Guild Wars 2

Aren’t marks magical traps? I don’t think any traps are triggered by downed foes.

Unless they remove ALL passive abilities on the dozen or so runes (e.g. Rune of the Grove), AND all the passive auto fear/auto taunt/auto stability/auto anything talents on every profession, no.

Cherry picking is not the way to go — either it’s all removed or it all gets to stay.

Booms.3952:

maybe you’re just not that good man?

Or maybe you can’t read the forum, which is full of countless posts like this from different people?

Blaming the player, who already reached legendary 2x in the previous 2 seasons (evident from having the legendary back piece) while you yourself have unlikely done so is not the first thing to do. The matchmaker has issues.

Does it? Or is it just being applied after the skill lands, meaning that if you dodge the skill the 6th bonus still gets on you. I noticed that it is applied almost 1s after the elite skill is used.

This thread is a joke, right? The build you’re defending was already competitive and many warriors were able to get to Legendary in S1 and S2 with it, even by solo Q. Sure, there were more “optimal” professions in ESL, but warrior was no slouch.

Then, Anet nerfed the hell out of Reaper, Scrapper, Mesmer, Druid, Tempest, Revenant and ignorantly buffed a build on warrior that was already very strong.

Even without the buff to warrior, this particular build would be OP since everyone else got nerfed. Anet should never buff and nerf in the same patch as it creates this sort of power leap. If you can be bothered to look at my post history, you’ll see that I’ve got posts ~ 6 months old detailing how strong the build was and how it only seemed weak because every other profession was overtuned.

What’s funny is that the “meta” build isn’t even the best version of it for team play. It’s possible to nuke the entire team on point and drop them in under 5 seconds. When I play with a friend, I get him to go in first to “pull aggro” and I leap in and nearly instantly drop half the team before they can call target and focus me. This was possible even when people were running super tanky amulets that are no longer in the game.

People will always defend the easy thing to play and win with. Just go with what works and wait until Anet nerfs it. Anet has all the numbers, they play their game, and they definitely know what is popular and what isn’t. The reality is that they’re working on a very different timeline since development takes time. It’s impossible to make changes overnight — this isn’t a simple game like Pong with less than 200 lines of code that can be changed overnight.

Much like watching a TV show, or playing a game on the first day it has launched, what we’re seeing TODAY is what the developers and creators were working on months ago. The problems we’re seeing today will not be fixed for a few months.

First of all, this is an old build and it is not even the optimal version of it. Lovingly named the “Herpes Thief”, the build has been viable and quite popular since the release of HoT. The only reason it faded a bit was because people stopped playing thief for a while since other professions are even easier to win with.

The proper way to play the build is to actually pair it with fields since the dodge (impaling lotus) and deathblossom are both whirl finishers. It plays very well in coordinated team games where you can actually utilize both your own poison fields and those of your allies (e.g. necro) or fire fields from allies (warrior, ele, engi) to spread condis to the entire enemy team. It also allows thief to sustain in team fights and use Impact strike + steal to instantly stomp targets, even those that get teleported away by Search and Rescue.

The build has several weaknesses, including hard CC, immob spam, sustained condi cleanse (tempest/druid). Dragon hunter/guardian can be a hard counter to this build due to the barrier walls that cannot be dodged/teleported through without triggering knockdowns. Good timing can also allow anyone to get heavy hitting attacks in between the dodges/DBs since they only have a few invulnerable frames. Weakness is a good counter to this build since it reduces endurance regeneration and breaks-up the rhythm/rotation. The build is also especially bad at dealing with long-range pressure due to having limited teleports.

The build was actually a lot stronger before the nerf to Sigil of Energy.

The build can be played as a pure condi build with evade spam, or a hybrid condi + backstab build where you layer condis to do damage in-between your cloak and daggers + backstabs. Different amulets are used depending on the goal.

The build is definitely easy to do well with at low-level play, even if you click pvp skills (kind of like condi chrono or the old turret engi). However, it isn’t any more “OP” than any of the face roll builds that we’re seeing or those we have seen so far. For example, the “Ragezerker” warrior build (which was around for a few patches but got buffed this patch) can melt a low-level player or someone who’s unprepared in under 5 seconds with the click of a few skills. But, anyone who’s prepared will simply kite the warrior until the stances run out then nuke them to death.

