Guild Wars 2

spoj.9672:

You cant nerf energy sigils without compensating the necro.

As others have said, just make energy sigils give ~9 seconds of vigor. Since necros don’t have access to vigor, they will not be affected significantly; in fact, vigor is sometimes better than instant endurance, since vigor is rarely “wasted” like energy sigil often is.

The problem is energy sigil stacking with vigor stacking with other traits to allow many builds to spam dodges.

Leeto.1570:

Yes 200 animation range on drakes breath will be gamechanger in TOL…
TCG will still win with human thief and guard, its stupid to force people play something else than their mains and pretend that it changes something, i can guarantee you that GW2 is not played on such level of competitiveness where player race decides outcome of match.

Would it decide the outcome of a match? Probably not. After all, most teams use Asuras, so it’s not like it would be giving a “disadvantage” to any one team. It would make it more fun to watch, though, especially small sidepoint fights.

I don’t think many PvPers play Asura except for the animation advantage, anyway. They’re about as cute as sewer rats.

Exedore.6320:

Just because a vocal subset of players hate it and posts on the forums continually doesn’t mean that the general population dislikes it.

Actually, the reverse is true.

Because that thread only asks for the “favorite” map, a choice like skyhammer may appear to be much more popular than it really is.

Let’s say that about 70% of the playerbase dislikes skyhammer enough to want it removed from solo arena. There are probably another 20% who don’t care too much, and 10% who like it.

So imagine that 90% of the playerbase spreads their votes around 6 different maps—about 15% per map, varying fairly widely from map to map. Skyhammer comes in at a solid 10% and appears to be not significantly less popular than other maps, even though only one in ten players actually like the map.

vincecontix.1264:

In a tpvp comp what reason is there to bring an engi over a ele?

I think cc is probably the main advantage, and maybe cleave, although engineer cleave is limited by bubble rezzes. Ele is definitely good right now though and is probably a bit better overall in a premade vs. premade fight.

Yeah, it’s unfortunate. It was really a neat map concept, but it doesn’t mesh well with GW2’s skillsets.

The main problem is that the map gets less fun when you build specifically for it, not more fun.

Bombsaway.7198:

Should the delay on bombs (not the BoB toolbelt kit) be reduced so that the engineer would perform better in a larger zerg v zerg situation in wvw?

Outside ascetics, would it really add to the power level of the engineer unfairly in any other mode of play?

With lag and the murderball of pvp often the enemy is not where you placed the bomb and given the radius of the bomb it isn’t like the grenade where you throw where you anticipate them going to be.

1. Would it be unfair to increase the speed of the grenade flight? This again would greatly help an engineer in wvw where multiple enemies run in multiple directions and there tends to be lag issues so it is not a pure “throw where they will be” issue.
   Given performance is a bit of an issue, why not speed the grenades up to improve predictability of the damage? Think Read the Wind only less dramatic.

I don’t think any of this is necessary. Engineers need to rely on skillshots in small encounters, and in zerg encounters, you can’t miss anyway. Speeding them up would just get us nerfed when people lose 1v1s to us, without helping us in zergs.

lunyboy.8672:

NevirSayDie.6235:

And I do agree that ultra-low skill floor builds like full-cheese engineer or warrior are a problem.

Ultra-low skill floor… on Engineer.

Riiiiight.

Well, it used to be impossible to create a low-skill-floor engineer build, but then came balthazar runes, the current version of IP, and projectile-reflecting turrets. Hopefully, engineers will go back to being that profession that is hard, but fun and effective, soon. That’s more or less what they are in team queue, but team queue essentially doesn’t exist atm—just solo queue and solo/duo queue.

Granted, engineer’s super simple build options aren’t really top-tier like warrior’s super-simple builds are, but it’s still a bit more cheese than I’d like to see. And as I said, staff ele players have done extremely well in solo queue recently, along with plenty of other non-cheese builds.

Hi,

I came up against an interesting dilemma earlier. I was doing some PvP and noticed another group of players displaying a significantly offensive guild name (in this particular case, profanity and sexism). I’m not trying to be a morality policeman, but it seemed significant enough to report.

Is there a correct way to do that?

Thanks.

Yeah, it would be really crazy if a staff ele dominated from the #1 position or something weird like that. Yup, definitely impossible.

In all seriousness, good solo queue builds come in a variety of shapes and sizes. There’s actually a lot of value in a pure teamfight-carry build like staff ele. Quickly turning teamfights can snowball an entire match instantly.

Of course, solo-artist type builds are more common as solo queue heroes, understandably so. And I do agree that ultra-low skill floor builds like full-cheese engineer or warrior are a problem.

Don’t protect home point. I know, I know—protecting home point is good. But you are too important to your team to miss any teamfights. That’s right. You have to be in everything.

Ele is a good carry profession. You have mobility, teamfighting, and solo artist capability. Carry the teamfight at mid, race to close point to hold it 1v2 because two of your teammates just lost a 2v1 there, decap far because your team wiped and there was nothing you could do. Intercept a straggler and kill him off point. Win another teamfight, etc, etc.

Be everywhere and do everything.

