Guild Wars 2

Would love to join you sometime. I too enjoy playing team queue in a competitive but semi-casual way w/o voice coms and w/o raging/complaining.

I play mesmer 99% and generally play backpoint / defensive roamer

I took some time to break out Halting Strike damage info b/c I do not want the PvP community at large to start coming at that trait with pitchforks and torches.

Ok so lets envision the typical scenario of a 20/20/0/0/30 shatter mesmer that takes this trait. That mesmer uses a berzerker amulet and lyssa runes, and has a power of 2039, crit damage of 40%. Lets take the damage formula for halting strike worked out and posted on the wiki: [weapon strength] * [power] * 1.25 [Coef]) / [Armor] = damage.

Of note PvP weapons have strengths of 905-1000 for one handed 995-1100 for two handed. However, utility and F skills actually use a different “weapon strength” – on the mesmer forums they calculated this to be ~760-775 (see https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Halting-strike-does-300-base-damage-bug)

On the squishiest possible target (light armor, no toughness) armor = 1836 so do the math you get:

1076 damage, 2044 if crit

Lets say you have 25 stacks of might, then you get:

1537 damage, 2921 if crit

And now lets say you have 25 stacks of might and the target has 25 stacks of vuln – i.e. the absolute best case scenario:

1921 damage, 3651 if crit

Ok so there’s that “3-4k damage!” number we hear all about – but look what it took to get it. Now lets say you aren’t only fighting zerker amu light armor people.

Rabid amu necro = reduce all above numbers by 26%

Soldier’s amu warrior = reduce all above numbers by 40%

Settler’s amu ranger = reduce all above numbers by 43%

Target has protection? Reduce the number AGAIN by 33%

In practice, halting strike probably averages somewhere in the 1.5 – 2.2 k range against typical targets under typical conditions of might and vulnerability.

Sure it CAN crit for 3.6k, but you are definitely not seeing that regularly, and such numbers should not be used as rallying cries to nerf the trait that barely competes with Mental Torment and Empowered Illusions as it is.

Halting strike damage is not nearly that high in most scenarios – typically more like 2k (even assuming the mesmer is zerker amulet). Anything above 3k and you’re hitting a very squishy target that probably has vulnerability stacks and you probably have might stacks.

Halting strike is also a good example of a trait that encourages an active play style. I think there should be more traits like this.

Plenty of people don’t take the trait as is – it competes with some other good choices in that spot like Mental Torment and Empowered Illusions. I think if you make it weaker you may as well remove it (it used to do like 400 damage and nobody took it ever).

I like your proposals to change some of the conditions. IMO conditions should be broken up into damaging ones and control ones, and condi removal should be more specific and deliberate. Instead of traits and abilities that remove conditions in some pre-determined order, we should have more traits like Stop Drop and Roll for the ele or skills like Hide in Shadows for the thief. These remove specific condis, making the interplay between condi applications and removal more elegant

1. Build templates

2. Recording function for games – ability to rewatch later as spectator pause/rewind/review builds etc.

3. More stats on match summary screen damage done, condis cleared, healing etc.

4. Improve combat log – include condi damage, filters, color coding

5. Online API to allow for WoW armory type site where you can review other players gear, builds, etc.

6. Ability to mousover players names in the PvP match screen and have it display their name.xxxx so you don’t have to start a report in order to see this info.

7. Normalize character sizes in PvP

reduce the aoe size of skyhammer. Increase the area of the cannon room.

Instead of glass automatically breaking, add a switch near each of the points and glass portions that you need to channel for 0.5 seconds to disable/enable glass.

Skyhammer is mirrored in that red and blue sides are identical. As was mentioned above obstacles on maps like Khylo and Temple are NOT mirrored and give some material advantage to one side (i.e. viability from Alter is way better than from Temple).

How do you intend to balance future maps to ensure that neither side gets an advantage due to map layout?