The build you’re talking about has been around for ages and really took off when HoT came out due to the extra whirl finisher + condis on dodge. The only reason you didn’t see it as much last patch was because condi reaper/mesmer/etc were all so much better.

This is actually true of a lot of items that were changed at some point. The old item version and new version are different items even though they have the same name.

I’ve been experimenting with MMR hell. It’s most definitely real.

On the way up the ladder I had blowout matches with crazy undefeated win streaks where games were ending in winning scores of 500-50, 500-100, etc. Basically, the other team had no chance. We could have even had 1 afk and still won easily. The matchmaking was TERRIBLE. In fact, there were some matches where I just sat on (“defended”) home point without seeing any other player since my team was killing it 4v5. I could not believe the unfair matches I was having — it was extremely boring and a waste of my time to even play them.

Once I hit diamond I got REALLY bored and I started doing the random daily profession pvp quest in ranked arena. I stacked up a bunch of losses while messing around with random professions that I don’t normally pvp with.

Now I get teams which are sometimes full legendary division ranks that double cap home or try to 1v3 off point, etc. These players are so hopeless that they have no chance of winning, and it is immediately apparent. Their legendary league rank is a reminder of how getting to legendary is possible even for clueless players who get carried all the way there.

Meanwhile, the opposing team is usually very coordinated and focuses targets perfectly — just like the teams I used to get before I started messing around and killed my MMR. I’ve now seen “the other side” of those blowout matches, and it isn’t pretty. It’s very difficult to carry a team of people on 10+ game loss streaks to a victory against teams that have had 20-30 wins in a row.

The worst part of it all is that there are numerous players getting carried to legendary by getting on the win-streak team through simple luck. The win-streak team would beat the loss-streak team even in a 4v5 (i.e., that clueless player does not have to contribute to get carried). These are the people who are under the erroneous impression that they’re good at pvp because they got carried to legendary. It’s really sad.

The moral of the story? This season is a huge mess. There’s no point in getting upset about the poor matches or feeling yourself because you got a blowout win in an unfair match. It’s way more fun to just mess around in PvP until ANET fixes their broken system. There is nothing competitive about the matchmaking this season.

Natto.5819:

Stand The Wall.6987:

yeah lets restrict ppl to only play the current meta
lawl

I don’t have Heart of Thorns. Does that mean I cannot play Ranked anymore?

You can get to diamond (and probably legendary) without HoT as a solo Q player if you’re skilled enough. Meta builds and HoT don’t make people win if they’re bad at PvP and with a bit of skill you can beat them without HoT.

Yasi.9065:

Had it happen today, too… but I was able to just keep on cleaving on the spot the downed player well… got downed… didnt have to chase him at all.

So might be, chasing is the wrong way to go about that… and just keep on cleaving.

Sounds like it might be like the desync bug where the body teleports to another location on the client but stays there on the server. Have to use tracking skills to find the “original location” on the client (e.g., leap skill, targeted teleport, etc).

There are two versions of the build. One is the brawler condi warrior (with Carrion) and the other is a toxic cancer that can insta-kill most players and pvp bosses. I’m really hoping the latter gets nerfed into oblivion before others figure it out. It makes me feel dirty using it.

Thank you for posting this video! This bug has been driving me insane lately. It has literally cost me a number of matches by preventing stomps in group fights.

The worst part is that the body slides very quickly so you have to chase it down with ranged attacks. Area of effect and melee don’t work and neither does stomp. Then, they rez up… Also, you need swiftness to keep up with the sliding body since your in-combat running speed is slower.

ESPORTZ SLIDE TO WIN.

Crimson Shi.5047:

What is a stronghold build? :o

Different game type with different objectives = different build requirements. Stronghold has a bit more going for it than “hurp durp I’m gunna sat on dis point and spam evades/blocks or aoe condis”

Every other endurance modifier on runes/sigils was changed to vigor in the previous patch, but it seems Rune of Adventurer was missed by the balance team.

The rune still gives 50% endurance gain with a 10 second cooldown.

There are a number of builds that can currently use this every 10-15 seconds due to having spammable or very low cooldown healing skills.

It should be standardized to vigor like the rest so there’s actual counter play to the dodge spam.

