Guild Wars 2

gavyne.6847:

I was totally expecting balance updates today due to a new season starting. I mean balance patch update on or before a new season starts make more sense than a balance patch towards the end of a season.

I also play WvW side of things and was expecting to see changes there, and fixes to oasis lag issues. Nope, nothing there either.

It makes you wonder what in the world they’re doing with all the time they’ve had this past month.

They seriously changed NOTHING. Number tweaks don’t even take long, and everyone knows the few classes that need number tweaks. Reduce damage on rev sword 2, tone down chill damage, tone down scrapper defenses, increase mesmer great sword damage. These things aren’t hard to do and I think 90% of the community would agree with these changes. I don’t get it.

Lyger.5429:

Why do I still have expectations when it comes to PvP balance?

I think this was the last straw for me.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Malediktus.9250:

Does this mean soloQing to legendary will be even harder than in season 1? It does sound like it

It should be easier since your teammates will be of more similar skill instead of the team teams having player skill split between them. Imagine matchmaking as if it were trying to make a bunch of 1v1 matches by picking 5 players as similar as possible to fight another set of 5 similar players.

Frankly, this might sound good but it seems incredibly worrying when you think about it a bit longer. Doesn’t this mean that players who, due to randomness for instance, had a bad string of games and had their MMR drop will now get worse team-mates on their team relative to the enemy team? This sounds like the definition of elo-hell. Similarly, if you have a high MMR, you will get great players on your team, so that even if you have turned into a poor player, play terrible builds, etc., you will still be advantaged to win. I don’t get it.

From the way I see it, if I were to stick this in a simulation, I’m fairly sure this sort of system will lead to a convergence into two player groups. The first group of players will happen to get lucky initially or play slightly better, leading to high MMR and them getting better teammates, leading to more wins, higher MMR, and even better teammates. The second group of players will have poor luck or just happen to play a little worse the first few games they play. Then, they’ll get worse players on their team, lose even more, and get even worse players on their team.

I don’t mean to be a negative nancy, but I’m hoping that there’s more to the system than this, otherwise season 2 is going to be a gigantic mess.

Rome.7124:

Kevin.4209:

Your point on thief is a good one, it just doesnt make sense to use heartseeker very often any more, the auto chain is higher dps than heartseeker even below 25% and shadow shot is a better gap close. Doesn’t make sense at all.

please convince the dev that mesmer would love to take the damage buff if thief community doesnt want it… Seriously, classes that got buffs are now complaining instead being the classes that got butchered have no idea how much worst could the situation be for you guys.

I don’t get your point, I agree Mesmer is getting screwed as well, but that doesn’t mean the thief buffs were done in the proper fashion. I’m speaking from an interesting play style perspective, thief is plenty strong right now its just less dynamic to play when one of your buttons is essentially pointless.

Your point on thief is a good one, it just doesnt make sense to use heartseeker very often any more, the auto chain is higher dps than heartseeker even below 25% and shadow shot is a better gap close. Doesn’t make sense at all.

Shirlias.8104:

diamonds are usually put against legends, so if they see they suck, they may have a point.
Also remember that the game allows soloq and premade to share the same queue, and actually the “pip” system is not worth it like the first 2 months.

So you don’t have any point.

That’s why ANET should have done their fix out of the season and not meanwhile.

Well, here’s what I experienced, having hit legend a couple weeks ago. I rarely ran into premades, I’m assuming because people hardly play premades in ranked ATM. The q times are too long. When I did run into them, my solo q team either won or did well enough not to lose a pip. Finally, when I hit legend, the players got way better. I had a 65% win rate in diamond and climbed it in under a week. However, upon hitting legend, that normalized to 50% and on average my opponents were quite good.

Vague Memory.2817:

Kevin.4209:

Vague Memory.2817:

It would be odd if they did. The message this would send out is if you exploit and game our system we will reward you for it, and if you don’t and play how we intended..then too bad.

Have you ever considered that the top players are mostly just good players and that exploiters are a small minority? Being at the elo where I get matched with those players, that had been my experience.

No. Read through the forum threads, even pros were doing this and citing they did it to shorten queue times. An apparent side effect from this was climbing the league much faster. Was it a side effect, or the main intent, who knows. But the first debut league results have been tainted from day 1.

