Guild Wars 2

Yea…its really annoying. I would actually say traps are our best utilities as well (and lightning reflex)…but we have to invest 300precision/crit damage to use a condition build.

Was just testing this in the Mists.

Basically if I use one of the spirits active abilities, while moving at the same time, they will interrupt themselves and their actives will go on their 20s/40s cooldown.

This doesn’t happen everytime, but so far it seems to happen over 50% of the time. You can test it yourselves – use a spirit active, then start walking away from them.

So atm you, can’t use spirit actives while moving and while they are not next to you (unless you have NOT traited ‘Spirits follow you’).

You never answered my question. What happens when two bunker builds meet each other? No one will die or can win….What useful statics is Anet getting exactly?

And why should things be balanced on the smallest entity possible first? Its a team game, and thus should be orientated around that.

Imagine if League of Legends had competitive 1v1….how useless would those statistics be when so much of the characters skills are based around being in a team, whereas some are based around 1v1 situations…

Ah sorry, I forgot to mention this a purely tPvP balance list.

As far as I know, hitboxes don’t change and are always the same. Its just the appearance which looks bigger.

Also, enlargement grants stability + 25% damage increase.

Spirits

• Health of all spirits, apart from elite, increased by 20%. Either this, OR damage taken by AoE reduced by 50% (I do not know if this feasible from a technical point of view!). Having spirits killed by enemies because they want to focus fire them is fine, it requires thought on their behalf and for us it means they are wasting their dps on something else – but what sucks is when they randomly die without the opponent even meaning to.
• Cast times of summoning spirits reduced to 1 second from 1.5. This is so we don’t have to spend a whole 4.5 seconds mid-fight to resummon them. There doesn’t seem to be a good reason to have such long cast times for them – are they incredibly strong moves or am I missing something?

With this I think spirits can start creeping up on the viable side. The 20% to 35% proc chance increase last patch was actually really good – you don’t have to trait the +15% now, and can use Nature’s Vegeance (spirits activated skills have larger range and activate upon their death) instead which is useful, especially because they die so much. The changes here seem small and reasonable, and is definitely a good starting point.

Signets

• Signet of the Hunt – Passive movement speed increased from 10% to 20%. Active effect is now “Your pet will deal more damage on its next attack, and chill its target for 2s”
• Signet of the Wild – Cooldown reduced from 120 seconds to 100 seconds. Stability duration reduced from 12 seconds – 10 seconds. These ridiculously long cooldowns for signets is one of the reason they are hardly used. Lower the cooldowns, and lower the effects so they aren’t one-time poof abilities that we can’t actively use unless we wait 2 minutes.

Pets
And lastly, pet fixes.

First of all, their F2 skills NEED to be 100% responsive, or in fact just have an instant cast time. You can rebalance some of the effects to make up for this (i.e reduce wolf fear from 2s to 1s). If you don’t, then they need to work perfectly or pets will just be continue to be useless in the tPvP environment.

Secondly, they need to be able to hit targets more reliably. This is something that needs to be fixed from a technical/programming point of view though. Maybe increase their melee attack ranges so they can hit targets that move more reliably.

Ending Note

These changes aren’t huge ridiculous buffs. None of them are direct “damage increased by X%”. It just makes the useless unviable traits/utilities that are never used in a competitive environment a bit better. I don’t think this will make rangers viable for top top level play, but it will definitely be a step in the right direction and I think once these changes are implemented we can re kitten the situation.

Something people seem to be missing too is that although our buffs were very small this patch, a lot of OP builds have been nerfed (unkillable staff ele, guardian protection duration/block bug etc.). This means we are actually in a better situation despite recieving barely any buffs.

Note: A lot of these changes are using ballpark figures. For example, the spirit health increase could in fact need to be an increase of 40%, or maybe just 10%. This what the balance testers and QA department is for.

This is for tPvP only

Since there are only 2 developers working on GW2 balance at the moment, I thought I would help out. Note these are small, realistic changes which I think could be implemented next patch.

Weapons

Axe Off-hand

• Path of Scars knocks down enemy if axe hits them on the way back.

Shortbow

• Poison Volley changed to projectile finisher. This would make it a much more active move which could be used in more situations. If you want us to stop spamming 1, make our other moves a bit more useful and active!
• Quickness with Shortbow shoots 30% faster – This is a bug-fix.

Apart from that it seems shortbow is in a good area. Despite the fact ‘spamming 1 ain’t fun’, it does require flanking and positioning yourself right to use it to full effect, making it an interesting weapon.

Longbow

• Increase projectile speed – this is stop it being so easy to evade.

