Guild Wars 2

The salt is real.

So if I got this correctly, cele rifle isn’t viable anymore because due to the trait rework we can’t get all the traits at once that snyergize best with cele. Conequently, solider or marauder outperform a cele build that lacks one of those crucial traits, therefore that’s the new meta. Tbh I kinda like this change, because it increases build variety, since now we don’t just go default cele rifle and faceroll anymore. That’s actually a good thing to me, even if that means being temporarily underpowered until the new superior meta builds have crystallized.

But what I don’t understand is why they didn’t handle d/d ele in a similar way. Both builds, d/d ele and cele rifle were roughly in the same spot in terms of balance, since every top tier team would include both in their lineup 99% of the time back then. It would be a great chance to further balance the game for everybody and to give ele players new opportunities to figure out new specializations and playstyles. I hope the devs are going to adress this soon.

Hey folks,

excuse me, but I haven’t played for like 8 months and decided to come back and play some spvp again. So I wasn’t quite able to follow all the changes and updates in the meantime.

So I noticed that the good old cele rifle spvp build appears to be dead and has been replaced by soldier rifle according to metabattle. I actually tried to play a couple of games as cele engi, and it felt like a pile of crap. Might also be due to my long break from the game tho, but it just didn’t feel as strong as in the past.

What makes me wonder though, is that apparently d/d ele with celestial seems to be as powerful as ever. People starting whine threads left and right, complaints everywhere and all the eles seem to play the same build right now. Why is that not the case anymore with cele rifle engi? Please educate me.

Welcome to the Interwebz. You must be new here.

But in all seriousness, GW2 community is like care bear land compared to other games. Try LoL or Path of Exile if you want to see what real toxicity is.

Play time says nothing about the PvP skill of a player. I remember times when I demolished rank80s while only being wolf level myself.

Besides, a player who just recently started playing a new profession might still end up beating you because of stronger overall mechanics. So character level doesn’t mean anything eiter.

Those players with full map explore and shiny skins of epicness are the suspicious ones to me. Oftentimes, you end up with some PvE kittenbags who are only here to farm for rewards and don’t care about PvP.

Only thing that truly matters is MMR. It adapts according to your performance and matches you with equal players. Gotta wait until Dec 16 tho when they launch the new leaderboards.

runeblade.7514:

Because you don’t have to play it. Don’t vote for Skyhammer or court yard if you hate it.

That’s not true. Even if only 1 out of 10 players votes Skyhammer, you can still end up playing that map in the current system.

I understand that there will be no troll maps aka courtyard/skyhammer in the upcoming season map pool, but what’s the justification behind having those maps in the ranked queue right now?

As far as I know there’s currently no MMR and people from all skill levels get matched randomly together. You need to wait until Dec 16 when the new leaderboard gets implemented, then you will be matched with equal players again. Until then you will either have to deal with crazy people all the time or not play at all.

Patch has been deployed 2 days ago and things are not working out according to plan. This is indeed very scandalous, because in software engineering, everything works perfectly from the very first second something new gets released. I mean what are they thinking? It’s their job to work around the clock to appease spoiled teenagers sitting in their basement playing games all day.

Sorry for the antagonistic comment, but in our times it seems, people really need to relearn empathy and patience.

NA will get steamrolled by the other teams, because Americans rack disciprine.

I think OP means people feeling entitled just because they spend money on the game. If you purchase GW2, you are entitled to play the game. If you purchase optional content, let’s say gems, you are entitled to receive that content in the game. But that’s all folks. You are not entitled to dictate the future direction of the game in terms of new game content or balance changes. That’s up to the devs. Some ppl, however, get mad because they paid money and then they act as if they were in charge of designing the game.

Hi everyone,

I apologize in advance for the length of this post. Please scroll down to tl;dr if you don’t like to read.

so the new PvP system has been out for 2 days and there’s been a lot of controversy going on. Many players are unsatisfied with the way party comps are matched with each other, which has resulted in numerous threads of people complaining about facing premades when queuing as a non-premade. To put it bluntly, solo vs premade appears to be the new 4v5.

Let me say, that I like the direction Anet have taken with the merging of soloq and teamq into one big ranked league. It allows people to practice and play for fun in a structured and safe environment (unranked) without all the hotjoin shenanigans while offering a platform for competitive play.

