Guild Wars 2

A no for me and a no for PKchu (he’s on my team and won’t check the forum)

Lopez.7369:

The biggest problem with PAX is that it stalled balance changes for two months or so. I don’t think anyone quit because of the tournament itself; the issue is what surrounded the tournament.

I think the only thing that can revitalize structured PvP at this point is a solid reward structure that pulls in players from world vs. world and PvE.

Yes, you’re right it isn’t just the PAX tournament itself, but everything else that happened around it. I just wanted to clarify that he didn’t leave post PAX.

ANet will never make an esport out of sPvP by getting WvW and PvE players, but if they can accept that then that’s ok.

Mammoth.1975:

Or he likes logical arguments. If the hivemind on this forum knows what those are, I have yet to see any evidence of it.

Another example of the playerbase being bad:

2 months of spamwhining about the condi meta before people figured out how to counter it and a double melee team won the invitational. Did warriors get new toys in those 2 months? Nope. The tools were always there to countercomp the OP CONDI TEAMZ but the playerbase was too stupid to figure it out. Despite being told how repeatedly.

Warriors did get “new toys”. They improved Berserker’s Stance to 8s after the initial 4s introduction and they improved all the heals. However, I’ll agree for the most part they could have been seen way earlier in the meta.

Lopez.7369:

Darn. Defektive was awesome and helpful.

At this point, it’s indisputable PAX was a disaster for structured PvP. What a shame.

Defektive quit prior to PAX, the week before. If HMan did quit he was a gentleman as well. He came and showed our Ele in our arena how to properly burst and spent a good bit of time helping him.

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

Jumper left, Acandis left, Zoose left, Xeph left, Helseth is leaving after next Mist League. Everyone is abandoning ship

You can add Defektive onto that list as well and word is HMan did or will quit.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Ok, now which is it? I have 3 different people saying that fun means 3 different things. This is what I meant when I said fun is subjective.

To some people, it’s fun to knock people off the edge of skyhammer. To others, it’s fun to be matched up against equally skilled players. To even more, it’s fun to feel like you’re great at the class you play.

You’re presenting a false dichotomy. You can find all 3 things fun or only 1 of them fun without the others impacting each other.

Warrior’s Sprint + GS = no need for swiftness. I also agree Forceful Greatsword isn’t the bee’s knees, as you wind up buffing the S/D thieves who target you, requires a good base crit (doesn’t work well with Valk or Soldier), and is subject to general boon stripping. I prefer picking up Desperate Power over it, since I run with Healing Signet + Burst Mastery (keep Adrenal Health ticking).

I’m going to give most of your version of the build a go to see how I like it in comparison.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Alright, after more people posted that they were having this same issue, I checked in with the team and they let me know that there is a bug causing Temple to pop more than other maps.

Our programmers have already found a fix for it, we just need to get it tested and it should be out soon.

Appreciate those of you that remained constructive.

Thanks for the update!

Erwin.5603:

One would think they have statistics and test runs at the arenanet offices to prove that it is indeed random. I mean I didn’t get any Forest game yesterday, does that mean it isn’t in the rotation, or there is a bias towards all the other maps? No, it doesn’t. Have some trust guys.

ANet couldn’t even write good tooltips for most of their traits and skills. What makes you think we can trust them when it comes to math, since SoloQ is also clearly broken.

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

If you loose to necros, you doing something wrong mate.
The problem with Spirit Ranger is, you can play the build one day and you will be more effective than players that play for example an ele for a year.

As someone playing spirit ranger for my team I can validate this. I’d be hard pressed to lose against people on my team now, but had lots of difficulty winning when playing engineer.

Silentshoes.1805:

Could it be that an ELO system is not necessarily designed to have even matches; it simply adjusts the penalty for losing to being very low or (maybe even 0) when you lose to a much higher-rated team?

If that is the case, it is not good for solo queue, especially when the players are “clumped” together in groups of very skilled, and very unskilled players.

It would be better to have a totally random group, and rating based on win-loss only.

That way most people would be at 50%, and really skilled players would be slightly higher. But I suspect the top-skilled people would hate it (as we do in the lower ranks having to carry people) and they would go back to Team Q pretty quickly.

ELO could be used in one of two ways. You either don’t care about balanced matches, which means you minimize or completely negate the impact of the loss on your rating, or you do care where every match impacts your rating. The former is better for systems that don’t integrate leaderboard functionality and is hot join style matches. The latter is better for the community as you don’t waste their time in matches that aren’t even worth playing and it allows you to not waste your time with the illusion of progression.

