuz they gave me a quaggan finisher! soooo kawaaaiiii

Rickster, Lordosicky’s fairly well known as a troll, so get rid of your self-righteousness, please. I never said why I thought he was a troll, so your argument that my argument isn’t well reasoned isn’t well reasoned.

Also, not only are you wrong there, but you’re wrong about what I think. I never said I didn’t think the game was in a bad place. Ask anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you the same thing. I hate the current meta, and I hate that Anet won’t tell us when and how it will change.

Another thing: I’m one of those hardcore players you’re talking about. I’ve been in every major tournament since the PAX qualifiers and 3,215 tournament matches played. Trust me. ArenaNet knows the top players are unhappy. I don’t think they understand quite how unhappy we are, though.

Lastly, agreeing with every insult is just as bad as dismissing them. I don’t dismiss them all. There are several valid points as to why this game is in a bad state, but the forums are a cesspool of ignorance. If you agree with all the complaints here, you need to seriously rethink many things.

I’m upset because we can’t pvp as a black quaggan.

Overall… too many low risk, low skill, required high reward specs. Too many passive skills/traits which are too strong. Seriously… passive shouldn’t also be optimal. You should give up some efficiency to gain that no input required stuffs. Fix this and the community will huggles you. Lots and lots of huggles.

Aberrant.6749:

Overall… too many low risk, low skill, required high reward specs. Too many passive skills/traits which are too strong. Seriously… passive shouldn’t also be optimal. You should give up some efficiency to gain that no input required stuffs. Fix this and the community will huggles you. Lots and lots of huggles.

This is true. EVERY class has one spec like that right now (except maybe ele). Passive is also too strong. The other issue is that AOE is too strong. AOE should be have much less damage than single target.

Thieves are OP and keep all the roamers out. Warriors are OP and keep the rest of the group fighters out, except for Spirit Ranger because his passive buffs are insane and he brings an autorez pet.
And Guardians bring all the buff sharing goodness.

They need to:
Give healing signet a passive heal component and an on-hit heal component
Decrease the HP of the spirit rez pet
Decrease berserker stance duration
Remove the healing from cleansing ire
Reduce thief auto attack damage by 30%
Reduce the duration and radius of warrior longbow burst

Devs have absolutely no idea how to nerf or balance thieves. It’s entirely their fault, because they created this class in the first place. Initiative? Wtf? Who came up with such a stupid idea?

The assassin in Gw1 was almost perfectly balanced. Sure, he could own you with 1 chain combo if you were inexperienced, but if you took a skill that blocked his attacks or blinded him…. he was an easy prey.

And here? Almost perma stealth, almost perma blind on the enemy, teleporting/running away easily with short bow, 1.5 – 2k with autoattack, 5k crits with heartseeker (that takes ONLY 3 initiative). This is insane.

REDO THIS CLASS. Next year, if spvp survives long enough, you will have only thieves and warriors running.

Well when you look at the number of patches and multiple hot fixes per day that pve gets and compare it to pvp (lol esport) it’s kinda obvious

i’m upset because they have redesigned lions arch like9 million times, and the last new pvp map was skyhammer

Spooko.5436:

i’m upset because they have redesigned lions arch like9 million times, and the last new pvp map was skyhammer

We wouldn’t have known it at the time, but how many pvp’ers would be happy if the 3/18 build just removed skyhammer from soloQ? Sure it doesn’t fix the myriad of issues plaguing the meta, but then I could at least soloQ, rather than solo in teamQ.

Spooko.5436:

i’m upset because they have redesigned lions arch like9 million times, and the last new pvp map was skyhammer

Yeah this is a very good point… It is quite obvious that anet has quite a lot of resources but is choosing not to use them for pvp. If we had new pvp maps coming all the time, even if they weren’t all totally groundbreaking, there would be a lot more interest.

Oulov.7913:

The assassin in Gw1 was almost perfectly balanced. …. but if you took a skill that blocked his attacks or blinded him…. he was an easy prey.

Lol that’s your idea of balance for your opponents… one where if you do one thing right they’re easy to beat. THIS is the general sentiment among the masses and it’s pathetic.

