This game has become such trash the only thing we needed were the evades on the counter skills four years ago. The rest is just more mindless power creep. If only the clock on balance could be set back two years.
I used to watch the changes happening in this game and wonder how progress was so slow and the devs were seemingly so inept. And then I read the employee reviews on glassdoor.com. The problems with the game are a result of basic management principles being flubbed.
Simply put, talented employees are underpayed and not recognized at anet. Instead, the more senior guys “go with the flow” guys rise up the ranks and are not held accountable for poor performance. What we have been seeing recently is much of their talent leaving the company resulting in an employee base consisting largely of the least effective and productive employees. Granted, it likely varies by department, and the disparities in the quality between the various content released shows as much, but at the end of the day their management style sucks.
And so, that’s why poor systems are repeatedly released and we are still in the testing phase five years in.
Well also what’s probable causing this is the fact, many long time PvP players. Who are getting beyond fed up with the condition Ranked PvP is in, have moved their PvP time to other PvP games, if not straight up quit GW2 all together.
So as more and more decent players stop playing. You get what’s left of the community who are not cheating or getting fed wins to artificially make them look like pros. With would also explain why Arena Net refusing to punish system abusers and chronic afkers/idlers. We all expected Season 5 to be the season that crushed the PvP community or make it great again. Needless to say we know what it did.
I can confirm this is true for me at least. 10k pvp games over three years and the state of pvp had led me to abandon this game entirely. This is the first time I have checked the forums in over a month and I can say I’m happy no longer holding onto a hope that things will get better. They won’t and people that think they’ve gotten better are probably too new to know how much better this game used to be.
What I’ve noticed really as an issue is that everything in essence is too spammable. Not in the sense that people use it for thief where a chasing ability or certain skill can be used repeatedly until ini runs out. I mean it in the sense that everything in the game, especially really big influential skills, have very small cd’s for the effect they have.
My first big thing on balance is a general increase of cd’s for pretty much everybody to make the game less of a spam fest and encourage more timing in skills so people who can analyze their opponent’s style and adjust to it better will come on top, not the people who spam the most aoe damage and healing.
Second huge thing I’d put out there is a removal of all passives because this will fix a large amount of the carry mode nature of some builds present in the game. This will allow really good players to do massive damage chains when they land their stuff and will accordingly punish those who overextend or fail to avoid damage incoming to them.
As compensation for the automatic reduction in tankiness this would bring I’d propose an overall reduction in the amount of damage (both physical and condition) present so we don’t get stuck in a burst meta where everything is 1 shot or be 1 shot.
I also believe their needs to be fewer “guard” or “bulwark gyro” type skills in the game where you get essentially another stack of prot that can’t be removed. Especially when the same classes have high access to prot giving them the ability to ignore any need to build for armor due to the ability to mitigate 66% of direct damage.
Those are just some general things I believe should be addressed before we look at specific classes. Once those are taken care of I believe class balance would be a much more straightforward task.
Edit: I have to go so I’ll post specific class stuff later
This so sadly captures the bulk of the balance issues in this game but will continue to be ignored.
The only thing that seems missed is that most classes have a build that does everything well (I.e., self-sustain, team support, mobility, dps, cc mitigation, etc). This is in part due to the fact that so many skills have tons of effects (I.e., combo fields/finishers, condi application, direct damage, cc, boon application, etc).
All you get from raising cooldowns is lower skill cieling, especially if you do it for every class.
>muh spam buttons
Which is somehow worse than uncounterable “I win” buttons? As long as all classes have short cooldowns, that means the player who is consistantly the best wins, holding class matchups and stuff.
Actually no. The low cooldowns are very forgiving on inexperienced players who are less punished for mistiming their skills and having consistent access to blocks and stun breaks. This applies in the reverse scenario too, experienced players are less rewarded for landing skills and have less incentive to manage cooldowns. To sum it up, the margin for error is much wider in today’s state of balance.
Having higher cooldowns means you have less skills to hit. Something to consider is that while your cooldowns may be shorter, so are you opponents. So it doesn’t make much sense to say that there is a wider margin of error in today’s balance.
