Guild Wars 2

XterrifiedX.9684:

Because this isn’t WoW.

Oh okay. SC2 and LoL both have PTR’s as well or something similar. Granted GW2 isn’t either of those games either but I think it’d be nice to be able to test things like the 20 second spawn timer before they hit live servers so they don’t have to be changed a day later.

In any MMO or Competitive game in general balancing is clearly an issue and a tough task to take on, especially when a game is new. I like the approach Anet is taking with patching in terms of the content themselves, but I feel like the frequency of patches may be a bit too slow because they have to err on the side of caution. These changes would be excellent if they were coming every 2 weeks but every month seems a bit too long of a wait for change.

I understand you need to wait to see the effect the changes have, and that you need to make sure you’re not making too radical of a change that will disrupt the current game too much, but I pose this question:

Why not open up a PTR (Public Test Realm) ?

I know you have internal testing and balancing going on but it seems like if you open a PTR you can make more frequent and radical changes without disrupting the current game and you can get a lot stronger feedback so you can be confident in making the changes you need to every month.

I still enjoy the game quite a bit but I wont deny there are TONS of issues that I think can be improved to make the game reach its fullest potential. For example: (without even touching class balancing or bugs) builds for nearly every profession are VERY limited in PvP, many weapons/utilities/traits do not see ANY usage whatsoever and I think that’s a shame.

I wont claim to know how you guys should best do your job, but I can’t see how you can possibly increase build variety, while maintaining balance and adjusting things that are too strong or too weak, and fixing new bugs that are constantly being discovered when you’re releasing 1 balance patch a month with GREAT but small/minor adjustments to the game overall.

So why not tap into your resources and let us help you and give you more feedback so you can make changes faster and more frequently with less of a risk?

Darnis.4056:

I for one welcome the new timers, being able to put 20 second timers on someone, Other then a warrior thief or mesmer or anyone on a point before was kind of lame. I haven’t seen a timer above 9-10 seconds.

I’m not sure if I’m reading your post incorrectly, but it seems like you might be misunderstanding that all timers are 20 seconds from when you’re stomped now.

I like that a personal timer adds more weight to a death. We’ll certainly see less of players trickling into a neutral point repeatedly now that each player has their own personal timer. I’m just worried 20 seconds may be slightly too long.

I like the idea of personal timers, I just think 20 is too long and unforgiving. Though this isn’t really an important issue atm, it also makes the game less fun to watch imo because people are going to have to wait around longer for their full teams to res before taking action.

15 seconds seems like a better number to me.

Shhhhhh dont tell them!

Actually a major drawback to S/D is that flanking strike has horrible tracking and will rarely actually hit the target unless they’re immobilized. This leaves the weaponset with no “Initiative dump” for bursting so your highest source of damage will be your auto attacks. The control is very strong esp with a burst class assisting you to take the target down, but the damage is much much much lower than D/D even outside of backstab because you dont have Heartseeker.

For me personally I’d love to see changes/tweaks made so that every comp isnt Mesmer/Guardian/X/X/X namely portal and some survivability changes with compensations coming in where needed. After that I’d hope they take a look at some runes that are causing problems(Svanir/Air) come to mind.

I also hope when they said they’re going to tone down spike damage they weren’t only talking about thieves and were looking at the game as a whole, I think if you’re going for making your game fun to play/watch you need to find a balance between people dying instantly and never dying.

That being said for a new game the balance really is pretty good, there’s ways to work around many of the current issues though not all of them. I just feel like they need to change a few things to make the game more fun for all levels of play and better overall at a competitive level.

I spend most of my time these days testing different Thief Weaponsets in tournaments and honestly so many of them are very close to being great they just need a few skills tweaked for PvP. I’ll go though my opinions on them and what could possibly improve them.
D/D and S/P are very solid as is all of the abilities have a clear and defined use in PvP.

S/D – My personal favorite weaponset, the ONLY thing that this set needs is better tracking on Flanking Strike. The weaponset lacks an Initiative dump to allow it to do damage and this is largely because the target tracking on flanking strike is unreliable. Its amazing that it goes through block and removes a boon you’re just taking a huge risk spending initiative on it because the hits rarely land.

Ive actually used this skill on a trebuchet(Stationary target) and spun away from it completely only to miss both attacks.

Pistol/Pistol – Pistols desperately need a piercing trait to start, nothing is more frustrating then seeing half of your unload being blocked by a mesmer clone or ranger pet or a target you’re not intending to hit.

Body Shot the 2nd ability needs either a faster cast time, more damage or both. I like the vulnerability alot, I like the idea of priming a target for your team to focus, but the cast time and the lackluster damage make it hard to justify spending initiative on it when you could just be unloading.