I am also really interested in the question above about teleport locations

If arcane thievery removed the condis from you immediately and then did the whole transfer/steal thing only if it hit I would be totally OK with it. Its lack of reliability as a condi cleanse really cripples the skill.

Super fun if you use it primarily for boon stealing Love stealing signet of rage – mesmers were not intended to have that much fury, mwahahaha

Please label 5v5 vs 8v8 hotjoin rooms better. Instead of “server 192” or whatever you could make it “5v5 anet hotjoin 192”

Also please separate the spectators from players on the server selection window.

I typically just use play now over an over again until I get a server that I want because the server selection window is poorly designed (have to hover over to get basic info like team size, can’t tell if the room is actually joinable or not b/c of how spectators display).

If you could get bots to play conquest that would be the best tutorial IMO. You + 4 friendly and 5 enemy bots play a game on Forest

How long is its cast time now? Doesn’t say on wiki

Suggestions

1 – have nature’s vengeance share a cooldown with the normal active rez (if active on cooldown, NV won’t fire)

2 – make it so spirit cannot heal itself or reduce its HP. Very difficult to deal with this spirit 1v1 because killing it is a huge time suck. Other elites do not give such persistent advantage in 1v1 (compare to ele signet pet, necro golum)

NevirSayDie.6235:

Making a thread that’s not well-thought-out is one thing. Everyone flocking together to point that out is another. It reminds me of how proud top-tier teams are when they beat the pugs I’m in. Could we get a mod to shut down the thread? I don’t see it fostering any useful discussions in the near future.

I think when someone gets around to actually testing it and sharing the results this thread could provide some useful information

Supcutie.2538:

Moa gives tankier comps opportunities to shine since they can just line up their damage during the window. That’s super boring though, kiting around for 180 seconds if it misses etc. Moa should def be banned.

The same could be said for many elites (tanky comps stalling until its back up). For consistency one could ban all elites with cooldowns of 180 seconds or greater

You already have a great way to determine the starting location of players on the curve – that is rank.

Instead of barring low ranks from queuing, just start them lower on the MMR curve.

Of course this would only determine where people start, not how they move up or down.

I do not think preventing people from playing tournaments is the right approach. If enough new people are in the queue – you can have them all play against each other on the lower part of the MMR scheme. tPvP is the optimal learning environment – there will always be issues with hotjoin.

Love this feature, would be nice if the icons were a bit smaller so you could actually discern how many enemies there are at a point which is arguably the most important information.

Re: mesmers – I think that reducing the size and/or color coding will go a long way toward addressing people’s clutter concerns. The current mesmer icon is so large that one mesmer on point with clones will cover everything else going on there. Smaller color coded dots would be nicer (6 dots on a point, but 4 of them are purple… probably 3 real enemy there)

Also its worth mentioning that enemy icons are only visible if they are in combat and within LOS of your team.

I do not think this dumbs down the game in teamq or anywhere else. If anything it frees up some voice com airwaves to discuss more interesting tactical information.

Also as someone who sometimes does teamq with people that do not speak the same language, I vote to have this feature remain across all sPvP formats!

This was great. Thanks Sensotix!

How awesome would it be if GW2 had a record feature like Starcraft 2 where you could go back and pause/play/rewind, look at different camera angles, builds etc. Oh the analysis you could do!

Teutos.8620:

You guys (especially ArenaNet employees) should know Oblivion (aka Symbolic) and Táge otherwise you must be pretty new to the whole gw2 pvp scene…

As far as I know Justin joined the team fairly recently, and Team Paradigm has not been active since, like, July.

I am getting error 19:0:0:0:101 and 19:9:19:1475:101 when trying to Go Now into a solo queue match I just had pop. Says some stuff about not being able to access log-in server. I had been playing without issue all morning so its not something that changed on my end. I can still play hotjoin.

lololololol

<3 this thread

Lux.7169:

From my understanding tPvP isn’t getting reset, nor is it getting much attention from anet =\

Team queue leaderboard is also being reset – reread Justin’s first post in the matchmaking changes thread

Oblivion.8307:

I’d rather there be a relief period (1week) until permanent decay sets in which would make the leaderboards a lot more competitive with no room for afking.