Think about like this, let’s I have a skill I can use 5 times in one fight and so does my opponent. Let’s also say my opponent is a skilled player who will likely hit all 5 attacks. To be at an equal level of skill I need to hit all 5 attacks. If we both had 4 attacks, I would only need hit 4 of them, which would be easier. If we only had 1 chance to use the skill, I only need to hit once to be at an equal footing against my more skilled opponent who can hit the skill very accurately.
What I’m trying to say is that lower cooldowns means more chances to hit for skilled players but more chances to miss for less skilled players.
In part, that’s true but read my response above about diminished returns.
All you get from raising cooldowns is lower skill cieling, especially if you do it for every class.
>muh spam buttons
Which is somehow worse than uncounterable “I win” buttons? As long as all classes have short cooldowns, that means the player who is consistantly the best wins, holding class matchups and stuff.
Actually no. The low cooldowns are very forgiving on inexperienced players who are less punished for mistiming their skills and having consistent access to blocks and stun breaks. This applies in the reverse scenario too, experienced players are less rewarded for landing skills and have less incentive to manage cooldowns. To sum it up, the margin for error is much wider in today’s state of balance.
Skill floor doesn’t matter at all. Like, throw it into the garbage. Skill cieling is all that matters.
So if inexperienced players are able to compete against highly skilled players that’s not a problem? That’s what’s happening now. It’s very easy to compete with skilled players and extremely difficult for those skilled players to take advantage of the skill ceiling in gw pvp. The number of people actually able to compete at that level is extremely small (I’m talking less than 1%).
There are diminishing returns. The way you’re looking at the situation you describe it as a linear relationship. That’s not the case.
All you get from raising cooldowns is lower skill cieling, especially if you do it for every class.
>muh spam buttons
Which is somehow worse than uncounterable “I win” buttons? As long as all classes have short cooldowns, that means the player who is consistantly the best wins, holding class matchups and stuff.
Actually no. The low cooldowns are very forgiving on inexperienced players who are less punished for mistiming their skills and having consistent access to blocks and stun breaks. This applies in the reverse scenario too, experienced players are less rewarded for landing skills and have less incentive to manage cooldowns. To sum it up, the margin for error is much wider in today’s state of balance.
I used to watch the changes happening in this game and wonder how progress was so slow and the devs were seemingly so inept. And then I read the employee reviews on glassdoor.com. The problems with the game are a result of basic management principles being flubbed.
Simply put, talented employees are underpayed and not recognized at anet. Instead, the more senior guys “go with the flow” guys rise up the ranks and are not held accountable for poor performance. What we have been seeing recently is much of their talent leaving the company resulting in an employee base consisting largely of the least effective and productive employees. Granted, it likely varies by department, and the disparities in the quality between the various content released shows as much, but at the end of the day their management style sucks.
And so, that’s why poor systems are repeatedly released and we are still in the testing phase five years in.
If you want dumbed down garbage go play league or something. Their, the dev literally says that simplicity is good for a comp game.
Garbage moba and mmo matches are decided over a few huge meme spells instead of repeated tests of skill, so you’d be lowering the skill cieling. Please take such cancer to other games.
You’re welcome to disagree but could you please provide a substantive response. You didn’t do anything but rant and state hyperboles.
This game existed in a time when things were far more simplistic and the balance was much better and skill oriented. Complexity is ok but it’s implementation had been horribly mishandled in this game. And I’m really just touching upon one issue so there is no need to make generalizations.
Did you mean raise the skill floor? Or are you trying to make the game easier by making many skills usable less frequently?
No I meant it the way it reads. By raising cooldowns you incentivize people to think about the skills they are using and actually manage their cooldowns. It also increases the significance when players mitigate the damage from those skills because they won’t be available for a longer period. This is not the case today where you almost always have a high impact skill available since nearly all of the skills and utilities have much shorter cooldowns then the pre-HoT era. Consequently, it’s much easier for a mediocre player to compete with an experienced player.
An added bonus is that with less skills flying around there would be less effects spam and the game would actually be cleaner for players and spectators to get a barring on what’s going on.