However, I believe that with trying to balance party compositions (i.e. 5man, 4+1, 2+1+1+1 etc) within one big matchmaking-system, you might have opened a pandora’s box. By that I mean, that it will be incredibly hard to offer players a satisfying PvP experience regardless of their party composition. Here’s why:

If you want to give full-premades partly-premades and solo-queuers an equally fun PvP experience within the same matchmaking system, there are 5 major variables that add up to a huge balancing dilemma. Those variables are:

a) party composition (i.e. 3+2, 1+1+1+1+1, full premade etc.)
b) profession composition
c) profession balance
d) waiting time in the queue
e) points awarded

If there’s 5 variables involved, it is hard to determine which combinations are actually balanced and acceptable, so that both teams have realistic chances to win the match. Let me give you a brief example of what I mean for each variable involved:

a) party composition:
we can pretty much agree that a 5man premade beats all other party compositions. However, some compositions may be stronger or weaker depending on the other variables. A 3+1+1 team with 3 players communicating via voice chat is probably stronger than most 1+1+1+1+1 comps. However, this is maybe not the case, if the 3man team gets grouped with 2 bunker guards or thieves, while the 1+1+1+1+1 team gets an optimal meta comp. It’s really impossible to tell, so how could an automated system make the right judgement call?

b) profession composition:
This one is pretty straight forward. There are certain comps that outperform others in the current meta. A team with ele/ele/engi will beat thief/thief/ranger 9/10 times. Keep in mind, however, that this is only 1 out of 5 variables which can mess up the balance completely, even if everything else is fine.

c) profession balance:
This one gets really messy if paired with the party composition variable. In soloq, you could go as far as to argue that the teams with more celestial builds wins the match. However, a burst-heavy comp can counter a high-sustain comp, if executed well. A premade, or a 4+1 could possibly pull this off. A 1+1+1+1+1 cannot, ever. But maybe a coordinated 3man with bunker guard and thief/mesmer burst can beat a full celestial solo group? Who knows. Again, I don’t see how an automated matchmaking system could possibly make the right judgement call.

d) waiting time in queue:
Now this is where it gets tricky. The devs need to take into account, that regardless of overall balance, people are only willing to wait for so long. This is where balance is being compromised the most. You don’t want to wait more than 30 sec? Okay here’s a premade right in your face. Same issue with party compositions. If 3+2’s can only be matched with other 3+2’s, then it will take longer than matching that 3+2 team with a different party comp. Then again, balance will suffer. This is the point, which makes it impossible to make everyone happy balance-wise.

e) points awarded:
This is where performance is measured and points are distributed according to how well someone plays. But how do you determine which amount of points is earned? The odds of victory system is meant to provide a fair solution relative to certain balance factors, such as party comp or profession comp. Which is a step in the right direction in my opinion. But as explained above, there are so many factors, which depend on each other, that it becomes almost impossible to determine a fair outcome. Let alone have an automated system do the job.

tl,dr: people have lately been complaining a lot about unfair matchups. But overall matchmaking-balance is affected by many factors, such as party comp, profession comp, profession balance, points awarded and time spent in the queue. These are almost impossible to balance perfectly. Therefore, many people will still be unhappy with the match-making system for quite a while.

The improvements are pretty huge, compared to the state the game was in before. Of course, some polishing needs to be done that’s for sure. But once the new leaderboards are up and running, we will have a pretty decent pvp infrastructure. Then they can finally focus on balance issues. Let’s hope Tyria won’t be entirely overrun by celestial monkey by then.

- capping close with 2 ppl at start of the game
- capping close and staying there
- fighting off point despite not being pressured
- leave cap to chase some1 and then getting decapped
- leave cap to chase some1 before fully capped
- getting steamrolled in 1v1 despite being turret engi or d/d ele
- horrible judgement calls on rezzing/stomping
- stay in the fight til everything was stomped
- generally poor understanding of rotation concept

There’s a couple of more “noob moves” besides those for sure. Sometimes even experienced players make one of these mistakes, so you can’t always tell. Regardless, everytime I see people do this, I’m pretty sure they are either very inexperienced players, or intermediates in kitten mode.

Laserbolt.6731:

When the match is ready, you must GO RIGHT NOW or suffer dishonor. No time for dueling or doing anything you cannot abandon in 2 seconds. That’s just the way it is now.

Exactly this.

I like the merging a lot. Soloq was swamped with antisocial scumbags. Now these people get an incentive to learn social skills and cooperate with others.

Guild Wars 2 is a casual MMO.