1 week sounds like a reasonable relief time to me. The rate of decay should be an exponential curve with no/minimal decay gradually turning into a lot of decay. Like,

- 10 days, some decay,
- 30 days, significant decay,
- >45 days very fast decay

Lumiere.4609:

Strike Force (JQ) has been running a 3v3 tournament on the central point of FoeFire.

10 minute match, only central point available, highest points at 10 minutes or 500 points win.

We are allowing caps, and that created a really interesting dynamic for teams to decide what to do if they lose someone. If you fall back and regroup, you risk losing the point. If you wait, you risk losing another player and getting into a 1 by 1 clear out.

I would love to have a capability to change a capture from points/sec to giving a set point count and putting it on a cooldown. That would force the 3v3 to occur in a set area and give an advantage to a team wipe, but also prevent a snowball.

Yes, more options on custom arenas would be a perfect way to cheaply get more game modes with less dev time! Back around the launch of customs there were a few threads with dozens of suggestions for options we wanted available in custom arenas. To date only a few of those are implemented. Please review

1. skills to punish those on nodes
2. skills to stay standing on a node
3. skills to move between nodes

Because of the nature of the game mode, skills that do one of the above will always be highly valuable in sPvP.

Happy about the changes to matchmaking and hope there are also changes to decay. Would love a cookie though for being high on the leaderboards

NevirSayDie.6235:

I queued extremely carefully for a while and got pretty high on the leaderboards, but it was too much work. I had to not play when top teams were syncing; I had to not play in off-hours; I had to not play on Friday nights (WvW resets); I had to not play during outside events (like the 2v2 tournament). I had to play cheap on skyhammer, and I had to run whatever would counter warriors (or necros, a couple months ago).

After a while, I just figured I had achieved the highest rank I should expect out of the current system, so I stopped caring. I did drop quite a bit, but that’s all right. With the new matchmaking coming, solo queue should be way better. I’ll probably try to get my rank up again after the new system comes in, especially if ranks are reset. That would be pretty cool.

I just want to emphasize this quote that the current ladder mechanics encourage NOT PLAYING in many scenarios over playing, which is pretty stupid.

I especially like this idea if it used your MMR to find you a match but your rank was unaffected. It would help make testing builds a lot easier b/c you don’t learn much from hotjoin and its kinda rough right now to go tank your rating in ranked queues while learning new classes / builds.

One problem to keep in mind with Dhuumfire (and Incendiary Powder) that gets common complaints among the sPvP crowd is the lack of counterplay i.e. you have no way of knowing when the ICD is happening, what attack to avoid to avoid the burning, and even if you dodge, the next crit is going to land the burning.

I really like Jon’s idea of tying it to a specific attack (Life Blast was proposed) because that gives you an actual strategy to avoid it.

Both traits should be reworked to provide some counterplay. It is fine to move them around, but I hope this deeper issue is also addressed in a future patch.

JonathanSharp.7094:

So a few things on CTF:

We found that CTF works best as a “push” the flag, not “cap it by bringing it back to my base”. This means you have to push through the enemy team, and since you need to push it into their spawn, it means they can more easily defend a cap.

If it’s “cap” it by bringing it back to your base, there are often cases where the capturing team gets a flag past a certain point on the field, and no one on the defending team can catch up with them in order to prevent the cap.

We tried various mechanics, like making it so that the flag carrier couldn’t use skills, or they had to use “flag” skills, or they were just slowed down greatly, but in most of those instances, players didn’t have as much fun when carrying a flag. You can see some of this carried over to Spirit Watch and some of the issues it has.