Elementalist is in a good spot right now. It’s just that there are two professions that are still too powerful from the previous meta (Scrapper and Reaper). You can support or DPS, just not both at the same time.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

at the moment,
warriors are under powered,
not over powered.

blind spam will effectively counter warriors.

This. If there’s anyone that thinks warriors are overpowered in the current meta, they need to get their eyes checked because they were just killed by a Reaper or Scrapper.

There seems to be something odd going on with PI and Fist Flurry. The combo is doing over 10k damage on heavy armor and its a near-instant skill on balanced builds. It’s possibly bugged. Before the patch, it only did about 5-6k and now it’s nearly double.

Hay guyz! Drood is totally fine being able to tank and group support with cleric stats while pet dps like zerker player. AI is good fur da game. If U get beat by AI, U bad.

/sarcasm

Seriously, it takes 0 skill to slot in bristleback and smokescale pets and mash F2 which auto taunts. It’s not like druid has a ton of immobalize that is unblockable… oh wait, looks like they do.

If the new pets stay as they are, they need to be made easier to kill and trigger a much longer cooldown when they die. There’s no downside to having your pet killed right now since you can just swap to the other one while you wait for its relatively low cooldown.

If anything, ranger pets should be given more active utility skills on the F1-5 buttons and their damage should be reduced. AI and passive play are killing this game and Anet knows it. That’s why all the AI runes (Ogre, Pirate, etc) were already removed from PvP.

Browrain.7346:

How do you know they are younger?

That was implied by “no-income.” There’s no credit card required to download the game and play it. Any 7-year old that can get on his/her parents’ computer can download GW2 and play the game. They’re not supposed to, but they can.

style.6173:

Wow. The matchmaking team has been able to pull off a rare feat. Long queues AND bad matchups at the same time.

This is because the players are causing this to happen.

Bad matchmaking and long queues are caused by high league players forming teams with low league players. This removes the low-league players from low-league queue and the high-league players from high-league queue.

The end result? Everyone playing is matched up against the Sapphire/Ruby tiers since 4 Diamond + 1 Amber = Sapphire/Ruby tier apparently.

Thus, super low queue times in the sapphire/ruby tiers and super high queue times in the amber/emerald and diamond/legendary tiers. If players stopped trying to game the system, queue times would be normal at the low and high leagues, and matchmaking wouldn’t be so terrible and random.

Anet needs to disable grouping with anyone that is a different league than you. Parties should be forced to all be the same league tier in order to queue.

At the moment, the problem is self perpetuating since once a group/player gets to a high-league tier, there’s no one to play against since all the other players are too busy exploiting (lowering their MMR), and so you’re left with high-queue times. The solution? Join in with the MMR abuse so you can play and keep matchmaking and queue times broken. The system WILL NOT fix itself.

I’m really curious if anyone has tested Rite of the Great Dwarf + Tempest aura/protection boons. If it’s really possible to reach 99% damage reduction, that would explain why the tempest + DPS rev combo is so powerful.

It’s possible that the damage reduction is being stacked in a weird way with other class skills, like Rite of the Great Dwarf.

If normal protection + frost aura + RotGD are stacking additively, you’ll end up with that damage.

Sunshine.5014:

You thought bunker mesmer was cancer? brace for Decap Ranger.

Can’t share the build here (it’s very easy don’t worry). Gotta enjoy it while the devs are still on vacation

No point in being secretive. It’s already all over the place. I’ve seen it from Ruby and up in almost every game with a ranger.

It would be better if they just tweaked stability skills a little to deal with the pulsing CC spam. When they converted stability from making you immune to all stun/daze for the duration of the boon to a “stacks consumed” mechanic, they greatly reduced the amount of stability on a lot of professions.

You’re angry that you won’t get an achievement for playing multiple professions because YOU CHOOSE NOT TO. Your choice, you live with it.

I choose not to do jumping puzzles. I will never get those achievements. I’ve come to terms with that. It’s your choice not to do the achievement. You can’t blame anyone but yourself, especially since it’s a super easy one.

Cynz.9437:

.. what is wrong with this pic xD

Basic math tells us that the game was tied and only won by a boss kill. Looks like a very even match.

zxstanyxz.8769:

any necro with more than 20% brain function can take down a DS tempest, which coincidently is about 20% of the players that play necro…

all you have to do is switch amuulet to give you some extra power with the sacrifice of a small amount of that condi burst (and i do mean small) whenever you see an ele on their team, and then AA them for 3-5 seconds and they’ll be below 90%. after that condi bomb away and watch them melt. they’ll either die quick or around 20% health they will run away.