You may calm down now and stop acting as if this game was even remotely esports.

Whiners gonna whine.

loser’s bracket.

Nope, no titles. Sorry pal.

Guy is complaining about rangers, while celestial monkeys are taking over the planet.

100% l2p issue. Now move on and stop feeding the troll.

Celestial monkeys all over the place but devs don’t seem to care.

china wins because asian disciprine

gj you win the internet

epic fail thread lulz

Almost every team nowadays runs 3-4 celestial monkeys. I’m getting tired of it. Please do something about it already.

The celestial monkey part is the only thing that remotely makes sense in this thread.

The moment we’ve been waiting for so long will be finally arriving in less than 24 hrs. Countless days of frustrating 4v5’s and totally meaningless leaderboards will finally come to an end. OMG I haven’t been this hyped since the days before release of GW2!!!!! Kreygasm

China wins WTS because asian disciprine Kappa

I honestly find it hard to believe people care about PvE.

A meta which is exclusively about stacking zerker stats and boons, content that can be easily skipped if you know how to exploit certain glitches, and super epic boss fights where you lure the boss in a corner and spank him down next to a wall.

It was an interesting experiment to make a game which does not utilize holy trinity roles in PvE, but it turned out total garbage. There were MMOs around in 2002 that offered better PvE content than this.

Hi all,

pretty straight-forward question. Maybe it’s hard to give a definite answer, since most of the loot is random. But are there any reward tracks in particular that are more lucrative than others in terms of gold? Any opinions? Thanks in advance!

I don’t mind the occasional game on Skyhammer or Spirit Watch. 9 out of 10 games will still be Foefire or Khylo anyway, which is boring enough.

A mechanic to solve this issue already exists, it’s called teamq.

On top of that, the new odds of victory system will disencourage premature rage quitting, because the loser team’s points will be counted in as well.

You would have to hire an army of new GMs if some1 had to rush in every time some kid starts raging in soloq. Of course they need to get paid for that. I’m sure you will happily pay subscription fees to fund all this.

In all seriousness, if you’re upset about random people acting weird, go find some friends and play teamq.

He capped tranquility but nothing happened after the bar had charged to the end and he had to restart capping the buff. That’s how I understood it.

Happend to me twice already within about 10 games on temple. Nobody was there to interrupt, and I didn’t move away too early either. Just took the buff but nothing happened. Really annoying bug it seems.

I like Skyhammer.

I don’t care what they nerf and how they nerf it as long as they put an end to the current imbalance of cele based engi and d/d ele.

Soz bois, forgot I’m on the interwebz. My bad. Peace out.

So I’ve noticed a couple of “RIP this and that” whine threads in response to the upcoming changes of the PvP infrastructure. In other words, people are whining about stuff that DOESN’T EVEN EXIST yet, and which will be continously tested and modified throughout an extensive testing period in the future.

Seriously boys, wait until it’s ready, then EXPERIENCE IT ON YOUR OWN and then think about providing constructive feedback to help the devs improve the game. Not the other way round.

To me, the degree of irrational whining on the forums is just mind boggling really.

RIP common sense.

ArthurDent.9538:

DD ele on the other hand has several hard hitting skills that are all well telegraphed and a skilled player can dodge each of them consistently. Burning speed, drakes breath, fire grab, earth quake, and (on the off chance that he actually uses it) churning earth, are the skills that should be dodged. Then there is lightning whip for the only decent auto attack on the set, but if he is camping air then there go all of his might stacks, and the damage becomes mediocre again.

Also lol at dodging earth. It is true that if he actually uses churning earth, and you do get hit by it then it will hurt. However with a three second rooted cast time, you not only easily avoid it, but also have 3 seconds to freely dps him down, heal your self, or /dance if you choose. As I have said in the past dd ele is a bit over-tuned at the moment, but statements such as yours are ridiculously hyperbolic and misleading.

Thanks for your critical comment. My post was neither hyperbolic nor misleading. It’s nothing but the truth about d/d ele atm. But you’re free to have your opinion, of course.

