Guild Wars 2

That’s all I ever see in WvWvW ! Where is the diversity? Where are the range of characters using a range of skills?
(Yes I see the odd Ranger/Necro/Warrior from time to time but they seem to be getting more and more of a rare sight daily).

i see many rangers and necro and really few Eles (at least D/D eles).

But of a thing i m sure

I never see any thief in www XD

I see plenty of everything but Necromancers and Engineers.

6 out of 8. Not perfect, but decent.

LordByron.8369:

I never see any thief in www XD

Thief: “Mission accomplished, returning to base, over.”

I see black charr running through me and I cant move… big hammer with small azura knocking my head… and i always dodge to big red circle… and some spooky animal wants me (i dont like spiders)… and after that I see dead people, of course mostly it just me lying and watching gray sky….

Anet claims overall class creation numbers are extremely balanced, but that is for the game at large. Its extremely dubious that this balance carries over to WvW, and I’d be very curious about the internal numbers they have.

Unfortunately balancing in this game only seems to take place at the sPVP level, despite that many builds and abilities that are effective there do not translate to WvW, or in fact, over translate to be even better when the fighting ground is not only the contest circle on a map.

If people haven’t figured it out yet, apparently many haven’t, this is a big reason roaming is largely a dead or extreme minority playstyle, because only 3 professions are ideal for it, those that get to choose their battles, and suffer no combat penalties or weaknesses for getting that advantage. Of course in sPVP running away means you lose the point, and that doesn’t matter in WvW outside of sieges.

It’s only natural players start gravitating to those classes that have to make less return runs from death and can ‘lose’ a fight without actually dying.

Source
http://dragonseason.com/Front/tabid/124/EntryId/211/Lunch-with-Colin-Johanson-Part-II.aspx

One of the aims of the game was to make every class feel unique, but also viable and fun to play in a variety of ways. What professions have been highlighted as a falling short of this target and what crazy ways have been tried internally to spice them up?
Colin: For me, every profession actually has a lot of different variety available to it. It’s just a matter of if you enjoy that playstyle or not. So I think people look at each profession and they’ll judge it based on “Do I enjoy playing the ways of this profession offers me to play?” And so just going around the table, everybody is playing a different main for the most part. There’s no thieves or warriors here but there’s plenty of them in game. So we know those are represented. We talked about that graph that’s up on the wall. We look at that every day based on what profession people creating and it’s almost always very close to being even across all professions. That’s a really good sign, that is very, very hard to do. In Guild Wars 1 it was not even relatively close to that. It’s a big difference between viability of playstyles versus, you know, not at all. I’m actually really impressed at how generally balanced the professions are. There are certain skills or abilities that all need to get better but across the professions it’s actually pretty decent. It’s just a matter of what playstyle are you interested in. The thing that we have to improve is look at weapons sets that aren’t interesting for that profession or don’t fit the playstyle that we’ve said that profession should have and bring those up to the point that are.

Shame they didn’t add dual classes cos they wanted gw2 to be a lol-sport

If ye see a thief they be doing it wrong matey.

I have been back on my necro most of this week. Was fighting a lot at the sentry point sw of TC Garr last night. At one point thought “holy crap I got feared”, and was thinking it was just a steal from thief until I saw the scythe animation across the way (ICoa I think). Was just nice to see another necro in the field.

Easy playable class’s are on top ofc, but groups without necros , warriors or rangers are bad groups (zergs), these tree classes are as useful as guardian/mesmer/eles.
Side note i have an engineer but quit to play with him on wxwxw for good as long as the class its the top RNG class on game and almost all kits sux and more or less no really top skills for group, its by far the worst crap class on WxWxW (i was playing almost 1 month), still i could won numerous 1Vs1.
But really it doesn’t matter for something useful for our group (turrets are all paper junk, nades are slow landing, bombs are too much melee without duration, i find flamethrower the only nice kit on him but still its too close range).

I see all classes in WvW very often on my server EXCEPT for engineer.

Engineer takes some finagling to actually get a solid WvW build on and is not an easy starter class.

ALTHOUGH, when you do find one with a solid WvW build, they either hit for 15k or never die!

Also, grenades are very good for clearing walls.

strik.5684:

Easy playable class’s are on top ofc, but groups without necros , warriors or rangers are bad groups (zergs), these tree classes are as useful as guardian/mesmer/eles.

You’re not trying to say that warrior is hard to play are you?

strik.5684:

Easy playable class’s are on top ofc

lol @ eles as an easy class. and btw, why a ranger should be more difficult?
every class has 5 weapon skills, 1 heal, 3 utilities, 1 elite …
someone (ie ranger) is just bad.

