Guild Wars 2

Wiping a team that is pushing your lord should give you some sort of buff or advantage to allow for comeback mechanics. Otherwise, it’s just too easy for the enemy team to zerg back, and unless you stay to defend the game is over. It makes it very difficult to do anything but turtle in your base once the other team has reached that point.

You’re basically asking for a league/ladder system.

They would have to rework the leaderboard completely to do this, because it’s not based on MMR or skill in any way right now. I’d love to see it too, but I wouldn’t bet on it happening anytime soon.

Or just randomize it so every person has a different set of professions to win with.

Keeping up 3 phants on a boss isn’t really that big of a deal. With the signet heal you can get all 3 up in under 5 seconds, with a 4th ready to go on weapon swap if one dies. This is true for all but a small few bosses that kill clones too quickly.

Some bosses will never damage clones. Some bosses don’t require specific utilities, which allow you to swap in the signet for illusion health to keep phantasms up much longer. Some bosses are only a threat for melee phants which allow you to swap in pistol and pop duelists in the back that never get hit.

Trash pulls are a different story, but they die so fast and we can often make up for it in reflections.

Problem is, depending on your skill level, it’s kind of hard finding competent people to play with.

If you aren’t the best of the best, you aren’t getting asked to play in a full premade. So what do you do?

You can post a LF team here, but thats kind of screwed now that everything pve/wvw/pvp is all in the same forum. On top of that, if you aren’t a well known top player that has tournament experience or whatever, then many people wont even bother responding to it or give you a chance. So then you try to form your own, which is equally as hard to do. People are flakey and, since you’re not tops around, can be hesitant to form anything new with you.

So you can shout in HotM. You can get semi-pugs this way, but you’re just as likely to get people far below your skill level in your pug-premade that you have to carry anyway. This is often barely better than going in solo.

A better method is to watch out for good players while playing and ask them to join up, but how often does this happen? Sometimes, but not often. There are a lot of lone wolves queuing into games.

Truth is though, you do need at least a partial team to do well. I consider myself a slightly above average player and I just have so much trouble solo queuing as a Mesmer watching the randoms on my team make the dumbest rotational mistakes ever, no map awareness, etc, and I’m just not good enough to carry as a mes. Even if I hover around the 50% win rate mark, most of the games aren’t fun because of how frustrating playing with random people can be. But if I group up with 1 or 2 of my friends that I know are competent and understand how to rotate, my win rate goes from like 40-50% to 75% instantly.

Shatter is a little harder because clones die so quickly from the excessive cleave in a 5v5 in a tight space. While staff is still nice because of some great blink spots on this map, I like sword/focus to set up reliable burst with the pull. Really comes down to whether you want to be more aggresive or defensive.

Portal is out. Null Field is a good option, as is Illusion of Life if your team has other cleansing options. I usually run IoL because I tend to think rez in a close team fight is a little more valuable, and you can snowball the map if you can get a kill first. You just have to be careful if you’re running with banner warriors that you don’t waste it.

I don’t find MI to be as nice outside of the initial opening. Moa is useful to relieve pressure from high threat targets. I’ve been meaning to try time warp because I think it might have some merit, but Moa on a cleaving engi or a lich necro or w/e can be clutch.

Tealots.6095:

I’ve never actually used a focus with a shatter build. Wardens do a lot of damage, but not at the pace I like. But the swiftness, yes, it’s great for that.

Focus isn’t used on a shatter mes for the phantasm, it’s used for the pull to set up big MW bursts and to pull people off ledges and such. A S/F shatter mes can much more easily set up shatters than a GS/Staff, but they are more vulnerable in that they are using a melee set.

Blackmoa.3186:

what this leaderboard desperatly needs is a league system like in lol or other similar games

This is entirely the issue right now.

You should be placed into a bracket at the start of a season based on your MMR, and your ladder points in that bracket based on your activity. This is how other online competitive games do it.

For example in SC2 by MMR:
Bronze – bottom 10% of players
Silver – next 35% (10-45)
Gold – next 35% (45-80)
Platinum – next 15% (80-95)
Diamond – next 5% (95-99)
Master and GM – top 1%

This way, you won’t see a ‘meh’ MMR player in the top 25 of all the LB due to sheer activity. They’d be top in their lower MMR bracket, and the best by MMR would still be visible in the high brackets.

People will be rewarded for skill and improvement by placing in higher brackets as new seasons come and go, and rewarded by participation by winning their bracket. Could even have an end of season reward structure that better rewards the higher brackets. This encourages everyone to play, because even the lower skilled players have something to strive for in winning the lower end brackets, rather than being rank 8000 or w/e it is now.