You are saying, if I understood correctly, that d/d ele has several well-telegraphed hard-hitting skills that can be dodged. Well, true and false. Technically, you CAN dodge burning speed, drakes breath, fire grab, ring of earth and earth quake. You forgot to add ride the lightning + updraft, or blink + updraft which is often used as an opener and has to be dodged as well. By the way, have you ever tried to dodge blink + updraft? Try it once and tell me how it went

But back on topic, yes you can dodge each of the skills mentioned above individually. However, and this is the crucial point, if you count how many skills he uses in a very short amount of time and then count the amount of dodges you have, you might encounter a little problem there. And that’s exactly what I described above. The “hard hitting” ele skills hit more or less equally hard. It’s not like you are facing an axe bow warr or shatter mesmer, where you need to pay attention to not get hit by eviscerate and shatter respectively. Because if you dodge, you evaded their strongest burst and are in a good spot until it’s off cooldown again. Whereas d/d ele is constantly damaging you with equally hard-hitting skills throughout his rotation, while stacking might, cleansing condis and healing himself. This makes d/d stronger than other builds in the current state of the game.

I disagree with you about cele nade engi. That also needs to be toned down. I’d like to see some of the nades do less damage.

I am interested in why you think cele nade engis are imba. Can you expand on this? I have yet to meet a nade engi who can pull off the build in a skillful enough manner to consistently beat my hambow or condi ranger 1v1. It’s really not been a big issue so far. Keep in mind that I am not facing super top tier players tho.

No, in general, I don’t want more PvE players in PvP. Only if they enjoy the competeitive aspects of PvP and are willing to learn and become dediacted PvP players in the long run.

I think it’s important to differentiate between how PvP and PvE players interpret “rewards” respectively. In general, PvE players want more loot, more skins, more gold, more content and what not. For PvP players, however, succeeding at PvP matches is rewarding in itself. To me, it feels very rewarding to win 1v1s, hold caps, rotate effectively and win close games. I couldn’t care less for PvE rewards such as gold, chests or crafting mats. If I want cool skins, I do reward tracks or buy stuff at the trading post with the coins I get from doing matches. In fact, it’s really annoying to get your inventory flooded with PvE garbage after a couple of games. So making PvE and PvP equally rewarding in terms of loot would be a waste of resources.

On top of that, PvE players shouldn’t be “forced” to play PvP for farming rewards, because PvP and PvE are two completely different games. PvP is about skill and competition, not about killing AI bots for farming stuff. If people don’t enjoy the competitive aspects of PvP, they shouldn’t be playing it. Consequently, making PvP more lucrative to PvE players would attract the wrong people, so it’s a bad idea.

However, I like the route Anet are taking to set up a more rewarding PvP infrastructure with the upcoming PvP patch. It won’t be perfect for sure, but it will a step in the right direction. To make PvP REALLY rewarding, the mode needs some sort of meaningful competition. There needs to be some sort of skill indicator, like a visible rating value or exclusive armor skins awarded to the most successful players within a season. Then it will be possible to, at least to a certain extent, measure your skill and track your progress as a PvP player. This will encourage people to improve and make the whole PvP scene more competitive, which would be really awesome. So let’s hope Anet will continue doing the right things with the upcoming patches.

tl dr: PvP and PvE players are attracted to different stuff. Therefore, giving them the same rewards is useless. Rewards should rather be tailored individually to each group.

Shaogin.2679:

“Broken class/spec” and “op” is tossed around so freely these days. If you have issues beating a class at this point, it’s 90% a learn to play issue.

Agreed 100%. That’s why I think ranger and cele nade engi are fine. These builds also require some skill to play them to their max potential.

Turret engi and d/d ele, however, are a totally different story. Turret means free win in 1v1 90% of the time. The only way to beat Turret engis is to either roll condi necro or try to outmaneuver them through well-organized teamplay. On top of that, the turret AI does all the killing for you, so it’s ridiculously easy to play. Turret engi lets people win games who fail at the dodge intro quest in Queensdale. That’s a clear balance issue right there.

D/d ele is a bit different. In fact, it requires a little bit of practice to get the rotations right, if you haven’t played it before. First problem is that when facing d/d ele, it doesn’t even matter what you dodge. Keep in mind that dodging damage spikes is one of the key abilities that separates skilled players from mediocre ones. But dodging vs a d/d ele doesn’t matter really. If you dodge fire and air, you get hit by earth. If you dodge earth and air, you get hit by fire. On top of that, the damage is more or less constantly the same, so you can’t win duels by dodging the right stuff. Also, his condi cleanse abilities are way overpowered. Let’s say you land your dps spike on the ele and he’s about to switch to water. Even if you keep poison ready and hit him exactly at the right timing before he switches to water, he just cleanses it by switching attunements. It’s just absurd.