This. All you really need is to corrupt the boons after hitting the tempest a few times with a power build. Tempest simply can’t cope with losing all their boons, especially protection, and getting a ton of conditions on them at the same time. They either have to cleanse the condis or focus on reapplying boons, both of which take time.

The long queue times at the high leagues are a player made problem.

What you don’t realize is that the people who got there early had no one to play against, thus had super long queue times and started exploiting the system by teaming up with amber ranks to go up against the lower tiers. In essence, they removed themselves from diamond/legendary queue

Because the diamond/legendary tier players are all teaming up (exploiting) with amber/emerald rank players, they’re not eligible to play against each other in true diamond vs diamond rank matches. There is no one in high league queue because people are putting themselves into low-noob league queue through exploits The only people to blame for the long queue times at diamond/legendary rank are the players who are exploiting the system to go into a low-tier queue, shrinking the eligible matchups @ the diamond and legendary level.

Julian.2971:

It’s not a rev trouble. It’s a glitch that has been on the game from day 1

This. I’ve accidentally teleported into the walls/steps on Foefire and had to re-log many times since this game has launched.

Also, ANY knockback can do this to you, not just revenant. Mesmer, engi, warrior, etc. can all knock you through the walls, making you get stuck.

A hotfix would have been nice on the following day of release. It’s too late now. If they change it now, all it will do is reward all the cheaters that exploited the system to reach legendary in record time.

Ferocity pays off more or less depending on the team comps and how your team is doing in group fights.

For example, if you’re managing to stomp 3 players every fight but can’t decap a point since their bunkers are super awesome, then ferocity is your only ticket to keep the scores even for long enough to get Stillness/Tranquility. Without these, you will lose the game since you’re not able to decap.

If both teams are bunker heavy and no one is dying, then ferocity is a waste of time. Going for it will not affect the game outcome at all since bunkers can fight each other in an outnumbered fight without dropping pretty easily.

If both teams are equal in the group fights, with some people getting stomped, and you both have 1 point capped and mid contested, the team that gets ferocity will win in the end. It’s pretty easy to keep mid contested in a 3v4 if you have enough bunkers to allow someone on your team to grab it.

In the end, it is really dependent on how the game is shaking up. It can definitely be the difference between winning and losing if the fights are really close. All those games where you’ve lost 490 to 500, or even 475 to 500 could have gone in your favour.

You shouldn’t give up holding 2 points for ferocity, however. It doesn’t pay off well enough. It’s more of a “rubber band” mechanic to keep the losing team “in the fight” until the game-changing buffs come up.

It would perpetuate the bunker meta even further. Playing a DPS build is already a huge risk with minimal reward and adding more points on death would increase the risk even more.

If your bunker is doing 1v2 at far and keeping it decapped while you lose the mid point in a 4v3 scenario, you have no chance of winning a 5v5 group fight anyway. I’m amazed that some people think they’d have a chance in this thread.

A bunker’s ability to “tank” decreases exponentially with every added player. Know what happens if you all try to go mid? Your bunker drops in 5 seconds to focus fire from 5 players and then the 4 dps that are left over drop in 1-2 second each. You’ve just lost all the cap points and the game.

A solo bunker can 1v2 all game without dying, and even 1v3 for a couple of minutes. But, as soon as you put that bunker against 5 players focusing him/her, he/she’s dead. Now you’re terrible team comp is outnumbered and without a bunker.

If you want to yolo Q, you should be asking your team of randoms how many players are bunkers at the start. If you only have one, you should be swapping to another build that can tank. The reality of the current meta is that you can’t have a team full of DPS builds and expect to win unless you’re really coordinated over voice chat. It can only work if you can spike a target and instantly kill it together, forcing an outnumbered fight in your favour.

Keeping 2-3 players on far point and preventing it from capping as a bunker means that your team has a 1-2 member advantage in every fight and should be winning 100% of the mid and home fights.

The worst thing you can do when you have a person who’s successfully doing this on your team is go to far point “to help them out” and lose that +1 or 2 advantage on the other nodes.