MMR is calculated via Glicko2.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glicko_rating_system

Assuming they are sticking close to that algorithm, there’s your formulas for rating changes. I believe the opponent MMR is the average of the opponent team, but could be they made it a bit more complicated.

Out of curiosity, why do you need to know exactly how MMR is working in this game at such a low level? Your value is not exposed to you.

Could be they had it running internally when the patch hit and they reset it at some point between then and now. So before reset you had more wins.

Or could just be buggy. Who knows.

I’d be interested if it’s actually possible to lose ladder points. I’ve got 2 friends with the same point count but one has like 4x as many losses. If you can’t lose points, ranking just turns into who has played the most games.

I don’t think they took Mimic far enough. Would be interesting if, on top of copying all boons, it also copied your target’s health percentage and conditions.

This would be powerful in allowing a near death mesmer a large heal + boons, but balanced by the chance of getting a lot of conditions you might not want either.

You’re in the wrong game if you are looking for PvE challenge, and I wouldn’t hold my breath that it will ever change. The entire game is designed from the ground up to be easily approached and consumed by the casual player. Even larger undertakings like a legendary weapon are nothing more than time consuming grinds of easy content.

Your best bet for difficulty in GW2 is going to be the pvp scene. If that’s not your thing, I doubt you’ll find what you want here.

Anyone else getting this bug?

Was playing a ranked queue game (about 5:55pm server time if any anet dev sees this), and everyone in our game got a queue pop in the middle of the match. I hit cancel myself, but about 5 of the people in our match were pulled into the new one while the other half of us were not, and our game went on. Seems like a bad issue to be having in ranked with seasons starting soon.

Main problem with Courtyard is it isn’t a traditional TDM in that it isn’t round based, so when you solo into it you get people straggling in one or two at a time in respawn waves. The team to win the first team fight usually wins the game because of this. This is why a good majority of these games goes 500-0, and good luck coordinating a bunch of solo players to play as a team.

Aside from that, I’ve played a few games as meta D/P and a few as S/D and I feel the S/D handles Courtyard better, especially if you aren’t going into it with a team. It’s much easier to bait and lead a few people on a merry chase with S/D, letting your team get a numbers advantage elsewhere. And if no one bites, it’s still a solid team fighting spec. Mobility allows you to abuse LOS quite easily, pop in and out of big fights with all your evades (D/P is much more vulnerable), and support stomps with poison fields and CB cleave. An SR opening is very valuable as well.

I don’t think double SB would bring anything to the map. You wouldn’t have burst potential and you can be ignored because you aren’t camping a point. P/D is probably more viable than it is in conquest, but I haven’t tried it yet because we still don’t have build templates and I don’t bother to swap around for 1 map. That said, I can see a stealth heavy condi thief being the “skyhammer engineer” of courtyard.

Just want to chime in that I’ve had 3 4v5s in 4 games, and each time my team’s 5th came in late saying the queue wouldn’t let them in. By that time it didn’t matter because the game was too far gone. I haven’t personally had a problem though.

This map snowballs worse than a bad legacy loss. It needs to be changed to an annihilation where everyone resets and respawns together after a team is wiped out. Otherwise, unless you’re in a full premade, people straggle in one or two at a time and get stomped by whichever team wins the initial teamfight. It’s not fun at all as is.

And while I’m thinking about it, we could really use build templates now. The builds suited for this game mode can be completely different from capture for some classes.

Just another fun tPvP build to throw out there. Phantasm lockdown.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fhAQNAR8ansISjaWjGOoB3aGx0IM9bcOpDSiKVJA-TZBCwAAuAA+3f4yBBIcZAGPBAA

If you’re good at timing interrupts, this destroys everything except turret engi, and can struggle against Ele with stab unless you understand how to bait them. Some matchups require more skill and anticipation than others (ie vs thief, ele).

Open with GS to get the berserker out (and GS 2/3 for dmg), switch to S/P for first duelist. If you’re confident and playing against someone with no stab (ie necro), pop the heal and get a 2nd duelist out immediately. Hit them with MB for a 2.6s stun (sigil +30% duration). When they break it follow with dom signet 3.9s stun (watch for dodges out of the break). If they don’t break it just chain them and its GG. If they break it with stab or damage immunity, wait it out with decoy and MI while your phantasms do their thing. If they live through that, watch for dodges then anticipate and interrupt the heal with mantra. Don’t be afraid to use your heal to refresh phantasms if needed… those things do nasty damage with this build.

Timing is super important. If you land everything, or most of it, with proper CI procs then you should win and induce a ragequit or map chat QQ. If you miss your stun chains and dazes then you might be in trouble.