Sword

• No longer roots you

Apart from that it does seem our weapons are in a ‘fine’ place. Torch is good, the projectile speed buff was actually good and needed, although not a huge change. Greatswords buff last patch was good – I’m still a bit iffy on how little damage its auto-attacks do and its long cooldowns. I know its meant to be a utility weapon, not a damage-dealing one with big numbers, but I still think it could do with a bit more damage so we can at least kill an enemy on low hp.

Traits

Line 1 – Marksmanship

• Beastmaster’s might – Activating a signet now gives 3 stacks of might as opposed to a 1. With signets having such long cooldowns, receiving just 1 stack of might when you activate them is really useless.
• Remorseless – I don’t even know how to change this. At the moment ‘You regain opening strikes when you kill an enemy’. For a grandmaster trait that really is quite useless. Feels like this is a PvE move where much more enemies get killed.

Line 2 – Skirmishing

• Moment of Clarity – “Gain an attack of opportunity when you interrupt an enemy”. Again, just a terrible trait. I don’t know what to change it to because its such a fundamentally bad grandmaster trait. 50% damage increase on next attack for us rangers is very bad. We aren’t thieves who can do 5k damage at once. We have much more sustained dps. Maybe if it was “50% more damage over the next 3 seconds” or “50% more damage on next 4 attacks”, this would be more useful. Also the terms on which you get it are really bad – interrupting in this game isn’t easy, and we only have a couple of interrupts on really long CDs!

Line 3 – Wilderness Survival

• Nothing – its the rangers best trait line at the moment, and you actually have to think about what traits to take because they are all viable. Making choices when building a character is good.

Line 4 – Nature Magic

• Enlargement – Changed from “Your pet gets enlarged at 25% hp” to “You and your pet get enlarged at 25% hp”. This should at least make this trait a bit viable. Apart from that this trait line is really good, and I feel like I have to make choices when choosing the traits.

Line 5 – Beast Mastery

• Instinctual Bond – Changed from “When you are downed your pet gains 5 second of quickness” to “When you are downed your pet gains 5 seconds of quickness, and when your pet is killed you gain 2 seconds of quickness”. Having a grandmaster trait that revolves around you getting downed isn’t exactly ideal, and I think the extra 2 seconds of quickness you get from your pet dying would make this a much more viable and interesting trait.

*This is the worst line that Rangers have, by far. However, this is because Pet A.I and relying on pets in tPvP really doesn’t work (well). Once they improved ranger pets maybe this line will become more useful.

Utility Skills

Shouts
A big reason these suck so bad is again because pets aren’t reliable in tPvP. However, there are still many improvements it could use.

• Guard – Changed from “Your pet will aggressively protect the area” to “Your pet will aggressively protect the area, and absorb 15% of damage you would take in this area for 5 seconds”.
• Sick Em – Cooldown reduced to 45 seconds and does not require an enemy to be targeted. Kind of random how it requires an enemy target?
• Search and Rescue – Pets will revive at the same speed as humans with this skill. A slow revive at 85 seconds cool down really isnt that useful. Necros can instantly revive 3 downed people at 180 seconds cooldown, I think we should get to revive one person at a normal pace at 85 secs cd.

Traps

• Fixed a bug where traps teleport next to you when your too far away, meaning they only get to do 1 tick of damage to enemies

@ OP, could you please edit in what the ACTUAL problem is – that might help. (That is that we are 30% slower with quickness on shortbows as opposed to 7% slower).

shaolin.9716:

1v1 with matchmaking would be the best way for players to get better, and developers to balance the game. Developers could gather basic statistics such as win/loss ratios between 1v1 profession fights, but also much deeper stats such as which abilities were the most used and how much they contributed to total damage, making it a lot easier to cross-balance. Also, imagine if the game was known for providing near 50/50 win ratio, you would know that any player that beats you actually really outplayed you rather than carried by his chosen profession.

Except this game isn’t balanced around 1v1’s, as its a team game and a large number of abilities are team-based.

What happens when a guardian bunker and staff ele get matched up in the 1v1? Fun times.

Official Wiki-Page:
The Lost Shores is a game release coming to Guild Wars 2 during November 2012. The new content will involve the Sea of Sorrows and will launch on November 16th, 2012 at noon PST (20:00 GMT)

No other info has been given.

I disagree with most of this…

More players on a point = game about numbers. Don’t see how zerging points to capture them adds any strategic depth or anything. I’m not saying the current bunker meta is amazing, but its 10x better than that.

Raid of capricorn is being improved (as stated by Devs), and its in hotjoin sPvP which people can leave/go as they please. Leave it in.

“Score in sPvP Conquest mode will now tick only for the team holding the major of the points at any given moment at the rate of 1 per second, 3 per second if all three points are hold.” – Whats the point of this?

“tournaments will now start when 4 teams have signed for it” – Pointless…..