Protivnik.8907:

Hi everyone! Been a longtime fan of GW and GW2 however I just got back into GW2 after breaking for about 6 months. I really enjoy the PvP but today I had the dishonorable debuff applied to me. I have never seen it before until now so I am assuming it’s a newer addition to the game. Earlier today I left a match early because my family was about to head to the store – one strike right? Well apparently I had two others that I was unaware of and the debuff was applied to me. Today is a thursday, so the 72 hour debuff prevents me from playing all weekend basically. It kind of killed my vibe as I was just starting to get back into the game. This kind of thing alienates players like myself who are getting into PvP and may not necessarily intend to cause grief to other players. An hour or maybe even a few hours sounds reasonable but preventing a player from accessing half of the gaming experience for such an extended period of time seems excessive to me. Anyone else have two cents on this topic?

It’s not a 72 hour ban iirc. Each stack of dishonored lasts for 72 hours, and you can’t play if you have three stacks.

So if you got one stack Tuesday, one stack Wednesday, and one stack Thursday, your first stack would expire on Friday and you’d be able to play normally until you hit three stacks again.

Imo it’s a necessary and reasonable restriction that simply asks people to think if they’ll be able to play their match before queuing up.

FearedbytheGods.8617:

NevirSayDie.6235:

I honestly don’t understand why the forums are so obsessed with esports.

I saw someone link you a post once where JP had stated that they sat around at lunch discussing how GW2 could become an e-sport. You then made some silly crack about how it was off topic and were going to ask the thread be closed….

If your going to stick your head in the sand you’ll never understand this ‘obsession’, as you like to call it.

The truth is the community talks about because they said it.

I’m a human being with limitations and faults. Sometimes, I’m wrong about stuff. If someone linked me a quote that opposes what I’ve stated, and I failed to see it or remember it, I’m sorry.

But this is getting ridiculous. You’re saying that you saw something in which someone said that something I said about something JP said was incorrect?

I remember having a similar forum conversation maybe six months ago, and someone linked me to some pre-launch interviews where JP talked about how excited they were for launch. I don’t remember asking for that thread to be closed, but it’s possible—I have suggested I believe two different threads be closed in the last couple years. It’s even possible that JP mentioned lunch in one of the articles. He did use the word “esports” a few times, mostly talking about the games they had observed to draw inspiration from for their PvP systems.

I did a quick Google search just now and found an interview with Colin about PvP from last year. He does talk about how he thinks there’s an open space in the esports world for MMOs (i.e. there are no MMO’s that are esports). He says he’s hoping that GW2 becomes the “number one PvP game in MMOs.” He says that at launch, they didn’t “have the things in place required to make PvP really successful,” and that they’re slowly working to improve it.

I just don’t understand the forum (over)reaction about esports, is all.

Hotjoin was a really interesting idea that the devs had back in beta. The idea was that maybe an MMO could be so action-oriented and casual-friendly that PvP could have a mode where players just joined and left whenever they wanted.

I’ve never really liked hotjoin, but it was a bold idea. I still use it when I feel like running a really awful build just for fun or if I want to warm up before a real match. Just make sure you never look at the score while playing hotjoins, and that you don’t play for more than ~20min at a time, or it starts to feel really dumb.

Try some solo arenas! Yes, you have to wait in a queue for a few minutes, but when the match starts, it is way more enjoyable and meaningful.

Just about one year ago, one of the biggest and longest-running jokes on the PvP forum was this:

“Which is stronger: a warrior or a ranger pet?”

…the joke was that everyone said “A ranger pet, obviously.”

I also find the hotjoin community to be subpar, and unfortunately the PvP community in general has gotten less friendly over the last year or so. Used to be the best subcommunity in GW2; now…it’s average at best, and hotjoins are the worst subcommunity.

Have you tried solo/team arenas? Both can be joined as a solo player, and they’re much more friendly and even than hotjoins. I have never been able to think of hotjoin as anything more than a practice area, honestly.

Rentapest.6503:

It ryhmes and it perfectly describes my PvP evening.

Why is nothing done about balancing the teams in spvp? Why is nothing done about players abandoning the battle? Why are the teams not auto-balanced when players leave?

Why are bunker builds not removed from 5v5? This is an important and relevant question. Think about it this way…a bunker takes 3-5 players (or more) to kill them! So if it’s 5v5 and the enemy team has 2 bunkers, they effective have 10-15players versus your 5. How is that even remotely balanced?! It’s not, so why is nothing done about it?

Large/massive aoe circles that cover entire capture points. The perfect example of this is the rediculously OP hambow with his 500mile radious fire aoe that never ends with his tough armor, 30k health and immunity to damage, stun etc. Why is nothing done about this?

Because GW2 has very dynamic combat, the damage you deal increases drastically the better you get at landing it. The “bunkers” that you’re seeing aren’t taking much damage because you’re not landing very much. Keep practicing, and you’ll start to see bunker builds melt to your onslaught. Bait out dodges, strip defensive boons, stack might on yourself, use and cover poison effectively, interrupt key skills, immobilize/stun to lock into AoE, dodge well, and bam—suddenly that bunker doesn’t seem so OP anymore.

Hambow is a strong build, but has plenty of weaknesses. Don’t be afraid to give up the capture point when dueling one—too many players feel they must stand in the circle no matter what, and just melt to combustive shot.

And once you’re feeling a bit more confident, try solo or team arenas. People generally don’t leave mid-match and the teams don’t usually become 4v5. But it sounds like you’ll want to keep honing your skills a bit first. (Hint: if you’re afk, you’re not honing your skills.)

Darnis.4056:

I don’t understand how PVErs misconstrue “Concentrating and Forcing fights in areas of a map” as “Fighting over points more important then killing players”.