Daendur.2357:

strik.5684:

Easy playable class’s are on top ofc

lol @ eles as an easy class. and btw, why a ranger should be more difficult?
every class has 5 weapon skills, 1 heal, 3 utilities, 1 elite …
someone (ie ranger) is just bad.

Eles are in easy class.

Using the copy-paste DD bunker build floating around the internet, it’s incredibly easy to live kill and run having never played the class not once in your life.

The trend will fade when DD gets nerfed and people have to go back to complaining how underpowered eles are while they try to make a solid scepter focus build to stand out when everyone knows staff is the true hero in WvW and most people will play it poorly.

Thus is life. BTW 3/4 of top I have as 3/4 of my fully geared level 80s, so the ele comment is not a close minded one.

Each class has a lot to offer in organized play, but ranger really. All they have to offer a coordinated group is a long duration water field.

It’s the only class that hasn’t found its niche yet.

Gisei.5749:

I see plenty of everything but Necromancers and Engineers.

6 out of 8. Not perfect, but decent.

You sir are not fighting FA. Try portal bombing them and see what happens when you get 15 wells stacked on your assault before you even exit the portal.

:*(

Necros are coming out of the woodwork on blackgate lately. Very annoying. I’ll agree that rangers and especially engineers are underrepresented. There’s a fair amount of warriors around and I see more necros than guardians lately. Thieves and eles are the most common probably followed by mesmer.

eithinan.9841:

You sir are not fighting FA. Try portal bombing them and see what happens when you get 15 wells stacked on your assault before you even exit the portal.

:*(

Portal bombs really become redundant at this point. On Mag, we’ve been dropping static fields and ring of warding on portal exits. So in general these past 2 weeks, it hasn’t been a good idea for anyone to use portal bombs. It’s just asking to get demolished.

Players will gravitate to classes that are perceived as overpowered. 6 months from now it’ll be a totally different set of classes that are perceived as OP and people will gravitate towards them. Its the circle of alts, and it re-rolls us all.

LordByron.8369:

…….
I never see any thief in www XD

That’s becos they are in perm stealth.

Each diversity complaint thread gets a little more diverse! Next thread thief/mesmer/ele/guardian/necro!

Was amusing on Gandara this morning… A pistol-dagger thief killed 6 fellow gandarans (including me)
Some loudmouth ‘I kill thieves easy’ guy in the chat started mouthing off, so invited him to have a go … he died much to the amusement of those already dead and he rage quit hehe
Sadly Gandara server is full of guys who are all talk and no trousers- so to speak :-(

Going back to Colin’s statement, he only talks about the characters that exist. Does this graph look at all the characters that are level 80? or ones frequently used?

They seem to be able to track a lot of things in this game. You’d think that looking at more than what people are creating would give them a better idea of class balance.

Oh My!

Actually, to be honest and I know I will get trolled for this but it is the truth. I RARELY see any d/d ele’s in WvW. It is mostly 2h staff. I see a pretty balanced amount of all classes though.

Now, if most ele’s are like me and switch between 2h staff and d/d than that would make sense. But as of right now, I hardly run into a d/d ele when I am occassionally roaming solo or even with a zerg.

Btw, I play in tier 1/2 at least 3 hours a day up to 12 hours. So I do believe I would get a nice view of classes I see.

Toble.2968:

while they try to make a solid scepter focus build to stand out

Aww, I already did this :\

I am a man born out of sync, I did it all wrong and too soon.

After doing it though, I have noticed more dragons teeth falling alongside my own, and its a sight to behold. That said, after levelling 4+ classes to 80 (and recently deleting my thief), the only “EZ” classes I am aware of are thief and warrior. Warrior tends to balance out a bit, though thief is still a bit of an issue when it comes to skill input vs efficacy.

I would love to see someone who has never played ele before even play the arcana bunker well. “What are attunements?” That said, the arcana bunker COULD use some balancing. But I honestly feel quite effective on my s/f ele, and I would guess anyone who has fought me would agree. They also probably wonder how they heck I actually get dragons tooth to hit and be effective!

The only class I dont see a whole lot of is the engie, I see a bit of everything else. I like to take note of this, as one of my 80s is an engie. I have a soft spot for the class, and it needs some work imo.