Unload actually does respectable damage considering it can be dealt from safety though slightly less than other sets when they run glass cannon, the issue with unload is that it is COMPLETELY owned by retaliation and confusion. I recognize the awareness needed to adjust your playstyle to these boons/conditions but with the abundance of retal it’s very scary to actually use your initiative on unload with a guardian around. One thing to help this could be unload doing a slightly smaller amount of hits that hit harder so the damage is around the same.

I like the 4/5 on Pistols alot great for utility and interrupting heals or spells and stomping with the 5.

D/P – This is an interesting set and actually not half bad but the blind on Shadow shot seems a bit redundant with the 5 from pistol being accessible. I think something like a cripple/chill instead of the blind could possibly round this weaponset out to help you stick on targets after you teleport to them.

P/D – This is in my eyes the condition weaponset it works so well with a carrion amulet, but suffers again from body shot being a bit lackluster. Your rotation primarily is cloak & dagger into sneak attack with the occasional dancing dagger in select situations.

Shadow Strike is a cool ability but I feel like it may lack a little synergy with the weaponset, its hard to really say but as is with pistol dagger it just feels like a situational defensive ability to gain distance. A blind or a poison could go nicely towards making this ability more desirable to use, or possibly just a bit more damage on the dagger or pistol portion.

Overall the weaponsets are good but many of the sets that are unpopular are just missing a few things to tie it all together to compete with D/D and S/P. I didnt go over shortbow either because it’s amazing.

Our utilities are actually great too , I think 1/2 venoms could use a bit of reworking mainly skale since the vulnerability is very short and chances are if you’re running venoms you’re using spider venom and you have the minor trait that causes your poison to cause weakness so the weakness isn’t very valuable either.

The major concern is that most traps aren’t entirely useful. They all have cool concepts but the thin line to trigger them renders them a bit innefective in PvP. I’d like to see them be about the size of ranger traps if possible allowing them to land reliably or at the very least add in a trait that allows you to throw them(in the acrobatics tree preferably).

While we’re on the subject of traits Pistol,Dagger and Shortbow all have damage increasing traits but there currently are no traits affecting Swords whatsoever.

That’s my wishlist for Thief changes/improvements, hope this helps!

I absolutely love S/D it’s very fun to play and has a lot of potential once you get used to playing it, the ONLY thing holding it back is this ability. In PvP at least the sweeping motion of the evade portion before the damage is very long and its hard to reliably land the hits. Currently its a risk to use but I hope to see its tracking improved like others have said so it’s a bit more reliable.

I couldn’t agree more Siric, IMO the initial balance of the game was pretty decent, but there were a few glaring issues and they’ve yet to be fixed or countered. Most people understand that Guardian/Mesmer is a staple in every team or that Thief burst output is very frustrating to play against, but it’s been this way for awhile now and we’ve seen only seen very small and infrequent changes.

I also feel like there’s very little build diversity seen in most professions, and very little comp diversity seen on most teams. I understand you guys cant just roll out patches every day and you have to think carefully about the changes you make, but I’m hoping we can either see more drastic changes or slightly more frequent ones to give players more diversity in playstyle and team composition.

More or less I just wanted to echo the OP since I feel like this is an important point, but I still do really enjoy playing the game I’d just like to see some changes.

I think adding hotjoin 5v5’s will greatly improve this situation but there are a few things you can do to improve your chances in a Pug.

I pug quite often, I’d say about 60-70% of my tourney games are solo/duo que, and while if you meet a good team you’re more than likely going to lose it’s still very possible to win more than you lose overall if you do a few things.

1)Change your profession to make your groups composition better. Not everyone can play the same role, if you know how to play multiple professions or builds you can adapt to what your team needs. If you only know how to play one thing take advantage of the fact that you have access to everything and learn something new.

2)Create a simple strategy, explain it to the group and try to execute it as best as you can. Generally focusing on holding/supporting 2 points and rotating to help what’s needed.

3)Call Targets, and tell your group to attack the marked target before the game starts.

4)If you’re bunkering a point tell your team which point you’re going to and that if you type a number thats how many people are coming. EX:" I’m bunkering mine if I type 3, 3 people are coming to mine". Also if you’re okay try to type it out, a lot of times people see that a point is being contested and run over only to get there as you’re stomping.

Obviously there’s a ton of other things you need to do to be able to win, and you’re not going to have much of a chance vs a strong team, but a lot of groups/teams aren’t as organized and you can improve your chances vs them by doing a few of these things.

I recently(this week) picked up a Guardian to try to get a better understanding of how to kill them, and while I’m inexperienced I’ve found that if you use a mace you’ll accidentally do it pretty often. It’s unfortunate because the mace is a pretty ideal weapon for a lot of defensive/symbol based builds due to the protection/regen/healing, but you cant use it without occasionally block bugging which is frustrating/broken to play against.

I don’t really think you can expect all Guardians to drop the mace if they’re playing to win, but rather you should expect ArenaNet to understand how big of an impact this has on the game and to issue a hotfix ASAP since its being used (Intentional or not). Id even say change the mace 3 to something else if the issue cant be resolved.