Guild Wars 2

http://www.twitch.tv/helsethgw2/c/2826888

Discuss.

I disagree a bit about what you said about Warrior, without some of the sustain changes that were made even if other classes were brought down we would have still have been too easily kiteable most likely. I’d say the current Warrior Meta builds are the definition of counterplay, condis are the meta and we build to not be affected by them. The counterplay to those builds is high damage power builds. I’ve dueled thieves using sword/dagger and sword/pistol that can easily wreck me because with all their short stuns and if you pop stability they can just steal it instantly then go back to stunning you. Of course those builds aren’t the meta so it makes Warriors look strong because power builds are out of season.

I think there’s a potential already there for player-driven meta, but currently people are refusing to adjust and instead wait for ANet to do a balance patch. Warrior got your Necros and Spirit Rangers being sad? Try running a Thief or Mesmer to keep them from doing that. The capability for counters are there but it seems like the “community” is stuck in the mindset that there can never be any change without ANet doing something.

I do think animations need to be made more obvious, or the GW1 cast bar needs to be brought back. Interrupts were a MAJOR deal in GW1 but currently that dynamic is gone. Casting times for magic users are also made stronger by the fact that unless it’s some very obvious spells you won’t be able to know what’s coming until its happened. I get that they wanted animations to replace the skill bar but it just doesn’t work as well.

There is a difference between counter and counterplay.

@BurrTheKing: If you find warriors to be in a good spot right now, then good for you. I find it sad, that we have yet another class, that can “do it all by himself”. I would by far prefer a class, that had the abilities, but depended on others to clear conditions for him … and this kind of thinking goes for every class. Once everyone wants to do everything by themselves and not depend on other players, we may ask ourself why we are playing a team-based game.

But as usual I find Helseth to be spot on. There is a bit that is related to the animation-thing he talked about earlier. I am wondering, if GW2 in relation to GW1 was made too simple, and that could be the cause to the “flatness” of the game. Sure, some things are complex, but it seems less strategic and more reaction-based. Again, this is a noobs view, so more experienced players are more than welcome to correct me.

More AI than players on the screenshot… awesome meta.
But its okay, The Fnureal is cleaning up the mess.

Posi and Helseth playing minion necro… this meta is driving people crazy.

Good rant of the week. I agree with Helseth in every single point.

Is Helseth banned from the forums permanently? I would like to see his arguments more often

This is proof the devs have literally no idea wth they’re doing, and just don’t care.

Losing hope again… wish they’d just listen to the top players that actually know wtf they’re doing.

What’s hilarious is that according to this top level play is being played the same way I used to play in hotjoins on release…. sad.

I find the rants both important and depressing.

Important because they’re truth and depressing because the truth is this game is a joke.

After playing Dota 2 for the last 2 weeks I am pretty much done with this game until balance patches hit and I see if they are just putting band aids on the balance or actually trying to make it better by addressing fundamental issues.

Nobody pays a monthly sub on this game. The best way to get them to fix PvP is to just stop playing it until they get it right.

Bump /15charskittenbunny

PvP is becoming too casual. /bump

Inb4 thread is moved to a useless forum because Anet doesn’t care lol.

I remember the devs mentioning how random effects are skillful because a player must then follow up on what happened. Never been sold on that, especially not in the way random effects are handled in gw2. Chaos storm triggering an aegis? Well I am already mid swing so I don’t exactly have the opportunity to correct my play. Random procs have to have a delayed effect as opposed to immediate to allow for adjustment. Not a principle I have seen upheld.

Even in recent changes I feel they are going further and further away from what I would consider proper gameplay. Warrior was closer before to being well designed. Sure now they can compete but they are doing so through cheese. 8s condi immunity is too much. 5s would be more reasonable. Mace on a 3s stun? Longbow 4x, 12s bleed on 0.5 s cast? Healing signet, all functionality is put into its passive, there is no skilled play.

Mesmer signet of domination 3s stun on 0.25s cast? Remember, fast casting cc should be designed as skills used for interrupts, long duration cc should give the opportunity to be reacted to.

How about this instead for signet of domination:
1s stun duration
cd reduced to 30s.
If a skill is interrupted the cd is reduced by 50%.
Punish them spammers.

Another thing. There isn’t a single weapon set in this game that is designed to my own standards. Sword mh on mesmer feels the closest though I am not the biggest fan of the use of an immob over a higher intensity cripple. Would prefer something like swap reduces targets endurance by 25% and apply 4s cripple. Now some of the other weapon sets require…. massive changes.