Daendur.2357:

Source
http://dragonseason.com/Front/tabid/124/EntryId/211/Lunch-with-Colin-Johanson-Part-II.aspx

One of the aims of the game was to make every class feel unique, but also viable and fun to play in a variety of ways. What professions have been highlighted as a falling short of this target and what crazy ways have been tried internally to spice them up?
Colin: For me, every profession actually has a lot of different variety available to it. It’s just a matter of if you enjoy that playstyle or not. So I think people look at each profession and they’ll judge it based on “Do I enjoy playing the ways of this profession offers me to play?” And so just going around the table, everybody is playing a different main for the most part. There’s no thieves or warriors here but there’s plenty of them in game. So we know those are represented. We talked about that graph that’s up on the wall. We look at that every day based on what profession people creating and it’s almost always very close to being even across all professions. That’s a really good sign, that is very, very hard to do. In Guild Wars 1 it was not even relatively close to that. It’s a big difference between viability of playstyles versus, you know, not at all. I’m actually really impressed at how generally balanced the professions are. There are certain skills or abilities that all need to get better but across the professions it’s actually pretty decent. It’s just a matter of what playstyle are you interested in. The thing that we have to improve is look at weapons sets that aren’t interesting for that profession or don’t fit the playstyle that we’ve said that profession should have and bring those up to the point that are.

He’s looking at the wrong metric. I have one of each profession so I cancel myself out. I have a three armor set Necro main lvl 80, a ungeared lvl 80 guardian, a lvl 63 WvW ele, a lvl 30 mes and thief, a lvl 4 ranger and a lvl 2 eng and war.

Anet needs to look at what professions are being played where and for how long with what weapons to see where they need to achieve balance.

Budchgon.2108:

Was amusing on Gandara this morning… A pistol-dagger thief killed 6 fellow gandarans (including me)
Some loudmouth ‘I kill thieves easy’ guy in the chat started mouthing off, so invited him to have a go … he died much to the amusement of those already dead and he rage quit hehe
Sadly Gandara server is full of guys who are all talk and no trousers- so to speak :-(

i think alot of servers have loudmouths who think they are all that.. and when they lose they rage quit.. they blame others or they say he hacking just because they lost.

i used to run either staff or s/d and never really like d/d but that was because i was low level and usually = dead when doing that unless you have a group. but being level 80 and hearing my server complain about a dd ele from BP ( looked like storm and was in the NOM guild ( referencing omnom berries.. cant fully remember the guild ) i was intrigued to start trying dd ele. ( i didn’t copy paste so i ended up spending alot of gold on trying different things and man it was alot of gold til i found the build i wanted which is the normal bunker build ). i complained on here like others about stealthy thieves cause even as dd i was losing.. someone made a statement" if you cant beat them with what you have then find another way til you do and learn their weaknesses".. so i eventually did and made my build just for the purpose of if i happened apon a solo thief ( i dont always win sometimes its a tie ).

so if i was able to beat that thief doesnt mean i would beat all 6 of you.. probably wouldn’t need all of you to beat me.

one time i checked on north camp being contested and found a thief from DH there.. i engaged him and we battled.. he of course would stealth,, then shoot and knife and stealth again.. we went around and around and i knew i had allies on the way so if i couldn’t beat him i knew i could last long enough til help arrived. a mesmer friend came in and then it was 2 v 1 and we went round and round but we could not get him down.. i thought this isn’t right how is he still evading and surviving. then 2 more allies came in i think they were uplevel warriors and this thief downed both of them. as i was fighting the thief i noticed they were being stomped and then i realized there were 2 thieves and they were alternating their stealths and attacks. they looked identical. its probably not a new strategy but first time i seen it and thought it was brilliant tactic. we eventually were able to separate them 2 and burst 1 down and then i think my mesmer friend got the other.

Toble.2968:

Eles are in easy class.

Using the copy-paste DD bunker build floating around the internet, it’s incredibly easy to live kill and run having never played the class not once in your life.

Agreed, to some extent. Lots of D/D Eles think that their fast paced button mashing denotes a high level of skill. Sure it takes skill, nobody denies that. But the Ride The Lightning -> Updraft, etc. generic F3, 4, 5, to either 1 or F4, 5 skill use is just that, generic. Everyone does it, and after a few hits a majority of players resort to button mashing until something happens. That goes for only a majority, obviously, as there are D/D Eles out there that actually know what they are doing and aren’t part of that group. Not an Ele bash. It’s just what’s popular right now. Props to the guy that’s got an awesome S/F build, although I still wish more people just ran Staffs like they should

Thieves and Guardians are also way overplayed. IMO Mesmers aren’t as obviously so just because the skill ceiling is much higher than it is for those other classes and the weak Mesmer(s) that you just killed don’t really register because of their inefficacy. They’re really just so abundant because they’re top of the list as far as ultimate WvW class.

