Guild Wars 2

Not really sure what the point of this thread is. It’s pedantic at best. Is this a +1 or something?

Yeah – “DPS the boss” isn’t proper English, technically. So what? It’s basically slang and has been used across any number of MMO’s for years now. It’s a shorthand way of typing something when you don’t really have time to be typing to people in the first place.

Honestly have no idea why people choose to take the term so literally in this context.

Lumines.3916:

It always starts with duelist, dodge roll for another clone, illusionary leap > swap to blurred frenzy + mindwrack.

Depends on whether or not they’re running mirror images.

Typically you’ll get diversion shattered inside a leap first, and then while that’s happening you’ll eat a full mind wrack w/ mirror images – all within 2 seconds or so. That way it’s usually impossible to immune the damage unless you preemptively immune or otherwise avoid the diversion.

Sometimes the mesmer will just stand on your head and instantly quad mind wrack w/ mirror images without ever using leap if he knows that you’re just gonna immune it. Works well on ele’s.

JonathanSharp.7094:

I spoke of this on Friday, but let me reiterate.

We could have had rankings, but without tournaments or a way to get teams playing against each other in an organized fashion, they would have ranked…..nothing. Just the pub play matches. That’s why we wanted to set down a framework first, then add in the custom arenas (for practicing/developing organized matches) and rankings. Having rankings without tourneys or a matchmaking system literally wouldn’t do anything…you would just have rankings based on random pub matches where teams would be anything from 1-8 players. Seems bad to me. That’s why we made that decision.

Does that make sense?

J

I wrote a post regarding this earlier in the thread.

Free tournaments were up and running on launch day, as far as I can remember. They were even up and running as far back as the beta weekends, albeit with some stability issues. Entire teams left the game because they were forced to play tournaments without rankings or matchmaking.

So… no, it doesn’t make sense when you say ranking/matchmaking wasn’t there at launch due to lack of a tournament infrastructure because that infrastructure was in place. Paids weren’t, true, but frees were, and they could have benefited greatly from day one had they been released with both a matchmaking algorithm and a ranked ladder.

If I’ve gone full kitten and am remembering something wrong, please call me out on it – otherwise, what you’re saying is completely backwards and I was really surprised that nobody called it during the podcast.

garethh.3518:

Using the fan population for their opinions on content, what they like or what they don’t is as important as kitten.

…

Using the fans as a base for ideas on how to make the game better… now that is bad territory to sail…

These two things go hand in hand though.

If a change is proposed or announced and you see a wild outcry of opposition from your player base, then choosing to succumb to that outcry is more or less accepting that your player base knows what’s best for the game better than you do, to some extent.

There are at least six examples I can think of off the top of my head where developers chose to ignore that outcry and the game visibly suffered as a result -

1. SWG: NGE. This was already described above and the company’s CEO actually apologized for it.

2. Ultima Online: Renaissance. The introduction of Trammel pretty much killed PvP in this game on a global scale and the player base had predicted as much long before the expansion was ever released.

3. DAoC: Trials of Atlantis. Similar to UO, this expansion pretty much killed PvP in the game and, by extention, pretty much just killed the game outright because its biggest draw at endgame had always been RvR, which ToA had made more or less impossible without 24/7 grind. The player base predicted this one too.

4. Planetside. SOE more or less killed their own game through neglect here, despite constant outcries by fans who wanted to save it.

5. Asheron’s Call 2. Fastest global server shutdown in MMO history, as far as I know. You can go read about it if you’d like.

6. Warhammer Online. Faction imbalances. Absurd crowd control systems. Insane class imbalances. Inappropriate solutions to server performance issues. Too much trying to add new content instead of fixing existing content. The player base called it. Mythic didn’t agree. Game died.

There’s nothing wrong with using fans for ideas on how to make the game better. The history is there and many of us have seen what can happen when dev studios don’t seriously consider ideas being provided by their players.

edit:

You can add SWTOR to that list as well, if you’d like. I didn’t bring it up because it’s very recent and I assume everybody remembers what happened there. Same thing – player base called it; BioWare didn’t agree; game died.

garethh.3518:

You’re implying random forum go’ers have all the idea needed to save PvP…

hahhahahahahahahah

Man you’re a kick in the pants.
The people at Anet understand what is going on just as well as you do, no wait, far better than you do.