As an aside, I have personally stopped playing gw for this and other balance reasons because I have seen what the balance philosophy is and it has moved further and further away from promoting skillful play with every patch. I hope it changes in the future but even if the devs recognize the problems it’s going to take them years to fix the problem at the pace they’re going. And that’s a very sincere estimate.
Ok lol this is just a semantics thing, higher floor = higher level of skill necessary to clear that floor. What “clearing the floor” means is subjective, but I guess clearing the skill floor would mean not being permadead (such as many new thieves, who have not cleared the skill floor). Alternatively you could say that higher CDs raise the skill ceiling, meaning that increasing CDs would require a higher level of skill to reach the maximum skill level possible (i.e. the ceiling).
This is getting really off topic and I don’t care to be right so ok.
Did you mean raise the skill floor? Or are you trying to make the game easier by making many skills usable less frequently?
No I meant it the way it reads. By raising cooldowns you incentivize people to think about the skills they are using and actually manage their cooldowns. It also increases the significance when players mitigate the damage from those skills because they won’t be available for a longer period. This is not the case today where you almost always have a high impact skill available since nearly all of the skills and utilities have much shorter cooldowns then the pre-HoT era. Consequently, it’s much easier for a mediocre player to compete with an experienced player.
An added bonus is that with less skills flying around there would be less effects spam and the game would actually be cleaner for players and spectators to get a barring on what’s going on.
As an aside, I have personally stopped playing gw for this and other balance reasons because I have seen what the balance philosophy is and it has moved further and further away from promoting skillful play with every patch. I hope it changes in the future but even if the devs recognize the problems it’s going to take them years to fix the problem at the pace they’re going. And that’s a very sincere estimate.
Since the devs are now being given more autonomy to split skill balance in pvp can we please address an issue that has plagued this game since the trait overhaul prior to the release of HoT. After the changes made to the trait system many of the traits which granted cooldown reductions were made baseline for many weapon skills and utilities. This was also followed up by overpowered elite specs and a general balance philosophy of lowering cooldowns on under powered skills rather than nerfing the over powered ones. The result has been the general spamfest we have today which has driven so many players, myself included, to abandon pvp and gw2 altogether. This being said, just because I have largely given up hope doesn’t mean I don’t care.
So I am asking the devs to please take these comments into consideration moving forward for the overall health of the game and help lower the skill floor in pvp. This is only one of many systemic balance changes which has adversely affected pvp (e.g., rampant addition of passive traits cough).
I like when this stuff used to matter. Now it’s just about who can mash more skills in a slightly more effective order.
What’s the point in baiting a dodge when the enemy always has another dodge (or more), blocks, invuln, blind procs, and/or permanent protection to save them? And all of these can be strung together into near perpetuity.
Gw2 combat does indeed have the potential to be deep and rich but HoTs and the trait revamp prior to its release diluted that potential.
According to me this balance patch is a huge disappointment.
I mean it took them about 4 months to bring some small nerfs on some classes, and to slightly improve some useless traits/utilities.
Basically, even hard buffing those traits/utilities would left them untouched by the players due to their lack of utility in most situations compared to the most commonly used Traits/skills/utilities, and still they decide to just add a few % here and there.
Instead of nerfing overly played HOT skills / traits, they change core traits which have proven to be balanced right before HOT launched (minimising the build diversity if you want to run something that’s not HOT related.) and if they dare change HOT traits/ skills they just increase CD’s or nerfs a few % here and there, leaving the “broken” mechanikittenouched.
The game feels overloaded with sustain, damage, mobility, crowd control, damage mitigation, reflects which are all on short CD and often fill more than one role.
And I’m not even getting started with class related problems and build diversity.
I really miss the pre HOT gw2, and if someone could pm me a private server where I can play the game I used to enjoy I’d appreciate (At this point, I don’t care if this cost me a ban.)
HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THIS PATCH? LET US KNOW !
Exactly! Instead of playing with the stats of things endlessly they need to start by removing functionality. So many of the HoT skills have cc, combo fields/finishers, blocks, and direct and condi damage all rolled into one skill. That might be a bit exaggerated but it is a fact that too many of the newer skills have way too many bells and whistles. Not to mention the low cd times on this stuff is nuts.