I personally know people who have abused and its not nearly as effective as you think. Qing stronghold with five people was leading to extremely long q times for them. Five man premades of good players also get incredibly long q times. Qing with ambers could work, but only if the ambers were actually decent, and that has been fixed now. All these techniques worked well at first but over time their effectiveness diminished for various reasons

I’m just annoyed by all the diamonds who can’t climb out themselves and say anyone who has was abusing (not saying you are one of those people, but I’ve heard it a lot lately). Also there’s a lot of people who talk about how bad legends are, but that’s a symptom of the fact a lot of them are trying new classes and not playing seriously because they lack the incentive.
Another thing to keep in mind- even good players have bad games, just watch the top streamers and you’ll see this.

Vague Memory.2817:

It would be odd if they did. The message this would send out is if you exploit and game our system we will reward you for it, and if you don’t and play how we intended..then too bad.

Have you ever considered that the top players are mostly just good players and that exploiters are a small minority? Being at the elo where I get matched with those players, that had been my experience.

Cynz.9437:

Kevin.4209:

I totally agree and have thought the same thing, the GS auto at the very least needs it’s aftercast removed, I’d even argue for shatter mes to get the thief treatment and have sword auto dmg buffed as well.

If mes GS dmg gets increase then the range on it should be reduced to melee. Same treatment!

I’m a thief main btw but enjoy playing Mesmer occasionally.
GS damage is even laughable compared to thief shortbow. Shatter has pathetic sustained dps for being glass, and removing the aftercast wouldn’t even be a huge buff.

I totally agree and have thought the same thing, the GS auto at the very least needs it’s aftercast removed, I’d even argue for shatter mes to get the thief treatment and have sword auto dmg buffed as well.

Evan Lesh.3295:

The changes for season 2 will make this less of a problem. Each team will have a tight MMR grouping such that each teammate should be very similar in skill to you. This is different from season 1 and unranked where we balance players on each team, i.e, high MMR and both sides and low MMR on both sides.

The goal is to ensure than if the higher skilled team wins, all the higher MMR players go up the ladder. Less unlucky high MMR players will drop on the ladder, and fewer low MMR players will get carried up the ladder.

Am I right that the intention of this system is to enable high MMR players to climb very very quickly? I’m just trying to understand why this would be better than a reset – I’m guessing because given a reset, it will still take a long time for ESL players to climb up just because of the element of randomness that is involved. The downside of the system you are proposing is that during the first couple weeks, there will be hugely one sided matches (I’m guessing you guys see this as a necessary evil – but perhaps it should be publicized before you get huge numbers of people whining) – however, after that the high mmr players will be in high divisions and it won’t be as much of an issue.

It’s really funny how the responses have completely confirmed the first two posters’ points. Especially the above one that repeatedly uses the word “chief.”

posthumecaver.6473:

You think you are so clever by dropping joy of tears here for the destruction of Cele Ele.

Only thing was keeping Condi Reaper/Condi Rev in check was D/X Tempest.

Now I will jump to my Condi Reaper and I swim in tears of whining, you didn’t know what you wished for, now enjoy.

True, people underestimate how strong chill is – it is ridiculous, as can be seen by how ele’s get completely wrecked by necros if they get below the threshold. Ele needs a lot of buffs to compensate for the change to diamond skin, buffs to necro, and removal of cele.

Just an idea for the acrobatics rework – this could be a decent place to offer thief some stability. Theives lack of stab is a large part of why they’ve suffered post HOT. For instance, I could see a stab on steal trait. Alternatively preparation could be made baseline and stab on steal could go to trickery.

Remember that this tree often has to compete with deadly arts, which has some really powerful traits, e.g., executioner, mug, panic strike, and poison/weakness.

So many good looking changes, wow, I am pumped! Everything sounds great!

Some of the great looking changes I saw included:
Revenant sword auto attack damage reduction
Slow and quickness no longer affect stomps (YESSSSSS)
Thief acrobatics rework (as a thief main, HYPE)
Offensive elementalist improvements
Diamond skin changes!!!

Now that the game has been out for ages and many people have capped out their achievements/titles, what about raising their thresholds? I think it would be cool to have:
1) An achievement for having champion ____ for at least X classes
2) An achievement for having, say, 1000 wins on a class. Then, we really know you are experienced at that class.
3) An achievement for winning, say, 2500-5000 games.

I think these achievements would give people some additional drive to PvP who have been around for a while, and it wouldn’t be very time consuming to add from a programming perspective.

Snorcha.7586:

Until you either:

1. Split SoloQ and TeamQ or;
2. Make it so you can’t lose PIPS against premades as a full solo team

these changes are pointless.