NGE-era Star Wars: Galaxies wants a word with you.

In particular, the ever famous quote from SOE CEO John Smedley -

“With the NGE, I’m sorry about the mistake we made,” he told us. "We screwed up and didn’t listen to the fans when we should have, and it’s not a mistake we’re going to make again.

…

[The mistake was] to not just think we know the right direction without bringing the fans into the mix," he explained. “We made the cardinal sin of not listening, but assuming and we were wrong.”

Unfortunately, developers do not always know best and SWG isn’t the only example of it – it’s just the most popular one. Post-Trammel UO is another great precedent.

Eurantien.4632:

I would argue that RNG promotes player skill.

Depends on what kind of RNG you’re talking about.

On one hand, you have a game like Tera. I haven’t played it in a while, but around the time I quit the game was pretty much dominated by RNG. RNG knockdown chains, RNG staggers and microstuns, RNG resist chance on all crowd control in the game, RNG cooldown resets, just RNG everywhere. In that game, you could and would lose fights literally because of RNG and nothing else.

On another hand, you have a game like Aion where things like paralysis and silence godstones meant you could chain those effects on enemy players with any and every hit with no hope of retribution from the other guy. Very, very bad.

On yet another hand, you have a game like WoW where things like brain freeze and fingers of frost, while arguably somewhat overtuned, are both well designed RNG procs that immediately open up opportunities for a team to capitalize and switch strats up on the fly, forcing the opposing team to react. The key, of course, is that such procs are very visible and obvious, meaning that the opposing team does actually have a chance to react and do something about it if they’re quick enough and attentive enough.

Somewhere inbetween lies GW2. There are certain RNG elements that are okay and make matches more dynamic, and then there are some RNG elements that are random simply for the sake of being random – i.e. engineers, some forms of unintended condi application, and some other things.

RNG can promote skillful play if it’s smartly implemented and properly moderated. Unfortunately, in many MMO’s, it isn’t – at least not across the board.

ens.9854:

Coming from quake, I find this to be an old discussion. Most quake players would say these games (mmorpgs) take no skill at all, because by skill they mean motor coordination. Many players believe motor skill is the only thing that matters, and reject duelling because it forces you to keep track of item spawns, learn arbitrary geometry and movement, and deal with random factors such as respawns and unusual tactics. They would rather be placed in a small empty arena with all their tools and their opponent in front of them; and this is exactly what they do. A quick googling of “quake thunderstruck” will show just how incredibly shallow and boring this becomes. Ultimately the only lasting form of competition in quake has been duelling (and team play to an extent) because it is so interesting, challenging, AND unpredictable (eg. deep).

I personally wouldn’t make this comparison.

Thunderstruck wasn’t the greatest but competitive 1v1’s in QL and especially Q3A had very little actual randomness. In the end, you’d see a lot of deliberate conversion frags in Q3A because players were able to predict off of respawns pretty accurately – this was nerfed completely with the respawn model in QL but that’s another topic altogether.

Item spawns aren’t even a point of contention since duels among the best players had absolutely zero RNG factor involved in terms of who was able to monopolize the spawns.

HLDM is as much of a relevant example as Quake was – watch somebody like Garpy play antigrav on a map like bootcamp or crossfire and you’ll see just how non-existent RNG is in terms of knowing player and item spawn points.

RNG in a MMO is something very, very different.

Agree with OP.

My view is pretty much identical to most others in this thread – leave the tournament system for special events (monthly/seasonal/yearly stuff) and have single map matches between two teams or best of 3 matches between two teams as the standard, day to day style of play.

Trying to match 8 teams together is going to result in horrible queue times for pretty much everybody.

@Mammoth -

I don’t really disagree with most of the things you said, but there’s a difference between tracking major cooldowns and tracking timed passives, especially in this game.

I don’t particularly want to derail this thread, but IMO there are three factors involved -

1. This game has tons of visual noise in the context of team fights.
2. Nearly all offensive and defensive abilities are AoE in some way.
3. Major cd’s are usually (but not always) visually obvious while timed passive effects typically have no distinct cue.