Now, sometimes there are people who FAIL to keep far point decapped and just fight 1v1 on a point that’s capped by the enemy. In this case, they are making your team lose. The same thing applies to home-point bunkers — if they’re successfully keeping 1 or 2 people at bay and have the point capped, this provides an opportunity to push mid with an extra player advantage. Going to help out if they don’t need it is going to make your team lose.

Condi rev is still plenty viable, it’s just not as mindless as before. I see so many revs just spamming condis and blowing all their energy, leaving them defenseless. If paced properly, there’s very little even necros can do against you.

All those people saying Chronomancer got nerfed, you should note that it was only nerfed for Conquest mode. Well of Precog was changed to prevent capturing a point.. which has no impact on Stronghold. It’s still insanely OP.

Sounds like you went up against a team that is using a smurf account to lower their team’s MMR. PvP players always look for a way to exploit the game and are relentless in doing so.

It is not part of any group since all the other groups have cooldown/effectiveness improvement traits. If the skill was put into a group, the base ability would have to be made worse to compensate for the extra power from traits. Instead of making it worse and requiring a trait to make it better, they just left it alone.

This started happening for me as soon as I logged in today (12/16). Camera and targeting options reset every single time I log in now. Also camera shake and double-tap to evade get reset (and probably others — I noticed these right away in PvP).

I played fine yesterday without any issues. I’ve never had this issue before. Been playing since pre-release beta weekend.

Windows 10 and Windows 8 (two separate machines), 32 bit and 64 bit clients are both bugged.

Whatever was done today broke my settings.

Edit: It’s possible that things worked fine yesterday and broke upon logging out. I think I only logged in for one session on 12/15 so I wouldn’t have noticed things breaking for subsequent sessions.

It’s pretty simple: Don’t stack more condis on the necro than you can personally deal with. You should always expect your condis to be returned to you.

Or, you can just play another build. Condi transfer necro is supposed to be a hard counter to condi spammers. Condi transfer skills do nothing vs power builds.

If you should have ROFLStomped the enemy but barely won, you should gain no pips. This would really help with organized premades farming low MMR randoms for pips. Pips should be earned, not awarded for any easy win.

This is funny.. I was wondering what was going on. I was going 1 vs Berserker and Thief. I downed the thief and then the Berserker.. stomped him, thief instantly got up. I reported him for cheating but I guess it’s a bug.

Group magnetic aura = suicide if you attack with a ranged weapon. All those DH were 1-shotting themselves with their own arrows. Honestly, it’s for the better. DH punishes if you try to kill it due to sitting on traps and ranged DPS on DH is too high.

Sitting on top of your traps and mashing your weapon skills is even more brainless than the meta bunkers.

It really feels like they’re just messing with it behind the scenes. One day matches are pretty even, but the next day/patch everything is all wonky. I’m pretty sure the matchmaker is server-side so they could be messing with it all the time without us knowing that it has been changed.

If you’re playing solo, you have to play when everyone isn’t grouping (i.e., during the week). Weekends are basically all 5-person premades in the higher brackets.

The “streaks” allow you to advance tiers up to Ruby, so it’s not a bad thing as long as you get enough to go up a tier before hitting a loss streak. If you won and lost every other game, then you’d be stuck in Emerald league forever.

Ragnarox.9601:

Dh don’t have place in esl league because tempest negates their range dmg. They are very strong if there are no tempests around.

DH need daze nerf actually. But before that Anet needs to balance other most used OP classes.

This is the most true statement in this thread. DH is only being pushed out of the meta because Tempests spam magnetic aura on the entire party which reflects all projectiles back to the attacker.

DH is very strong, and the real problem is that Tempest is allowed to completely shut down all ranged damage to the party and reflect it back to the source, making any ranged damage ability a hazard. There’s no counter-play to magnetic aura aside from waiting it out —- but it’s up quite a bit with Tempest from utility + weapon skills + overloads so you’re basically sitting idle for most of the fight.

Party-wide spammable magnetic aura hard counters all of the high-burst ranged DPS (ranger LB, warrior Rifle, DH LB, thief P+P, etc) and really needs to be looked at as it completely prevents many builds from being even remotely viable.

It’s impossible to answer this since you can lose and gain up to 3 pips. E.g., if you win 3:1 matches, but get 1 pip each win and lose 3 pips each loss, even though your win% is high, you’re still at 0 progress.