Am I the only one who gets a premade like one out of every twenty games and wins at least half the time?

So much negativity on this forum

Would it be possible to clarify how the mmr/division trade off will work? I just want to make sure that the system is not continuing to balance across teams using mmr after matching by division. That is, I’m hoping the system isn’t first choosing 10 players close in division, and then choosing the teams players are put on to equalize mmr across the two teams, because if that is the case, high mmr players are still being penalized severely (I can clarify why if desired, PhD student in econ/stats here).

Aidenwolf.5964:

I whisper them congratulations on cheating a broken system. As a solo Q’r your diamonds mean you grouped and took advantage of a flawed mechanic. I know many of you are good and fun to play with as I’ve been here fo eva but I solo and Anet kitten on my kind.

What makes it so hard for you to accept that there are players in the game who are better than you?

Apolo.5942:

By their own admission, they lack testing environment, thus new mechanics should never be considered “balance fixing”.

Work in programming for a state financial entity, the things the games industry in general and Anet in particular, get away with delivering broken or flat out unfinished (aka underwater revenant just to name 1) is unbelievable to me.

I imagine this conversation, yeah, we processed your mortgage but the system bugged out so you will need to make 3 payments a month. Dont worry, we will get it fixed, eventually.

I dont know if this comes down the quality of US programming over all or out sourced Korean programming or what, but this would never fly in my line of work.

Let’s cut anet a little bit of slack here…
1) It’s probably a lot harder to bug-check a complicated game of this sort than a mortgage system… there is an enormous list of things you need to check to bug fix this kind of game.
2) Having a bug in a game of this sort is no where near as catastrophic as a bug in a mortgage system, so of course it is better for the team to devote more resources to content production versus bug fixing in this kind of setting.

Ithilwen.1529:

@Kevin.4209

The “highest pvp achievement currently in the game” is being achieved through cheap manipulation.

As to the elitist full statement; “Did you expect the highest pvp achievement currently in the game would be attainable by casuals?”

Well yes, actually. I expect all achievements to be possible without paying to win ( Buying HoT.) I hasten to add that I bought HoT twice for two accounts. I liked the Mesmer update. It made me feel I have an even chance going in. (sadly, Mesmer is still being undermined often by ANET with hard nerfs ) It should also be doable without needing to play games with the system.

This game is allegedly about heroism.. rising to the challenge. Heroism almost by definition is individual achievement. As such, it should be possible for an individual to rise to the challenge and to complete it.

The lack of a place for an individual is one reason WvW suffers. There really isn’t any room for a solo when exploiters run around in blobs of as many as 60. Some of the HoT maps have similar issues.

The players making money on this game represent a huge minority. It’s an interesting commentary on the state of society. You imply that exclusive levels should exist for players who cheat and manipulate and even pay guilds to help them “achieve” high rank. Is that really the position you want to take?

To your first point: Has there ever been an MMORPG where you could go without buying the expansion and still be competitive? This is pretty much the nature of MMOs. 40 dollars really isn’t much for the amount of play you will get out of the game.

To your second point: your original comment was about grinding and had nothing to do with exploitation, I don’t know why you are bringing up exploitation, that’s a different point entirely. I also don’t know what sort of exploitation you are talking about, MMR tanking does not work very well after you get to ruby. Grouping with lower tier players does seem to be an issue, because the system seems to think that a legendary + an emerald is around the same as 2 rubies, but generally if the emerald is at least competent, the legendary+emerald on TS has an advantage.

Floplag.4032:

the idea behind 50/50 is valid, however… the matchmaking to support it currently is not.

I have had far too many unbalanced matches to give the system the credit it deserves, most of which have gone against me mind you but still.

The goal is to give everyone an even shot, but the reality is that this has not been the case due to multiple factors… exploiting ranks and groups versus solo queue to name a couple.

I agree with this, most of my matches feel incredibly unbalanced. Either the enemy team plays like absolute idiots and loses every even fight or my team does. It might be a consequence of the bunker meta, where once you are down, its difficult to come back.

Krysard.1364:

..sucks on leagues

The complaints on this forum are weird. 50/50 win rate is what matchmaking is supposed to give, unless your skill is improving. So then, maybe you think you should be able to advance even if you aren’t improving. Which is fine, but then there is a huge segment on the forum that is complaining about how people can just grind out legend and it means a lot more about the time you put in rather than your skill. Clearly, to have a system that cannot be grinded, it needs to be the case that if you have a 50/50 win rate, you won’t advance.