When combined, the three sometimes create situations where you literally cannot know where a boon application or a condi cleanse came from, especially if they came from passives. Not to mention situations where you start taking massive damage but cannot reliably identify the exact source because of the noise. This isn’t a low tier problem either – you can see reactions like this day in and day out on current paid streams.

Neither WoW arenas nor GW1 GvG had this kind of aggregate problem, but IMO it’s a real issue with the visual design of this game and something that a little more UI transparency could help with.

Mammoth.1975:

I’m against most kinds of UI spoonfeeding. I’m bad but I prefer a game where people can differentiate themselves with skill.

I’m assuming this is some kind of potshot at WoW, so I’ll just say that there’s a significant misconception here.

Yeah, there are a lot of addons for World of Warcraft and many of them help out in PvP – custom cast bars for target/focus target/target of target, spell announcers, cooldown trackers, DR trackers, interrupt trackers, whatever. Because of this, players typically tend to spend some amount of their time keeping a close eye on their UI.

However, what I think you fail to realize is that at mid-high levels of arena competition, you can’t just watch your UI. You have to keep a close eye on the field. You have to know where all of your teammates are and where everybody on the enemy team is at any given point in time. You have to know where you are in relation to every single player on both teams in order to be able to make informed decisions at any point in the match and keep yourself from doing something stupid or being in the wrong place at a crucial point. You have to know that, when you see your cast bar light up with a critical spell and hit your focus counterspell macro, that the player you’re counterspelling is actually in line of sight. You have to know that, when you hit your focus shadowstep/kick macro while harassing another target, that the player you’re shadowstepping to is actually in line of sight AND not surrounded by teammates so you don’t get owned as soon as you step to him. You have to make sure that if anybody on your team gets controlled in any way, that you’re in a proper position to quickly cleanse that control without getting controlled yourself. So on and so forth.

Keeping an eye on all of these things while also being aware of what’s going on in your UI in order to be able to get off those split-second interrupts and cleanses takes a magnitude of awareness and precision that tons of WoW PvP bashers tend to ignore for no obvious reason.

IMO, the more information that a player has to work with in order to make informed decisions, the higher the individual skill cap is for a given game – regardless of whether that information comes from the field or the UI.

Mammoth.1975:

Hypothetically, what’s the UI solution for plague signets passive?

The same thing that was suggested in the OP for purity and signet of resolve would probably be a good start (some kind of pulse on the icon).

Mammoth.1975:

As a necro: spam 1 hard till conditions drop off without the guard doing anything, or doing something else, then apply all your stuff.

That’s kinda beside the point.

Not every fight is a clean, prolonged 1v1. Sometimes you need to spam 1 hard on a different target and then swap to a guardian momentarily for a quick fear or whatever. The lack of focus target frames in this game means you can’t monitor the buff/debuff activity of multiple players at the same time.

It also doesn’t address the situation from a defensive perspective – where you are the guardian and you just blew smite condition or w/e to cleanse something critical cause you didn’t know that purity would have auto-removed it a second later and couldn’t afford to wait.

Idk, I’m just not sure why anybody would argue against giving players more visibility into their actions.

Mammoth.1975:

Guard passives have nothing to do with rng.

Technically, this is true.

Things like purity, the signet of resolve passive, and the virtue of courage passive are not based on RNG because the effect doesn’t happen randomly – it happens exactly every 10 or 40 seconds, respectively.

However, this timer is obfuscated from the player and there’s no reasonable way for the average player to track multiple internal clocks for the entirety of a match to know exactly when these effects are going to go off. The same goes for enemy players who are trying to work around these effects offensively.

So yeah, technically not RNG, but effectively it might as well be.

I agree with suggestion #2 – to have these timers visible on your own and your target’s buff frame.

The discussion was decent, but it really feels like a lot of the more difficult questions were either dodged, sidelined, or omitted altogether.

