Guild Wars 2

The ambush and mirror mechanics are just bad.

Ambush skills are hard to execute and the effect is very weak. They are so telegraphed and I don’t see how they are ‘ambush’. These skills will be so easy to avoid or interrupt. They are nothing like thief stealth attacks which are true ambushes.

Mirror spawn location is bad and they exist for such a short time that it is almost impossible to make use of them.

The sad truth is that so many of mirage’s new skills and traits evolve around these 2 mechanics. All of them turn out to be underwhelming due to how poor these 2 feature mechanics are implemented.

The underlying idea is sound. Trade defensive value (the movement) for offensive (the ambush).

That’s where the good ends. The ambushes are so badly balanced that most of the time I wish I could AA instead, and as a result the gain in damage can’t remotely hope to keep up with the loss of defense.

Further, beyond normal dodging our ability to gain cloak through mirrors is just… poor. Generation is astonishingly bad, and they last ~3x-4x too short. Should be 8-12 seconds.

duster.7013:

It’s not going to “feel” impactful when you’re new to pvp. If you wanna cast 4 spells and “feel” pro then you can play dota or league. We’re not lowering our skill cieling for you.

Seriously. You have four spells if your team is remotly competant and you’re trapped in the match for an hour. Go play 1k hours in dota only playing support, then come back here and tell me you want “less, more impactful spells.”

4 spells per many many many different heros plus hundreds of items. That are balanced every 2 weeks are shorter if something is completely broken.

Then there’s mid game tactics with the items and play style to counter on the fly while your enemies are doing the same.

If you are going to bash dota or lol at least make sure to properly bash it. There is a reason those two are dominate eSports while GW2 was kicked out. Hell even the baby Smite picks up more renown then GW2 by far.

But #/shrug the lies some GW2 PvP players tell themselves to sleep better at night. Dota and LoL has a skill ceiling soo much higher then GW2 that GW2 thinks god it self takes dumps on it. Smite even does the same.

Mesmer is suffering.

Shame it’s on warrior though.

Failure providing more incentive than success is a failure in game design and should be addressed by ArenaNet.

Read the subject and couldn’t decide if it was going to be a thief or a warrior.

Everything was powercreeped to all hell, everything needs nerfs this is good for the game

Call me when they decide to poll the removal of elite specs from ranked.

Uh, is this even a question? Queen Jennah obviously.

Zintrothen.1056:

MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! On NA and EU.

Can you feedback an entire city? Yeah, didn’t think so.

#QueenJennah2017

Lukas.7159:

Can you people bashing against thief use your brain for once pls

thief in its current state has 2 condi removals, being signet which clears one single condi and shadowstep that clears 3 condis ON RETURN

the difference between other classes and thief is, that thief has almost no boons, except might fury swiftness from steal (+ stolen boons, which dont last long enough to be productive)

ehh
condi remove on heal if you use it, shadowstep, signet, dodge, and evading an attack.
thief steal gives tons of boons, the ones listed in trickery plus 3 you can rip.
yes pls use brain.

Power mes is such trash (mostly due to the HoT power creep, not condi’s in particular, but whatever) that you could delete mesmer from the game, drop Moa from existence, give portal to Warrior, and nobody would complain. In fact with the exception of a few crazies, 99.9% of the GW2 population would nod their heads happily.

nothelseth.4621:

discard that friend and find a better one.

so cruel… :’D

foste.3098:

@cynz if the entire class is dependent on a single trait to function then the class itself is the issue,

Except the class isn’t dependent on that trait. If Impacting Disruption was deleted from the game, thieves would still win all the same matchups that they already win, and lose all the same matchups that they already lose.

ID is a totally superfluous trait that has done nothing but promote mindless interrupt use.

Windwalker.7421:

^ Thank you Fay! Spot on!

I’m glad to see I’m not the only one with that opinion, based on my experiences in ranked PvP at least.

What we really need is a thread about suggestions to make at least one Power Mesmer build viable again! I’d love to hear your suggestions on that Fay, and other experienced Mesmers’ as well.

Ez

Remove Rev from the game (mechanically broken as kitten since its conception anyway), and bring thief back to that sweet spot just before HoT ruined everything.

DONE

oh and condi cleanse split through the other lines yada yada

Our “serious” burst is well telegraphed, easily countered, and on a long CD as compared to other class’. However, the real problem is that in order to achieve that burst, we pretty much give up any and all sustain, which simply isn’t the case for our enemies who frequently out burst us, out DPS us, while also out-sustaining us.

They simply have viable sustain built into their professions, while ours requires us to build for it, giving up all semblance of burst and/or DPS output. The only option is to go Condie damage, where you’re not relying on one single shatter to do all your damage, but can continually pump out shatters to apply conditions while sustaining yourself.

I do think that individual weapons need buffs, but I agree that it’s not all about damage. The GS simply gives up too much defense for what you gain in offense, and exactly the opposite is true for the Staff where you give up too much phantasm damage in order to gain minimal added defense.

For those of you who want a less long winded synopsis of what I think would make PvP better:

1: Simplified traits with one primary effect. Any secondary effect should be weak and designed to have synergy with another trait.

2: Do away with weapon-based traits. Adjust weapon Cool Downs to compensate. Replace the old traits with a more generalized version of the trait. For example, Forceful Greatsword could be changed to give might on crit with every weapon, but with a short ICD. Now, if you don’t want to take Strength you don’t feel like your GS is inferior because of it.