Just some things to think about.

Love your thoughts on this. The reason why push seems more fun is because there is more counterplay from the team defending from a score. There are ~ three times the number of skills that knockback/launch an enemy vs those that pull an enemy.

What you are describing is similar to Huttball from SWTOR. Hope the map is something similarly inspired!

Also please consider the idea of being able to pass the orb. You can sort of do this in spirit watch by using a teleport or something to forcibly drop, but it is far from intuitive. To do this right you’d need to create a new ability for orb carriers that was “pass orb” that was ground targeted, maybe 600-900 range, and that you could keybind.

Rather than slowing or disabling skills while holding orb, could have debuff that gradually reduces endurance regeneration over time, giving incentive to pass the orb. i.e. every second you hold the orbyour endurence regen is reduced by 1-2%.

Two comments:

1) What defines a good match is that both sides have a reasonable chance of winning

2) In terms of balancing team composition, I think the focus should be less on class and more on amulet choice i.e. no more than 2 of the same amulet type per team. Multiples of a class can be fine if they are unique builds, and amulet is probably one of the easiest to identify build defining choices.

Capping an empty enemy point is a gamble. You have to judge whether your team can re-enforce it before the enemy. If your team just lost a teamfight b/c you weren’t there, your opponents will simply rotate and smash you, keeping your team perpetually undermanned on the field.

Capping an empty enemy point works better on maps like Niflhel and Spirit Watch because it is more likely on those maps your team can rotate to you on respawn. On a map like Legacy of the Foefire, however, the mid point is so close to the sides that you’re going to get smashed quickly by enemy forces from the mid fight they just won.

And regarding the OP – losing a 1v1 on a point is always bad, regardless of the setting. Avoid fights you cannot win, and consider your build’s ability to disengage from losing fights if you are going to engage in risky 1v1s.

The new merged Confounding Suggestions probably still wont see any play, mainly for the reason stated above (thanks Xaylin) that a dazelocking mesmer would probably rather have 3 mantra charges, or interrupt focused traits like Chaotic Interruption.

The new effect now is quite bland, still subject to a terrible RNG factor (why not 100% with an ICD?), and definitely not build defining like many other grandmaster traits.

Here is another suggestion: Just scrap Confounding Suggestions and make a cool new Grandmaster. Move Imbuded Diversion up to Domination, and make a new trait in Illusions to compete with Illusionary Persona:

Afflicting Shatters: Shatters apply conditions
1st clone: 4 seconds chill
2nd clone: 4 seconds torment
3rd clone: 4 seconds poison

This would open up a new condition focused play style for shatters and be actually worthy of taking over Illusionary Persona.

JonPeters.5630:

Phew,

Ok, I made it through all of my notes on the 8 professions. Today will be a busy day here on the balance team talking through those notes and continuing to comb through this and other threads. I am certain there will be some adjustments that come out of today and as we compile those we will get back to you (in this thread) to update what has come from our discussions.

Thanks so much for all of your time and effort providing us with this feedback.

Jon

Jon is it better for us to provide profession specific feedback here or on the discussions going on in the professions forum? I really appreciate your dedication to reading all this feedback!

Scepter auto

- increase projectile speed
- reduce cast time of Ether Clone to 1/2 second.

Done. That is all it needs, though I did like the suggestion above to make it so the clones cast the whole chain including Ether Clone, but when the clone casts Ether Clone it dies, essentially replacing itself. It would make clone death traits + scepter pretty fun, without being OP (scepter clones may or may not be next to target at time of death).

Confounding Suggestions – do one of these:

- make it turn dazes into stuns at 100% rate (could add internal cooldown i.e. 5 seconds)
- make it turn any daze that interrupts a foe into a stun (100% rate).
- make dazes apply 3 stacks of 3 second confusion.
- make dazes apply 5 seconds of weakness

In any case, don’t just make it a super bland flat increase to daze duration. Nobody would take a grandmaster for that, especially when daze doesn’t stack on it self so Diversion would probably not even benefit from extra daze duration.