I particularly liked when Xeph asked why the decision was made to launch the game without ratings and Jonathan said it was because ratings would be useless without free or paid tourneys – which was funny, because free tourneys have been up and running since the betas. Although, for whatever reason, nobody bothered to point that out and the question was effectively dodged.

Well played.

The amount of AI in this game’s pvp is obnoxious tbh.

I can’t wait till they overbuff MM necros somehow and make them an integral part of the meta – glhf with those team fights…

It’s pretty well known that rangers have one of the best, if not hands down the best, 1v1 builds in the game.

Where’s our PTR?

edit:

Also, https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/can-we-do-something-about-the-skill-queue

As mentioned by another poster, tpvp isn’t really a representation of individual skill.

The skill cap on all classes is way too low because they’re fairly simplistic in terms of number of abilities and the range of actions that a player can accomplish with those abilities (comparatively speaking, in relation to past MMO’s). Even team fights are mostly AoE fests where people who aren’t being focused take excessive splash damage from nearly every offensive ability in the game, while the lack of hard support classes means that you can train all damage and all cc on the same person without really having to worry about controlling anybody else or executing complicated swaps. Lack of cast bars and target of target further reduces individual skill cap as well.

So really, the gap between a player who hits r40 doing nothing but tourneys and a player who hits r40 doing nothing but hotjoins is basically non-existent in the context of 1v1’s assuming neither player has downs and the hotjoin guy watches streams occasionally to stay up to date with builds, rotations, and tricks for any given class in the most current meta.

The real difference between the two players is going to come from their ability to rotate, communicate, coordinate, position properly, and understand the maps well enough to function effectively in a team.

IMO anyways.

Really frustrating mechanic -

You cast something like, idk, updraft. At the same time, your target casts something like shield of absorption, or a daze, or a kd, or some other disable and – thanks to latency or whatever – their instant goes off before your instant. After you come out of the disable, the updraft (or whatever other skill you were trying to use) goes off and obviously whiffs since your target is no longer in range, wasting the cooldown.

This might sound like a when the stars align scenario, but it actually happens pretty kittening often in practice.

Can you (ArenaNet) either -

1. Make it so that a player’s skill queue clears out completely whenever they get interrupted by anything.

or -

2. Give us a slider to adjust the queue latency.

or -

3. Give us a toggle to disable the skill queue altogether.

Or all of the above, idk.

Thanks.

Run balanced s/d with double cantrips (preferably mist form and cleansing fire) + arcane wave and renewing stamina, then pillar hump like a kitten when critical attunement swaps are on cd.

That’s the best way to kill shatter mesmers as an ele IMO and the fight will typically be pretty even, if not in your favor, depending on how many pillars are available in the immediate area.

It’s situational.

If you can delay multiple players long enough for your team to cap another point, then it can be worth dying.

If you can delay long enough for your team to get to your point and support you, then it can be worth staying and getting downed, especially if your support has rez utility.

If the enemy team is over-committing to your point while your team is preoccupied then it’s usually better to just leave and support another point to punish them unless you know you can delay without getting blown up instantly (depends on the classes involved).

If you’re getting owned in a 1v1 and you’re not getting any support any time soon then it’s probably okay to bail – no reason to give up 5 points unless you die on point and can keep it neutral long enough for somebody else to get there.

IMO anyways.

Vandal.8029:

I like whoever suggested just matching two teams up to play a best of three.

I also like this idea. Either that, or just replace 3-round tourneys with a single map match between two teams.

I really don’t know why tourneys are the core mode of play to begin with. Requiring 8 teams to do anything just seems wasteful to me and, IMO, might be one of the reasons they’re having trouble implementing a matchmaking system – since matching 40 players together can be problematic compared to matching 10 players together, especially once you get to higher ratings.

I’d really rather have single map matches w/ two teams as the basic, every day game mode while leaving 8-team tourneys as a monthly or seasonal thing.

As mentioned, this build is completely impractical against any kind of non-random competition – nobody would ever run it seriously.

It doesn’t prove much outside of raw damage potential, which is mostly irrelevant.

CS was doing voice menu commands as far back as ‘99 so honestly at this point idk why developers don’t just include this stuff as a default part of any game they expect to be competitive.