In a team fight, start s/p and get 2 duelists up away from the point and then camp GS until you have the opportunity to chain stun/daze a target for an easy kill. Always try to dom signet in the s/p set. Save dazes to get kills via heal rupts, or to stop stomps.

Figure out how to answer to get through without raising any suspicion, then purposely pick a bad option over and over until your bar is 1 wrong answer from full. Then you can complete the rest for the achievement.

Mesmer here, I’d be interested in doing it on either day, whichever you need another person (Sunday preferred though). I just need p4 for my DM, but as someone who came back to the game a few weeks ago, it’s been ages since I’ve run Arah and wouldn’t mind a refresher.

For WvW roaming you could do a D/D burst or a P/D condi or hybrid stealther, usually with SB as the secondary weapon. I don’t have exact builds handy since I mostly do tPvP and PvE, so someone else can probably provide that.

This is the dungeon meta build: http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAoYVl8Mp6pNOxwJ0PNRLRtdHsBfgXnh2XQAEiA-TFCBABVq+zZKBxa/R5HAHAh803wwBEIg3UgeHCgAAHA/23++b++7v/+8zP/8zPvf/93f/93RBERA-w

PvE is pretty much always full berserker gear. You can tweak utilities depending on the situation, but that build will give you the highest damage output you can get. If you aren’t comfortable with your survivability yet, you can switch to S/P SB 5/6/0/0/3. Less damage but more forgiving with pistol whip evade frames.

The third hit in greatsword auto chain was increased by 17% damage.

Counter attack wasn’t a CD reduction, it was an aftercast reduction. So the knockback happens faster.

I think ricochet was 1 stack of might for 3s for each hit, where each ricochet can hit 1-3 times.

I hate skyhammer and would love to see it removed.

That said, I’d be ok with a map balance pass. Remove the glass panes from the side nodes and possibly hammer, and allow hammer to be dodged and blocked. I could probably live with that.

A ladder with seasons ala SC2 or LoL, each season with unique pvp rewards, would go a very long way towards fixing this.

Getting tops on leaderboards is cool, but its improbable in team arena if you don’t have a few other competent people to play with, and partially luck based, partially cheese build based in solo arena. Ultimately there’s not much (some, but not much) point to doing it.

Getting all the champ titles can be fun, and what I’m working on now. I wish there was an achievement / title for getting every profession champion though.

The decay is a rating decay, not an MMR decay. Because of that, if you come back after a month out of pvp and play 1 game, you will shoot back up to around where you were at.

I think the biggest thing is there isn’t much incentive to do so. The upcoming tournament kind of helps, but where is an actual quality working ladder? Where are pvp seasons that stretch weeks that require dedicated, consistent team play for unique season rewards?

There are none, and with leaderboards being relatively meaningless there isn’t much reason to do anything other than queue in solo or with a friend when one is around.

Aside from that, the actual act of forming a team is difficult. I’ve tried myself recently. It’s hard to find people with similar play times and skill level with similar pvp goals that get along well. Even if you do, half the time they will fade out without dedicating any time to a team, and the other half flat out don’t respond to you if you’re not some known top 10 LB player.

My mes friend noticed his phantasms hitting harder lately as well, so we tested this.

We went into a custom, him as a standard shatter mesmer spec (4/4/0/0/6 with zerk), myself as an ele with ~1650 toughness (0/0/6/4/4 with celestial).

His iSwordsman was regularly hitting me, with 1650 toughness, for 6-7k each. The hardest crit we saw was 8200. With 2 swordsmen up I was almost killed from full health by a hit of each.

I was also hit by the warlock in a duel for almost 10k, but I wasn’t watching how many condis I had on me.

What prompted this whole thing was him noticing a swordsman hit for over 10k on a zerk ele.

I don’t mind half of the fix, but I would really like to hear the reasoning behind making thieves essentially uninterruptable.

Runes of strength with a x/6/x/6/x build, with might on signets and dodge is pretty nice. It’s not as borderline OP as it is on some classes like ele, but it puts out some nice numbers, and it ties together well as an acro S/D build.

I’ve been running something very similar in solo arena since the patch, but 0/0/2/6/6 for the +damage within 600 range trait, and air sigil instead of energy for more dps. It’s potent with great sustain and solid damage once you get the might stacks up. Very viable now, and a fun build to play.

The lightbulb moment for me a month or two back running a 30/x/30/x/x build without DE, coming from shatter, is you need to adopt more of a phantasm playstyle. Stop trying to shatter all the time and let your phantasms get a couple rotations off. You will be shocked at how much more effective it is. It was like a night and day difference for me.