“New game mode, Control and Capture” – Potentially something that can be introduced further down the line (as you mentioned)., but not a patch that is coming tomorrow. Lets make sure they introduce a match-making system, fix bugs/balance professions, introduce custom servers, solo/premade queues, Spectator mode, etc., fine-tune some other stuff. Then after that we can talk about new hybrid game modes.

Too many of the changes are overly-complicated and unrealistic and would just turn the game into the biggest unbalanced kitten ever. They just need to introduce some basic + essential features, balance professions, fix bugs, and replace free/paid with match-making solo/premade.

ANET, please don’t consider hiring him….

Need solo-only queues (with ranked matchmaking). The concept that Team vs PUG stomping isn’t fun is actually quite easy to grasp….

Ok after some testing, it seems that when I put down healing spring and shoot through it I do not get any regen, and nor does anyone in the projectiles path.

How does it work?

If you stand in the circle and spam shortbow 1 – does that stack with the regen you get from the circle?

Just out of curiosity where is everyone getting the info that there will be a neutral boss on that map?

The article never mentions it. Are there other sources of info about this map?

What I would like to get cleared up, I’m pretty sure of it but would like to check on with you guys anyway, is how the projectile finisher works with Healing Spring?

So when your arrows pass throw the combo field who gets affected? Do YOU get regeneration, or do allies who get hit by your arrows get regeneration?

I think its a pretty terrible finisher if thats the case, because manually aiming your arrows at allies through the healing spring combo field isn’t really easy/practical – every other finisher is WAY more effective.

Its been 2.5 months.

In those 2.5 months, do you know what they’ve done for PvP (which was released without TONNES of features).

They’ve added paid tournaments, which are an exact clone as free ones but with better rewards and a barrier of entry (have I mentioned that queue times are ridiculous?)

But its fine, we’ve had a halloween event and theres a lost shore pve content update next week. PvP will get a few balance changes and bug fixes.

At person above: You don’t lose points for losing. So Player A could be amazing, and win 6 QPs out of 7 tournaments.

Player B could be bad, and win 7 QPs out of 100 tournanments.

Player B is simply higher because of time invested.

However I think this is true with normal rating systems too anyway….you need play a lot to get high ratings as well, so there is always an element of time invested in any ratings/ladder system.

Nice video, but you really do repeat yourself and drag on some simple points which makes it quite boring to hear till the end….

Still, one of the comments on youtube I find quite interesting. At the moment the only competitive system are ‘tournaments’. This means you usually need at least 40 mins, sometimes longer, if you want to play a competitive match all at once. And you can’t leave halfway through. It also requires 40 people all queueing up at the same time, which leads to boring waits and just isn’t practical.

Why can’t we just have single competitive matches? This would mean queues would be virtually non-existent as only 10 people would be required at one time, and people wouldn’t have to play 40 minutes at a time just to get a competitive match in.

Me and my mates on EU all have 6 QP’s, but we aren’t anywhere on the ladder

Might want to include EU or NA…

Well you can make glass cannon shortbow/longbow rangers now so…?

And why would be given an extra weaponset?

I definitely think mesmer portals need a nerf of some sort. They are such a huge advantage atm as the team with the mesmer always has an extra player in the field. There are ways to slightly “counter” it (by counter I mean make a bit less effective) but it still definitely OP.

However, without it I definitely do not think it would be an indirect nerf to guardian bunkers – I think thats stretching it a bit too far. In fact, it could encourage teams to now have 2 bunkers – 1 at mid, 1 at close point. Of course I still think this is a bit more interesting as it allows for more tactics and mobility etc. and at least every bunker wouldn’t have to be the exact same class/build (e.g. portal mesmer).

This is really awesome. Good job!

PvE/PvP are balanced separately (or have the ability too if they feel its necessary). For example, confusion is balanced completely differently in both formats.

@Ace of Spades:
Saying its balanced because every team can use one is really bad logic. Forcing teams to use certain classes/build shows imbalance and takes away diversity.

Protection spirits seem like they have the same 10 second proc cooldown.

Would really like to know if it is once every 10 seconds for each person, or just once every 10 seconds for everyone though

Ok so it seems there is a 10 second cooldown for the spirits burn proc. Did it 5 times and everytime the burns happened within 10-12 seconds of each other. I’ll test it more later, but it seems pretty obvious from the results. It seems there is a 35% chance for it to proc, but it can only do it once every 10 seconds!

Test 1:
5 Burns out of 100 shots.

Test 2:
5 Burns out of 100 shots

Test 3:
5 Burns out of 100 shots

The burns always happened at roughly the same intervals, so I guess there must be some sort of cooldown. Not once did the burns happened within 10-15 shots of each other (thats out of 300 shots, and you would expect that to happen at least once?). I’ll try and see the shortest time they proc from each other.