Signets – the signets themselves are not bad, but the associated traits one would take to make a signet focused build are really lackluster

- Blurred Inscriptions – increase duration of distortion to 2 seconds, and make it work with Masterful Reflection
- Cleansing Inscriptions – make it remove specific conditions i.e. all poison, burning and bleeding. Alternatively, just buff it to 2 conditions removed.

theCOREYCOLAK.5698:

I’d like to also see an addition to the stun trait, something that increases the cooldown after interrupting an ability, because 3 seconds is just… lame.

Love this suggestion. Would love if it turned interrupts into something more like counterspell from WoW: http://www.wowhead.com/spell=2139/counterspell

GW2 version: “interrupts prevent casting of skills of the same type (i.e. if signet interrupted couldn’t cast other signets) and weapon swapping for 6 seconds”

All the ele doom and gloom is misguided. You want to run 0/10/0/30/30 still you can, just need to make a tough choice in that master slot for water and arcane.

On the upside you still have some good choices in water like vital striking and soothing disruption (which can mitigate the need for renewing stamina btw) and a cool selection of former master-weapon-traits in arcane.

You guys are acting like these traits are being deleted. That is absurd – just pick the one you like more and have fun with your new diversity that you get from having to CHOOSE.

If a single trait setup is always the most optimal, you will never get to run anything else.

Also, stop claiming ALL your survival hinges on 5 seconds of protection or 1 condition being removed. You can live without one or two of these traits, and forcing choices will bring diveristy. Eles have many choices when it comes to obtaining prot, vigor, or condition removal.

Love most of the notes, just have a few thoughts on specific changes outlined by class below:

Elementalist water and arcane trait movement – many ele players are posting here worried about how the changes will affect their build. I believe that is because people do not like change, and have grown so accustomed to 30 in water and arcane that they cannot imagine a world without those traits. The moving of key adept traits to master is an excellent move in order to force hard choices for these traits that were previously so good at the adept level that it was very difficult to pass them up. Adversity builds diversity. If certain traits are so good that it only makes sense to take them, you end up with everybody running the same build. Now you have all these eles running 30 arcane for a long time afraid of change. Please do not let that deter you from making these necessary changes. Forcing difficult choices for players making builds is GOOD and encourages diversity – keep it up!

Engineer Incendiary Powder – thank you. Again moving this trait changes it from a “you would be an idiot not to take this” to a “man if I take this I can’t take all the other stuff I want!” The second scenario is actually good for the game.

Engineer turret buffs – please be careful with these buffs. Many PvP players are already very upset at the amount of AI and “passive play” and while things like Engi turrets and Guardian spirit weapons and Necro minions may be used less than other utilities, tread lightly here because they could easily turn into the new petting zoo. PvP/PvE splits could be helpful here.

Guard symbol of swiftness change – seems highly controversial. Change it so any ally in it when it pulses gains 12 seconds of swiftness (once) that cannot stack with itself, but can stack with other sources. While your at it, figure out a way to do the same with Mesmer’s temporal curtain so players crossing it get swiftness once, non-stacking with self but stacking with other sources of swiftness. Maybe a debuff that last 12 seconds that makes you immune to the symbol/curtain?

Mesmer confounding suggestions – if you’re trying to make this useful, this change fails. I think it probably makes it worse actually. Our major source of reliable daze is diversion, which doesn’t stack with itself so an extra 1/4 second of daze that you probably aren’t even going to notice on multi-clone diversions is really really lackluster for a grandmaster trait. To make it useful change it to 100% chance to stun on daze. Another idea is to make it so instead of a stun chance, daze apply 5 seconds of weakness, which synergies well with the vulnerability on daze, and helps line up your burst by reducing your opponents endurance regen.