That’s not to say you never shatter, but you need to be very selective. I rarely use MW or CoF anymore, unless its on a downed target to avoid wasting clones.

Sweet chat drama like the good ol’ days of AR mists back near launch. It got so entertaining that I would stop queuing into games to watch it.

Oh, and a bank would be nice as well.

For tpvp, I’m still toying with new lockdown builds. I’m having good success with this one though:

S/P GS
Sig Heal, decoy, MoD, Dom Sig, MI

6/2/6/0/0
Halting, Sig Mastery, Power Block
Phant Fury
Ill Defense, Bountiful Interruption, CI

Zerk ammy, lyssa runes (strictly for MI condi clear), air+generosity sigil on both weapons

Play it like a phantasm mesmer (rarely shatter) with a focus on interrupts using MoD, signet, pistol and GS 5. Rupts are huge if landed, doing good damage, giving you boons, and CI+PB on the enemy. Before you heal pop your phants so you can pop a 2nd set immediately after. Basically keep them locked down while your phants shred them. It’s a little weak against heavy condi if you can’t control the fight, which is why I had to keep lyssa runes and the condi transfer sigil.

From what I understand, GS/Staff is more prominent in EU than NA. A lot of NA mesmers are still running S/x in place of staff (at least, pre-patch). Staff is generally a more effective weapon against thieves than a sword combo.

As someone who went from thief main to mesmer main, what you want to do as a d/p thief against a staff mes is stealth up / disengage when he drops chaos storm and pops chaos armor. Both of those stack up a lot of nasty non-damage condis that can really wreck a thief who goes in guns blazing.

I can understand preventing it from working on auto attacks and rez/stomps, but I absolutely would not agree if they made thieves completely immune to it. We actually have a good shot against thieves now with it.

That said, 6/2/6 pb+CI is amazing.

No sympathy from me either. 4v5 is out of control lately, and whether that is from intentional leavers or a bad ISP, it’s still an auto loss and a wasted 10-15 minutes for 4 other players.

If you are having connection issues but still want to try and practice, go find a custom arena or something. Don’t keep ruining games for people who queue up.

This trait is an instant contender if its really putting thief skills on CD. They were a very tough matchup to lockdown specs pre-patch, and this could really shut them down.

Interrupt a d/p thief HS, he can’t stealth for 10s.

Interrupt a s/p thief pw, he can’t pw for 10s.

That’s insanely potent and very reminiscent of gw1 mesmer play.

Last night I ran close to what was the old d/d meta before the nerfs.

0/0/10/30/30
Sig heal
LF, cleansing flame, AoE
Celestial amulet
Battle, doom or air sigils
Strength runes

Great sustain with the buff to the heal and EA icd removed. Power is fine with a maintainable ~15 stacks of might in combat. Played well against most builds but did struggle against a couple things. Ended up on an 8-1 run in solo arena using it (and then tanking with a yolo zerk FA for lols )

I really want to play around with the blind on burn trait to sustain a more offensive build but I don’t have the skillpoints yet on the ele to buy it.

(90 second cooldown)

So this is sort of a “last minute” LF team for anyone who might still need a 5th. I was putting something together myself but some of the people fell through.

I’m a recently returned rank 53 (most of that was before rank rewards were buffed), have played off and on since launch with ~3k games played. I main mesmer and thief, but am also knowledgeable enough to play ranger or warrior if necessary. Can play all the meta builds, plus a few creative ones of my own.

Have a mic, solid understanding of tpvp strats and matchups, and can jump right into practice quickly with anyone. Can also stream practice matches if needed.

PM me here or in game if anyone has a fit.

I’m pretty sure I saw that they are leveling it out to be 20k/rank from 39-80. If that is true, then:

39-80 = 820k glory (20k x 41 ranks)

Right now, from 39

450k to hit 49 (45k from 39-49). 75k a rank after that. Hitting 54 is 825k.

So it looks like 53 with 70k/75k is the mark. This is assuming my quick math was correct, and it is 20k a rank from 39-80.

Skyhammer isn’t pvp.

Skyhammer is who has the most engineers/pulls/stability. No one actually fights each other on this map, they just try to land pulls and KBs. This map absolutely has to go from queue.

I really don’t care overall, but after some thought I think it would’ve been a fairer compromise to rebalance so that rank 70 is the new rank 80. 70-80 is ridiculous, but we can see r70 is possible in a year or so now with dedicated play and 1000/1500 for wins.