Not every game mode has to be about a rotating champ farm like wvwvw, where you zerg down players all day…

Completely agree. As far as I can tell, conquest is the best thing to happen to GW2 combat. It encourages mobility but still punishes running away. It allows for large teamfights, 1v1s, 1v2s, and 2v2s all in a single match. It encourages team splits and strategy instead of just balling up. All that, and it’s still pretty simple and easy for anyone to understand.

SkylightMoon.1980:

Its hard to believe that we have only 1 game mode after this long in the games history. Its also shameful that the only game mode we have doesn’t even incentivize you to fight the enemy, but just cap points. How is this possible? What are the devs thinking when designing this? There has been an enormous backlash towards the way PvP has been handled in gw2 and yet all Jon Peters does is tell everyone gw2 will soon be an esport.

Aw yeah, I was just chatting with JP last week and he was telling me GW2 was going to be an esport…

Just kidding. Can we stop claiming the devs talk about esports? Because they don’t. JP was interviewed several times in 2012 and mentioned that as the team had designed PvP, they had looked at aspects of different esports such as LoL.

I honestly don’t understand why the forums are so obsessed with esports.

Soul.9280:

I wonder if this list needs to be different for teamq versus soloq. While I’ve heard that Engineers aren’t viable in top tier Teamq, in soloq they do quite well in top tier. Nevirsaydie was top 25 in soloq up until this week, he runs a 3 kit engi, and was very good at point assault with good survivability.

Lol thanks. It’s true, engineer is better in solo arena than team. Susceptible to focus fire. And unfortunately I had a pretty bad run of luck in solo arena recently so I’ve fallen pretty fast

Arganthium.5638:

infantrydivEU.9670:

Are people on this thread purposely acting dumb?

Sigil of air x3 + Sigil of fire x2 = 5k+ damage over 10 seconds. These sigils are doing more damage than even Incendiary powder.

Lol chill dude, I didn’t see the part about 10 seconds.

First of all, I’d like you to tell me the last time you saw a thief running sigil of air and sigil of fire. I’ve only ever seen thieves running one or the other (including since the update to sigils/runes), not both at the same time.

Secondly (and more importantly), the probability of hitting sigil of air three times and sigil of fire twice in a given 10s period is extremely low (and technically impossible in the case of SoFire anyways) on a 20066 thief such as this one. Even assuming you had permanent fury and could get in 2 hits per second on average (which is highly unlikely), it would still take you ~1.587 additional seconds on average to activate your sigils, meaning you’d get in an average of 2.18 Lightning Strikes and 1.52 Flame Blasts per 10 seconds- and this, again, is highly optimistic, when you considered that we assumed that we would be making a total of 2 hits per second on average and had permanent fury. Plus, I’m not even sure that the meta 20066 thief runs Sigil of Agility anyways- I just put that in for the additional precision.

And anyways, in the end, anybody who runs enough power/precision and the two sigils to get 5k damage/10 seconds (assuming that’s even possible) is going to be pretty glassy anyways, and will probably go down quickly. Ironically enough, conditions are a massive weakness to S/D, as well.

Right, 500dps+ from air/fire is a top-end scenario. It’s not completely unlikely, though.

Air/fire combo may not even be the best for thieves, but this topic is about free damage of all kinds. Free direct damage is currently slightly higher than free condition damage, although if you count stuff like doom/geomancy as basically free damage then it’s close.

I’d like to see all kinds of free damage toned down. In return, energy sigils could be changed to grant vigor instead of instant endurance refills, so that dodge spamming wouldn’t be so effective.

The April 15th patch was good, but it had one large drawback: power creep. Every build in the entire game got significantly stronger. As a result, gameplay deteriorated. For example, spamming dodges is easier and more effective because it’s easy to equip energy and another good sigil with no cooldown interference. Glass cannons are now easier to play because even if they dodge your burst, you get more damage for free with fire/air! Whee! Everything is free—damage, dodging, might!

That’s why we need to guard against power creep.

Arganthium.5638:

So you’re telling me that there are players with over 3600 power in sPvP? Because that’s how much it takes to hit for 5k on sigil of air alone (even more power for Sigil of Fire). Even with 25 stacks of might, this is impossible.

According to the wiki, sigil of air has a 3 second cooldown, fire has a 5 second. So it sounds very, very possible to get 5k damage worth of procs from the two sigils over a 10-second period.

I would guess with fury and a very high crit build, a lot of might, and fast-hitting attacks, you could squeeze about .5-1k damage per second out of fire/air combined.

ErazorZ.5209:

I just changed the trait and you are right, it was the problem all allong. i do insane dps with insane healing now, sadly im carrying allot of my team, any suggestions on where to find good teammatchmaking outside of the game?

Yes, just choose “arenas” and then “solo arena.”

“Play now” doesn’t really have matchmaking, and team arena isn’t optimized for joining solo.

Eurantien.4632:

The dude near the top of the NA solo queue leaderboards runs zerker staff (not full zerker traits though) “Josre”. I know he’s got mad damage and I know he is able to tank a bit when it counts. Which suggests it isn’t ONLY viable when a team supports it.

I think your “staff being viable if the ele is skilled” is right on and that therein might lie your problem.

Yup. Played against him for the first time several matches recently and he carries hard. He is usually #1 on the leaderboard, unless he doesn’t play for a while and decay kicks in, or some other person who hasn’t played for ten years skyrockets up to the top.

I think his build is even better in solo arena than team arena. In teams, he’d get focused by enemy roamers, especially the thief. But in solos or hotjoins, he positions well, uses defensive abilities smart, and staff/icebows massive AoE nukes everywhere.