I completely agree with Helseth, every class in this game has broken mechanics (cc lock, perma evades, mega instant damage, mega condi damage and too much sustain, auto-ress, IA, etc. ) anet needs to work about these broken mechanics if they want to improve meta game.

www.youtube.com

Please use it :/

for some reason he forgot to mention the engineer, didnt anyone notice :P?

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

Is Helseth banned from the forums permanently? I would like to see his arguments more often

He will likely leave after mistleague, with many other teams, possibly Team Curse too, so I don’t think you will see anything from him in the foreseeable future.

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

Is Helseth banned from the forums permanently? I would like to see his arguments more often

Yes, I am fairly sure he is permanently banned, but as I recall the ban happened a long time ago.
From what I have heard mr.Helseth say on his stream, it had something to do with a post that got him a temporary ban. When people kept re-posting it, A-net made the ban permanent. According to him, they falsely asumed it was him asking people to do so.

I think it was something along those lines anyway
I don’t know what that topic was about.

Besides that I think Helseth has some valid points in this rant.
It would be nice to be punished when playing poorly and rewarded when playing perfectly.
The spam factor in pvp atm is just ridiculous.

i dont think anet even care anymore…

I know am not the best play out there, but I seriously do not find any fun in playing in this meta at all. I remember someone from Anet post on the forum saying “fun / not fun” is a very broad term and its not very constructive criticism.

I dont know, you tell me why its not fun.

I loved PVP, ever since GW1, i hated killing monster, killing AI is not fun, they are not alive, you dont feel “good” about owning a computer really. That’s why I play PVP, but the way the meta is now…. I dont even know how to explain.

I went back to Diablo 3 a week ago, I think I will do some mindless spamming there, less stress out.

As someone already mentioned in a post (don’t know who or which post exactly): It feels like all the gw1 pvp team member either left or got fired, because I see none of the phenomenal constructs that made gw1 pvp so good.

I’m not saying I want exact same thing, but if they managed to do something that good once I think they should at least came close to that ingenuity. But sadly it gets only worse. More spamming, less skills needed, higher damage, …

In Dota 2 if I die at least I know it’s my fault or my teams fault because either we didn’t have wards, noone helped me when they could (stun, slow) or I didn’t use my abilities/skills properly in order to escape.
In Gw2 I die and most of the times I can’t even analyze what happened. Mostly you die just because you get focused by more than one person and not because they crippled you or dazed you or even stun you. Mostly you die because they thrown everything they had at you, every skill/spell and autoattack till eternetiy.

I really hope ArenaNet wakes up and starts fixing the obvious problems.

I only just started playing sPvP because I found the game to be unbalanced at the start and I noticed it’s a lot worse now than it was back then. I’ve encountered pretty much everything he said. Stupid AoE condition spam, too much mobility and passive gameplay.

I agree with everything he said. It would be a start to return to the power meta. And encourage active play instead of passive and random play.

matjazmuhic.1649:

As someone already mentioned in a post (don’t know who or which post exactly): It feels like all the gw1 pvp team member either left or got fired, because I see none of the phenomenal constructs that made gw1 pvp so good.

when you were talking about gw1’s good balancing, were you talking about necro backline with spirit and minionspam? or were you thinking about grenth derwishes?
paragons in general after nightfall release? ray of judgment and heros? shadowstepderwishspikes with massenchantmentrips? bloodspikes? holding builds in ha?

hero ranger spike was better

besaah.2516:

matjazmuhic.1649:

As someone already mentioned in a post (don’t know who or which post exactly): It feels like all the gw1 pvp team member either left or got fired, because I see none of the phenomenal constructs that made gw1 pvp so good.

when you were talking about gw1’s good balancing, were you talking about necro backline with spirit and minionspam? or were you thinking about grenth derwishes?
paragons in general after nightfall release? ray of judgment and heros? shadowstepderwishspikes with massenchantmentrips? bloodspikes? holding builds in ha?

I didn’t really play Nightfall, but I recall standing in HA and we were a couple of people who had a blast holding HA for Europe with a couple ME/ele with spirits. There was so much control in that combo, and we just knew a nerf was coming … and sure thing it was. The same day even. Another time it was trappers with some with spirits and some necro-pressure (not us though). But my point is just, that it took more coordination in order to pull things of, where as now it just takes one, since we all have to have it all.
Bloodspikes were really not that effective imho; at least I recall that they were pretty easy to shut down.