Yes, you can technically have both, but I feel the latter is the more noble goal, but requires a large enough playerbase to successfully keep queue times down. The former makes queue times much shorter as it doesn’t require soloq be popular.

Silentshoes.1805:

Yes, the Top 100 seems to be self-perpetuating now. The MMR system does not allow them to play on a low-rated team and have to carry four people.

The other problem is that this game is harder than MOBAs to carry the rest of your team. We removed 1 guy from our team and our win rate went way up.

I can confirm nearly 70% of our tpvp matches are on Temple since they implemented “random” maps. At this rate I’d prefer the old system. It seems like random means 50% Temple, 16.5% Forest, 16.5% Legion, 16.5% Khylo.

ArcticPanzerWolf.7692:

I understand the frustration as my first game of the night was against top 50 players while I’m currently in the 400 range. However, I’m not sure which solution doesn’t ultimately end up in much longer queues for everyone, which I’m sure nobody wants.

It appears the system is looking for players of similar rating and forming groups, then it next seeks out another group of similarly rated players to match them up against each other. However, if you think about the number of players queuing up at any given moment, my guess is the population isn’t big enough to get the match just exactly perfect every game.

For example, if the system brings together 5 top 50 rated players and then seeks to match them up against a comparable group, but all other players nearest in rating are currently in matches or perhaps not even playing at all, then I’m assuming it keeps moving down the list until the “best” match is found. Furthermore, once the match is over and all 10 queue up again at about the same time, then it’s likely to happen again. It’s simply a function of who is playing and when really.

One alternative is to have rating ranges and if there isn’t a match within the range, then the system waits until there are two teams within the range before matching and starting a game. As mentioned above, that will result in longer queue times. Personally, I’d rather have a shorter queue and take the risk that I’m going to run up against higher rated players on occasion than waiting 20-30 minutes or more between matches.

In a properly used TrueSkill/GLICKO/ELO system the rating will offer insight into the probability of each team winning. In other words, you don’t need all that hoopla to fix the system. They simply need to correctly implement the rating systems such that the odds of winning for each team is no more than a 10% (this obviously needs to be played with) difference, ie. one team has a fifty five (can’t write the numbers…) % chance and the other a 45% chance.

The OP is right about similar level players getting sync’d up together, as I watched Symbolic get into almost the same teams match after match for nearly three hours. I formulated pretty much the same thing as OP that they group teams based on similar rank and despite some people I’m sure doing it unintentionally, I’m sure there are even more exploiting this system.

Do you like pwning nips? What about a deep love for Chicken Xxpress? Are you a cool chill dude/dudette? Will you not perform epic levels of drama that lasts for over an hour? Are you someone who believes there is always room to improve (to pwn even more nips)? Is Sean Connery your role model or potentially could be your role model?

LotD is looking to get a 5th dedicated player onto our team who can answer yes to most of the above and feels they can fit well into our current team comp who can help us bring the phat dps, such as engineers and eles.

Our current team consists of:

• Fugazi -r4x Bunker Guardian
• The Infanta (Casey) r4x – S/D Thief
• Bear Wax (PKchu) r23 – Necro
• Myself r37 – Spirit Ranger

LotD has seen a big roster change over the past month with the addition of Fugazi and Infanta, so the team you saw before and the team you see today are almost completely different. We’re looking to go into Mist League Season 2 much stronger than before.

What we’d like from you:

• Be experienced at competitive gaming (like PKchu) or have enough experience in GW2 that we don’t need to teach the fundamentals
• Understand how to communicate, what you should communicate
• Be skilled in your class
• Be willing to win as a team by changing class if necessary
• Rank doesn’t equal skill, but please don’t waste our time
• Wow us with your in-depth Sean Connery knowledge

You can contact myself in-game/on reddit/on here, Fugazi, or Infanta if you have their contacts.

Our normal practice hours are 9-12 EST Sunday – Wednesday, but we often play way longer. If enough people show up, we’ll even do practice on Thursday, Friday, and/or Saturday.

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

It’s strange when you got a leaderboard without visible ratings. This leads to the following question: Why invisible rating, when the system works proper? I come to the same answer as Authority: Something in the system is flawed.

The leaderboard is obviously extremely flawed. There are people who are sitting there for months without having played who move up the leaderboard by not even playing the game. A guy on my team looked up a friend who apparently has 70% or so win rate yet is at 45% or so with a good deal of wins, yet you have accounts with 14-3 in the top 10.