ErazorZ.5209:

I think you need to stop Bming this thread eurnatien and actually accept the idea that elementalist staffs are terrible in sPvP. seeing as there is no matchmaking whatsoever hence there is always the guy who just started playing versus 5 r80ies where you need to actually figure out yourself what to do cause you Cant relly on your team.

Also where do i find his traitset/runeset etc eurantien? Im wondering how much of an anti condi build he has….

It’s not BM, the guy is good and his build is good. Staff ele is good.

You don’t need an anti-condi build. Just kill the condi player and you’re good. Although if you really want an anti-condi build, support staff is what pushed condi comps out of the meta.

Evan Lesh.3295:

NevirSayDie.6235:

Could definitely happen that way. Do you think that’s more of a problem stemming from players not being able to easily switch builds on a per-map basis? It goes both ways: If someone is built for one map, there is no guarantee they get the map. They may do poorly on a map they didn’t vote for, or need to switch builds to adapt.

You can think about whether a certain implementation of a map vote feature would be a good one if you imagine how it works given any subset of maps. What if we had 2 maps, 20 maps, or 20 game modes?

I would prefer a map vote feature to be an improvement over the total RNG we have now rather than a solution to an atypical conquest map.

I actually find the PvP build system to be very streamlined, so I don’t see that as an issue. Anyone who wants to run a skyhammer build can run one. People just don’t like building that way.

I don’t think the number of maps or game modes makes a big difference. Most games with a ton of maps + a voting system randomly select 2 or 3 maps for the players to choose from upon queue pop. The voting system doesn’t need to account for 20 maps.

I completely agree that you don’t want the vote system to be thought of as a “solution” to one map. That’s why I don’t think you should go overboard to “protect” it using weighted rolls. Even though skyhammer is the least popular map atm, there are still enough people who like it that it will pop regularly for them in straight votes.

Just offer a choice between three maps on queue pop, voting favorite style rather than veto style. That’s important because veto style is much harsher on unpopular maps. Offering three maps means that it potentially takes fewer votes for a map to win the vote. It’s much better to “protect” skyhammer that way than by “rigging” vote results.

Thanks for taking time to discuss this so thoroughly!

Evan Lesh.3295:

Darnis.4056:

I dunno I feel like this thread is more about putting in a new feature, which could as a secondary part of this thread disenfranchise quite a few players
(33% voted to keep skyhammer in Soloque, this is not a small amount)
It’s not really about forcing players to do one thing or the other..

ALSO ::

IMHO Making the Vote a RNG system where each vote buys a roll for a certain map and the winning map is the one with the highest roll is fair. (I feel like this idea was ignored, or maybe I’m missing something)

Well said. I don’t think the weighted RNG is being ignored. It is an elegant solution that both caters to the masses and doesn’t ignore the minority.

Please see my above post for why I don’t think weighting votes is a good idea. I predict that a lot of players will feel very insulted if they feel the system is “rigged” to make skyhammer come up more often than it “should.” Notice how the entire “Choose the maps” thread turned into a “skyhammer” thread. That’s because there are a lot of players who don’t like skyhammer. Making their vote count less is not going to be well-received.

It’s also going to endanger your skyhammer players to verbal abuse. Consider the following scenario:

—Skyhammer pops
—Map chat complaints start: “Which one of you idiots voted for this map?” “It wasn’t me.” “Not me.” “Not me.”
—A skyhammer build such as Darnis’ greatsword/focus/boonrip mesmer instantly shreds three normal builds rushing into the skyhammer platform.
—“It was YOU who voted for this garbage, wasn’t it!?!?!”
—A long stream of insults, curse words, and dishonor stacks ensues

No one wins in a weighted-vote scenario. If 30% of the playerbase votes for skyhammer somewhat consistently, it will come up on its own, as all the math has shown. If only 20% do, it will still come up. If only 10% like skyhammer enough to ever vote for it, then it needs to become a hotjoin map.

Darnis.4056:

Jasher.6580:

Here is what I get from this thread.

There are a lot of people who hate Skyhammer and the developers are planning on coddling the minority who contribute to making the majority miserable.

The people who like this map, like it at the expense of making everyone else miserable.

The only people who have fun on this map are the people pulling and pushing people off with troll builds. The people they are doing it to HATES it. Don’t FORCE us to play with these people… because basically that is what you want to do.

I dunno I feel like this thread is more about putting in a new feature, which could as a secondary part of this thread disenfranchise quite a few players
(33% voted to keep skyhammer in Soloque, this is not a small amount)
It’s not really about forcing players to do one thing or the other..

ALSO ::

IMHO Making the Vote a RNG system where each vote buys a roll for a certain map and the winning map is the one with the highest roll is fair. (I feel like this idea was ignored, or maybe I’m missing something)

I believe the RNG aspect of selection was that only two or three maps would be presented as options, and that presentation would be RNG. So you could be presented with Skyhammer, Forest, and Temple, and get to vote for one.

In a strict veto system, skyhammer would never come up at all. The odds are nonexistent that every single other map would get more vetoes than skyhammer. It would literally never happen in 1000 matches.

In a 6-map vote system, skyhammer might come up too often because the votes would be too spread out. No map would likely receive more than 2-3 votes, so any time you got three skyhammer enthusiasts in a match together, the 30% would likely win.

An RNG roll wouldn’t increase or decrease skyhammer’s chances unless you’re suggesting that the devs play with the numbers to “help” skyhammer out. I don’t think you need me to tell you what 70% of the playerbase would think about that. Also, why even vote if the results are going to be rigged to about 1/6 per map anyway? That’s what we currently have.