It’s like people don’t realize that it is impossible to have a matchmaking/rewards system that does everything they want.

brannigan.9831:

Grats on being able to play spvp 25-30 hours a week and that could be a generous understatment as I probably under counted your average queue time and length of match.

Did you expect that the highest pvp achievement currently in the game would be attainable by casuals?

Stilgar.6437:

i just got to diamond with soloQ mostly (some duo or trio here and there overall but ruby was almost all soloQ). Lost pips and even tiers a few times, but it was consistently upwards trend and didnt take too many matches. Didnt count matches but i took a break from pvp during the height of chrono meta so couldnt have been too many.
Got a bit lucky maybe in the last tier with a win streak. I felt matches where for the most part very fun and even, i think the MMR/leagues system settled in very nicely. Getting here was a lot of fun (for the matches played before the mass influx of chrono kitten and after the nerf). SUre it can use the some tweaks, but overal i find leagues are a excellent addition to the game.

Got a lot of wins vs premades so i still dont get the constant complaints about solo vs. team. Never felt it was a issue really, the premades that stomped me would have stomped me soloQ-ing too. The other pugs on my team for the most part understood rotations/teamwork/etc and matches had teamwork/strategy similar to when playing with a team. Sure TS and team comp is a bonus but skill outweighs this by far.

I dont think i will be able to reach legendary soloQing though, queues are a bit longer, going up vs pro teams etc. but i will try, should be better with more players reaching it. diamond is about the level i judge my skills at anyway so im ok with getting stuck here

P.S. thanks to all fellow pugers who helped me get here, good games

I’ve had the same experience, I find my pug teams beat pre mades like 75% of the time. I imagine its harder when you are facing apex, pz, etc which hasn’t happened to me yet, but my pugs have even beat radioactive a couple times. While they might have ts and a better comp, the m individual player skill in the pug is generally a lot higher because of the way the system is designed.

insanemaniac.2456:

Kevin.4209:

However, I’d like to point out, that well of precog is now a bit of a troll ability.

soooo…. like shadow refuge. lets keep wasting shadow refuges to troll. it works.

Refuge is a little different because you can more easily deactivate the effect.

…and I’m inclined to say good riddance. As a mesmer player, it was pure torture to spend the entire game at far 1v1ing another mesmer, druid, or ele for 10 minutes straight with only occasional action from a +1. That game play was utterly miserable. Thanks for the fix!

However, I’d like to point out, that well of precog is now a bit of a troll ability. Players can use it to cause their own team to lose a point fairly easily. Hopefully people just stop playing it completely, so I don’t have to actively avoid precog wells to prevent a decap.

hackks.3687:

Kevin.4209:

This is just how matchmaking in any game works, there’s an element of randomness in order to secure timely matches. The enemy team on average should have the same skill level as your team, if your teammates are worse than you, than the other team will (roughly) be a weighted average of your skill and your teammates skill level. There is no problem here.

If they were equal skill they wouldn’t have lost the first game by blow out. The match maker should not be pulling from the same group of players for successive matches, all this does is successively stack the odds against players by continually moving them into groups with lower and lower rated players.

Also, I don’t consider the status quo to be a good reason to keep doing anything, much like you’re answer suggests.

The point is the team you were facing afterwards should have had a weighted average of your skill and the team’s skill. Your team in games with somewhat low population will not have the same skill as you, but the point is, the weighted average of your skills will equal the enemy teams skill. If you didn’t do it this way, you’d have massive queue times (and you’ll note tons of people are already complaining about queue times).

This is just how matchmaking in any game works, there’s an element of randomness in order to secure timely matches. The enemy team on average should have the same skill level as your team, if your teammates are worse than you, than the other team will (roughly) be a weighted average of your skill and your teammates skill level. There is no problem here.

Embolism.8106:

Kevin.4209:

SteepledHat.1345:

In SPvP, I’ve been solo queueing my way up the ranks. I’ve been learning the new specialization’s build types as I go. Mostly, I run a bunker chrono with insp/chaos/chron lines. Sword and board and staff as weapons. Utilities tend to be portal, blink, precognition, and gravity. I can easily bunker multiple enemies and most professions. However, I’m having a heck of a time with dragonhunter. Now a scrubby fotm hunter isn’t the issue. As I’ve been playing my mmr has shot up. I’m seeing these beastly career guards. I can sustain for a bit, but their cd on the unblockable trap is so low they seem to always outpace my defenses. Any advice on how to prevent a well played DH from decapping?