I agree the bunkering is out of control and I’d support a reduction in burst if bunkering got shaved.

Yes, and it’s a good idea, since those were the only good ways to kill an assassin, if you didn’t equip any blind, kd or block skill (instead of an attack skill) you would have a heard time beating a sin. And even if you did, sin had a block and KD skills too. That forced players to use varied builds.

Can’t take your whining seriously mr. Tualek – Thief

Skyhammer, theres the entire problem with soloing atm.

I think nerfing eles or mesmer would solve the problem. They’re just to strong in the current meta.

BoB.6082:

I think nerfing eles or mesmer would solve the problem. They’re just to strong in the current meta.

amen

Oulov.7913:

Devs have absolutely no idea how to nerf or balance thieves. It’s entirely their fault, because they created this class in the first place. Initiative? Wtf? Who came up with such a stupid idea?

The assassin in Gw1 was almost perfectly balanced. Sure, he could own you with 1 chain combo if you were inexperienced, but if you took a skill that blocked his attacks or blinded him…. he was an easy prey.

And here? Almost perma stealth, almost perma blind on the enemy, teleporting/running away easily with short bow, 1.5 – 2k with autoattack, 5k crits with heartseeker (that takes ONLY 3 initiative). This is insane.

REDO THIS CLASS. Next year, if spvp survives long enough, you will have only thieves and warriors running.

What? I am sorry thieves have been in a better position in the past. Remember the old days of dd thieves with a 150% increase to his next 5 attacks and we never had a million thieves running around. I agree that certain builds are unbalanced, pistol whip for instance has no side effect to using the insane amount of damage. I mean really an in built evade??? You don’t even have to think twice about blowi g it in the middle of heavy aoe. But overall the thief class is a good class. This is the first game where in the class description it says something along the lines of ‘do large amounts of damage in a short space of time’. A lot of other games describe rogue classes as such but the burst is so underwhelming. Don’t you understand the thief class is meant to be hard to lock down its how they survive but once you do lock them down the rest is a doddle and finally initiative is a geneous idea this is how they actually perform their burst and keep it up. Am I really the only person who looks at a thief’s top end burst and thinks ‘meh I can take it just wait for that dodge and then I have you’? And what is this crap about perma stealth? If a thief is perma stealthing he can only be using his skill one to do damage in which case you should be owning him with the cc.

Perma blind? A big tip for you mate. Don’t stand in that tiny little blind field and you should be ok.

I wrote ALMOST perma. It’s not even about blinding because it’s more balanced than in Gw1 but about the fact that I see all thieves running with the same 3-4 utilities… Blinding powder, Shadow Refuge and Signet of Shadows/Shadowstep. Rarely a venom thief.

Every class should be given 1 skill with long recharge that reveals thief’s position in a 400 radius. Without it it’s just “I stab you, now catch me if you can, loser!”

In Ragnarok Online (RO), there were 2 kinds of stealth: cloak (receiving damage reveals you), and stealth (receiving damage does not reveal you, and you continue to be hidden). In League of Legends, some champions cannot go into stealth until they have stopped taking damage (this means that players cannot just vanish mid-fight. They have to create some distance before being able to disappear).

Right now, every stealth ability in GW2 works like the super strong version of stealth in RO. If the devs split stealth into variations, it could make things feel more balanced to the player. This will especially be important when conquest is no longer the only game mode in PvP.

Zoose.1640:

Just speaking for myself here, I don’t enjoy getting on the forums too often because it’s often not very constructive and pretty troll. : P

To be fair, you say everything is pretty “troll” even when it’s not…

zone.1073:

Right now, every stealth ability in GW2 works like the super strong version of stealth in RO. If the devs split stealth into variations, it could make things feel more balanced to the player. This will especially be important when conquest is no longer the only game mode in PvP.

I remember RO. It was so fun The thief hide skill had no cooldown nor cast time and made you invisible for 30s a the first skill rank, up to 5 minutes at max rank. It was a tad stronger than GW2 version, aka 3s max stealth that needs a target for C&D with a cast time and a somewhat high resource usage.