That said, I would absolutely LOVE to see to see class numbers in WvW, as Pendragon said:

Pendragon.8735:

Anet claims overall class creation numbers are extremely balanced, but that is for the game at large. Its extremely dubious that this balance carries over to WvW, and I’d be very curious about the internal numbers they have.

So yeah. TBH, I feel that the classes at the bottom of the list take the highest skill set to play in WvW. I’ve run into one or two absolutely incredible Necros on the battlefield and one of the most dominant players on my server is an Engi. He rolls anybody and everybody. For the most part though, people that play these are pretty weak.

pita spoon.5708:

as i was fighting the thief i noticed they were being stomped and then i realized there were 2 thieves and they were alternating their stealths and attacks. they looked identical. its probably not a new strategy but first time i seen it and thought it was brilliant tactic. we eventually were able to separate them 2 and burst 1 down and then i think my mesmer friend got the other.

There used to be two Thieves that did this on our server, with even identical names (difference being an accent over a letter). I’m sure there are a decent number of running with this idea now, especially since we can abuse the culling and rendering from Stealth still.

Fizzlepip.5218:

Props to the guy that’s got an awesome S/F build, although I still wish more people just ran Staffs like they should

Never!!!!

I used to carry a staff with me when I was playing d/d on my ele (not an arcana bunker though). I actually ended up using it more than d/d, even though the build had no staff specific modifiers.

I have noticed that in using s/f I have very close to the sieging capabilities of the staff, but dont have to switch. I do notice I have to pay closer attention to combo fields, as I cant lay them out as well myself. Other than that though, I still see plenty of combo fields getting laid down by people who dont understand what they can do with them. So, Ill hop in one and do arcane blast, etc etc. I run both arcane wave and arcane blast for the on-demand support (and obviously for the damage!).

I really think that as this game ages, we will start to see more and more classes added to that list. I still remember when ALL eles, of any form, were considered underpowered…

One of the best fights I have ever had on my ele was with a ranger a day or two ago. Absolutely phenomenal player! I am guessing they would have won, but were probably not entirely familiar with the s/f ele skill set. I have also fought along side you, so you may have seen my dragons teeth falling

Trying to get post to work… sketchy forums.. wow! Got it to work.

Fizzlepip.5218:

There used to be two Thieves that did this on our server, with even identical names (difference being an accent over a letter). I’m sure there are a decent number of running with this idea now, especially since we can abuse the culling and rendering from Stealth still.

They were on your server. I dont remember the guild tag and this was about a week ago. I’m on GoM server, and im still amazed at how well they alternated thier strikes.

Tuluum.9638:

I really think that as this game ages, we will start to see more and more classes added to that list. I still remember when ALL eles, of any form, were considered underpowered…

Agreed 100%. haha, and I too remember when people were complaining that Eles didn’t have enough to work with.

pita spoon.5708:

They were on your server. I dont remember the guild tag and this was about a week ago. I’m on GoM server, and im still amazed at how well they alternated thier strikes.

The ones I was talking about were on a guild that transferred from our server. I’m sure there are copycats still around tho.

Ever held a broken wall as a chokepoint for an extended time?

ALL I EVER SEE ARE RANGER PETS. All over the place. They’re the only thing assaulting us.

Darxio.5672:

Ever held a broken wall as a chokepoint for an extended time?

ALL I EVER SEE ARE RANGER PETS. All over the place. They’re the only thing assaulting us.

Are they also spamming Barrage on you? I’ve seen an assault of that with 10. Half a zerg, downed within a matter of seconds.

I think Arena-Net’s statistics are far more complete than most of us realize. They are tracking how frequents certain skills are used and weapon sets, so I imagine average level of each class and number of 80s are well within their knowledge.

Swamurabi.7890:

He’s looking at the wrong metric. I have one of each profession so I cancel myself out. I have a three armor set Necro main lvl 80, a ungeared lvl 80 guardian, a lvl 63 WvW ele, a lvl 30 mes and thief, a lvl 4 ranger and a lvl 2 eng and war.

Anet needs to look at what professions are being played where and for how long with what weapons to see where they need to achieve balance.

He is looking at the right metric this was also included in that same quote explaining the graph that Anet uses

(Before the lunch started, Colin spoke about a chart displayed in the office that tracks live results of how many of each class and race are being played, so when one class becomes OP, it shows on the chart. At the moment, all classes are at a level field, with a slight increase in warriors and a slight dip in engineers. Races are hugely different, with humans and norn hitting the highest rolled races, and charr being the lowest.)