The extreme range on rally has been a problem since the betas and I don’t think ANet has even acknowledged it as something they consider to be an issue.

I agree though – the entire rally system in general is poorly thought out.

Jason Segel.2908:

Good guardians can survive against anything for a long time. You aren’t a good guardian if you can’t.

Depends on what’s attacking them really – with the current well necro meta, guardians don’t last very long in 2v1’s without giving up neuts. All it really takes is some combination of wells, shatters, bomb/nade spam, and poison fields spammed on point.

If your guardian friends are surviving 3v1’s for “a very long time”, then the other guys are doing something laughably wrong or simply running builds not suitable for bunker busting.

Suzu.4193:

CS ( the original ) is open source (source as in the SOURCE game franchise) it was a mod to the source games and it wasn’t until later on they became a stand alone game.

I don’t think you understand what open source means…

hackks.3687:

whether the Ele runs aura share or not would have more to do with his given role in the group rather than just merely being in a group.

That’s why I said -

Noctred:

If you’re not running aura share, you might as well run s/d or staff imo.

Yeah, it depends on your role. Aura share is what d/d does best and in a lot of situations it can turn team fights around quickly (especially with the current well-spamming necro meta in NA).

If your role is close or far point defense, you’re better of running staff imo as it’s still a strong bunker regardless of the EA nerfs. If you really want to bunker with something other than a staff, both s/d and x/f are arguably superior to d/d because the former has more sustain and the latter has more straight damage mitigation.

If your role is aoe pressure, s/d is better imo.

In either case, the original point was that the builds most commonly used for d/d in tourneys these days do not put any points in earth – maybe 10 at best, sometimes.

Also, what mouse said.

hackks.3687:

Earth traits III (free armor of earth) and V (protection on aura use)

D/D eles typically run aura share and there’s no room for more than 10 points in earth since you need zephyr’s boon, powerful auras, and at least 20 in arcane to make shares worthwhile. The most common builds are probably 0/10/0/30/30 and 0/20/0/30/20, neither of which has anything in earth.

If you’re not running aura share, you might as well run s/d or staff imo.

Arken.3725:

It just seems a bit much. I keep hearing complaints of Guardians boons but they’re, at most, 5 seconds in duration each per skill on high cool down.

Keep in mind that everything I said above is a best case scenario per boon. Things won’t always play out that way.

Not all d/d ele’s run triple cantrips. You obviously can’t use GoEH in multiple attunements at once. Not all d/d ele’s even use GoEH – many still like signet of restoration and a lot of players are using ether renewal now that the channel time has been reduced. You don’t always want to spam attunement swaps on cooldown. So on and so forth.

Practically speaking, you’re not always gonna see durations that high.

30+ seconds of swiftness is doable with air swap, GoEH while in air, and double auras w/ zephyr’s boon. Updrafting somewhere in the process will get you over 40 seconds of swiftness.

High vigor uptime is common w/ renewing stamina and soothing disruption.

High fury uptime is common with aura rotations and constant attunement swaps.

50+ seconds of regen is possible with water swap, GoEH while in water, and insta-popping triple cantrips with soothing disruption. You can get a little more if you run 2x water and 2x monk runes.

Syeria.4812:

So what you’re saying is that retaliation isn’t enough of a threat to justify using utilities to remove it.

That’s a decent twist of my words, I guess?

I said two things -

1. Builds that focus on retal can reapply it quickly, frequently, and in short pulses. This means blowing 40+ second cooldowns to remove a single boon that will typically get reapplied shortly thereafter is wasteful.

2. There are bigger threats. Epidemic can wipe you quickly if the proper condi’s are spread. Stability stomps/revives can turn team fights instantly if stability isn’t stripped and the target controlled. Some bunker builds are easier to take down quickly with well timed boon strips/conversions and taking them down quickly can be the difference between whether or not you neut a node in time.

—

However, just because B is a bigger threat than A doesn’t suddenly turn A into a non-issue. It’s all relative.

Symbol guardians (bunker or non-bunker, doesn’t matter) are still the worst offenders probably. I’ve played one, it’s stupid simple and the amount of your total damage that comes from retal is laughably high.

