Guild Wars 2

Anonymouse.4760:

As has been already said, sigil of punishment and and compounding are really worthless sigils. Force was essentially a 100% better version of these sigils and still wasn’t used, so to have worse versions of force competing with the same condi sigils is just silly.

To be fair, Force isn’t taken because Air/Fire/Blood still exist. I’m pretty sure they’re also trying to tone down raw burst as well with these changes. Though I agree with your concerns about Condi, at least its damage is still dealt over time and cleansable.

As for the proposals, 8% damage increase is definitely too high relative to what they’re offering anyway, though I could see 5% versions of your proposals being included. That said, I really wish they would solve the problem by offering a way to get unique effects without weapon swapping. Daredevil runes-esque buffs on dodge, next hit, whatever with appropriate cooldowns and similar effects would be a better alternative and more in line with the current design goals in my opinion.

Either way, you’re right that thieves, druids, and even some engineer builds are really hurting from a lack of useful sigils.

Just an observation: I would use one reveal sigil on just about every build even with the options we have today. Its relative utility is kind of insane compared to everything else. I’m glad they’re adding more counterplay to stealth, but I don’t know about an AoE reveal every 9 seconds. Maybe limit it to the 1 closest target so stealth doesn’t become completely unusable in teamfights?

I really want to emphasize my concerns about sustain and power/condition relative strength as pointed out by others in this thread.

As for the rest, though I like the streamlined options across the board, it seems especially lacking to builds that only weapon swap conditionally rather than constantly. Perhaps that is intentional, but it doesn’t exactly excite me to choose between one 2% DPS increase and another when there are unique effects like reveal, boon removal, quickness, etc. available on weapon swap.

The changes to vault affected its animation in a very negative way. It feels floaty and is out of sync with the evade frames. I hope there will be a bit more polish applied to this skill as it went from feeling fluid to feeling quite bad in the name of quickness and latency support.

Making vault affected by quickness is fine, but the way it moves now feels and looks much worse. The movement portion starts much slower and results in this bizarre “floatiness” that didn’t exist before.

You’re also locked in to the animation and cannot weapon swap out of it like you previously could which is an annoying but arguably understandable change if intended.

I played several ranked games in the new system, and it genuinely feels like the majority of my matches consist of me playing as well as I can to carry a team of newcomers. I don’t know if it’s my MMR or what, but for some reason I get placed on teams of players that clearly don’t PvP much. I try to keep an open mind, but when I have just about every Forest game start with a 2-3 man boss rush for example, it makes me curious.

Is the current matchmaking significantly looser from an MMR standpoint, or is my MMR really so low that these are the players I belong with? I don’t know, and my pride won’t be hurt if that is the case, it just seems off. It’s not just my team either, that’s why it is particularly noticeable. My opponents seem to be new to things as well, but my team still struggles.

To add to my evidence, I’m running into builds that boggle my mind – SD Cele Engis, sword/shield warriors, condi SA thieves, and other weird things that don’t tend to work particularly well. Now, I’m not saying someone can’t be a great pvper with an unusual build, but it tends to be more likely that they’re just new. I notice that some of these people have the same guild tags — maybe it’s a result of the way small team queues affect the MMR matching?

Either way, I feel like I shouldn’t have to be playing the best game of my life just to end up losing a game by 50 points to people that seem so completely new to things. I don’t feel good about winning against these players, and losing just feels unfair. It didn’t seem like this would happen very often in the old system, but that’s why I’m asking. If anyone else has noticed this or maybe has an idea of why I might be feeling this way, let me know. Hey, maybe it all boils down to confirmation bias/Dunning-Kruger effect over a few odd games, but I really am curious.

There are two things they need to do to make the ladder work well in my opinion:

1. Scale the points awarded for a match by the average MMR of the teams.

2. Make average points per game the ranking metric for the leaderboards.

Constructive:

• There should be an option to buy a custom amount of gems/gold at the exchange rate that calculates the cost based on the desired amount (opposite the way it worked before).
• I understand the familiarity of this system may make it more likely to be used by certain users, but the old system hardly warranted such a flawed change.

Reactive:

• Slow development and changes like this really make it seem like someone is trying to get as much profit as they can while spending as little as they can on the player experience.
• Trying to play this change off as purely motivated by improving the experience for new users is disingenuous at best and insulting at worst. Blunt honesty might not be desirable for you, but at least skip the justification and go straight to “we’ll take your feedback into consideration” if we’re going to pretend this change was intended to make this system more user-friendly.

I think a reporting system for siege would fit the bill. Allow players to report friendly siege for abuse and use those reports to correct the behavior. Essentially, what would happen is, based on the frequency and total of unique reports, remove the offending siege and/or apply the exhaustion debuff to the player that placed it based on their report history.

I like this because by tweaking the thresholds of the triggers and length of the punishment, you effectively can solve and prevent the majority of abuse cases. The most frequent offenders will statistically stand out enough that they can be targeted with long term punishments while the naive or occasionally mischievous moments can be corrected quickly.

Even aside from the automated system, the reports can also be used to help ease the workload on GMs by giving them some hard data to look at when assessing potential abusers.

And, for the record, I don’t like the idea of making a moderating system like this commander-based.

EDIT: I am assuming the threshold for the triggers is high enough that the potential for abuse would be quite low. By scaling those thresholds over time as well, it will require a concerted effort of a sizable group of trolls constantly following you to cause any real issues.

If a piece of siege gets 10 unique reports in the first minute of its existence, for example, there’s a good bet somebody just threw a gate ballista, while if those reports were spread over 30 minutes, it’s possible they were just trolls.