Mesmer dazzling glamour – worthless since blinding befuddlement nerf. Also bugged according to wiki when taken with blinding befuddlement and confusing enchantments (only get 1 stack of confusion). In order to be at all worthwhile this trait should turn glamours into pulsing blind fields ala black powder and smoke bomb.

Thief changes overall – great changes, most complainers above do not realize how large a buff global initiatve regen buff is. Love the nerf to sword 2 return. I have a suggestion for Hard to Catch since people do not like that it ports you somewhere unpredictable. Change to: “Steal now breaks stun. When disabled, recharge steal. Cooldown 60 seconds.”

Warrior healing signet – a big thing missing from the changes was the expected nerf to healing signet. This skill is too good. Nerf the base amount, improving scaling with healing power or the active. Passive play is frustrating your PvP player base.

I have lots more thoughts but for your sake will leave it at those. Thank you Jon for committing to reading all the posts – I did as well up to this point! Don’t sweat the naysayers – you have a great list of changes here that will shake a lot of things up. Some other random thoughts

-wish these changes were rolled out gradually every 2 weeks like PvE updates
-the more things you change the less predictable the results – see June changes
-wish there was a player test environment for us
-may want to think of a way to better organize the feedback on these big balance passes in the future. Huge 11 page thread is surely difficult for you to sift through

Thanks for your time!

The S/D #3 would be better if it were more similar to shortbow 3, which is a skill that is not regarded as imbalanced by so many players. I think a large part of this is because it doesn’t do a huge amount of damage/initiative, where as the fs-ls chain does a ton of damage/initiative. In fact, fs-ls does the most damage/initiative for any initiative costing thief attack besides heartseeker (<50%) and unload – but both of those do only damage, are single target, and offer no secondary effect aside from combo finishing.

Clark Skinner.4902:

Can someone link the build site for this old OP ele? I did my own thing back then and don’t know what it was that made them so powerful.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Guide-Mastering-S-D-in-t-sPVP-OUTDATED

An idea to fix flanking-larcenous:

Remove chain aspect of this attach. Make flanking strike a stand alone attack that does minimal damage and steals 2 boons. Keep evade. increase initiative cost to 5.

You want evade and boon steal? You can have it but you can’t do damage at the same time. Damage/Utility/Defense – pick two you can’t have all three.

BurrTheKing.8571:

I feel like the only reasonable fixes would be to just slightly modify the behavior of certain skills and traits that lower the damage a bit without totally destroying the build.

Earthshaker applies the stun before the damage. This means that not only does it gain the damage increase from Merciless Hammer, it also gains the +50% crit chance from Unsuspecting Foe. Let’s also not forget that Burst Mastery also increases the damage applied. Having the damage apply before the stun means that only the attacks following the stun deal that bonus damage consistently. Backbreaker is on a 25 second cooldown and have a very obvious animation, so having it hit hard isn’t unreasonable.

The same change could also be applied to Skull Crack, you aren’t reducing the overall effectiveness of the weapon, just reducing the overall DPS. Being able to have a lot of CC is something unique to Warrior and shouldn’t be nerfed. Keep in mind that even with Soldiers Ammy the survival of both the Skull Cracker and HamBow builds is less than that of a Guardian, so it stands to reason that they should at least have the ability to deal a bit more damage than them. Guardian Hammer also has plenty of CC, so why would you take a Warrior if they had less survival and around the same DPS?

I do not think Unsuspecting Foe should be moved up, it would make it a worthless trait. In the Master tier and up it would force you to spec into a trait line that focuses on Condition damage. Why would you force players using CC weapons into that line when the trait is pretty much a must have. If it really must be changed it should be moved into the power line, have the +crit chance reduced (maybe to 25%), but in return it should apply to all control attacks. It would still reduce the overall DPS but would still be useful, not to mention it could encourage the use use of physical utility skills because Physical Training is in the same line. It could also make Rampage worth taking as well. It could make a build like this potentially viable (replace Restoritive Strength with the suggested move and changes to UF).