Poxxia.1547:

But that does mean, that you are no fan of thieves initiative-system either? That is as mindless as it comes. And haste-centered build (which are the ones suffering from retaliation) .. you have to hate those, or?

Retal impacts everyone to some extent. My view on thief builds specifically is kinda irrelevant to this thread though?

tOss.9024:

In my opinion, mmos are less about the content devs give us and more about what we do with it.

The problem is that GW2, or at least it’s PvP side, isn’t a sandbox design. It’s straight theme park.

The entire system is formally structured with very specific intentions but the fundamental features required to fulfill those intentions simply don’t exist right now. So, it’s more like a broken down theme park – or one that’s still under construction.

Just wanted to say that using corrupt boon and null field/arcane thievery to remove retaliation is a joke.

Firstly, builds that focus on retal can typically reapply it frequently in constant short bursts, so blowing ~40 sec cd’s on that is about as wasteful as it gets – and second, those utilities are 100% more useful in a variety of other, more critical situations (i.e. removing stability, bunker busting, countering epidemics, and so forth).

Also mesmer auto attack? No mesmer is going to run (and stay) into the middle of a team fight to spam sword #1 on somebody.

So yeah, I’m just generally not a fan of passive damage reflect in any sort of competitive game. If it has to be there, make it an active thing so players are forced to use it smartly and at the appropriate time.

aydenunited.5729:

and since you think Engis can’t get perma swiftness (mine does) I’ll just assume you couldn’t give me the info I was looking for, but thank you.

He said you can’t get perma swiftness with elixirs, which afaik is true with the recently modified boon durations.

Obviously you can still get it with kit swaps if you’re running that.

leman.7682:

These things have changed since tPvP is quite difficult and WvW is easy-mode.

Again, it’s just perspective.

There are lots of bad tourney teams and pugs that get rolled over by more experienced teams. There’s no difficulty – it’s just a one-sided blowout.

On the flipside, not everyone in wvw is undergeared or underleveled. It’s very feasible to be roaming around with a small group and come across another roaming group – equally geared, equally leveled. You might come across a marginally larger group of players and wipe them much like you used to see with GvZ’s in DAoC or any other game where extending enemy groups was a valid tactic – and trust me that kitten is not easy when you’re going against organized groups.

You’re basically just umbrella generalizing. Yeah, there’s PvE that goes on in WvW. There’s also classic world PvP that goes on there.

leman.7682:

Explain to me, how is this PvP?

How were roaming 8v8’s and 8vZ’s in DAoC frontiers PvP?

How were base wars in AO PvP?

How was rifting in vanilla Aion PvP?

How was small group roaming in Tera PvP?

How was Dread Alliance-era UO PvP?

How was null sec griefing in Eve PvP?

How was Blood Monarchy-era Asheron’s Call PvP?

…and so forth.

All of the above feature elements of PvE but ultimately, you’re out there looking for other players to fight on some scale. Just because some people are rolling around WvW maps picking carrots and farming dolyaks doesn’t mean other people aren’t rolling around in small groups looking for skirmishes.

Believe it or not, for a long time in MMO’s world pvp was considered premier content and canned pvp was considered scrub kitten for people who couldn’t handle uneven fights and unpredictable environments.

I don’t necessarily agree, but it’s just a matter of perspective. Both playstyles have their merits and it’s all pvp in the end.

I agree that claims about spvp balance shouldn’t come from wvw experiences because, as said, balance in that environment isn’t parallel to balance in spvp. However, that doesn’t mean wvw isn’t pvp – it’s just a different form of pvp with a different ruleset.

I guess you just misrepresented your argument? Cause tbh what you said in the OP and what you’re saying now are two pretty different things.

Archaon.6245:

you can’t even see the names on the other team….like they are, guess what? Player controlled monsters…

Except they’re players. You’re a player… fighting other players… PvP.

It’s not perfectly balanced or fair, but world PvP never has been and never will be in any game.

Sad Swordfish.9743:

A skill based game like Counter-Strike and Starcraft 2 still has a large following, right?

re: CS -

The most relevant reason behind why that game has held and still holds such a massive following revolves around the fact that it was developed under an entirely different generation of gamers.