This stuff is so basic I don’t get why the balance team and some of the community are so against it.
Remember when d/d ele was considered op? Now they’re specifically trying to give dagger buffs.
Remember when d/d ele was nerfed before Hot even launched? Also remember how Celestial amulet was thing back then too?
but hey I’m sure the power creep from these OP offhand Axe warriors, shield engis, and Axe necros is going to break the game.
Care to account for why reducing skill cd is the new solution to most balance problems? Do even recall when they just made traits baseline which reduced skill cd’s by 20%? That was the beginning of this horrid trend and was a very bad decision.
You should read the patch notes before complaining. As Crinn said, the buffs were mostly to underused skills.
You should read the OP. The premise is to bring everything down not to bring everything up. The amount of skill spam in this game is out of control. The skill floor has been brought way up even since the trait revamp just prior to the HoT release.
More cooldown reductions and damage buffs so we can continue to chain spam skills endlessly. Wahoo!
Instead of buffing underpowered skills and utilities maybe we could start by making those baseline and bringing down the overpowered stuff. Too late now though. This is clearly the direction things will be heading in the future.
I could do a forum recap if you wish.
In bullet points:
-In an effort to clean up the forums, suffish posts a “happy go lucky” message.
-The thread dies a horrible death
-Attracted by the impending smell of dis pare, the forum trolls breath new life into a dead thread
-Olrun breaks out his Esl thief dodge skills
-The greatest moment was uncovered: People fleeing from a fight to grind some loot from the AI lord.
-The second greatest moment was uncovered: people spamming the same skills.
-Salt was flung
-Olrun proclaims himself the master of Na being ranked 6th overall,
-Oxford dictionary to rewrite the defination of “winning” 6th out of 10 will now be known as “skillful”
-In an effort to reclaim the thread, Suffish pulls of a stunning backcap and pleads for positive vibes, not realizing this thread is positive, positively hilarious.
Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that top 6 in the world with a last minute roster wasn’t good enough for you. I forget, where were you? On your couch munching on Doritos?
The ego one develops when climbing to the top of a very small mountain is quite fascinating.
Regardless, I don’t think you can defend the claim that gw2 pvp had lost much of its depth.
the ego of someone sitting on their couch eating dorritos mocking the person who climbed that small mountian. cuz eating dorritos on a couch is so kitten hard right?
Why such hate for Doritos? But seriously, I’m sorry for hurting your precious feelings. Now can we get back to talking about something that actually matters like how pvp has largely devolved in this game?
Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that top 6 in the world with a last minute roster wasn’t good enough for you. I forget, where were you? On your couch munching on Doritos?
The ego one develops when climbing to the top of a very small mountain is quite fascinating.
Regardless, I don’t think you can defend the claim that gw2 pvp had lost much of its depth.
Maybe if you actually learned how to play the game instead of crying about how everything is overpowered, you might actually realize that there is a lot more depth to the game than you’re even cognizant of.
The only time they won something noteworthy they had to have a balance patch and meta tailored to the only comp they could run. Plenty of other teams have adapted but they can’t. That’s just being inadequate plain and simple.
Once again i have to disagree, whats wrong with being really good at a few things?
It be like in the NBA where they still had the Don nelson rule or in the NFL where teams where still forced to have 3 people in the back field.
Right now Astral Authority (The Abjured) have Shaq O’neal but right now Anet has a rule that you cant dunk.
I dont think its a coincidence that a team that has the best necro and thief in the game are struggling when they have made mesmer and ranger the Apex, 2 classes they dont play.
Do i think Astral would win if things were changed? Who knows but just like anything thats Professional League advertised you need to call things out. If refs are making bad calls in the NBA/NFL they get called out.
Anet needs to be called out for the really bad HOT specs which has completely ruined PvP S1-S4. Literally the community has build names that were OP like spirit ranger, turret engy, hambow warrior, D/D ele and then when you talk about whats broken lately.
Its HOT spec lines
Your argument just does not make sense. You are trying to cherry pick a couple sports analogies and generalize them. Good teams still win even if circumstances are not on their favor. AA has not been able to perform when life was not heavily in their favor.