Also, I’m curious about something:

You keep on saying that skyhammer will never come up in a straight vote, but then you also keep on saying that a ton of players still like skyhammer and would be disappointed if it never came up. Which is it?

If there are enough people who vote for it consistently that it still comes up sometimes, perfect. If there are so few people who would consistently vote for skyhammer that it would never pop, it’s not worth protecting.

google.3709:

Easy!

Neither Sigil of air or fire will ever show up as the top damage in dmg logg

But burning, burning even at 0 condi dmg will always be the top unavoidable damage!

Exactly.

Burning shows up at the top because everyone applies it. If I get focused in a teamfight, I’ll probably get hit with 3k from air sigils, 3k from fire sigils, etc, etc.

They all show up as small numbers because they’re all counted separately. But if I’ve taken 5k burning damage total from all five enemy players, that will show up at the top even if each of them only inflicted 1k burning damage apiece. Air/fire sigils could hit me for more than that, but they won’t show up at the top because they’re counted separately in the breakdown.

Even in a duel, if my opponent uses four different skills that cause burning and I take 8k burning damage, it will appear that burning did more damage than the direct damage skills—even if the direct damage skills did 3k or 4k per attack (twice as much as each burning attack).

Epidemix Revenge.4862:

Haha… They changed my topic’s subject line from Mr. Evan Lesh to Regarding Skyhammer 20 minutes then merged it with this topic because “This topic already exists”. I wanted him to respond to his own direct quote. In the topic I quoted him from he said he would not respond to the removal of Skyhammer because it was off topic….Which was why I created a new topic challenging his words directly. And now its been sent here to Skyhammer post hell.. the end of the line, the point of no reply.

Well played moderator…well played..

Well you’re lucky it wasn’t deleted, honestly. That’s what I figured would happen—moderators don’t usually tolerate calling devs out by name. This is their forum, and I do respect their right to moderate it how they want to.

It was off-topic in a way; of course, the entire reason people want a voting system is so they can vote against skyhammer, so I’d consider it closely related. I know personally, I have favorite maps and less-favorite maps, but only one that I really don’t want to play. Guess which one?

Rezz.8019:

I like Skyhammer. It is different map and requires different tactics and style of thinking. If you play well then you will never ever get pushed or feared off the edge. I think this map can teach players positioning.
I want Skyhammer added to team arena, it is my second favourite map after the temple.

The map is kind of fun at the casual level you describe here, where players are trying to fear or push each other off the edges. But that’s not really what most 90%+ players are doing on skyhammer. Combinations of stealth and pulls are much more effective because positioning doesn’t really matter.

The map you enjoy ceases to exist when players start to build for it.

manveruppd.7601:

NevirSayDie.6235:

Remember that your own vote—100% skyhammer—will greatly increase your chances of getting in a skyhammer match. So even if 33% of people didn’t vote for skyhammer real often, and the general public only got skyhammer matches 1 in 15 times, your chances would be about double that, depending on how likely those 33% actually were to vote for skyhammer.

That was my fear too, that a minority of players would be able to enforce their preferences on their opponents. Like Evan said, people want to win, so if someone is running a build that allows them to exploit a map mechanic, you can be sure that player will ALWAYS vote for that map, sure as Grenth’s balls are cold.

Exactly. That’s why it’s important that the vote process is simple. If there’s anything perceived as “funny stuff” that makes skyhammer come up more often than it would otherwise, people are going to get mad. Like really mad.

Honestly, I think the best thing would be to announce skyhammer coming off the solo rotation temporarily, for two weeks, and then judging the responses. My bet would be three or four players—total, in the entire game—would complain, and the other 24,996 would cheer. But it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

However, the good news is that anyone with a 100% voting chance, either for or against skyhammer, would have a massive influence on their chances of getting the map. The difference in probability between 4/9 other players voting a given way, and 5/9 players voting a given way, is huge.

Darnis.4056:

Well yea; this was assuming that 33% of the population would choose skyhammer 100% of the time, which is not going to happen.
You don’t have to be a statistician to know how probability works..

The poll was that 30% of people don’t want to remove skyhammer, that’s a highly improbable situation.

That’s still okay. As I said, it’s better for skyhammer to come up less than one in six times, because people don’t like skyhammer. The point of voting is that people get more say in the maps they play. If they have to play the maps they don’t like just as much as before, the point of voting is kind of null.

Remember that your own vote—100% skyhammer—will greatly increase your chances of getting in a skyhammer match. So even if 33% of people didn’t vote for skyhammer real often, and the general public only got skyhammer matches 1 in 15 times, your chances would be about double that, depending on how likely those 33% actually were to vote for skyhammer.

Darnis.4056:

I plugged the values we have into
http://stattrek.com/online-calculator/hypergeometric.aspx

And the results were favorable(20% Skyhammer will happen)

Unfortunately I don’t think 33% of the population will vote skyhammer 100% of the time to uphold these results.

Sociology has thoroughly proven that people will vote for whatever everyone else is voting for; If you show the results..

I’m leaning toward a Weighted system with More RNG rather then a direct democracy (For this particular feature)

Most likely its the skyhammer lovers who will throw away their votes as they are in the minority.

I’m not sure I followed your process. Do you mean on any given queue pop, skyhammer would have a 20% chance? That’s greater than 1/6, which means skyhammer would be more popular than it is now. But I’m pretty sure I’m misunderstanding something.