1. CS was originally a HL mod created by a player, and players notoriously create games that players want to play, rather than games that make money. As a result, CS (as a HL mod) developed an insanely strong community pretty much straight off the bat, which was helped by the fact that communities in FPS games actually meant something back then – read: Quake, UT, et al. Back then, you could probably find a CS LAN happening in almost any city around the United States. I can’t even count the number of times I packed my PC up back then and lugged everything over to some local venue across town for a local weekend CS tourney or something.

2. Half-Life already had a crazy following and was itself built on a modified Quake engine, which itself had a crazy competitive following. This basically meant that Counter-strike had an extremely solid foundation before it was ever even conceived.

3. Gameplay. In contrast to something like BF or CoD, the former strives too heavily for realism while the latter strives to incorporate things into FPS games that shouldn’t exist in FPS games. Realism isn’t fun, while leveling and perks don’t belong in FPS games because they introduce too many variables into the playing field that are out of a player’s control to counter. In CS, it’s just you, your gun, and your ability to aim and control the map – period. It’s the same reason why Quake was/is such an amazing competitive game.

4. The engine. Firstly, you could play CS on a complete piece of trash PC and get 60+ frames. In fact, most competitive players intentionally played at 800×600 or lower for improved precision aiming. Very few CS players, competitive or casual, actually gave a kitten about visuals. Second, the engine didn’t place arbitrary limitations on the player. You could fly across maps if you were able to pull off the necessary movements and headshot people while doing 180’s in mid-air if you were good enough. If you were good enough – key words. You can’t do things like this in BF or CoD because the engine itself stunts you. Those games just feel utterly slow when compared to pre-1.5 CS, or even post-1.5 CS.

I mean, check this out -

It’s not CS, but CS was built off of that game so it’s the exact same engine. This is the sort of gameplay that drew people to Counter-strike over a decade ago and it’s the same sort of gameplay that makes people go crazy today with their eyes glued to the monitor saying things like “holy kitten this guy is incredible”. You can’t pull things like that in FPS games designed by today’s standards. The visuals are prettier, things are more realistic and visceral, but the gameplay is just bland and boring in comparison. You don’t see the sort of total map domination and insane aim that you saw back then.

5. Mods. HL had a huge modding community and that carried over directly to CS, which meant tons of maps, huge replayability, and consequently huge player retention rates – all of which lead to a literally undying competitive scene.

6. Custom leagues. CAL, CPL, CEVO, whatever. They made things happen for players at all skill levels.

There are other reasons, but those are probably some of the biggest ones. Today’s FPS games are designed under a different paradigm and today’s FPS communities just suck in comparison to Quake and HL communities back in the day, which is a big part of what it takes to develop and maintain good competition.

WvW is PvP in the same way that games like UO, DAoC, AO, Shadowbane, Darkfall, Eve, and all the rest are PvP games. World PvP is what this entire genre grew up on and those were, arguably, the golden days of the MMORPG.

Either way – regardless of whether it’s open or canned, it’s all PvP.

Sad Swordfish.9743:

I thought LOL and DOTA2 and all MOBAs are very hardcore and not casual at all? dont you get destroyed in seconds in those games?

Some are, some aren’t.

LoL is more casual because you don’t have to worry about denying your own minions or teammates (last hitting is easier), you don’t lose gold on death (holding your lane is easier and making one mistake won’t kitten you for the entire match), towers are much stronger (don’t have to worry as much about early tower diving), and so forth.

It basically cut quite a lot of the complexity from more traditional moba’s, so yeah it’s more casual.

Seragi.5910:

lol what a freakin joke… so you saying joe smo with no experiece or talent at all puts in 10-12 hours a day will have mroe qualifying points then someone with skill??

The amount of truth in this statement tends to be directly proportional to the number of teams in the paid pool.