While I do agree HOTs has completely ruined pvp and significantly lowered the skill necessary to compete, that is another issue entirely. We are talking about the highest level of pvp where skill absolutely still makes a huge impact. Abjured admitted they learned how to rotate from TCG. Now that the meta has shifted they can’t cope. They are just not up to par you need to let go.
The only time they won something noteworthy they had to have a balance patch and meta tailored to the only comp they could run. Plenty of other teams have adapted but they can’t. That’s just being inadequate plain and simple.
All I’m saying is the one WTS they won was handed to them due to a very fortuitous patch a week or two prior to the tourney which heavily favoured their comp. Without such circumstances they can’t really do much without a cele meta to carry them.
Well if I want to pvp in wvw ascended is needed. If it is too much why not give us some considerable amounts of gold, not 5 for legendary, just spit in our face
I think you’re confusing crossing into legendary as if that were some sort of accomplishment.
I pick foefire because it has the potential to be over the soonest. Best for grinding out dailies… I used to be a hardcore pvp player but this is what it has come to.
GW2 PvP is just player vs passive. It’s w/e. When overwatch comes, this game is gonna lose like 1/4 of it’s pvper playerbase.
Looking forward to playing a game with an actual balance team.
How bad are things here if someone think Blizzard’s notorious history of kitten poor balancing looks appealing?
It’s not that things are bad here, but rather that the grass is greener on the other side and right now Overwatch is the new shiny that everyone’s hyping over. I’m sure it will be a good, successful game, but once it’s been out for a while people will realize that it’s not some magic, God’s gift to PvP. Instead, it’s just another FPS game with it’s own balance issues.
But in the meantime, we’ll just have to deal with salty posts like this where people transpose their own struggles onto whatever external blaming they can (in this case, class balance) while they transfix themselves with their starry-eyed fanboy fanaticism towards the next up and coming shiny game that will eventually become just as mired in salty QQ.
Older gamers here should be able to recognize this pattern easily enough.
How anyone could defend almost four years of poor balance is beyond me. I used to keep telling myself they would turn it around because the mistakes they made were so blatantly awful there was no way it could persist.
Does anyone even remember when runes were overhauled to create build diversity and they just made strength runes so clearly overpowered every build used them? Or how about the entire year of turret engis? The list goes on and on. Now we are left with a state of balance that just makes every class face roll.
So yes I know the grass is greener elsewhere because it can’t get much worse than what this game has provided.
More cool down reductions to allow the spamming of even more weapon skills and utilities. They were under performing because they weren’t op. Now they are just silly like the rest of this game.
I wish we could just roll back this game to the time before this baseline cooldown reduction movement started. There used to be such a concept as counting enemy dodge rolls to land your important skills.
What’s your screenshot supposed to show? One team had two Mesmers and another had just one. The final score difference was 58 points.
son this is legend, 58 point difference here means more than 0-500 in your average ruby match, besides enemies have made plenty of mistakes including us stealing beasts and stuff but simply pressure from 2 mesmers was insane
when you have a class that can be present in 2 places at once while being one of the best duelists in game you cant really do anything about him decap-skitten outside of swarming the mesmer with 2+ people which puts your team at a huge disadvantage
You thinking you’re something special for being in legend is cute. Good luck with the rant though.
It took over a year for them to ruin turret engis by simply making them susceptible to condition and crit damage. I’ve spent two years hoping there’s pretty much nothing left.
fixed that for ya
Let me try again…
It took over a year for them to save us from turret engis with a lazy band-aid fix of making turrets susceptible to condition and crit damage. I’ve spent two years hoping there’s pretty much nothing left.
Thank you for this. This video demonstrates how inconsistent devs are with their balance philosophy. For over a year now they have been nerfing to prevent dodge spamming. Now we have a totally unoriginal elite spec built around the premise of dodge spamming. I’m sorry it’s not dodge spamming it’s the ability to “press the fight forward to the end.”
And yes this has not been beta tested yet, but the entire spec is built around the premise of dodging more and more effectively.
It took over a year for them to fix turret engis by simply making them susceptible to condition and crit damage. I’ve spent two years hoping there’s pretty much nothing left.