My own figures were pretty crude estimations and I’m no statistician, but it seems that having the least-popular map (by a large margin) come up somewhat less than 20% of the time—let’s say 10%-12% to account for the other variables you mentioned—is completely sufficient. The whole purpose of voting is to have less popular maps be chosen less often. If the voting system doesn’t make skyhammer chances fall below 1 in 6, there’s a massive problem.

Imo, there’s enough RNG in the 10-player pool to give a great enough variety of results. I think there will probably be a significant outcry if players feel like the voting process is “rigged.”

Personally, I feel skyhammer would be better off as a hotjoin-only map, and the majority of solo arena players feel the same way. If it must stay in arena, so be it. But if a voting system fails to cause the least popular map to come up fewer than 1 in 6 times, it’s not functional at all, and WILL cause player backlash.

Evan Lesh.3295:

The remaining question is: How often would the least popular map (by any amount) actually get played?

Remember, it’s not about simply how often the map comes up. It’s about how often the map comes up for people who like it. Given that players who really like it are a 100% vote for skyhammer, their chances of seeing it would be almost double that of a player who has a 0% chance to vote for it.

So with a three-map, vote-for-favorite system, skyhammer would likely only come up 1/14 times overall. But it would come up 1/9 times for people who vote for it.

Darnis.4056:

I actually haven’t got a clue I can only say for certain Map Voting will effectively remove skyhammer from the Soloque Rotation.

Why do you feel that would happen? Given a 30% chance that any player would choose skyhammer, and a 100% chance that you would, I believe your chances of getting skyhammer would look like this:

1. Two map options offered on queue pop: a little under 10%
2. Three map options offered on queue pop, players vote for favorite map: a little over 10%
3. Three map options offered on queue pop, players vote against one map: well under 5%

I’d say the best solution is to offer three maps and have the voting be for the map you want to play, not the one you don’t like. That way, it’s more likely that skyhammer will be one of the options when 6/10 players are in the queue who like skyhammer. If voting is veto style, it’s far more likely that skyhammer will get 4 vetos and the other maps will only get 2 or 3, even if 6/10 players like skyhammer.

If only two maps are offered, it’s less likely that skyhammer will be an option when 6/10 skyhammer players are in a queue.

Given that the current chance of skyhammer popping is 1/6, I think that you’d still see skyhammer pop nearly the same as it does now, maybe about 1/9 times instead of 1/6.

Players that hate skyhammer would see it much less often than that, because they’d vote against it and would only see skyhammer come up if at least 5/9 players voted from the 30%. If my statistics are right, that’s a huge difference.

tl;dr three-option, vote for favorite style would allow people who like skyhammer to see it pop at a similar frequency as it does now, about 1/9. Players who dislike skyhammer would see it much less frequently, about 1/16.

Let’s keep it on topic guys. The main point of this thread is that a lot of people would like a way to have some say in the maps they play on, specifically most don’t want to have to play on skyhammer. There are at least 1-2 people in this thread who like skyhammer, but I think that even with a vote system it would still come up often enough for them.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Darnis.4056:

As a fan of skyhammer this feature would make me sad ;_;

Thank you for responding, as this is a very real case we would have to handle. What would make this feature work for you?

As I said before, even if only 30% of the playerbase votes for skyhammer, it will still come up regularly. It’s as simple as getting a random match in which 6/10 players come from the 30%. As I stated, that’s about the same probability of getting a match with 6 medium armor professions in it, which happens all the time.

However, I’d again caution that 30% is a very low approval number. That number could easily drop lower after a vote system is introduced, because skyhammer matches would now likely include 6+ skyhammer-specialized builds (usually a mix of survivability, pulls, and stealth). Even skyhammer lovers are likely to reconsider in that situation.

Ario.8964:

I have an 80 warrior and it has been alright as a class but not a very high skill cap and therefore is limited in its max potential. I have been beaten many times by Mesmer on almost every class so it seems like Mesmer is in a pretty good place. So my question is: should I delete my warrior and start over on a Mesmer? I mean, is it more worth the time to play Mesmer? Do you get a higher degree of challenge from it?

I appreciate all responses and contributions, just saying that ahead of time

You should definitely make a mesmer. It sounds like you might not be very familiar with mesmer skills, which is probably why they keep beating you; a great way to learn how to beat a profession is to try playing it for a while.

But what I gather from the thread is that you have seven characters, and your warrior is your least favorite. I assume that you have spent a considerable amount of time on all seven characters to reach this conclusion. And so I really have to assume that making the eighty gold or so you need to buy that 8th character slot is probably not a big deal for you.

Troll.4237:

Just had a couple people tell me that the professions in this game are completely balanced. What are your thoughts in the manner? Personally i think it is not even near balanced and will never be so.

That’s a really creative account name. How did you think of it?

Nabbo.2845:

NevirSayDie.6235:

But in all it is a very strong rating system.

lol pls

I was referring to Glicko2. Do you feel a different rating system is better?

As I mentioned, glicko2 isn’t always perfect, especially when there’s so many variables affecting match outcome. There is a lot more volatility in GW2 than in chess or other things Glicko2 is used for, so naturally, things like lucky winning streaks happen, and the ratings get off.

I believe there are currently about 25,000 people ranked in the NA leaderboards. So you’ll need to hit about 96% to break into the top 1000.

The ranking works purely on the Glicko2 rating system. Your rating is compared to your opponents’ ratings; if you win, your rating goes up. If you win against people with a higher rating than yours, your rating goes up a lot. It’s not a foolproof system when applied to GW2, since there are a lot of variables in solo queue (for example, you might get really lucky and draw super teammates your first ten matches and wind up on the top of the leaderboard). But in all it is a very strong rating system.