Yup – I’ll try doing it with a steady pvp bow so it does less damage. Maybe there is some sort of cooldown between how often it can proc? That would actually explain it as the burns usually happened roughly the same time between each other.

So I decided to test out a spirit build today. I traited in ‘spirits have a 15% better chance to apply effects’. This means spirits should have a 35% chance to apply effects. Roughly one in three shots.

So I took out the fire/burn spirit and start shooting at some dummies. These were the results:
Test 1:
Dummy was burnt 2 times out of 36 shots

Test2:
Burnt 2 times out of 34 shots

Test 3:
Burn 2 times out of 31 shots

Test 4:
Burn 2 times out of 32 shots

I repeated this test at least 10 times, the large majority of the time the dummy only got burnt twice, rarely once and rarely three times.

However, the dummy, when it did get burnt, recieved three ticks of burn damage! (as opposed to the 1s of burn the tooltip says it does).

I have yet to test the other spirits.

PvP/PvE skills can/are balanced separately….and well ranger botters aren’t much of a problem in PvP so…..

We can now use traps in clocktower with trappers expertise!

This wasn’t mentioned in the patch notes at all though?

Maybe we did get some changes/fixes but they were just left out of the patch notes by mistake? Rangers are now viable in Khylo!

Except for rangers.

Devs?

And exactly what is he meant to do if the Guardian has retaliation up the large majority of the time?

Thanks for the update.

I hope amidst all this chaos they are fixing that stupid ranger bug where traps don’t work in clocktower. Every time you place a trap down there NOTHING happens. Its been like this since release. Our pet A.I is still sucky (howls in particular don’t work well….)….but the fact we are made so useless in mid in the most competitive/final map is a HUGE problem for us (as well as entangle being silly buggy).

This is the single and most important thing that needs fixing for the ranger at the moment and I’m not sure this is near the top of your priorities at the moment. Its not a complicated balance issue which is subjective, its just a massive bug the ranger needs fixed soon!

Nope. This bug happened I think on at least two (maybe three?) separate occasions, and no one ever got their chests at the end.

Template = ability to save your old/other builds and instantly load them up whenever you want (instead of manually respeccing). Also people can share their builds with a line of code that other people can simply copy+paste to use.

Kikkee how many e-sports features did LoL have on release? (NONE?)
How long did it take for them to implement spectator mode? (ONE YEAR?)
How popular of e-sports is it now? (VERY)

Seriously be patient – they will add the features in soon enough. Would you rather they just delayed the game release another 2 months so you couldn’t play anything? Use this as a training period – and btw, you are going to need LOTS of tournament tickets to play the paid tournaments, so use this period to collect as man as possible.

Have you forgotten Anets support? They’ve release minimum one patch a week so far which is VERY VERY good compared to 99% of other companies. There is also a patch coming today (https://twitter.com/guildwars2) so at least wait for that and see what they do.

Where did you get that pic of me wtf!?!??

I sincerly apologise for all the major butt-hurt I have caused.

Wishing you all a speedy butt recovery.

No one here see’s the humour/strangeness of winning a tournament with 5 necromancers using the exact same minion master build (5 of one of the worst builds)?

Step 1: Make 5 Promancers
Step 2: Spec your Promancers into Minion Masters
Step 3: Be a boss and faceroll a tournament

Well thats why you should run trap rangers :P

You own thieves in 1v1 and and with mesmers they do have the advantage, but if your more skilled you should be able to win (traps do well vs illusions/clones and their stealth….if you get moa’ed then gg).

Single-target DPS is nice but 1v1’ing thieves is just way too common at the moment and having a build which gets owned vs it isn’t such a good idea.

The one class thats impossible to kill IF they are good is a bunker guardian though…

Just won a tourny, no chest

312 to be honest.

But all pvp matches are cross server so doesn’t matter

I don’t think you guys understand how awesome it is we have automated tournaments on release.

Do you know how cool that is? Its a dream for competitive games.

Sure you can’t host your own games/custom servers, but the game has barely been out so be a bit more patient and enjoy the fact we have automated tournies.

Agreed.

I prefer 5v5 tournament/premades BUT there are lots of times when my team isn’t on, or im in more of a chilled mood, can’t use my mic, or I might have real life DE’s that pop up randomly meaning I have to leave (can’t leave mid tourny but can mid-hotjoin).

I really hope they add a hotjoin 5v5 option which only allows balanced teams (you wait in queue instead of giving another team an extra player).

Everyone can do it? It requires more APM, and thus skill (whether it is mechanical/tactic/brainless skill, it still requires more)?

Allows people to use more skills?

Am I missing something here…? They’ve disabled in combat switching and your allowed to switch it outside of combat for a reason.