Seems like a decent middle ground, you reduce the amount of DPS from burst skills but still allow the builds to remain viable, removing them from play is not balance.

The issues are healing signet and berserker’s stance.

I hope the PvP balance team does not fall into this trap of going round and round with traits to fix problems created by BUFFS rolled out just months earlier. Suck it up and tone down the buffs, don’t start nerfing stuff that has been fine on the class since release.

This should be in the bugs forum

MOBA – too much PvE in that PvP

GvG – the sizes of teams people are throwing out (10v10, 15v15, 20v20!) are WAAAAY to huge to make a functioning team. Good luck getting 9 of your closest friends to log on at the same time. I think the best way to satisfy all these people really attached to GvG is make an offshoot of WvW which is capped at like 20-25 players and make it instanced so the guilds can go throwdown there. sPvP is for balanced, competitive, spectate-worthy competition. GvG doesn’t fit into this model

2v2 or 3v3 deathmatch – love this idea. My favorite part of WoW PvP. Much easier to form a team and compete. Much easier to understand what is going on from a spectator perspective as well.

Capture the flag, payload, “de” style bomb plant/diffuse – All these would be good as well and work in both a hotjoin and more structured ranked environment.

The advantage of a constant, impossible to interrupt, near perfect efficiency (minimal overhealing), zero downtime (no casting) heal cannot be understated.

The arguments above claiming “oh but the other heals give some secondary bonus” are ignoring that Healing Signet’s secondary bonus includes all of the above inherent advantages over most healing skills.

NevirSayDie.6235:

I agree, but that’s a bit easy to say now. Back in March, how many people really thought warriors shouldn’t be buffed? And even after being buffed to essentially their current state this summer, warriors didn’t become popular until a little over a month ago. There was a period of about two months in which warriors were faceroll powerful but no one knew it because we were all too busy complaining about necros.

So I do agree that power creep is a problem, and that the forums saying “X needs a massive buff to be viable!” is a problem. I’m just not sure what they were supposed to do differently. The forums had been screaming for buffs to warriors, necros, and rangers for months. There were accusations of “intentionally keeping the meta stale” and just being too lazy to fix things. The slow, steady path they were on may have eventually worked out, but in some cases, it would have been years before certain professions would have been taken seriously.

On build variety, I do honestly believe that more than one build can be considered optimal. Is Five Gauge is the highest-ranked engineer on the NA servers, but almost no one else uses his build. I don’t think that’s because he’s using a sub-optimal build. Nor do I think all other engineers should re-roll to his build because it’s objectively the “best.” Actually, I don’t think more than 2 or 3 engineers in the top 500 team/solo use the same build at all, so there’s that.

I agree its with the benefit of hindsight now that we are able to see the flaws in the “big buffs to what is not used” and then “lets not revert the big buffs but now tweak unrelated stuff” strategy. I just hope the PvP balance folks can learn from these mistakes.

There are lots of builds out there, but one will always be considered “optimal” for any given class. For warrior alone I could name like 5 or 6 builds. It is inevitable that they will be tested, compared, and that one will achieve dominance over the others.

If they keep buffing every time they nerf they will never stop the power creep that is currently very problematic with this game.

In the first ~8 months of the game it was mostly nerfs and bugfixes going out. That was fine. In the last ~6 months they seemed to change their philosophy (based on misguided advice from the playerbase, unfortunately) and started buffing things that were less used. Many of these buffs have turned into something from the Little Shop of Horrors. Spirit changes, necro changes, warrior changes – these buffs all were disastrous. For reasons I do not understand, instead of reverting or toning down the buffs, they have continued on the path of nerfing things unrelated to the buff in an attempt to bring things back into line (spirits OP? lets nerf healing spring. dhumfire OP? lets nerf terror and bleed stacks. Signet OP? lets nerf stun duration on all classes).