Prysin.8542:

Well, honestly, the reason you bring a bunker guard is because it will never die, just like it hardly ever kills anyone either. It is the ultimate form of stalemate.
Also, what the OP seems to be going on about, is that some bunkers are just far too strong in the damage department while still going for maximum defense.

Actually bunker guardians have fairly low survivability compared to pure survivor builds. They go down extremely fast in a 1v2 vs. two roamers, and even 1v1 they will go down without too much trouble.

They’re taken by all the top teams because of their teamfight support and downed-state control. “Holding points” is barely part of the job description.

However, a lot of less-experienced players will do stuff like take soldier’s amulet but without good defensive skills or healing. That means that their builds are literally bad at everything—there’s not much dps and there’s not much survivability, either. It’s no wonder bunkers appear unstoppable against builds like that.

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

My thoughts:
-More emphasis on mobility
-Less emphasis on bunkering because holding points doesn’t matter as much as capturing

Conquest places massive emphasis on mobility; I think that would be greatly lessened in this game mode. Probably it would be best for all five players to stick tightly together at all times and attempt to get 1-2 kills. As soon as your team has 1-2 kills, you can easily send one bunker back to your close point to protect against respawning while the rest of your team wins the match.

Compare that to conquest, where 1v1, 1v2, and 2v2 situations abound. The faster you are, the more likely you are to be able to force the other team to spend more time travelling (i.e. thief decaps far—>5v4 at mid while the other team re-caps it). There wouldn’t be any of that if capping that third point was no use until either you were about to win, or one of your teammates was dead.

Bohab.7825:

Perhaps this isn’t true and I can easily and quickly return my character back to the state it was before I left. So my question… Are there any guides out there as to what has changed and how to go about getting back into the fun quickly? I’ve read the patch notes but the amount of changes listed just left me lost as to what to do now…

Thanks!

Yes, you can.

There were a lot of good changes on the April 15th patch, along with a few overdone/poorly-thought-out changes.

Your gear still has exactly the same stats as before, no change.

Your gear may have changed appearance, because appearance is now the same between PvE/PvP. If that happened and you want your old appearance back, just use transmutation charges on whatever you happen to be wearing. If you don’t play PvE, you will never have to worry about needing to “update” your gear. You’ll want to click the “hero” panel and then the “wardrobe” section.

If you want to switch back and forth between several different looks regularly, just buy starter level armor and weapons for a few copper from the merchants and use transmutation charges on them. This system is slightly more restrictive than the previous one, since you can run out of transmutation charges. To prevent that from happening, just keep “copies” of whatever look you want in your inventory. A bit more restrictive than before, but also more streamlined.

There are a couple of unlockable traits and skills that were a somewhat unfortunate decision. For those, you’ll need extra skill points (fourth healing skill) or PvE maps (new grandmaster traits) or gold (new sigils and runes). I believe the traits can also be purchased with gold, not sure atm. It’s slightly frustrating but you can usually unlock everything you need just by jumping through a couple of hoops. Not good design, but tolerable.

It’s a little harder to get the most out of than most other professions, but there are some simple builds too.

Are you playing PvE, WvW, or PvP?

nightwulf.1986:

Or they just laugh and respond to useful threads.

Bingo. There are threads that are worth a paid employee’s time to reply to, and there are threads that are not.

Also consider that everyone in this forum is convinced that their profession needs to be stronger. Any dev who said anything would instantly receive 8 replies, saying: “(insert profession) needs a huge buff! Anet why are you ignoring us? You hate (insert profession), don’t you? This is all because the devs all play (insert profession) and want it to be the strongest!”

So yeah, I don’t blame them for not posting here.

ajhak.9716:

Anet please consider working on the match making system. I don’t appreciate being matched up with top ranked players when im with much lower ranked people with less skill. The match is not fun at all when we are getting owned by the top ranking people in NA. the lowest ranked person on our team was in the 30’s and their team was made of all 80’s. Considering I’m friends with some of the people from the other team it didn’t bother me to lose, however for people that don’t have a relationship with high ranking players it feels awful to lose just because the match making system is broken. pls fixerino…

Was this team arena or solo arena?

Because team arena wasn’t designed for matchmaking between solo players or small groups, it often places a high-ranked team against a low-ranked one. This happens because the system attempts to simply form a team first. It looks for other players somewhat close to your own rating and then puts you on a team roster with them.

After the roster is formed, it looks for another roster close enough to go against yours. Unfortunately, sometimes the matchmaker already took the five highest-ranked players in the queue and placed them on the same team, leading to some unfortunate matchups.

The solo arena matchmaker shuffles teams and you’ll theoretically never see a situation where one team has a significantly higher average rank than the other. The ten players are shuffled together so that the strongest players end up on opposite teams.

Eurantien.4632:

I really don’t understand why people consider turret engineers to be strong. I have yet to even feel threatened while fighting one. Maybe its because I have typically only fought them using a condition ranger build, but still.

Most engineer builds are weak to conditions and kiting, so that would make sense.

Unfortunately one reason people find turret engineers strong is because of the forums. We’re somehow convinced that winning the fight isn’t as important as standing on the node and dying…things as simple as firing a single combustion shot onto the point, waiting five seconds, and then going melee with the engineer could be enough to win the fight instead of lose it, but people tend to suicide on points constantly. Not to say that decapping builds aren’t effective, but they’re only truly effective when they can’t be killed 1v1, like the old AR decap builds. If you have to choose between dying or killing a guy but losing control of the node for 30 seconds, win the fight.