All in all, I find the current matter is suprisingly balanced. Balancing 8 professions with different kinds of viable builds isn’t easy. If they fix turret engi and d/d ele, we can all enjoy nearly perfectly balanced pvp.

So it’s skyhammer and I keep 2 people busy at cannon for about a minute until they finally manage to kill me. Meanwhile, my team lost all three points despite being one more.

Soloq makes me so angry sometimes, I might as well just not play at all.

That mesmer guy is obviously crazy.

Doesn’t mean the whole pvp community is like that.

Edit: as a more serious side note, the guy is completely oblivious of the fact that his “meta” way of thinking only applies to top tier of play, where everyone has near perfect mechanics. In low and mid tier level people are “messing up” and outperforming each other mechanically all the time, so the build doesn’t matter as much.

Reaven.3958:

My concern is mostly in a 1v1 scenario. Supposing all things are equal (skill, experience, etc.) and the players are both down at the same time, the ranger will win every time.

Not true. Warrior will just self rezz and stomp you. A downed ele can escape through a mesmer portal in mist form (LOL). Thief downed state is so strong that you rather just cleave him in 99% team fights and avoid stomping altogether. There’s a lot of seemingly imbalanced stuff going on in regards to downed state. But I like the extra variety and tactical options it adds. Also keep in mind that the game is not balanced around 1v1.

Spirits and condi rangers are still going strong. Many successful teams don’t have a ranger, because they rather rely on stacking eles and engis. That has more to do with how celesital ammy synergizes with the current ele and engi builds than with ranger being just bad. Many strong comps don’t run thief/necro/mesmer either. Ranger is fine, it’s the current cele ele/engi dominance that needs to be fixed. Making ranger the new OP profession wouldn’t improve the overall situation at all.

50 views, no replies. Does that mean that the spvp community does not wish to have replays implemented? That’s not what was I hoping for, but it’s still some sort of feedback I guess.

Hi everyone,

I like Anet’s efforts to slowly but steadily position spvp in the esports scene. Still a long way to go IMO but we’re getting ahead.

Now let me say that spvp desperately needs a feature to save the replays of spvp matches. This would help people a lot to study strategies and step up their game. It would also help the organization of leagues and tournaments. Needless to say, all major esports titles have some sort of recording feature and it would help the competitive scene develop a lot.

So please Anet, give us a replay feature ASAP!

Without drastic changes to the current spvp infrastrucutre, there is no hope for growing a fun and active competitive scene.

Here’s why I find it especially difficult to motivate myself to keep playing spvp: going from noob to intermediate is pretty easy. There’s plenty of viable builds including detailed info and video guides. Through consistent practice and repetition you get a solid basic understanding of how to play your class and how conquest works.

But moving from intermediate to above-average skill level is where it really gets frustrating. This is normal for every skill in life, but besides intrinsic motivation, there is zero incentive to try and get better. Leaderboards are utterly meaningless, because of vague and arbitrary evaluation parameters. Why not just adopt the system of WoW arenas? I personally think WoW is inferior to GW2 in every single aspect, except the arena system. There are ladder seasons, a rating value which (roughly) indicates the skill level of a player and is used for fair matchmaking, and special rewards so people can distinguish themselves based on their achievements. Whereas in GW2, noone gives a kitten whether you are ranked 700 or 94% in soloq, really.

What also inhibits improvement is the lack of online content in general. The number of twitch streams is laughable and it’s incredibly hard to find advice which goes beyond composing a build. I REALLY want to learn the more advanced stuff, like how to rotate effectively and how to make right judgement calls depending on the situation. But when I play spvp, I can’t help but feel like everything is happening randomly most of the time. I win games when I play totally brainafk, and lose games despite being sharp and playing “on fire”. It’s like it doesn’t even matter what I do. Team comps are random, builds are random, outnumbering people happens randomly. I believe 95% of the player base experience this (at least to a certain extent), except maybe the top teams that play on a professional level.

This can be overcome through more advanced players producing content. If there’s more guides, streams and video tutorials out there, then people can figure out what they are doing wrong, adapt accordingly and then feel that they are making progress. Right now, however, the only thing I can do is learn through trial and error and talk to more experienced players, who are facing more or less the same dilemma anyways. And don’t even tell me to watch tournament streams. I’ve been watching streams a lot lately, and games were either reset 10times, or streams cancelled altogether. Also, most commentators seem to miss half of what’s going on. It’s a terrible way to learn spvp.