The devs need to know when to suck it up and roll back or tone down changes they made instead of spiraling further down into the abyss. They are currently playing the very game of Whack-a-mole they have stated so many times they want to avoid in State of the Game webcasts earlier this year.

Ashanor.5319:

Huttball was horrible. It was basically a premades playground because it was so ridiculously easy to faceroll a pug there. I also found space football to be rather boring personally.

Give me Voidstar from TOR (siege attack and defense).

Give me WSG from WoW (standard CtF).

Give me Arathi Basin from WoW (similar to conquest but 5 point and huge map, but give me the WoW was of switching a base instead of the GW2 way – which means you don’t have to stand on the point to protect it, you just make sure they don’t have 8 seconds to change the flag uninterrupted).

Lucky for you the premade vs pug issue has been resolved in this game. I think the coordination and excitement of passing the ball in Huttball was really great and would work well in GW2.

Voidstar was too dependent on spawn waves. Something more like “payload” from Team Fortress 2 or “de” from Counterstrike (no respawns) would work better.

Warsong Gulch – w00t! Would love to see this in GW2.

Arathi Basin (and Alderaan Civil War for that matter) both use inferior capture mechanics to GW2. These maps snowball way hard in a premade v premade situation and would not add anything useful to the current conquest mechanics. Area control is more volatile than the ability to channel a node.

I would be happy to update this chart with the new meta. I would need matchups for these builds:

D/P thief (prelim matchups here https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Meta-Build-1v1-Matchup-Chart-Project-8-12-13/page/2#post2622445)
Sw+Sw/Bow condition warrior
Revised necro build? Power necro?
Power ranger?
Hammer/Bow warrior probably replaces mace+shield/greatsword warrior on chart

I could probably expand it to max 2 builds per profession, but would definately need help on matchups at that point

The idea has been frequently tossed about on these forums and I believe the ultimate solution to patch release day bugs, community discord regarding balance, and making the players feel more involved is to implement a Player Test Environment where the community can truly collaborate with developers to shape upcoming changes.

The area this is most relevant to is structured PvP. PvE players are getting frequent content every two weeks and bugs are fixed within days (if not hours) of patch release. The most difficult content to test are balance changes and I believe a larger quantity of QA via community testing would improve player satisfaction with patch releases.

One suggestion I saw that I liked was a “Test Mists” where players could travel to and get a sneak peak of upcoming changes. The Test Mists would not need to include much besides the NPCs to gear your character and a few hotjoin servers.

Alternatively new log ins could be created for players signing in to a totally different server with a full world in the test environment. Character imports would not be necessary as the main objective would be testing sPvP content which requires no leveling or gear grind.

A separate forum could be created for the Test Environment feedback and discussion.

Let me know what you all think

Signet of midnight is a low cooldown stunbreaker, but its hard to justify over decoy, blink or mirror images. I think they should make some of the signet traits easier to get or better. Blurred Inscriptions or Cleansing Inscriptions both could be pretty cool with Signet of Midnight since its the only instant signet. They could increase the distortion to 2 seconds or make it so 2 conditions are removed and these traits would be worth taking. Also it would help a lot if the cast times of the other signets were reduced or removed. I don’t see why Signet of Inspiration needs a cast time, for example. It is far weaker than a number of other instant boon giving utilities used by other classes (i.e. shouts).

cymerdown.4103:

• Bugs! There are still SO many bugs that exist with all 8 classes a year into the game, and some of these bugs are part of the class balance issues. If you go and look on the wiki you can see most of them, I really don’t know why more of these aren’t being addressed over more minor things like tooltip mistakes.

I think Grouch is now working at anet and has been tasked with aggressively dealing with bugs. Just take a glance at the bug forum and he’s posting all over the place. He has asked in the profession forums like 3 days ago to start posting your game bugs directly to the bug forum (“his domain”)