Assuming GW2’s pvp scene was more popular and had a very wide range of teams queueing (both real premades and the equivalent of trade chat pugs) then it would be far easier for subpar players to accumulate QP’s because -

1. No matchmaking whatsoever, thus increasing the probability of bad players being matched against even worse players.

2. No QP attrition upon losing.

Put #1 and #2 together, and you end up with a system where time investment can very realistically eclipse genuine skill if the player pool is large enough. Currently, GW2’s player pool is not large enough so QP’s are a decent indicator of relative team skill. However, if GW2’s pvp ever sees any kind of significant population boom, then the QP “ladder” is going to turn into a sad joke when compared to a real rating system.

milo.6942:

What does the right build for the best 1v1 ranger look like and why is it superior to a thief (for instance)?

- axe/torch + shortbow
- shaman’s amulet/jewel
- 0/30/30/10/0 if running traps or something like 10/10/30/15/5 if not running traps + lightning reflexes, or something inbetween
- dwayna runes + troll unguent/signet of the wild for around 1300+ hps with nearly 50% uptime, or some condi rune set w/ healing spring if you’re running point defense with traps, or something inbetween
- double leeching sigils + minor corruption or whatever else
- wolf + lynx (my preference)

The non-trap version is probably better for straight 1v1’s cause of more reliable condi removal/lightning reflexes/non-reliance on gtaoe’s, but the trap version is probably better in the big picture for team fights and w/e.

Either way you have one of the best 1v1 builds in the game. Thieves won’t do much to you when you have over 2100 toughness, constant burning uptime, high vigor uptime, and massive regen + a decent number of evades.

If you have 70% base crit with RHS then you’ll most likely see better returns with bloodlust IMO.

I like the map, but I generally agree with several other posters that vertical combat needs to be fixed.

Skills like earthshaker, burning speed, leap of faith, and various others seem to have no sense of a z-axis hitbox and will completely whiff when used on targets at a slightly different elevation from your own – which tbh can suck pretty hard on this map.

EatThisShoe.5136:

I think one of the things which frustrates people is that most of the skill in this game is defensive.

I’d probably take it a step further and say that most of the skill in this game is tactical – i.e. rotation, coordination, communication, positioning, map knowledge, et al.

The classes in this game have generally low skill caps because they’re fairly simplistic in terms of number of abilities and the range of actions that a player can accomplish with those abilities (comparatively speaking, in relation to past MMO’s). Even team fights are mostly AoE fests where people who aren’t being focused take excessive splash damage from nearly every offensive ability in the game, while the lack of hard support classes means that you can train all damage and all cc on the same person without really having to worry about controlling anybody else or executing complicated swaps. Lack of cast bars and target of target further reduces individual skill cap as well.

For the most part, skill in GW2 is 95% map sense (on the part of your whole team) and 5% being able to predict other players so you don’t get blown up instantly.

zxcv

/15char

I just logged in and tested this – mist form is on a proper 60s cd w/ cantrip mastery.

Unless there was a hotfix within the last 2 hours idk what you all are talking about.

Aether McLoud.1975:

Title says it all. Apparently bunker guardians are completely OK (hell they got a 2 seconds buff on one of their protection moves), as are mesmers and warriors.

The nerf to selfless daring is actually a pretty big hit for bunker guardians – that was a huge part of their total healing output when combined with double energy sigils.

Also, shield of judgement duration wasn’t increased by 2 seconds, it was reduced by 2 seconds.

Please understand the patch notes before crying about them.

Syeria.4812:

The ticket costs of paid tournaments are a non-issue. How people got the idea that changing those would somehow improve things is baffling.

It’s an issue because it creates an unnecessary barrier to entry for teams that want good competition but aren’t necessarily top tier.

Unless you win paids consistently, your tickets won’t last long. Once your tickets run dry, you’ll be forced to farm free tourneys. Free tourneys are primarily populated by pugs. This results in two problems -

1. Premades farming pugs for tickets so they can go play more paids. Not fun for either party.
2. Queue times for paids go up as losing teams have to abandon paids in order to farm frees for more tickets. Not fun for the teams that consistently win paids.

If ticket costs were reduced, you’d likely see more teams doing paids at any given time (faster queues and a wider range of competition), and you’d see fewer premades farming pugs in free tourneys (good for fostering new blood in the pvp scene since people are less likely to get 500-0’d and quit out of frustration).