This way, people at the front end of the curve who’ve hit 70 get rewarded as dragons, but only them. No one’s feelings are hurt, and we get a new rank 80 that is actually possible for more pvpers.

zaced.7948:

wait, so we have to transmute stuff in pvp now? i can’t have another look in pvp than in pve? i get tons of pve stuff in pvp which i have absolutely no need for after i have to transmute stuff instead of simply switching every time i want to? erm … nothxbb

You can have a different look in pvp. Just buy some cheapo white items for a few silver and skin them with the charges you get for your pvp rank. Then when you pvp, just equip the white items.

Lux.7169:

Nettle.9025:

Doesn’t mean anything to me personally, because rank has always been a number that many mistakenly relate to skill when it’s really only an indicator of time spent.

If anything, maybe others will have incentive to play more with dragon becoming feasible for more people, whereas before only the most dedicated diehards had a shot at it. Anything that encourages more people to pvp is fine by me. Mid/upper 50s now is still a decently high time investment in this game mode.

Except to some people it was a prestige.

Just like legendaries. Some see it as a grind, which it is. Now imagine anet saying they’re going to make it more achievable and all ascended gear will instantly be legendary and you get to choose the skins. People who were already so far along get hipped and people who just have ascended basically get a freebie boost.

If its meaningless leave it alone.

That analogy doesnt really work because the process of making each is completely different. It’d be more like saying, instead of needing 250 t6 mats for your gift of fortune, you can now make it with 100. Even then it doesn’t work, because legendaries are feasible for most people (attainable in a couple months if you really want one), whereas dragon rank is not at all for almost anyone.

While I can see that some people think time spent is an accomplishment (though I can’t understand it, any no-lifer can spend a lot of time at something), I think it’s the wrong thing to be taking prestige from. Perhaps the biggest problem is that this game has no real reward for skill, so people have to fall back on ranks to feel like their time spent is worth something.

Doesn’t mean anything to me personally, because rank has always been a number that many mistakenly relate to skill when it’s really only an indicator of time spent.

If anything, maybe others will have incentive to play more with dragon becoming feasible for more people, whereas before only the most dedicated diehards had a shot at it. Anything that encourages more people to pvp is fine by me. Mid/upper 50s now is still a decently high time investment in this game mode.

I believe it’s because the leaderboards have fake decay. You drop when you don’t play, but as soon as you do you will jump right back up to where you were. This is why you’ll notice if you take a week+ break, come back and lose a game, you will still jump way up from the loss.

For people complaining about having to pay to switch pvp looks, just buy a cheap set of whites and use the charges you get for your ranks to set up your look one time, and then switch to that set when you pvp. The stats don’t matter so whites are the cheap and easy option.

For people complaining about rank, when has rank ever really mattered? There are a lot of r40/50+ who aren’t that good. The reward tracks seem like the new thing for people who need a carrot on a stick to enjoy pvp. We also have potential ladders to look forward to in the future (maybe?)

If anything, the changes will entice more people to come into pvp. More people in pvp = faster and more balanced queue system with a larger pool of active MMRs to pull from = more interesting games and competition.

Pyroathiest.4168:

Nettle.9025:

I would say that, yes, lockdown is the highest skillcap of Mesmer. You need better reflexes and skill usage awareness than a shatter mes needs, and it is more unforgiving towards mistakes.

You’re confusing high skill cap and hard to play.

Something being hard to play (has a high skill floor) doesn’t automatically mean it has a high skill cap. The 2 concepts are entirely unrelated.

I’m not confusing them. I genuinely believe it has a similar skill cap to shatter (for different reasons), but a higher skill floor, and so I consider it the harder build to play overall. I can admit though that I might be slightly biased because I’ve had more practice with shatter.

A 20/20/30 is kind of a hybrid shatter/lockdown and plays pretty similarly. I think they are fairly equivalent.

A pure lockdown (in my opinion) of 30/x/30/x/x is more difficult to play than shatter. If you nail your interrupts you can counter probably 6 of 8 classes in this game, but if you miss anything you’re completely screwed. Lack of DE and escape mechanisms makes it a bit more unforgiving. If you are out of position you are in more trouble than you would be with a standard shatter build using blink, DE, and MI.

I would say that, yes, lockdown is the highest skillcap of Mesmer. You need better reflexes and skill usage awareness than a shatter mes needs, and it is more unforgiving towards mistakes.

I don’t think, at least for me, that power block is going to be worth it.

The 30/0/30/10/0 pure lockdown I’m running now is just too good with the immense amount of condi cleanse and 3 dazes using harmonious mantras. Having played pure lockdown extensively recently, I just don’t think 5 more seconds is going to make a big enough difference to warrant dropping what I have now.