Guild Wars 2

Arenanet is missing the point of a skill ranking system.

In sport it is used to decide who is best.

It isn’t used to create stagnant matchups game after game after game after game…until someone comes between them in skill ranking. It is used for seeding and bragging rights.

It is time to decouple the weekly matchups and the weekly server rankings. There are numerous ways to do this, including fun stuff like wvw tournaments.

The only logical complaint people could have is that having top servers sometimes face weaker ones will be boring. Well, that is a problem with the game! Make the matches shorter and more fun during a blowout.

Enough of the same long boring matchups that play out the same week after week. Thanks.

“So, not only does world choice have quite a bit more meaning now that paid transfers are online, we also want to adjust how the ratings are calculated. If we redo the calculations involved with the ratings, then it’s much better to just reset the ratings and let the new formula do it’s thing instead of trying to carry the old data over from the old system and have those numbers pollute the new rating.”

This makes no sense at all. You want to sort the servers by their strength. You have an imperfect sorting of the server rankings. You contend this “pollutes” the new system and that setting all rankings to the same number is better because everyone will sort to their proper places faster.

This means

a) your sorting algorithm is seriously flawed as heck. Any partial sort should be more accurate than no sort at all, and should help stabilize things faster for a majority of the servers.

b) if you need to deal with inertia within the system, design a better system. Don’t have to reset ever year to fix it.

c) you are willing to let us suffer through weeks of bad matchups rather than use the much more accurate “polluted rankings”.

d) if you feel that certain servers are much stronger or weaker, suddenly, due to the guild movements, then bloody well just put that in your ranking formula for a few weeks.

Seriously, just hand over the data to the community. They can model it and come up with a free simulation for you to use every week. They can do this without disrupting servers for a month. Personally, I hate when i can’t play Wvw because my server has “packed it in” and we are camped at spawn.

Its time to do these by hand.

Arenanet has more information available to them than they are plugging into the formula. Thus, any formula will fail because it has incomplete information.

Namely, which servers have had some organized guilds coming in, which have had them going out.

So get rid of the whole notion of “tiers” for a few weeks and make the best possible matchups that a fully informed team of humans (and their formuli) can make. It will be better than a formula using incomplete information. Then fall back to a formula once the dust has settled a bit more.

I’m a level 30 mesmer who is trying to level in WvW. In Pve I can kill an npc mob extremely quickly. Many mobs, fine, they die, too.

But I go to WvW and it takes forever to kill a Pve mob. And versus players I’m just not doing the damage my other alts have done. I understand I will be somewhat weak compared to level 80s but I gear up regularly.

Right now in Wvw, unbuffed. Power 1600, Precision 1500, 400 cndn damage . Crit chance = 37%. 1200 vit and toughness. Wearing level 28-30 blues with runes.

I’ve taken defensive minded talents and skills so far.

And I run staff with scepter-focus (not changing that as that what I’ll play at 80 and I want practice).

Any tips on build and gear as I level, so I don’t hit like a wet noodle. I try to shatter the best I can. My play isn’t the greatest, but its not totally pathetic; although maybe I’m missing something there too.

Well aoe nerf…they said it. I’m not sure where that leaves staff and dagger/dagger which have barely any single target attacks between them except auto-attacks. They can’t possibly rework the class enough to compensate for a major aoe nerf (aka ele overall damage nerf)… so it should be interesting.

I also predict…
Ride the lightning will have its distance reduced by 33%.

They will intentionally bug at least two things they can’t officially nerf.

D/D elementalist is by far the most fun spec/profession I’ve played in the game, so I’m extremely worried. It seems they will want us using autoattack alot if they nerf all our aoe…we have what? two single target spells? Autoattack classes are the most boring.

As for staff, they’d have to rework most of the skills….

I’m a bit peeved they go and spout-off about this stuff on their livestream with no context or explanation.

I love the Ranger, mobility, kiting and the feel of the two bows.

The biggest problems with the profession as I see them:

1) pets do too large a portion of our damage. This is damage largely outside of our control and prone to all the pet problems people report (buggy, squishy, time on target etc).

2) most pets aren’t useable because there are better options. damage/surviabily and utility of certain pets is too good, others too poor.

3) pet damage doesn’t scale with gear. This means there are no pets useful for certain builds (e.g. condition damage pet, power pet)…. and as we gear up our pets do not.

4) our trait trees are very poor compared to some of the other professions and the fact our damage is divided between Ranger and pet, the actual dps increase of some of the dps talents is really lackluster.

Conclusion: Overall, I give the Ranger a 9/10, but our useful talents are limited, and the percentage of damage our pets provide is too high. We need more choice and more of the power in our own hands, er, bows.