Poxxia.1547:

But my point is just, that it took more coordination in order to pull things of, where as

fear me warriors. everyone spams their skills and the enemy dies. pretty much the same thing we have today.
and the fearme builds weren’t the only builds that pretty much just needed your players to keep their skills on cooldown. there was no skill involved.
sure, you can call spiking coordination. but how high is the skill requirement for a build where someone already tells you one to use your dmg skills? that’s basicly what every spike in guild wars 2 was. there were more “press-t-press-1” heros in guildwars than spiritrangers in guildwars 2. coordination doesn’t equal skill. in guildwars 1’s case it turned out to be the exact opposite with a lot of builds and that’s just spike builds. there were a lot of pressure build that dominated the scene which required you to have your skills on cooldown all the time. in other words spam skills.

the best part is: back in guild wars 1 anet had issues balancing spirits and minions for pvp. now in guild wars 2 we have the very same kitten. it’s like nothing changed at all.

bottom line: guildwars 1 was in no way better than guildwars 2 when it comes to balancing. the similarities between those two games are actually what is shocking me the most.

besaah.2516:

Poxxia.1547:

But my point is just, that it took more coordination in order to pull things of, where as

fear me warriors. everyone spams their skills and the enemy dies. pretty much the same thing we have today.
and the fearme builds weren’t the only builds that pretty much just needed your players to keep their skills on cooldown. there was no skill involved.
sure, you can call spiking coordination. but how high is the skill requirement for a build where someone already tells you one to use your dmg skills? that’s basicly what every spike in guild wars 2 was. there were more “press-t-press-1” heros in guildwars than spiritrangers in guildwars 2. coordination doesn’t equal skill. in guildwars 1’s case it turned out to be the exact opposite with a lot of builds and that’s just spike builds. there were a lot of pressure build that dominated the scene which required you to have your skills on cooldown all the time. in other words spam skills.

the best part is: back in guild wars 1 anet had issues balancing spirits and minions for pvp. now in guild wars 2 we have the very same kitten. it’s like nothing changed at all.

bottom line: guildwars 1 was in no way better than guildwars 2 when it comes to balancing. the similarities between those two games are actually what is shocking me the most.

It is honestly a very long time since I have played the game, so I may recall it unprecisely.
I played 2 roles mainly: Mesmer and monk. Monk as main, and mainly prot/boon. I recall stuff like bodyblocking, intervening spikes via various means. Spike-groups … maybe my group was just good, or we only faced bad groups, but that was not a huge issue as I recall. We played a balanced pressure most of the times.
Minions, you say? I recall spirits being a huge thing, but minions? As in necro-minions? The only necro-build I played (yes, that was my 3. option at times), was curse-builds as a part of a more attrition-based build we played at times.
Bottom line: My experience back then vastly differs from yours. Yes, it is likely, that it plays a part, that it was a long time ago, and so much has changed in both connection, computers, my experience as player etc, but I nevertheless am very certain, that TTK was vastly different back then. Looking at vids from back then only makes me more sure of this … compare this to the almost insta-kills thieves were able to do. This does relate to your view on spam in a very direct way .. which I hope you see. This is most likelt where we disagree, btw
And as I recall my mesmer and how it played I didn’t spam spells out in the blue; nor on my prot-monk. I find the way it worked to be dramatically different than now.

i can see where you are comming from and here is why our experiences are so different:

I didn’t really play Nightfall

nightfall introduced a lot of kittened kitten that promoted spamming. minions became a huge threat. basicly you would see tons of spirit/minion combos running around in HA, gvg in the rank 1000 area was full of herobuilds where heros would have a better aoe placement then most humans. there were a lot of assassin frontlines that would just spam 1-4 over and over again on the same target while putting down more pressure than a good warriorfrontline. searingflames"spikes" would just call out one target and spam 1-2 on it untill the enemy monks run out of mana. basicly most pressure builds would be most effective with skills on cooldown. things went to kitten a lot of times in guildwars 1. of course there were times when balancing seemed ok and all the skillfull play really stood out, but there were a lot more metas with mindless spamming than anything else. the fact that i was able to win games on a warrior when i barraly played warrior using a hero as 2nd warrior is a testament to how broken things used to be in guildwars.

i used to play prot monk btw and i know of all the positioning, timing, how and when enemies use which skills, watching out for interrupts ect. but all that wasn’t worth kitten a lot of times in guildwars 1. anet did a lot of cool things with gw1 but they did just as many dumb things.