When I play chronobunker, I find dh to be completely countered by me. Illusions proc traps, and when you see traps procced just throw a precog on them and walk in. Alternatively, you can use distortion. New builds run blink so you have a stun break for dragons maw. I think this is probably the biggest counter to trap dh.

On the other hand, when I play thief….. It’s painful

Proccing traps with illusions is another way of saying “I’m not contesting the point and oh it’s now lost, defeating the whole point of playing bunker”. Same goes for Distortion and to a small extent Blink.

True I had in mind a situation where say your team is engaging and there are traps on a point. Precog, stab on shatters, and other evades also make the match up easy. Distortion alone is generally not enough for them to get the decap. You can blink away and quickly go back in after dropping precog if you do end up stuck in a maw.

I think it’s the team queue times they are worried about.

SteepledHat.1345:

In SPvP, I’ve been solo queueing my way up the ranks. I’ve been learning the new specialization’s build types as I go. Mostly, I run a bunker chrono with insp/chaos/chron lines. Sword and board and staff as weapons. Utilities tend to be portal, blink, precognition, and gravity. I can easily bunker multiple enemies and most professions. However, I’m having a heck of a time with dragonhunter. Now a scrubby fotm hunter isn’t the issue. As I’ve been playing my mmr has shot up. I’m seeing these beastly career guards. I can sustain for a bit, but their cd on the unblockable trap is so low they seem to always outpace my defenses. Any advice on how to prevent a well played DH from decapping?

When I play chronobunker, I find dh to be completely countered by me. Illusions proc traps, and when you see traps procced just throw a precog on them and walk in. Alternatively, you can use distortion. New builds run blink so you have a stun break for dragons maw. I think this is probably the biggest counter to trap dh.

On the other hand, when I play thief….. It’s painful

I hear this a lot, but in almost every game I play there is a thief. I have around 800 games played with 60% win rate so I’m not sure if it’s because my elo is somewhat high and you have long term players who don’t switch off of thief no matter what. I still do decent on staff thief (had two games with over a million damage recently). I don’t think it’s great but it punishes players who don’t see it coming.

I agree, I’m having a lot of fun (even on thief!). I think it’s the classic issue of people losing half their games, and blaming it on class balance rather than just the way things are (you will always win some and lose some as MMR adjusts to your skill). Losing feels bad, and people want to justify their loss in some way or another.

I don’t really see why complaining about needing elites is so rampant as well, though to me $50 is almost nothing, so “needing to buy the expansion” to be viable seems irrelevant to me. However, I could see this being an issue for the younger players of the game.

Alleyviper.6081:

Kevin,

Do you mind sharing your condition build?

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAoYVn8lClOhdmCGOB8PhFqiy7C+gtrrnCgDYu67+wH-TpRAABA8AAEc/hoPBAkVGgjDBgHHBAA

There are a lot of changes that can be made. I’m still not sure on the best elite. However, I think this is a good starting point.

I’ve also been having a decent amount of success with standard, power s/d thief, using bound. Bound is very very strong, I almost never run out of evades even with that build. You do have to be very careful though, as if you do run into a situation where you can’t evade, you can die extremely fast with the power creep on other classes. Nevertheless, I am actually having a decent amount of success with it in 1v1’s, though it might just be that since ranked is banned right now, the unranked players are not the best. Dealing 3k damage on dodge, having an extra dodge, having 10% increased damage after dodge, and better condi removal is a huge buff for thief. The new heal is very strong in combination with 3k damage on your dodge, and in combination with signet of agility, means you almost never run out of dodges. You can’t imagine how annoying this is for your enemy to play against. I don’t understand how people are complaining so much, to be honest (I’m prepared for the incoming flame, about how I’m playing against idiots, haven’t played enough, etc., I don’t care, haha.).

I think people just need to experiment with builds more. Condition thief feels absolutely busted, I can send my build if anyone wants. It’s so so hard to kill and dishes out huge AOE condition damage… I often end up with bleeds ticking for 2.5k in a large aoe.

With this build, I feel confident in 1v1ing. The new heal is so strong as well, with condi’s+caltrops on dodge, the new heal, and signet of agility, you can evade almost permanently. It’s absurd.

EDIT: Also, the condi cleanse is insane because you are evading SO much. I’ve had the bonus points for most conditions removed from self.

Also, don’t forget that D/D 3 was buffed in the last patch to add a 200ms additional evade. This is not trivial.