Defektive.7283:

No, it should ignore clones too.

to much GD spam on the screen.

I feel like 1/2 my difficulty with other classes is due to all the spam and kitten to try to target through.

Defektive.7283:

JonPeters.5630:

The heal sig is a typo. The numbers are correct but it should say per second. Yes, that is correct, 392 health per second.

Oh.
Snap.

392/sec is pretty gd strong!

Time to re-awaken the shout/banner bunker warrior, 1600hp every 3s (w/Adrenal Health), and more from either shouts or banners. You could probably convert the cc warrior build into a very similar build, but more of a bunker.

Ultima.8673:

Volrath.1473:

I made a very similar thread 2-3 weeks ago and got flamed cuz it was “too soon” after the patch and players would adapt to this new meta.

well guess what?! I was right…

PS. This was my thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Worse-Meta-EVER

in the past i knew from many necrofriends posi, moa and others that the patch will be ridicilous overpowered…

What’s funny is that pre-patch I was telling my team it is time to run double necro due to how awesome they would be post patch and I’m not even up there with the likes of some of the people posting here. If someone of my skill can see this coming that begs the question of how ANet couldn’t see this coming.

Parisalchuk.9230:

I love people coming in here that I have never seen playing in tPvP saying this map is fine for tournaments. Perhaps its now because you feel like you have an equal footing against better teams? Too bad that the game had to add a cheap mechanic to make up for your lack of skill.

A gimmick team will beat a team of skilled player playing as a balanced team 9 times out of 10. Thats not creating variety and breaking meta, thats creating a new meta on a new map to take advantage of overpower map mechanics which eliminates individual player skill to an extreme degree.

I can vouch for this. We scrimmed Lagger Tag, never having won a scrim against them. But having played this a little the previous night had already come up with a good enough gimmick comp to win a Bo5 (we also had Jirafe from PINK acting as a sub).

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

The fact that A-Net needed 4 MONTHS to create this map is just… wow, I can’t find words for this. Other developers create 10 maps in 4 months. wtf is wrong here?

It is because they’ve had a handful of people solely devoted to sPvP.

Bas.7406:

I am unsure how to respond to OP, one of the longest tenured teams, disbanding. I am saddened. Is there a single NA team right now that has had the same 5 for more than 2 weeks? Maybe LOST or PINK?

Yes technically I’ve had been working with the same group of players since May 1, but not being a top tier team and having significantly less experienced players I don’t know if that counts or not.

Lopez.7369:

It’s great and vindicating that Skyhammer is now out of tournament rotation, but I think the playerbase really needs an explanation for how such a terrible map got through the QA process and straight into the tournament rotation in the first place.

This gives me very little faith in ArenaNet’s vision for Guild Wars 2 as an e-sport.

I hope that, at the very least, this humbles overzealous developers in the future.

You must have missed this https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/introducing-the-new-skyhammer-pvp-map/ and here is a key quote that shows you how they got into this mess.

“We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from our playtesters,” Bearce says. “Pretty much as soon as we threw this in for testing, our internal playtesters said, ‘This has to go on Live.’”

Claypool adds, “People who have played this map already have been more excited about playing PvP. Skyhammer has a really dynamic, old-school feel; like a Quake map.”

The real question becomes who are these playtesters and why are they still allowed to be playtesters? To support ANet a little here, but if your testing shows positive feedback you would be expecting positive feedback when released; however, this shows whatever method they have for selecting playtesters or conducting playtesting is very flawed and should be reevaluated.

MiLkZz.4789:

Juba.8406:

Juba.8406:

still 60 seconds CD is too much, make it 40s .

also Berserker Stance DOES NOT affect conditions already applied on us , this has to change too.

Just learn when to use it, what you are asking would make the skill OP and signet of stamina 100% useless.

Seriously, you combine that bad boy w/signet of stamina or lyssa runes and you’re golden.

nicknamenick.2437:

Jonwar.9205:

nicknamenick.2437:

not sure if its better than signet of stamina (i use signet traits also)

Its every 36 sec full condition remove..

Berserkers stance is on 60sec cooldown for 8 sec.. necro will see you activate it and just wait for 8 sec and bam spam you after..

Also gain adrenaline issnt needed anymore (you get more adrenaline than you can use your burst normally)

The necro can “wait” 8s, but how is he going to wait while your closing on him (completely immune to any movement impairing conditions he can put up, and fear as it counts as a condition) and start bashing his face in?