In addition, engineers do have powerful anti-melee. A lot of people play melee builds, say stuff like greatsword guardian. And of course a semi-tanky greatsword guardian that that isn’t really very good at dps or sustain will get crushed by a turret engineer.

NinjaEd.3946:

Not op, no. Never suggested they were op, but the risk/reward of using them isn’t right in my eyes. If they were op I’d suggest nerfing them and their durations and buffing condition removal to the point where conditions became irrelevant. Even in an earlier post (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/pvp-Toughness-Vs-Vitality/first#post4044916) I may of stepped a bit over suggesting condition builds are everywhere but never once suggested conditions be nerfed. I don’t want them nerfed, I just want them to be more thoughtful and less button smashing. I’ve been melted by conditions far more than I’ve been spiked by power bursts, and that’s me focusing more condition removal than toughness. I know what the skills look like, but there are only so many dodges/blocks/teleports in the game to avoid soaking up long term DoT.

On a side note, torment seems like the most ridiculous condition, when I hear statements like, “limit movement till they wear off”. I think a sitting duck is far more vulnerable than a bleeding limping one. Who ever thought a fast paced game should have a parameter against mobility should have a brick dropped on their foot.

Risk/reward is a strange concept to bring up when you just said you either beat condi builds or just disengage from them. That sounds suspiciously like a very low-risk build.

On the other hand, condi necro is an ultra-high-risk build at the moment. Very little mobility, very few get-out-of-jail-free cards, no blocks, no vigor. If a necro is out of position, he dies, period. There is no “oops, that was dumb but I guess I’m still okay.” I don’t even play necro regularly, but if you think it’s just button mashing, you should give it a try.

There are some condition specs that could be considered brainless just because of the way the build is set up, like PU mesmer. That’s a fault of the build, not conditions in general.

I agree that there are only so many defensive abilities and cleanses before you will go down to a condition build. That’s why you have to kill them first. Healing/cleansing should never be able to keep up with heavy sustained dps.

Evan Lesh.3295:

What if you don’t care what map you play on in a vote system? Should there be a ‘pass’ or ‘vote random’?

What about the case where some people legitimately want to play on less popular maps? Would they ever get to play their favorite map?

This would be a system that provides good metrics.

Skyhammer does not have any more uneven matches than other maps last time we checked.

I think it’s important to keep the process simple. If it’s simple, it will be easier to develop and can be released faster. Also, probably people don’t want a sophisticated voting system to make sure everyone’s needs are met perfectly—they mainly just want the ability to feel like they won’t be forced into a map they don’t like.

Because of the way statistics work, even less popular maps would still get played. Let’s say only 30% of the population likes skyhammer, a rather pessimistic number. The chances of having 6/10 players from that 30% in the same queue is actually not bad. It would roughly correlate to the chance that your solo queue has 6/10 players using a medium-armor profession.

(PS—if the number of people who like skyhammer is truly only 30%, as polls seem to show, it might be more efficient to just remove the map from solo queue and make it hotjoin only. 30% is almost as low as US congress approval ratings.)

NinjaEd.3946:

NevirSayDie.6235:

NinjaEd.3946:

Also food has no place in pvp, which is another place that has problems with condi spam.

Well not really—condition builds have seen some nerfs and PvPers have in general figured out how to deal with them. That’s not to say there aren’t some unfortunate builds still remaining: mace/sword-longbow warrior is ridiculously strong in duels, for example. Turret engineers sometimes use conditions, and they are an unfortunate plague on solo arena and pug team arenas atm.

But in standard team or solo arenas, things like scepter/dagger-staff condimancer have been figured out. They don’t wreck people any more; in fact, they’re barely good enough to compete.

I haven’t played much WvW recently so maybe p/d thieves and PU mesmers are still running rampant there. That’s more a flaw with open-world PvP than conditions, though. You could cut condition damage in half and those builds would still wreck new players in WvW because they can’t be pinned down.

In tpvp whether its power or condition (although power tends to work better in groups due to condi cap), all I see is AoE spam. I watched 1.5hours of the EU ToL and probably an hour of the NA ToL and was not impressed. First off the spectators were kittens, always monitoring the hambow or altruistic guardian and rarely ever panning to the others, and secondly it was just a pile up at mid over and over. People weren’t doing side objectives, they weren’t back capping, it was just a duel at mid. If this is how tourny’s were supposed to play out then just make death match and be done with it.

I don’t roam nearly as much as pvp, but I still have gone out there and seen a huge difference between playing a power and condi spec as well as fighting against power and/or condi spec’s. Conditions were far more lethal because I couldn’t burst them down (built more defense) and on mine I was never near risk unless it was a zerg incoming in which I would Chain CnD off ambient creatures and gtfo. In pvp I can deal with condition builds on most of my builds but there are a few who put them out way to easily and frequently that even timing my condi removal does nothing. Often I just move to another objective because it’s a waste of my time.

I mentioned that in regular old run-of-the-mill solo and team arenas, things like condi necromancer have been figured out and usually get destroyed now. I’m not even talking about top players, just regular arenas. At the top level, of course, there are even fewer condition builds. Not sure if that’s what you meant by bringing up ToL.

Sounds like the worst that ever happens to you in a duel vs. a condition build is that you might get into a stalemate. That doesn’t sound too OP now, does it?