3: Try to design traits in such a way that one class can’t be good at everything, for example the old D/D Ele. It’s OK for builds to have major weaknesses, it is a team game after all. I see people complaining that Reaper is only good if supported, but imo that’s a GOOD thing. Now, I know that might make Solo Qing hard, but maybe someday the matchmaker can start grouping people up by looking at their traits and assigning them a role based on that so that it can try to create a balanced team comp?

4: Change skill CDs so that player’s aren’t just constantly “spamming” (for lack of a better word) so that there is more emphasis on timing like on launch. Before anyone says anything, I’m away launch balance was far from perfect, the I preferred the speed of combat compared o now.

5: I’ve said this a million times but I think the design of Conquest in general could do with borrowing some ideas from Conquest in the Battlefield series. This means that the side with the most players on it capture the point. If enemies are contesting the point, even if you have more players the captures are very slow. This would mean team fights are still important, but one tanky player can’t keep a point from flipping for an extended period of time. This would also allow for the capture points to be a bit longer, maybe kitten some terrain decoration so that the points are more than just flat circles.

Obviously, I don’t really see any of these things happening, but maybe a Dev will read this, because I know a good number of players that have left PvP for similar reasons to go back to games like LoL, Dota, or Battlerite. I WANT to come back, but the current meta keeps me from doing anything more than jumping into a dueling server to run a fun gimmick build or a unranked server with silly settings

I’m going to kick this post off by admitting that I am fully away that I was never in any way important in the GW2 PvP scene. Also, I tend to ramble on. What I was however – was someone that was fairly active on these forums. This was because despite all of the flaws the basic mechanics of the game were super fun and unlike anything else I had played. There are plenty of character action games, but none with this level of variety and customization in a 3rd person perspective.

After putting up with parts of the game that bugged me, mostly balance, I eventually just stopped playing PvP altogether. These day, I only sign on to do solo PvE content. THe main reason I ended up leaving was simple, there was so much power creep and bloat that the gameplay became a huge mess.

Go look at PvP from the launch of the game and compare it to now. The pacing is almost absurdly fast now. This is mostly due to the design of the Elite Specializations. Rather than being simply a new playstyle, many were just flat out upgrades. Berserker feels like Warrior+, Chronomancer adds a new ability, Dragon Hunter gets WAAAAY better virtues, etc. The only Elite Spec that felt truly like a different playstyle to me was Reaper. Instead of carefully using your skills, you’re almost constantly throwing skills around now. You see many players just using rotations regardless of what the enemy is doing.

Now, the Elite Specs weren’t the only reason for power creep, there was the merging of many different traits in the original Specialization update. It’s a system I like conceptually, but it may have been better if certain traits had just just disappeared or receive more significant nerfs before being merged together. Almost every class got a huge boost in overall power and then HoT came and added even more must-use traits.

I’m sure some players prefer this faster pace, but I for one can’t even be bothered to watch GW2 PvP anymore because the screen is just a mess of skills and particle effects – which is funny since that was a complaint you saw a lot at launch. Even with me knowing what is going on it can still be hard to make any sense out of it.

My other major issue that has also been present since launch is the overall class balance. We all know balancing a game like is is impossible, but GW2 has been one hell of a rollercoaster ride. Warriors started off at the ultimate noob killers, then were useless, then were dominating as Hambow, then they did nothing well, then Shoutbow became a thing, then it became weak again, and now they seem to be OK but are lacking much of the variety the class used to have. Ele also had a fairly similar experience of up-and-down balance.

My timeframe may be a little off but I believe that the time of the Hambow Warrior was one of best in terms of balance we have ever seen, with the exception of the Hambow build itself. Warrior could do pretty much any role you wanted. It may not have been the best at it, but it was at the very least viable. You could do CC on Hammer, stack a crazy number of bleeds on Sword/Sword, provide support with Shouts, and straight up DPS with Axe and GS. That kind of variety is what I think all classes should aspire to. They can all fill a Support, Physical Damage, Condition Damage, or Control role, but in different ways. For example, Warrior being really good at stacking one condition but Necromancer applies a moderate amount of many different condis.

The framework for this seems to be present in most classes, and is probably what the Devs originally wanted. They were killing the holy trinity by making every class able to fulfill every role. The problem is that now most “meta” classes are able to do a bunch of different roles in one build instead of having to focus on one primary role and maybe one or two lesser roles. Again, I think this is because many traits have too many different effects. Simplifying the trait system would hopefully allow for more defined roles with less bloat.

Power Mesmers strength (or the return thereof) lies in the games overall mechanics. Adding more damage to Power Mesmer is a stupid way of bringing it “up”. Rather a reduction in stability access, aoe spam, condi spam, and other power creep problems related to the HoT debaucle are what’s needed.

This problem will never be resolved and instead will become exasperated with the release of subsequent expansions and Elite specs down the line.

This game suicided. Have a great day! :D (playing better games XD )

You’d be better off leaving for the time being. There’s no use being unhappy waiting for some magical content to appear out of nowhere.

Another thing Blizzard is constantly making balance changes, like almost every week and they don’t care about making balance changes in the middle of pro tournaments either.

Highlie.7641:

i would think the latter would grow the population more.

And how did it work so far? Is gw esport yet? Oh wait.. nobody cares about gw, its dying, not growing.