This is a big buff IMO, if it’s off CD I see this as a realistic way to stomp d/p thieves and necros alike. Not to mention the ability to actually get on a point and cleave for a while instead of waiting on the sidelines for someone to step out of the mess of AoE.

ok so if i use berserkers stance its also the same as stability?
Does it ignore CC? if so i think i change my stability signet for berserker stance and keep my signet of stamina also..

I have to test this stance more..

It ignores CC that is classified as a condition, fear & immobilize

Cosine.7841:

With the buff to berserker stance, what do you think about changing adept traits to 25% stance and 25% speed (and swapping signets dolyak/stamina for berserker/balanced)? 10 seconds of condition application immunity seems pretty strong.

My personal take on this is that it’ll be largely situational.

If you’re in a match with a necro/engi (the majority of matches nowadays) you’ll want Berserker’s, Stamina, Balanced/Dolyak. In this case 25% stance is better, but you’ll want the combo of Berserker + Stamina to negate most condition damage, so would still want 20% signet recharge meaning that either Dolyak or Balanced would work. Hell, you could even run with Lyssa runes to easily combo Berserker’s Stance w/Lyssa as to ensure you can’t get corrupt booned to death (pop Berserker’s, get your signet of rage off and proceed to lollerskate as those conditions instantly disappear).

If you’re in a match w/o a necro/engi picking up Endure Pain in place of Berserker, Dolyak over Balanced, and Shield Mastery over Sure-Stance, and even something else in place of Stamina is the way to go.

If you’re in a match with a balance of both forms of damage you’ll have to decide how to mix and match.

TLDR: No I wouldn’t drop Signet Mastery, since you’ll still probably want to use Signet of Stamina, despite the Berserker’s Stance improvement. However, Sure-Footed is a pretty nice choice now too.

Olba.5376:

What’s next? Protection Hate because “DotE isn’t good”?

Better yet, change DotE to be remove 1 boon for each bar of adrenaline used and let Cleansing Ire remove the conditions prior to landing.

I’ve been playing a build like this for quite awhile now, pre-patch it was 0/30/0/10/30. The biggest difference with yours is I’m going for the condition damage over physical, some minor trait choices, and using warhorn over shield. I’m going to give the Zerker version a try and see if I like it better. My team seems to like my build too, as I can provide us with the combo field might stacks pre-match start and you provide the best fire field in the game.

Defektive.7283:

When I mentioned Hammer as being viable, I did not say it was paired with Longbow. The hammer build is a separate build.

I really don’t recommend running Hammer + ranged weapon, but Hammer Sword Shield is viable against teams where they run limited stun breaks or stability (Necros).

Currently, everyones running Necros due to their buffs. Hammer is very solid against them. When the ‘meta’ settles out and people stop running 2-3 necros, you’ll see Hammer no longer become viable. Hence why I originally mentioned it has a limited time frame to be useful.

I can completely agree with this. This is my biggest problem with running a cc build right now is how bad it is against lots of professions. On the other hand, if you see two necros on the other team, running a cc build is akin to getting your team two free kills.

As a quick FYI, Stronger Bowstrings currently has an unlisted effect that is better than the one you suggest replacing it with. The unlisted effect is 100% finisher on the projectiles, which means you’ll deal way more damage with the unlisted effect than with your new suggested effect. Your #1 spam will always proc 2 burns in your AoE burst combo field.

Valkyriez.6578:

Ultimately mate, if you think it could/should be done better, throw your own hat in the ring.

That’s not exactly easy. I’ve been doing some hot join shoutcasting the last 2-3 weekends and the only chance I have to getting a shot is if tournament organizers invite me or I can get some teams willing to scrim with me shoutcasting to practice real matches. It doesn’t matter if you are better, but whether or not you’re now a “big name” or at least that’s how I feel.

Cliff Spradlin.3512:

Gilgamesh.2561:

Concerning authenticated API and potential features: GW2 does not have any kind of in-game inspection. You can’t see other characters’ traits or gear details. Is it safe to say if you can’t do something currently in-game, such as inspect other players, that it won’t become exposed in an API until it is in-game?

Yes, you won’t have any additional access beyond what your character can already do.

You can’t inspect someone outside of spectator mode, but clearly there is an API to allow you to view another character’s traits and gear. Would the API then expose this for consumption outside of spectator mode or would this itself require the character to currently be in a sPvP match where spectator mode is accessible?